You can't make this shit up | Hacker News Reader

You can't make this shit up

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40 pointsanyfactor44 comments

Summary as the title is a bit clickbait:

Senior executive thought fake beach background in video meeting means employee wasn't at home. Enacts new policy employees can only work from home.

I don't post on HN often. Should I have modify the title to be less clickbaitey or be true to the post? I thought about changing it to give more context.

Personally I would only call it "clickbait" if it didn't fulfill expectations. Instead it was an entertaining story.

HN would nitpick the second coming of christ until he apologized for it and agreed to start all over again.

Most criticism comes from changing or replacing the title but I think adding something in brackets at the end would be ok.

The site guidelines cover this: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

In this case the title was linkbait so it would be correct to change it. When changing it, the goal is to represent the article accurately and neutrally (i.e. not putting a spin on it, which would be editorializing). The best way to do this is to find a representative phrase from the article itself which has those qualities—if you can find one.

I took a quick look at that Reddit post and couldn't find one. That might be a sign that this article is too sensationalistic/shallow to make a good HN submission.

My first response from dang! Thank you, I will be more cautious next time.

There was a viral video of some PMs working from a pool. On one hand, it doesn't really matter where you work from as long as you get your work done. But on the other hand, I find it hard to believe that someone can have focus in an environment like that. It might be unpopular opinion online, but I think its entirely reasonable to put some restrictions on where you can work from home, if only to allay the feelings of colleagues. Ideally everyone would have a work environment where there is a set standardized output of X that needs to be produced by each employee in which case how it gets done is irrelevant. But in modern work environment, there is a level of trust and autonomy employees are granted. There are dark patterns people can use to minimize the amount of work you're doing without drawing too much attention. And sure, you can think cynically that you should do the minimum amount of work required, because your employer will pay you the minimum amount they have to. But that just sounds overly adversarial and could create a toxic environment and resentment amount colleagues. Not to mention its terrible for you in the long run.

https://twitter.com/coldhealing/status/1533093790503821315?t...

I would be a little worried about somebody working from inside the pool (laptop may get dunked).

By the pool -- seems like a bit of a fuzzy thing. I can definitely imagine working from a deck could be quite relaxing which could help with focus. And some decks happen to have pools built in. I can't imagine a good manager would micromanage, like, distance to the pool or something like that.

We've accepted programmers working from coffee shops for ages, and that environment seems much more distracting.

I dunno. In the end, the metric that matters is, does the work get done? If you can get it done by the pool, fair enough, right?

What do you mean by "an environment like that"? It was just them outside by a pool...it's not like they were at a Vegas pool party... Different kinds of people work well in various environments.

I sit outside and work all the time, often by the pool. It's actually very relaxing and I can get a lot done when I have my headphones in... Sure, sometimes it gets distracting...and that's when I go back to my desk.

God I hate the internet grapevine. The PMs in question were literally on a company retreat. All of their colleagues were at the pool with them.

If you look on their TikTok profile the 2 videos preceding that one makes this extremely clear.

By this logic, you shouldn’t be allowed to listen to music while working, because I don’t think anyone can focus under those circumstances.

While the story itself is amusing, I actually focused on the thread where they've discussed tax implications that the company may bourne due to working in another city/state. I'm not familiar with US tax law, is this really true that income taxes can vary even between cities? I understand that it varies between states, but surely it doesn't extend that there are differences between two cities in the same state?

American/Californian checking in here. IANAL and not an accountant. That said: I find it a highly dubious claim that there are differences in individual income taxes between cities. I've lived across the US and I've never even heard of that. Different sales tax, sure, but not income tax.

Employer taxes on the other hand.... who knows?! There very well might be local ordinances that cities levy on employers based of the number of employees or some such thing. Maybe, I have no idea - but the point is: income taxes no, employer taxes, maybe. Would be interested if anyone else knows more?

Edit: City taxes are the reason that "The Strip" in Las Vegas is technically not in Las Vegas. What we think of as Vegas is really in "unincorporated Clark county". I'm sure employees all pay the same State and Federal income tax, but the business don't pay city taxes. I don't know how much that's based off their business location vs. their employees location.

There are certainly differences. Most cities have no income tax at all. Some do. I personally had never lived in a city or county with an income tax until I moved to my present location ~12 years ago.

There are City income taxes in lots places around the US: https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/comptrolle...

It's really not that uncommon. There are also special districts for things like sewer or water service which can also levy income tax.

Special assessments show up on your property tax bill, not income.

Not everywhere. For example, most (maybe all? not sure.) school districts in Ohio can levy different income taxes. Here is a 5 page PDF listing the different rates: https://tax.ohio.gov/static/tax_analysis/tax_data_series/sch...

Interesting, I didn't know that. Best way to learn is to say something false on the internet I guess!

There are about 170 cities in the US where individual residents pay federal income tax, AND state income tax, AND ALSO local municipal income tax. Usually they use the 'taxable income' line item from your federal 1040, and charge you a percentage of that. Baltimore and NYC charge about 3% of your 1040. https://taxfoundation.org/city-income-taxes/ You may be referring to city business profits tax, sales, or property tax, but that's unrelated.

Yes.

California requires non-residents to file & pay income tax for any days worked in the state, regardless of where you live or typically work:

https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/3d/2...

Sometimes the tax is fine-grained enough to be certain blocks, not just within state or city limits. For example, Portland, Oregon has an income tax (with mandatory employer withholding) for employees working in the downtown district, to fund public transit:

https://www.portland.gov/revenue/withholding

> Sometimes the tax is fine-grained enough to be certain blocks, not just within state or city limits. For example, Portland, Oregon has an income tax (with mandatory employer withholding) for employees working in the downtown district, to fund public transit

And now it's much more clearer why there is a tax software cartel in the US. If an accountant can barely remember that, an ordinary people would definitely not get this.

Yes, some US cities have additional income taxes beyond what you pay to the state. New York City, for example, has a city income tax, as does Yonkers, NY.

At one of my prior firms, pre-pandemic, they fired a remote worker because she moved from one state to another. We thought this was insane because she was one of our best employees and the workflow wouldn't change since she was already remote. The company's logic was that they didn't have any employees in her new state, and they didn't want to take on the additional tax, legal and administrative burden and risks of expanding into that new state.

The obvious answer to this policy is to take a photo of the inside of your home, family photos and all, and use that as your zoom background.

Learned the hard way that being an employer in the U.S. is basically opting in to being an extension of a social surveillance/control mechanism in the sense that it incurs/induces an elevated level of control over how you can conduct your life.

The larger you get the more control you are accountable to implement. Basically anything that would be shrugged off by the average citizen as either B.S. or "none of your damned business" is basically shoehorned into being handled by employers. Up to and including surveilling the physical location of H-1B workers.

My eyes were opened wide once I started to look into how the modern corporation is utilized in the U.S.

You absolutely can make this shit up, and people have been doing it since the dawn of the internet.

That was my first thought as soon as I saw the domain. "'Can't make this shit up?' How many times a day does that exact thing happen on reddit?" (And then everyone in the store applauded as soon as I vocalized my thoughts.)

It really could use a better title.

You could make up a better title though.

Lesson learned. I was confused about the title policy.

The post has been flagged. I will try to do better next time.

sorry if that was overly harsh, but yeah descriptive titles are always a positive!

Haha no way it was harsh, my good friend. Thank you.

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