Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

They say this now. But in 12 months (or the next layoff period), they will move from hybrid to full RTO.

Still a shitty move to mandate RTO. Most people (IT folks) have spoke with do this routine:

0) daily routine to prepare for day 1) 1 hr commute to shitty office 2) login to computer, do calls with cross regional (and international) teams over Zoom/Teams/Webex or whatever conferencing system 3) teleconferencing with boss or manager 4) teleconferencing with company stakeholders 5) work on features and push code to remote systems (VCS, CI/CD…) 6) eat shitty food at nearby places, or use the low quality vending machines or cafeteria 7) logoff 8) 1 hr commute back home

There are _some_ roles which may require in-person. But those were mostly sales folks. Some IT folks that deal with physical assets did require RTO (ie, data center / network engineers).

View on HN

I think the worst part is 9) at night, do more work that requires focus time while no one is bothering you, since expectations got calibrated to when everyone had a private office and more control over their own time.

Yep. Many of my days are 4-6 hours of meetings in the morning, 2 more hours of paperwork/email/coordination activities, go get dinner, then work another 2-3 hours.

Thank goodness I can work from home. I know in some ways that makes my flexibility more damaging to my work/life balance, but the tradeoff is worth it to me.

Yep that schedule is pretty familiar for me as well. I’m willing to do it when necessary; I feel like it’s fair given the flexibility and trust I’m given as a fully remote employee.

When I’ve worked in the office in the past, the laptop stays closed as soon as I leave work at 5. They don’t get to have it both ways.

That’s how it was for me circa 2004-2005. The only way I could get anything real work done was from home, after hours. During the day all we did was sit in meetings and report status to each other and to the higher ups. Worse, then the higher ups decided that we don’t need a sustained engineering team for the past two releases (boxed software) and the team would context switch between building new stuff and patching what’s already out there, 2 releases back. I said fuck it and left.

> since expectations got calibrated to when everyone had a private office and more control over their own time.

which is why you should not be doing overtime to meet expectation. Expectation (aka, productivity) needs to drop when RTO is mandated.

the only thing I can do more efficiently in the office is socialize, so I assume that that's what they're talking about when they talk about collaboration and culture and all that shit, so how's the wife?

There's no way in hell I'd agree to additional remote work if I'm being demanded to return to the office. Either it's remote or it's not.

If you won’t, others will. That’s this job market.

Don't forget 10) get your ass in bed by 10pm so you can haul it out at 5 to get to work again on time tomorrow.

So stop doing it. It’s making it worse for everyone else who has boundaries and a life outside of work.

In the Bay Area, 1-hour commutes are generally for older and apartment people. Younger family people are in the 2+ range.

When I lived in the Bay Area, my commute was ~2.5 hours each way. I would have killed for a 1 hour commute.

That’s insane. 13 hours of work + commute. After 7 hours of sleep you only have 4 hours left in your day for literally everything else.

The push for the 8 hour work day over a century ago was often accompanied with slogans to the effect of "8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours for what we will."

5 hours round trip commuting a day is giving up over half of your prerogative time to simply shuffling from one place to another.

The Bay Area is lucrative monetarily and all, but there's just no world where that's worth it for me.

I’ve worked in tech in the Bay for over a decade and met a handful of people with that insane of a commute. It’s not normal.

That's because having children in SF is not "normal," a huge fraction of new workers are single male tech workers. SF is the city with the fewest children per capita in the country, Daly City is #6.

https://www.aaastateofplay.com/the-u-s-cities-with-the-most-...

Plenty of my colleagues have had kids.

Well, OK, there are ways for a young tech family to avoid the 2+ hour commute:

- Be extremely well paid, and don't mind buying a $1.5m house that would go for $500K in, say, Pittsburg CA.

- Squeeze into an apartment.

- Buy near one BART station and find a job near another, e.g. if you buy right next to the Pittsburg station and work at Uber HQ it's 1 hour each way. This mostly rules out Apple, Meta, Google, etc.

Another way of course is if your colleagues bought homes at around the time of the market lows, but that was ~15 years ago, so they would not be young families.

With hours like that, do they really though? Or did they just procreate?

A lot of people had to literally fight and die for that 8 hour day too.

>13 hours of work...

... what?

13 hours of (work + commute) -- that's 5 hours of commute + 8 hours of work.

The parentheses help a lot. I also thought the original commenter was implying 13 hours of work + the 5 hour commute and couldn’t figure out where they got the 13 from haha

That is a ... choice.

