Microsoft's dystopian pitch for remote work | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's dystopian pitch for remote work

37signals.com

227 pointsph0rque146 comments

Hypothetical: I get a call from my boss's boss at 7pm asking if I can create a weekly metrics spreadsheet for him for the meeting tomorrow. Because I'm a go-getter and want to help him out, I have three options:

1. Wake up crazy early the next morning and head into the office early.

2. Cancel my evening plans and drive back to the office tonight.

3. Pop open my laptop while waiting for the next round of beers at Von Trapp's and get it done.

David's arguing that the third option is the least conducive to work-life balance. That's cool, but I'd rather have the ability to edit that Excel spreadsheet during happy hour than have to shift my plans around to do it some other time.

(And it sits uneasy with me that 37signals has a book about remote work out and also makes linkbaity, low-content posts like these which blur the line between "signal" and marketing fluff.)

4. Tell your boss's boss to go stuff themselves.

5. Do not answer phone.

This.

Making yourself overly available trains those who would call upon you at unreasonable intervals to use your availability as a crutch.

"Plan ahead? Why? I can always call Bob!"

I'd also add:

Unless you're in a position where you're on-call, don't check your work e-mail when you're 'off duty'.

Actually there are two steps here:

4 a. Acquire FU money. b. Tell your boss's boss to go stuff themselves.

You don't need FU money to tell people to go stuff themselves, you just have to have a skill set that's in high demand and a good reputation.

Actually, you mostly need a) balls and b) the verbal skills to tell people to go stuff themselves without being directly insulting.

You would be surprised how few people lose their jobs by saying "no".

This is very true. It's a truly dysfunctional environment where someone gets fired for not willing to work un-negotiated overtime.

In either way though, there is a huge advantage to having choice - and being able to walk away from a job if push comes to shove. It affects the way you carry yourself, and it dramatically alters the dynamic between you and your employer.

The knowledge that, if things really got bad, if your boss turned out to be a giant asshole, you could walk away and be at another job in a week's time, is a tremendous psychological aid when it comes to pushing back and negotiating.

In this hypothetical situation, if your boss is calling you at 7PM the day before a meeting, you've already lost. Either your boss should have had the good graces to give you a better heads up, or s/he is going to have to be a big boy, suck it up and either do it themselves or go without for the meeting because you're off the clock.

Good luck with this attitude in the real world unless you're a unionized hourly worker.

In the real world, you're an at-will, exempt employee. So unless you're so special that you have the ability to tell your boss to f-off without worrying about the consequences, you're going to be updating that spreadsheet.

You don't have to be special. You just have to have a skillset and knowledge base that's difficult enough to replace that people treat you with a modicum of respect. If the place isn't burning to the ground, I don't think it's unreasonable to push back.

"a skillset and knowledge base that's difficult enough to replace"

That would be the definition of special.

I guess it depends on how low your bar for calling something "special" is. I would put on two different levels someone who truly has a "special" skillset vs. someone who is simply very effective and in whom the company has a sunk investment.

Or don't give your boss your cell phone number?

Don't be an apologist for bad management and bad people skills. If a boss or management ever called me and requested me to do a task on my own time, not company time, I'd politely refuse for obvious reasons. It's okay as a one time thing, "Hey David sorry to bother you at 7 but could you do me a huge favour and do X and Y? My bad I'll buy you lunch tomorrow" then yeah that's fine. But if it's spoken with any hint of authority or consequence they can fuck off.

That's in America.

In Europe employees have a bit more to say.

You missed an option. Maintain your work-life boundaries, tell your boss's boss you're sorry, but you have plans, and that he'll have a better chance of getting things like that from you with more lead time. I'm pretty sure David's arguing we should do that.

ETA: Actually I really think the idea of "work-life boundaries" is a useful framing to have alongside "work-life balance"

There's another missing option, which is your boss makes you get it done whatever the cost and your boss is the one telling his boss next time do things with time (like in R. Hamming's You and Your Research talk)

tell your boss's boss you're sorry, but you have plans, and that he'll have a better chance of getting things like that from you with more lead time.

Well, I think the actual answer here is that your boss doesn't ask you to do things like this in the first place. When he or she asks you to you're going to be hard-pressed to say no.

That depends entirely on your confidence in your job security/your ability to find another job.

So what has that got to do with the advertising campaign and calling it a shame and dystopian?

Technology is an enabler. If you want to work, the advertised technology enables you to work. If you don't want to work, the technology does not hold a knife to your throat and force you to work. This is coming from someone who refuses to take a smartphone from work because it raises expectations about answering phone calls and emails over evenings and holidays.

I do appreciate VPN though, because it means I can leave early on Friday evening if I have something fun to do, and catch up on the work on Sunday night. And that's why DHH argument comes across as so silly, because it is dystopian not to allow technology that allows me to time shift my work.

