The growing inequality of who gets to work from home
hbr.org
hbr.org
Front-line staff have to clock on, get their toilet breaks timed, get drug tested, have weird random shift patterns, have to work at least one day on the weekend, have to cover for colleagues by doing a 16-hour shift, get paid overtime, can't nip out for a doctor's appointment, etc, etc, etc.
Happy for bosses to consider making the workplace more equal, but let's start by making front-line staff's lives easier rather than making everyone else's lives harder.
I agree that flexibility such as doctors appointments are important, and also that can be difficult if you’re one of two employees working a storefront, particularly if it’s busy. Heading out to an unplanned appointment (what I assume you mean by “nip out”) may be difficult, but accommodating planned and scheduled appointments could certainly be made easier - this is a time when the onsite manager should say “I will be in that day and I will cover for the time needed for your appointment”.
This from the article. My point is that this is absolute bullshit. Front-line staff already have massive inequality of working standards, and have done for decades.
The need for people to go back to the office is not driven by some sudden compassionate drive to equalise workplace differences. It's driven by an entire class of asset for the very wealthy becoming almost worthless.
The overall takeaway I got is that the better approach is to bring better value to the frontline workers to make up for the discrepancies in “fairness” - honestly, this should have been the thinking from the on-set.
> The need for people to go back to the office is not driven by some sudden compassionate drive to equalise workplace differences. It's driven by an entire class of asset for the very wealthy becoming almost worthless.
I didn’t see anything suggesting this as a remedy in TFA, though I’ll go read it again in a bit. Completely agree that the only reasonable defense of any push to end work from home is to make up for real estate investment
Exactly. Things weren't fair back in 2019, but no-one cared back then because it was just front-line workers.
Like you, I'd applaud any effort to improve conditions for front-line workers. But that's not the motivation here, and I very much doubt that WFH policies would be the first thing that front-line workers would suggest to improve their lives.
Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstreet traders? There would be a nation wide solidarity strike.
Bill Gates famously joked in the 90s that Microsoft would lose a third of their engineers instantly if they drug tested. The NSA even had to make an official exception on past drug use so people would stop failing the security screening (although they still get tested iirc).
How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs?
it seems like introducing a whole machinery to just have the same resting is an industrial scale waste of resources.
However, people regularly die because of drunk and tired drivers.
Of course no law would have prevented this because the Nazis made the law in Germany.
How many people could be hurt by a drunk pilot, and how many could be hurt by working at a Walmart while high?
The point is that we test where there is no reasonable danger at all and don't test when there is. Why? We drug test poor people and not wealthy people.
Walmart is the same.
“ After pilots and flight attendants have been hired, they are subject to random drug screenings. Federal regulation detail the percentage of the total employees who should be subject to random testing in a given year, and this figure is usually around 50% and varies by the positive test rate from previous data. As drug testing is random, flight and ramp crew don't know when these tests will occur. Pilots and flight attendants who are randomly selected for drug screenings will often be met on the jet bridge after passengers have deplaned. An official holding a clipboard is usually the sign of an upcoming random drug screening.” - https://simpleflying.com/pilot-drug-test-frequency-guide/
As long as testing is uncommon you could say that number will remain at zero or near zero simply for lack of data.
You comment implies but doesn’t state explicitly that you think truck drivers are more likely than pilots to be on drugs, is that true though?
“To a degree” means some pilots will still stay up late and try to use stimulants to stay awake. But the pressure on the two cohorts is not equivalent.
Let’s say for argument’s sake that truck drivers proportionally engage in more risky behavior. This can be either the use of stimulants or simply driving tired. Why is that?
Drivers’ — like many low status workers — jobs security is more precarious and are monitored more. Therefore, they’re more likely to engage in risky behavior in a desire to simply not be fired.
Now let’s get back to pilots. Is it just that airline pilots are a high status job like ceo? Not entirely. Pilots are essentially no different than truck drivers in the sky. Ironically, it’s because planes themselves are tracked by a competent and vigorous government agency, that employers can’t put the same pressures on pilots that they can on truck drivers.
This comment betrays the old and persistent idea that lower status people are inherently shifty and lazy, while higher status people are inherently more virtuous.
Success at the top is a careful dance of social nuance. If you fly to an on-site, get drunk in the hotel bar, and are late to the meeting or smell like booze, you're social status will be impacted unless you're a wizard with social excuses or make up for it in some other way.
So--in a way--the success is the greatest drug test.
