Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

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faeriechangling

Of course, SOMEBODY needs to at the very least needs to lay fiber-optics and rack networking gear to make remote work, work. I was one of those people for year. I was at one point the only person in a building full of servers. When I say the ONLY person, in a building of hundreds of people, I mean across departments, and I was paid a pittance extra for my service. The janitors would wish me good night and I would activate the alarm on my way out the door.

You can sure bet I worked my ass off to reduce that companies need for an on-site presence. It was also because one of my backups was disabled and I didn’t want to push that cost onto them. Another went for into a car accident and went on disability and it was bad enough that their personality changed when they came back. Shit fucking enraged me, I just did math in my head about how many employees my employer killed or maimed on the highways yearly with its forced office attendance policy and it was a decent number.

Of course, I respect the sacrifices of anybody doing such work and staying in the office so people can stay home.

Yet what we saw with on-premise work wasn’t that. What we saw was managers misappropriating company resources to have employees keep them company and make them feel important and follow them around to flex on their contemporaries. Who threw tantrums and threatened peoples livelihoods and broke disability accommodation laws to get their way. There are people who need to “come in to work” but it’s a LOT less than who was actually coming into work.

It's more like the constant coordination of disparate people, keeping those people motivated and aligned, making sure they're getting full access to all of the resources that would be otherwise trivial to provide to people collectively in an office.

And there's zero reason to believe that driving to work killed anyone. That's like saying being born killed people. The causes of people's car accidents are what killed them, not the reason they were driving.

Of course meeting in person can be a good way to deal with such concerns, but it doesn’t need to happen five times a week. Sometimes solving such problems just means sending an email.

There are also a significant number of companies that are remote only and successful and totally reject the need for this at all but of course - this won’t work for all workplaces or all workers. Just saying.

For companies that were previously set up as in-person, it's the only way to operate successfully for any role that has any regular interaction.

Are you one of those managers who insist on talking to me twice every day: "What are you doing right now?". Maybe treat people like grownups, not toddlers at least sometimes.

I'm in school full time, so no. The problem isn't that managers need to be able to check on employees, it's that everyone needs to be able to interact with one another face-to-face to optimally work, and when they can't, it's the people who manage them that actively suffer.

Maybe the tech will catch up to that, but it currently doesn't.

In a lot of cases in densely populated cities, commute each way is half an hour and people are paying tons for rent or mortgages in part because they want to be near their jobs.

Let's say your employee works 9-5, but really they start their commute at 8:30 and get home at 5:30 so it takes 9 hours. Imagine how much better some employees would perform with an extra hour of rest a day instead of essentially forcing them to drive because face to face interaction is awesome.

Some employees are literally not going to go to one meeting the entire day. They will drive. Sit at a desk. Talk to nobody. Then go home. It's a strange thing.

Also, just as there are people on tech who really thrive off the face to face interaction, there's a whole lot of people who got into technology BECAUSE they aren't good at face to face interactions.

People who got into tech because they're bad at human interaction will find no refuge working professionally. You're a burden to your company and your coworkers if you're in a role that requires coordination and you refuse to coordinate.

For roles that require little/no team coordination, it's acceptable to not work in the office most days. That isn't what a software developer job is, however, nor is it the vast majority of white-collar jobs generally.

Yes, you must commute. Yes, it takes time. But that's what the money is for. You wouldn't do this for free, so they compensate you for the inconvenience. The hour lost in a commute is infinitely made up for in the human interfacing that happens in person.

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