Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

Oh man do I feel this. I used to report to the director, just one step below the VP. Zero issues. Everything went smoothly. My team is very independent and we interacted with the guy like once a month, he’d just ask about one particular issue and move on.

Everyone is retiring here and they want to prepare new blood, that means unnecessary middle management. Everyone has them, but I was lucky. Until 2020.

This new guy wants to meet once a week. Got us all in the office FIRST, while everyone else was still WFH. I do need to be onsite for a few things, but I live 3 miles from work and being on call had been working great, but you think he was listening? Now I just spend my time sitting at the office when I could be letting my dog out with the same productivity.

Additionally he has no power of making any decisions that matter, so talking to him is useless. He doesn’t have the courage to transmit messages to other teams that could be a problem for someone else, so we are basically gagged. And whenever something happens he will defend himself, not us, so we are pretty much abandoned. The decline in quality of my position went from an easy 90 to a 10 in a matter of months.

In other words, my happy job turned into me looking for a job.

It's not really as simple as larger pool -> easy replacements though. You might find a great remote candidate with great technical skills; but there's an 8-hour timezone difference, they speak poor English (or whatever language your team mostly speaks), don't understand the market that you're working with etc. Granted that there's not much of a difference when it comes to Canadians VS USA-ians, but that's where labor laws might complicate things.

There's usually stringent laws when it comes to hiring people (depending on where you are, I guess). The company I work for, for example, had to sponsor my work permit in the Netherlands for it to be legal to hire me, since I'm not a EU citizen. That's a stressful, expensive and time consuming process for everyone involved, and in general it's just easier for them to hire local talent since they don't have to bother with all the extra steps. I'm not sure of how that works exactly in the US, but I can't imagine it's any simpler or more convenient.

Now, companies might move onto hiring more freelancer type workers to circumvent these issues, but that also has its slew of problems. They're usually more expensive, you have to spend time and resources onboarding them onto the project, they have to get used to the project and its intricacies, they have to learn how the team works, the process for paying them might be different than your usual workflow, they tend to leave just as quickly as they came which compounds the other issues even more.

I think things will mostly progress as they always have. Sure, there will be more competition, but that doesn't necessarily mean that hiring non-local talent is the easiest way to go for most companies, plus as can be seen from any discussion about WFH on HN, there's a sizable group of people that don't enjoy WFH and would rather stay in offices anyways. The WFH crowd like me will be free to pursue a company that suits their needs, and the ones that enjoy WFO will still be able to choose those companies that prefer that. Win-win, in my eyes.

successful then, I’ve even been reported to the FBI! The outrage being generated is actually fascinating. Why do developers see their work as so special compared to other labor? For example many workers clock in/out. Fast food workers are tracked precisely. Uber drivers are paid precisely. I think it’s very interesting that the idea someone could watch exactly how much time they spend working at their computer, which they are paid to work on, would get them so incredibly outraged. Special butterflies it seems to me.

Let’s pretend that the employee agreement doesn’t explicitly tell them that they should have no expectation of privacy and all their activities on the company computer system is monitored.

It’s still not even remotely illegal under the laws in Germany according to your reference and my understanding. People are confusing video, audio, and communication surveillance with monitoring or surveillance of use of the computer. Of course governments have laws to protect privacy, they don’t want companies reading your private emails or text messages or taking pictures of you or recording your conversations, all while you were unaware. Notice for all that to be legal you just have to clearly notify them so they can potentially not consent, probably almost always can be fired if they don’t anyway.

The idea that a WFH remote access system that monitors if the employee is actually using the system and that monitoring is used by managers to review if the employee actually did WFH or not is somehow privacy invading is ridiculous.

The most interesting part of this whole discussion is the intense reaction of people. We kinda know there are a whole bunch of HN reeders who are suddenly freaking out when they consider their manager/boss might be able to see what I’m describing, and tbh there really might be some who can, it’s very likely.

I assumed they were referring to the spontaneous work-related hallway chats that middle managers and executives claim are so important. I'm not OP, but I relate, and while I'm not big on small talk I'll engage in it because I respect my colleagues and I don't want to snub them.