I mean, I guess it's a choice in that I'm not willing to move my family into a tiny shoebox or split the cost with three other roommates in order to afford to live in my employer's city. I don't make $300K+ at a FAANG like everyone else on HN, so I have to live in a place farther away that is supported by my compensation.

I find it absurd how Americans can't give up on their suburbs and car centric development dystopia and then spend so much time in their cars.

What steps do you suggest an average person take?

None? This has to be dealt with at city planning level by investing in proper public transport. Because money in US only subsidizes car drivers.

People would go for condos if there were cheap large ones nearby. Alas, the supply restrictionists blocked all vertical development decades ago in order to inflate prices 10x and capture tech wages. That left SFHs and townhomes in far away places.

+1 for family sized (3 bedroom condos) if they existed close to work we could have families and jobs - imagine!

Now that's crazy talk.

You have to sign over most of your future earnings to the guy who's selling you the property, in exchange for (hopefully) getting the next guy to fork over most of theirs. The game is so hardcore that the pyramid scheme is as strong as ever.

I'm living in smaller-ish city in Spain, we rent ~120m2 2bedroom flat for ~650€ and it's city center so we don't even think about getting a car as it would be more hassle to take it out of the garage then actually walking to the nearest shop. Lots of squares / parks around usually full of kids playing :)

Because door-to-door transport is faster than public transportation. Average American commute time is 26 minutes, what is it where you live?

https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans....

They didn't necessary talk about time in commute. Maybe they thought spending time inside cars was useless. Sure your commute is shorter but most Americans also have to drive everywhere in their cars. To be honest, it's shit.

Edit: also, the chart is too simple to know how they conducted and came up with the data.

Tbf, some Americans might think it's shit to live life in a 100 m^2 box they don't even own and commuting in a crowded stinky wagon for longer than 26 minutes.

Not sure there's just one right way to live though. I wasn't saying there is, just sharing some data to a discussion oblivious to the realities of most Americans.

Not where I live. A bus ride takes about half an hour to get to downtown SF. The same drive during rush hour would take an hour, easy. You couldn’t make me drive to work here.

Well... in most cases in densely populated places you simply can walk to the job or ride a bike.

In BCN for example commute would be most of the time ~15-20 minutes (walking+metro). Car would easily take twice as much.

Of course if you are living in urban sprawl and nothing is close and even getting something to eat requires "a trip" then yeah - door-to-door car would probably be "better"

I live within an European city - not downtown, but relatively close. My commute by car over ~10km is 18-20 mins, same distance by public transport takes 40-50 mins, depending on train reliability and workers not striking.

So change my mind?

I don't intent to change your mind because it's often that people are stuck to their opinions.

Just want to say that sitting in public transports I can do other things such as doing some work or reading a book. While sitting in a car feels terrible to me. 30 minutes of driving a car is a lot worse than sitting in public transport. Also, if I have to commute by walk/bike, I also feel much better.

> Just want to say that sitting in public transports I can do other things such as doing some work or reading a book.

In my experience that kind of activity was often not possible, especially in cases where one bus was late and I had go worry about getting to the connecting stop on time. Likewise I couldn't really read b/c I might get distracted and miss a connection.

This was all pre-Internet and of course pre-unlimited data plan. These days I might have a downright pleasurable experience on public transport listening to podcasts under those conditions. Except here in Seattle there are just too many maniacs on some lines.

What's there to change your mind? There are areas that are poorly connected and cars are much more convenient.

I live outside Rome, Italy, my SO works downtown. It takes her 35ish minutes to get to work by train, it would take her way more than one hour by car.

Hell, it takes her colleagues living in Rome center often an hour to get to work on a 6 km drive.

The funniest thing was when I worked with a guy that commuted by train from Naples! That's 150 miles away. And he would still get back home quicker by train than people living in Rome.

Yes, we Americans love our cars, oil, wars, wwf, and guns.

Well at least we still donate to preserve endangered species. 1 out of 5 ain't bad!

But only because we're confused and think we're still paying for pro wrestling. :D

>I find it absurd how Americans can't give up on their suburbs and car centric development dystopia and then spend so much time in their cars

I agree that kind of commute is insane, but maybe we don't all want to raise our families in shoe boxes (often surrounded by filth and crime) in the city centre (as if everyone in France lives in downtown Paris).

You may find that thrilling, but I don't. None of it.

There is zero relation between filth and crime, and living in the city centre. At least inherently. There may be a correlation where you live.

