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Comment by juunpp | Hacker News Reader

> Others blame what they view as a permissive corporate culture in Silicon Valley that creates environments where it’s possible to stay employed without working hard.

I mean we aren't farmers working the sun-baked land, but where is this notion that the job is easy coming from? Am I alone?

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Some people are pretty invested in a return to in-person work (possibly invested in a literal sense, like they own office buildings) which is why a lot of articles like this sorta pivot to vague complaints about WFH part way through. Starts off as "some tech workers say their employers didn't give them any work" and then switches to "some CEOs have a hunch WFH people are slackers"

Looks like it’s my turn to wear the tinfoil hat…

There’s a concerted PR campaign to push the “tech workers do nothing” meme for two reasons: - justify layoffs that are pushed by activist investors - union busting (as in “why would these lazy so-and-so’s need a union?”)

On the latter, the fallout from things like the firing of Timnit Gebru and other incidents alarmed a lot of board members. This is part of that fallout.

“He takes off his tinfoil hat…”

That's probably what it is, then. And Wall Street Fake Journal is amplifying the signal.

It depends. I know plenty of "professional meeting attenders" in tech. Most of them are not engineers, but occasionally we get roped into it. One day I had 7 meetings. All of them were useless.

There's a narrative being pushed (I don't know if anyone is intentionally pushing it, but you can see it recently). These recruiters have been in many news articles and the circumstances make you understand why they weren't doing much work (one was a Meta recruiter hired at the beginning of the hiring freeze).

The data probably just says people love reading stories about people making a huge salary by doing nothing in the decadent tech industry.

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