This is very deep seated idea in American culture. It manifests all sorts of ways. Deference to the rich, because clearly every rich person got and stayed rich through hard work and skill, instead of luck and family connections. Harsher penalities for poor people crimes, rather than rich people crimes. Constant monitoring for low wage workers, but no monitoring of high wage ones. Egregious hoops and monitoring for welfare, versus tax credits. Hell, even modern evangelical grifters leverage this idea with their prosperity gospel lies.
Disclaimer: I believe it's society's duty to shame the shifless and lazy.
And most of the behaviors that are taught by religions are rooted in anecdotal evidence over hundreds of years. Harder workers usually succeed more than the lazy. It's a lot more effective to say "hard work = heaven".
And it's not even really about "success". Giving a damn about what you do in this life is key to a life of happiness and therefore a life aimed at a target and governed by rules about how to interact with your fellow man. "Giving a damn" is the most important foundation for financial success as well.
It's not about that. But also statistically on average that idea is accurate in this case at least. The qualifications and self-discipline required to become a pilot are significantly higher than for a driver. Your also surrounded by many other people all the time so it's much harder to not get noticed. Also AFAIK random testing for alcohol is certainly a thing for pilots.
> that employers can’t put the same pressures on pilots
One might argue that they would more or less end up doing the same on their own. The cost/risk ratio is extremely different compared to truck drivers. Also costs of having extra pilots/allowing them to work less are not that significant relative to road transportation.
lol. No. Not at all. There is nothing to support this widely held idea. This is the very bias I was talking about.
You mean you don't think that there is a difference between commercial pilots and truck etc. drivers when it comes to drug and alcohol use?
> lol. No. Not at all.
That does sound very convincing.
This is an interesting question but not all drugs decrease performance. For instance, if a pilot responsibly takes some wakey meds before landing a long haul flight it may be a good thing. There’s a reason for the “I can’t function before the morning coffee” expression.
I remember a documentary many years ago about long haul pilots who went partying HARD the day before flying back from Bangkok, Tokyo or places like that. They wouldn’t have been allowed to drive, but flew hundreds of passengers. It was filmed undercover, but I don’t remember if there was a backlash/consequences.
i recently met someone who stopped drinking coffee and after a while realized that the only reason he could not function without having a coffee before was that he must have been addicted to it. once he got off that addiction the problem went away.
the only reason that stops me from functioning in the morning is lack of sleep.
But ultimately it comes down to sleep. Caffeine just masked sleep problems. If I don't sleep well, I still crave it. If I sleep well, I don't think about it anymore.
Yeah, a lot of people tend to be later-risers. The realities of the 9-5 job mean that they have to get up at 6-7 to get the kids ready for school, then get themselves ready for work, and then the commute to work... despite that going completely against their chronotype.
WFH alleviates a lot of that stress.
Unfortunately the pilot was also drunk. And he tried to shift the blame of the vodka bottle to the deceased person. There is no amount of technical skill that should permit someone like that behind a stick ever again.
I am quite convinced it is a productivity measure.
If drug testing was motivated by productivity, amphetamines wouldn’t be tested for.
Otherwise, you'd see productivity being better in places that allow drug testing of normal employees and worse off in places that do not. But that's not the case: Retail employees in Norway aren't really less productive than those in the US.
Plus, if it really were a productivity measure, why would you not drug test more professionals and salaried employees? Does their productivity not matter? Wouldn't more small businesses find drug testing worth the money?
Depending on the drug, and the circumstances.
I'm sorry to say.
What business does an employer have with employee drug use outside of work?
I didn't say that drugs never have that effect. And like you say, May. The same drug might have different effects for different folks, too.
good question, but there is just no way to get an answer
Every crew involved in a commercial aviation mishap knows they’ll be tested as well.
There may be no way to get an answer with 6 significant figures, but you can get a pretty good answer.
Companies aren't testing for this because they couldn't care less. Drugs isn't killing their business and they like having access to smart people who might fail a test. The main reason testing is more common in the public sector is not that drugs are bad but that the optics of people using drugs has negative political consequences when political leaders are waging this war on drugs. Also with drugs being illegal, using them necessarily means breaking the law and interacting with criminals. Which looks bad politically as well.
Remote work is different. People and companies disagree about the effects but a lot of companies seem to prefer having their people not work remotely. Not because of the way it looks but because of at least the perception of its impact on productivity. Whether you agree with that or not doesn't matter. Some people are concerned about it and acting accordingly.
