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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Lets be honest here, a very significant portion of business practices are caused because upper management do not trust the team they hired.

Be it that they don't trust them to have the right idea, or trust them to do the work. Nearly all business practises we hate are caused by a measure of overt control over your daily time and a strict measuring of your time and tasks.

Unfortunately: there's about 10-20% of people who genuinely shouldn't be working because they are untrustworthy, and things like remote work just enabled them to take multiple jobs or slack-off massively.

So these practices mostly exist to deal with those people and the rest of us just suffer.

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>Unfortunately: there's about 10-20% of people who genuinely shouldn't be working because they are untrustworthy, and things like remote work just enabled them to take multiple jobs or slack-off massively.

Many of these people suffer from chronic procrastination. They don't want to slack off, but they do it anyway. They want to work, but they're not capable of working in a remote environment. These might be the people who have ADD/ADHD, people who suffer from depression, extroverts, etc. For some of them, the fix is surprisingly easy: put them in an environment where there are people around them. It can be a coffee shop, library, or whole-day video call.

Source: I'm a co-founder of a body-doubling platform for remote workers.

Can you compare Workmode.net with Flown.com?

On other platforms, you work with the platforms' other users. If you don't show up to a scheduled session or disconnect mid-session, nobody is going to care. You might get a bad review or an automated email, but that's it. If you're a chronic procrastinator, you might have just started another zero-day.

On WorkMode you work with our employee (Productivity Partner), and their only job is to ensure that you stay productive throughout the day. You always work with the same Productivity Partner. They'll call you 15-30 minutes before your session starts to remind you about it and to make sure you prepare for work. They will notice if you don't show up, and they'll call you to find out what happened. They'll call you if you disappear mid-day or your lunch break takes more than you planned.

They'll keep track of your to-do list and help you break down tasks into manageable pieces. They pay much more attention to what you do and how you do it (perfectionism/productive procrastination/detrimental context switching). They know when you might procrastinate and what may trigger it. You can do 30, 60, or 4-hour sessions - it's up to you. The focus is on you.

Now, should you try WorkMode? If you already use Focusmate, Flown, or Focus101 and it works for you - keep doing that; you're doing great! If, however, it's hit-and-miss, you have zero days or need extra accountability, definitely try WorkMode :-)

Being in a random coffee shop won’t help. I do way less work than I used to because it’s just not visible anymore. Working really hard or working 50% and talking it up well in standup looks exactly the same. Back in the office you couldn’t get away with watching YouTube or sleeping for half the day.

>Being in a random coffee shop won't help.

It doesn't help you. Merely going to a coffee shop works for some people (me included). This is exactly what allowed me to finish my master's thesis two decades ago.

When discussing procrastination, it's important to remember that it's just a result of something else. Many things may cause procrastination, and everyone is different. It's like a headache. You might have the flu, a hangover, too high blood pressure, cancer, or be overly sensitive to external stimuli. You might also suffer from thousands of other causes. The result is that you have a headache, but there's no single cure for it.

I'm undiagnosed "but many markers" (according to a psychiatrist) ADHD and I find the opposite. A problem, in context, with a time-frame and I can do it much much easier remote.

In the office there's too many things that either distract me directly or are distractions for me indirectly. (people coming up to me to ask questions vs overhearing a problem and thinking I need to listen or step in).

I think a lot of people aren't actually aware of how much they already rely on trust - I dread to think how much an actually adversarial employee could have cost as many of the places I have worked...

It did always strike me as somewhat unreasonable that my job trusts me with the ability to spin up an arbitrary number of $100/hour AWS instances, but not with purchasing a $60 mouse.

The bean counters only understand (and measure) one of those well enough to try to control it.

CIA: The Art of Simple Sabotage

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage...

It’s kind of terrifying to have and give out admin powers with no oversight (except maybe forensics if we’re lucky). I’m interested in what alternatives could look like. Maybe provisioning requests take multiple signatures, like turning missile keys?

We use PIM in the Azure world. You can also use Azure PIM with AWS.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/id-governance/privil...

Trust is a key enabler. I avoid low-trust environments, because nothing can get done there, everyone is suspicious and puts CYA first.

