Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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I’m always taken aback when people in power denigrate remote and flexible work, as if it’s lazy or incompatible with an organization succeeding. If you want people to have families and lean into them, they need this work arrangement. Remote and flexible work has been shown to be very beneficial to parents and working mothers specifically. Several other countries protect this as a worker right. There’s over $120B in remote first or highly remote compatible enterprises. But you still have the bros, from Silicon Valley to Jamie Dimon in finance, dragging people back in for the performance art. I hope the right people get into positions of power soon, who understand economic success and worker well-being go hand in hand.

It shouldn’t taboo to say “I’m here to do good work, but then I’m going home; my job is not who I am, but merely a means to a reasonable amount of economic and professional success.” We have to enable people do their best work with reasonable accommodations.

Mothers are leaving the workforce, erasing pandemic gains - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44894464 - August 2025

Remote and flexible are nice, but not what is needed. What is needed is consistency and not too many hours. You have to be expected to not work or party late because you will be with the family. You have to be expected to work the same first shift schedule - that is the kids are in school or in child care when you are working (child care for young kids is expensive enough that one parent staying home until the kids are school aged looks really good, so support for going back to work after that is useful).

There needs to be one parent with flexibility, but it doesn't matter which. Just so that when a kid is sick at least one parent able to not go into the office. Most people reading this will have a job that can be done okay from home between cleaning vomit up and so it makes sense for us to get that flexibility. However there are a lot of jobs that must be in person (you can't work an assembly line from home)

We don’t have to agree on the remote and flexible part, but I agree with reduced hours and am an aggressive advocate of the 4 day week (8x4 @ 100% pay).

Honestly, I do think there are advantages to in-person work, in terms of team cohesion, serendipity, etc. That said, 1) I don't care, the advantages to me of remote work vastly outweigh the advantages of working on an irl team, 2) many organizations don't set up their irl work environment to effectively maximize the benefits. But I get why employers would prefer it.

There is a huge element of hubris at play. Founders are highly competitive and high achieving people, who imagine their teams to be like leading NFL football teams where there is no room for members who are not absolutely dedicated. Working a 40-hour work week is not compatible with that. As a result perhaps these kind of companies are self selecting, and it's rare to find a leader who is willing to say the equivalent of, "hey, you know, it's OK to be a loser team and not work 100 hour weeks"

A lot of dysfunctional management behavior ive seen can be chalked up to simple projection by either the founder or management.

They want you to feel invested enough to work 60 or 80 hour weeks coz they do. They want you to feel the need to be in the office putting in face time coz thats how they feel.

Not every founder or CEO is egocentric enough to want a bunch of mini-mes orbiting around them but a lot of them are.

agreed, and they also miss the fundamental difference in compensation they're getting for those hours compared to regular workers.

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