"In 2005, Harvard University and Suffolk University researchers worked with local police to identify 34 "crime hot spots" in Lowell, Massachusetts. In half of the spots, authorities cleared trash, fixed streetlights, enforced building codes, discouraged loiterers, made more misdemeanor arrests, and expanded mental health services and aid for the homeless. In the other half of the identified locations, there was no change to routine police service.

The areas that received additional attention experienced a 20% reduction in calls to the police. The study concluded that cleaning up the physical environment was more effective than misdemeanor arrests."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

I’m not sure what you are trying to say? It feels like you should be trying to refute what I said, but it’s actually in agreement?

They probably read your comment as three things instead of two (I did at first and had to take a second look). Tighter binding between the paired items might make it read better, instead of the awkwardly placed comma:

> There is zero relation between filth/crime and living in the city centre.

Your arguments has way too many fallacies, like if the US has any shortage of crime and filth filled suburbs, but I'll cut it short.

Everybody should live in the context they prefer.

That being said, if the suburb dystopia was instead built around sensible public transport with good trains, metros and well planned gathering and commercial areas I could have some sympathy.

But no, everything is planned and built around the concept of owning and driving a car for everything.

Which is also why you end up having so many suburbs that are the facto dumpster ghettos, people not owning a car cannot even easily commute daily to a job available downtown.

Good public transport and proper city planning are some of the best social equalizers and life improving engines out there. For everybody, including and especially people wanting their own home rather than living in apartments (that by the way don't have to be small, albeit smaller dimensions have plenty of benefits too).

The irony is the vast groups of tech employees that choose to live in San Francisco and commute to the suburbs.

I find it tiresome how someone who lives elsewhere thinks we can waive a magic wand and change trillions in infrastructure and a century of entrenched car culture. Unless you have workable solutions please keep the peanut gallery comments to yourself.

There are solutions but they are the hard “get people to buck all incentives and change their behavior for the common good” kind that take a lot of work.

I'm not sure what other people can do, but personally I decided that instead of wishing in vain that the place I lived in was this way, I moved across the world to a new city and country where I could live car-free. Now I ride a bicycle to work and use subways and trains to get around on the weekends. Vote with your feet, I guess.

I am at 2h30 total commute, and will be soon at 3h-3h30, in Switzerland.

At least, I can work remotely 2days+what ever I need depending of the day.

Holy shit that commute is crazy. Have you requested to work fully remote?

Uhm... that's like almost getting from one side of Switzerland to another (Zurich-Basel is like 1h by train?)

Maybe he lives and works somewhere that's not point to point connected by a direct train connection as the crow flies.

Well there are plenty of people going from Montreux or further to Geneva. With the changes in schedule, any trains going around the lake past Renens will be slower by at least 5min.

Over the years, I had met several workers who were doing 2h+ per leg commute.

Holy Schweiz

That's the nice thing about the Bay Area, you get to have the best of both -- live in a shoebox with no green space AND commute for hours to your job.

I had a commute from East Bay that was a 30 minute bus ride to downtown SF and a 15 minute walk. I didn’t mind it so much when I had to do that daily. The bus ride was a great time to read a book or the news. The walk was a nice chance to get some air and exercise and practice mindfulness, or to go the opposite way and listen to a podcast or some music.

I far prefer my current commute of walking downstairs. I could abide the 45 minute ride-and-walk commute if there were a legitimate reason I needed to be somewhere in person. No one would pay me enough to commute 5 hours a day.

The bay area is godawful in terms of expense, traffic, regulations "WHERES YOUR LOICENSE". Prop 13 means the new home buyer has 10-100x higher property taxes than their old home neighbor. Permitting madness means that in the santa cruz mountains, any construction is on essentially a permanent freeze. Even driving an old car, generally considered to be an "antique" if older than 25 years in the other 49 states, why in California there is no set time, it is a set year, 1976. So, according to classically rabidly insane california logic, in the year 3000, a 1,000 year old car would be "new" and not "antique"

the saving grace: whereas lane splitting (driving a motorcycle between two cars) is illegal in 49 states and grey-area in DC, it is outright totally legal in California.

Thusly those with interest and probably low anxiety and medium-high deathwish are exempted from traffic

Damn I was ready to jump in front of a train after having a 2h commute to university by train. Can’t imagine doing that in a car where I have to be alert as well.

Everyone I know with a long commute can afford a shorter commute, they just trade the commute for a larger single-family dwelling.

yeah, “can afford” doesn’t mean I should, props to them

I'm mostly just observing that long commutes for techies is driven by American cultural norms. I have some sympathy for the ones with kids, zero sympathy for the rest.

