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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

#421

Post by doctor_eval »

acituan wrote: post #403
doctor_eval wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My company incorporated in December 2020. Mid pandemic. One of the people I’m talking about starts in two weeks.

I know this doesn’t fit everyone’s model of WFH utopia, but whatever happened to an assumption of good faith at HN?

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

#422

Post by doctor_eval »

acituan wrote: post #404
austhrow743 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a manager it seems to me that WFH externalises one of the most expensive costs to employees: office space.

I think you’re being naive if you think that BigCorps aren’t thinking about how to turn this to their advantage.

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

#423

Post by Krisando »

neilwilson wrote: post #262
xvector wrote: 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…

Have you considered that some of us actually see the benefits in a hybrid model? There are downsides to working remotely, just like there are downsides with working in the office. Some of us just want to get our work done.

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

#424

Post by mixmastamyk »

ilaksh wrote: post #243
durovo wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people miss in these discussions about going full remote is that the market for software developers is very good right now but this won't last forever. Many companies are surely going to embrace full-remote once they have built up the right processes and infra. When that happens, it is not going to matter whether you live in California or Mexico or Brazil. It is much easier to replace an employee who is working…

One of the reasons I moved from California to Mexico a few years ago. Much more affordable and can live on outsourcing wages while working from home.

Might I ask any details about how taxes work in that situation and what cities are good etc.

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

#425

Post by ilaksh »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #424
ilaksh wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I moved from California to Mexico a few years ago. Much more affordable and can live on outsourcing wages while working from home.

Might I ask any details about how taxes work in that situation and what cities are good etc.

The US still wants to screw me with excessive 'self-employment' taxes and if I put the local address into Upwork, Mexico wants to take an additional 20% for their own taxes which Upwork is happy to do off the top since they enjoy spending my money more than anything.

I like Ensenada. Thinking about La Paz at some point maybe. Supposedly the water is warmer there.

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

#426

Post by aksss »

muyuu wrote: post #391
aksss wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly the entire developed world after their growth booms. China will get there too. It’s a common enough pattern for wealthy countries worldwide.

China has been in (artificially) in demographic decline for a while most of the country remains dirt poor. There is no such cultural determinism. Many countries won't stop having children as their economy grows, in fact the opposite is happening in many places around the world.

Nobody said anything about "stop having children" (good night!) - back to reality: I think the established pattern for countries joining the developed world is large economic growth/dev, followed by baby boom, followed by declining rates of reproduction until under the replacement value. This happens not only because of changing priorities of a wealthier population and changing behaviors, but also the availability of birth control and lower mortality rates (infant and elderly).

So it's not that birth rates decline "as their economy grows" - the birth rates go up during the growth phase - it's what comes after in an established prosperous society: fertility rates decrease.

It's consistent enough to predict with some certainty. As prosperity has grown worldwide, so global TFR has dropped. This happens one by one with the individual countries following a predictable pattern.

China does have regulatory limits that keep their TFR lower than it otherwise would be, they are still in their (modern) growth cycle. Absent that regulation, with the economic boom they've been seeing in last twenty years you'd expect to see the fertility rate boom accordingly, and while it appears to be growing despite the regulatory constraints, it's still below replacement value. This slow growth in the face of structural prosperity changes is the impact of regulation, not organic. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/fertility-ra...

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

#427

Post by dsyrk »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #256
sam0x17 wrote: post #231

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.

Based. I hope that this isn't an empty threat and ends up actually being prosecuted.

Of course it’s an empty threat. Nothing we are doing is illegal or even immoral. You people are literally entitled children. The responses to my comment have encouraged me to expand the system to include minutely screenshots, so I can replay their work as a video at 20x speed. Now when I combine this with standard productivity measures I have an extremely good idea of how they work or don’t work. Also the response to a 20 min inactivity auto disconnect has been hilarious, some of them seem to have set timers to wiggle the mouse periodically to keep the remote sessions open. It’s sad. Of course the best is the real developers, they focus in bursts, it’s typical 60-90 min bursts of activity, lots of keyboard and mouse events, and it corresponds well to their productivity, they are the people who really produce quality code, good commits, solves bugs, it’s impressive. Of course they take hours long breaks regularly and that’s great, who cares, they kill it when they work. The secret window I have into their behavior is a goldmine, we know who is valuable much more clearly now. And the excuses for the slackers, I can just pretend I believe them, but now I know. Who is stuck and who is a schmuck. Nothing wrong with being stuck, banging head against wall, I can help them now, let’s me focus on who needs my help.

Love to see you try and prosecute me. Slacker!

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

#428

Post by dsyrk »

leesalminen wrote: post #106
dsyrk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see you must be a sharp knife. I conceal my surveillance from my employees but I should tell you the name of my company so you can tell them?

Are you afraid your employees would leave you if they found out? Good. You should be. And I’ll be here to treat them with respect and scoop up your talent.

You have made me realize I should investigate commercializing the system we have. I added minutely screenshots, of course could be higher frequency if I want to use the resources. The screenshots can be played back at high speed as a movie. The commercialized version could integrate all the other activity statistics, maybe even label other external events like commits, as a browsable surveillance device, like a security dvr, but on the employee. This will be and is 100% legal btw, despite the objections being raised claiming it would be illegal, it absolutely isn’t.

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

#429

Post by dsyrk »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #221
dsyrk wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be fairly young and idealistic. It’s really hard to know people well enough to be able to trust them. Especially in this new WFH environment are you going to know your employees after a few skype calls? I’ve been in tech for over 25 years now and a manager for last 15, the level of deceit one comes across is mind blowing. In one case we had an employee we all liked and thought well of, did decent work, extre…

You must be a tropey children's story villain who doesn't understand he power of friendship https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThePowerOfFriend... Your one employee betraying your trust does not justify treating the rest of your employees this way

You must be a child who fantasizes his employer and boss are their friend.

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

#430

Post by muyuu »

aksss wrote: post #426
muyuu wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has been in (artificially) in demographic decline for a while most of the country remains dirt poor. There is no such cultural determinism. Many countries won't stop having children as their economy grows, in fact the opposite is happening in many places around the world.

Nobody said anything about "stop having children" (good night!) - back to reality: I think the established pattern for countries joining the developed world is large economic growth/dev, followed by baby boom, followed by declining rates of reproduction until under the replacement value. This happens not only because of changing priorities of a wealthier population and changing behaviors, but also the availability of…

my entire point is that such determinism is illusory and your example wrong in every way

there are direct factors that explain away TFR drops that are not "prosperity" - in fact prosperity alone has historically increased TFR pretty much every time

drastic drops in fertility rates in Europe and North America respond to very specific cultural phenomena that are unlikely to happen in a similar fashion in Africa or the Middle East, more likely to happen in South America and parts of East Asia to some extent, but certainly not across the board

social pseudoscientists can spend as long as they wish looking at past charts, they still won't see causality and there is no better example than fertility predictions to showcase The Poverty of Historicism

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