Out of curiosity, where do you live?
2,422 karma · joined November 9, 2020
Former head of product and lead for assessments @ Triplebyte.
I think it's simpler than that: we sold out.
Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.
Some of them drank the kool-aid and became financiers themselves, corrupted by the same forces that corrupt bankers or politicians. Some of them sold out because hey, ping-pong table in the office, that's pretty cool! evil never has ping-pong tables! Some of them sold out because times are hard and they wanted a job. And some of them don't realize they have sold out, because tech culture does a very good job of propagandizing selling out as a virtue.
But it isn't. There's a reason that every company wants that top 0.001%. Employees who give a damn and can be trusted to get things done effectively without supervision or managerial pressure are rare. Even at the best organizations, they're often a minority. At weaker organizations, and (typically) at older and larger ones, they're somewhere between "very rare" and "totally nonexistent".
If you're the latest highly-funded startup, maybe you can pay enough and create a good enough work environment to attract that person. But what if you're a random 30-year-old contracting firm in Overland Park, Kansas, paying $85k a year for software engineers? Do you think you'll attract that vanishingly rare talent? Can you rely on the idea that all of your engineers are so motivated and so skilled?
If you want to argue for that level of managerial hands-off-ness, you can do that. It's a legitimate managerial philosophy, and it might even be the right one! But I think it's hard to deny that many people don't think that's the right managerial philosophy, and that's all that they need to believe to favor RTO without any particular malice.
My point isn't to argue for RTO. Again, I run a remote company, and if you ask me, I'll tell you your company should probably be remote, too (depending on exactly what you do). My point is to argue that people who are arguing for it need not be doing so out of any particular malice.
And why Feb 1? Who decides what the reasonable timeline is? How sure are you that they aren't playing political games? How do you measure their performance? Did the engineer abandon some on-call thing to get it done? Did they pull a more senior person off of their job to help? Did the manager who gets blamed for all this choose who to hire?
Management isn't binary in this way, and when managers try to make it binary, a lot of people (rightly) complain. And I'd bet that many of the people who complain about that are exactly the same people who are here arguing for remote work (not least because I am in both groups).
Quantifying work to such an extent that you can detect any slacking or poor-quality work is one of the fastest ways to make it horrible for employees. Unscrupulous employees abuse Goodhart's Law to hell and back, scrupulous ones get punished for doing important work that didn't make it onto the quantified metrics, and work becomes more about covering your ass than it is about getting stuff done.
That's possible, yes. But I'm in as good as position as anyone to know, and as far as I can tell, that does not appear to be true of any of the people I'm interacting with. (I do agree with your preceding point, but that's a bit off-topic.)
> Rather than improve their accountability systems so that they can trust their workers more
Accountability trades off against other things, though. If it's by some objective standard, you run into Goodhart's Law almost immediately. If it's by subjective standards, you run into politics and personal biases (the exact biases you're concerned about, by the way!). It's this effect to "improve accountability" that leads to metrics on your git commits or programs that watch whether you're moving your mouse or stack-ranking or whatever else.
You could say "well they should improve their accountability to something not stupid" - sure, but organizational and managerial talent is limited. You don't run a business in an abstract ideal vacuum, you run it in a real world of human beings who are sometimes selfish, biased, petty, inattentive, stupid, egotistical, or any number of other things.
Given the practical fact that accountability has costs and is often done badly, avoiding the need for two much of it is not as unreasonable as it sounds.
> Hustle culture itself encodes a sense of superiority that serves as emotional and philosophical justification for the power of business leaders over their employees.
I agree with that, yes. Hustle culture is not a good thing. But buying into something dumb is different from malice or some deliberate effort to suppress workers.
> It is difficult to see any real moral difference between wanting to exercise power for its own sake and imposing uncompensated costs on employees to avoid doing the hard work of being a leader.
Even if there isn't a moral difference (and I think there is probably one, for reasons already described), there is a practical difference in the nature of the problem and the solutions to it.
> When leaders propose arguments for a policy that do not actually justify the policy
But I do think they justify it - or at least, that a reasonable person could think that they do. I think you're sort of assuming management of spherical cows on a frictionless plane here, without any of the extremely messy business than comes with any organization involving a large number of human beings.
It's very possible that I won't, no. But I also don't think I'm naive.
I run a company. I founded it without funding from venture capitalists, so that no one will ever be able to tell me to sell anyone out. One of the first things I wrote down was that I would never lie, mislead, or otherwise tell anything less than the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And right now, my company is functioning and profitable, while doing - at least as far as I can tell - no harm to anyone.