Most of the tech employees I know in SF could have shorter commutes with larger houses but choose to have smaller houses and longer commutes to live in the city rather than the suburbs. Why? Access to people in parks, cafes, bars, restaurants, events, “culture”, single people.

I think if you're required to RTO, you should insist on not having Zoom/Teams/Webex on while in the office.

"Come to my cube if you need me".

Way before the pandemic, I almost never had those tools running on my work laptop - unless it was for a (rare at the time) cross-geo meeting. A coworker once sent me a screenshot of how I appeared in the IM tool - Last seen 120 days ago.

Sadly, that went away once we hired our first remote person.

If you're required to RTO and doing it you probably aren't in a position to "insist" on jack shit.

You have to fully lean into it. Or at least pretend to. My company implemented RTO, citing the usual collaboration and culture, and I've suddenly turned into the biggest in-person sycophant every time they try to organise workshops online "because it's much easier".

We have offices on both sides of the Channel. It means travelling, which is expensive, hard to align, and really disruptive, but since the RTO mandate I suddenly realised _how valuable_ those in person interactions were, and how much more creative we were thanks to those watercooler chats.

I'm interviewing elsewhere, so I'm having a bit of fun seeing how far I can push the malicious compliance.

No one else is in the office on the same days. I recently seeked out a job that was in-office. It was just a reminder that the model is dead beyond repair. These boomer CEOs can't be gone soon enough. I'm full remote now and the engagement, interaction and team comraderie are FAR better.

In the best case you might have all the engineers rolling up to the same line manager sitting in the same office, but those above entry-level are expected to spend a good portion of their time collaborating across teams (and therefore across sites).

Varies quite a bit by company. Pre-pandemic, we had phones in our cubes :-) Thus I could easily turn Teams off. My immediate team was physically nearby, and people elsewhere could email. They'd call if urgent.

> shitty office

I'm not sure this applies to Google. Their offices and food are pretty nice. And their gyms are top-notch. If you stick with the salad bar, I'd venture to guess the freshness and nutrition variety will be better than most IT guys can get at home.

Of course, this does not mean RTO won't suck.

Tech office amenity spaces are visually impressive, but then your actual workstation is just a desk in an ocean of desks, where you have to wear noise-cancelling headphones to hear yourself think.

You're forgetting that a lot of people still have to WFH, they just do it now before or after going to the office - so it's even worse than you're stating.

I know some folks that work from the west coast with customers on the east coast, and they regularly are taking meetings at 6am from home, then commuting in, and getting home late.

If we return to the office, we should not also be expected to work long hours when we're at home. It's the worst of both words.

I was told at a previous job I couldn't work from home but they expected me to take my laptop home with me just in case something happened. My response was I couldn't work from home and just left my laptop at work.

> but they expected me to take my laptop home with me just in case something happened.

which is called being on call, and it needs to be paid. Otherwise, you're right, you cannot be expected to work (at home or not) in off hours.

>It's the worst of both words.

And it's quickly becoming the status quo.

They really don't ever let a disaster go to waste, do they?

West coast seems like the worst time zone to be remote. You have to get up early for meetings with your coworkers, and they can get your immediate feedback on their problems. But when you have your own problems, it's often too late for them to help you.

RTO for sales folks doesn't make sense to me either. Typically you want your sales folks on the road not in your office. I think sales is a good candidate for fully remote.

You 100% want your sales folks at customers not in your office.

Most roles can be hybrid/remote. Regardless of Tech, Finance, Marketing, whatever, if the job involves sitting in front of a computer or being on the phone all day it's a good candidate. If you were doing the job remotely from March 2020 through the end of 2021 and being effective, it's a good candidate.

Sales also has long established and standard ways to measure performance

Amazon is not mandating RTO for sales folks.

Good, they didn't when I was in sales at AWS (well before Covid).

> There are _some_ roles which may require in-person

IME when working in a Product role, it worked better from the office. Doesn't have to be every day, but being able to talk directly to people is much better than having to schedule meetings.

Tech positions don't even need daily video calls IMO. My team experimented with a few days of written status updates and it was fine. But they chose to have a 10-mins stand-up mainly for socialization.

> being able to talk directly to people is much better than having to schedule meetings

i do not understand what people are talking about when they say things like this

    personA: hey @personB you got 20 mins to talk about XYZ?
    personB: yeah gimme 10 mins
    personA: k, i’ll grab a coffee
    personA: /zoom start

that’s ^ not scheduling a meeting. that’s having the same direct conversation but with like one extra step (joining zoom).

the rest of what your comment says is fair enough. i just see this mentioned a lot in anti-WFH leaning comments. often about how hard it is to mentor a junior.

