Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

okdoomer.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 371 posts

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#321

Post by kolbe »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #307
kolbe wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. They might be commissioning a harvard business professor to write about productivity gains of being in-office. They might lobby for some regulation to force a liability onto companies with remote workers. But what they aren't doing is getting 1000 of the richest people in the world into a room and coordinating a conspiracy to help some corner of the room not go bankrupt.

Except, She never said any of that. Since the article is in line with what you said, coordination could be through commissioning a Harvard writer, or lobbying, or regulation, either way it isn't explicitly stated. I get the impression that you are arguing against a point of view that you are assuming. This is clearly you, reading (a lot) into what she said, and then reacting to your own pre-formed perceptions of an a…

The only way in which she anything she said could be consistent with mine is if she used the term "the elites" to mean very specifically "CRE investors." This is a definition she never once even implied, let alone stated.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#322

Post by cscurmudgeon »

camgunz wrote: post #264
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eh I would say Socialism as practiced in Western Europe and the Nordics is doing better It is not an easy comparison. They have the luxury of the US taxpayers taking care of their defense while they propped up Russia, which US is also paying the most by a large margin to fix now [1, 2, 3]. Hilariously US socialists are against US defense spending except when it comes to US spending on Europe. They also have the lux…

Arguably the US caused the Russia problem with the aggressive expansion of NATO, and the failure to defend Crimea, so this seems fair. Also the US produces a bonkers amount of oil; dunno what your point is here. EDIT: how could I forget Trump's undermining of NATO, cozying up to Russia, and withholding aid to Ukraine?

1. NATO doesn't need Russia's permission to expand.

2. All I am saying is socialism that exists due to the benevolence of capitalism and exploiting nature is not real socialism and is not sustainable.

3. > how could I forget Trump's undermining of NATO, cozying up to Russia, and withholding aid to Ukraine

Wasn't Trump the one who warned the snickering Europeans against Russia? Even if that is the case, it doesn't go against my point #2.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#323

Post by AYBABTME »

Crappy article, but I'm sure there's more than a few board members who also happen to be real estate investors, and they're probably not disclosing that fact when they hype up RTO.

Nevertheless something missing from this conversation is the somewhat complete dismissal of the premise: that RTO might be better for (some? many?) companies. Like it's possible that not every company, team, employee, project is fit for WFH? I've been remote for a long time and even I can admit it's probably not the best choice for most companies from a purely business value point of view. But it's pretty inconvenient to admit.

In my experience, people with very high self drive, teams of dedicated people, in highly parallelizable projects, are successful at remote work. Many are successful in spite of remote work, and would fail without remote work not because of efficiency but because the practitioners wouldn't sign up to the work in the first place if it wasn't remote. But in a whole lot of cases, WFH _is_ a tax on businesses.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#324

Post by karpatic »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #316
zer8k wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they talk about "the elites" they are talking about a cabal and yes, it does exist. Vanguard and Blackrock created this environment by simply owning more real estate (via other companies) than anyone else. This, combined with their ESG score, is absolutely toxic to "the little guy". They tell their constituent publicly held companies that they're losing big on real estate and the next day 2,000 articles on the r…

Please tell me more about the naked shorts and the hedgies.

It's just a matter of time gamestop's volume dries up. It's a long game and we keep setting records as people continue to register shares directly with computershare.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#325

Post by ebiester »

egoregorov wrote: post #224
ebiester wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The office already doesn't matter when it comes to offshoring. Companies are rarely in the same office already, and are spread across the US. Even if a team is co-located, their stakeholders aren't. Further, timezone-friendly offshoring is about 70-80% of the cost and comes with larger organizational complexity. Good (not mythical 10x, mind you - I mean good by standard definitions) developers are expensive no matter…

70-80% is incorrect, it's more like 40%. I made 22kUSD last year in Kiev. I think my colleague on same team in USA was making 65kUSD. Not SWE, just comparing numbers. I was also paid more than the average for my position/geography. I was a contractor, as was all of the UA team....don't know what coworkers arrangement was...

How much was the contract company getting paid? How much overhead did they have? I saw what the blended rates were grow our negotiations with one of the big players and it wasn’t what the people on the ground were getting paid.

I’m guessing you were getting contracted out at minimum 45 USD an hour.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#326

Post by strix_varius »

ip26 wrote: post #198
lagniappe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this type of stuff only existed in movies. Just curious, can you elaborate at all? I'm wondering if I'm just blind to this stuff assuming everyone else is nose-to-the-grindstone all day too.

I theorize the prevalence depends on factors like how competitive the market is. In a highly competitive market, the organization can’t tolerate gross failure for very long without failing, so it either manages this kind of person out or does not survive.

I don't think that's the case (having spent several years in both the IC and management tracks).

An incompetent or checked-out IC is easy to spot. While comparing the relative impact of people on a team is a Hard Problem, setting that someone's just not doing anything is easy.

On the other hand, the metric of success for a manager is how well their team is performing. So if you take an incompetent (or even a complete no-op) manager and assign them to a capable team, the organization gets no signal that the manager isn't part of the formula for that team's success.

