Seattle has become the first city where the major platforms are converging on the same pandemic playbook: Microsoft asked Puget Sound and Bay Area employees to work from home through March 25 the day before this report, and Apple followed within 48 hours by encouraging Silicon Valley and Seattle staff to stay home as an additional precaution. Amazon, Google, and Facebook now making the same request means effectively every large tech employer in the region has moved to remote work within a single week.
Tens of thousands of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple employees in the Seattle area shift to remote work immediately, emptying campuses and the transit, cafes, and services that depend on them.
Facebook's policy creates an immediate two-tier outcome in its own workforce: salaried employees go home while Accenture and Wipro contractors keep reporting to sites.
Second-order effects
Outsourcing partners Accenture and Wipro are left administering on-site workforces for a client whose own staff is remote, forcing them to defend the arrangement to workers who see the inequity directly.
Amazon's rapid expansion of its work-from-home order to four more regions shows the policy is contagious across geographies, pressuring every large employer in those markets to match it or explain why not.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, remote work stops being a per-company courtesy and becomes a baseline expectation for tech employees — while the exclusion of contractors points to a durable structural divide in who gets flexibility, likely to draw regulatory and labor scrutiny.
The speed with which five of the largest US tech employers coordinated the same policy in one city suggests distributed work becomes standard crisis infrastructure for the industry, with real-estate and vendor contracts priced accordingly.
The trend: Tech employment is splitting into a remote-capable core and an on-site contingent workforce, with the pandemic forcing companies to reveal that split city by city.
We are committed to making public health our top priority, while also addressing the economic and societal impact of COVID-19. https://blogs.microsoft.com/ ...
Microsoft says it will continue to pay hourly workers even as it encourages full time staff to work from home. Encourages other large employers to do the same. https://blogs.microsoft.com/ ...
Salesforce has fully agreed with King County recommendations & we now ask all Salesforce & Tableau employees based in our Seattle, Kirkland & Bellevue offices to work remotely for the month of March. https://kingcounty.gov/... https://www.salesforce.com/...
Microsoft has confirmed two cases of coronavirus in Seattle. One is at LinkedIn and has no known contact with other employees, and the other is from a main campus building that houses Microsoft's cloud team. Both employees are now in quarantine
Free Teams for 6 months to facilitate remote work and not affecting hourly worker's wages who's hours are disrupted? As a human and as a shareholder, compassionate business is good business. Great job, @Microsoft. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Microsoft is going to keep paying the 4,500 hourly workers at its HQ (shuttle drivers, cafe workers etc) even though most of its full time employees are working from home https://twitter.com/...
This is the kind of Corporate Social Responsibility that is inspiring. As we work to protect public health, we also need to protect the income of hourly workers who support our campus https://blogs.microsoft.com/ ...
I appreciate companies being like “fortunately we are a ~tech~ co so due to the corona virus, we will wfh, where we can continue to be effective” imagine if they had wfh policies all the time! so they could hire disabled people! for whom public health is not a passing concern!
Online learning will be put to the test in Seattle area as Northshore School District shuts down 33 schools for up to two weeks due to Coronavirus. https://www.geekwire.com/...
That's very thoughtful. “Microsoft will continue to pay vendor hourly service providers their regular pay during this period of reduced service needs. The 4,500 hourly employees who work in our facilities will continue to receive their regular wages.” https://blogs.microsoft.com/…
I've seen a lot of people offer the take that once coronavirus forces more people and companies to try remote work everyone is going to want to do it going forward. Certainly possible, but that has definitely not been my experience during periods when I've been primarily remote.
Super super grateful to see this. I worry so much about the folks who take care of us day-day: drive shuttles, make coffee, serve lunch, keep offices clean etc. Often they are exactly the ones who can't afford to just not get paid for 3 weeks. https://twitter.com/...
Amazon changed its policy late Wednesday and is now recommending “all employees based in Seattle/Bellevue who work in a role that can be done from home, do so starting now through the end of March.” https://www.seattletimes.com/ ...
Programmer contracting jobs typically do not offer insurance (source: I was one for years). I hope this lets us spark a conversation and pushes much needed change in the software engineering industry. #COVID19 #TheResistance https://www.cnbc.com/...