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Comment by 5350-uiop-1130 | Hacker News Reader

People should have an option to go fully remote, not be forced to do X number of days because reasons.

This is the problem that remote work solves. It gives you some sense of autonomy so that you don't feel like a completely subservient slave.

Also you said objectively it has not been proven but your subjective opinion is that it's better to be in office. What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment and social mobility two things which have been destroyed for our generation.

Being forced to live in expensive cities, pay extortionate rent or be held hostage by a mortage and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.

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> People should have an option to go fully remote, not be forced to do X number of days because reasons.

This.. this is exactly what Google did - everyone had the option to go fully remote.

nobody said otherwise?

The title does "Google mandates workers ...". Have to read further to know there is an option.

It's 2022 - why would you believe a news article title?

Huh? From the article it seems that this was something you had to request and get approval for (with 15% denied).

Somewhere else I remember reading this would also cut your salary by 10%.

The salary cuts depend on where you live. If you work remotely near your original office, there is no pay change.

Some people did have requests denied. In my org, every single person who applied was approved. It is easy to change teams at google, so people who really want to work remotely can make it happen.

> Somewhere else I remember reading this would also cut your salary by 10%.

It totally depends on where you're living. It could even be a salary increase if you were previously working in a lower CoL office but have since moved to a high CoL region -- in that case your salary would increase. There's definitely no blanket single figure that applies (in either direction) to people who go fully remote.

E.g. my grand-boss is a fully remote worker based out of Manhattan. He's getting the highest pay tier.

Software developers are not completely subservient slaves. But some of them are certainly obnoxious prima donnas and like throwing tantrums about their oh so terrible working conditions.

Ironic that some of the highest paying jobs out there are also the jobs that are most easily performed at home. Software dev really seems to be one of those win/win/win scenarios when it comes to jobs. Of course, there will always be a litany of complaints online because there's always something to complain about, but still.

Comparing highly paid office work with slavery is incredibly insulting.

Slavery is a strong word but in reality this is what we office workers are, modern day slaves and that’s how I understood it, as an analogy. They pay us for our work&time and they “own” us for these 40-50hrs/week. Remote working is not the silver bullet and for sure it’s not suitable for all, but for some of us it’s a life changing opportunity. Remote working opened a new door and gave us new possibilities, allowing us a little bit more freedom on many aspects of our jobs, thus making the whole thing more tolerable. After all that’s the expected flow of our modern lives for most of us: study, work, die.

Slavery is perhaps not the right word, but prisoner could be. That’s why they are called “golden” handcuffs. Very few people escape this prison, but it is indeed possible and doesn’t require going out into the woods and becoming a hermit.

To continue the analogy, isn’t the jailer/warden also a prisoner? He too is stuck in the prison, perhaps for different reasons but stuck nonetheless.

Just like you are not a slave the warden is not a prisoner since he can go home every day, and can choose to stop working there if he doesn’t like the place.

Choice is what prisoners and slaves don’t have, and we have plenty of both.

No, still not the right word. Both those words have a meaninh vastly different from voluntary employment.

This reminds me of unvaxxed people pinning yellow stars to liken the situation that they cant visit cinema to holocaust

More like a walled garden. You have duties to uphold, but you have plenty of freedom to leave. but you know the outside world will be difficult until you find the next oasis to give your duties to.

Please just stop. You’re exchanging your services for money. You’re not compelled to offer your services to any particular employer.

You think that saying “I’m a modern day slave” will garner you sympathy. In reality it makes you look like a muppet.

There’s actual slavery and human trafficking still happening today by the way. These people aren’t helped in any way by you clawing for sympathy.

What a narrow minded way of looking at things. Just because a word doesn't fit 100%, doesn't mean we shouldn't use it if the main idea is there.

"You’re not compelled to offer your services to any particular employer." But you are compelled to offer your services to an employer, whose ways of working are almost all similar to each other. And it's not like you have infinite choice.

Is it really a choice to move alone somewhere else just to find a decent employer, but sacrifice friends, family, and so on?

Is it really a choice not to work and become homeless, a social outcast?

Is it really a choice to be an entrepreneur, in such a competitive environment that most startups fail, and you need considerable savings to sustain yourself in case of bad times?

Is it really a choice to find such a unicorn of employer that fits a modern day humans needs for privacy, sense of autonomy, sense of progression, good work-life-balance, good compensation, good responsible manager who doesn't micromanage (...), when most employers (have to) follow the same corporativistic mindset to get as most profits as possible out of employees in order to survive in an extremely competitive enviornment?

