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Comment by slykar | Hacker News Reader

> For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.

Working remotely for a small company with a few people from around the world and it's going fine. We are in contact when we have to be. I can cut distractions when I need to. No open space office bulshit.

I was raised on IM. I'm fine communicating like this. If I need to talk I can always call someone.

In any case, you need a space to work. If you WFH you should have a space for work. I strongly believe that employers should pay you more so that you can afford an additional room. This should not be a cost cut for the employers. They should just pay you instead of paying the insane office rent.

WFH is simply different from working at an office. It will be hard for some people to learn a new way, but this major change could even redesign our cities.

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> I was raised on IM. I'm fine communicating like this. If I need to talk I can always call someone.

It is not about you being comfortable with IM, it is about doing an A/B comparison of the 2 options. You don't know what you don't know, if you don't compare with being in the office then "being fine" does not mean "it's better", it can be worse and you don't know it.

I am working from home a lot for ~ 12 years, I still go to the office from time to time not because I have to, but because it is good to. Those days are a complete waste of time in terms of productivity, sometimes I don't open my laptop the whole day, but they are priceless for other reasons; I talk to people all day long, the kind of discussions you don't plan and send invites with an agenda upfront.

> I talk to people all day long, the kind of discussions you don't plan and send invites with an agenda upfront

For what reason? You say it's a total waste of time productivity wise. Imagine having this all the time, because it's how it looks like in an open space office.

This might be the reason why we are expected to work 8h/day. We simply waste most of our work time. It would be much better to be paid 2x more per hour and only really work 4 hours a day.

Also, working remotely does not mean my meetings have invitations or an agenda. You can call someone anytime. We have webcams on all day. I only have a calendar event if it is a planned meeting, like an interview with a new candidate, daily stand up, brainstorming session.

It's all about the context. I am a senior IT manager in a very large US-based non-IT company. I am in the top 1% in the company as IT expertise (and in the bottom half of the people here, for perspective), that makes me a technical guru of the local organization. I will never be promoted to the next level (Director), but I can be a fellow if I want; this creates the expectation that people can reach me for guidance and help and this is what I do in the days I go to the office: be there and talk to anyone that needs me.

The huge advantage for me is that it makes me almost intangible to people like the local Director (technically incompetent and an ass) and I don't have to spend time with bullshit corporate "organizational work" like going to recruiting events and explain why we hire and promote only women (because targets). My yearly evaluation is also just a formality that I never spend more than 15 minutes for and I have the flexibility to pick the most interesting projects we have. If spending a couple of days per month in the office is the price, I am willing to pay it.

>They should just pay you instead of paying the insane office rent.

Or pay the shareholders instead. Or the CEO. Or ... you are a cost center for your company. Why would they pay you more than the minimum anyone than they would for any other cost center? That said you should negotiate for an extra room as a part of doing business.

>I was raised on IM. I'm fine communicating like this. If I need to talk I can always call someone.

I finally got emacs connected to the corporate email server. My productivity went up 100% overnight. I'm debating setting it up for slack.

I get what you’re saying and business is often like that, but buying employees computer equipment for their home office is common for example. Tech is also on the cutting edge of pampering employees in exchange for better work. Why not an increased salary for more space at home.

> Why would they pay you more than the minimum anyone than they would for any other cost center?

Maybe because you're a resource and not a cost center?

It's not always the case - some job roles are fungible - but I don't think that's the case with a typical HN denizen.

Let me put it another way. Why is paying the CEO more a better use of money to paying an employee more? Doesn't that build in a lot of assumptions about untapped value? And (at risk of getting out of my depth) paying the shareholders isn't the always the right thing to do. Don't most tech companies avoid giving dividends in favour of using the money to improve the share price? Which brings us back to employees and their potential value...

> Why is paying the CEO more a better use of money to paying an employee more?

I think the problem here is the one who decides who gets more is the CEO.

They tend to believe the employee will keep working for the same amount until they leave.

It is not about what is better, but what the company considers to be better; it is not the employee's decision, the company may simply decide that raising CEO's bonus or the dividends is the best. The comment was not advocating this, just telling how it happens in the real world.

