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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Why are you pretending this analyst is the same or even should have the same affordances as the CEO? You might be shocked to find out the CEO even gets paid more!

Most people come up through the ranks and you can bet the CEO was one time an analyst with a demanding boss. After decades of work he made it to boss. You see this everywhere where you move up the ranks and things get better. That's the apprentice deal for all of history.

Part of his compensation is relative flexibility although I'm almost certain c suite often work a lot more and have higher demands than junior employees.

If you're very valuable to the firm (e.g. CEO) you can get away with more stuff. It's the natural order of things. I don't really see any other way around it apart from a dehumanizing process to treat everyone exactly the same regardless of capabilities

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Why are you pretending like flexibility is something you cannot give freely ?

That's like saying all junior-level employees MUST carry a book on top of their heads all the time, and only C-Level executives get to skip that. If you give someone flexibility, you are not taking anything away from other people, so not giving it is only an unnecessary punishment for junior level employees.

>> Why are you pretending like flexibility is something you cannot give freely ?

Many of these things are about rite of passage, and people who have gone thru the rites want others to not skip.

It can also be about a power-dynamic, where flexibility isnt given because imposed inflexibility is a power lever.

It can turn into that, but on the flipside it's normal to get more privileges over time, either as a reward (raises, time off) or once you've shown you won't abuse it (WFH/flexibility).

You're assuming that someone working from the Hamptons is as productive as working from a desk in the office or his own home. I highly doubt this is true and especially so for young junior employees.

After you've been there a while, learned more and are more effective at your job, you're more likely to get the benefit of the doubt but even that has limits.

Why are we pretending like this is all weird? New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up and it's inappropriate that they just get the same consideration when compared to someone that's been there longer than the analyst has been alive. Have you guys ever worked a normal job before?

>> You're assuming that someone working from the Hamptons is as productive as working from a desk in the office or his own home. I highly doubt this is true and especially so for young junior employees.

I've had co-workers in these situations for a long time. In theory there is no difference. But then...

- suddenly you can barely hear someone on a conference call because they are on a 4G-tether on a beach,

- or because there are tons of bar sounds in the background on a call

- or you have a production issue but cant get the person to screen-share because they are on low-bandwidth

I even had individuals who would block their entire calendar on WFH days and only take meetings on in-office days.

The problem is with those who abuse privileges, not with those who are honest.

Blocking off the day makes sense because you want get work done. Meetings can wait until I'm at the office because I'm too distracted to get real work done in my flex-desk.

Who cares if employee works at the beach?

You need to provide value not appearance of value.

>> Blocking off the day makes sense because you want get work done.

I'm sure there are cases there it doesnt matter, but I was mentioning cases where teams need to work with each other and are paid to work with each other. I specifically mentioned Production Support. How can production support meetings "wait until they are back at the office?" From my standpoint, it doesnt matter where they are (home or office) but if they have no connectivity and cannot jump into troubleshooting meetings during business hours, i'm not sure how this works for numerous situations.

Through my career, i've been on the hot-seat as live applications have gone down. Imagine a DB is down or a pipeline is broken, and my DBA co-worker says "sure, lets take it up on Monday when I'm back". Note, I have no admin rights to the DB.

I had a k8s cluster run out of disk space. I had no admin rights to fix this. If the k8s admin decided he could take the meeting a day or days later, it would be a total disaster.

> You're assuming that someone working from the Hamptons is as productive as working from a desk in the office or his own home. I highly doubt this is true and especially so for young junior employees.

We're assuming you even read the article.

It clearly says "how the underling walked up at a restaurant, introduced himself and pointed to associates with him"

i.e. it was more than 1 person. Maybe they are doing face-to-face training? Are you saying that's ineffective?

> New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up

That's exactly what's happening. Why are you assuming it's not?

Exactly. What if it was a "team building lunch" or they were all out meeting a client or they are all remote together in a summer share?

And of the CEO - was he meeting a client, the board, or simply out to lunch by himself or with family/friends/etc. The article is silent on this topic.

> I'm almost certain c suite often work a lot more and have higher demands than junior employees.

Lmao. I'm no where near C-Suite but I've also never worked as hard as I did as an intern/junior engineer. Moving up often means working less hard.

> I don't really see any other way around it apart from a dehumanizing process to treat everyone exactly the same regardless of capabilities

This post is about WFH, not treating everyone the same regardless of capabilities. Those are such different things that I'm convinced you must be arguing in bad faith.

Yeah, Elon Musk is currently CEO of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla, owner/CTO of Twitter, and owner of The Boring Company. It is incredibly hard to believe that the C-Suite works hard when someone is able to multitask like that. Tesla is even a public company--the shareholders could have him removed if he was doing a bad job!

Visionary leaders that can also attract talent and delegate well are force multipliers. Hard work doesn’t mean it’s not easy for some and almost incredibly fast to accomplish for others.

We're not talking about impact. We're talking about the claim that "c suite often work a lot more". That claim is hard to substantiate.

Hey who let David Sacks enter our chat ^

>can bet the CEO was one time an analyst with a demanding boss.

Executives have not been promoted into their jobs since the 50s.

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