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Add Social unrest to social distancing… WFH is here to stay
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All of this is great dialogue for how to envision our work in the future. The idea of waking up in the morning and trudging off to an office is so deeply entrenched in everyone’s minds as the norm that even with Covid as a reality, it’ll take a fair amount of effort to create change. And perhaps this is where freelancers and independent contractors can lead the way.
Here’s a recent article from an Irish perspective but the ideas in the piece can be applied to many other places:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
https://tallmanproductions.net -
[greg janza] “Here’s a recent article from an Irish perspective but the ideas in the piece can be applied to many other places:”
Sounds like the “coffee shop edit suite” 2.0. Or… WeWork might survive after all ☺
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “WeWork might survive after all ☺”
My favorite analysis of the rise and fall of WeWork is actually a series of GIFs from the US version of The Office illustrating major events in the company’s saga posted last October, after the entire company had been laid off, here.
The questions about gear and expectations for WFH come down to, who’s eligible to work?
Just as a reminder for context using the COW, we’re seeing 800,000+ visitors a month, and 71% of them are under 34, age groups known as Millenials and Gen Z. Gen X is another quarter, and Boomers represent single digit percentages.
Which also means that some of us on this thread are older than the parents of the COW’s largest demos. If my kids and I had kids at the age my parents did, the youngest would be the age of my grandkids.
As the label shows, we’re talking about 5 million Gen Z and Millennial folks passing through the COW in the past year alone.
The systems that Herb and Greg and others of you are running cost more than cars, which many young graduates can’t afford in the first place. I think people our age who don’t have college-age kids haven’t reckoned with the scale of student debt. The average student graduates with $25,000 in debt, and by the time they turn 30, currently onerous rates mean that their student debt has gone UP at age 30 to $32,000!!!
WFH is interesting for distributing workforce, but the point that Tony and Warren are bringing up is that it’s also shifting infrastructure costs onto people who are already swimming in debt.
There are trades that do that, of course. Mechanics have been paying for their own tools for generations. Barbers often rent their chairs.
But if someone in their mid-20s needs to own their gear as the cost of entry, what does that mean? A laptop? An iMac Pro? How much high-performance storage? Because if we’re saying that, “To work for me, you’re gonna need $25,000-$40,000 worth of gear” is cutting out nearly everyone in their 20s and a good chunk of folks in their 30s.
Even my idea of renting gear assumes that you’ve got $1700/mo to carve out of your revenue stream that’s also going to have to cover the average $400/mo of student debt service, and have anything left over to live on.
The combination of the pandemic and social unrest is also underscoring the risks to society as a whole in tying health insurance to employment. So now, somebody who’s 28 and no longer included in their parents’ health coverage is having to manage health insurance, debt service, AND gear? WHICH GEAR?
If it’s gear that anyone is reasonably expected to have, or that’s within reasonable reach, that’s one thing. This pushes some responsibility back onto facilities to create distributed workflows that help grow industry-wide opportunities, instead of using this as an excuse to make the industry easier for themselves and harder for workers.
Maybe someone else thinks that it’s political to assume that companies are responsible for making the industry either better or worse, but I don’t agree. I think of it as a value-neutral observation. Companies DO make the industry as a whole better or worse with their choices, and I think that there are implications for this that are no more or less than they are between any two random people. The general concept of “Don’t make other people’s lives worse” doesn’t feel political at all to me. It’s what you do in retail transactions, or when you drive, or clean up after your dog — you conduct yourself to not make other people’s lives worse.
But it also doesn’t happen by accident. You decide that this is how you are in the world.
What I see is an opportunity to make the industry more flexible, more open, more ready for anything….but it’s a very short distance from “flexible” to “unstable.” As much as we’re looking at possibilities that open up the range of what’s possible for both producers and creatives, there are also definitely some WFH scenarios that will slam the door shut on potentially millions of trained post professionals with degrees and experience, but without a pile of cash or the wherewithal to take on more debt.
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[Tim Wilson] “To work for me, you’re gonna need $25,000-$40,000 worth of gear” is cutting out nearly everyone in their 20s and a good chunk of folks in their 30s.”
Tim,
30 years ago that number could be TEN TIMES that. Million dollar rooms were NOT that uncommon. There has always been a financial barrier to entry in this biz, yet somehow new talent still breaks through. I’m not worried about millennials. Never before has that barrier to entry been so low or the tech so simple. They WILL find a way to make it work.
I say this because I think you’re VASTLY over estimating the cost of gear. For basic off-line “story telling” editing, a low end iMac or comparable Windows system is fine. You could eBay one for way less than $5K, all in.
Sure, a high end system for color correction can reach $40K, but if you need that kind of system, chances are you’re making the rate that can support it.
As you point out, many trades already include the cost of their tools in their rate. It looks like post production is headed that way.
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[Oliver Peters] “https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/discovery-reviews-production-costs-after-s…”
Discovery realise that self shot “authentic” “at home” content is OK with viewers – perhaps someone should tell them about Youtube vloggers?
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[Mark Raudonis] “I think you’re VASTLY over estimating the cost of gear. For basic off-line “story telling” editing, a low end iMac or comparable Windows system is fine. You could eBay one for way less than $5K, all in.”
I agree. The move to remote workflows for editors has been made possible in part, by the incredible advances in computer hardware design and the cost reductions that’ve accompanied it.