(i can’t remember the exact slack command but you hopefully get the idea).

You might be leaving out the one hour delay between the first two messages.

Well, that's already 30 minutes instead of 30 seconds.

And that's without taking what sibling poster said: sometimes people take 1h, 2h, 1 day to reply you on Slack.

With face to face communication you convey more than "the message".

This comes from personal experience: dealing with tech people with Slack-only communication is fine. Dealing with non-tech people is much different.

For example, I just RIGHT NOW have to ask a Salesperson about whether a feature is ready to go into prod. I can just walk 10 meters to their desk and get an answer in 5 secs. OR I can write to them in Slack on email and get an answer Monday, because they have 20 unread Slack messages and 500 unread e-mails.

You might call this "a bother" to them. To this Salesperson, which happens to be my buddy: this is how they prefers to work.

Google had flex time for all the time I worked there, for a dozen years, well before the pandemic. I don't see any particular reason it wouldn't work for them now?

Google has always had the flexible working hours and didn't mind the occasional "plumber coming today" day, but before COVID it was very allergic to permanent WFH arrangements.

Yes, can confirm.

I don't know if that will happen. A lot of the cloud heavy offices moved to shared desks for engineers, so there's only a desk for 2 days/week, so they don't have enough space available for everyone to return full time.

It's still possible, but I don't think would be as easy as an annoucement.

At least Google's offices have nice perks: free gym, healthy and nutritious meals, healthy and tasty snacks. Personally those perks are enough to negate the terrible commute.

I was told Amazon's offices has none of these.

I mean, my experience says you’re right, but the red hot labor summer combined with Dell and Amazon _and_ Apple workers vocally opposing such mandates and leaving outright give me hope that maybe, _maybe_ leadership will accept this is a losing battle and embrace the new norms.

Barring that, the younger working demographics have made it abundantly clear there’s a zero tolerance for the traditional corporate bullshit. When mandates first came down, they responded with “coffee badging” and the like; I don’t doubt there will be another adaptation, like arriving late and leaving early, baking the commute time silently into the work day.

The writing is on the wall, and the modern worker knows how badly they’re being screwed over. I’d argue it’s a wiser decision to let the workers do their jobs from wherever, consolidate offices into continental HQs, and decentralize the workforce to disincentivize collective action. Workers get the flexibility they need to survive in the current cost of living/housing crisis, and companies don’t risk bleeding talent or earning the wrath of a Union election.

Everybody wins except commercial landlords, but they’re not exactly the good guys here anyway.

Tech organizations are all overstaffed from the pandemic. Engineering is usually boom/bust. Likely outcome is recession and purge. The plucky gen alphas will be in the cube farm to pay they rent.

It depends on your perspective and context. I refuse to subscribe to the defeatist attitudes of "this is how it has been and therefore always shall be" that's in your post, because otherwise what's the point of participating at all if change is impossible?

The engineering boom-bust cycle is a recent phenomenon (past fifty years) relatively speaking, and it doesn't mean it's a permanent fixture of civilization unless we choose to accept it as such. I reject permanence and advocate change, and so should you.

Besides, "Gen Alpha" won't be in cube farms even with a RTO, because Glorious Leaders (TM) in tech threw out cubicles, personal identity, and privacy in favor of hotel seating and clean desk policies. A return to cubicles would be a marked improvement over the present status quo, if we could just figure out the right marketing buzzwords to trick the C-Suite into believing it's the Next Big Thing (TM).

I’m not defeatist. We’re at a high where massively capitalized companies have been in a hiring binge for skilled technical employees for a long time. It’s been good to me - my family is more prosperous by any measure than my parents are grandparents, who were arguably smarter and bolder people.

All of these companies have been incredibly successful… but can they sustain their historically unprecedented growth? Maybe. But when that train slows down, Intel is the example of what happens.

Oh goodness, if we’re talking about sustainable growth then boy do I have some hockeystick charts to reject that notion. For decades, growth has largely been an illusion created through clever accounting and inflation metrics - it’s why the industry keeps desperately trying to jump on “brand new” stuff like crypto, blockchain, and generative models: a new industry means actual growth as opposed to illusory growth, which would create a new wealth class above and beyond any of the existing billionaires of today. For all of Sam Altman’s own blowharding, he’s not wrong that whatever the next brand-new revolutionary industry turns out to be - AI, space mining, molecular fabrication, whatever - will require literal trillions of dollars to explode into a 100x ROI.

