Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office • Hacker News Board

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#131

Post by luxpir » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

pinkybanana wrote: post #101

mywittyname wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait for the mass exodus. Remote work is turning out to be a requirement for hiring people. So once the company starts bleeding (good) people who find remote jobs with other companies, they are going to be difficult/impossible to replace. At some point, the execs will have to suck it up and offer remote work.

If remote work is a winning concept on the market, why we needed coronavirus crisis for it to get adopted? Are markets not working?

Markets are not optimized for quality of life. It's one variable of many in a system evolved to coerce the many to benefit the few.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#132

Post by CamperBob2 » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

irq11 wrote: post #25

CamperBob2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAD, but I'm sure there are some medical contraindications for certain individuals, such as people who are immunocompromised, that may legitimately keep them from being vaccinated. That's why achieving herd immunity is important, and my understanding is that we aren't quite there yet. Never change, HN.

Herd immunity is not a fixed vaccination percentage pulled from Anthony Fauci’s latest media appearance. It’s the immunity level at which cases stabilize and begin to decline. It is defined by observation. Cases are at all-time lows in the most vaccinated locations, and are dropping rapidly nationwide.

No, it's the level at which people not eligible for vaccination are no longer at risk because most of their peers are incapable of spreading the disease. The political aspects are just some stuff some people made up.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#133

Post by dcolkitt » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #71

darth_avocado wrote: post #34

The whole pushback against remote work is absolutely nuts. When the companies were staring at shutdowns and loss of revenue, everyone gladly accepted the idea that people can work from home. And contrary to the popular belief, productivity increased (our own CEO admitted at one point in an all hands). But the minute there was a sign things are opening up, there's a complete opposite viewpoint being pushed from the sa…

The problem with fully remote work is that once you accept that a job can be done from anywhere, you have to compete on a global level. It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people willing to work for less than you! So don't get too excited about it ;-)

> It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people

Software engineers in these countries are significantly less competent than their American counterparts. This has been documented by academic literature.[1] That still doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers in Pakistan, but what makes you think you have the ability to recruit, interview, hire and retain the top decile of engineer in Pakistan?

Are you able to discriminate between a great Pakistani engineer's resume looks compared to an average one? Do you have a network of contacts in Pakistan to make recommendations? Will you be able to speak Urdu when you check their references? Does your company have any reputation or prestige in Pakistan? Why would a highly in-demand Pakistani engineer be interested in working for a company without any career progression, who's only outsourcing work because it's cheap?

It's not like this is the first time in history that companies have realized they can offshore programmers to low-cost markets. It's literally been a constant theme in IT management circles for fifty years. It's not like they needed WFH to make it happen. It really doesn't cost much to open an office in Bangalore. Cassandras have been predicting the collapse of the American software market for decades, yet engineer compensation just keeps growing. If anything the economics are far less compelling than they were 20 years ago, since the wage differential is much smaller. If offshoring didn't work in 1995, there's no reason to expect it to work in 2021.

[1]https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#134

Post by machinebun » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

not_jd_salinger wrote: post #94

phkahler wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with fully remote work is that once you accept that a job can be done from anywhere, you have to compete on a global level. It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people willing to work for less than you! So don't get too excited about it ;-)

People have been making this threat for decades now but here is the thing: you always get what you pay for. High quality developers from these countries can get paid surprisingly well. The ones that are insanely cheap tend to also do poor work. The reason we still plenty of work being outsourced is because if you have a really high tolerance for low quality work, the lower end is much cheaper than you can get in the…

Well, you could still arbitrage expenses. In SF a highly paid developer is paying $4-5K a month on rent and another $1-2K on food - the same developer living in India would probably be paying 1/10th of that sum for the same expenses. Plus taxes and such. I'm not sure what the delta really comes out to though.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#135

Post by machinebun » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

pinkybanana wrote: post #101

mywittyname wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait for the mass exodus. Remote work is turning out to be a requirement for hiring people. So once the company starts bleeding (good) people who find remote jobs with other companies, they are going to be difficult/impossible to replace. At some point, the execs will have to suck it up and offer remote work.

