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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

People seem to always circle back to arguments about whether wfh is better/worse for productivity and so on. But that potential cost/benefit is surely drowned by the extra cost of paying people to work in an office.

If productivity is +/-10 or 20% (which would be huge) between office and wfh but the additional comp is 50% to get someone to work 100% in office then the calculus is still simple.

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Obviously in practice, this isn't always true, but in general, each employee should output more than their pay, or they wouldn't be there. As an example, Exxon Mobile supposedly has profits of $899,000/employee [1]. Their average pay is probably significantly lower than that, but let's say it's $300k, so a 20% boost in productivity increases profit per employee by $180k. An increase of 50% in salary (and I don't think it takes that much to get people to work in an office) costs them $150k.

[1] https://www.lifehealth.com/top-25-us-companies-ranked-by-pro...

As a small employer in European country, I'm mostly worried about the problem cases. What if someone gets seriously difficult? Like stops working at all. Firing in US is much cheaper and legally easier than in Europe, there I would have less to worry about.

Also one time we had remote employee, that was committing fraud towards the customers.

If someone doesn’t work at all and you are worried about not noticing I think there is some organizational issue.

What in this scenario makes it easier to know if this person is working when they are in the office?

I didn't say about not noticing.

It's much harder to get away with avoidant behavior in-person than remotely. I think you are twisting yourself into a knot to avoid admitting this point.

I was only considering pure solo desk work like software development now. But anything with visible individual output should follow the same pattern for observability. Obviously in other lines of work it can be different. But if I wanted to not work (say, work 50% on my personal project during office hours) then I’d probably prefer trying that stunt in the office. Because in an office no one questions whether you work (people confuse ass-in-seat with work) while if I’m working from home I know I’m only measured on my output.

One guy I finally got fired because he built a lego shelf at his desks for weeks rather than work. I'm not saying that is normal but people can drag out slacking off for a long time remote.

How would firing them differ wether they are wfh or in the office?

I think the point is that the remote employee is able to get away with it better and longer, and likely feels more empowered to due to the lack of built-in surveillence from colleagues.

That speaks more to the fact that they don't properly track work being done then.

If I'm behind on my work for a week my manager will know because I have nothing to show as results.

While european law is a lot more employee friendly, what I noticed is that companies are hardly willing to invest even some effort into stringently building their case, which they often could have done, from my laymen perspective.

Given that employment law is even more employer friendly for small companies, I would expect that a small company should not have much problem to argue about terminating an employee not working at all?

This will depend on the country as well, but most have pretty long probation periods.

For Germany for example, it's quite common for office jobs to have 6 months during which point you can "fire" employees with 2 week notice.

Do you have anything against B2B contracts and hiring freelancers? Employing on contractual basis allows you easily cancel the contract or prevent its extension.

It’s not productivity, it’s instilling norms in juniors.

Employers care so little about “the pipeline” they regularly have layoffs and deny training, but we’re supposed to “instill norms” through osmosis for free to a population of people, most of whom have been through college?

I have difficulty believing employers are that forward thinking.

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