That said, if we abandon this idea of “infinite growth forever” and accept that market saturation and incremental improvements provide opportunities to rebalance structures and remediate institutional flaws, then there’s a lot more hope to be had. You can’t build new things forever, and eventually need to take time to pay off outstanding debts, improve existing systems, modernize legacy infrastructure, and basically make everything simpler and sustainable for whatever the Next Big Thing turns out to be.

…unfortunately for me, making that pitch to leadership usually just gets me laughed out of the room because maintenance and efficiency isn’t “sexy”, nor does it boost their share valuations. Ah well, won’t stop me from trying.

I think you have a really interesting pov that is thought provoking. Seriously - thanks.

Does he? Don’t most people in tech roll their eyes when the suits, be it business or economy, talk about growth? Not saying what he said is wrong or stupid or whatever. I just thought that was the status quo outside of the business bubble.

>The plucky gen alphas will be in the cube farm to pay they rent.

Gen alpha? You're talking about a generation that the oldest cohort is ~10-11 years of age.

Will there even be enough of them given their potential parents can't afford a house? Will they go into tech after seeing this "learn to code" cohort getting screwed in the marketplace?

>The plucky gen alphas will be in the cube farm

I find it so ironic that around the turn of the century, cube farms and suburbia were the ultimate evil and seemingly a fate worse than death in the pop culture.

Meanwhile in 2024, me and my Gen Y/Z colleagues daydream about a comfy dedicated cubicle and a quiet 3.5 bedroom with matching furniture and a spot to grill.

I don’t know if I’d want to go back to an office regardless of how it looks but a cubicle seems perfect to me. I honestly thought about turning my office at home into a cubicle. Like, I have a large room in the basement (36 square meters or something like that) and it is office, gym, hobby room and TV / Gaming room all in one. I’d love to just have a little corner sectioned off to separate the office parts of it.

Same with the house of course. I somewhat achieved that but only through luck and I’m renting (which is fine here in Germany) but man do cubicles seem nice.

It’s kinda like the rooms in IKEA. If I built my own house, I’d just buy complete rooms from IKEA and build a house around it. They’re all so small and cosy.

You're making it sound as if working from home was something that everyone did eternally, and not something that started in 2020 out of necessity.

Going through your routine:

1) Noone forced these workers to live 1 hour from the office. In fact in the beforeCOVID times, people made an effort to live closer to where they work. Sure many can't afford to, but we're not talking about baristas here, right? But highly paid IT staff.

In the cases like Google the office is far from shitty.

In the cases like Amazon, the offices are more mid, but located central to where people live in cities. (We'll come back to this)

2/3/4) Legitimate problem, that exists SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE OF HYBRID. If everyone RTOs 5 days a week like Amazon did, it's no longer an issue.

6) If it's a nice office like Google the food isn't shitty. If it's a mid office like Amazon, it's downtown surrounded by the best restaurants/cafes the city has to offer.

> You're making it sound as if working from home was something that everyone did eternally, and not something that started in 2020 out of necessity.

Err...what? Let's not rewrite history here. Plenty of people -- especially in tech -- worked remotely before Covid. Yes, the numbers increased dramatically, but don't make it sound like it was unheard of before the pandemic.

Also: tons and tons of people have no choice but to live far from the office. Rent is cheaper and more plentiful the farther out you get from metro centers, simple as.

> Noone forced these workers to live 1 hour from the office

> made an effort to live closer to where they work

sacrificed a lot to live closer, out of necessity, pre-covid. Then, it turned out that WFH can be made to work, with little to zero loss in productivity (if not gained productivity).

If you work on a distributed team, then you were already talking to a screen in the office almost constantly. It's only gotten worse since covid.

Inside sales maybe. But sales reps who physically meet with customers spend very little time in company offices in general.

No disrespect intended by this, but I'm a little confused. What makes a direct contradiction of what Google said a reliable statement? Is it just pessimism bias?

There’s a ton of fraud in this space. You need at least hybrid to keep that at bay.

At a previous place, we chose hybrid RTO over intrusive surveillance. My opinion shifted from being a full remote advocate after I caught a half dozen folks with various schemes and scams.

The straw that broke the camels back was a guy who lied about where he was living. He was going through a divorce and the ex-wife ratted him out to the state tax authority to get the reward. The company was fined by both states. The ex made like $50k.

Define “fraud”? If you get your work done in two hours and can’t progress until a teammate does their end, is it better or worse if you are scrolling HN in an office or at home?