By DHH's same metric, the following are dystopian because they enable you to work outside your office: Remote desktop, VPN, Google Apps, SaaS offerings, web based tools, smartphones with work email.

Google even has a similar pitch for their Google apps:

>Need to attend a meeting from your kid’s soccer game?

>Access your work from any device with a web browser – your computer, phone or tablet – and stay productive even when you’re away from the office

>Google Apps makes it easy to stay connected to projects you’re working on and the people you work with, no matter where you are or what device you’re using.

Perhaps because history has shown advertising to be an effective tool for shifting perceptions and turning previously unacceptable things into the expected norm.

Ads like these can have a funny effect, such as making the idea of working during your child's recital or soccer game okay. Notice the specific example Microsoft provides, where the child is about to score a goal while the parent is turned away while on his cell phone (presumably doing "work"). This is ghastly to me.

This is exactly the position I would take. However, I have little doubt of my ability to find another job quickly (and the resources to weather a period of unemployment fairly easily) so doing something that puts my job at risk in service of my principles is a relatively easy stance for me to take.

For those who have less-portable skills, or are in a more competitive labor market, telling your boss to go to hell is a much more dubious choice.

Given that the task is creating a "weekly metrics spreadsheet," something the boss had the time to plan for, I agree with you. But I remember my younger years very clearly, when something that sat on your director's desk for a week would plop down on yours at 6PM with a next-day deadline. Balking is a less attractive long-term proposition than grinding for a while. At that point, having the mobility options presented in the advert could be attractive.

At more senior levels, shit happens - servers blow up, deals come out of nowhere, and your top client with millions of dollars in arrears declares bankruptcy. It's generally unreasonable to declare all those situations unworthy of your consideration, let alone time, ex ante.

"At more senior levels, shit happens - servers blow up, deals come out of nowhere, and your top client with millions of dollars in arrears declares bankruptcy. It's generally unreasonable to declare all those situations unworthy of your consideration, let alone time, ex ante."

You're just reinforcing the culture that it's ok for these things to steal you life from you.

- Outside of a young startup you should be paying someone to monitor/fix your servers overnight as their job.

- It's very very rare that a deal shows up that can't wait until morning and by handling it right away you are telling the client that you'll drop everything to deal with them...which isn't a good or sustainable practice.

- What could you possibly do at 10pm one night when a client declares bankruptcy? Deal with it in the morning.

By not declaring all these situations unworthy of your consideration/time ahead of time you are saying to everyone that it's okay to interrupt you at any time for any reason...fuck whatever else you are doing at the time.

Such a shitty deal.

If you're in a product-driven business, then the idea of working during appetizers is pretty horrific. If you're in a client driven business, it's just what clients demand, and if you don't give it to them they'll find someone else who will.

That said, there is a flip side to the coin. In a client-driven business, you tend to have more flexibility when something isn't on fire. I used to work at a law firm and now I work for a judge. I liked my work-life balance substantially more at the firm. Before, if the baby had a rough night, I'd just sleep late and roll in at 10. Not so now. Uncle Sam expects me to be at my desk by 8:30 sharp. Before, if I wasn't busy I'd take a long lunch with my wife. Now, I've got 1 hour for lunch, minus 10 minutes to get through security. I don't take work home anymore, but I also don't get to go home when I don't have work.

So I guess I don't find that Microsoft ad as troubling as David does. To me it doesn't signify filling all the crevices of my life with work, but rather having the flexibility to do my work when I want to and need to.

A client driven business doesn't have to give in to every demand any more than a product driven one does.

David's contention is ultimately that work-life boundaries can result in better work than simply being on call at all times, because people are more productive when work is not in conflict with their significant personal relationships.

If David is right, then client driven businesses that maintain robust boundaries will perform better than those that do not.

If 24/7 responsiveness is the highest priority for your clients, the implication is that they themselves do not understand the value of work-life balance and that by going along with their demands, you are acting as a facilitator of a dysfunctional behavior that is also bad for you and your business.

It depends on the firm. Some legal and accounting firms offer 24/7 responsiveness to clients, and charge accordingly. Other firms provide work-life balance to their employees and make it clear to their customers that they won't be available after Xpm, or before Yam, and correspondingly charge significantly less for their services.

Moreover, the more-responsive firms compensate for the worsened work-life balance by paying their employees more. If employees would rather have work-life balance, they can always jump to a more balanced firm for a smaller salary.

You don't actually know any of this as fact, do you?

It's the difference between optimizing for latency and optimizing for throughput. Clients tend to want to optimize for latency rather than throughput. To them, a "good enough" analysis by tomorrow morning (before some important meeting) is often much more valuable than a perfect analysis tomorrow afternoon (after the meeting is over).

