Hacker News Reader

Comment by khold_stare | Hacker News Reader

The comment about an "email chain could have been a 30-second chit chat" is such a straw-man argument. On top of that, forcing everyone to commute up to an hour each way is a blatant disregard for people's personal time. How productive would the workforce be if the commute counted as work hours?

View on HN

Hate that. Yes, some issue can be resolver faster by talking in person, but that can be accomplished by a phone call, too. Just like a face to face conversation can end in an hour of gossip. How's that for more efficient?

Back when a lot of my work conversations were with sales reps and system engineers over the phone, certain reps in particular would take 10 minutes to get to a point where they could have been handled in a minute with an internal email. Though, yes, sometimes the real-time conversation was useful.

Yep. Some people are just the "let's hop on a call" type and others are "send me an email." If these people need to talk to each other it's difficult.

Sales are a different breed of people.

Sales is hard. For some it comes naturally, others have had to work at it. A good sales person is valuable, and a good relationship with a sales person is very valuable, especially to those of us of the engineering breed.

Give them the time, build the relationships, could be worth the effort.

On a busy day, I resented it sometimes. And there were a few who, when I got a call from them, I silently sighed. But, as a product manager, keeping field people happy was part of my job and I mostly did.

And of course, the email chain gives everyone time to think on the problem and construct a sensible reply, without interrupting anyone.

As opposed to some manager walking up to your desk while you're neck deep in concentration, only to ask you a retarded question that should have been an email.

And, not mentioned explicitly anywhere in the discussion, email is a proof of sorts come a dispute time. Chat in the hallway won't be captured in a deposition or at least not as much more than 'he said, she said'.

Except for the most part, commuting has never counted as work hours except in particular situations like billable hours for some professions.

I unironically think they should be. It will never happen, but one can dream.

This incentivizes people to live far from the office. I know people who live 2 hours from the office. If the commute counted, every day would be a half day. People choose where they live relative to where they work, so if someone has a 2 hour commute, that is a choice they made… assuming the housing choice and work choice were made in an environment where working in the office was the expectation.

I work from home currently, and thought about getting a less expensive place in a small town. However, I ended up deciding to get a place closer to the city. This way if I do need to get a new job, I have more options without a painful commute, and I’m not only reliant on remote positions. We all make these choices.

Alternatively, it incentivizes companies hiring locally, and/or investing in infrastructure to make commuting faster.

That seems like it would result in employers refusing to hire people who don't live close to the office.

While the downsides of this are obvious, I wonder if in the long run this would push our cities towards better designs, by encouraging the mixing of residential and office buildings, and by encouraging improvements to implementing public transit that can quickly and efficiently move a dense population between their homes and their jobs. It probably wouldn't work, but I can dream.

That sounds great, and I care enough about this that I moved somewhere with well-designed transit, but I still think it's a problematic policy. Some people might want to live in a bigger place further out, and if they're willing to make the long commute (and pay for its negative externalities, which most aren't) then I don't see why they can't.

I actually prefer to bike to work, but I doubt any employer would be willing to give me my hourly rate for that...

Yeah, just going to be a dream.

Awhile back a bunch of superbowl workers who were mandated to drive off-site to go through security screening before being bused on-site sued to have those 3 hours counted as billable. They lost in court.

If: (conjunction) in case that; granting or supposing that; on condition that:

But work from home has revealed how wrong that was and returning to office is a waste of limited free time that we are not compensated for.

> The comment about an "email chain could have been a 30-second chit chat" is such a straw-man argument.

I imagine them hardly holding back laughter when they say it. It's such a bogus straw-man they have to know it makes them look stupid. If in-person communication was such a great boon for the company how much had they invested in the last 3 years in travel budgets for teams, to meet in person? Nothing? Even lowered it? Well, there you go, that explains exactly that's a completely bogus claim.

The solution is as simple as responding on slack/teams/etc in reasonable time during work hours.

I thought it was funny in a "This email could have been a meeting" type way...

> On top of that, forcing everyone to commute up to an hour each way is a blatant disregard for people's personal time.

Commuting is dangerous and stressful. Stressed employees cannot perform their best. It is in a company's best interest to reduce stress and danger.

And now will real time collaboration tools it doesn't even need to be an email chain

Except when the co-worker you need to collaborate with is doing their laundry, gardening, or picking their kid up from school.

It's fine, teams is on Android too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com