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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

After seeing various consultant presentations early in COVID (and much pundit commentary), I find it somewhat remarkable just how little ended up really changing five years later. It has changed a bit some places. Some relatively remote-friendly companies that basically ignored hiring location requirements during COVID really can't go home again without drastically cutting their workforce--which they probably don't want to do if they're doing reasonably well whether they like it or not. But I'm not sure that, aside from seeing a few more masks being worn, that there's really a lot of change overall.

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While interviewing candidates for a critical role in my organization, the recruiter mentioned that she is finding it hard to get good candidates who want to come to office. And yet, management stuck to "minimum 3 days from office" rule. We are also "gently reminded" often and another rule about showing your face on video.

My previous team lead was a super smart guy and pleasant to work with, in the 1.5 years that I worked with him, I saw him once on camera. It didn't matter to him or me to see each other's face. The only people it seems to matter are the suits, who go around nitpicking everything making life miserable for everyone. Sure, it is nice to have human connection and seeing people on camera helps, but if someone doesn't want to be on camera, why push them? The sarcasm ("someone is having a bad hair day"), the threats ("camera or else...") - it just reeks of pettiness and stupidity.

None of this makes any sense. My job is to write code, I am not a model for toothpaste or eyelashes or lipstick or razor or whatever. Just leave me alone so I can do the tasks that I was hired for.

I don't think COVID changed the work culture much, except exposing some corporate lies ("you gotta haul your ass to the office to be effective" etc). The more we think things are changing, the more they are staying the same.

> We are also "gently reminded" often and another rule about showing your face on video.

I'm actually buying this being 100% remote. We had more than a couple of folks who never showed their faces except for the first interview, never attended any face to face meeting (company sponsored travel and accommodation) and in one case a dude posted a daily update from his second (or third, or seventh) company on our channel by mistake and was pissed off he's getting fired.

I'll take the video if this means I can stay 100% remote otherwise they'll announce RTO and I don't even have an office to go to in my country.

I don't think you always have to be on camera and a cell call is sometimes just fine. But, given that we have the technology, especially for genuinely interactive calls, I agree that people should generally default to video on. And, to the degree that there are face to face offsites, I think you need a really good reason not to attend--and "I don't want to" is not that good reason.

Lets say 10% of people have a side job. Are we gonna put stupid rules in place and piss off the other 90%?

That dude who posted updates on the wrong channel? He deserves to get fired. That said, lets say he was doing his job well and he was posting the right updates to the right company channel, then why does anyone care if he has 1 job or 10? Sure it is ethically dubious - so is not providing raises, not keeping up promises, withholding promotions for no reason etc (one of my team mates was hired at a very low salary with the promise that they will pay market rate after 6 months, it has been more than a year now, they refuse to honor their promise. He is fantastic and still gets treated like this). Ethics works both ways.

Suppose person A is sharp and fast and finishes his work in 4 hours while person B takes 8 hours for the same set of tasks. Is A going to be paid twice as B? In knowledge work, why does anyone care if a person works 2 hours a day or 20, as long as they finish their work in the agreed upon time?

<< Are we gonna put stupid rules in place and piss off the other 90%?

If one is to believe Linkedin crowd, yes. I have long stopped trying to understand that frame of mind. I simply accept that it exists and plan around people with those perspectives.

If you believe not being on video is enough for going back to RTO and if you comply, they will just find another absurd reason to go back to RTO.

I just want them to not have reasonable reasons.

Before COVID, I worked for an international company, with people from various countries often working in the same team together. It happened that in my team, I was the only guy from my country. So whenever I needed to talk to my teammates, I had to make a call.

And yet, it seemed very important for the managers that I come every day to the office and make those calls from there, rather than from my home. They couldn't make even the excuse about people being in the same room, because we obviously were not. But if you make the rules, you do not really need an excuse.

Then COVID came, and impossible things became possible overnight.

Now they are gradually becoming impossible again. Except that more people are pissed off, because they remember that it used to be possible.

I think a lot changed, socially, over that time.

Inflation, crypto, and sports betting removed almost all stigma from gambling.

Being in your 20s with a crippling gambling addiction is just normal now.

The tech industry has finish metamorphosis and is now just another financial industry. No care towards building great products or solving real problems.

Just building great pitch decks and solving for investor attraction.

OAI is the peak example. ChatGPT was the fastest growing product ever and, especially in the early forms, sucked.

Even now, it’s just kind of mid.

OAI seems more focused on regulatory capture and spending on compute rather than innovating.

That’s why deep seek caught them with their pants down.

I think you're overstating the betting angle. I saw and read about people buying buying lotto tickets long before COVID. Sports betting is certainly a bigger deal but day trading was a big thing in the dot-com era well before crypto.

And there's still a ton of innovation going on in the tech industry. There have been shifts; there's a lot more about open source for example. AI is way over-hyped probably but there's still the core of something useful there even if we don't really know how it will develop.

> I think you're overstating the betting angle

My sister is currently 23 and I talk to her about this a lot. At least from what she tells me, I don’t think I am.

