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

The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

hbr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–209 of 209 posts

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

#201

Post by marcus_holmes »

phatskat wrote: post #196
marcus_holmes wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Business leaders rightly worry that this divide could hurt morale among front-line staff, undermine perceived fairness, and create new rifts in the workforce. This from the article. My point is that this is absolute bullshit. Front-line staff already have massive inequality of working standards, and have done for decades. The need for people to go back to the office is not driven by some sudden compassionate drive…

I will agree that that particular part of the write up is suspect, who exactly said this beyond those nameless “business leaders” that are just now realizing remote work is a thing? I wouldn’t argue that frontline workers haven’t harbored some resentment to remote coworkers as remote work got more widespread, the framing of it being a new thing seems disingenuous. The overall takeaway I got is that the better approac…

> The overall takeaway I got is that the better approach is to bring better value to the frontline workers to make up for the discrepancies in “fairness” - honestly, this should have been the thinking from the on-set.

Exactly. Things weren't fair back in 2019, but no-one cared back then because it was just front-line workers.

Like you, I'd applaud any effort to improve conditions for front-line workers. But that's not the motivation here, and I very much doubt that WFH policies would be the first thing that front-line workers would suggest to improve their lives.

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

#202

Post by itsnotafight »

tuffff wrote: post #59
silisili wrote: post #4

I feel like this is missing the forest for the trees. Perhaps salt in the wound, if you will. Pay a forklift driver or warehouse worker 150k a year, and see how many complain about not working from home.

That comment may apply to the general topic often, but this article clearly mentions "just pay them more" as a solution. It's really quite a balanced read.

A bit tangential, but as someone who has been responsible for paying many people, I have never seen increased pay improve performance and rarely morale. Promotions have sometimes covered the latter.

What I’ve found is that mostly people work as hard as they care to, and that is mostly orthogonal to compensation and title.

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

#203

Post by wkat4242 »

ysofunny wrote: post #47
virtue3 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many bad economic decisions were based on cocaine usage back in the day? I think the point is that with higher paying and salaried jobs you are practically exempt from having repercussions due to drug usage while a lowerpaid wage worker is constantly in fear of getting fired over it.

arguably, by a similar logic, world war 2 was started by terrible decisions made while high on speed

Hitler was also talking cocaine eye drops, his personal physician was batshit insane. A good match of course as Hitler himself was too.

Of course no law would have prevented this because the Nazis made the law in Germany.

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

#204

Post by cityofdelusion »

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'm not annoyed at these things because as I have gotten older, I've realized that society has become fiercely anti-child in the west. You get nasty looks if your infant cries virtually anywhere in public other than a hospital. Again, you get nasty looks if your child acts up anywhere. There are no "safe spaces" for parents of young children other than schools and playgrounds, we've ostracized them very effectively in our current culture.

Thus, when I hear a babbling babe, I smile and move on. We're going to have a Japanese population pyramid situation if we keep discouraging parenthood and punishing child-rearing. There are virtually no societal or financial benefits to doing so these days, its a total sacrifice of self.

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

#206

Post by badpun »

rangestransform wrote: post #192
badpun wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I agree that difficult work should be payed more. For example, military service is as difficult as being a CEO (just in a different way), but pays a fraction of CEO's salary. 2. Should job requiring acquisition of skills pay more? Probably, but the discrepancy shouldn't be large. Most high-end jobs require 4 extra years of schooling (and thus forteited income) - whereas the job will be performed for 30-40 years. T…

So good parenting is an inequality that needs equalizing now?

It is already being equalized to some degree. That's what's public schooling or child protection services are about.

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

#207

Post by qwytw »

jonathankoren wrote: post #166
qwytw wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> idea that lower status people are inherently shifty and lazy, while higher status people are inherently more virtuous It's not about that. But also statistically on average that idea is accurate in this case at least. The qualifications and self-discipline required to become a pilot are significantly higher than for a driver. Your also surrounded by many other people all the time so it's much harder to not get noti…

>It's not about that. But also statistically on average that idea is accurate in this case at least. lol. No. Not at all. There is nothing to support this widely held idea. This is the very bias I was talking about.

> There is nothing to support this widely held idea. This is the very bias I was talking about.

You mean you don't think that there is a difference between commercial pilots and truck etc. drivers when it comes to drug and alcohol use?

> lol. No. Not at all.

That does sound very convincing.

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

#209

Post by CRConrad »

nindalf wrote: post #21
freddie_mercury wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps a reason for this is that not everybody agrees that drugs are all that bad As an explanation, this is implausible to the point of impossible. The same employers drug test lower-level employees but (e.g. in the warehouse) but don't test other employees (e.g. in the office). Amazon drug tests warehouse workers but not AWS engineers. It is difficult to come up for a coherent theory for that that includes "as a…

As an organisation we’d like to drug test everyone, except those with enough leverage to tell us to get lost.

Hm, one might think at least some of those are the ones you'd especially like to test. (Just not actually get to test.)
Post reply on HN