Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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If we take the articles claims at face value, what we know is:

* There was an existing compliance department.

* It had several remote team members.

* The company opened a compliance office in PDX.

* The company required Black team members to relocate to PDX or apply for new jobs.

* The company allowed a non-Black team member to remain in PHL and work out of the NYC office.

* Multiple sources claimed that the PHL employee was allowed to continue working remotely.

* The stated reason for demanding the relocation of the Black team members was to have the whole compliance team working from one place, a goal that obviously wasn't served by having someone else working out of PHL and NYC.

Maybe the sources in this article are lying (of course, you can rebut any claim that way), but apart from that, I'm not sure how this complaint is easily knocked down.

It's unclear but I think when it's mentioned PHL employee is able to work remote, they mean they are able to work out of the NYC office which is remote relative to the PDX office. It was not my read that they are working remote from home.

Your wording speculates on how the communication around remote was delivered in an unfavorable light. We know the decision was made to end WFH/remote, and one employee managed to get permission to work from the NYC office. A more realistic (still speculative) scenario imo:

-Company announces end of wfh/remote for a team. Folks are asked to relocate to PDX. -Employee asks for permission to work from NYC. Request is approved.

Group employee relocations are a big deal. You are leaving out the part where the stated rationale for that relo is to have the team all together in one place. Instead, the real rationale appears to have been to have all the Black employees all together in one place (or, just as pausibly, that the relo was in fact a soft RIF of that group of employees).

@tptacek: you are imputing a motivation out of thin air. having fought hard for wfh/remote at companies against it, I can imagine far more benign reasons to be plausible.

No company does a group relocation without expecting to lose several members of the team. They're essentially all RIFs. I've tried to keep my analysis as dispassionate as I can in this part of the thread. I think the facts as asserted in the article speak pretty clearly, and the bulleted list I provided upthread recites those facts pretty much directly and in ways you haven't disputed.

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