The future of work is not threatening your employees | Hacker News Reader

The future of work is not threatening your employees

warzel.substack.com

79 pointsRuffleGordon66 comments

Seems like there are a lot of ways that employers are effectively blaming their employees for COVID. Some of the anecdotes in this article really resonated with me. It does feel "super shitty" when you feel as though you've been barely holding it together during what has undoubtedly been one of the most difficult years of the previous century and yet your employer seems to feel entitled to hold you to the usual standards. The tech industry (well, the "business" industry really) lately seems just so utterly inhuman that I've seriously considered getting out of it for good and becoming something like a technological hermit. But I can't be a "business" hermit so I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Afterword: I feel like this post is a good litmus test for identifying which respondents are in the C suite lol.

"during what has undoubtedly been one of the most difficult years of the previous century"

That seems a bit hyperbolic.

Lol, really? A pandemic doesn't count?

Perhaps that should say "this century" because the 21st century has got nothing on the 20th.

...knock on wood!!

Sorry, but I think I can objectively say that a year in which a global pandemic occurred that took millions of lives and completely upended normal life for the majority of people counts as one of the worst years since 1920. The fact that anyone would question that in this forum is, I think, extremely telling.

Are you just ignoring all the wars with more than a million casualties, all the famines with many millions of casualties etc, during the past 100 years? 2020 doesn't even make it to the top 10 possibly not even top 20. Maybe it was one of the worst for USA, but not if you take the world overall.

I think that the last several decades... maybe the last 5-6 decades... have been so GOOD compared to what came before, and to the bulk of human history, that when a bad year comes around it's especially shocking. The window has shifted.

I'm not arguing that 2020 wasn't a really bad year, but just that a hundred years ago this wouldn't have seemed such an outlier.

"The previous century" includes the Great Depression, WWII, the Cold War, a bunch of nuclear war close calls, and 9/11. Also if you include the whole 20th century, WWI and the Spanish Flu.

And those are just of the top of my head, I'm sure I've missed some.

Personally, I'm not sure this pandemic qualifies as "one of the most difficult"...

It's almost as though you're responding to a different statement than the one that I made. What about what I said would have denied that any of those things you mentioned were not also terrible things that are among the worst things in the past century?

In terms of death toll for my family, more people died in the last year due to Covid than all of those events combined. So yeah, I would put Covid right up there at the top.

One could argue that being shut off from in-person interaction is not as big of a challenge, as escaping a genocide or being drafted into an army to fight $ideology on the other side of the globe.

Pandemic is sure bad, but not "half of all men in your country being killed in war" bad.

Does something really have to be equal to or greater than WWII in damage to qualify as a bad year or two? That's quite a high bar to set.

One could also argue that the reduction of in-person interaction is in some ways worse, if not as heinous, because of the long term harm that it will cause.

I think the issue is that, as has been widely reported, the pandemic effects have been so vastly different from person to person.

I'll volunteer myself. I work for a tech company, stuff was hard for me originally when pretty much everything shut down (e.g. office, my gym, school where I took evening classes, etc.), but beyond that I don't have kids so I don't have to worry about home school, things actually opened up for the most part many months ago, I still have a good paying job, etc.

Compare that with someone that lost family to Covid, or who was working in the ICU throughout, or who was working in a grocery store and got sick, etc.

Yes, the pandemic has been a huge, gargantuan event, but I'm not about to pretend that my typing from home on my couch in my underwear is remotely comparable to a relative who had to worry about how to home school her kids while she worked in a hospital the past year.

Compared to two world wars both of which lasting longer than a year and change?

I think that would vary by person and location. Some people have had a terrible time losing friends and family without the option to even say goodbye, which is genuinely awful. Then people who have lost their livelihood and even become homeless.

On the other hand, I got the best job I've ever had and I don't even know a single person who got covid. Restricted travel has only been a minor inconvenience because I live in such an incredibly beautiful and temperate place. In the most selfish perspective, this seems like a great year for me. There are probably many like me, and also in between.

All that is to say I don't think we can truly evaluate how difficult this has really been until we see the full consequence revealed in several years. Some people speculate that we will collectively bounce back in a roaring 20s kind of way, others suspect this has kneecapped our global economy and we haven't seen the worst yet.

Only 3 millions dead worldwide in about a year - not as many as WWII's 50M in 6 or 8 years but on the order. So yes, one of the most difficult.

I had two family members die of COVID, moved house 3 times (including several months couch surfing) and burned out at work while having daily panic attacks due to being locked indoors and isolated for months alone.

I don't think elements of this experience were uncommon.

