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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?

#461

Post by rcme »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #396
rcme wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It doesn’t matter where you work, as long as you get the work done." This sentiment is weird to me. When people express this, I think they have a myopic view on work. Like they view work as a series of JIRA tickets that need to be closed out. As a senior leader, one of your jobs is to teach the younger folks how to do their jobs efficiently. Your personal output is not that important. You are there to be a force m…

> As a senior leader, one of your jobs is to teach the younger folks how to do their jobs efficiently. I'm in the leadership position you describe, and I've found remote work to be amazing for teaching because of screen-sharing. It's so much easier to get the team talking about some code over Teams/Slack/etc. than it is awkwardly huddled around someone's monitor or looking at a TV in the office. Remotely, you're able…

As a junior engineer, most of what I learned wasn't explicitly taught to me. Just a really basic example: a service outage happened and the senior engineers started trying to debug the issue. Watching them debug taught me a lot about our system and how to diagnose problems in general.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#462

Post by nathanlied »

renewiltord wrote: post #446
pmoriarty wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get my sense of belonging with my friends and family. I don't feel a need to bond with the other office drones.

It's always funny how these interactions go on HN. Office worker: I enjoy working like this. And I really hate working like that. Remote worker: I enjoy working like this. And I really hate working like that. Also here's an insult. For some bizarre reason, for the folks in the office it's always like "I like this style of stuff" and for the folks remote it's always "I like this other style, but also you're a drone /…

While that's true, and I feel you do well in calling it out, I also think it's because in my anecdotal experience HN is mostly pro-WFH.

When looking at the wider pool of people commenting on this issue outside HN, I see antagonism on both sides. I've seen pro-WFH people being called lazy, entitled, antisocial, uncaring (because they're "killing downtowns"), elitist (because not everyone can WFH, and usually those who can have higher paid jobs), among other litanies of derogatory terms.

The truth is, this is an issue that people feel threatened about; however you look at it, assuming an even split of full-remote, full in-office, and hybrid, and assuming you're only happy with one of those options, you'll find your potential work pool diminished by 2/3rds. That's not a small amount. So people will take it personally and try to fight - some with logic and studies, others with underhanded means - for their preferred choice. Of course, I don't think things will reach those equal proportions anytime soon, if ever. So people who prefer WFH are waging a battle for a small % of overall jobs. You can see how that'd feel threatening - to have gotten something you love, and now seeing your options diminish or outright vanish. It is especially pernicious when cases of people with deep commercial real estate investments clamor for a return-to-the-office with all kinds of negative things to say about those who prefer WFH.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#463

Post by caskstrength »

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…

> Some managers (like yourself) have clearly adapted, while others have realized how much they relied on (benign!) shouldersurfing to figure out if work was being done.

So you are saying that those "other managers" will have to actually become competent in projects they are managing instead of measuring the time butts spent in the seats and trying to sneak on employees who are reading reddit at work? Good!

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#464

Post by caskstrength »

senttoschool wrote: post #150
tluyben2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many managers are not very good and mostly believe managing means flogging the herd to work harder; that’s not really possible remotely.

Many individual contributors are not very good and mostly overrate their own ability to be productive while working from home.

> Many individual contributors are not very good and mostly overrate their own ability to be productive while working from home.

So go ahead and fire them. What is the issue exactly?

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#465

Post by davidmurdoch »

bathtub365 wrote: post #262
davidmurdoch wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone that lived in Mexico but listed a friend's address in NYC on all work paperwork.

How did that go come tax time?

Pretty sure he pays NY taxes like normal. Not sure about Mexican taxes.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#466

Post by epgui »

squokko wrote: post #32
epgui wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite position could just as well be said to rest on the opposite assumption.

The burden of proof is much higher on remote work. The entire history of civilization from hunter-gatherers to 2019 was built largely with in-person work. If companies are going to make a permanent change to the way work is done, they will need affirmative proof that the new way works better than the old way, otherwise the much more tried-and-true old way is a much safer bet.

I think the burden of proof is not that high.

I agree that status quo and stability have at least some non-zero probative value, but you have to acknowledge that the status quo only exists because the dinosaurs didn't document their prehistoric internet well enough, so our ancestors had to rediscover the concept of a zoom meeting.

(Edit: obviously I wrote this in jest, but in all seriousness, when considering the value of "how it's always been done" it's extremely important to consider how we happened to stumble upon the status quo, with a holistic and historical bird's eye view. This is consequential to the analysis.)

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#468

Post by RestlessMind »

ericmay wrote: post #276
jsty wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s plenty of virtual office / forwarding address services, but claiming you live at one when you don’t for a pay gain risks (1) fraud against your employer; and (2) tax fraud (if eg in a different city / state / country).

What’s the definition of where one lives? For example what if you wanted the NYC salary and you rented out a bunk bed for $50/month and traveled around the country while working remote? Cities definitely don’t have the resources to track you down and I’m not sure employers especially larger ones have any mechanisms in place to keep track. I’m not advocating for this just surprised it’s not more well known. Though I s…

> What’s the definition of where one lives?

https://www.annuity.org/personal-finance/taxes/residency-req...

Ultimately it comes down laws, regulations and taxes. Company wants to make it easy for itself to deal with that.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#469

Post by RestlessMind »

bojangleslover wrote: post #289
jsty wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s plenty of virtual office / forwarding address services, but claiming you live at one when you don’t for a pay gain risks (1) fraud against your employer; and (2) tax fraud (if eg in a different city / state / country).

(1) and (2) are separate. The IRS/state department of revenue won't care, and they won't tell your employer. Say you live in HCOL, actually live in LCOL, and at the year claim a refund from HCOL and file properly with LCOL. You can just say plans changed and you moved in the case of an audit. You could tell your employer the same thing. Much harder to dock someone's salary once they've started working.

> The IRS/state department of revenue won't care, and they won't tell your employer

California FTB very much cares if you are collecting SV salary but are not paying CA taxes by living in LCOL areas. Unless you are a CPA, please do not spread lies.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#470

Post by davidgerard »

fleddr wrote: post #339

The "return to the office" move is largely management/extrovert bias. Managers collaborate all day long, it's what they do, whilst "workers" tend to be overwhelmed by the many meetings. Further, extroverts get energy out of being around people. Another factor is that some (many) managers frankly have no idea what their employees do. Physical presence management is the coping strategy. That being said, I do agree that…

> It's an open invitation to move your position to the lowest cost country that outputs quality that is acceptable.

This threat has been waved at highly paid techies for the past few decades.

If they could have, they would have.

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