Yeah, being a horrible human being means you're free to do everything to your game-theoretic advantage. But you can choose not to do that. You can win without choosing to do that. You just have to know, crystal clear, from day one, that you'd rather make one million dollars ethically than two million dollars unethically.
Similarly, will people sometimes abuse your kindness? Yeah, sure. But you can give your kindness knowing that that's part of the cost of doing business - especially if you're successful enough that you can afford the loss.
You ever read Les Miserables? There's a scene where Jean Valjean, who has been taken in briefly by a kindly bishop, steals some of his valuables out of desperation. He's caught by the police, who arrest him and bring him back:
“Ah! here you are!” [the Bishop] exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. “I am glad
to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too,
which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get
two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and
spoons?”
Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop
with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.
“Monseigneur,” said the brigadier of gendarmes, “so what this man said
is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is
running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this
silver—”
“And he told you,” interposed the Bishop with a smile, “that it had
been given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had
passed the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him
back here? It is a mistake.”
“In that case,” replied the brigadier, “we can let him go?”
“Certainly,” replied the Bishop.
The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.
“Is it true that I am to be released?” he said, in an almost
inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.
“Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?” said one of the
gendarmes.
“My friend,” resumed the Bishop, “before you go, here are your
candlesticks. Take them.”
He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and
brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering
a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the
Bishop.
Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks
mechanically, and with a bewildered air.
“Now,” said the Bishop, “go in peace. By the way, when you return, my
friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always
enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with
anything but a latch, either by day or by night.”
Then, turning to the gendarmes:—
“You may retire, gentlemen.”
The gendarmes retired.
Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.
The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:—
“Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money
in becoming an honest man.”
Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything,
remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he
uttered them. He resumed with solemnity:—
“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good.
It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts
and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”The value in excess wealth is what you can do with it. You can find a person in need and hand them a thousand dollars for fun. You can fund some program your town needs. You can build a "third space" for your community. There's so much you can do with wealth that isn't just hoarding it!
Personally, my goal is to have enough money to buy a giant mansion on the edge of some town and be the weird rich lady you can go to with your problems. If I get richer than that, great! It'll be a bigger mansion and a bigger town. But if you gave me a billion dollars tomorrow, I'd just use it to be a bigger weird rich lady you can go to with your problems.
But if I were to play devil's advocate?
- Because you think the apparently qualified person in the Mojave desert might be a fraudulent person who doesn't exist.
- Because you think the apparently qualified person in the Mojave desert might be interviewing for jobs they intend to quietly outsource, possibly to people worse than themselves and definitely in ways that create security risks.
- Because you think the random overheard conversations and water-cooler factor of in-office work has enough benefits to compensate for nominally lower qualifications.
- Because you think you're not perfect at detecting low-quality work and think remote employees might take the opportunity to slack off in ways they wouldn't in an office.
- Because you think it creates additional security risks by removing the implicit air-gapping of having to physically be in an office to handle sensitive information.
- Because you and your current employees actually like being in-office and having that cultural cohesion, and you don't think you can get it remotely.
...or any number of other reasons.
Like, I get that people like remote work. I do too. But the moralizing of RTO is...just incorrect, I think? There are practical arguments against it (I literally wrote a few thousand words to that effect not long ago - see my most recent HN submission), but that's an entirely different class of objection than the idea that it's just about middle managers wanting to breathe down your neck.
You can say "well that's the sort of thing you should catch in a performance review", but that's more-or-less isomorphic to hiring anyone who applies to your job and relying on performance reviews to fire the bad ones. I think people can intuit that that approach would not work very well.
If you want to frame "being worried people will not do their jobs, or will do them worse than your expectations on hire" as "asserting control", I suppose you can do that. But surely an employer has at least some legitimate right to try to ensure that their employees are doing the job they pay them for (notwithstanding the broader economic undertones to the employer-employee relationship, which are a much larger issue that extends way beyond RTO).
I travel around a lot (a thing I can do because I work remotely). From SF to Seattle to Tampa to Salt Lake to the small-town corners of the Carolinas, everyone is struggling. You can feel it in the air, find people identifying with it in every conversation, see the slow decay of every place you know. The dead mall in your hometown, your phone forcing a prompt to take your data to train some AI, the favelas that are now the norm in every major city (regardless of local policy), the fact that you now get a prompt for what is effectively a payday loan when you try to order a pizza.
I think people underestimate how poisonous that is to a culture and to a body politic. When you don't believe in reform, you either shrug and let things burn, or you start setting the fires yourself. Neither bodes well.
