Twitter told its employees yesterday that they can work from home forever if they want to. Not "until this blows over." Not "through the summer." Forever, as in the actual word Twitter's own spokesperson used when the memo leaked out yesterday. I read that headline over my second cup of coffee around 8:40 this morning and just kind of sat with it for a minute.
I've been working from a kitchen table, on and off, since 2015, so I want to be careful not to act like this is some brand new revelation to me personally. But there's a real difference between choosing to work remotely and being told by your employer, in writing, that your desk downtown might just cease to matter to your career. That's a different kind of permission, and I don't think it's a small thing.
A few things stick out to me about this that I haven't seen people say plainly yet.
First: this hasn't got much to do with any sudden breakthrough in remote work tools. Twitter isn't running better software than it was in February. It's the same Slack, same Google Docs, same too-many-tabs-open Chrome situation as everybody else. What changed is that eight weeks (going on nine now, depending how you count from the Bay Area's shelter-in-place order) of nobody's productivity collapsing proved something to management that a decade of remote-work blog posts, including some on this very site, apparently couldn't.
Second: "forever" is doing a lot of work in that sentence and I don't fully trust it yet. Companies say generous-sounding things during a crisis. I'd put real money on there being a walked-back version of this policy within a couple years, one that leans hard on the word "hybrid" and some vague language about "in-person collaboration." I hope I'm wrong. I've been wrong before on this blog, loudly, more than once.
Third, and this is the part that's actually kept me thinking past the headline: nobody's talking much about what this does to a city like San Francisco. Twitter's headquarters sits right on Market Street. If a meaningful chunk of a company that size stops needing to physically be there five days a week, that's not just an HR policy, it's a real estate story, a transit story, a lunch-spot-that-depended-on-foot-traffic story. I don't have the answer for any of that. I just don't think "employees are happy about it" is the only consequence worth counting.
And a small complaint, since I'm apparently in a mood today: if we're doing forever-remote as a society now, can we also agree to stop doing hour-long video calls that could've been three sentences in an email? I had a call yesterday at 2pm that ran fifty-five minutes and produced exactly one decision, which was to schedule a follow-up call. My camera was on the whole time. My dog was asleep behind me for the entire thing and somehow still looked more engaged than half the participants.
I don't think this memo is going to be the story everyone remembers from this stretch of the pandemic, honestly. It'll get filed next to a hundred other pandemic-era policy changes, and in a year it might just read as how things always were, obvious in hindsight. But it feels worth marking the day it actually happened, because eventually some other company is going to make a similar announcement and everyone will treat it as inevitable. It wasn't inevitable on May 12th. It was still news enough that people were texting each other the headline.
My own setup, for what it's worth: kitchen table, a desk lamp I bought at IKEA back in 2017 for something like sixteen dollars, and a chair that is very much not ergonomic and that my back reminds me of by 4pm most days. If forever really means forever, I might finally go buy a real desk.