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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

So, I have often worked remotely, think it's fine, and makes sense in some cases. But, honestly, this is a professional-class issue, and every article about it seems written from a viewpoint that has forgotten about most of the population. The waitress and cook never had the option of working remotely, nor did the factory worker, the construction worker, the taxicab driver, the truck driver, etc. etc. Most of the population never had the option of remote work. The professional class bemoaning that they are being "forced" back to the office (translation: they won't pay you to work at home) is beyond a 1st World problem; it's a 1st World professional class problem. Even surgeons and nurses and dentists have to be "at work" in order to work, for the most part. The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.

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This reads like "you better clean your plate, there are starving kids in Africa!"

Yes, some people don't have the option of remote work, but if you have that option, how does that affect those that don't? Cleaning my plate won't feed starving kids in Africa, and taking shit over working from home doesn't help people whose jobs require physical presence.

Some people can work from home, and entire fields can't. So what? How is that relevant? Some jobs just don't require physical presence and business owners don't like that for a variety of unfair reasons. People who can work from home are being treated unfairly. How does that affect kids in Africa? Does it hurt them? Help them? Or are they utterly irrelevant to the problem at hand?

The existence of farmers doesn't really have a single thing to do with call center workers taking calls at home. Of course farmers can't farm remotely, but that's utterly irrelevant. No one is trying to force farmers and nurses to dramatically change their work environment on the whim of some middle manager who read a really good thinkpiece from WSJ.

Discussion about this problem doesn't mention doctors and farmers because the conversation is not about them in the same way that it's not about starving kids in Africa

This is a very bad take in multiple ways. Firstly, problems in the professional workplace need to be discussed too. And that's not just for the benefit of the "professional class" if these people work more efficiently at home it's better for both them and everyone else, the company, the people who pay for the services of that company, the world thanks to fewer driving emissions.

Secondly, you most be very out of touch to think that everyone who can work from home is a 180,000 a year Peet's coffee filled software engineer. Lots and lots of lower wage, lower education jobs can work from home but are getting forced to the office. Executive assistants, customer support, marketers, copywriters, I could list a lot more.

These are the worst comments on HN, just ultra lazy defense of the status quo with no real meat to it.

Executive assistants can work from home? Our admins mostly can’t.

Customer support folks working from home predated the pandemic. In fact, they often work from outside the country.

Marketing is a profession like engineering. They don’t get paid by the hour.

Most hourly workers have to work onsite.

I feel like your comment is less logical argument and more emotional reaction.

My wife works customer service remotely.

> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.

I stopped caring about what random strangers think when I was in high school. The correct answer to this is to tell these random people who have no skin in the game to fuck off.

I think your answer basically proves his point that we are becoming a highly entitled group of people. We struggle to empathize with other workers and, I would say, companies and managers. We tell ourselves this very simplistic stories like "all managers are bad", "all office work is a waste of time", "I should just get tasks on my async proj manager tool". I am telling you, with this level of entitlement, just hope the tech industry keeps growing so the job market remains an employees' market.

Or unionize.

But what is the point? If we can all agree that going to the office sucks, how is the "professional class" being forced back in the office make the other workers' day suck less?

I'd argue it's quite the opposite!

If I stay at home, I'm one less person compressing them in the metro, or helping gridlock the highways or taking up parking spaces (I live in the city where parking is scarce for pretty much everyone). If I can work remotely every day, I'm likely to leave my apartment in the city center and go live somewhere far away. That's one less person competing for housing.

We are also in the class that's driving housing prices up (via geographic arbitrage) and pricing out a lot of forced in-person workers (who actually live "far away" as you said, and not in the city center). And that does breed a lot of resentment.

So in some ways (i.e. housing prices), you working from home does directly make these people lives worse, as you are now their competition for real-estate.

> So in some ways (i.e. housing prices), you working from home does directly make these people lives worse, as you are now their competition for real-estate.

But if enough people like me move out from the city, there's a possibility that prices will go down in the cities, right? So that should help the people who need to be physically present at work.

That was a serious problem before WFH was a thing. Fix the underlying issue not the symptom!

Why is it when employees expect more it's "entitlement", but when managers do so it's just business as usual? Especially considering it's the employees creating the value.

I think it's fair to expect employees to exert the mental effort to empathize with the companies they work for when the companies show effort to do likewise.

I 100% agree with you.

Early in my career, a senior colleague used to reply to complaints with the simple statement "you only get the company/boss that you deserve".

By that, he meant that if you complained, you were always free to leave and find a better fit elsewhere. I learnt to appreciate that saying as I grew older.

If you think you deserve a better office space / coworkers / manager / CEO, then go look for it elsewhere. If you don't find it, then you are probably in the place you deserve, like it or not.

Yesterday morning I woke up and it was raining. I could hear that sloshing sound as cars streamed past outside carrying people to work and school. It's a sound I've hated for as long as I can remember because it means a miserable wet and grey morning with everyone seeming slightly depressed.

I didn't have to go outside that day, but I'll never forget how lucky I am and that other people still have to.

