My office went full remote starting the beginning of this week related to covid-19, I'll explain why (thread)
This isn't out of fear that going in to work is dangerous. It isn't, at least not yet. It's out of concern for not spreading disease and erring on the side of going full remote sooner rather than later.
We're mostly remote to begin with, so going full remote has only minor impact on how we work. For some San Francisco employees it mostly means we don't have work-from-the-office-wednesdays any more (Yes that's a thing)
Anyone for whom it's easy should go full remote, to increase the overall staying at home as much as possible and normalize that change for other companies where it might be more technically and politically difficult.
The big danger with having an office right now isn't that one of your employees will get sick, it's that they'll help spread the disease. There's a small probability that one of your employees has it now, but while we're in the exponential growth part of the pandemic \
that can translate into a huge number of people getting it who possibly otherwise wouldn't but definitely would have gotten it later when the hospital system is more prepared to handle it.
We're using a combination of github, keybase, zoom, google docs, and trello to coordinate among everyone. Having roughly daily check-ins and longer weekly coordination meetings seems about the right amount for maximum productivity
That meeting schedule is probably best even when people share an office. The one experiment we're doing for full remote is having a video chat open most of the time in case people feel like hanging out and chatting.
So far people seem to not be big on joining it, either out of not wanting the distraction or not wanting to have to make themselves look presentable (although we strongly urge people to put on video for scheduled meetings)
There's a question of whether we'll stay full remote or nearly full remote even after the pandemic has blown over, and whether this is going to be a trend amongst companies generally. My guess is yes, but we'll see how it goes.
