Hacker News Reader

Comment by resource_waste | Hacker News Reader

As a biz owner, this kind of decision making would stress me out.

No one knows what the quality of the people will be. The people okay with driving 2+ hours are going to stick around. What kind of person is that? A hard worker? Maybe. A dedicated worker? Maybe...

Or is it the people so untalented, they cannot find another job, and do this for survival?

I don't know the answer, and I'd be horrified to roll the dice on that. I'm unsure what the packages look like to cut your lowest performers, but at least you aren't rolling dice.

Side note: I can get nation wide talent way way way cheaper when I offer remote/flexible schedule. I kind of appreciate the big companies arent sucking this labor market, leaves me room.

View on HN

You're taking a pretty black and white look at this.

You make the policy and then hand out exceptions (quietly) to the MVP's.

I have managed a few dev teams inside more "traditional" companies and you would be remisss to think the the corporate policy you set cause you have a CS team is going to get applied to engineers.

Every business rule is fake and can be overridden the moment it inconveniences someone with power.

Or, rephrased, many (not all) business practices should be adapted to specific situations when called for.

I've mostly worked remotely, whether at home or because I was traveling a lot, informally (except during COVID) for about the last ten years and with a mix of in-office and out-of-office before that.

My doubtless somewhat unpopular opinion is that I developed stronger professional connections with people I worked together with in person to at least some degree than those I never met in person. Some of this can be mitigated with off-sites and other events; the convergence of generally tighter budgets and the lifting of COVID restrictions didn't help. But I don't really agree with the 100% remote viewpoint in general.

> You make the policy and then hand out exceptions (quietly) to the MVP's.

This right here is exactly the kind of manipulation that's causing my generation to quit corpo jobs in record numbers.

It's BS and everyone knows it. Those quiet exceptions aren't as quiet as you would believe. We all see it. And we all understand what's happening.

Naval Ravikant was right. It's best to play long term games with long term people and have zero tolerance for anything less than 100% integrity.

What Naval was talking[0] about is that you start to know whom to trust when playing the long game, and people start to trust you in return. Which is exactly what causes those quiet exceptions to be handed out.

While it does not seem to be ‘fair’, this is how long term game actually looks like.

[0] - https://nav.al/long-term

I was on dev teams inside industrial-age companies before I went to FANG, and I saw it go both ways.

In one company, the hourly customer service folks who sat adjacent to our patch of the cube farm (that's right, no noise isolation between the call center and the software development team) complained about engineers arriving half an hour after customer service shift start, so we salaried engineers were instructed to be at work by 8am or whatever. In another company, the hourly people were not allowed in the executive barbershop, the executive dining room, or the executive washroom and had to park in the surface lot instead of the garage. Actually, garage access was denied even to most software engineers but whatever.

I'm sure it's generally true that "MVPs" get exempted to varying degrees. My point is that the policies themselves are fairly capricious in the first place and the identification of MVPs is unreliable too. Performance management for managers is probably more difficult even than performance management for software engineers and my experience makes me highly skeptical about the whole prospect of professional management.

Yep, selective enforcement is rampant. Makes an even stronger case rest it's intended to force attrition.

Great way to breed resentment, giving some people exceptional treatment. Why not treat everyone fairly?

> Why not treat everyone fairly?

Lots to unpack here.

1. Why is “not the same” equal to “not fair”? Genuine question.

2. It’s human nature to give favor to those that you think are “on your side” — this can mean various things in a manager’s case.

3. I would counter “why don’t all ICs contribute equally?” They don’t, and usually it’s not even close.

Overall, I understand and appreciate your sentiment, especially in a large org in which most folks are effectively replaceable cogs in the wheel.

That said, as a business owner who uses sub-contractors, I would not be happy if I had to treat all of my sub-contractors equally since they often add vastly different amounts of value to my business (even in the same type of work).

That's how it's been done at my current employer. A few good folks moved away before the RTO and were allowed to stay.

As one of them (well, I'm at least folk), I can only imagine the angst it causes those who didn't, and thus had to RTO.

Making exceptions isn't necessarily a sustainable position either.

Others have already commented on colleague resentment.

There's also the problem of being the only remote team member, or having to deal with company infrastructure which doesn't support remote work well "because we are all in the office anyways".

How much this matters differs from company to company, but often letting certain people continue to WFH while most of the company is RTO has a shelf-life before the WFH employee has enough of being a second-class citizen and leaves for a more remote-friendly company.

> You're taking a pretty black and white look at this.

As are you, to be frank. Rules for teams are well and good, but social dynamics are what they are. Dynamic. Individuals make these up. Not all offers are the same or as you expect.

I was offered something you might find reasonable, I find it untrustworthy. Favor given can be taken away, no thanks. I'll manage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com