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Comment by water9 | Hacker News Reader

Acting like all humans will work equally as hard when they are supervised vs unsupervised is completely naïve

Thing is, I'm just as supervised at work, honestly (which is to say, not at all).

I still have 1:1s with my manager, am still accountable for my targets and organizational goals, and generally do the same thing whether I'm WFH or in office.

Office work has several advantages: 1) I like discussing in person with coworkers - sometimes coming up with fun/interesting ideas 2) office itself is more conducive to a particular type of work 3) I get some isolation from the family

But that commute...

I think RTO would have been a lot more palatable if most offices weren't intentionally built with 1hr+ commutes from residential areas.

What is the intention?

To look and feel important. I worked for a company that moved to a building simply because the CEO wanted the sign to be seen from a major highway. My 20min commute would become 1 hour or more. I left upon hearing that rationale.

Lol. The intention was to build the suburbs far away from the offices, not the other way around.

Exactly: the problem isn't the corporate employers, it's the middle-class Americans who bought into the suburban dream. Now that they got away from the black people downtown, they're complaining about the commute.

It's this, 100%, but I asked anyway just to see the thought process

That I think gets more to the point that our housing economy is completely irrational.

Used to be, you could live close but maybe not the best neighborhood.

Now everything that's not some new exurb 1hr+ away from medium-large metros is insanely priced.

I think it's more that residential areas are 1hr+ commutes from offices/downtowns. You could build an office next to a residential area, and some do, but many of the job applicants will be in a different residential area -- often even in a different city. Suburban sprawl, y'all.

You could have smaller offices in different neighborhoods, but there's usually not enough people in any given suburban area to justify an office. Co-working spaces are one compromise but larger companies dislike them for security/secrecy reasons.

I would also add that many people have reasons for not moving closer to work even if they could. Also people are no longer working for decades at the same job, and moving is a hassle if you're changing jobs every few years.

It's not "intentional", at least on the part of the company. It's intentional in that this is the product of American car culture and suburbia, and it's something that Americans have been buying into willingly for many decades now. The company can't just locate down the street from your house: that's zoned for residential use only. They can't locate at the shopping center near your subdivision: that's zoned for commercial use only (for storefronts/shopping, not corporate offices). And even if they did, that wouldn't help: it would be a nice short commute for you, but not for the other employees that all live in other subdivision scattered at a similar radius from the city center. The employees that live on the other side of town will have a horrible commute. What you're complaining about is simply what you get by building with such low density and making everything dependent on cars.

It's also naïve to assume that the work people do when supervised is always valuable and not optimizing for the appearance of work, rather than work itself.

It's also naive to assume that optimizing for productivity is some goal we should work toward when zero reward structures are in place for it. The thing to optimize for is just enough productivity.

Particularly when pay increases in this craft are largely found by job hopping until you possibly land a FAANG job or approximate

> when zero reward structures are in place for it.

we used to have them. Pension is long dead, however. Hell, promotions and raises are arguably dead as well in certain industries. It's practically common knowledge that it's easier for tech jobs to change jobs for a 20% raise than to ask the current company for a 5% raise. And then that company you left after 2 years proceeds to pay someone a 20% raise in order to ramp up someone doing your same job.

Companies need to reward tenure and actually budget for employee bonuses if they don't want to keep doing this. But from what I've read, they don't care and HR may even be incentivize to do this song and dance: https://old.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/uo589a/why_are...

or if you want a TL;DR for the TL;DR:

>HR / recruiting "wins" when hiring, and does not "lose" when employees leave. Their incentives are in most cases at the fastest possible rotation of people.

Would those people be working significantly more without supervision? I find it hard to believe.

I don’t think that’s their point.

The kind of person who isn’t going to work when not stared at all day by a manager is also probably the kind of person who is going to try to LOOK busy at the office without actually having to do a lot of REAL work. Surfing the web, playing games, chatting with their friends, whatever they can get away with when someone’s not watching. Or maybe doing their real tasks really slow.