I run my own company, I do not give a single fuck how, where, or when people get their job done. I only care they deliver.

Likewise, people who need to be watched over are not the employees I want in the first place. I’m not running a daycare for children. Adults can make their own decisions, if you need me over your shoulder to deliver you aren’t useful to me to start with.

And if you find out that your developers were actually in North Korea and you've violated sanctions, would you care then?

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-n...

They’re literally doing the work. They’re not accused of placing backdoors, they’re not accused of anything aside from the US government running an antiquated sanctions regime, and just doing the work. The US government isnt charging companies with OFAC violations, so there is no reason to care. North Koreans learned how to be a fake Staff Software Engineer and do non-fake things for real RSUs.

Companies shouldnt burden the rest of their employees for social verification, for something that isnt a problem for the company.

That sounds akin to saying a security breach doesn't matter until there are consequences. Not many companies would be comfortable being in the position that they have not verified the identities of employees who have access to payment processing data.

They did verify the identity to the standard required. The employee lied.

Although analogies compare dissimilar things with a common attribute, your analogy relies on saying all employees are security breaches. These are employees competent to work in medium sized all the way to big tech companies as software engineers.

Every company with sensitive data need to consider insider threat risk. Many compliance standards require background checks specifically because employees can lie. My point is simple, it's not as simple as "employee complete tasks? Y/N" but that every employee is a potential liability that businesses need to do risk management according to their role. Remote work makes that more complicated, and requires different controls.

You could have them turn up to an office for a few days when they start work if you wanted

So the logic is that even though they may get their required work done, the risk that they may one day flee to North Korea and cause you to violate sanctions requires that you have to constantly bring in all of your employees to a central location and soft surveil them to mitigate this?

Why not just require a single background check or interview them on-site?

I was responding to someone that says they only care that they deliver. And that was the statement I took issue with, there are numerous factors that employer should care about beyond performance. As another example, the liability raised from creating a toxic workplace. I said nothing about bringing people in. You raise two things that would be good controls for identity fraud.

Don’t worry. Most people here that “run their own business” are in VC-funded startup la la land anyway. It says very very very little about knowing how to actually productively steer a group of people.

Why do we do this all the time? Somebody makes a slightly hyperbolic statement, and everybody replies to them with the most outlandish and extreme examples of things that would be problems if they literally meant the exact thing they said.

"People can wear anything they want out in public, I don't care"

"Yeah, well if they wore a suit made of plutonium, or one covered with guns that fired randomly in every direction, I bet you'd care then".

I'm going to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and assume that he probably does the due diligence to verify that his employees are legally able to work wherever the company is, and aren't using company resources to launch cyberattacks on the NSA, aren't international terrorists trying to destroy the moon, etc, etc.

The Internet, where the comment section contains a bunch of people cosplaying as compilers that somehow manage to be more pedantic than the Rust borrow checker.

Surely nobody is referring to scrolling HN during work hours as “fraud”

No, I think the current buzzword for that is "time theft".

> Define “fraud”?

He lived in another state but paid taxes where he supposed to be living. The company was held liable.

> I run my own company

Then you should understand what for you can be held liable and what your responsibilities are. It may be very expensive not to know. In extreme cases you may be held criminally liable.

> I do not give a single fuck

It’s just a recommendation: I’d suggest you do because your tax authorities certainly do.

For people making tangential points about tax compliance, no shit. Obviously I’m talking about work environment, not saying I’m cool with tax fraud and embezzlement.

The point I’m making is if you want to feel like a Big Boss go ahead and stand over people, if you want an a-team doing a-team shit hire people who don’t need a babysitter.

The point you are making is completely irrelevant. You might not care, and if you have people you trust, good for you. But it’s still irrelevant, you asked to define „fraud”, which I did for you. All you do in response is virtue signalling.

A lot of business don't want to bother performance managing that closely. Plenty just worked off of trust.

* You hire someone, and then figure out someone else is doing the work (usually because they are making stupid mistakes, and the person you hired can't be that dumb)

* Your staff work odd hours that make coordinating hard (side gigs / hussle's etc).

* I think the rumored record of multiple full time jobs someone was working was 5+.

* We interviewed someone who was upfront they would be working for us while working for her full time day job remotely.

We deal with sensitive information. Having data go overseas etc is a no go for our business at least.

Note: If you have to deal with government agencies that have gone remote you KNOW that the throughput is sometimes < 50% what it was before. You can almost immediately tell as someone dealing with them. No one answers their phones, all voicemail, all super long delays (week+).

