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The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

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

#151

Post by xyzelement »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #52
j7ake wrote: post #27

Unsurprisingly, workers whose skills are in high demand and short supply (eg highly educated, highly experienced people) can demand better work conditions such as pay and commute flexibility.

Honestly a lot of the “low skill jobs” actually have a high skill threshold but we just arbitrarily decide to suppress them. Take somewhere like Starbucks. They pay them minimum wage, churn em constantly so they’re never trained and make them work arbitrary shifts like 4 hour -> 2 hour unpaid break -> additional 4 hours. Those staff end up “low skilled” but in reality someone who was treated fairly and respected woul…

This feels like a tortured argument to me. Starbucks seems to do fine using existing strategic so seems like they are “right” about the appropriate level of skill and investment.

Maybe someone else could have a strategy more like yours but it’s clearly not required.

An airline on the flip side cannot “try” this with their pilots.

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

#152

Post by pcmaffey »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #137

The amount of effort to make inequality a fight between a white collar worker making 100,000 and a blue collar working making 30-40,000 and not about a CEO making 10Million or an investor making 100 million is clear and insidious.

Culture warfare 101

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

#153

Post by unsupp0rted »

caddemon wrote: post #115
Aeolun wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I have the opposite reaction. Whenever I’m on a work call and my colleagues apologize for their children shouting in the background I’m mostly fine with it. If anything it makes them seem more human when they’re otherwise just some disembodied voices.

I think it depends a lot on the specifics, if the background noise is loud and persistent enough it makes it harder to understand the other person. Hard to tell from OP's description but I'm guessing it was actively impacting the conversation if they're complaining about it.

Admittedly it wasn’t loud enough to make it hard to hear words.

You know when you call your cell phone company and you’re routed to a Call Center in India/Philippines and you hear snippets of other people’s support calls in the background?

It sort of throws you off throughout the call. You wonder if the agent is getting everything you’re saying, given the distraction.

It was that, but with a children’s cartoon and a toddler.

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

#154

Post by redcobra762 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #139
redcobra762 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I didn’t need to address the issue. Sometimes the best escalation is no escalation: get your task done and get on with your day. I don’t have a responsibility to their company to improve their service quality. To me it was a brief nuisance that turned into a shareable anecdote. If this is sufficiently annoying to other customers, they can address it however they choose to, or not… doesn’t affect me.

Except it absolutely affects you to the degree that you explicitly stated you would request another person to speak with, should it happen again.

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

#155

Post by x3n0ph3n3 »

Duanemclemore wrote: post #34
BossingAround wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the assumption you're missing in the circular argument is that gay people could be blackmailed against other entities than the FBI. For example, "give us this FBI file or else we'll release a scandalous photo of you and this gentleman to your wife" kind of a thing. Of course, as being gay becomes more normalized and less of a secret, FBI wouldn't need to take it into consideration. How true or not that thinki…

Gambling was verboten because of the presence of organized crime in the industry even where it was legalized.

Gambling is seen as a liability because gamblers often get into huge amounts of debt, which is what the FBI is really concerned about. Huge amounts of debt open people up to bribes and other corruption.

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

#156

Post by unsupp0rted »

tinktank wrote: post #143
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…

You can always take your business elsewhere.

Because one support agent isn’t doing the WFH thing to my standards?

It’s an anecdote for HN, not a nuclear event.

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

#157

Post by jvaseniselv »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #150
jvaseniselv wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is an overreaction. It was likely as simple as hanging up and calling again, if it bothered you so much. Or did you consider providing some polite feedback that the background noise was distracting you, I have had people buy headphones advertised as noise canceling and assume they work well but only realize they didn't until pointed out to them. Or did you even consider that she might work from an office…

What was an overreaction? I ignored it and got on with the task. My reaction was to comment about it later under a post on Hacker News about WFH.

What you ignored was a confrontation but made assumptions and judgements about the person, their work, and their ability to work from home and concluded the issue was with working from home, without providing feedback or attempting to learn more about the situation, and then complained on the internet. How would you like it if your work performance/feedback was handled this way? IMHO, I don't think that's a very professional way to handle a work issue/relationship. I would have been more sympathetic to your issue if you had made an attempt to provide feedback or tried to resolve your problem, and if the other party failed to help.

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

#158

Post by carlosjobim »

afarviral wrote: post #85
badpun wrote: post #60

I will agree to abolish the inequality caused by WfH when CEOs agree to abolish the inequality caused by salary discrepancies (i.e. never). We leave in an inequal society, and for good reasons.

Who wouldn't agree that difficult work should be payed more? Work that requires the acquisition of skills should be payed a bit more too, no? There should be a system in place which determines the appropriate compensation, not arbitrary compensation as determined by the market.

What you're describing is communism. And renumeration for workers will be even more arbitrary than market forces, because humans cannot make "a system" that is independent from humans.

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

#159

Post by unsupp0rted »

jvaseniselv wrote: post #157
unsupp0rted wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was an overreaction? I ignored it and got on with the task. My reaction was to comment about it later under a post on Hacker News about WFH.

What you ignored was a confrontation but made assumptions and judgements about the person, their work, and their ability to work from home and concluded the issue was with working from home, without providing feedback or attempting to learn more about the situation, and then complained on the internet. How would you like it if your work performance/feedback was handled this way? IMHO, I don't think that's a very prof…

What assumptions did I make, other than that if they can hear a toddler and a cartoon in the room, and if their job is phone calls, then they should take care that this isn’t distracting on phone calls?

I don’t have a relationship with them- they’re one agent of a handful, whom I’m obligated by my client to call a couple times a year.

I’m not in a position to give feedback on their work performance. Nobody needs me to have a confrontation with them. I’m not their coworker, boss or direct customer.

This is a HN post about WFH and I’ve shared an anecdote about somebody’s toddler babbling during our work call.

I admit mine is an unpopular opinion- we’re supposed to celebrate parents who work so hard to balance their duties with their entirely elective decision to have children.

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