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Why is remote work seen as a gift?

cdoyle.me

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Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#181

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

sokoloff wrote: post #106
mcv wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers are the buyers of labour. If food prices depend on what the consumer can bear, then labour prices should depend on what the employer can bear. And most of them can bear a lot more than they're currently paying.

It is a market. Employers and consumers will pay what they have to be satiated. If they can’t afford that, they’ll have to make do with less. If something is priced too high and there are viable alternatives, they’ll consider those alternatives.

"Market" is just another way of saying "Power differential."

Most corporate cultures are inherently authoritarian, with money being used as a proxy for power.

Empirically there is plenty of evidence that given a choice, many businesses would rather maintain the power differential and complain about "lack of applicants" than increase pay and suffer a corresponding diminution of authority.

Stock is an even more specific proxy for power, which is why stock options that have real value are usually reserved for those at the top of the hierarchy.

This is also why remote working is unpalatable. Even if it increases productivity it also enhances worker autonomy and reduces the power differential. That's not acceptable in an authoritarian culture.

Attitudes to remote work can be a useful indicator of how central hierarchy is in the culture.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#182

Post by goodpoint »

silveraxe93 wrote: post #58
re-thc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be in another job? Still cannot leave. It's the equivalent of changing prison cells.

Of course. Having a job is comparable to being in prison. By those standards every single human to ever live has been in prison. Humanity will only be free once we're in a post-scarcity society.

> Of course. Having a job is comparable to being in prison.

https://wikidiff.com/simile/comparison

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#183

Post by natymad »

herbst wrote: post #64
natymad wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to believe that there's IT companies that would trust you to work on your own personal PC. It's a glaring security issue that sounds like a company problem, not a general difficulty for remote work.

I am not sure why that would be an issue. I am 'just a coder' all I do is pushing and pulling things from git.

- You can easily steal code - if you were working on a company laptop with USB device protection (can't connect drives to transfer without approval) and heavy website moderation (can't send code to yourself), leaking code would prove way more difficult. Compare that to just copy+paste on your personal computer. (ofc it's possible to steal from company laptops too, but you'll leave a very visible trail). - You're a security risk if your computer gets stolen: with company laptops remote disable is an easy option, not so much with personal ones. - Your dev environment can be radically different from others if the company doesn't install some software center (OS, dependancies). - You can't guarantee your personal PC isn't compromised by virus software, again playing into possibly leaking code.

It's a liability to let devs download code to their personal computers. It's risky from both physical, and intellectual property perspectives.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#184

Post by mcv »

interactivecode wrote: post #178
sokoloff wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely! Everyone is free to select among their options the one that they most prefer.

though you have to admit in basically all situations the employer has more leverage than a single employee.

That is the big fundamental problem of employer-employee relations. They hold more power and it's easier for them to organise with other employers without anyone being aware of it. The only way to balance that is for employees to also get organised. Or ban corporations, I suppose.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#185

Post by RugnirViking »

siva7 wrote: post #140
silveraxe93 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. Having a job is comparable to being in prison. By those standards every single human to ever live has been in prison. Humanity will only be free once we're in a post-scarcity society.

GTP will free us finally. I'm serious about that.

what is GTP?

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#186

Post by mcv »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #172
mcv wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the kid is home then either office work was never an option, or there's another parent present. Just make sure you've got a separate room as your home office. (Admittedly not always possible with smaller apartments; this is the real additional cost of working from home.)

I see yes never crossed my mind the one working parent scenario for some reason. In that case you need a good setup. For me dogs barking is way worse than kids noise though. I prefer a baby cry to a dog bark terms of if I am working.

Where and how you live certainly matters. If your neighbours have a noisy dog, working from home won't be as good an option. And of course there's a million other reasons working from home can be problematic, especially in small apartments with too many neighbours, or living in a noisy or distracting environment. Or it might be too hot or cold to work comfortably.

Of course it's also possible for offices to be noisy or otherwise uncomfortable, and you might not have any power to do anything about it. I guess WFH is a great option mostly for people who have a great home.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#187

Post by ajsnigrutin »

interactivecode wrote: post #178
sokoloff wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely! Everyone is free to select among their options the one that they most prefer.

though you have to admit in basically all situations the employer has more leverage than a single employee.

This depends on the worker... if we're talking about a job that 'anyone' can do, sure... worker is replaced within a week, and the worker might need more than a week to find a new job.

But a professional in a small team, usually witha bus factor of 1? This means a hard time finding a new employee + months of training, while the old worker probably found a new job before they even quit at the first one.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#188

Post by gcatalfamo »

fwlr wrote: post #103
skrebbel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you believe managers don’t do useful work, that doesn’t even strike me as a very cynical take. I disagree with it though, I manage a distributed team and I can do my work fine without the team being in the office. I think the serendipity arguments for on-site are much stronger than “manager doesn't trust team member to be productive on their own” which the entire world discovered was bullshit during the corona…

No, I believe managers do useful work. What I mean is that knowledge workers have discovered they have the capability to do their job just as effectively when remote, while managers have simultaneously discovered they don’t have the capability to do their job nearly as effectively when remote; i.e. a lot of managers are realizing they relied on face-to-face interpersonal skills to motivate, track, and manage their em…

I know it's not very HN-y to say "I agree", but I think your comment encapsulates wonderfully the general topic, in a concise and very well put paragraph.

edit: I am also commenting to retrieve it in the future.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#189

Post by MrPatan »

komali2 wrote: post #112
dontlaugh wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn’t the price of goods be the cost of producing them?

Because that's labor theory of value which is Marxism and marx is just some guy. Arguments against will be that value "is" what people are willing to pay for them, which is some combination of supply and demand, but I find this just too simple. Technically it's true that the "value" of something is the price someone last paid for it, but then we get situations where we say a Bitcoin is worth 40k usd or whatever tf th…

There is no global "value", there is no global "worth".

There is bid price, ask price, and last sale price.

Do they indicate "value" to the specific people making those transactions, bids and asks? Sure. Does it have to be the same for everybody? No, and that's why trade happens.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#190

Post by [deleted] »

MrGilbert wrote: post #25

I find it kind of amusing (and annoying) that employers like to play the salaray game as it fits their needs. I got interviewed a few times, and some stated that they cannot pay the salary I was asking, because i don't live in a high-density, high-cost-for-living area, while others argued that they have to respect their local salaries, which are below what I would expect in my area. I'm yet to meet the employer that…

[deleted]
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