This is true, but it sounds as though this is just because your clients are facilitating this kind of behavior in their clients by not scheduling the meeting for a time when the material can be prepared without people working in their family time.

Presumably they do this because they expect to be able to lean on you when the work needs to be done.

>steal you life from you

I love what I do - when something comes up at 11PM or 4AM I'm jumping, not groaning, to the phone. I can reciprocate that by reserving the option to take long lunches and spontaneous time off when I am not needed. It is a mix of gradients, not a balance of discretes.

>What could you possibly do at 10pm one night when a client declares bankruptcy? Deal with it in the morning.

Get a stay put on an account which, as it happened, had a large withdrawal by international wire scheduled for the morning.

Everything doesn't need to propel you from your seat. But I find value in being able to triage. This is not for everyone - I am slow to get stressed or agitated and can sleep on an urgent-in-the-morning-but-not-tonight issue. I also work with smart people - they don't shove their bad planning onto my evening.

To be honest, I'm also someone who doesn't mind jumping online to fix something quickly in off hours. But I think the ad that prompted the post by dhh is part of a trend in our society that is only going to get worse. It's ok for you and me who can find a job in a week, but that isn't most people. Most people don't have the option of telling their boss that it's after hours. They'll lose their job, or significantly endanger their job/raise/bonus/performance eval/etc. if they do so.

There has been an amazing increase in productivity over the last 20+ years, but all it's led to is companies making their employees do more. The ads just reinforce that this is ok. That you are at the mercy of your job 24/7/365. It's a disturbing trend.

The product is named "Office365" after all. It is paving the way for that future in a not too subtle way...

I have to really agree with this, well put. I'm FT at a startup now, love everyone I work with (we're a very small team of 5) and we all feel an urgency to 'make things happen'. I'm the oldest person in the group, have a 2yr old and another one on the way. I've been lucky (sad to say) to be able to work at home a few days of the week and I'm usually out of the ofc, heading home at 5/5:30. I have to because of family.

When I didn't have a family, I worked 10-12 hours a day, no problem. Mostly because I wanted to and not because it was required. I feel like no job (unless it's your own making) is worth the crap that dhh talks about in his post. Sadly with tech, it is definitely headed in that direction.

Ultimately, being FT is not a good thing in tech. You rarely work only 40 hours, there's always pressure to work on vacation (such bs that one is), weekends, etc - basically the MS posters. The only way to avoid this is to be the boss (altho that has certain requirements as well) or be a contractor with very fixed boundaries (I simply say "I have 9-5 M-F available only. I"m not available for emergencies or weekend work."). And for the stock; unless you're a higher level employee in the company that can negotiate a great stock and benefits package, you get nothing compared to those at the top.

So the ultimate question is: are you willing to be a wage slave that makes someone else's dreams come true?

That said, tech is _the_ platform to make any dream happen as long as you're creative and persistent.

I would try to look at this in a different way: Is there some kind of flexibility that your employer could offer you in return that would allow it to ask for this kind of flexibility from you? If there is, why is this a problem?

Looking at things more historically, yes we are seeing work show up in more areas of our lives, but we are also getting a bunch of flexibility in return: e.g. who has set work hours? who needs to get approval to go on vacation? Is anyone tracking your time in/out of the office? when there isn't some emergency, can't you just leave work any time you want to take care of personal business?

Maybe it depends on where you work, but I don't find myself worrying about this kind of stuff. And to be fair, I don't ever have the experience of "the boss asking me to make him a spreadsheet at 7PM for the next day" but I have had the "this server just fell over and users are complaining, can you help debug it right now?" experience.

> But I remember my younger years very clearly, when something that sat on your director's desk for a week would plop down on yours at 6PM with a next-day deadline

That's a sign of a badly-run company. It happens, but by no means all companies are like that (and in an area like IT with generally high mobility, it might be a sign that you should be updating your CV). There _are_ genuine emergencies, as you say, but they're typically rare.

Freelancers and consultants have one more option: offer the boss two choices: (1) do the work during regular business hours, or (2) do the work now for twice your normal rate. Actually, in-house employees have this option too, it's just less socially acceptable to ask for overtime pay in many organizations.

Sometimes business emergencies do just pop up, but it's surprising how quickly an emergency dissipates as soon as there's an extra cost associated with solving it (or not surprising, depending on how jaded you are). Assigning explicit costs to emergency work is an easy way to make a team more efficient.

DHH's argument has nothing to do with ranting on Microsoft then, he should be yelling at the companies that Microsoft is creating Office 365 for.

I have a saying "It's on-call, not beck-and-call".

