The growing inequality of who gets to work from home • Hacker News Board

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#71

Post by em-bee » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 10:01 AM UTC

unsupp0rted wrote: post #23

The other day I phoned a service provider and the lady’s kid was babbling in the background and a children’s show was playing throughout the call. I couldn’t get off the phone fast enough. Either invest in voice isolation or don’t work from home. Functionally this lady brought her kid to my home office and blasted a cartoon during our meeting. Is this harsh of me and an unpopular opinion? Yes. I agree that Human bein…

this is a cultural problem. in asia and africa people take their kids to work all the time. part of this is because parents can't afford childcare, but part of it is also: "why not?".

i find our western attitude towards kids disturbing. after living 15 years in china i have come to realize that western, and even more so the european, and especially the german and austrian attitude towards work and school is much more conservative than i thought.

and as a parent, i find that very sad.

i wish every parent the opportunity to spend as much time with their children as they can. and if that means that they play where the parents are working, then i am all for it. rather that than sending them off to daycare. (there are exceptions of course where the environment is not safe for kids to play)

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#72

Post by autoexec » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 10:03 AM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #7

throwup238 wrote: post #2

The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t. Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstree…

Perhaps a reason for this is that not everybody agrees that drugs are all that bad. Half of silicon valley allegedly is micro-dosing all sorts of things and apparently benefiting from that. Steve Jobs famously advocated using LSD. The Vietnam war famously had a lot of drug abuse. WW II soldiers and leadership were consuming epic amounts of amphetamines. And that wasn't just the Nazis. Companies aren't testing for thi…

> The main reason testing is more common in the public sector is not that drugs are bad but that the optics of people using drugs has negative political consequences when political leaders are waging this war on drugs.

I always thought companies that do drug testing got some kind of discount on their own insurance rates for it.

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#73

Post by unsupp0rted » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 10:03 AM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #71

unsupp0rted wrote: post #23

The other day I phoned a service provider and the lady’s kid was babbling in the background and a children’s show was playing throughout the call. I couldn’t get off the phone fast enough. Either invest in voice isolation or don’t work from home. Functionally this lady brought her kid to my home office and blasted a cartoon during our meeting. Is this harsh of me and an unpopular opinion? Yes. I agree that Human bein…

this is a cultural problem. in asia and africa people take their kids to work all the time. part of this is because parents can't afford childcare, but part of it is also: "why not?". i find our western attitude towards kids disturbing. after living 15 years in china i have come to realize that western, and even more so the european, and especially the german and austrian attitude towards work and school is much more…

As an intentional non-parent who lived for a decade in several Asian countries: work calls are for doing work.

Serious people don’t let their kids talk over their meetings.

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#74

Post by em-bee » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 10:07 AM UTC

rapidaneurism wrote: post #30

bitschubser_ wrote: post #11

The same inequality between c level and frontline workers exists on so many levels with other perks is it possible that the c level just don’t want to lose its privileges? In Europe as a manager you get subsidized cars where the company pays for gas, private corner offices, equity or special bonus programs not always are benefits packages available for frontline workers… and now they talk about inequality if more sta…

I think that this is partly because in Europe taxation is progressive and it quickly becomes quite high. (In the UK £100k-£120k is effectively taxed at 60%+ more if you have young kids) So there is a point where giving someone 10k take home pay rise costs the business much more than giving a frontline worker a 10k take home pay rise. But an EV car in the UK is taxed 98% less than the same amount in cash. Rest zones,…

interesting, as far as i remember, in germany any benefits towards employees are treated as income and taxed accordingly or even worse, to the point that it is better to pay out benefits in cash only. i think this comes from companies trying to save on taxes by taking advantage of benefits that previously were taxed differently (or not at all)

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#75

Post by vladvasiliu » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 10:16 AM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #68

mschuster91 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So everybody needs to be miserable as if you are not miserable the rest of miserable people will look at you and say: That's not fair!! I am miserable so you must be miserable too! This argument gets used a lot in politics, whenever a situation is to be improved people claim "but we suffered, that's not fair!!!". Personally, I know this from fellow second-generation migrants here in Germany that are opposed to how…

Crab mentality is dangerous. It seems like a lot of people would rather pull others down to where they are than allow everyone to be lifted up to somewhere better.