They’re just not a hard worker.

Where is an employee who tends to do a good job is going to try to do it whether they’re in the office or not (assuming that’s possible for their position). They don’t really need to be monitored at home or at work. They would do basically the same either way.

So all you’re left with is you need to check real productivity instead of the appearance of productivity. THAT’S what matters, not where the employee is physically located during the day.

Some people are exceptions and will work significantly better in one environment or the other. But if you have an employee who took remote work to mean “watch TV and occasionally jiggle my mouse“ i’m willing to bet they weren’t a good employee in the first place.

I've definitely seen juniors who need attention to succeed.

> is also probably the kind of person who is going to try to LOOK busy at the office

I disagree. The vast majority of people benefit from basic supervision and accountability.

This is a long comment section, with many good viewpoints, but your summary is the most insightful: WFH spreads the performance distribution of pre-existing traits for attitude to work.

The question for management is, are you hiring, cultivating, and retaining the best people? And are you defining "best" appropriately? If management's concerns around remote employees slacking off are at all valid, it's management's own fault in the first place.

In-office work isn't the same as supervised work. If you have managers/cameras hovering over your shoulder at all times in an office, that's a toxic work environment.

People have always found ways to be unproductive even in the in-office era: going to the bathroom while on the clock, constantly hanging out in the break room under the guise of getting coffee, office small talk, or just old fashioned web browsing on their computers/phones. Pretending like every white collar job was at 100% efficiency in the pre-pandemic era was just pure delusion on management's part.

Completely agree!

I work way harder unsupervised.

It's probably also naïve to believe all humans respond to supervision the same way...

Unsupervised and left to my own devices, I tend to spend my time on what I actually think is the most valuable contribution I can make. Selfishly, perhaps, because that tends to lead me toward what I find to be the most fulfilling and enjoyable work. This tends to upset some people, because my maximum effort is not funneled toward advancing their immediate metrics. But others get it.

In my experience, just doing work you are told to do is the surest path to burnout (at least for me). If I am allowed to pick an area I concentrate on, I remain engaged and excited about the project and spend more hours per week on it. From manager's POV is that so bad?

That only makes sense if the employees in question don't produce anything measurable

What’s the difference between producing something measurable that gets scrapped before ever hitting prod regardless of the several months spent working on it and not producing anything measurable at all? Unfortunately, these are the thoughts I’m left with, especially now that my current job is deprecating the years of effort some other guys spent building the last system.

Most office workers really aren't supervised unless you count a manager glancing across the open-plan office to see how many butts are in seats.

Which is also where you get pointless busywork. Doing things on your computer to pretend to look productive because if you were to just sit and think or take a five minute break a micromanager would yell at you or nosy teammate would rat you out as “unproductive“.

Even if you’re thinking through a heart problem or just finished something mentally draining from complexity.

If I am ever forced into office, I will look very productive as I update my resume, schedule interviews and spend hours on https://leetcode.com/ every day! The butts-in-seats managers will probably want to promote me by the time I hand in my two weeks notice.

My last 3 managers (since 2020) have all been in a different office than my "home" office.

That's only if you work at big companies with several offices where teams are distributed anyway, so in-office work was remote-work anyway except done in the office instead of in your home. Big international companies were already basically remote even before the pandemic and had plenty of inefficiencies already built in.

What I notices small companies in my area (here in Europe) with only one office, put a lot of value in having all employees coming to the office so they can react faster and cooperate easier than distributed teams, rather than saving on rent and letting everyone WFH 100% of the time from wherever they are, seeing it as one of their strengths over big distributed companies where things move slower.

While there's some truth to their arguments about the response time and cooperation in the office, I find they're selecting for people who drink their cool-aid and buy into "the mission" of the company instead of seeing the work as a simple transaction of "I give you my time and mental labor, you give me money, period".

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