>ETA: Actually I really think the idea of "work-life boundaries" is a useful framing to have alongside "work-life balance"

When I hear an employer talk about 'work-life balance' I hear "we expect you to be available all the time, but you can take comp-time in a less formal way when we don't need you." I think that is the standard interpretation these days.

"Work-life boundaries" sounds like something different entirely.

> also makes linkbaity, low-content posts

You were expecting otherwise from a company?

Whenever there's money to be made, expect that someone will try.

Well, I'm pretty sure selling books is not their biggest slice of revenue. In situations like this I prefer to think of the post as coming from the author of a book which might give him some additional knowledge points on the issue at hand. David surely is one of the main advocates of remote work. In my opinion, this one it not linkbaity but insightful.

DHH's arguing that you're missing the very important 4th option here:

4) "Sorry, I'm busy with other things tonight."

The problem is that if your boss knows that option is available, he'll use it more. That may not affect you but it affects the marginal case, where the only thing stopping the boss from overloading the worker is the fixed working hours. All change happens at the marginal case.

Look at the pictures in the post. Both pictures show a person working while actively ignoring the person they are with.

Missing a goal at your kid's soccer game? Pretending to pay attention to your date while working under the table?

I think that's what David is addressing.

I think no matter what MS will do David won't be happy.

Example:

MS creates online-powered tools: David is not happy because it means MS is advocating ignoring everything around you while working.

MS does not create online-powered tools: David is not happy because MS does not create online-powered tools like, for example, google does.

It's not the product, it's the pitch.

As I noted in another comment[1], Google's pitch is this:

>For your business, this means every employee and everyone you work with can be productive from anywhere, using any device with an Internet connection.

>Free your team from cubicles

>Access your work from any device with a web browser – your computer, phone or tablet – and stay productive even when you’re away from the office.

>Need to attend a meeting from your kid’s soccer game?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740512

The ads with the silhouettes are a lot more in-your-face about fostering a lack of work/life balance, though. I wouldn't characterize it dystopian so much as it is tone-deaf, out-of-touch, and heavy-handed. Which is par for the course for Microsoft marketing. To me, it's less egregiously disagreeable than it is benignly mediocre. Oh MS, you're so corporate.

To expand on Apocryphon's point, it's not the product, it's the dystopian advertising around it. I don't look at those ads and go "oh goody", instead I go "oh God!".

Getting work done away from the office? Beautiful. Great. Love it. I'd love to be able to get some work done on the train, or waiting for a plane. I'd love to be able to shoot a quick reply to my boss while waiting to check out at the grocery store. That's empowerment, and I'm all for it. They could have created ads about this. They let me turn down time into productivity. Awesome.

But instead they created ads about how instead of doing things I enjoy doing, I can work instead. Missing your child's big moment because your nose is buried in work? Check. Ignoring your friends/date at dinner time because your nose is buried in work? Check check.

I want tools that let me more more efficiently from more places. I want tools that enable me to go to dinner with my friends and not have to look at my phone.

Somebody don't likey teh David much?

Bingo.

And how many people, later in life, are going to go "damn, I really wish I had finished the Schiller report on time" as opposed to "damn, I wish I had worked harder on my relationship with Jill".

To you, Microsoft is selling the concept of the "freedom" to attend to minor work-related tasks without having to go into the office. But to management, Microsoft is selling the concept of being able to reach out and task their people for more hours during the day, to improve productivity.

This is a mess, and anybody who thinks that Office 365 is going to improve the "life" side of "work-life balance" needs to put down the Kool-aid. Bad bosses -- and they are legion -- will take advantage of this capability.

David is right to call this out.

I'd rather have my wife ignore me for a few minutes to deal with a work e-mail than not go out to dinner with me at all because she has to stay late to make sure the boss is fully prepared for the big meeting tomorrow. Because that, realistically, is the alternative.

Is that realistic state of affairs something you love, and should be encouraged, or would you rather have clearer work life boundaries so your wife could also choose to spend time with you without worrying about work?

I do love it, because its the same blurred boundaries that let me take a long lunch, leave at 3pm, or just spend an hour doing personal stuff during the day.

I don't see why those things require blurred boundaries.

"I'd rather have the ability to edit that Excel spreadsheet during happy hour than have to shift my plans around to do it some other time."

And if this becomes a trend and lots of people start popping open their laptops at happy hours (go-getters probably tend to hang out with other go-getters), happy hours won't be very happy anymore.

I think his argument is that Microsoft is enabling actions such as your bosses while selling it as a boon to you.

There are times when things "have" to get done but this sales pitch isn't about that. This pitch is about blending work and personal life to such a point as to there being indistinguishable. That makes for a very crappy life for the worker.

