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

Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

governance.fyi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 316 posts

Re: Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

#191

Post by abeppu »

cosmic_quanta wrote: post #52

I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH. My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money, and that benefit from maximum productivity of their employees, still generally have a hybrid work culture.

I think some of it was just a belief that work you can see being done by a floor of people talking with their mouths and looking at screens in the same room is more real than the slightly less visible conversations in slack while looking at screens in their own rooms.

Open plan offices continue to be designed more for seeing the work happen than for doing the work. I spend a lot of mental energy on ignoring the distractions around me. No job has ever offered me a private office with a door that closes in exchange for being in the office 5 days a week.

Re: Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

#192

Post by ryandrake »

delecti wrote: post #147
bhouston wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of flavors of "pro-natalist". For example Elon Musk is a "pro-natalist" but he seems to clear favor white Christian people and himself especially. Others are pro-natalist but have a general eugenics bent, rather than just white/Christian supremacy. And then others are pro-natalist in a more general sense, in that our culture in general should encourage at least rough replacement levels of fertility so…

I don't think those groups are as distinct as you're implying, certainly not in the US. I think there is considerable overlap, in the form of people who believe in the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory. Essentially "we need to make sure there are enough white babies so that white people can outbreed ." That thought is inherently eugenicist because it implicitly holds that white people are "better" in some way. "C…

The Christian "Quiverfull"[1] movement embodies that "Out-Breeding The Others" idea.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiverfull

Re: Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

#193

Post by nehal3m »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #184
rennokki wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as someone finished the assigned tasks for the day, idc if they want office or remote.

Thing is, who decides how many tasks someone can do in a day? What if they get paid for 8 but only work for one, but the manager doesn't know they do, and they never communicate their workload is too low?

Why would you expect Homo Economicus to ask for more work? The companies they work for chase infinite profit at zero cost as a matter of principle, why shouldn’t employees?

This holds whether their butt is in a seat in some office or at home.

Re: Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

#194

Post by [deleted] »

rossdavidh wrote: post #50

"One or two hybrid days per week capture nearly all the fertility upside." That is an interesting point, and not obvious why it would be so. In fact, it kind of calls into question whether the whole relationship is causal. The people who were able to WFH longer were more often in high-income jobs (service workers never got to do it in the first place, it was almost entirely an office worker thing). They were thus mor…

[deleted]

Re: Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

#195

Post by LiquidSky »

edgyquant wrote: post #155
LiquidSky wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that this is Hacker News and so all rich and important people must be geniuses making only rational moves, but consider the slim possibility that most aren't very good leaders and make poor decisions. Maybe there's some 19D "soft layoff" motivation, but I suspect a large part is just about control and appearance. You spent all that money on offices so workers better be there. And what's the point of having you…

There’s some of that for sure, but also knowledge sharing is easier in person. The question is whether or not it’s that much easier to justify the trade off of in person work. I don’t think so, but even most remote workers I know would agree that in person has a certain collaborative nature that remote lacks.

Sure, WFH has some downsides as does anything, but it's always funny to me that we have 150+ years of basically everyone who's ever worked in an office despising it as a place where productivity goes to die mired in pointless meetings, office politics, etc., but when WFH becomes a realistic option all of a sudden the office is now Plato's Academy reborn.

Re: Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

#196

Post by LunaSea »

gnerd00 wrote: post #90
LunaSea wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google & co have very little footprint in the EU.

citation please

In 2022 they had 25K employees and interns. That's tiny.

Source: https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/di...

Re: Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

#197

Post by zer00eyz »

cosmic_quanta wrote: post #52

I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH. My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money, and that benefit from maximum productivity of their employees, still generally have a hybrid work culture.

> 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs

Look at the last 3 years of the job market: No company has any issue with doing actual lay offs. The layoffs have been about reducing capital spend, and one wants to get rid of dead wood and redundant hires, not let fate decide who stays or goes.

> My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money

If you're talking about "trading" as in financial, then this makes sense from a culture perspective. Its a group of people who, are about the job and not about any ones feelings.

It's harder for teams to be this way without the social lubricant of bonding over lunch and coffee and small "how are you" or "the boss sucks" social interactions. Things that are easy in person but more difficult when all your communication channels are owned by the company or result in "documentation" that can be used against you. It's much easier to be "professional brusk" (I need this asap) with someone you just ate lunch and talked about life with than it is for someone you DONT have those interactions with.

I have been a consultant (read: mercenary) for over a decade now. I have seen just about every team layout there is, and there are lots of distributed teams whos effectiveness is much lower than it could be. Its going to depend more on your product and ALL your teams willingness to be candid and blunt than anything else.

Re: Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

#198

Post by ryandrake »

redwall_hp wrote: post #170
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that it was a reaction to the pandemic-era trend of "over employment" where a small number of remote workers bragged about clocking in simultaneously to multiple jobs. Employers may have decided that their employees' physical body was the only unique identifier that couldn't be duplicated.

They should start with over-employed executives in the C-suite of more than one company or sitting on more than one company's board of directors.

Yea, for some reason:

Rich people sitting on multiple boards and running multiple companies is A-OK

Poor people having to work 3 jobs to keep food on the table is A-OK

But, middle class office workers working at multiple jobs is fraud and abuse and must be stopped.

Re: Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

#199

Post by everdrive »

rcpt wrote: post #167
everdrive wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also consolidation of jobs in big cities. When I was a kid you didn't need to move away from home to find a stable income. WFH could have solved that, but I think the cultural movement to relocating has just become too entrenched.

You were a kid before Detroit automakers? Before NYC was the center of finance?

Point taken, but the trend has only increased since then.

Re: Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

#200

Post by ben_w »

graemep wrote: post #183
ben_w wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would still match "[favouring] white Christian people". Or at least that part matches the "Christian" part, the other stuff Musk associates with seems to suggest at least some racial (and not simply cultural) biases in his thinking, e.g. how he regards DEI as being a promotion of undeserving people rather than a way to give equal opportunities to deserving people who are demonstrably under-represented given thei…

On that basis Richard Dawkins matches the Christian part.

It is entirely unimportant how Richard Dawkins is categorised, isn't it? Last I checked, the "pro-natalist" part isn't there for Dawkins, so how other things modify a pro-natalist stance don't connect to anything.
Post reply on HN