But what difference does it make? I can feel sorry for people all day but I can't stop the rain.

On the other hand, nobody listened to people like me who were saying open offices were bad for us and we can't concentrate properly in them. So much for empathy.

The real world is just high school with bigger stakes. You can "not care" all you want as long as you're quiet about it. But if you start badmouthing the bully or whining in class every day about not having enough time to eat lunch, you might improve things but there's a much higher chance it just turns out bad for you.

It's an existential issue.

Carbon emissions are literally killing people, and are bound to kill many more millions if we don't change our ways.

So if the cooks and nurses and truck drivers have no choice, then I'd say that it's our duty to work remotely in order to do our part in reducing emissions.

Exactly - these same cooks and nurses are so anti-worker that they can’t see fellow workers having a positive outcome and be pleased, while simultaneously dealing with less traffic?

Press X to doubt; sounds like billionaire brainwashing noise to me.

Yes, we need more tech workers to save the world from all the cooks, nurses, and truck drivers out here literally killing people with their emissions.

Not sure what your point is.

Skepticism about the environmental impact and motivations of the tech sector - an industry that consumes vast amounts of energy for largely intangible ends. I suspect you've got your story flipped on it's head and the people with the largest impact are not cooks, nurses, and truck drivers, but software engineers.

The comment you replied to asked us to consider the views of the rest of the population. Well, my point is that framing the WFH/RTO debate as a duty to the environment while selling ads for a living does indeed look entitled and a bit spoiled.

A place I used to work you had people transporting their 100kg sack of meat in a 2000kg car over 100 miles every single day just to place said sack of meat at a desk and be on Zoom (well, Skype at the time) calls all day.

And this happened day in day out with nobody ever questioning the sanity of such a practice.

Sorry, this does not compute. Your whole argument is that since we cannot do all jobs remotely we shouldn't do any jobs remotely?

People in every profession would be offended by meaningless requirements coming from the top without any plausible justification. Construction workers, truck drivers etc. understand full well why the need to show up. So do software engineers who need to work on physical devices that they can't have at home.

I actually think professional class is more prone to tolerate this attitude from the management, because it's what corporate environment teaches to do.

I personally saw WFH as another step in the advancement of labor that is not completely unlike 40h work week. Yes, not everyone can get it, but it is clear that:

1. it can work 2. it is against existing, entrenched interests

Hence the tension.

FWIW, our company just mandated RTO and there was push back, because the person making the decision made it basically within a week from publishing date and a lot of people have kids so it is not exactly a flip a switch kind of situation PLUS there are a couple of high visibility projects that rely on staff good will to push it past the finish line. No flexibility from company means no flexibility from us ( no more calls after 5 to deal with fires and so on ).

I accept not all jobs are ready for WFH ( butcher, surgeon and so on ), but some absolutely are.

WFH isn't about not going to the office. It's about breaking real estate. If the professional class can do that, it actually benefits everyone by taking some of the pressure off hyperinflated real estate markets in major cities. We could also see some repurposing of commercial space to residential, which would further take the pressure off.

If you as a professional class worker think the rent is too damn high, consider how insane it is for people who make less and work longer hours.

It's become clear to me that real estate is the economic problem, at least in the US. I said the economic problem, singular. I don't think any other issue compares.

The phenomenon of younger generations feeling poorer than their parents is largely attributable to real estate costs. I think real estate is at the root of a ton more problems too: homelessness (for obvious reasons), collapsing birth rates, low rates of family formation, even crime. Real estate is basically cannibalizing the future.

Your comment is much more insightful than 99% of the responses, which mostly seem just angry. But I have to think that the primary reason for the real estate problem (which, I agree, is quite serious and the cause of many other issues) is that housing became financialized, and the primary way for the middle class to save money. It doesn't have to be that way; mobile homes, for example, do not work like this, they work more like cars (financially). The dearth of people working from the office in NYC or SF lately does not seem to have made any meaningful dent in the rent, primarily because the drivers of it were financial.

If a restaurant line cook could work from home they very well might want to. Software work can, most of the time, be done from home. So the question of if it should be done from home is valuable and worthy of discussion.

All workers deserve to have a say in their working conditions.

How one talks about it can be entitled or spoiled sounding, but the desire to influence and change one's working conditions is noble and in common with great majority of workers.

When my children were small I started working remotely while my partner worked in an office still. I looked for a remote job so that rather than being in a office and going to get some coffee I was excited to instead get to see my 8 month of doing some baby biz on my coffee break.

What a wonderful privilege it was during that age of growth. How great it would be for more people to have that experience (which was very common before industrialization).

The thing is that the office is not what it was before. The hybrid office with its roaming desks is a nightmare. I hate it so much.

Going to the office before the pandemic was totally different. Even though I did work from home regularly then too. But at the office I had the same colleagues around me (even though my direct colleagues were all in different locations). I had my own desk with my stuff. Now I just have a locker and I'm a dumb number that nobody cares about. I hate the company.

> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.

They decided to get into a profession they doesn't have working from home as an option. They can change if they want.