The inequality here relates mainly to the value of the work people do. Just like companies don't like losing access to people who are smart and may use drugs, they also don't like losing access to people who have valuable skills that insist on working remotely. So they allow some people to work remotely. But of course some skills are more valuable than others so the inequality mainly relates to how easy it is to replace people with more compliant ones.
As an explanation, this is implausible to the point of impossible.
The same employers drug test lower-level employees but (e.g. in the warehouse) but don't test other employees (e.g. in the office).
Amazon drug tests warehouse workers but not AWS engineers.
It is difficult to come up for a coherent theory for that that includes "as an organisation, we don't think drugs are all that bad"
Low level workers have the highest chance of getting injured while operating heavy machinery -> highest chance of being drug tested by the police in such cases -> the management would rather spend money on drug testing than on the lawyers later on.
High-paid workers have a pretty small risk of injury -> very small risk of the government testing them -> management is not incentivized to spend money on drug testing (and possible hiring costs later on).
It wasn't that everyone got drunk at work every day, some more often than others, some rarely which made it kind of a special occasion if they stuck around.
He had the same assignments as his coworkers but completed them in half the time. Sometimes, at 11 am, he would just continue drinking beer while sitting in the sun and go home an hour early.
The funniest part was that they mostly talked about work. It was one lengthy extended meeting till 1 am, if they had some kind of deadline they would just work in their spare time while drinking (without pay)
No culture is strange until compared. I drink 2 liters of coffee, smoke a lot and consume lots of sugar. This is perfectly normal here.
edit: it was a desk job
Alcohol at lunch in a business setting was much more widespread at the time.
I always thought companies that do drug testing got some kind of discount on their own insurance rates for it.
The way I had it explained to me in the 90s was while drug use was disqualifying for things like the FBI, for the NSA it was fine-ish provided you were open about it.
Of course, as being gay becomes more normalized and less of a secret, FBI wouldn't need to take it into consideration.
How true or not that thinking is, I have no way of assessing, but it does make sense if you consider the premise of blackmail to 3rd parties true. The same could be probably considered for gambling (e.g. "we'll tell your local church group how much you gambled away in your drunken stupor on this weekend").
Why aren't they doing this now if it was really about the potential for blackmail?
I was a carefree recent college grad and sheepishly admitted to smoking weed a couple of times, having been assured by older friends that admitting to some past experimentation was a lot better than hiding it. “Is there anyone you don’t want to find out about this?” was the agent’s response.
“Nah, my parents know…”
Later, a friend who had assiduously avoided even being around weed took ages to get his clearance. We theorized that the holdup was DIA being suspicious that he didn’t admit to such minor drug use, and wondered what else he might be hiding.
Habitual gambling still gets the side-eye for the same reason general financial problems do: higher susceptibility to the temptation of a few thousand dollars to let something slip or to look the other way.
I'm sure there's a lot of moral-highgrounding about everyone outside the group being untrustworthy, and looking for confirmation of this in the most paranoid ways.
Whether that is wrong or right I could see how there is an argument to be made
“you’ll get to work for X big client, but you’ll need to be drug tested”
Of all the "arguments" used by hired Public Relations companies hired to spin "work from home" in a bad light, this is the most stupid argument I have ever heard.
This makes me uncomfortable as probably because of that it could be the most successful.
This argument gets used a lot in politics, whenever a situation is to be improved people claim "but we suffered, that's not fair!!!".
Personally, I know this from fellow second-generation migrants here in Germany that are opposed to how "easy" refugees have it - their claim is that they had to fight German bureaucracy for years until they were allowed to work and whatnot. Which is valid, yes, but they seem to be unaware that times have changed.
The issue seems to be that many people don't consider their situation in absolute terms, but tend to look at how others have it.
An interesting book on the subject is Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (original German title: Der Neid: Eine Theorie der Gesellschaft) by Helmut Schoeck.
If I get the chance to get to know more bucket crabs I'm perfectly willing to change my view of them if turns out that they're largely cooperative and helpful.
So there is a point where giving someone 10k take home pay rise costs the business much more than giving a frontline worker a 10k take home pay rise.
But an EV car in the UK is taxed 98% less than the same amount in cash.
Rest zones, work from home etc have 0 tax implications .
Arguably lower paid staff is better off getting the cash instead of the benefits and using it as they see fit
Edit typo
Under those conditions tax free benefits like working from home (convenience and not having to pay expensive train tickets) can be a nice topping to a modest salary increase when moving jobs.