Ironically, a high-transparency, high-trust environment is exactly what makes teams of remote workers efficient. But it greatly helps in the office, too.

I think there's a large pool of good talent that can't fully be trusted to do the right thing (not slack off), but can be employed successfully with sufficient guardrails (return to office).

Loosely related anecdote why I feel so:

For a while right after Apple started its mandatory RTO and ramped up Caffe Macs, the soda "grab n go" sections had an honor system - you paid your $1.25 for a coke and went on your way. Apparently there was a _lot_ of petty theft of drinks, so they have a person with an iPad check you off now, and I assume theft has basically plummeted since there's far less employees brazen enough to just barge off with one without checking off their name.

So maybe the RTO is effective in someway? Or maybe the real lesson is that the soda should have been free to begin with.

You have to.... pay... for soda... at Apple? What the hell?

You have to pay for food and drink. It’s not like Google etc.

Call it the Apple tax

Same at Nvidia. But it's subsidized. The argument I heard is it reduces food waste.

Sorry; not understanding your outrage here. You expect your work to provide you with free soda? Or you expect a FAANG company in particular to do so?

Yes, free basic cheap commodity drinks and snacks are bare minimum for a FAANG-class employer, and every other FAANG-class employer I'm familiar with goes well above and beyond that.

Even my first job out of college as a boilerroom MSP sysadmin earning $40k in manhattan gave us free soda (the only benefit lol)

I mean, even if you work as a mechanic at a body shop, there is often free coffee in an old pot in the break room, it's not that crazy.

But outside of that context, no of course I don't expect/care if my employer provides me with free soda. I don't even drink it.

It just seems weirdly cheapskate for a supposed FAANG-class employer.

I'd rather receive benefits in cash than paying some vendor tens of thousands of dollars to stock useless items.

I actually kind of agree as I am not even a soda drinker, but that was not the point. The point is the message it sends. And it really doesn't cost that much on a per-employee basis -- I would guess some employees might consume a six pack per day, valued at $5, and some others might consume nothing, valued at $0, so average that to maybe say $3 or $4. This is less than that employee already paid out of pocket to commute themselves to work. And having some basic food/drink taken care of centrally is more efficient in terms of saving time stocking up, going and buying more during break, etc.

But most of all, it's just the message. All the other "nice" employers do it, even some pretty "basic" employers do (not surprising, this is a very cheap perk, only a little more expensive than breakroom coffee), so if you don't, it you look like a cheapskate. Like what else are you cheaping out on?

I also don't drink much coffee, but would see it as a red flag if they cut costs by getting rid of the coffee in the break room, and that's a red flag that would hold even if I was working as a retail cashier (that's not an industry where free break room coffee is standard, but it's not unusual, so while I wouldn't care if a company never offered it, if I was a cashier at a company that had it, and then they took it away, the message would be obvious -- we are preparing to cut costs at the expense of your work life, our company is no longer growing, jump ship if you can)

Sure, you could cap the expense per-employee so its a non-issue. I was thinking about benefits in general that nobody cares about or uses. But even if they use it, snacks/food can get expensive real quick.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-free-cafeteria-lun...

There is a classic text [1] about exactly this, the free soda.

In short, when a company starts to pay attention to such petty details as the cost of soda, which must be a rounding error in the cost of running an office of a decent engineering company, it's a signal that the culture has changed. With that change, best engineering talent often leaves towards places where priorities are still aligned with lofty goals, not bean-counting.

(Disclaimer: of last 10 companies I've worked for, only two did not offer free soda, due to being 100% remote.)

[1]: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Thanks for the explanation. It makes sense, but is entirely foreign to me (at least for soda). In my history of 20 years of software/DBA in the Australian mining/construction industry, most have had free coffee but none have had free soda. Though two did free Friday-afternoon beer and pizza.

My current place has free instant coffee (until it runs out) and everyone who wants to push for more than that is viewed with 'tall poppy syndrome'.

I worked at the KFC/YUM! headquarters for 10 years. When I started, we had free soda in the lobby of the building. It was great for those late afternoon doldrums and a group of us would often walk down 5 flights of stairs to get a pick-me-up.