I mean… pump.fun exists…

Remember, the 20yo people now grew up with CS go betting, loot box mania, then sports betting, then crypto.

They’ve been cooked wrt gambling their whole lives.

> And there's still a ton of innovation going on in the tech industry

I don’t think that’s true, mostly.

Please give me some links. I’d honestly like to see where.

I feel so down on tech right now.

I feel like all I do is work on money making machines without solving actual problems for people.

I’m quite curious what you consider innovation (and not)?

>> And there's still a ton of innovation going on in the tech industry

>I don’t think that’s true, mostly.

I mean there's all the work in the cloud-native space. Fusion and quantum remain speculative and probably relatively long term but you can't say there isn't a lot of innovative work going on there. Lots of little things in the Linux kernel and elsewhere in open source even beyond cloud-native. AI is probably a big deal depending upon how you define it although I'm more cautious than many here are.

> the cloud-native space

I'd argue that a big chunk of that particular space is sales innovation rather than tech innovation. But I'm admittedly pretty jaded and cynical of all the bs at this point.

I guess when I say “innovation” I’m not talking about advancements in science or incremental improvements to existing solutions, but using those advancements to solve real problems for people.

It feels like tech lost the plot. (This was most apparent during the NFT craze)

We advance technology for the sake of it, assuming that solutions will be found using this new technology.

There’s no focus on people anymore, just technology in the hopes that one will be a jackpot.

> AI is probably a big deal depending upon how you define it although I'm more cautious than many here are.

I think we’re on the same page here and it illustrates my point.

Innovation still happens, ofc. I think AlphaFold is a major innovation, for example.

I just feel like it’s no longer the focus of the industry at large

I wish people had learned from covid and taken widespread illnesses more seriously. Before covid I was getting sick 5 to 8 times a year, thanks to coworkers. Since covid I am 100% WFH as is practically all of my company, and I've been sick exactly 1 time in 5 years. I mask indoors in public spaces during the seasonal spike in contagious viruses, and use hand sanitizer after touching anything like doorknobs or other surfaces a lot of people touch, like restaurant menus, etc. No, I am not hiding inside like some idiots seem to want to think I am.

It really disappoints me that air filtration was not taken seriously during covid, it should have been mandated by the government and paid for by the government for public places like post offices, and there should have been tax credits given to businesses to install air filtration systems. But no, we've learned nothing, and people continue to get sick far more than they would have to if we only decided to do something about it with readily available mitigations. Of course, it also helps to not elect a malicious narcissist to lead us down a path of ignorance.

I hope you realize you're doing an experiment with your health. We don't have studies on the long-term effects of this degree of isolation from everyday pathogens. It could go either way, but so much human adaptation is use it or lose it that my money's on worse long-term outcomes.

Agreed. It's common for new teachers to get sick a lot during their first year. Then their immune system adapts.

I was a bartender for over 20 year and never, i.e., very rarely, got sick. I'm pretty isolated now due to being a caregiver. Nearing the tailend of that role though and think often about how I am going to ease myself back into a regular life.

>I hope you realize you're doing an experiment with your health.

It was much more of an "experiment" before covid, getting every virus that came my way, to see how much damage it did to my body. There's a lot of evidence that even the regular flu causes irreparable damage to the body.

https://www.health.com/condition/flu/flu-long-term-effects

So, you can keep your own experiment going if you like, but I'll take the experiment that doesn't result in heart complications, loss of endurance and strength, physical decline and secondary infections. You can keep performing that "experiment" all you want.

>my money's on worse long-term outcomes.

My bet is on living longer for not having contracted the flu 40 more times in my lifetime, or long-covid, which would erase a year of my life just living through it not to mention the toll it takes on the body.

And getting the flu or a cold is not the only way to exercise the immune system, your immune system is constantly fighting pathogens. If it isn't then you'd be dead right now from something normally most people wouldn't die from because they have functioning immune systems. So, no I'm not concerned about my immune system not being able to fight off infection, it's doing that right now as we speak, and so is yours too whether you know it or not.

It's also known that when the immune system is too aggressive, people also die from the immune response. A lot of people died from covid because their immune system was fighting too hard.

Getting an avoidable disease certainly is quite a gamble.

5-8 times a year is a lot. You were really getting a cold every other month?

I feel like 1-3 times a year is much more realistic. For me, that’s a small price to pay for social activity.

Where did I say that I'm not socially active? I explicitly said that I'm not cowering inside afraid of the world. I just take precautions, and added precautions during spikes in seasonal viruses.

Maybe my immune system is just not that great, and covid has taught me it doesn't have to mean guaranteed illness so many times a year. I do mask when appropriate. I don't mask when the risk is low. How am I not socially active?? Forget it, you don't know me at all.

I’m sorry if I offended you — I meant social activity in the context of WFH, ie I was specifically talking about the social activity one gets at the office

I’ll admit that I was throwing some shade — but I was really just implying that “5-8 times a year” seemed like an exaggeration to me, not that you are a hermit.

Still, no need for that tone, so I apologize.

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