Is there really a choice when you have children to take care of, a mortgage and are just too tired or barely have any time whatsoever to look for jobs or invest time into your own startup?

Should I continue?

Where is the choice? Where is it?

People are not bound by physical means with the threat of death. Sure. But if you can't see other more subtle and equally powerful binds, then you're blind.

So yes, this is the modern equivalent slavery, in short - modern slavery - and please you stop.

You are not compelled at all. You can probably afford some land in the middle of nowhere and grow your own food.

You want some things that are available for money and need a way of getting money. That is very far from slavery. Every day you can choose to with or not, and what you want to work on.

Yes, go to the middle of nowhere and isolate yourself from everyone you know. Nice!! Also you need to be able to afford such a house with proper terrain to be able to cultivate every kind of food needed to live (not easy and needs a lot of learning). You can't do this by yourself also. You need more people to take care of such effort. So convince your family or friends to do the same and abandon who they know? Good luck with that! And for all of this we have to sacrifice the amazing feats of technology and go back to the middle ages because everything costs money. I'm sorry, but there has to be a better way where it's possible to have a good middle term. This that you present is no choice at all. It's almost like saying "Hey you can always kill yourself, so you do have freedom!" /s.

What do you want exactly?

1. You want to not be compelled to do any work to meet your daily needs.

2. You aren’t prepared to be self sufficient so you also want others to render goods and services to you, for presumably no charge.

Are these contradictory? If work was optional for everyone, why would they work and give you goods and services for free?

Sure maybe in future everything can be automated away but right now do you think it’s reasonable to want to do no work and also not want to be self sufficient?

Slaves can be bought and sold. Their children can be bought and sold. Slaves can be physically punished and even killed without legal recourse. They have no rights. They are property.

And it still exists, so the modern equivalent of slavery is still slavery.

What you are talking about is the social obligations of being part of civilization. Yes, there is no free lunch. We must all work to live unless someone else is willing to foot the bill for us. But if that is slavery, then literally everyone in the world with a job is a slave and the word loses its meaning.

There can be different kinds of slavery. Let's not get bogged down by details shall we?

If a situation fits for 80% and there is no other single word that better describes it, i see you would just do nothing and leave a clearly wrong situation in confusion and undefined. People need a word and a clarity of meaning to rally behind it. Slavery fits really well, even if some things don't fit the historical original definition of it. If you can come up with a better fitting word, be my guest, otherwise please don't stand in the way while people are trying to raise awareness for the tragic lack of freedom that so many of us experience.

Yes, improving your life situation requires sacrifices. And different outcomes require different sacrifices. Free people have the autonomy to choose which sacrifices they make. Enslaved people don't have that autonomy at all.

What I understand from your post, is that you want access to opportunities without making any sacrifices. It's an interesting discussion topic on its own. But the opposite of it is not slavery.

> People are not bound by physical means with the threat of death. Sure.

With how your health insurance depends on employment in the US, I kind of have the opposite impression that people actually do work under threat of physical harm; or violence, in other words, not unlike the working conditions of a slave.

Yes, most of the things you listed are actual choices. Should I stay inside all cozy and eating ice cream or go outside and exercise? That’s also a choice to prioritize near-term comfort over long-term gain.

>Just because a word doesn't fit 100%, doesn't mean we shouldn't use it if the main idea is there.

A strong word better carry a stronger metaphor. No matter the framing, you are

- it is a choice to move alone somewhere, that is a chocie many make for college and post-college work

- it is a choice to be homeless. Not a comfortable choice, but a choice to make

- it is a choice to TRY to be an entrepreneur, but success is never promised when your job is to convince other people to give you money (which is THEIR choice).

- it is a choice to spend your time expecting perfection. Again, you are making a choice contingent on someone else's choice, success is not guaranteed.

- it's not an easy choice, but children can be given to others if you cannot provide care, and mortgages can be sold if you cannot afford payments. You not having the time/money to make your own company (which is a RISKY endeavor, and always has been) does not entitle you to free money.

I don't see how any of these relate to being a slave. Or even a minority/woman 100 years ago in the US. They didn't even have the option to work most places, let alone start up a business. homes would deny them for not being white or not having a man to backup expenditures. Still a step up from slavery, but still very much restricted because of who they are, not due to life factors they want to maintain (they had few to begin with).

So no, I don't see the slavery metaphor here as a valid one to make. There is more than one type of slavery, but we're in an american website. so you would basically need to very specifically frame your form of "slavery" if you're going outside what people commonly associate it with.

> You’re not compelled to offer your services to any particular employer.

