Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

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I love remote work. It made me 20x more productive when I was managing a distributed team of almost 1000 people during COVID - all of our metrics improved. 5 years later I am in a different role, and it’s the exact opposite. Executives represent the company and its interests, and there are some significant issues with the real problem - hybrid.

Grift and fraud. Nobody likes to talk about this, but many people are running grifts, from doing nothing, meetings in the supermarket or on vacation, to running multiple jobs. I had a couple working 5-6 different full time jobs together. Another was working offshore using a family member as “remote hands” to keep a device connected in the US. It’s difficult and expensive to police.

Hybrid decreases effectiveness. A remote only unit is great, a on-prem unit is great. “Permanent” hybrid is the worst of all worlds. Remote people rely on tools more and they don’t work as well with people in site. Meeting transcripts rely on the different clients to identify speakers, and work poorly in conference rooms, for example. It’s also easy for bad patterns to develop where remote people get cut out by people talking off the cuff in office, or vice versa.

The majority of the quality of life improvements are really about time freedom. You’d get most of it by giving employees sufficient paid time and allowing them to use it. Remote first by business unit makes sense too, but I think that the risk is the remote workers become like the folks in “provincial” branch offices.

I don't understand how it is a problem if an employee takes on multiple jobs. Presumably you don't limit births either and being a parent is effectively taking on another job. If the work output is acceptible or not is what should matter alone to you as a manager. Not how exactly the sausage is getting made.

For example, this employee who is supposedly spending 1/6th of their time on your job. If you say tried to capitalize their time such that you now have 6/6ths on your tasks, would the employee even accept this arragement themselves? You are effectively giving them 1/6th the pay for the same full time day of work they do anyhow. Squeezing this employee is not going to see you get more work out of them. It is going to see them leave your company and replace that job with another, leaving you shortstaffed and having to invest in vetting candidates and onboarding. Now you ask how much you get out of an employee you put the squeeze on given that this will lead to turnover and an overall loss of that full time work being done as you suffer through a period of short staffing.

If I’m paying you $200k to be a full time employee, I have an expectation that you’re proactive and working. Likewise, if you’re a contractor getting paid for hours, those hours are contractually exclusive to me - don’t accept the contract if you want to double dip. With a deliverable based contract, I don’t give a shit how many jobs you work, so long as you deliver. Respect is a two way street.

When you have your wife sending proof of life texts and posing as you, pretending to have technical difficulties in meetings, not only are you not doing anything, you’re like a disease that saps the productivity of your colleagues.

With respect to kids and other “life”, we set clear expectations - you’re not paid to babysit. Personally, my expectation is that our folks are professionals and we all deal with incidental things. I was stuck waiting for a gas meter change all afternoon last week. My admin’s son had a snow day. But if your car breaks down every Friday, or your 6th grandmother has passed, that’s a problem.

Well, if they are affecting your teams performance then deal with it. If they don’t cause ripples then whatever. People were slacking off at work long before zoom was invented. Ever see Office Space?

People stacking jobs have next to no interest in anything about the jobs except getting paid, and are really easy to spot in high performance environments because they tend to make a lot of excuses and miss a lot of deadlines.

What you are saying is this: how an employee spends their time is 100% the responsibility of their manager. That's extremely infantilizing - strong teams I have worked on expect employees to self-manage their time productively and deliver about "full time" bandwidth (minus time off, maintenance work, etc) on a consistent basis so we can effectively plan and execute.

I'm speaking from experience: I had to deal with a new hire whom I was assigned to mentor who tried to juggle just one other job and it was super obvious they weren't working when they said they were. It took a long time to work through the PIP process, and effectively that person stole not only the company's time and money, but wasted a good deal my own time and patience. Fuck them and their entitled mentality. If they had gotten their shit done on time and without sketchy meeting aversion, they might have continued enjoying the second paycheck. Frankly if they had done good work and in a timely fashion it might not have mattered if they had another job - but if you're employed (not contracted) ethically speaking that employer and those coworkers are correct to expect that job to be your first priority during the work week.

Sounds like the system works fine. You cull low performers and don’t notice those who might be doing this and delivering on acceptible timelines for you. You’d have the same issues with any distraction really, job, wife, hobby, drugs, whatever it may be. All you have to really look at are the outputs no matter what you do. Alcoholics were drinking at work and slacking off when it was in person too after all. People would even simply stare at the cubical wall for a day to spite the boss.

> I don't understand how it is a problem if an employee takes on multiple jobs.

Because that's the execs' privilege. Just like how the old feudal aristocracy was free to engage in as many economic activities as they wanted for self gain but the feudal serfs were supposed to tend to their lords' fields all the time and be loyal and honest and not steal from their lords.

Who are you, the lowly pleb, to think that you can have the same privilege with your modern technolords... Know your place.

Surely these people are assigned tasks to do? Are they not getting the tasks done? How are your managers unable to tell whether the assigned tasks are getting done?

Are the tasks getting done but are poor quality? Are you implying that you'd be fine with the shoddy work if they weren't working multiple jobs? If not why do you keep them, irrespective of whether thy have multiple jobs?

Thanks for your comment. I agree with a lot of what you said, in particular that trying to have it both ways (hybrid) often ends up with everyone being frustrated, in my experience.

I want to say very clearly that I don't doubt that "grift and fraud" happens. What percentage of the workforce are engaged in this grift? If you have 100 remote workers in your average IT shop at BigCo, how many of them do you think are truly running a scam that would never pass if they were in person? My guess is 3 or less, but that's just a guess.

In case it's not obvious, what I'm working towards is: If 3% of your workforce is engaged in grift, but a lot of the other 97% are happier and more productive, is it worth pissing off a substantial portion of that 97% just to shut down the 3%?

> The majority of the quality of life improvements are really about time freedom. You’d get most of it by giving employees sufficient paid time and allowing them to use it.

This leaves out one of the main things to like about WFH for many (most?) Americans, at least: I get to avoid wasting 30–90 minutes of my day in a stressful commute that comes with its own share of expenses.

With contractors, I’d guess 40% or more. I’ve discovered things that are pretty shocking.

With employees, I agree it’s much lower, it’s mostly just lazy loafing that is harder to spot if the employer doesn’t have clear evidence of performance. The bigger issue for them are people who move away, lie and invent medical problems to avoid work rules.

The majority of my folks are in IT infrastructure and support. It’s pretty easy to spot on the operations side if you understand the tickets. The other side of the shop, who do more dev work relies on having good managers and leads. The documentation isn’t a fair evaluation— a single change may require weeks of work for a developer, so using counts isn’t fair unless you really understand the workflows. For those roles, hybrid makes hiding easier.

> The bigger issue for them are people who move away, lie and invent medical problems to avoid work rules.

Don’t worry, people are perfectly capable of doing that in the office too.

I find it a lot easier to hide not doing anything in the office? If you are sitting at your desk the default assumption is that you are hard at work.

Sounds like companies managers are shit at their jobs then if they can't make sure that people are actually doing there jobs.

Its really simple -> give them assigned tasks. If they don't get them done and can't prove they actually worked on it (provided it was reasonable for their skillset) then fire them.

It is really that easy. But people continue saying this "grift" exists of employees abusing their companies. If this is really true, then all it says is that managers at these companies are really REALLY terrible at managing and they should be the first to go.

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