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

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

#401
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a few examples of those reasons?

Lack of a dedicated home office, children/family members interrupting, noisy surroundings, bad setup, etc. I'd argue that "brain chemistry unsuited for WFH" qualifies as well.

I understand that life circumstances and general aversion to WFH can make one not like it -- absolutely. And the reasons enumerated are fair.

I don't think your original parent poster meant ill, IMO they were just saying that bending your home WFH setup to your will is achievable but I get it that some people just don't want to -- or their estate is too small or otherwise unsuitable for WFH (like kids not understanding your need to focus).

Where it gets problematic is that even if some people absolutely can't do WFH (and some absolutely can't do work from office like myself for the last 10 years and a half) and even with us respecting each other, the end result is not always productive -- one group doesn't work well with the other (reasons unknown, at least for me?) and it all kind of ends up in "us vs. them" mentality. :(

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

#402
post #3

Can’t imagine not having at least partial WFH after this pandemic. If my office doesn’t let me WFH, I will also be leaving. A good portion of my team is similarly minded, but management is insistent on disallowing WFH. I can’t wait to see their faces when the company bleeds massive swaths of engineering talent. It’s about damn time that companies realized that they ought to treat their employees like the adults that…

The 'hybrid model' is just a marketing trick to try and force people back to offices using the Fear of Missing Out routine. It's classic foot in the door sales psychology. Go find a firm that has genuinely embraced full remote and understands that remote can only work properly if everybody is operating in the same mode - precisely to avoid the natural tendency of people to ignore others that aren't in the physical ro…

Even US federal employment has started considering remote work as a permanent policy (where possible).

I'm currently looking for new work, and full remote has become a _hard_ requirement. In addition to the great point that you've made; if an employer is insisting on in-person work, there exists a strong signal of deeper issues. For example: dogmatic/discriminatory thinking, egoistic processes, stifled/silenced innovation.

This certainly isn't universally true, but it is a giant red flag.

There's also my responsibility. This is my responsibility by choice, and I'm not out for anyone who doesn't make the same choice. If I am hired by said in-person employer, then I am supporting and perpetuating that behavior. The transport device also happens to be destroying the planet: I would be supporting that. The transport device is a luxury: I would be supporting discriminating against people with no access to it. Some jobs are by definition in-person (doctors, baristas, cleaners, etc.), and I would be consuming their transportation resources (whether that's room on a train, or a road). The housing market madness has been driven by access to in-person work hubs.

In-person work, where it isn't actually required, is a terrible idea. It's bad for you, and it's also bad for everyone around you.

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

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably they pay their employees.

Yeah and also “work from office” and “mentor juniors” is in the PD and the contract. It’s not like we were being underhanded. If they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t have signed on.

That's asking for perfect foresight; the job market structure have drastically changed while they are in contract and WFH is now a competitive advantage in the labor market. That results in being shortchanged.

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

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are young and relatively inexperienced, and I want them to see how we work, how we solve problems, how their peers communicate and how we think about different aspects of the business. You basically want the seniors' suffer the uncompensated inconveniences of WFO so that the juniors can grow. > This is every bit as important to the professional growth of our juniors as it is to my new business. This is not alt…

Presumably they pay their employees.

Drop the sarcasm, it's annoying and obfuscates the dialogue.

WFH employees get paid too, we're talking about the differences between costs of WFH and WFO externalized to the employee, which are not trivial e.g. commute, access to wider and cheaper housing market, all the associated stresses etc.

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

#405

By “quitting” they mostly mean getting new jobs or career changes. Not necessarily refusing to work in an office. The headline is misleading. It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms: > In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000. The higher turnover is expected in a booming ec…

>By “quitting” they mostly mean getting new jobs or career changes

I actually had someone on my team quit until WFH was over. They couldn't take WFH any more and plan to return to the job market once they're able to go to the office.

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

#406
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are doing this on US soil, it is a felony to surveil employees without their express knowledge and consent. Hacker News has your IP address information so unless you are using a proxy or are outside of the US you'll be hearing from the FBI shortly.