But if you do not participate in the system of employment, you will either be left to the mercy of others or die of starvation. Even if you own land which you farm and make all of your own stuff, hunt your own food - you will still have to work for someone else by selling them stuff you farmed, made or hunted yourself so that you can pay property taxes.

Modern capitalism is a world-encroaching system of slavery, made necessary by scarcity (mostly of land).

You think taxes don't exist in other systems?

Capitalism is the opposite of slavery, you control who you sell to, work for, buy from.

But I do agree property tax is theft. Less taxes, smaller government, more capitalism.

You can thank modern capitalism for the fact that you have no earthly idea what slavery is. This whole thread is insanely offensive.

I'd highly recommend you go read the definition of "slave", as well as the history of slavery around the world.

Focusing on the context of this article specifically, what makes you think that workers of a company worth 1.78 trillion dollars are slaves?

The fact that they don't share those 1.78 trillion not even approximately equally.

More like modern day blowhards.

Here's what modern day slavery looks like: "Harassed, insulted and raped – that is everyday for thousands of women working in tomato and strawberry fields of Spain, Italy and Morocco. The vegetables and fruits they harvest are sold in German supermarkets and all over Europe".

Slavery is a strong word. But consider serfdom in Middle Ages.

When some historian looked at it they found that on average a serf of a French baron say 700 years ago worked less than 40 hours per week on average. Perhaps even less than 30. And there was no commute. David Graeber in his «Dawn of everything» discussed that.

“Some historian” is a bad citation.

I’m very good friends with a medievalist professor. Something they said to me recently was interesting. Today, most medievalists don’t really like the term “feudalism” and instead see serfdom as an extension of Roman slave systems. Not chattel slavery, but definitely not a mutually agreed upon and beneficial economic relationship. I’m not so sure that “serfs didn’t actually work all that much” is aligned with current consensus.

But under serfdom peasants were not allowed to move. Workers are free to move to better opportunities as they see fit - that's a big difference.

>> David Graeber in his «Dawn of everything» discussed that

David Graeber is the one who wrote this:

"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages"

And I'm guessing his knowledge of what happened 700 years ago is going to be much less accurate than his knowledge of times he lived through.

You could either be genuinely insulted or just trawling the internet policing it for misused words. It’s hard to tell which is the case.

And you could be trolling the internet trying to police any opposition to concepts, however ridiculous, that you find favourable to your philosophy.

The word cannot either have been misused as people have subsequently expended great energy defending its use.

> so that you don't feel like a completely subservient slave

Are we still talking about Google?

What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment

Being forced to live in expensive cities … and suffer the misery of public transport, yeah no thanks.

In your attempt to throw everything against a wall to see what sticks you’ve contradicted yourself. Living in dense cities and taking public transportation is good for the environment.

You want to work from home—own that instead of trying to pretend you are fighting for some great moral cause.

>Living in dense cities and taking public transportation is good for the environment.

Citation?

Comparing one group of people that live in a dense area, and can take a bus to/from work and other places, versus another group of people that each drive a separate car over a much longer distance to/from work and other places. Not to mention the efficiency of heating one large building over lots of small buildings and things like that. I don't think this is much of a contested thing.

https://www.acogok.org/why-transit-matters-environment/

I bet it'd be more of a contested thing if there were more environmentalist intellectuals living in the countryside seeking to justify their lifestyles. How far does each population's food travel? How often does the average person in either location travel by plane? What is the lifecycle cost of treating water in a concentrated location versus local wells? What are the positive effects of human activity on the environment in either local?

There are a lot of factors to consider when making that comparison, and if you're going to criticise upstream commentators for handwaving justifications of their own lifestyles, it seems important to consider more the availability of public transit.

> What I will counter is that remote is almost certainly better for the environment and social mobility

Neither of which have an appreciable business use in the near to mid term & are therefore totally irrelevant to an employer.

To the contrary, I prefer to work for employers who are kind to the environment and I'm quite sure my entire generation feels the same. In fact, I long for the day when the last business harmful to the environment shuts its doors.

> I'm quite sure my entire generation feels the same.

they may agree, but may not have the fortune of choice. Not everyone is being well compensated in a cushy office space. Google people certainly are, but that's a small slice of an industry that's a slice of an entire society.

In a competitive job market, employers are motivated to care about that which attracts and retains employees.

it seem that "completely subservient slave" caused some controversy. it wasn't my intention to demean real slavery, like the factory workers sub-contracted by google and apple.

perhaps "completely subservient." would have been better and less redundant :)

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