And I can’t speak for Herb but my costs to build a fast edit system with enough storage to handle all types of projects would barely get me this used 2014 Nissan Versa Note which has 104,000 miles on it.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
https://tallmanproductions.net -
WFH will definitely expand. But that requires a new mindset and business plan. And those that make that decision tend to be older. Even Google and Yahoo at one point discouraged WFH BEFORE COVID. And those types of companies and work are prime for WFH. Yahoo I think found that overall, there was a reduction of efficiency compared to their in-office counterparts.
And as said before, US broadband is a patchwork of various networks. We served dozens and dozens of editors with remote system during this pandemic. 2 things are true –
wifi connection on a >50 Mb/s ISP is common. And many have very little or no option to increase their bandwidth or change their provider.We had an editor in Michigan who had a better experience than a user in upstate NY. We are located in NYC.
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[Dom Silverio] “Yahoo I think found that overall, there was a reduction of efficiency compared to their in-office counterparts.”
I believe Marissa Mayer ended the practice because of this, but I don’t know what the current status is.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[greg janza] “[Mark Raudonis] “I think you’re VASTLY over estimating the cost of gear. For basic off-line “story telling” editing, a low end iMac or comparable Windows system is fine. You could eBay one for way less than $5K, all in.”
I agree. The move to remote workflows for editors has been made possible in part, by the incredible advances in computer hardware design and the cost reductions that’ve accompanied it.”
Look, nothing would make me happier than to be wrong about this. LOL But you don’t have to go too far back in the COW to see folks excited about their $20,000 Mac Pros, with no external storage or monitoring. I understand that this is overkill for a skinny terminal, or for offline episodic editorial, and isn’t expected to be included in the “journeyman”-level package.
But we’re nowhere close to setting an industry-wide expectation for what that would be. What kind of storage would someone need to expect to have in order to get a job working from home in offline editorial? Obviously fast internet access, but what else are we talking about?
Nobody can answer that question yet because we have no idea what a standard “WFH” scenario looks like. I don’t, and neither does anyone else. Mark comes closest of any of us course. ☺ But of course, there could be as many WFH workflows as there are combinations of employers and employees.
My hope is that all employers are as broad-minded, creative, and generous of spirit as Mark Raudonis, and are thinking about ways to make the industry more inclusive, more flexible, and provide more and better jobs to the graduates of media programs who are graduating with plenty of chops, but little more in hand than an iMac or laptop and a lifetime of debt.
That’s the fork in the road we’re approaching. Will this be an opportunity to make more people’s lives better? Or cutting off opportunities to people who can’t afford the gear that employers were providing as recently as February?
I find myself thinking about the balance of power in this context. If you’re in the office, you don’t have a boss saying, “If you want to keep this job, you need to upgrade the computer.” If the boss wants you using a new computer, the boss has to buy it.
Whereas if you’re working from home, you can imagine some employers saying, “This is absolutely your problem. I’m not going to pay to upgrade a computer that you can be using to work a bunch of other jobs.”
There can also be a lack of respect for boundaries. Hey, you’re working from home. This means you can work a lot more hours.
Whereas we now know that there are cases where you’re available for fewer hours, because now you find yourself having to be running your kids’ education while they’re home too.
[Oliver Peters] “[Dom Silverio] “Yahoo I think found that overall, there was a reduction of efficiency compared to their in-office counterparts.”
I believe Marissa Mayer ended the practice because of this”
I think that a lot of the talk of “efficiency” is a smokescreen. There’s a whole class of managers who rule by intimidation and hectoring. Marissa didn’t think twice about 100 hour weeks, was famous for them in fact, and she had zero respect for people who didn’t work as hard as she did. And guess what? It turns out that once people leave the office, you can’t berate them to their face for wanting to leave the office.
One of her SVPs went on the record about it at the time:
“Marissa is the type of boss that makes you feel like you’re disappointing her at all times, so I always feel like I’m on the verge of being fired,” Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo’s senior vice president for communications products, tells the New York Times.
In some fairness, she was undermined from the start. (Google “glass cliff” and “Marissa Mayer” if you’re ready to have your stomach turned.) Probably the ONLY thing that WASN’T wrong with Yahoo was an overzealous CEO, but she was far from the only senior manager in tech with outlandishly toxic views of what “productivity” means.
You know the thing that some people have said as not much of a joke, “If you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in Monday” — ie, not showing up on Saturday was tantamount to quitting. The one I heard at Avid was, “If you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.” Because yes, there were times when 7 days a week was demanded, and anything less was explicitly tantamount to quitting.
And zero working from home, on workdays, EVER.
Of course, that was then. Aside from nobody being able to get away with demanding that now, management there has been saner for a while. ☺
So while I definitely see potential risks in putting the responsibility for buying and maintaining gear on home workers, I love the potential to remove power from abusive managers who demand that YOU to work around the clock to cover up for THEIR inability to actually manage.
People who want to figure out how to manage true productivity in the spirit of collegiality and mutual trust can do it, which is why companies like Twitter are saying that they’ll be supporting most WFH scenarios for forever. There’s no definitive reason for this not to work.
We can have another conversation another day about how inefficient EVERYTHING about American approaches to work are. We have less time off, and shorter lifespans, than pretty much any industrialized nation (and plenty of non-industrialized ones) for no good reason whatsoever, apart from the chimera of productivity. That’s something I’d like to see blown up right there.
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