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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

the 9-5 is dead.

My hours are more like 8-2 or 9-1. Sometimes I log off after lunch.

Remote work is awesome. No more dealing with impatient dick heads on the road. No more contributing to the destruction of the local environment via tail pipe emissions or tire wear particles. More importantly more time to spend with family, friends, or personal projects. Overall happiness is increased.

I’ll never understand the reasonings behind forced RTO. Is it a hidden financial gain for CEOs to fill the offices? Is it a false flag op to “appease” stock holders (“hey guys pandemic over, we are working to returning to normal. Pardon any poor quarterly results for the year”)?

Leaked Amazon doc shows reduced physical office footprint saved company billions.

All data is showing forced RTO policies are counter intuitive and counter productive.

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The office I’m at receives significant tax benefits from meeting targets for person-days in the office per year. This is a pretty common arrangement, I think.

[edit] in fact, at certain times they’ve had to shift workers around when new buildings have been completed to meet occupancy targets for whatever benefits they’re getting, before they have enough new hires or transfers to really use the space. Just shuffling people a few hundred meters away so the compliance forms have the right numbers. Total joke.

The most ridiculous make work rule I've ever had was being forced to use objects instead of functions because it was apparently easier to claim oop code as capex than fp code.

I don’t even necessarily like my coworkers, but the idea of spending five days a week not leaving my house except for in the evenings just isn’t appealing to me. Two or three days in the office is the sweet spot, for me anyway.

This is why I moved to the city instead of buying a piece of shit sfh out in the burbs.

walk to my fav pub, and fuck around. Or even better take a walk around the city parks and enjoy the views in the middle of the day. Maybe even get more exercise in for the day or walk the dog.

Honestly cities are great, cars kind of suck though

Sure, and I love going out in the evenings like I said. But it’s just weird to me that people want to just stay home all day and only go out in the evening every weekday.

I think for a lot of people “going out” when it’s to the office isn’t exactly a good thing. Like being at home isn’t somehow less pleasant than that. Neither’s “going out”.

And depending on your job you can go out to actual normal non-forced social spaces while working “from home”, some of the time.

I hate WFH, but I love my employer.

I tend to go to a coffee shop most days for a few hours. Some days I'll go to a public library, or a co-working space.

As a young, single person, staying at home for 4-6 hours every day is soul sucking. I can see it being very appealing to anyone with a family, though.

I’ll take staying at home over dreadful commutes or sitting in traffic any day.

Also invested significant money into wfh setup. Monitors, chair, standing desk. Much better at home than whatever shit office managers buy at the surplus store

You’re allowed to leave your house. I go to the store, the gym, go for a walk, whatever I feel like during the day. As long as I don’t miss any “important” calls

I find people tiring to deal with constantly so enjoy being isolated by doing WFH permanently. I guess the years of dealing with noisy, overcrowded offices sucks the life from you. I don't like drama at all in the work environment. I am there to perform utility not to play politics, which I find so boring.

I have to go to the office in my town to work remotely with my teams in New York and India. I sit at a desk and code all day. Everyone around me works in some other department/team and I never engage with them except maybe in the break room. What is the point of this requirement? I don’t know but it’s making me search for a new job

That’s insane. Hybrid only works if everyone else is doing it on the team.

Look at the current Commercial Real Estate collapse, e.g. Canadian pension fund sold its stake in a NY office building for $1 recently, and that's just the start. That's the why for public policies of forced RTO.

Also tax credits based on bodies at office per week.

How do you do that? Are you able to complete all your tasks in just over half the time? Aren't there meetings after lunch. What about coworkers trying to contact you during (the rest of) their workday.

You’re not paid for 9-5 hours. You’re paid to get the job done. Sometimes that takes two hours. Sometimes it’s ten hours plus a weekend. It’s very easy to identify (and fire) workers that don’t honor this system.

I get this logic, but in software development there is effectively an infinite and continually growing list of tasks to do. A lot of large and popular software projects on Github are not closing issues at a faster rate than they accrue.

The challenge is software development is planning out software development years in advance. Moving up the deadline years in doesn’t really help anyone because marketing and sales won’t have planned around your new date (see: the surprise release of the Sega Saturn). What matters is being able to stay on track and get back on track.

From my experience there's always more tickets you can pick up.

Personally I’m just more efficient and happen to have people around me be very independent and competent. Having decent project management helps as well.

Team is well aware of the product and confident. Very very rare to have knowledge colocated within a specific member of the team.

All or most knowledge is well documented as well.

On the very rare instance I am actually needed to put out a fire. We have “on-call” rotations (pager duty).

Just for reference this is an exception, not the norm.

1pm is when my meetings end (to the extent that I can control) and I can get to work on my real work for the day. This includes meeting with fellow independent and competent developers to ship features. Our software is also in high demand

Time is not even an approximate measure of productivity. I don't know about you, but everybody I know gets way more work done in early hours than in later hours, just as an example.

Does your company care if you're "available"? I'm supposed to keep my slack dot green during working hours.

I think the awesomeness of remote work really depends on the company culture. If you're in a meeting heavy environment, it may be pure hell for anyone trying to do technical work. If someone schedules 3 meetings with a half hour or more in between, the whole day might be shot.

I never am visible on Teams and it doesn't stop people from reaching out, so I think the default, despite dot color, is to be available.

crazy, I'm still doing 8-5

on occasion i leave a little early but i also often get in early. I WFH 2 days a week.. it suits me fairly well.

What I'd really prefer though is to take my LSL one day a week.. have three day weekends every weekend. I feel that two days off followed by five on is feeling like I'm scraping the edges of the bottom of the barrel.

> My hours are more like 8-2 or 9-1. Sometimes I log off after lunch.