(Numbers approximate)
I know I recently began paying tax on employer provided health insurance for example.
Edit:
I think it is better explained here:
https://electriccarguide.co.uk/what-are-the-benefit-in-kind-...
Pay a forklift driver or warehouse worker 150k a year, and see how many complain about not working from home.
On the other hand, anybody that works in a cubical and mostly deals with a phone/computer could probably easily expect that they would be able to work from home. Many of those jobs have fairly modest pay. And I think if you have that aspiration to work from home, you would probably still be a little annoyed about the inability to work from home, regardless of the pay. But I agree there is likely a price where one would be fine with letting that dream stay a dream.
I feel that the far greater problem is that employers are now painting this neat picture where it's employees vs employees in this dilemma over inequality. Foreshadowing that it may be something they need to bother to step in the middle of in the near future. When in reality we are fairly united against employers in their seeming lack of willingness to just treat all of their employees well. Speaking generally of course.
I can remember in 2010 or so having two friends who worked from home - one doing generic helpdesk in a small apartment, and one doing medical coding in a trailer. Neither paid well at all, and never did I get this sense of jealousy. Perhaps their lives were easier because of it, but it was far from the giant sun lit home offices people seem to imagine.
I also think a lot about how retail has changed. As a child, you had actual sales people in a lot of places who seemed happy to help. Probably on commission. Even the non-commissioned jobs people didn't seem so miserable. Probably because the wage gap wasn't as huge as it is today. So many people I encounter seem bothered by my presence and genuinely miserable, I try to avoid even going to stores anymore. It's a lose lose lose situation.
Of course, I have no answers for any of this, just observations from a middling age man.
This happens over and over and now a workforce that’s too ambivalent to be productively helpful to customers experiences. Not even proactively in common sense ways. An example I’ve run into a couple time from quick service food joints goes like this. I order a fountain drink with my food. Pay, walk to drink machine that’s out of order. I ask clerk if there’s anything else to drink, they say no. I then ask why they sold me a fountain drink if they know machine is broken? I tell them I want a refund. They say they don’t know how. Takes 15 minutes and a manager to get the refund. As I’m waiting, cashier continues selling fountain drinks to customers in line.
You might just not be one of these people. For some people, the feeling of being on your way to work is an existential dread. Or like you're leaving your life behind to live a different one that you don't generally enjoy for a while. Some of those people would likely do anything to avoid that feeling. I think for those people, working from home is epic. You get to go to work every day on what feels more like your terms and your life, whatever that life may be. Instead of molding myself into the image of my work environment every day, I can mold my workplace more into myself. Feeding me into:
> but it was far from the giant sun lit home offices people seem to imagine.
For some people, the ideal working conditions are a dimly lit basement, believe it or not.
> [The generally unhappy state of front line workers yesteryear and this one.]
Just 10 years ago, I was working front lines at a Super Target, making 15 cents above my state's minimum wage, which amounted to something like $8.50/hour. I'm in general a fairly.. well "stoic" might be the nicer word.. person, so faking a smile for the sake of a stranger's comfort would have cost me more in energy than my employer was paying me, if that makes sense. That's not to say I'm a jerk to people on purpose, by any means. But if I'm in a bad mood because I left for work at 4:30AM to make barely more than enough for a room to rent, peanut butter sandwiches, and my cell phone bill, it would have been difficult to summon the strength. This is mostly just to say that I agree with your observation, but I empathize more with the employees than the customers who feel they were under-helped.
Observations from someone who will be entering the middling ages soon.
I think especially for forklift drivers and alike - this is about to change. With teleoperating semi autonomous machinery, most of these jobs could be then remote as well. But it will take some time as currently humans and simple forklifts are way cheaper.
You can find a hundred side effects of that - people who want to work in their underpants, not get ready for work, not shower, have a flexible schedule, etc., as individual 'inequalities.' If fixing the pay makes other complaints disappear, were they ever a primary factor?
FWIW, I do think the pendulum will shift in our lifetime. The 'You Call the Handyman' South Park really hit home for us, and I can totally see that now and even more in 20 or so years. Can you imagine needing something fixed in your house and trying to barter your skills? I sure can't!
i don't think this is the right question.
of course, if i get paid more, i am willing to put up with worse work conditions. (to a degree). so the mere fact that pay makes the problem go away is not an indicator that this was not a real problem.
more pay lets me compensate the problem otherwise. for example it may mean that me or my partner can reduce work hours instead of working from home.
What I’ve found is that mostly people work as hard as they care to, and that is mostly orthogonal to compensation and title.
