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Comment by christofosho | Hacker News Reader

Companies need to set the bar and uphold it. Saying people are "quiet quitting" is synonymous with saying, "we don't know how to set and uphold standards". Putting the blame on the employee instead of having clear guidelines (i.e. making it a performance problem) is an unfortunate scapegoat used to shift the blame and accountability. A job is a contract. Ain't just one sided.

Edit: Amending to mention that there are companies that do quite well at upholding standards. To those, thank you for trying.

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Same with the WFH debates.

'We're going to force workers into the office and hope they do some work out of boredom' is taken as a serious strategy because the average manager is mind-bogglingly incompetent. If you know how productive people are (i.e. your managers aren't morons), and you have incentives set-up (e.g. pay, promotions and hiring/firing is dictated by productivity), then there's no problem to solve. Workers who are more productive in the office will be forced into the office to meet standards, you don't need blanket rules.

Oh and the penny pinchers have consistently under-leased space and forced the worst setting imaginable on most of us - open floorpans. So RTO is disruptive, distracting and pointless.

My small team of 3-4 will occasionally go to the office when someone is in town, ask for a room/office get denied and assigned random open floorpan seats.

Usually sat next to the interns or the Helpdesk or some other noisy group we don't interact with at all.

Often they can't even find contiguous seating so we are sat hodgepodge amongst people we don't work with.

Would be better to go to a WeWork or something.

They really think we are cattle.

Of course after this post, no joke I go into the office last week and the reservable open desks were in the supply closet with broken chairs and monitors. Amazing.

I have a $30k computer at home.

Are you going to give me one like that at work?

If not I'm less productive there and only showing up to polish your ego.

My corporate escorts rates are higher than my working rates accordingly.

I'm genuinely curious as to what kind of work requires a $30k computer for productivity. High end CAD?

ML workloads where I can do a few epochs locally to see where the data is going wrong before running the full training run in the data center.

What companies allow you to do work on a personal computer? That seems like a recipe for disaster...

Ones without a straitjacket of bureaucracy.

It's not like I can't exfiltrate all their data with a python script and a web cam.

I never had an issue with using my own computer at work. And didn't even want to use a corporate computer.

Companies also control things like anti-viruses, etc, on their work machines. It's not just about concerns over stealing information.

I use qubes.

A corporate antivirus is a rather large step down.

The other day my manager straight up told me he doesn't understand what I am spending time with issue X for and why I even put it in my scrum meeting ( he assigned it me; he really should know what it actually entails, but clearly doesm't know ). I will be honest, I got pissy and simply removed it from my todo list, will let it fail and I will let it be assigned to me again. I am now George Constanza and embrace the sheer corporate managery.

I am tired of this.

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