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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

It might be as simple as they don’t know if you are working or not when your butt isn’t in your seat. Or, to put it another way, lack of trust.

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If they can't tell if you are working or not without physically watching you come into an office and sit at the desk for 40 hours every week, then WTF is your actual job? It certainly can't be something consequential that the business actually needs to have done. If it were, they would quickly notice if you aren't doing it.

(Edit: As a concrete example, I once worked on an all distributed team where it was abundantly obvious to the whole team that a new hire was goofing off. If they were simply having issues meeting productivity expectations, that would have been one thing, the kind of thing we could hopefully resolve with closer mentoring. But they were also really difficult to get a hold of during the day, and frequently made lame excuses - or obvious lies - for why they couldn't be available for meetings on short notice. Things like that.)

I think there are plenty of jobs that would be overlooked or mistrusted (by bad managers) if people can't see you physically sitting there 40 hours every week and some might even be questioned then.

When I was doing IT Support for employees of this one company I certainly got questioned why they pay me and what I do all day when everything worked. They would certainly notice very quickly when I wasn't doing it and they did notice quickly that things where not working anymore when I left and wasn't keeping these things running anymore. This was when I was going into the office every day and I think this would be even worse if I was doing this from Home.

No one had a clue about what I do all day. The same way that I have no clue who does payroll at my current employer or what they do all day, but I would very quickly notice if they decided to slack off.

The problem is that there wasn't really any way to track my performance or any way for me to show that I did actually work. The systems for that just where not there. So the only way my manager evaluated me was by me clocking in and clocking out every day at the front desk.

So you guys don’t even have basic issue and task trackers? Even Office 365 plans have Planner, a basic shared to do list. This is strange. Even without project tracking software, all you’d need is a weekly standup meeting for status.

No, we didn't have any of that. There was a reason why I left this place. IT was not seen as anything that deserves more respect than the dirt on their shoes.

Even if I had introduced a standup meeting or status meeting, I don't think I could have gotten my manager to participate in that. What exactly would that have done? If you work under a shit manager none of what you suggest would have helped.

If they can't tell if you are working or not without physically watching you come into an office and sit at the desk for 40 hours every week, then WTF is your actual job?

More like wtf is their actual job

There are companies in India that took your mobile phone before entering office. This was before pandemic. They had no trust in their employees. Because of pandemic they had no option but to trust their employees or else they were all gonna go in the ground. Their hand was forced by pandemic to trust their employees and it worked really well.

We would have forever worked in those awful open office plans if this mass scale experiment had not happen. Now the cat is out of the bag and everyone knows wfh works.

We've had two years now--that's plenty of time for management and HR to figure out how to measure and validate remote work is getting done. If a tech company still needs a manager to see a physical person in a seat then the company has far, far bigger problems.

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