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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

In the end , it s a behavioral issue.

Self-employed knowledge workers generally work both 'remotely' and 'at the office' everywhere, all of the time. Salaried people don't have this kind of attachment to their work so they need to be compelled to. Being present at the office is a good behavioral tool for that, forcefully isolating them from other concerns and temptations. There are many ways to replicate that in a remote working situation, but they mostly require pervasive monitoring of the employee.

As the world is coming out of the trough of disillusionement from WFH, it seems that the trend will be towards new monitoring tools or other ways of proof of work. This is the compromise workers will have to make, because working remotely is a too damn good thing to miss.

Edit: the other option is for everyone to become contractors and charge for results

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With knowledge workers isn't there like... an end result? I usually know who on my team will get stuff done vs who will struggle with a task for days on end. Whether the person is working 4 hours a day or 12 who cares about anything beyond the output and impact they have.

I guess it feels too meritocratic? I used to work in grocery and while stocking some people could shelve 30+ boxes of product an hour while others slowly put up 10. Is it fair to pay both those people the same hourly rate when their output is so disparate? It feels bizarre to me in retrospect that being able to "own" the 8 hours of someones life is more important than them actually achieving something during that time.

It takes being an actual manager who can evaluate the work being done and progress towards a goal instead of “who’s in the office for how long” assuming that an hour in the office is an hour worked

You then get other problems as you incentivize output over work done properly, which if implemented improperly can just result in endless rush jobs that pump up the metrics while lowering overall quality. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

A common example is doordash and similar delivery services where people are paid by delivery and not by time spent on the job, so they race around ignoring all traffic laws and nearly get themselves killed half the time to shave off those extra 30 seconds.

regardless of the outcome, it is salaried work, which is a remnant of feudalism and even older slavery, and pay is presumably for time and attention. maybe people shoulkd become contractors en masse and charge for outcome

Employees can slack off at work just as effectively as they can at home, they just can't have quite as much fun while doing it.

The only incentive for quality work is a quality working environment, quality product to work on, and quality people to work with.

Yeah and there is the other side of it. Workers are being overpaid for work they don't do, and there are even workers doing nothing yet still being paid to show up. It's all inefficient , in both directions. If the world of work decides to fundamentally change these relationships it will be a big shift, and it will have to address outcome measures, location arbitrage etc. The developed world is still wholly unpreprared for true remote work

You can also measure the work output directly which is not hard in most industries.

I don't work in an IT shop, but we have no issue seeing who is slacking and who is actually working when working from home just from the deliveries, no monitoring required. But I guess that's included in your "other proof of work".

There are some people who need discipline though, there were some guys in my previous company that were notorious for showing up at the 10 am teams meeting with a bed head and a yawn or the 2pm meeting outside in their garden. You could also notice their output go down quite drastically.

>> You could *also* notice their output go down quite drastically.

neither waking up at 10am nor taking a meeting from outside imply that they are not being productive. We should measure output by output, not by how it's done. By linking the two I feel like you have a bias against people waking up late or taking a meeting from a non conventional location. Those things are not inherently bad unless they are also linked to low output.

This line of thinking that lead to worse and worse environments. More pervasive monitoring generates more sneaky and worse workers. Better goals and work definitions generate results. Having people at the office just means they're wasting time on coffee or staring at a blank screen instead of putting a laundry load or other home distraction. No amount of office environment will solve a bad working environment, and the work environment is not physical.

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