> * I think the rumored record of multiple full time jobs someone was working was 5+.

> * We interviewed someone who was upfront they would be working for us while working for her full time day job remotely.

I'm not sure how this is justified as a problem.

CEO of multiple companies: A-OK

SVP serving on multiple companies' boards of directors: A-OK

Salaried office worker working for multiple companies remotely: Fraud

Hourly worker working three jobs to make ends meet: A-OK

Capital patches out any attempt of non-capital to exit the system quickly.

I wouldn't call it fraud, but it is probably violating the terms of the employment contract. I know it is for my company (I bet people still do it anyway)

What's the recourse for violating your employment contract beyond termination? Ineligibility for unemployment because you were fired "for cause"? Seems like it's worth the risk since you can be fired for no reason at all.

That’s just, like, your opinion, mahn. I don’t recall anyone else saying that those things were OK, or that they were comparable, which they aren’t? Your MO seems to be to just make your comment so high-effort to reply to that nobody will bother.

CEOs and SVPs have contracts that deal with these issues. Salaried workers commit to full time hour commitment.

My employer allows outside employment for some roles if appropriate. It requires disclosure and may not be possible depending on what you do. Double dipping is not acceptable.

I’m a VP level person who serves on a couple of boards and help with a family business. It’s all disclosed and approved with mutually agreeable boundaries.

Another example is an attorney - it’s ok for some private practice, but not ok if that practice will reasonably involve an entity that the company is likely to interact with.

I know a person who is absolutely brilliant, first class intellect. They have two remote jobs and have gotten softly reprimanded at both for essentially making other people look bad because they get so much done.

As far as I see it, both companies get an a-tier person who outperforms the rest of their staff. This person gets two paychecks. Everybody wins.

But in the “we own your time and soul” employee relations model he’s a “crook” or a “fraud” because they aren’t sitting in the company canteen talking about bollocks all day.

That's why he should have kept it a secret. Envy is a pervasive effect. Do everything possible to counteract it.

It is a secret, they’ve been doing it since pandemic started!

Hiring?

Quietly and carefully.

> Define “fraud”?

the BigCorp owns your life, the rights to tell you where to be 75% of your waking hours and what to do.

get the eight hour job done in two hours and slack off for the rest? that's theft and fraud. get it done in two hours and admit to it? that's more work for you for the same pay, to fill the rest of your time.

then you go online and some overly enthusiastic yc sponsored clown will dunk on you for not giving your life away to a corporation

And it should be that way. The responsibility for tax cheats should rest entirely on the person not paying. But that's not how it works. Our government has passed authoritarian laws that put the responsibility on the employer too even if they have no knowledge of the crime.

If you want to work like a hourly contractor, be one. Work your hours.

If you want to be a $250k engineer and fuck around on Netflix waiting for something for 75% of the workday, you’re demonstrating a lack of maturity and professionalism. Or you work for a really dysfunctional place.

If you’re running your own shop, you’re empowered to run it to your needs. That’s awesome. Mine are different.

My point is about supervision. If an engineer making a quarter mill needs somebody over their shoulder to produce, that’s the core issue.

If during an afternoon where they have to wait for somebody else, I’d rather they go for a casual walk and think through a hard issue slowly and carefully than sit at a desk artificially, writing dumb emails to keep up the charade they are “busy”.

(Of course the person they are waiting on now has to read said emails instead of finishing their task - busy work is net drag on everyone.)

For jobs that require thought we do very little to provide space for reflection, and imho that’s dumb.

"Work in the office" or "remote surveillance" are not the only two possible options here.

I work (remotely) for a company that treats their employees like adults. I have a work-provided laptop, but it doesn't contain any surveillance-ware and my boss doesn't care where I am or what I'm doing as long as I'm getting my stuff done and showing up for zoom meetings. When they hired me, they ran a background check to ensure that I was who I said I was, among other due diligence.

There are more companies like this. They may not be in the majority, but they exist.

Same. My work is very flexible, we can take time throughout the day for an appointment or errand, and in return, we have a strong work ethic that ensures that things get done, which sometimes requires overtime or after hours.

It's nice to be treated as an adult and it goes both ways.

who are these people who barely do any work from home? My office is an amusement park with free food and amazing views and yet I still work from home to minimize distractions and wasted time. My output is measurably higher when I work from home.

> But those were mostly sales folks.

So, are there really so few biotech / hardware people here? Hard to do lab work from home.

> mostly

Yeah, but here's an exception!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com