It's been a pretty rough year for DC residents to be fair. Between BLM protests, the gangs that drove to the city literally to fight with them, then a literal insurrection, I think it's possible that for this group, it's up there in terms of difficult years in the last 100. Oh, and then there was the pandemic on top of that.

I was going to argue a bit about the scale of some of those issues, but then I saw that you said "for DC residents", and... yeah, I'll buy that.

> so utterly inhuman t I worked for a company once that moved offices-- literally, there was no workplace to go to for 2 weeks (keep in mind this company made hardware).

The C level management sends out a company wide e-mail saying "the move will not be tolerated as an excuse for missing deadlines."

God I wish I had a copy of that e-mail.

tbh that's probably not all that unfair -- whoever created the timelines should have already accounted for it, and if the timeline was created long enough ago (because the project is sufficiently long) before the move was known, there should be significantly more than two weeks buffer included for issues exactly like this. Of course, it's also that person who should inevitably be held accountable for the fuck-up (unless the move was sudden, in which case it's the fault of whoever initiated the move.. perhaps the C*O :)

At least in my mind the only time its the fault of the employee himself only when they slip their own agreed-upon schedules, without warning or reason

In a rational world yes... The company scheduled 8hrs/day of work on a project in its schedules-- no time taken out for breaks, mandatory trainings, meetings, etc. They wouldn't even account for things like vacation time, holidays, or even pregnancy. I remember one engineer became pregnant, and she still had a development schedule of 8/hrs a day in the estimates. This problem was pretty obvious 6 months out or so.

You'd say it is just bad management-- and it is-- but its a control technique.

I’m not sure how much control it really creates... it seems more like a recipe for slipping milestones

Well then let me elaborate... it's a gaslighting technique.

It creates a no-win scenario for the workers where the employee/team/etc is always blamed for managerial incompetence.

I work in tech, and my company has bent over backwards to help us. Dozens of extra days off I'm having a hard time even using, an extra 4 days off a year (one per quarter) where the whole company is off, constantly reminding us ourselves and our families come first, and encouraging others to be understanding that our coworkers might be working unusual schedules as they juggle remote-learning kids, childcare, elder care, and other life priorities during such a difficult period.

It's not everywhere, and maybe it's not even the norm, but surely other companies are supportive of their employees as well.

Wow, yeah, our company started emphatically asking us to take our days off piecemeal because we all went heads down in work and our days off became a financial liability. We spent the last year with benefits cut and idea that worry that we'd be having layoffs after the first round of furloughed employees weren't rehired.

So some different realities for sure.

To be fair, there's a very real difference between companies that are thriving or at least doing as well as ever during the pandemic, and those that are seriously hurting. I don't blame the latter for tightening purse strings, but one would hope they're at least not assholes about it.

You would hope. My employer froze raises and retirement contributions when they expected things were about to get tight. At the time we pointed to the billion+ dollar strategic fund and asked why they couldn’t dip into that, and we were told that money was untouchable because of the strategy.

Now a year later, things have worked out better than they expected and there is a huge surplus due to the freeze o. Wages and stopping contributions to retirement funds. Instead of giving some of that money back to us, want to guess where it’s going? That’s right, the strategic fund.

My manager has been very active to push sick says when needed, maybe partially as it's hard to gauge how functional someone is when you can't see them at their desk. They've always been awesome but it has shown through this past year.

I have tried to gently help my corporate overlords to understand that wfh is something happening that they need to react to, not a decision they get to make. It is 100% not working. The convo goes like this:

Them: We understand the concerns, but we have decided that the return to the office will be mandatory.

Me: So those who are not comfortable returning to the office will be let go?

Them: No! Yo mean fired? Good heavens, no! No one will be let go. But they will have to return to the office.

Organize with similar minded employees so that everyone is on the same page when push comes to shove.

Unpopular opinion - is the CEO really threatening her employees? Or talking more abstractly about the downsides and ramifications of people deciding to work remotely? Ie, downsides that people would face at many/most companies, not just her own. I read the original article with a more charitable assumption, and the latter is how it came across to me.

"If you park in my driveway again, I will have your car towed" - very clear threat.

"If you go around parking in people's driveways, you run the risk of having your car towed" - maybe a threat, maybe not, depending on how the person says it

"I understand that you parked in my driveway yesterday, because of an emergency. No problem. But if you continue doing it regularly, please be aware that I might need to have your car towed, if I urgently need to use the driveway myself" - I suppose this is a threat too, but probably justifiable.