Indeed. But it seems widespread.

The issue seems to be that many people don't consider their situation in absolute terms, but tend to look at how others have it.

An interesting book on the subject is Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (original German title: Der Neid: Eine Theorie der Gesellschaft) by Helmut Schoeck.

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#76

Post by verve_rat » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 10:17 AM UTC

starttoaster wrote: post #20

silisili wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for some reason think about these things a lot, even though I guess I'm not in the front line anymore and have it pretty nice. I can remember in 2010 or so having two friends who worked from home - one doing generic helpdesk in a small apartment, and one doing medical coding in a trailer. Neither paid well at all, and never did I get this sense of jealousy. Perhaps their lives were easier because of it, but it was…

> Neither paid well at all, and never did I get this sense of jealousy. You might just not be one of these people. For some people, the feeling of being on your way to work is an existential dread. Or like you're leaving your life behind to live a different one that you don't generally enjoy for a while. Some of those people would likely do anything to avoid that feeling. I think for those people, working from home i…

I totally agree with all of this. It used to be that Retail Salesperson was a career you could do until you retire. But now employers really do not pay the sales people enough to care.

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#77

Post by unsupp0rted » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 10:18 AM UTC

BossingAround wrote: post #46

unsupp0rted wrote: post #23

The other day I phoned a service provider and the lady’s kid was babbling in the background and a children’s show was playing throughout the call. I couldn’t get off the phone fast enough. Either invest in voice isolation or don’t work from home. Functionally this lady brought her kid to my home office and blasted a cartoon during our meeting. Is this harsh of me and an unpopular opinion? Yes. I agree that Human bein…

I totally understand the reaction. Then again, people with kids have it hard enough, let alone those that with low paying jobs. When that happens to me, I get annoyed, but then, I remind myself that I get to exit the call while the other person has to stay in that environment, trying to hustle for money, and I try to show them as much kindness and grace as is possible for me in that moment.

When this lady applied for the technical phone support job, did she mention that her toddler would be on the calls?

If her manager were to “secret shopper” call in, how much kindness and grace would they show for being forced to sit though a children’s cartoon while quoting 5-figure invoice numbers back and forth?

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#78

Post by dmezzetti » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 10:20 AM UTC

My biggest question after reading the article is why did they use a LLM to do what is basically a binary classification task? Why not use a BERT-like standard text classifier?

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#79

Post by bitschubser_ » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 10:25 AM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #74

rapidaneurism wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this is partly because in Europe taxation is progressive and it quickly becomes quite high. (In the UK £100k-£120k is effectively taxed at 60%+ more if you have young kids) So there is a point where giving someone 10k take home pay rise costs the business much more than giving a frontline worker a 10k take home pay rise. But an EV car in the UK is taxed 98% less than the same amount in cash. Rest zones,…

interesting, as far as i remember, in germany any benefits towards employees are treated as income and taxed accordingly or even worse, to the point that it is better to pay out benefits in cash only. i think this comes from companies trying to save on taxes by taking advantage of benefits that previously were taxed differently (or not at all)

jep, it gets treated as "gedldwerter vorteil", so it affects your taxable income/social security tax, but depending on the car (E or ICE) and the way you deduct it (driving log, 1% rule, etc...) it can be worth it

Re: The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

#80

Post by em-bee » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 10:27 AM UTC

klabb3 wrote: post #57

madsbuch wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this comment represent a weird sentiment: if you drugt test in one field, you should equally drug test I all fields. How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs? it seems like introducing a whole machinery to just have the same resting is an industrial scale waste of resources. However, people regularly die because of drunk and tired drivers.

> How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs? This is an interesting question but not all drugs decrease performance. For instance, if a pilot responsibly takes some wakey meds before landing a long haul flight it may be a good thing. There’s a reason for the “I can’t function before the morning coffee” expression. I remember a documentary many years ago about long haul pilots who went partying HARD t…

I can’t function before the morning coffee

i recently met someone who stopped drinking coffee and after a while realized that the only reason he could not function without having a coffee before was that he must have been addicted to it. once he got off that addiction the problem went away.

the only reason that stops me from functioning in the morning is lack of sleep.