I think you might be confusing audio and video surveillance with computer system logging. We can log anything we want it’s in their employee contract that they have no expectation of privacy on company computer systems and it should not be used for any personal business, which again WFH is great because clearly they have their own personal computer they use to access remote access and all our logging is on the server…

Regardless of whatever wording you have included in your employment agreements, your statements on the matter indicate that you are surveilling your employees without their knowledge. Your public comment to that effect could actually be used in court to throw out whatever wording you have in your agreement, as your statement nullifies the assumption that your employees have read the agreement (you don't believe any of them have, and you believe the wording that is there is vague enough that they are unware of any actual surveillance -- this is damning as it is exactly what a prosecutor would have to prove in this case, and you have openly admitted it). Don't worry I already archived the original thread and included it in my report to the FBI.

When your employees bring a WFH device into their home, and your spyware collects metadata on their keystrokes, you are in violation of federal wiretapping law as you are collecting metadata from within their private home network and exfiltrating it through connections not initiated by the employee and without their consent or notification.

By law you must indicate to your employees that you collect metadata on their keystrokes (under privacy laws, this is still just private information in aggregate). Every time one of your employees enters private information or logs into their bank on their WFH device, and you log your metadata on these keypresses, you are committing another felony. Even the DoD has to provide a warning every time you log into a DoD system describing the surveillance being used on the device.

Depending on your employees' locations, this may also be a GDPR violation.

There are also numerous export control laws governing surveillance software that you may or may not be in violation of depending on your location. This is why obtaining this kind of software is difficult, especially in the EU.

People like you should be afraid, not your employees.

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

#407
post #3

Can’t imagine not having at least partial WFH after this pandemic. If my office doesn’t let me WFH, I will also be leaving. A good portion of my team is similarly minded, but management is insistent on disallowing WFH. I can’t wait to see their faces when the company bleeds massive swaths of engineering talent. It’s about damn time that companies realized that they ought to treat their employees like the adults that…

You might as well stay at home and do nothing because no one wants to work around whiny crybabies like you,anyway.

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

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social hierarchies have their downsides, but if history is a guide, they are necessary. Any behavior that appears in all recorded cultures is likely to be a core survival advantage, and therefore very fundamental to us as humans operationally and unlikely to change.

The arc of human history, especially in the west, has bent toward equality. I think some hierarchy is necessary, but I like how one of the previous comment distinguishes between organizational hierarchies and social (status) hierarchies. I’m not sure the latter are useful at all.

How are organizational hierarchies and social (status) hierarchies not the same thing? I'm not sure I'm following

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

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the "everyone remote" of 2020, one of the things that spooked a lot of companies is the employees adding to additional complications by living in states (or sometimes countries) that have different labor laws, taxes, and such without telling the company. I've side-stepped this issue by being self-employed. Then it becomes as simple as - you keep paying me and I keep working.

Well, I don't know how this works in the US, but in germany when you are self-employed, but basically only work for one company - it would be declared a fake selfemployed situation, with lots of legal and tax complications, basically forcing the company to employ you regulary. (to counter companies pushing their workers to be self employed, to avoid taxes, healthcare costs, etc. But I am not convinced if the result i…

From what I understand, it's an issue in Canada as well, but only if you leave money in the company and don't take it out as salary.

If you pay yourself 100% of the extra revenue (aside from expenses), then there's no avoidance of a lower corporate tax, thus no issue.

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

#410
post #85
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s ridiculous, and only proves my point that management is obsessed with meaningless metrics and what employees do with their free time rather than whether they’re completing their assigned duties or not.

I feel very empowered by WFH as a manager. I get gamed much less by the developers I manage. For instance I assign a duty or task as you mention, and I can now clearly see if anytime was spent on it or not. So during my progress reviews if a developer says he is still working on it, been a bit more complex than he expected, yet I can clear see when he was active on the system, and due to proprietary nature of our sof…

There is something you might be missing. I'm a developer. Quite a bit of my development time is not spent at a computer. It's spent working things out in my head while walking or jogging, or even just wandering around the house.
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