Maybe others would consider this to be cynical, but I've always considered compensation and job stability to be directly correlated to the amount of value you provide as an employee. If an employer thinks that remote-working will reduce the amount of value I bring to the company, I would certainly expect that to have an impact on my career growth. If my manager tells me this directly, I would thank him for the upfront feedback. I would also consider working for a different company that has a different perspective on this topic... the exact same way I shop around for employers that offer the best work-life balance. But either way, there wouldn't be any hard feelings on my side, and I'm puzzled by the outrage around this article.

agree, I think tech employees should be weary of remote work. We'll probably see even harder interview process and less pay / benefits as a result.

Weary or wary?

Or as jay_kyburz suggests above, there will be even more contractors and less employees. The interview process is usually easier for contractors because it's not like you're vetting a new family member.

The Washingtonian's employees presumably know their CEO better than any of us do, and their interpretation of the op-ed resulted in them organizing a work stoppage the next day.

So maybe your reading is a bit too charitable, as it seems like all the employees heard the threat loud and clear.

Meaning exists in how language is interpreted by the intended audience, in this case, that audience identified this as a threat. No other interpretations are pertinent.

First of all, the pandemic is still happening. Imagine telling your neighbor about the abstract dangers of parking in your driveway when they're currently doing so because their house blew up and they don't have anywhere else to park.

Second, the CEO published this without talking to a single one of their employees about the issue. Why? "I am concerned about the unfortunately common office worker who wants to continue working at home and just go into the office on occasion." Can you imagine your colleague stating this publicly without ever speaking to you about it? It's incredibly disrespectful. Your neighbor is parked in your driveway out of necessity, and you're within earshot asking a friend "Can you believe these people who think they can park wherever they want? I hope they realize how easy it is to tow a car off your own property."

It's the wording. There are no "risks" in not returning to the office other than whatever the leadership decides to inflict on them.

I think one of the consequences of work from home culture will be less of an emphasis on how many hours you work, and more focus on what you produce, and how that can be monetized.

What this means is that a good manager will farm work out all over the place finding the right mix of quality / quantity / price.

People will not be paid salaries, they will be paid per unit of work.

Rather than interviewing people to join your family, businesses will be running a continual review of work producs and more carefully measure that mix of quality / quantity / price. Each cycle letting go the least desirable contractors and giving new contractors a try.

On-boarding new contractors will be streamlined, and how fast the contractor gets started will be the first quality control checkpoint.

Well, that would certainly be what it took to finally make me buy a farm and leave tech forever, so maybe I should be on board!

The future is apparently going to be impossible for new grads and people who would thrive with mentorship.

It's already near impossible for people not from top tech schools.

I don't know what generation you are, but for millenials, the 2008 crisis was a real doozy. Anecdotally, only maybe 20-30% of my cohort found stable, well paying full-time jobs in the 10-12 years since that recession.

Many of them put their life plans on hold due to not being able afford things that a family generally requires.

So the "future" is already here. And has been for about a decade.

I think you are in a hell of a bubble. I've worked at several large companies over the years and would have to say that many of the engineers i've worked with have all come from vastly different backgrounds. I've certainly worked with some people with very impressive academic credentials but the majority do not.. and that could mean an engineering degree from a run of the mill school, a degree in an unrelated field or no academic credentials at all.

I'm in a bubble because my group of friends is more diverse than just tech engineers?

What a weird peak HN comment.

Just onboarding a skilled/experience new team member has been painful all around. There is so much you can get in a traditional in person whiteboarding session, or that one has developed the skills to teach in person. I think much of the issue comes from communication limitations or lack of skills in remote communication. That could be as simple as a senior member with 30 years of xpeirence teaching someone in person and can read body language to understand when to slow down or go over a topic again. Without that feedback source they lose a major component of their effective teaching style. Even checking work or notes can take 2-5x the time, swapping presenters or losing side by side comparison from two different views. Anecdotally, I've found it easy to get lost in what I'm presenting and forget to slow my sentences for clarity over an often poor call or connection and some of the people I work with are not even able to view meetings at home due to poor internet access.

To your point, I hope students today are learning how to learn/communicate/perform at home and building the skills required to do so in the field or these issues will be compounded after graduation. It's super easy to slip under the radar or just get by, in many cases it was like that before the pandemic. I think there will soon be lists of interview questions related to how one coped with the challenges of learning/working from home, what difficulties thy overcame, and how they did so as an individual/team/company. It's not like I'll be at a vendor conference to compare those notes with other people any time soon.

That's pretty much what the demonized CEO in the linked article is predicting, too.

