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Comment by phpisthebest | Hacker News Reader

hmm I wonder if that is why I have a somewhat negative view of WFH, I dont have kids, and often times I seem people with children for go their work responsibilities or worse say something like "well phpisthebest does not have kids so they can be on call or work holidays"

to me your personal situation should have ZERO bearing on your job, I should not even know if you have kids or not.

>>I judge an organisation by how they treat employees with divergent goals

I judge organizations on their equality, and by that I mean they treat all employees the same regardless of their marital or child status.

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You could say the same about being in the office, or not. If the work can get done remotely who cares about coming into the office.

Companies that are capable of succeeding with remote workers are going to have an advantage as they will have less real estate costs, and they can get value out of paying for both a wider geographic worker pool, and they won't necessarily have to pay them big-city rates if those workers will accept slightly less nominal (which translates to more real if they have lower cost of living). Not possible in all circumstances but those that do it will benefit.

>>Companies that are capable of succeeding with remote workers are going to have an advantage as they will have less real estate costs,

COVID did not change the economic metrics on that, so I am not sure why this is a continual talking about for justification of WFH in these "new times"

There have always been full time WFH organizations, and there have always been non-WFH organizations.

I dont see this having a huge impact on if an organization stays WFH post covid or not.

>>and they can get value out of paying for both a wider geographic worker pool

Yea... no. Companies tried that and found out real fast the problems with legal liability, and tax jurisdictions this is why you are seeing even companies that stayed Full time WFH post-covid have started to limit where they can hire from to only states / nations where they have business in already, already have Tax ID's already know and comply with the local employment laws.

>COVID did not change the economic metrics on that

I disagree with this assertion completely.

You are commenting on an article that illustrates the fallout from COVID having economic consequences that companies are working through. Inflation, higher rates, over-hiring, and I would add over-investment in expensive prime real estate. There have been plenty of reports about companies having to deal with new problems with higher rates necessitating cost cutting. One of which is re-assessing the need for huge amounts of expensive real estate. Facebook and Amazon come to mind in this regard. Others may follow.

The change here is we may be enterning a new economic cycle unlike the last 10 or so years of extremely low interest rates and huge VC money as well as companies running stock buyback and stock compensation schemes to paper over low or no profitability. You can claim the next few years will be like the last few years, I simply disagree with this. So in this light, WFH may be a variable in equation of lowering costs.

>started to limit where they can hire from to only states / nations where they have business in already

Ok, but the dynamic I describe can still be achieved by limiting workforce to US. You can still have a wider pool of workers who want to stay located in lower costs states near their hometowns and families and not need large footprints of expensive real estate.

I think you are taking the missteps of perpetually online companies like Amazon and Facebook and conflating that too much with the wider economy.

Did the tech sector screw up, yes... That is nothing new for them... the local psychic has a better track record at predicting the future than the Tech Sector

Do I believe the problems in the tech sector are indicative to the wider economy. No. NYC, Silicon Valley, and other Extremely "Hot" cities may have an outsized downturn, and a commercial collapse but I know people that live in those places do not like to admit it we here in "Fly Over Country" do exist, and have huge amounts of economic output. increasingly so based on the Investments in Ohio, Michigan, Texas, and other states.

The economic shift may be less WFH and more Shifting to other regions of the US as CA, and NY collapse

I'm not talking necessarily about the wider economy, rather only "Companies that are capable of succeeding with remote workers" as I stated, regardless of the label you want to apply to them. But certainly tech/software companies primarily.

So let's constrain our point of contention simply to these companies. The larger players have an outsized position in hiring, and a few cities have an outsized position in being the location where these companies and employees operate and live, so the trends in these companies and these locations is meaningful.

Even if there's a hybrid strategy where more companies locate in midwest/lower costs areas and they have some remote workers, my claim is there will be less real estate footprint than before covid and more WFH employees. And that this combination, even if just marginal, will be a net benefit for these companies vs themselves before pandemic if they didn't have this strategy before and going forward vs those that don't do it/are intransigent on remote work.

Fly over country does not have the same economic output as the big cities. It’s why most people flock to the big cities. Cities are economic powerhouses at the forefront of innovation and culture.

I worry that we're sliding towards employer divide and conquer tropes here, being at odds with fellow employees over this makes no sense. Rather the onus should be on the employer to ensure they create an environment that is accommodating for all sorts of lifestyles. Why shouldn't you be able to take time off in a similar fashion to pursue your own child-free but otherwise time-consuming activities?

That parents are able to WFH and work flexibly also confers YOU the rights to do the same. That is why I am personally extremely supportive of those rights despite not having children because it gives me the rationale to demand the same flexibility when I need/want it.

I have kids and I agree with this. Giving someone work on a holiday or weekend because of their parental status is pretty bad. I think I would quickly leave a place like that.

>to me your personal situation should have ZERO bearing on your job

I can't see for humans ever being the case. People have life events that change their productivity: depression, marriage, death, children, personal interests.

I completely agree that you having/not having kids should not dictate workload.

Working without any context of peoples life wouldn't be a place I'd want to work at, basically your personal situation has a fuck tonne of bearing on your job.

> "well phpisthebest does not have kids so they can be on call or work holidays"

I’ve worked in the industry for over 10 years, on teams with several parents and have never heard this sort of sentiment. Just throwing my anecdata out there. The most I’ve seen it brought up is for maternity/paternity leave and for someone adjusting their commute schedule to take care of picking up kids/avoiding bad traffic.

It depends on the company and the organization. I have seen it personally (all the parents have a soccer game to go to, the non-parents pick up on call).

We need to talk about the bias against child-free employees - https://www.fastcompany.com/90564837/we-need-to-talk-about-t...

> A senior lawyer working in the Bay Area told me how, prior to the pandemic, the parents of small children would file out at between 5 and 5:15 p.m. each day to collect their children from childcare and head home, while child-free colleagues stayed at their desks until the work was, well, done. “I know many parents also log on later in the evening, but if they’ve missed an important call or haven’t had time to read the latest documents we’ve received, it falls to me and my child-free colleagues to pick up the slack,” they told me. “There’s a disparity in expectation as to when the working day ends and what gets done during it. I’m given the message that my nonwork life is less important—sometimes explicitly.”

> A friend in Salt Lake City is a former competitive skier, and the topic of being child-free came up during a recent conversation. “Honestly, I’m starting to resent the fact that my colleagues who are parents are free to take slabs of time off to look after sick kids or log off early to attend recitals. The thing is, I fully support the fact that they can—being a present parent is so important. But sometimes I wonder why I’m not allowed to take a couple of extra days each year to ski, or spend time with my 97-year-old grandfather? Whenever I suggest this to HR they literally laugh.”

There was also a reference to a NYT article in the fast company article - Parents Got More Time Off. Then the Backlash Started. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/05/technology/parents-time-o... (HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24383264 - 76 points; 160 comments)

That just sounds like unrealistic work expectations from the org being redirected into anger at parent employees. The issue is surely with the org as opposed to the employees that happen to be repopulating the earth. i.e. the non parent-employees should have access to the same level of freedom and if the org doesn't permit that or punishes the remainder somehow then that's the issue at play here.

> to me your personal situation should have ZERO bearing on your job, I should not even know if you have kids or not.

This is just impossible. Trust me, if your baby is sick it will impact your job. If (s)he had a fight in the school and the teacher calls you in the middle of work, that working day is gone. etc. etc.

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