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

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

#271

Post by eudamoniac »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #141
softwaredoug wrote: post #51

If I could afford to live 15 minutes from the office I 100% would go to an office. But housing, transportation, daycare costs make that impractical. If they really want me in the office, companies need to engage on these issues in the metros they live in. They need to clear NIMBY barriers to urban housing, support transit, and good parental leave.

Unfortunately, much of the US, and elsewhere, has been taken in by decades of successful American propaganda promoting and romanticizing the suburb after the War. The taste for the suburb, like the taste for cars, is very entrenched in many people's minds. In our vapid consumerist culture, they have become elevated to virtual rites of passage: buying a car and buying a suburban house are marks of manhood and adulthoo…

Your solution to "the stupidity of the housing markets in cities" is to increase their demand, and to make housing overall more unaffordable?

Sorry, no, I'm not going to raise my family of six plus a dog in a high rise. Encouraging happy, productive families by subsidizing suburbs is good.

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

#272

Post by array_key_first »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #105
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.

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.

If it is this, it feels very emotionally driven.

Realistically I think very little employees were doing this. And, of the ones that were, is it even a problem?

I mean, the idea is that they're such amazing developers that they can be 2 developers at once. So you still end up with 1 developer. So, break even, right? No harm no foul?

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

#273

Post by Yodel0914 »

graemep wrote: post #74
hypeatei wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I could afford to live 15 minutes from the office I 100% would go to an office. I live ~20 minutes away from my job and you eventually get tired of that, too. Car maintenance, bad weather, bad drivers, etc. grind you down little by little everyday.

20 mins walking or by public transport would be fine though? GP does not specify driving.

I’m 20min by public transport and still much prefer my 3 days at home than my 2 in the office.

I think the thing people miss about RTO is that management are more likely to be extroverted. They’re the kind of people who thrive on being surrounded by people. I don’t think RTO is as nefarious as people here make out - it’s just extroverts wanting to mold the workplace to for them.

That makes them bad managers, but not necessarily bad people.

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

#274

Post by array_key_first »

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.

I dispute this in my case. While this is true theoretically, in practice we all go to an off to sit in front of a computer 8 hours.

I haven't had an in person meeting in, god, years at this point.

The only difference between my house and the office is the physical location. That's literally it. Oh, and I'm a lot less happy now.

... hard to feel that the "lot less happy" part isn't the motivation.

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

#275

Post by array_key_first »

pc86 wrote: post #157
vrganj wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because there's a lot of overlap between people thinking "those damn lazy workers better get back to the office so they don't slack off" and people thinking "a woman's role is in the household, raising children and cooking". Regressive attitudes tend to not come alone.

"RTO is sexist" is a hell of a take.

It's a return to form, a reinforcement of the status-quo, and in that since it's inherently socially conservative.

You know what else is socially conservative?

RTO makes relationships outside of the traditional nuclear family more difficult. It discourages career building which, because of the patriarchy and our history, is going to primarily affect women.

Sexism and misogyny is actually very complicated. It's built-in to just about every system that exists in America. It's not the sort of simple "woman bad" some people think. It's the choices we make when we design structures. It's part of our DNA, it's not a symptom.

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

#276

Post by givemeethekeys »

pc86 wrote: post #270
givemeethekeys wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a company looks for a new office, cities give them subsidies to open office there. Those subsidies come with strings attached beyond, "please lease this office space". They expect additional foot traffic that the other businesses near the office would benefit from.

I don't think this is true, do you have a cite for this other than stories that make national news like Amazon's HQ? Even if it happens for more than outlier examples like that, this would only happen for huge companies that can meaningfully move the economy of large urban centers. So maybe top-5 level huge companies in mid-market cities, but 99.9999% of companies wouldn't qualify for that.

Alright, let's agree that it only happens for the top 5% of companies. Then the leadership of those companies come out and make big announcements on how WFH is dead.

... everyone else follows because, "Amazon's doing it.."

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

#277

Post by rainsford »

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…

It makes a lot more sense if you think about WFH in terms of flexibility rather than being able to be home with your children all day every day. As you point out, the latter is unlikely to be super productive if you have young children. But at the other extreme, where the only option you have for work is being physically present in the office, any situation where it would be useful for a parent to be home requires taking paid time off. If they have a long commute, even scenarios involving partial days or just uncertainty around whether a parent needs to be home requires PTO where a WFH option might allow them to work for some or all of the day.

This also explains the results specifically impacting the number of children per mother. Having to take time off to deal with kid related things is much more manageable with fewer children, while even modest WFH flexibility might relieve that logistical burden even for much larger numbers of children. Just one or two days a week of WFH hybrid flexibility could take the place of 10-20 weeks of time off, which is far more than any employee is likely to have or need to deal with even the largest of families.

To preemptively address an obvious complaint about my comment, I'm not saying WFH replaces the need for taking PTO when it comes to childcare. Some childcare situations realistically would not allow the parent at home to work. But a lot of scenarios just require a physical presence or the ability to duck in and out with short notice. In those situations, having the WFH option is dramatically better than having to take the entire day off and removes one more burden of trying to work and parent at the same time.

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

#278

Post by jmyeet »

shdudns wrote: post #126

If you can WFH you've demonstrated to your employer that one impediment to offshoring your job is gone. Thats not to say there aren't other impediments. Maybe your job is legally protected onshore (military) Nor is this a value judgement, or a prescription of a solution. Maybe lowered tech wages are the best solution for this problem. I work in a lab, I'd love for these coders to make less money and not have to compe…

If this were true, every tech job would've been offshored already. The idea that offshoring is strictly better and cheaper is a myth that's yet to be realized since the 1990s. Just like RTO mandates and layoffs, it's just another tool to suppress wages.

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

#279

Post by rainsford »

largbae wrote: post #28

I love this new information about birth rates and WFH, and totally support following it to higher birth rates. But the article framing as if the pronatalists somehow knew of the birth rate benefit and maliciously used it to counter their stated goals is too heavy-handed. How about framing this as the new information that it is and getting the information out there in a positive way so that it can be used in both gove…

The article at least partially addressed that. The argument isn't that the pronatalists aren't truly in favor of higher birthrates, it's that they're selectively in favor of higher birthrates for certain groups of people and thus support solutions focused on those groups such as expensive fertility technology like artificial wombs while opposing more generally applicable approaches like workplace flexibility.

I think the article is on the right track, but it misses also mentioning the conservative politics angle. The right-wing version of pronatalism also includes a pretty obvious implicit, if not entirely explicit, goal to return to the 1960s model of family life where the husband worked while the wife stayed home with the kids. Offering women workplace flexibility and giving them the option to both work and have a family runs counter to that societal vision.

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

#280

Post by rainsford »

pllbnk wrote: post #263
subpixel wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually paying someone to take care of your child 7-5 is easier, it's just wildly unaffordable and therefore less attractive.

I don’t understand the reasoning to have children if you don’t want to spend time with them and rather would pay someone to do that for you (not addressing directly at you). Being able to spend time with your child is a gift which passes by very quickly.

Unless you're independently wealthy, even the most traditional two parent nuclear family with a married mom and dad requires at least one parent to spend a significant portion of their day away from their children earning a living. I'm not sure why you would so strongly object to both parents doing that when you would presumably not object to just one doing the same.
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