Converting staff to contractor status sounds like a layoff, making said staff eligible for generous covid unemployment relief and fully subsidized cobra health insurance payments until September.

> "The original headline of the piece was itself an unsubtle threat: “As a CEO, I want my employees to understand the risks of not returning to work in the office.” (Over email, Washington Post Opinion editor Fred Hiatt told me that Merrill did not write the headline. “I asked our team to change it early this morning to something I thought better captured the piece,” he said.)"

As an aside, this unethical practice in the media irks me. It's really despicable for the Washington Post to write a headline from the perspective of the CEO, which the CEO never said themselves.

Does anyone know of any good non-partisan orgs that attempt to quantify and track these unethical practices across the media landscape?

FYI, from my understanding this is an extremely common behavior for most op-ed boards ex adding a headline when none was sent in, or editing the submission itself for length/formatting/etc. Most groups will require you sign something allowing them to review and publish the letter and may request sources or your own connections to the topic to identify and disclose a conflict of interest. This generally makes op-eds more reliable gauge of public opinion and viewpoints vs a blog style opinion article bashing an industry rival.

Some groups like NYT have retired the term 'Op-Ed' name in favor of something like Guest Essays as it better conveys the intention of the submission: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/opinion/nyt-opinion-oped-...

It's also important to note that local papers may print what is provided vs editing for spelling/grammar or even fact checking a submission. Larger publishers who by simply printing it add weight to the original may exercise a higher degree of involvement. For a look at the NYT process when you submit a piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.htm...

Anecdotal, but every letter I remember I or my family wrote to the local paper was edited in some fashion, most often for length. Short articles were the least touched, if at all, as they had the least content to make fit on a page of newsprint. I think it's also near impossible to get a non-partisan source either simply because that term is applied to basic human decency these days like how it's apparently partisan to wear a mask.

Wow, using an op-ed in the Washington Post to threaten her employees' careers? Where is this one in the How To Be A Great Leader manual? Wouldn't a private internal memo be at least marginally better than picking a fight publicly?

Why are executives, regardless of industry, digging in and going to such great lengths to insist that physical presence in a purpose-built office building is the only possible way to work?

My guess is that they are by-and-large older and not digital natives

Control. Everything is always about control.

Kudos for the employees to be able to organize and shut down operations for the day. I hope that it’s not only symbolic. What would it take for the CEO to get replaced?

This is hilarious. I was completely predicting this would happen when the time comes. The author nailed it precisely in this:

>The true issue at hand is not, ultimately, where we will work, but how we will work. Remote work forces you to change the how. It is not a cure for shitty management or a bad business model or a bad product. It is merely an organizing principle — it forces you to the hard work of listening to and trusting employees. It pushes executives to build a culture with intention and long-term vision. >If history is any guide, the business case for remote work HAS been made.

Management is increasingly becoming irrelevant. The fear of being irrelevant will drive all sort of drama as work forces returning to office.

The future of work will be whatever is easier for the CEO. So easy for CEO, hard for everybody else is what we will get.

The future of work is whatever employees will tolerate. CEO’s are less than worthless without competent people to boss around.

That only works as long as the demand is greater than supply. If that shifts then the employee will either require the means to reskill or they can accept the new future. Software development in America is in a unique place for that future.

Is this a veiled threat or a Maquiavelic warning?

I really can't tell, but the meat of the difference is that the warning would be about what other people will do, not himself. (So it makes sense to publish a warning on the media, but it makes much less rational sense to publish a threat. But there's no reason to be sure he is acting rationally.)

Anyway, it's a very narcissistic comment. CEOs will do what the competition for labor allows them to do, the ones that do anything more will fail. There's a huge and complex society deciding those factors, he (or the ones he is warning about) does not get to choose.

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend David Graeber's 'The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy'

This article is just another typical example of the parasitic administrator class devaluing the people that do real work.

Having never worked in a work-from-home company, just exactly what do the managers do?

Perhaps actually keep their team on the same page and trajectory, and actively working toward a common goal.

The same thing that in-person managers are supposed to do.

My company is on the next stage, which is vaccine threatening. I’ve already been through my first dose and will get a second, but the corporate threat to others is: if you don’t get a vaccine you may not be able to go to client sites and complete your job (i.e you’ll probably be fired.) They haven’t yet made a decision on whether vaccines will be required for the office that they’re making people return to. I endorse vaccination and would recommend it if asked, but it doesn’t sit right with me to force people into making a decision that they’re uncomfortable with. If we don’t get vaccination high enough for herd immunity it would be something that you could start to make a case for, but we have to see how the voluntary participation goes first.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com