Working at a multinational, people have had varied work arrangements, perquisites, social hierarchies, and pay scales, for a long time. WFH is just a new wrinkle, where you're one of the "remotes" but you live in the same town for some reason. Also, if you think about it, the network of suppliers, contractors, and customers represent quasi-remotes in the sense that they're also involved in the business but are not locating themselves on site, and are jockeying for advantages just like everybody else.
The remotes are mostly invisible. The winds of self-interest that fill our sails continue to blow even if no other ship is in sight.
There's a glut of office space where I live, something like 35% of new offices are unoccupied, so maybe that's due to over-supply or failing RTO policies?
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/ceos-give-up-on-full-tim...
Most companies are settling for hybrid, and workers not returning are slowly being left behind. Mostly because "classic" companies processes are not ready for remote workers
2. Should job requiring acquisition of skills pay more? Probably, but the discrepancy shouldn't be large. Most high-end jobs require 4 extra years of schooling (and thus forteited income) - whereas the job will be performed for 30-40 years. Thus, in a fair world, high-end jobs would pay around 10% than jobs requiring only high-school diploma.
Right now, the high-skill jobs largely go to children of parents with higher social and financial capital, which are able to roll out a red carpet for their children to the well paying jobs (via being role models on how to land a place in corporate hierarchy, choosing good schools, paying for tutors, encouraging choosing a profitable major in college etc.). Many people in high-end jobs are largely there because of their parents.
Remote workers with lower salaries are usually contractors. Sometimes with multiple parallel gigs.
I think the office PR have almost exhausted all ideas to try pushing people back in the smart city or interment champ for slaves who should not be aware of they status...
If I were working a highly paid job where I had to manage a server farm I’d also need to be on location simply due to the requirement of constant physical access.
To some people.
If you don’t see it as a perk, you should take that into account when negotiating salary.
For me personally (someone who doesn’t see it as a perk), I’d need a higher salary (compared to an in-office job) to consider a remote work arrangement – because I’d need to cover the cost of my coworking space.
On a serious note, there are obvious restrictions on who can work from home with intellectual jobs preferred over physical labor. And wasn't it always this divide? Even in communist countries it was sought after to get a college degree and perform intellectual work because it's better paid and has advantages.
So concerned with checking the box of incorporating AI into their work, the writer managed to quickly associate AI’s classification with “must be right”.
Take somewhere like Starbucks. They pay them minimum wage, churn em constantly so they’re never trained and make them work arbitrary shifts like 4 hour -> 2 hour unpaid break -> additional 4 hours.
Those staff end up “low skilled” but in reality someone who was treated fairly and respected would get very good at running the shop. They’d be able to turn out twice as many drinks and they would actually care about running costs and cleanliness. You wouldn’t get the constant underlying corruption by mistreatment where they can’t be bothered to check stock levels and throw away a grand of material a week on inefficiency.
Sure you can operate the machines and make a good drink, but what good is that if you have minimal influence over the menu?
Maybe someone else could have a strategy more like yours but it’s clearly not required.
An airline on the flip side cannot “try” this with their pilots.
Problem is VCs don’t fund coffee shops, otherwise Starbucks would be “disrupted” overnight.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90867251/blank-street-coffee-rai...
My take is, you get to work from home if your job isn't that crucial. Jobs that are driven by cost rather than result.
I don't think most remote workers understand that eventually they must be cost competitive with any legally-applicable competitive workers. Are you ready to become cost-competitive with Mexican devs who know React well enough?
In ten years I predict most "remote" work will be pay-per-ticket:
1. Log in to hiring site to complete aptitude test.
2. If pass, get a ticket and propose solution.
3. If solution isn't accepted, goto 1. If another worker solved same issue for less money, goto 1.
4. Close another ticket within X hours. If not, goto 1.
Anyone stuck in this loop may very well fantasize about aspirational careers like being a UPS driver.
I couldn’t get off the phone fast enough.
Either invest in voice isolation or don’t work from home.
Functionally this lady brought her kid to my home office and blasted a cartoon during our meeting.
Is this harsh of me and an unpopular opinion? Yes.
I agree that Human beings should be able to have work-life balance and kids are a natural and necessary part of that balance.
I just don’t want them in my ear.
If the lady had had gangster rap music or 8-bit video game music on in the background of the call I’d have been equally annoyed.
Work calls are for doing work.