About 3 years before I left they removed the soda machines. My understanding was that it only cost about $30k / year and most of that was for cups & lids. We even had an executive that was willing to pay for it out of their budget. No go.

It turns out that the catering company that supplied food to the building didn't like losing out on the soda money. So they told KFC/YUM! to remove the free soda option, and they did. It really was the beginning of the end.

It's not so much that the soda was gone it was the thought of it. That free soda actually solved quite a few programming problems, or at least allowed us to solve them on our way downstairs. It also let us work harder/later than we normally would by giving us that afternoon journey. It's positive effect was much greater than it's financial cost.

Cokes are 2.25 now

I'm a coke zero guy

> I think there's a large pool of good talent that can't fully be trusted to do the right thing (not slack off)

Ever worked in an office? At any corporation size no one works 8 hours a day and if you want to slack, there are plenty opportunities in the office as well. Hell, you can spend the whole day there without doing ANYTHING.

So that is a non-point for me, slackers gonna slack.

I knew a guy whose daily routine was something like:

9:25 - Arrival (cafeteria stopped serving breakfast at 9:30.

9:30-10:15 - Breakfast

10:15-11:30 - A lot of walking around the office, having business-sounding conversations with others but really getting nothing done.

11:30-1:00 - Out for lunch.

1:00-3:00 - Sneak out to car in the parking lot for a nap.

3:00-3:30 - Daily standup. Vaguely talk about how he’s “merging code” or “updating library dependencies” this week.

3:30-4:00 - At desk working.

4:00-5:30 - Doing his walk-around-talk-arounds through the office hallways again.

5:30-6:00 - At his desk again!

6:00 - Cafeteria starts serving dinner. Grabs a bunch of food, throws it in his backpack, and heads to the parking lot.

This went on for years. The other teammates joked that he must have blackmail dirt on the boss because it was obvious to everyone that he wasn’t doing anything and nobody seemed to care. He was there when I joined the company and was there when I left, years later. He may very well be still there today, merging code.

There are less serious versions of the same thing that people might unintentionally do.

09:25 - arrive.

09:30 - 10:00; breakfast

10:00 - 10:30; standup

10:30 - 11:00; Coffee after standup

11:00 - 11:30; checking emails before lunch

11:30 - 13:00; lunch

13:00 - 13:30; food coma, better just check some emails

13:30 - 14:00; coffee and a chat

14:00 - 15:00; maybe some actual work

15:00 - 15:45; someone needs help, they come over and have a chat

15:45 - 16:30; maybe some more work

16:30 - 17:00 wrap up, go home, urgently write some emails and expect a response before you arrive 09:25 tomorrow.

I've seen this, a lot of this.

I remember when Oracle took over Sun and they brought in the free soda drinks where you can grab a can and they're constantly replenished. I brought in a backpack and filled it then took it home. After a week of doing that I had all these soda cans to drink but I realized I didn't like soda anymore. Larry is the best.

I'm sorry but the example you gave for your argument makes no sense at all. Most people here have tasks and daily meetings where these tasks are discussed or at least briefly mentioned (in other words, your "iPad guy" is already there).

If someone is slacking, it is immediately visible. Can you abuse the system by providing fake explanations for why one task takes so long? Of course, but you can do the same whether you work remotely or not, and this can also be easily verified in both cases.

Well all the people at the top were machiavellian bastards on their rise. But they need underlings to not be machiavellian to get the best operating business and stock performance.

So they need to be visibly watched.

Of course ascending the hierarchy means visibly larger and larger numbers of underlings. Zoom phantoms don't count in that swinging duck contest.

I would pay a lot of money to see this swinging duck contest. Especially if the ducks were not sedated.

> Unfortunately: there's about 10-20% of people who genuinely shouldn't be working because they are untrustworthy, and things like remote work just enabled them to take multiple jobs or slack-off massively.

There are better ways to deal with those people. I'm not convinced that is the reason for RTO.

The real reason, IMO, is there is all this office real estate that needs a justification to exist.

Actually it's a complicated effect. One person doing it often causes many people to do it. And its one of those things that doesn't replicate in an "in office" atmosphere.

I'm curious - Where are you getting your numbers from?

Not parent, but perhaps Pareto?

I'm assuming 80% of your comment was in jest.

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