With remote work, an employee can work multiple jobs simultaneously, and they're unbeholden to any one employer, what with how easy it is to apply and switch to a new one. So how do companies combat this? They introduce friction at the very start of the pipeline - hiring. Multiple rounds of oral exams, take-home exams, leetcode questions that can only be answered with weeks or months of deliberate studying (something an already-employed person has little time for) - flaming hoops galore. They'll still compete with one another, sure, but they've found it's in their best interests if they all agree to hire in this kind of fraudulent manner.
So, out of respect, I do perform tests.
But some employees who seem perfectly good during tests come into the company with plenty of grammar mistakes, then I notice that they only master the surface of everything and they get fired.
I should charge employees for passing my exams, since it lowers the risk of misadventures. I’m so tired of this “Employers are evil” trope often suffixed with “because going to a coding interview is like working for free.”
I should do lengthy tests just to filter out stingy employees. (and I talk as someone who gave a 78% raise to one employee who’s been here 10 months, and 30% to the other).
A subjugated worker doesn't make a very good problem solver. They're really good at following procedure, though.
I don't think employers are evil, they don't get value out of the interview process. I would say both employer and prospect employee gets a similar value out of it (the chance of hiring / being hired).
I think employers (or better, their middle managers in charge or recruitment) are mostly stupid and inefficient.
Working together for a bit is the only way of actually checking if someone will be fine doing the job or not.
Demonstrating some random knowledge is not a good predictor of success. I worked with people who passed leetcoding and were trash and people who didn't who were amazing.
I found out about their qualities only after a few weeks of work (not even full time, even just on and off).
But yes, I think it cannot be coincidence all those articles pushing the back to the office, when (at least what I have seen) the productivity has undoubtedly raised.
Can you expand upon this?
IIRC the wording on the form is simplified to make it seem like the question is "do you have another source of income?"
Oh and the amount of meetings skyrocketed.
Dumped my last client because it turned into basically 8hrs of meetings
I tried to check the overlap with /r/churning but it looks like overemployed isn't in the database.
https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/overemplo...
edit: the concept has made appearances on HN
but the difference here is the concurrency. In-person jobs require the person, so you cannot do two at the same time.
But a remote job, where the employer assumes you have their job at full attention, might be short-changed if you were to work two remote jobs at the same time. That is, of course, unless you work remote for two employers, in two different time zones (so basically the same as the two in-person jobs).
Not everyone just accepts the promise of automation to free us from tedium is lost to ever-growing corporate balance sheets.
I'm not saying all of the things you mentioned are a good solution to that problem, but I do believe they are how some organizations are (poorly) attempting to solve it.
We have now hired 3 (that we know of) people who turned out to be different from the person we interviewed. I suspect one other, and one of my colleagues suspects a fifth. The is a problem for several reasons.
We have talked about many of the ideas that you mentioned, and tried some, but ultimately decided that they are too burdensome. So, now we only hire remote people in cities where a long term employee already works and they can attend the interview in person to verify the person being interviewed in not cheating or getting assistance in any way. Our solution isn't perfect, but it's what we're doing until we can find a better solution.
Much like when the papers write so much nationalistic tripe that the people reading them actually start both believing it, and expecting it.
No, they're writing what gets clicks or shifts papers. Saying WFH is bad pleases a (large) subset of managers and enrages a lot of the rank and file, but they all click. So that's what they write.
And I say that as someone working in tech missing the office.