The question is: are they at an advantage in effectiveness? I think they probably are, but it seems like a reasonably open question, one that we should see an answer to in the coming years. If in five or ten years remote companies aren't crushing non-remote ones, that's going to be pretty strong evidence that there is good reason for in-office work.
I've known some pretty rich and powerful people. None of them talk this way behind closed doors, or at least they haven't around me. Even the ones that denigrate social programs or support for workers or poverty don't frame it this way. They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers not to abuse remote work, or sometimes because they've bought into some hustle-culture narrative that wanting comfortable work means you're not a Scrappy Highly Motivated Self Starter or whatever.
In our data set, the on-paper gap is about 18% (~37k on ~200k) if you just compare remote to non-remote, but given that the remote candidates often live in lower-COL areas, some of that probably comes from COL and not purely value placed on remote work.
The real driver is that ~half of engineers only want remote work, and the vast majority of the remainder aren't in whatever city you're hiring in.
The solution to the problem is trusted intermediaries that act as something of a filter against bad actors. They're just hard to establish, especially in a world where people want the other side to have their hands tied but not their own.
Those roles are going to get squeezed pretty fast as the market heats up.
Institutional trust has collapsed, and the public is desperate.
Yes, "it's the economy, stupid" - but economic perceptions are reflective of that desperation, and of how far voters will go to express it.
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There are a million individual failures that add up:
- An economic and judicial system that protects the rich at the expense of the poor, to the point that no one of any political persuasion is the slightest bit surprise when rich guys get off scot-free.
- The normalization of snake oil, MLMs, conspiracy theories, etc., which enhance the perception of institutional failure even when institutions are functioning (e.g., antivaxxers). This includes deliberate misinformation from a very effective right-wing propaganda apparatus, beginning with Fox and continued through the present day; I think this apparatus is a very important factor but it's one Democrats have no control over.
- The almost naked contempt for the lack of well-being (particularly economic well-being) among the public from many laissez-faire politicians of the Clinton-Bush era.
- The post-9/11 apparatus that led to the Iraq War, which obliterated trust in neocons/hawks as an institution (paving the way for an alternative wing on the right, whereas the left has had no comparable failure [possibly until now] to clean house on the left).
- The 2008 financial crisis, which intensified perceptions that we were getting screwed and generated the Tea Party and Occupy. The Tea Party became MAGA, while Occupy has no similar vent on the left (thanks largely to the fairly transparent sidelining of Bernie Sanders, the heir-apparent of that movement).
- Outsourcing, particularly of manufacturing. Beneficial overall, perhaps, but looks like an institutional failure from the perspective of workers whose towns evaporated. That's part of why the Trump movement started with those towns and expanded outward: they were the nexus of a discontent that has continued to grow among the electorate.
- The relentless enshittification of nearly everything we do, use, or consume. As I was waiting for results to come in, I was watching a YouTuber play video games, and he was talking about how every fast food place sucks now relative to how they used to be. Not election-related at all! It's just so pervasive in the zeitgeist that it's a normal discussion topic. And everyone can name stuff that's gotten worse in their daily lives because someone's trying to milk it for extra cash.
- The increasing alienation of workers from their work, and especially from doing work they feel has any moral value. I wrote more about this a while back at [1]
- A pervasive sense of societal decay, brought on by...well, everyone's got a different theory, but everyone can feel it. Almost no one actually feels better about life right now than they did ten or even twenty years ago, with the possible exception of queer rights (and as a queer person, I can tell you I certainly don't feel like things are going well, and I wouldn't have felt that they were even if Harris had won). I think there is substance to that (see [2]), and because it's vague and nebulous, it's incredibly easy to assign to whatever cause you want.
- A lack of belief that success even can be done without being corrupt. (see [3]) A lot of Trump supporters are fully aware that he's nakedly corrupt and lies all the time, they just think everyone is and that he's at least lying and corrupt "on their side".
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When the public is in this state, it has a legitimate grievance. The social contract between the working class and the elite is, roughly, "make sure my life is OK and I won't burn the place down". Well, the elite failed to hold up its end of the bargain, and failed to listen to many cries for help (among other things, during 2008), until people got desperate. So they decided to burn the place down.
People often wonder how Sanders-Trump voters existed given the apparent policy conflict between the two. Well, I was almost such a voter in 2016 (I would not be now! I'm ashamed to have ever considered him), and I can tell you where I was: it's not (just) about policy, it's about disruption. If you feel like things are going badly for you, and no one will listen or offer you help (and might actively sneer at you when you ask for it), you start asking yourself if you have anything to lose by going nuclear.