I feel like your hypothetical boss in this hypothetical situation is not very organized as he didn't think about the weekly metrics spreadsheet until 7pm the night before it is due. It might be time to change hypothetical teams.

DHH has some interesting observations on remote work, putting his money very much where his mouth is (which immediately differentiates his actions on this from mere opinion of others). It is not surprising that he comments on things related to a discussion that he has long been involved with.

If something comes up in the security industry, I expect Schneier to comment on it. If remote work comes up, DHH will likely chime in. Either may or may not get voted up on HN if it promotes discussion.

I would reply with the following famous quote-

Your lack of planning is not my emergency

No you won't. I bet that most of the hotshots in this thread that say they will tell their boss to go fuck himself will actually do the work and shut their mouths.

I will reply with the following famous quote -

Your lack of planning is not my emergency

The way I've heard it is: "A lack of planning on your part, does not constitute and emergency my part."

I keep seeing this or similar comments. A reply like this would almost certainly equate for many people to quitting their job on the spot.

I'm puzzled why so many people think everyone has this luxury.

There have been many times in my life where I've had bosses make shitty unfair demands, and while I would have loved to stick it to The Man and thrown off my proletarian chains the reality was I needed the damn job to pay my bills and quitting on the spot was not a sensible option.

These sorts of discussions remind me of times I've hung out with guys who've witness some sort of verbal altercation, with somebody then insisting that if anyone every spoke to them that way they would kick his ass into next week. But we all knew how easy it was to talk like a tough guy when it wasn't your ass on the line.

Yes, if your boss is an asshole then you need to figure out how to get to a better situation. But telling people to take a hike is not everyone's best career move, and having the option to make a bad situation a bit less onerous is a good thing.

The problem is with the whole concept of a need for 'weekly' metrics spreadsheet suddenly appearing in 7pm.

There are various options for fixing this problem:

1. Assigning and scheduling someone to do them weekly on the day before that meeting within business hours.

2. Implementing automation for the weekly metrics spreadsheets, to be stored or emailed at the scheduled time.

3. Othwerwise, accepting the fact that you won't have all the ponies you want by arbitrary deadlines.

By the way, this is a choice for the boss to make, not you. And none of these options involve doing something at 7pm.

Like others have said, if your boss is calling you at 7PM to do a worksheet for a meeting the next day, one he has likely know about for a while, then worrying about your work/life balance is the least of your problems.

As it's not so much the occasional 'Crap, we need X stat!' that is a problem, it's the constant assumption that your boss can call on you any time and _expect_ you will comply.

That's just a shitty boss. Regardless of their title.

how about you have some self respect and let your boss know that that request crosses a line.

Option 4: Say no. TPS reports can wait

Setting aside the fact that if you've got metrics that can be compiled into a spreadsheet, you should probably also have a system to do that automagically -- how about option 5) Remind your boss to call someone in a different time-zone?

Side note: Not sure if they still do it, but the IT team for Norwegian "local" airline Wideroe, used to rent some offices in Thailand, and have employees work 6 months from there (with families) -- in order to provide 24 hour support provided by the same team that did the rest of the work.

Do people really do this? Maybe I'm a bad boss, but I wouldn't dream of calling staff out of hours for stuff like this...

There are bosses who will do this just so they can have some sense of power over you, never mind whether they actually need the results or not. Pray you never have one of those.

Hypothetical 2: You get a call from your boss at 7pm for the third time this week and the seventh time this month. Because you would like to keep your job, you have three options:

1. Cancel your evening plans and get the work completed.

2. Pop open your laptop, skip the second act of La traviata, and kind of get something that sort of looks correct done in the lobby.

3. Tell your boss that you'll be happy to get it done with sufficient lead time, but cannot do so this time. Then, skip the second act while you polish up your resume.

4. Not bring that stupid cell phone to the opera house in the first place

> I'm a go-getter and want to help him out

It's language trap. Go-getter is just a tag. It sounds nice, but in your context it just means "I'm ok with altering my personal life when my boss asks".

Here are some more options if you are not a 'go-getter':

4. Ask your boss to delay the meeting so you have enough time to do the spreadsheet in your own time.

5. Ask your boss if the spreadsheet is absolutely necessary for the meeting. Given that there was no time to have the "proper" document done, would it be possible to have a "high-level" version only? Maybe I can send the complete spreadsheet after the meeting via email?

6. The last-resort option would be proposing compensation with free time. "I will arrive early and do the spreadsheet early, but I will leave after lunch / will not come to work on friday". Make sure that you earn personal hours here: if you arrive 1 hour earlier, you should leave 2 hours earlier. Don't accept more money for that overtime.

In addition to those two options, start telling your boss (softly) that having you prepare a spreadsheet manually every week is not very productive. Propose spending some time automating the process so at least it takes 15 minutes instead of several hours.