If remote work is a winning concept on the market, why we needed coronavirus crisis for it to get adopted? Are markets not working?

> Markets are not optimized for quality of life. It's one variable of many in a system evolved to coerce the many to benefit the few.

You need enough buy in from enough companies to actually have a competitive market for remote work. I think things were moving in that direction but slowly (as things tend to do) - COVID just accelerated the trend.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#136

Post by narrator » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

dred_prte_rbrts wrote: post #103

narrator wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it's good to be a lawyer. It's one of the last remaining guilds of knowledge workers with any power. It's literally illegal to have someone from wherever do certain tasks if they are not properly licensed.

I would point you at board certified doctors.

Their work isn't remote though.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#137

Post by Andrew_nenakhov » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:42 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #110

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #33

Office is a space where complete strangers can become a collective, sharing common goals and establishing bonds that can help achieve great things. This is possible with remote work, but much harder. In my experience, remote workers are generally rather detached from their colleagues and projects. YMMV, but I vastly prefer working from office.

This strikes me as a very romantic view of what offices are. Maybe it is possible for an office to be like this, but I would suspect that it is an exceptional case. Mostly offices are where people go to do sufficient work to get paid, and the only real goal coworkers have in common there is a desire to receive paycheques and make sure the company doesn't go under so they can continue receiving paycheques. If people d…

I wasn't talking about what all offices are, but about what some of them can be.

It is clear that many offices are dull hives that suck the life out of their occupants. But why be in such office? Why should someone have a job just to get a paycheck, getting miserable in return? There are always options.

To look at it from a different side, office is a tool, which, used correctly, can give a tremendous boost to productivity. But it is not a given. It has natural advantage - like physical proximity between people and disadvantages - the need to commute being one of them.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#138

Post by johbjo » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

The observation that many office jobs are meaningless must have been made many times before the pandemic, and I/we can't be the only ones to have made it.

Maybe the purpose of many workplaces, from the perspective of some managers and workers, is not only related to the output of the company. I have come to the belief that part of the purpose of "work" for some people is "live role playing" careers, and thus they want to fill the roles for the other co-players.

From this perspective, it's not surprising that people want to return to the office.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#139

Post by kelnos » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #129

kelnos wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but this thread is about an employer bringing everyone in for a luncheon. People who are not vaccinated for medical reasons should be taking responsibility for their health in these situations and declining to attend an event like this. (If the employer will count this absence against them despite their medical situation, that's a shitty employer that might be violating ADA laws.) The issue is with the anti-vax…

I read that something like 3-4% of the US might be immunocompromised, easily an order of magnitude higher than I would have initially guessed, which means that if you have a staff of 20, it’s possible that vaccines might not be effective when administered to one of them. It’s not just antivaxxers who are at risk from in-person meetings.

> I read that something like 3-4% of the US might be immunocompromised, easily an order of magnitude higher than I would have initially guessed

Wow, agreed, I would not have guessed that high a percentage.

> It’s not just antivaxxers who are at risk from in-person meetings.

Right, and I explicitly said that I would hope people with medical conditions would decline these kinds of in-person meetings if they weren't comfortable with them just yet.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#140

Post by autarch » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

throwawayboise wrote: post #20

mech422 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been WFH for 20 years now... It gets easier all the time, the pay gets better, and I actually have a much better setup at home then I've ever had in an office (Granted, I've had 20 years to set it up...) I'm not concerned about 'losing out' in any capacity going forward, especially now when its become so common.

Where do you find work? Is it all for one client or are you more of a consultant/contractor?

I've been working remote since 2002. I've done both full time and contracting. I've been full time only since 2011 at two different employers.

There are _enough_ employers that will allow fully remote employees that it's not hard to find jobs, and it's only gotten easier in the time I've been doing it.