There are measures to counteract that (skip levels, for example). But in many places, skip levels are so rarely held, and/or the manager is geographically close to their manager, creating a wide delta in social comfort between the manager and the IC with the skip-level manager. That dissuades ICs from being honest about the situation.

So there's no signal to use to "manage this kind of person out," and since this is a common problem across the whole tech sector, competitors are weighed down by a similar percentage of worthless managers - so their existence doesn't threaten the company's survival.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#327

Post by Kamq »

sudosysgen wrote: post #313
Kamq wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative. I disagree. When laid against things like the end of mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as transformative. I think the effects would look pretty much like the existing US system, because Denmark looks pretty close to the current US system by the standards we're talking about. If you want to argue they'd be fundamentally di…

> Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long. This is not correct. Under, for example, the Roman Empire, privately held land was routinely leased to free men, either for a share of the produce (métayage) or for a fixed fee. This practice lasted hundreds of years. The end of subsi…

There's a fundamental difference here in that these examples exist before the state had a monopoly on legitimate violence.

Or, to put it another way, the large landowners you're referring to, also had large armies, the largest armies around by definition, otherwise they wouldn't have owned that land. They _were_ the state in their area, in the modern sense.

That's not private ownership of the means of production.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#328

Post by Kamq »

mindslight wrote: post #304
Kamq wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems that share some aspects of capitalism even though they haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over everything else. This is…

I don't know that is a great definition any more. A straightforward implication is that China is capitalist. Which isn't necessarily wrong , but rather demonstrates that it's focused on yesterday's arguments. Meanwhile I'd say most critics of "late stage capitalism" aren't bemoaning the private ownership aspect itself. Rather they're criticizing the wealth concentration, industry consolidation, and government corrupt…

> A straightforward implication is that China is capitalist. Which isn't necessarily wrong

But it is wrong. The Chinese government has demonstrated repeatedly that they are the de facto owners of, effectively, all of the wealth in the country.

Meaningful ownership isn't a legal status, it's the power to do... well... whatever you want with the thing in question.

Which I suppose puts ownership (and thus also capitalism) on a spectrum and makes it all messy, but all real life things are messy.

> Meanwhile I'd say most critics of "late stage capitalism" aren't bemoaning the private ownership aspect itself. Rather they're criticizing the wealth concentration, industry consolidation, and government corruption

And they can criticize all of that they want. I'd, frankly, like a less corrupt government along with a more decentralized world. But equating that to capitalism itself is roughly as lazy as the old boomers who think that socialism is when the government does anything.

But capitalism is the only system of economics I'm aware of that doesn't seem to have periodic famines, which I have a vested interest in preventing (I enjoy eating). And until I see serious evidence to the contrary (and several smaller scale experiments), I'm going to keep pushing it.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#329

Post by sudosysgen »

Kamq wrote: post #327
sudosysgen wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long. This is not correct. Under, for example, the Roman Empire, privately held land was routinely leased to free men, either for a share of the produce (métayage) or for a fixed fee. This practice lasted hundreds of years. The end of subsi…

There's a fundamental difference here in that these examples exist before the state had a monopoly on legitimate violence. Or, to put it another way, the large landowners you're referring to, also had large armies, the largest armies around by definition, otherwise they wouldn't have owned that land. They _were_ the state in their area, in the modern sense. That's not private ownership of the means of production.

That's completely untrue for Rome, and barely true at all for France in those days.

Roman landowners did not own their land by stealing it from other citizens with large armies. They owned their land by either receiving it from the state as payment, or by buying it. The Roman state had a definite monopoly on violence. In fact, when people commanded armies to take power in Rome, what they were trying to do was to take over the state, and the vast majority of the time those weren't private armies, but State armies that they were misusing.

The Roman state very very much had a monopoly on violence and roman agricultural tenants very very much were renting the landlords privately owned means of production.

Capitalism doesn't magically stop subsistence farming. The advance of science and nothing else makes that possible. The Romans had little interest in advancing fundamental technology because there was no money to be made doing it, and so they never made any advances beyond the domains engineering which were immediately profitable (like weapons and aqueducts and bridges). That's why they made barely any scientific progress in a thousand years.

Re: The elite's war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

#330

Post by somsak2 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #240
xyzelement wrote: post #225

The "article" rehashes the well repeated meme about propping up commercial real estate, with the only callout to productivity being the authors own self admitted "bullshit job". My counter would be as someone who is loving WFH as a new dad, it is obvious to me that as a group, teams are less productive when not face to face even though individuals may think they are crushing it. This is obvious to many people I talk…

I've been working on an app, with a small team, of [mostly] non-tech folks. Most of our interactions are messaging (Slack, IM, etc.), with occasional Zoom calls. I T . I S . V E R Y , V E R Y , S L O W . I have never worked this slowly in my life. I literally cannot rush ahead, at my usual pace, because I make assumptions that are often wrong. A few days ago, we had an in-person meeting, at a local diner, and talked…

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Post reply on HN