While David's constant MS-bashing makes me weary to his writing most of the time, in this case, he's absolutely correct to call Microsoft out on this advertising. People using their electronic devices and ignoring people with them is already a large problem and is sucking the humanity out of humanity. Encouraging this sort of behavior is deplorable, but obviously Microsoft has got to sell a product and this sort of stuff appeals to management.

Your scenario assumes that you're going to a bar, working while attaching no significance to anyone else in the process. These ads actively encourage ignoring your partner on a date or your kid at a game to get work done. Call me old-fashioned, but that picture simply isn't correct.

> David's arguing that the third option is the least conducive to work-life balance.

Where does David say this, and why do we consistently upvote arguments to the extreme at HN?

DHH is simply saying that encouraging people to work during their free time is a bad thing, and remote access doesn't magically make it okay.

Since you offered an example, let me give you another. I have a good friend who came down with the flu early last week (not "flu" as in cold, but the full-fledged flu). All she wanted to do was rest, but because she can work from home her boss insisted she pull 10 hour days while in bed with a fever. They would never have wanted her in the office in that condition, but somehow remote work made it okay. She's still not healthy and hoping to sleep through the weekend to recover.

Apparently whoever made this at MS did so on their phone during happy hour because its some of the worst marketing I've ever seen.

If you're a 'Go-Getter', you've probably already recognized that your boss's lack of planning will impede your fast-track career.

How are you planning to unseat him or find a new boss who can help fulfill your ambitions?

The point is that it's not ok for your boss to call for work at 7pm. It isn't.

Increasing your efficiency in responding to that call is a step in the wrong direction.

Plus the images show someone actively ignoring the person they are with to do work on the side, which also isn't ok in my book.

There's nothing wrong with increasing your efficiency in responding to that call.

We need to distinguish between the technological and the social. Increasing your ability to work in more times and more places is great! It means that if you really need it, you can use it instead of just being screwed.

Socially, we need to realize that this incredible ability needs to only be used when truly necessary. Dumbing down the technology to not support it is not the answer.

Unless I'm paid to be available, I'm not taking the call.

Businesses buys your time according to the contracted deal; a set amount of time, to do a certain task(s), in exchange for money. Now, no business I know of gives out free money, even if you ask. So, why on earth would any one give them extra time on a task for no money?

Try it. Go ask your boss for some money for doing nothing. In fact, phone late at night and ask...

4. Don't answer the phone at 7pm when you see it's your boss.

You could also say no, but Von Trapp's is a damn good option too unless you get a bocce ball through the screen ;)

Microsoft is an enterprise software company and these advertisements are targeted to the bosses who bully people into working nights and weekends from home/bed/the bar/ their kid's soccer game, not to the people who are actually working nights and weekends. The fact that they've gone for brutal realism, if anything, just goes to show they're accepting this fact rather than pretending they are in the business of bringing joy to people's lives.

As someone who just threw his smartphone out of a car this morning due to the stresses of having to work before my contracted hours, they can fuck off.

Waking up to work and going to sleep with work - not for me.

Apologies for the language.

> Apologies for the language.

None needed. Certain words exist to convey a very strong sense of emotion. The topic you're talking about is obviously one of those.

IMO, you used the word perfectly, and I hope you did it to their faces too :)

(They've been doing the same to me this week)

They did indeed get it to the face (well by email).

Thou who hire third parties to validate our dev process (which is a fucking shambles) and take advice from said third party, despite us crowing the same message for 6 fucking years, will recieveth face full of nasty language.

Quit your job then. There are plenty of better situations out there, if you tolerate it then you're helping no-one - and definitely not yourself.

Not that easy when you have to work from home due to a disabled child and wife and don't get any help from the state.

Working on my own business as an exit plan.

I struggle with calling this dystopian, even though I partially agree. I think it's great that we push work-life balance, and I believe we should disconnect but I can see where these advertisements might be comforting to some.

Back in the 70's my dad worked in an office and wasn't home until 7:30. He only made it to a handful of sporting events and school events. If you asked him, in the 70's, would he prefer to be in the office making that phone call or be sitting at <insert kid's> <insert event> he would choose the latter without hesitation.

For a more recent example, my sister is in sales and will get phone calls any hour of the day. For her, being able to go out and do things with the occasional 5 minute interruption is an absolute game-changer. Not just answer phone calls, but to bring up the customer information and maybe write a quick email.

i agree, and i'm not sure this "pitch" can be really pinned on microsoft (alone), the entire tech ecosystem of the 00's made it happen, starting with blackberry, then apple, the wireless carriers, etc. it's a larger cultural/technology shift.

Why are you trying so hard to be an apologist for a shitty advertising campaign?