> Maybe because you're a resource and not a cost center?

You are providing a resource by consuming money.

Imagine a company as if you were playing a CEO in a "software company tycoon" game. Are developers something you like to have, vs. need to have? Would you allocate them more money than strictly necessary to keep the output at desired level?

So make it necessary by refusing to work without being paid for utilizing your space and equipment. It's a thing of culture. You are paid based on supply and demand mostly. Devs should be on the front of this movement. Anyone who is able to generate any kind of financial pillow.

If you are a pizza boy where I live you get paid extra if you use your own car. It's not a law. It's expected. That's the work culture. No one will drive for you otherwise.

I'm not saying that you're not a cost. That your are one is obvious. I'm saying that you're not a cost that can be reduced without any negative second order effects.

I think WFH is particularly difficult for young people, not because they don't have access to seniors (or any other such drivel), but because they often don't have the discipline necessary for it.

For example, I've been doing freelance work for well over 10 years now and I eventually started insisting on having an extra office with a strict policy of the room is for work only (even if not paying work). The thing is, a lot of people will recommend things like dressing up as if you're going into work, taking a walk around the block as a transition, and so forth. But for me I can literally walk into that room completely naked straight from bed and have no issues.

But the thing is, what works for me doesn't work for you (and vice versa). But I've had over 10 years to figure out what works for me, young people haven't.

That's where their challenge is at, not in trying to learn from mentors, which can still happen even remote.

And some people just can't do it because they don't have the discipline and never will. Those people will fail, but that's on them.

Even when I was in my early 20s it took way more discipline for me to work in an open office than WFH. It's hard to concentrate on a task when your coworkers of all ages and ranks are talking about TV, sports, and politics all day long

Can I ask why you think that young people are inherently less disciplined?

Most children do not take on the responsibility of setting an alarm, getting up in the morning, cooking for themselves, and then walking to the bus stop to take the bus to school (or their own car).

Pretty much every adult does this as a matter of course.

...perhaps other than the breakfast part, that’s exactly what most teenagers do every morning (at least in non-COVID) times.

Certainly children don’t, if you’re only talking about prepubescent children, but they’re also not particularly relevant to a discussion about working from home.

> Certainly children don’t, if you’re only talking about prepubescent children, but they’re also not particularly relevant to a discussion about working from home.

Then I think it's pretty clear that's not what I meant when I said children... It becomes even more clear when you realize I said "or their own car", or did you think it was my belief that 5 year olds were driving themselves to school?

I had covered teenagers earlier in my comment, and so I wanted to cover younger children with the rest of the comment.

Right but we’re not talking about children. We’re talking about recently hired software engineers? And if you’re saying “pretty much every adult”, doesn’t that include those engineers?

Are you claiming that a 21 year old engineer is obviously going to be as experienced at life as a 40 year old engineer?

Because that's what you're implying here, and I don't think any reasonable person would make the claim that's obvious.

I think it's been observed by many psychology studies that conscientiousness (the personality trait that determines self discipline and self control) tends to increase with age. Excerpt from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/:

"Agreeableness demonstrated a fairly linear increase with age whereas the pattern for Conscientiousness was curvilinear: scores increased up to a peak somewhere between the ages of 50 to 70 and then declined."

Accorindg to your link, mean Conscientiousness raises by only 16% over age, with the standard deviation stays the same.

Doesn't sound that large.

But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here.

> But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here.

Exactly right. The sort of discipline I'm discussing here isn't conscientiousness.

Someone who scores low in conscientiousness, but then has children, is going to be a lot more responsible than they were before they had children.

Someone else accused me of reverse ageism. As if I'm biased against young people because I believe that people generally get better at life the more life experience they have. My rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone 10+ years older than you, it's generally good to assume they can read you better than you can read them.

> My rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone 10+ years older than you, it's generally good to assume they can read you better than you can read them.

This is giving a lot of people undue credit, is the problem.

I will facetious say that it's (reverse) agism against young people by older people.

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