And this isn't just a logical judgement, either. To be ignored and suppressed is humiliating. It makes you feel impotent - choice of word very intentional - and that seems to hit male voters rather harder than female ones. There's a reason Bannon found a lot of Trump's initial younger base of support in gaming communities: it's not much different than someone raging in a League of Legends match because someone else is feeding and that's making you lose. Your pride is being damaged because someone else (in your perception) screwed up. You're a great player, it's all their fault, so your pride is unbesmirched.
Voters do care about democracy, contrary to this result. A lot said they cared about it, and a lot of people who voted for Trump said they were concerned about Jan 6. But people won't care about someone else unless they feel like they're taken care of for themselves, and principle comes after basic everyday needs for most people. And that goes double when you're being asked to defend institutions that (you feel) have completely betrayed you.
The same goes for, say, social justice. It's not that voters don't care in a vacuum, it's that it's at a higher tier of their hierarchy. Yes, hardcore racists, sexists, etc do exist, and are a problem, but what makes Trump powerful is that he co-opts populist rage into bigotry. When he talks about DEI, it's not "boo black person in power" (keep in mind, much of Trump's base enthusiastically voted for Obama), it's "that person took a job that you should have had because Democrats care more about diversity than they do about you". That works for the people who are explicitly racist, but it also works for the people who feel like they've been robbed and are looking for someone to blame. And the latter can become the former, especially because it sets them up for being called racist when they feel they aren't (somewhat correctly, in my view, but not in theirs).
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Was the inflation of the last few years bad? Yeah. But it was also everywhere, and it wasn't that bad in the US relative to the rest of the world. An electorate that was interested in listening to any sort of explanation would have probably been persuadable on that point. But the electorate has had their problems explained away one too many times.
Was there a problem at the border? Yeah. But it was clearly not a problem of our own making, and not as simple as "put up a wall". And an electorate interested in expert opinions and complex solutions might have believed that. But when you feel like you're being screwed in a thousand ephemeral ways, it's easy to point a finger and say "Biden gave all your money to immigrants".
Despite the fact that I'm probably leaving the country to avoid what I expect to be attacks on people like me, I don't think voters are actually all that much more conservative. The administration will be, and their power will be almost wholly unchecked, but voters weren't. Abortion measures passed last night in some really red states. So did minimum wage hikes. Dobbs has been wildly unpopular.
Harris outperformed Biden by wide margins among the wealthy, presumably because of Jan 6. But she got blown out among the working class by an even wider margin - a working class that cannot own a home, or afford healthcare, or expect a good stable career, and who might be automated away entirely at any minute.
Trump isn't the answer to that (he is more or less a walking institutional failure himself, one that is causing a cascading collapse of other institutions), but Democrats have, so far, largely failed to acknowledge the problem at all. And so they could not present a compelling alternative.
I'm not sure Democrats can actually solve this problem. Institutional failures are being driven by a lot of non-political forces, and if you care about policy, some degree of institutionalism is inevitable. And worse, addressing systemic issues runs fundamentally against American individualist values. But I think that's the nature of the problem they're dealing with, and one they better figure out quick.
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41977655
Personally, I think it's somewhere in between. Yes, some degree of "actually make things people want" is an essential component of a business...but I think the amount of "required evil" is usually overblown.
If markets were so ruthlessly competitive that no one could afford to be not-evil, no one would be making a profit. Every company would be barely surviving and profits would be minimal. The fact that profits exist - indeed, are much greater than they have been in the past - means that markets are NOT that ruthlessly competitive, at least not between actors with comparable access to capital resources.
Every dollar of profit a company makes is a dollar they could afford not to make and still survive. And given that the feasibility curve of profits <> level of evil is likely pretty convex, choosing not to make $1 likely pays out many dollars of not-being-evil externalities.
The incentives of an organization - or at least of a corporation - are to make money and to continue to exist and to enrich and empower the people who control it. But employees' incentives are usually pretty different. Nurses usually get into nursing because they, at least to some extent, want to help people. Engineers get into engineering because they, at least to some extent, want to build something really good. Teachers get into teaching because they want kids to learn. And so on.
If you're the principal of a school, and your goal is for a teacher to teach, you don't have a coordination problem. Most teachers want to do that. But if your goal is for teachers to maximize standardized test scores, or to minimize the number of frustrated parent calls, etc, you do have a coordination problem, because your goals are misaligned with your employees'.
