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Comment by quaintdev | Hacker News Reader

While saving money on fuel and avoiding pollution. If you can avoid pollution in India you can literally increase lifespan.

The problem here in India, when I brought up "WFH is future", all the experienced manager above 10yrs were not happy with idea. Why? Probably because they are paying EMIs for hefty loans they took for buying flats. People like me who are relatively less experienced don't want to take that risk at all. Moreover I intend to move to my hometown permanently. Needless to say, my ideas don't sit well with managers.

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I think the other issue is that middle managers see that people working from home barely interact with them, which means that their middle man role is visibly unnecessary. A recipe for getting scared.

Agreed. There’s more focus on output and a lot of management simply produces nothing tangible.

I couldn't agree more. Compared to my previous job at an office, where my manager's role seemed to be to draw developers into pointless arguments he had won beforehand, as a fully remote developer I find myself only interacting with management a couple of times per day on Slack and the odd Zoom call.

But that is about people who don't understand their role as middle management. They should set guidelines and enforce processes so employees that do job think only about working and when they forget about some rules there is management to guide them.

This does not have anything to do with meeting with people f2f, one can use tech tools and maintain policies. Of course having coffee with people all day is easier :)

> middle man role is visibly unnecessary

Yep. One way forward is to move "middle" to other leaf node tasks in organisation. I have restructured a bunch of organisations towards globally distributed remote work since early 2000s. Every time: Unless I have strong investors' support I _MUST_ find a way to get the "middle" excited to move away from traditional management and coordination tasks into other things. Often this is back tech or sales where they originated. If you do it right most are happy and you get great improvements in productivity, staff retention, decision making. Do it wrong and you get mired down or sabotaged.

At my company we recently had an incident related to the recent WFH with a subcontractor in India. He was providing his credentials to another contractor who impersonated him, which is something that he probably would not have tried in the office!

Although maybe he would have tried it, because the impersonator called into meetings and everyone noticed that he sounded completely different (had much better English) and the work was different (less skilled)! If it was me, I would be checking the sub-sub-contractors work and at a minimum calling into meetings myself ;)

Well, there was the guy that outsourced his own job to China [1]:

"The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay.

He reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his job."

...

"Authentication was no problem. He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average nine-to-five work day," he added."

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693

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