Comment by axg11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by axg11 | Hacker News Reader

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I think the basis of your comment is incorrect. Employees have never had more freedom. Work from home is now widespread. Working hours are more flexible than ever. Workplace benefits have improved drastically over the last 10 years. Percentage of workers with access to maternity/paternity leave is increasing year-over-year.

> There has been an erosion and change in the nature of an employee-employer relationship.

This however, is correct. I believe the cause is counterintuitive. Workers simply have more choice today.

For the last five years (excluding a brief hiccup during the worst of COVID lockdowns) demand for workers has outstripped supply. Low earners can choose between ultra-flexible gig work (Uber, etc) or endless less flexible options. Knowledge workers/tech have enjoyed a hot market where recruiters largely come to them once. The result of this? Average tenure at companies is decreasing. There is always a better opportunity around the corner. Why work hard at your current role for a 10% raise (at best) when you can focus on improving your interview skills and get a 30% raise at the next company?

Young people aren't "quiet quitting", they're just no longer subject to the Stockholm syndrome workers have exhibited over the last 20 years. They realize that maximizing their income means gaining 18 months of experience and moving on. If companies want to get 100% effort out of their employees, they should make sure that internal opportunities are as good as, if not better than, external opportunities.

>Work from home is now widespread.

It's not. Look beyond the HN bubble. Where applicable, hybrid is the status quo, and hybrid is still a far cry from complete WFH. Traffic jams certainly speak of the opposite.

As long as most individuals are limited by their location regardless of legal issues, WFH is not widespread.

>Working hours are more flexible than ever.

Marginally. Most places still have core business hours and soft-enforce synchronicity. A lot of this also happens naturally thanks to pushing daily standups or whatever the equivalent is in another branch around the late morning, in a way that requires participants to look presentable.

>Workplace benefits have improved drastically over the last 10 years

Eeh.. questionable, really depends on the context. And that's without mentioning the obvious: benefits exempted from tax vs straight cash.

>Percentage of workers with access to maternity/paternity leave is increasing year-over-year.

True, with the obvious caveat that one-and-a-half income households are practically required to even start a family now. Those benefits are primarily a countermeasure to the issue of having any of the two parents spend time with kids, and paternity leave in particular tackles the "issue" of moms quitting work.

>Knowledge workers/tech have enjoyed a hot market where recruiters largely come to them once.

I fail to see how you make this conclusion. The service industry exploded and with them, recruiters. Recruiters got to eat too. It's nigh on zero effort to cold call or post something, either directed or undirected. Alternatives exist, but the culture of recruiters as middlemen has firmly taken root. Even managers tend to complain about their existence.

Meanwhile, job ads have noticeably blown up in demands over the past few decades. Every job went from requiring a bachelor if not a master, when most individuals could do with a few months and proper documentation. On top of that we have YoE for starters (wtf) and a giant wishlist of skills with no rhyme or reason. Despite your claim of demand and supply, competition is far more fierce than before, with popular companies getting their ridiculous wish list job ads blown up.

WFH is more widespread, but have you seen all those videos and memes of people attaching their mouse to a fan or whatever so their employer can't see that they're stepping away from their laptop? That would be unthinkable at my cushy tech job, but some employers are clearly using it as an opportunity for even more employee surveillance and asserting more control over their employees' time.

Yea I think us HN'ers are in a bit of a bubble here and many of us are unaware of the unprecedented amount of monitoring and measurement being done on employees in "normal" companies today, and not just office workers having their keystrokes counted. Service workers, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, everyone is now subject to monitoring and measurement of their behavior at a microscopic level! The last 20 or so years have been a real permanent sea change.

> Work from home is now widespread.

But for how long, I ask? There is now a pretty strong tendency to get people back to the office. It may seem like trying to turn back the clock, or put the genie back into the bottle, but in these times of economic downturn, I guess they figure they have a chance of succeeding...

>>Work from home is now widespread.

I work not in dev but in the operations side of IT, and for system administration and help desk there has been a DRAMATIC shift away from WFH job offers, 8mos ago I would say 80% of the admin jobs I saw posted were remote... today that is less than 50%

I wonder if the housing market is also impacting this. It is a lot easier to pick up and move jobs when you don't own a house or have kids. It will be interesting to see how this changes in the future.

> Work from home is now widespread.

Yeah because you don't have an office anymore.

If I could have a job with a private office where I could close the door, have peace and quiet, and open the window as I wished, and I had a manager who simply gave me tasks to solve, like our parents had, I would also never quit and work there for 35 years. The working environment and conditions today are terrible in comparison, and people insisting to work from home is probably mostly a symptom of that.

I always liked going to the office to hang out (as a 35ish year old) but I would go home if I wanted to get something done. When afternoon hit the office was always too noisy. This was a typical cubicle office environment.

Noise cancelling headphones are a game changer.

I got a pair of Sony WH-1000XM5's and they're like magic. Lightweight, incredibly comfortable, and the active noise canceling is like getting transported into another reality.

It's the first pair of headphones I've been able to wear for a full 10-hour flight and never feel uncomfortable.

The office is handy to confer with others when necessary, but you waste a lot of time just getting there and back. So much easier and less stressful to grab coffee in your boxers and just get on the computer at home. I realize some people need the brownian bounce of personalities, but a lot of people just don’t and managers and execs need to realize this, especially for work that is not people-facing.

At the time I cared about my career, so I couldn't hang out looking like a pod caster. And this doesn't solve the problem of people standing there waiting for me to take them off.

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