If you're the CEO of a tech company, and your goal is for your engineers to build good software, you don't have a coordination problem. Your engineers want to do that. But if your goal is to maximize conversions, or to ship faster, or to raise money, etc., you do have a coordination problem.
If you run a hospital, and your goal is for your nurses to care for patients, you don't have a coordination problem. But if your goal is to maximize profits, then you do.
It's usually these kinds of coordination problems that managers are, effectively, in charge of enforcing. Their job is not to help individual employees achieve individual employees' collective goals, it's to make employees feel (sometimes truthfully) like their goals are aligned with the organizational goals, or to use the threat of loss of income or work to force them into line.
Note that marijuana has become legal in a LOT more jurisdictions during the timeframe of this chart: it was illegal in every state at the start of that graph, and is now legal for recreational use in 24 states, including many of the largest. So this is despite it becoming much more available and much less risky to use.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/284135/percentage-americans-smo...
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CASE 1: This gatekeeping is wrong, and is actually excluding a lot of good people and imposing a lot of arbitrary if not outright stupid requirements. In that case, there ought to be a huge market inefficiency. You should be able to build an elite university by finding all the smart people who didn't do a bunch of dumb signaling extracurriculars, or build a great company by hiring all the smart people who don't have great resumes, etc.
CASE 2: This gatekeeping would be wrong in isolation, but the smartest people mostly "play the game", and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we collectively agreed that smart people spend six months when they're 16 hopping on one foot in a purple clown suit, then everyone smart would do that, and it would actually become a good signal of e.g. conscientiousness and class.
CASE 3: This gatekeeping is right even in isolation, and we've gotten to a point where we can, with some reasonable reliability, tell who really won't amount to anything. And if that's the case...is it really a matter of hard work or virtue if we can tell ahead of time what you will or won't succeed at? And if it isn't, is it just to leave you to suffer because you happen not to be gifted in particular ways, whether in intelligence or in motivation or in class signals?
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I'm not really sure which one of these is true, to be honest. I've got my chips on case 1 at the moment, but I have no idea whether I'm right. And I think it's a decent ethical test to ask yourself what you believe about "meritocracy" in each of those cases. Personally, I think:
- In case 1, we don't really run into a conflict, because the incentives run the right direction. The market is just being irrational right now, and you can make your fortune exploiting that irrationality. That would be great news! The problem in case 1 ought to solve itself, if perhaps only to create new variants of the same problem.
- In case 2, the problem is fundamentally one of class. Like a peacock's tail, we've effectively created a system that demands costly signals of ability, signals that are costly to everyone. If that's the case, we should figure out how to minimize the "peacock factor" as best we can, perhaps via some form of regulation, so that we're not wasting a bunch of resources on things that fundamentally don't matter.
- In case 3, the problem is fundamentally one of (somewhat indelible) inequality. Some people will be ahead, and others behind, and it's not a matter of their decisions, but of their personalities or natures or formative experiences or whatever. And in that case, I'm not sure the idea of competing for a place in the world has any ethical justification, because it effectively means we reward those whose lives will already be inherently better and punish those whose lives will already be worse. Case 3 would undermine the entire case for a competitive social system, really.
- The north-south component comes from the Earth's axial tilt
- The asymmetry from north to south comes from the elliptical nature of Earth's orbit, which is closer/faster in northern winter + further/slower in northern summer.
- The east-west movement comes from the equation of time, which is mostly a mix of the Earth's axial tilt and the eccentricity of its orbit.
Raising money is about convincing investors that you can solve someone else's problem. Or even more abstractly, about convincing investors that you can convince other investors that you can convince other investors that you can solve someone else's problem. That's enough layers of indirection that signaling games start to overtake concrete value a lot of the time, and that's what gets you your Theranoses and your FTXes and the like. You get into "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", or its corollary, "the market can remain irrational long enough for you to exit before it wakes up".
But making money means you are solving a problem for your customer, or at least, that your customer thinks you're solving a problem with no additional layers of indirection. And if we take "making money" to mean "making a profit", it also means you're solving their problem at less cost than the amount they're willing to pay to solve it. You are actually creating net value, at least within a sphere limited to you and your customer (externalities, of course, are a whole other thing, but those are just as operative in non-profitable companies).
I think this is one of the worst things about the way business has done today. Doing business, sustainably and profitably, is an excellent way to keep yourself honest and force your theories to actually hold up in a competitive market. It's a good thing for you and for your users. But business has become so much about gathering sufficient capital to do wildly anticompetitive things and/or buy yourself preferential treatment that we're losing that regulating force of honesty.
[1] see my HN profile for more on that if you care