Comment by arnvald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arnvald | Hacker News Reader

There are a few other interesting things mentioned in the article:

> Employers are also forbidden from monitoring their employees while they work at home.

I'm wondering what that includes - any software that tracks mouse movement, applications used etc? Or is it limited in its scope? Anyway, sounds like a win and I hope other countries do that too.

> However, a proposal to include the so-called "right to disconnect" - the legal right to switch off work-related messages and devices outside office hours - was rejected by Portuguese MPs.

I don't understand this - so employer can't contact me but I can't disable my work phone? Sounds contradictory

> [parents] now have the right to work from home without having to arrange it in advance with their employers

Another win, though I'm wondering about the scope - who does it apply to? All office workers? Is there some definition of jobs where the work can be done remotely without limitations (e.g. having to use some machines available only at the work place)?

> Companies must also now contribute to expenses that workers have incurred as a result of switching to remote working

That's cool. I've seen companies already doing it in The Netherlands, but I don't know if it's regulated in any way, for now it seems companies come up with some arbitrary numbers between 40eur and 70eur a month.

All in all, it's hard to say how some of these rules will be implemented and enforced, but I like the direction it's going. Portugal becomes one of top places to attract remote workers in Europe with it's low (for now) prices, friendly taxes, great climate and good level of English spoken in the cities.

>> However, a proposal to include the so-called "right to disconnect" - the legal right to switch off work-related messages and devices outside office hours - was rejected by Portuguese MPs.

> I don't understand this - so employer can't contact me but I can't disable my work phone? Sounds contradictory

I was probably deemed unnecessary to write this down in law since the company is already forbidden to contact employees outside of work hours.

Now we just need to be competitive enough to have decent wages.

Else those remote works are just going to increase even more housing costs (both rent/real estate), and keep funneling cash to what has proven to be our greatest weakness: tourism.

Wouldn’t rising wages tend to increase housing costs?

Except housing costs have been greater then wages increasing - so we're getting the shit sandwich without even getting paid more.

> Else those remote works are just going to increase even more housing costs (both rent/real estate)

I'm not sure that's true. Remote work does not require workers to be at commute distance from anywhere, and it only requires them to have a reliable internet connection. Everyone I know who switched to remote work moved out of city centers and into places where both rent was lower and quality of life was higher.

What exactly leads you to believe that fleeing tech hubs and urban centers leads to higher rents?

>Everyone I know who switched to remote work moved out of city centers and into places where both rent was lower and quality of life was higher.

That's precisely my point, they're raising rent prices where rent was cheap - remember that construction isn't following growing demand, the supply of houses is the same.

>What exactly leads you to believe that fleeing tech hubs and urban centers leads to higher rents?

In the case of Portugal it's not tech hubs that are the cause for urban centers to have high rents, that's purely Tourism in our context. AirBnBs wiped a bunch of the supply, then pensioners and rich people that want to have houses in an European capital without paying London/Paris prices.

Hell for 500k they can buy an house and even get a EU passport after 5 years. Where else can you get this deal?

> Companies must also now contribute to expenses that workers have incurred as a result of switching to remote working

What about the savings? No pricey lunchtime sandwiches or commuting expenses. I don't think the above is fair.

"I don't understand this - so employer can't contact me but I can't disable my work phone? Sounds contradictory"

I believe worker can still be contacted in case of an emergency.

If companies can’t monitor employees working from home how do they protect against malware? Does every employee now bear responsibility for keeping their system secure? If they cause a data breach because they didn’t update their system could they be liable?

What does monitoring have to do with malware? IT departments can setup automatic updating so employee equipment fetches and installs updates from the departments servers, and the "service" running on the employees machine doesn't have to send out monitoring data in order to facilitate this.

Or is it essential to monitor the employee in order to prevent malware for some reason I'm too inexperienced to see?

We have some software that monitors all network connections. I assume it’s for DLP and perhaps identifying suspicious traffic. As far as I know, management doesn’t use it for anything more than that. But it’s certainly a form of monitoring, even if they’re not using it to enforce a virtual “butts in seats” policy.

>If companies can’t monitor employees working from home how do they protect against malware?

WTF ? if you as a company want protection againt malware then give me a super locked down work machine, where I can't install shit and updates will be done automatically?

If I work remote and I am using my own hardware then fuck you, I don't install your malware on my own machine so you can check my personal stuff.

So give me a lockeddown work machine if I have some super secret project that I work on. If you don't trust me and think I will screenshot your secrets then maybe is better we end this. I work from home for more then 10 years, it is all based on trust and progress tracking, but I don't work with super secret stuff, just the average proprietary SPAs(or desktop apps in the past).

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