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Comment by carabiner | Hacker News Reader

If we are totally honest though, people working in a google office generally have fewer private distractions like porn, taking naps on a sofa, watching Succession, playing with their cat etc. Reading the discussion on Blind is very illuminating on this, like one guy claiming to have frequent sex with his wife during the workday.

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If you're getting your work done even when you take mid-day sex breaks, why is that the company's business? Employers claim to be able to measure productivity to give raises and fire unproductive employees, but they somehow can't figure out if someone working from home is productive? Do managers need to physically look over an employee's shoulder to figure out if he's productive?

"Work" is not always a production quota assigned by the local commissar.

I agree that working from home can be more productive but your argument is not convincing on its own.

Oh how awful someone uses their life to have sex rather than sit in a dark cubicle being bored out of their mind, hoping time will pass until the next paycheck comes in. Such better way of living.

I find it funny how people equate office = 10hr hard and efficient work vs WFH = 2 mins of work, rest watching tv and having sex.

The truth is people do as much work as they're motivated to do and as much as they have to do. There's teams at Google who never are allowed to launch anything due to corporate bullshit politics. I have a friend who has been there 15 years, maybe one or two of his small feature products launched, dozens got cancelled. Like a good soldier he goes to the office because he feeds his family with Google dollars. That's it.

If you need to be in an office to be able to focus on work (or healthy supplements to work, like exercise and sex with your partner) instead of taking naps or bingeing junk, you have bigger problems, like immaturity, lack of personal discipline, burnout / alienation, and/or severe depression. Being in the office won't fix any of those things - it will mask them in an unhealthy way that will do neither you nor your loved ones any favors in the long run.

I don't understand what having sex with your partner has to do with work, unless it's directly interfering with it. In fact it probably makes your work better.

I'm going to assume the people complaining about this don't have much sex.

It's a good extreme example of something that the work place really claims that is way out of the bounds of what they expect you to do during work. On top of that, it's considered to be less appropriate than gossiping at the water cooler.

If an employee is given an hour lunch break off campus, and they use it to have sex, the only reason I can understand someone being mad is if they're jealous. Substitute {having sex} with {driving aimlessly} to {eating lunch} and it should be the same thing to the employer - the employee is off campus and not subject to workplace expectations.

That's all bogus excuses. If you suck at work you will get fired. If you are producing to the expected point you will retain your job.

I've heard no shortage of stories from coworkers at big-tech or fancy startups in the past couple of years where line-level managers simply aren't able to make the tough decisions.

A third of your team is getting practically nothing done? Are you having the tough conversations that need to happen? Or do you not want to rock the boat (it might not look great on you, either, especially if your peer managers aren't taking things seriously).

You're right, you can't hide forever. People do get fired. And in a couple cases this has ultimately resulted in the managers getting fired too when higher-ups realized the sheer obviousness of "they aren't doing a single thing" that was being ignored.

Failures all around, but I get why one would say "we didn't have this level of complete abdication back when people were in the office" and take that as the easy solution rather than trying to make huge swaths of both their managers and employees get way better discipline, extremely quickly.

> like one guy claiming to have frequent sex with his wife during the workday.

This would be more believable if he’d said girlfriend.

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