Those are examples of terrible work life balance that would become only slightly less terrible with Office 365's version of the future. Meanwhile, Microsoft is promoting that slightly less terrible future as a Good Thing™.

It's interesting, DHH has a book to pitch, and he has all these link-baiting, low quality posts that automatically get upvoted because it's DHH. And surprise, they're all about how working remotely is the best situation for everyone. It's not. Just like every other working style/paradigm, it works for some, not for others.

How is this post about working remotely being the best situation for everyone?

How is it linkbait?

It is. Because he's just over analyzing a bunch of ads. And picking on Microsoft is bound to draw the usual startup hate crowd. The ads just showcase the fact that you can access your work files online anywhere, which was previously unheard of anywhere. Twisting that and putting on dystopian airs is just link baiting

Firstly, accessing your work files anywhere has long been enabled by Dropbox, Google Docs, and iCloud, so there's nothing that was previously unheard of.

Secondly, the complaint is that Microsoft is celebrating people being distracted from family events by the demands of work. I think that's a valid complaint and not something to be encouraged.

I'm talking about Enterprises (fortune companies), that've been tied to IBM or Microsoft, access to files everywhere is new. And google apps for enterprises doesn't preceed o365 by that much

Fair enough. I guess you agree with the other point then.

So it is, as with most things, complicated. Yes, having to work during your kid's soccer game is not great, but having the option makes some things possible.

Clearly there are toxic work situations where "the boss" is always demanding more than is possible and requiring a lot of free "overtime" to get it done. And this technology is an enabler for that type of supervisor, but it isn't the cause of their mismanagement. Bad bosses are bad, they ask you stay late all the time, they ask you to come in and work weekends for this "sprint" they put a spin on it that it is good for the company but at the end of the day they are just trying to maximize productivity at the expense of their employee's work/life balance.

But there are also things that come up, they come up in random time zones far away and sometimes they need you to work at odd hours. At those times, when it is an exception that you're going to be working at an odd time and unexpectedly, it can be convenient that you can do that work on what you have with you (your phone or tablet) than feeling the need to carry around a larger amount of stuff 'just in case.'

That said, I don't know here Microsoft gets their ad agencies but this one and some of the ones poking at Apple are probably not the best way to express their intent. And sometimes a bad advertising pitch is identified by how easily it can be used against the company that funded it.

The rest seems to be 37signals taking advantage of a wonderful "straight line" as comedians would say, and spinning it to their advantage.

For the millionth time. If you're going to tell me you don't trust me to work from home you'd better not be pushing to outsource to India. I mean how can you trust someone on the other side of the planet but you can't trust me 10 miles away?

I think it's because programmers in India cost less than you. It's easier to trust someone that cost less - if they screw up you've lost considerably less money.

I was ready to post some counterpoints, but that was before I clicked on the link to the full Microsoft ad. The images are truly awful. An example promoting that during my lunch, while walking in a national park, I should participate in meetings is ridiculous. A guy collapsed in bed clinging to his tablet that's pulsing with new work? Right.

Also, just try getting a decent cell signal on the rim of the Grand Canyon. And the wi-fi options in national parks are decidedly subpar.

The fact that I know this saddens me greatly.

The wi-fi options in national parks is fantastic.

There isn't any. That's the way it should be.

Microsoft has this weird knack for anti-marketing. They did this shit, too, with Windows phone. The launch campaign was basically a bunch of ads saying that using your phone was bad.

Ironically these ads have the complete opposite message than the original Windows Phone ads.

"Abortions for all!"

"Boo!"

"Very well, no abortions for anyone."

"Boo!"

These ads are just fine for the product, which allows you to work anywhere, and is what they are touting. The only reason they are being hated on right now is because it is Microsoft, and around here Microsoft Is Evil.

No. They are being criticized because they are trying to persuade that it's good for bosses to demand that people work instead of paying attention to their families in order to sell tools that allow people to work anywhere to corporations.

Why aren't we outraged at Dropbox for letting you have access to your work documents at home so that you can work late into the night? Or Google so I can work on that spreadsheet during dinner and until late in the morning?

All companies that push cloud based easily accessible products will tout how you can work / play whenever / however you want thanks to their new tech.

This is just faux outrage because it is Microsoft.

There is no outrage at the technology or the idea of being able to work when you want.

There is outrage at an advertising campaign that celebrates being distracted by work from important family events.

Yet the ads are saying exactly the opposite. You don't have to be totally absent using 365 like you could before the product was available to you (which is a good thing when you are forced to work, vs not being there at all). People are just trying to find reasons to not like the product to fuel the MS hate in my opinion.

I think underlying the dislike of the ad is that it glorifies a situation where people as you say are forced to work.

