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Comment by bayarearefugee | Hacker News Reader

You'll have to define "abuse" more concretely for this to have any meaning.

Do most knowledge workers actually put in exactly 8 full hours a day on work tasks working from home? Probably not.

But as a professional software developer since the 1990s the same was true for myself and virtually everyone I know when I worked in an office.

The way I 'waste' time is different now, but arguably a lot better (eg. me taking a nap just before or just after lunch improves my productivity in the afternoon a lot more than me fucking off on slashdot for extended periods of time in the office did back in the day.)

(And whether or not this not-directly-related-to-work downtime is really a time waste is extremely debatable, as switching thorny problems into the subconscious realm often turns out to be one of the best ways to actually power through them in my experience).

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What I consider abuse is Lying and padding resources. I know people who will turn an 8 hour task into a 40 hour task, and spend the difference hiking. The other grift is when people have multiple projects to tell each manager that the workload is high on the other project right now.

This isn’t an exclusively remote problem though. This happens in-office, too.

It’s extremely easy to pad a week with meetings, “I’m checking/organizing my email”, “I need to double check code from last week”, etc… if you wanted to burn time.

Sure the remote worker has the opportunity to go hiking, but the business impact is the same. Except at least the hiking wastes less time from others.

Sure, lots of people waste time in office too. I just see it a lot worse from friends and colleges who are hybrid and WFH.

This is not a WFH peculiarity, is the bad company architecture to blame, where workers can extort time and managers can't see that. It might happen more FH than FO simply because managers tend to have little to know digital culture, but it's still not a work mode peculiarity.

The real issue is that with the big RTO push to save cities, who can't be saved BTW, avoided baking a WFH culture where people take WFH seriously providing an office room per worker at home, with all things needed there, instead of working with craptops anywhere. It's not different from people who take a photo of an email and send it via WA because they do still not having a clue about CC/BCC.

> The other grift is when people have multiple projects to tell each manager that the workload is high on the other project right now.

Your problems might be a little bit more deeply rooted, WFH abuse sounds like a symptom and not a cause.

Funny you say that. When I worked in the office, I knew people that turned 8 hour tasks into 40 hour tasks, and spent the difference slacking off.

The most productive teams I worked with (only one exception) were mostly remote.

And yes, I also worked with remote teams that were slacking off.

What predicates performance in my experience is not if people are remote or not. It is the quality of the people hired and low churn.

Why can't your managers or engineering leaders tell who is underperforming their potential? That seems just as much of a problem for in-office folks, if not moreso - the in-office folks can get away with simply looking busy.

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