If her manager were to “secret shopper” call in, how much kindness and grace would they show for being forced to sit though a children’s cartoon while quoting 5-figure invoice numbers back and forth?
Hopefully the identical amount? I don't know why the answer would differ in any meaningful way.
Sharing experiences and opinions on HN that are unpopular?
I didn’t complain to the worker, the company, or give her any attitude about it. None of that would have helped me get my task done.
They have other agents who are more professional, so next time I could get routed to somebody else.
To answer your question:
If the noise was an office cacophony then I’d put the blame on the company that tolerates it.
The noise was a children’s cartoon and a babbling child.
The worker has a responsibility to either get noise-canceling tools or work from a quiet area of the home. It’s 2024- it’s really easy to do either one.
It's easy if you earn $100k+ of course. It's not easy with $40k in a two-bedroom house with a toddler as a single parent.
"But then, she's not supposed to have that job if she can't do it," I can already hear you say. To that, I'd say sure, you could do that, if you're willing to pay for a several year long maternity leave from your taxes until the parents can place their kids in kindergartens.
Even minimum-wage construction workers know that they’re gonna need to invest a bit up front into work stuff.
i find our western attitude towards kids disturbing. after living 15 years in china i have come to realize that western, and even more so the european, and especially the german and austrian attitude towards work and school is much more conservative than i thought.
and as a parent, i find that very sad.
i wish every parent the opportunity to spend as much time with their children as they can. and if that means that they play where the parents are working, then i am all for it. rather that than sending them off to daycare. (there are exceptions of course where the environment is not safe for kids to play)
My last employer had childcare available onsite at work, and that should be more common too (I did not use it because my now ex did not work, but still very good for a lot of my colleagues).
I also find it sad how little time many parents have with their kids. We really need to make employment a lot more family friendly in general.
I find this or that sound a dog makes endearing- you find it annoying or worse. I find the mess a dog makes a mild inconvenience- you find it disgusting.
Instead of telling you you’re overreacting or that you’re being insensitive to people who are obligated for some reason to include their dog in your meeting with them, I can agree with you that you shouldn’t have to have dogs in your working life if you never chose this.
And it’s not me doing you a favor by accommodating your unique sensitivities; the default should be your version, not my version.
I’m defensive on this topic because I get a lot of flack for it. I’ll stop now.
Serious people don’t let their kids talk over their meetings.
/wfh parent of two
Thus, when I hear a babbling babe, I smile and move on. We're going to have a Japanese population pyramid situation if we keep discouraging parenthood and punishing child-rearing. There are virtually no societal or financial benefits to doing so these days, its a total sacrifice of self.
I do despise the call center background noise where I'm hearing other people making calls. but the person on the phone has no control over that. I'll take WHF over RTO any day
If anything it makes them seem more human when they’re otherwise just some disembodied voices.
You know when you call your cell phone company and you’re routed to a Call Center in India/Philippines and you hear snippets of other people’s support calls in the background?
It sort of throws you off throughout the call. You wonder if the agent is getting everything you’re saying, given the distraction.
It was that, but with a children’s cartoon and a toddler.
Also, is this even about working from home? I have worked in multiple offices which had open layouts and other meetings/conversations going on in desks around me and very distracting too.
Personally, imho, I work remotely and have a quiet room to myself but I also understand that other people I work with have lives too, and if it really bothers me I just tell them that politely, if you are courteous then its likely most people are going to be to you too, and do what they can to help. It makes me wonder if you have already made up your mind about the person you spoke to and about work from home and are finding reasons to justify it.
My reaction was to comment about it later under a post on Hacker News about WFH.
I don’t have a relationship with them- they’re one agent of a handful, whom I’m obligated by my client to call a couple times a year.
I’m not in a position to give feedback on their work performance. Nobody needs me to have a confrontation with them. I’m not their coworker, boss or direct customer.
This is a HN post about WFH and I’ve shared an anecdote about somebody’s toddler babbling during our work call.
I admit mine is an unpopular opinion- we’re supposed to celebrate parents who work so hard to balance their duties with their entirely elective decision to have children.
In this case, if it is disruptive enough to the call then that makes it take longer to get done what you need to do. The quicker you get done what you need to do, the quicker you are done with work. I'm not a fan of judging things just because they are "unprofessional" but there are unprofessional things that actually make everyone else's lives more difficult.
It’s an anecdote for HN, not a nuclear event.
I was calling in to get a task done. I got it done as quickly as possible and moved on.
Next time if I get her again, I’ll request a different agent by name, who was professional and capable last time.