Certainly if you are forced to work at the whim of your boss, being able to do so while being able to attend a family event is better than simply not being allowed to attend family events.

Being waterboarded is better than the thumbscrews, but most of us would prefer not to have to choose one of them.

This comes back to my other comment in another thread, that everyone should be outraged at the companies enforcing this type of work/life balance, not Microsoft.

Microsoft is putting large amounts of money into celebrating this kind of behavior. Why on earth should that be ignored?

I don't think it's because it's MS, but the history of MS proves them to be the perfect company to promote a campaign like this. It's like a bank advertising that compounding interest will get you more money if you don't give any to charity. It's advertising a distasteful lifestyle.

Those images are comically off-putting. The father looks like he's missing his son score a goal because he's on his cell. The guy in happy hour looks like he's awkwardly suffering boredom.

First of all remote work is not only for the employee. The startup community should know better that working can also include monitoring, getting up to date on things, and even meetings.

Having a coworker that lives across the globe and needs a quick line edit help shouldn't punish you by means of staying at home OR him to a strict off-hours schedule.

That's all part of the work from home culture and tools.

I find the image of the woman typing away at her computer while her date, boyfriend, husband, coworker even sits attentive to her, to be appallingly rude. Now I am much older than nearly all of you and I grew up when the only electronic distraction was a portable radio. I remember being at a restaurant with a date. She told me that she liked being with me because I paid attention to her and ignored all the people around us. My partner and I have been together for 12 years, but I still pay attention to her like it was out first date.

Of all the things in the world to get indignant about this poster ranks pretty low in my opinion.

Obviously it is some kind of ironic marketing campaign. The full pr is here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/nov13/11-06ge... I don't get it because I'm picturing people that are working 8h in the office and then working during the night thanks to Office 365.

The best part is the illustration of the person having completely passed out in bed, still clinging on to the tablet. Wow, that's sad.

I thought the posters were a joke at first, but I think the point is that people already do this. The posters aren't saying "now you can work from bed!" It's saying: you already work from bed, let me help you with that.

I get work done during work hours.

#GetItDoneAtWork

microsoft's 'get it done' ad campaign reads more like a parody of bad marketing than anything else. The SNL skit almost writes itself.

Incredible low-content article for how many points it has. Terrible linkbait. It seems more like HN likes to upvote anything anti-Microsoft. If you actually look at Microsoft's ads, they are definitely poking fun at these use-cases, while highlighting that these are actual REAL-WORLD use-cases, that people already actually do.

For a second there, I thought DHH turned over a new leaf and wasn't going to drop the f-bomb in a post... wrongo...

That said, I agree fully with his thoughts from an employee perspective. However, MSFT is trying to appeal decision makers who write the check for their software, not the employees.

I think some are missing the major point. If you are working from every where there is no "life" in the "work-life" balance message that they are trying to convey. "Work anywhere", yes. "Work-life balance", no.

So everyone supporting this, don't you have on calls in your team? (assuming you work on a live product). Don't you have subject matter expertise split enough that you might be needed when your component conks? Don't you have aggressive targets that your whole team is rushing towards once in a while?

It might be a systemic issue. It might also just be an one off situation. You should fight back if the boss is just being lazy / incompetent, but most of the situations I have seen have been way too deep for the boss / current oncall to handle. You just suck it up and get to work - that's all. The onus is on you to equip your boss to handle it himself.

As always different shades - there are many cases where a set timetable isn't an option. In those cases, I welcome such tools that give me the option to work from anywhere rather than forcing me to drive back to office.

Perhaps they should rebrand it, "Office Eternity".

So, the idea is making remote work so unappealing that employees reject it actively?

Eh, there are also less dystopian versions of this ad. Like the one where someone works on a presentation on the train while going to a customer meeting - more about squeezing out the completely wasted hours than about working during the really rewarding parts of your life.

Microsoft is a toxic workplace.

classic FUD. look it up, whippersnappers.

Isn't that the pitch of everything from Remote desktop to VPN?

From http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/benefits.html

>For your business, this means every employee and everyone you work with can be productive from anywhere, using any device with an Internet connection.

>Free your team from cubicles

>Access your work from any device with a web browser – your computer, phone or tablet – and stay productive even when you’re away from the office.

>Need to attend a meeting from your kid’s soccer game? Edit a spreadsheet while at the airport waiting for a flight? Respond to an email from a hotel business center computer? Google Apps makes it easy to stay connected to projects you’re working on and the people you work with, no matter where you are or what device you’re using.

Putting Microsoft and dystopian into the headline does get a lot more clicks, upvotes and outrage though.

Or really even what 37signals own features are implying:

"It’s just the right amount of Basecamp when you’re on-the-go."

https://basecamp.com/mobile

Create an enemy. Great marketing DHH.

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