> I'll never understand the reasonings behind forced RTO.

Uh, the first excerpt might help answer the question you pose in the second.

Only if we assume companies can't measure employees' productivity and output, only their hours of butt-in-chair. Is that true?

I don’t understand. All work is completed for the day (or even the next couple of days…).

What’s the point of staying logged into a computer staring at nothing?

You are literally defrauding your employer. The fact that you should be available, but aren't, alone is enough to make sure of that.

“Defrauding my employer” — a bit dramatic, buddy. You must be a micromanager.

You know what’s also “fraudulent”? Wasting my time.

Time I will never get back. Time that you can never buy. Time that I will never spend with family/friends. I will never get back the hours lost to commuting to a stupid office.

Who’s “defrauding” who at this point?

>a bit dramatic, buddy.

No. It is factually true. You refuse to meet your contractual obligations towards your employer, but represent to him that you have met them. That absolutely is "fraud".

>You know what’s also “fraudulent”? Wasting my time.

No it isn't. It is not fraud to waste your time.

>Who’s “defrauding” who at this point?

You are defrauding your employer. Lying to your employer about the time you work is fraud. Your employer wasting your time does not under any circumstances count as fraud. In fact you signed a contract which explicitly allows your employer to tell you what to do with your time, including telling you to waste it e.g. by sitting in front of a PC waiting for someone to talk to you about something. If you don't like what he tells you to do you have options, but refusing to work and representing to him that you have worked is not an option you have, without commiting fraud.

There is no world in which you are not committing fraud. And there is no world in which your employer is defrauding you.

This is a good point. Wasting lots of people’s time is quite a bit worse than completing all your work to your employer’s satisfaction but not twiddling your thumbs for a few extra hours, so we shouldn’t use the same terms for the two things.

Then dissolve your contract.

Why are you so bothered by an arrangement that seems to be agreeable to those actually involved in it?

> No. It is factually true. You refuse to meet your contractual obligations towards your employer, but represent to him that you have met them. That absolutely is "fraud".

I wonder if you're referring to jobs outside of the U.S.?

Salaried software developers in the U.S. typically don't have actual contracts.

How can you be an employee without having a contract?

In the US, most employees do not really have "contracts." You'll generally get an offer letter that you return to accept the job, but it's not a legally binding contract. You're an at-will employee.

So, companies can just not pay their employees? And employees can do whatever they want with no recourse by their employer?

No. If the employee doesn't do what the employer wants, they are at-will and can be fired. Payment / wages is covered by labor laws and can result in legal problems if not corrected.

>Payment / wages is covered by labor laws

How are wages defined, if not by a contract?

It’s in your offer letter. You can read up on how this differs from a legal contract.

You have an explicit contract. Employment which defines job requirements and pay. You sign it with your offer letter. It is usually very light in nature.

As an exempt salaried employee you can simply check your email and (legally, backed by case law) call it a day of work. In an at-will state an employer can let you go for any reason. The contract is favorable to both parties at the same time

I have no “contractual obligation” to sit in front of a computer between 9-5. My obligations were clearly stated in JD and offer letter. Seems like you are projecting what ever shit situation you are in onto others. I didn’t sign anything about whatever shit you are talking about or making up.

Again, you are very dramatic. Everything you have said hinges on the fact that “yOu hAvE tO be 100% aVaIlAbLe dUrInG 9 tO 5”. This is not the case.

If there are employers out there that do this. Their priorities are not on delivering a usable product but using other people to make themselves feel better (surrounding themselves with yes people, lol)

Maybe I am projecting German labor law onto this, sure. But I suspected that, if anything, German labor law would be more accommodating to employees. If you are correct than I think that I'd wrong though and the law actually favors employers quite heavily, who actually have demands of you that you have to contractually agree to.

>If there are employers out there that do this. Their priorities are not on delivering a usable product but using other people to make themselves feel better (surrounding themselves with yes people, lol)

This isn't something an employer or employee decides. My contract is essentially a single page stating my salary, days of and saying that labor laws apply. There is no actual alternative I have.

There’s no mention of the terms of his employment, how are you so certain?

Employers almost always pay you for working an average amount each week, anything else is extremely rare. Alternatives are usually common for self employed, but then there is no employer.

If he self reports weekly hours or they are just assumed he is commiting fraud. If he correctly reports his worked hours his wages will obviously get cut to represent the hours worked and lead to swift termination as he is violating the contract he signed.

> If he correctly reports his worked hours his wages will obviously get cut

Why do you think he’s reporting hours and getting paid hourly? This is pretty uncommon in my experience, usually people work a salaried job where they’re paid in terms of an entire year. They don’t report their hours, that’s typically considered a toxic work environment in software development. For example at AWS we take turns being on-call every couple weeks and reporting hours would look absolutely ridiculous, it would be something like 80 hour work weeks.

It’s kind of like if you and your wife insisted that you report how many articles of clothing you’ve each folded or how many dishes you put away each day. When one of you ends up doing a bit more or less, it’s not “defrauding” the other

It's not necessarily defrauding, depends on if the person in question is paid hourly or salaried, and if salaried the expected work hours.

An hourly employee (several got fired at my last office for this, contractors who were not salaried) who shows up late in the morning and leaves early in the afternoon and claims an 8-hour day, yeah, that's defrauding. A salaried employee without a contractual requirement for 8-hours at their desk, then not fraud (maybe won't win them points with peers and supervisors, but not fraud).

Yeah nobody ever goofed off in the office. Never happened.

Honestly if this person does all their work and does it well and just works really fast, that’s great. I’d keep them. Performance matters not hours.

If they’re fucking around and underperforming they’ll eventually get laid off. Don’t see how their work location matters that much either way. Someone who sucks at home probably sucks in an office too.

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