Also I don't really give a F if other people think I'm spoiled.

The thing is that the current environment is sort of what you'd expect if most people don't come in most days any longer. I think some companies are giving a permanent desk to people who come in most days but most coworkers are probably still not coming in regularly.

> The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled.

My experience is that the rest of the population has very little day-to-day contact with people like me and remote work only reduces it, so they simply don't care.

I get some vague interest in the details of my life when salaries are mentioned, but when I explain what kind of hoops you have to jump and what kind of lifestyle you have to lead (desk job and learning after hours) to get to these figures, interest is usually lost.

Overall people are way less interested in how strangers live their lives and visibly less envious than one would think. For most this line of work is boring and soul crushing and they don't think the salary makes it worth it.

I don't think the fact that remote work is not possible for other professionals is relevant. If it is about fairness, you could say it is even an advantage for other workers since it means less traffic congestion, better access to restaurant and less land use.

No one can advocate for any improvement in their conditions with attitudes like yours.

I've been WFH for a decade, at the end of the day, if i'm forced to come in to an office then i'll just take my business elsewhere. There are plenty of companies willing to pay me for my time and more than happy to have me work remote. I don't see how i could possibly be the only one.

This reads like some crab mentality; since heroic nurses and factory workers can’t work remotely then we should bemoan those who can and do work remotely.

Should we also cancel telehealth programs so those nurses that actually do work remotely don’t become spoiled and entitled?

I have flipped burgers, assembled camcorders, and driven airport shuttles. The thing about those jobs is that the workspace was well designed by someone who understood the tasks. Writing quality software requires long quiet concentration, yet we keep cheaping out on open plan desks.

There is a way of generalizing this to all of them, though, which is: Why should any of them have to do anything they don't actually have to do for their job? A relevant example to many hourly jobs might be managers being inflexible in their hours more-or-less just because they can. (Though this has gotten "better" as more and more businesses staff down and they're being inflexible because they have to be to be open at all... which is not exactly manifesting as an improvement for the worker, though.) Doctors might wonder why they went to school for over a decade and have 1.5 administrators per doctor and still need to spend the majority of their time filling out paperwork. Etc.

Some thoughts:

* Employers should pay the cost of employee travel to work, at least count the time spent traveling to work as work hours. If I'm driving into work it's not really my free time.

* If I lived near my workplace, I wouldn't care about working from home so much. Society has done something seriously wrong where most people cannot live near where they work.

* By getting the professional class off the roads, traffic is better for those who have to work in person. By tearing down the offices that aren't really needed and replacing with residential and other mixed use, we might have a shot at rearranging things where the people that need to be physically present at work can live close to work.

Spoiled, or righteous indignation? Never have we been more productive as individuals, and efficient as an org. And no one has presented any actual functional reason to be in an office. No one wants to take a step backwards.

All those other jobs you mentioned don't have offices to work remotely from... I don't see the comparison.

No. It's forced in-office that is a problem which impacts all desk jockeys, regardless of what bucket their country or neighborhood gets slotted into.

The fact that other roles cannot work remote is beside the point. People want a reasonable say in their work environment regardless of the nature of their work. And they'll negotiate accordingly if the work requires physical presence.

Desk workers aren't spoiled for pointing out the waste and abuse of involuntary butt-in-seats policies. The accusation comes across as trying to incite discord.

This is crab bucket thinking. Dragging people to the office doesn't improve the plight of other workers.

Keeping more people away from commutes though does reduce traffic for those who need to get around.

Central commercial real estate could actually provide useful things, rather then "places people sit at computers they could do anywhere".

Distributing the work force out means more mixing of class and profession. Service jobs can be closer to where people live because they're more distributed.

>" The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled."

So people who can work from home should go to the office to satisfy "the rest of the population"? This is some novel concept. Have you tried approaching company owners and CEO and ask them to make their compensation to be more in line with the general population as well?

Nearly anything can be bucketed up into some kind of "this is an N-class issue, think of the non-N class!", so I am not sure this is a great approach to problem solving. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, investors, CEOs, world leaders all have problems and they all want solutions. My doctor who exists in the top 0.1% is still entitled to say, demand working less than 80 hour weeks and whatever else their "class" problems entail.

if their professions allowed them to work from home they should be

don't know what this argument is supposed to be? seems like something a ceo made up to emotionally justify their position rather than based in any sort of objective reasoning

things shouldn't get better because other things haven't gotten better? is that the crux of your argument?

The rest of the population presumably appreciates not having to share the road with us, at least.

okay but the plumber doesn't have to learn fucking Kubernetes.

Fair point.

What? Is your argument basically "you can't have problems because other people have problems too"?

My partner is a nurse. Of course she can't work from home. Her job is literally touching people, putting things in them and taking things out.

They're not making her go to the hospital just to fuck with her.

My job, on the other hand, does not involve physical contact. In fact, I don't even need to leave home, as demonstrated by years of working at home. I deliver value at home so I get paid for it. It's as simple as that really. It's completely irrelevant how other people deliver their value.

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