18 ms·

I am currently soft-quarantined by my employer in Hong Kong because I recently visited Mainland China, and will be working from home for 14 days, along with man

by hkai 7y ago

I am currently soft-quarantined by my employer in Hong Kong because I recently visited Mainland China, and will be working from home for 14 days, along with many others. It's not going that well: from my subjective point of view, people seem to treat it as an extra vacation. They are often not online and will only complete a few small tasks per day, because there is no threat from the boss who sees that you are browsing facebook instead of working. Even government employees are at home. Many people didn't get their tax bill so they don't need to pay tax for now. Sweet! That experiment makes me think that perhaps work from home is optimal mostly for a small pool of highly motivated and talented individuals, such as the average person on HN who actually does feel more productive working from home. Outside of HN, work ethic could be different.

runawaybottle 7y ago
There is one major requirement for remote work, it’s called deadlines. Give people a paycheck, some requirements, and deadlines and I promise you the work will find a way to get done. They can browse Facebook all they want.
- Razengan 7y ago
  What about work that does not have deadlines, but requires constant attention? Like monitoring security cameras, or the status of a medical patient or a nuclear power plant.. These types of work have the added risk of unauthorized people, such as the employee’s kids or friends, snooping in on sensitive information. That might be helped by the employer providing a dedicated computer for remote work, with screen-recording and facial recognition that locks the system if you’re not (the only person) in view. Perhaps having always-on video and voice surveillance on that computer, and announcing that fact, would force employees to create a dedicated distraction-free work environment in their homes.
  - exdsq 7y ago
    There are ways you can 'force' attention. Things like semi-regular unannounced drills, audits, etc. I agree it's harder, and for things like the status of a medical patient or nuclear power plant the potential damage of someone going to the pub in the afternoon and missing something is far worse than missing a couple items in a sprint, but it is still possible to assess.
  - iso947 7y ago
    What stops people just watching cat videos on Facebook in those situations?
    - teddyuk 7y ago
      What stops people watching cat videos while walking around and touching their key fob against specific points?
      - touisteur 7y ago
        Can't you walk around a familiar place whilst looking at your phone or reading a book? Been doing this for years on daily commute...
        akamaozu 7y ago
        Yes but as a security guard, or someone monitoring patient vitals, you want them to actually pay attention to details, not reflexively act from memory
        touisteur 7y ago
        I understood that. I think OP was saying that forcing a path and specific, physical actions, meant the security guard will perform as expected. Which is... kind of not the case?
  - Traster 7y ago
    You do the same thing that you do in the real world. Have you ever noticed how sometimes security guards will walk around with a little key fob and touch it to a point on the wall? That's because in order to ensure they're doing their required patrols they physically have to log they've been to a point. If you're requiring someone pay attention to a monitor you can do the same thing - for example put a square on the image and require the employee to click it. Obviously though, this requires someone to actually critically think about protocols for ensuring work is done to a standard.
    - mjevans 7y ago
      The measure becomes the mark. If touching points is all that's required, then that's all that will get done. The neural nets of all employees will eventually become trained to touch the points and not do the actual work you desire. In the case of a security guard the 'real' job is to catalogue all things 'out of place' and then react if necessary.
    - sbr464 7y ago
      One of the more interesting examples of this is the NYC subway operators pointing at signs to show attention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9jIsxQNz0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9jIsxQNz0M
      - Razengan 7y ago
        Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011793 “Why Japan’s Rail Workers Can’t Stop Pointing at Things”
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    So externalising office costs onto the workers - lovely You might want to think about how this effects the housing market if this take off long term.
    - Razengan 7y ago
      Every home of the future would/should have an office, with the kitchen evolving into a general in-house factory with 3D printers etc. :) This would have the added benefit of reclaiming the space currently taken up by many office towers, reducing traffic and the associated stress from daily commutes, improving overall health, increasing leisure time, which in turn improves the economy, and so on.
      - C1sc0cat 7y ago
        So an extra room per home then is going to increase housing costs longer term to the worker long term is what I was getting at.
        andrewzah 7y ago
        Why is this companies' faults? What can they really do anwyays besides giving a small budget to situate oneself? All homes - should - begin to have offices anyway as people realize that physically going in to work isn't necessary to be productive.
        blaser-waffle 7y ago
        Why do you need an extra room? Laptops can go anywhere, and my living room is empty until ~4pm when my kids get home. I've been remote for going on 5 years now and routinely take my work laptop to the kitchen or living room (though I'll concede I need a quiet room for some calls/tasks that involve PII).
        st1ck 7y ago
        If remote work became a norm, I'd expect housing market in large cities to sink dramatically. Why would one move e.g. to New York if their hometown provided same same job opportunities?
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    Those are the jobs that should be automated, and I imagine will be soon.
- exdsq 7y ago
  Exactly, and I'd argue the metrics you need to check that someone working remotely has been efficient is a much better business metric than ass-on-chair time.
- knocte 7y ago
  Deadlines are the incompetent manager's virtual whip.
- notacoward 7y ago
  It doesn't work that way, because most work is at least somewhat collaborative and that means the remote worker is not solely in control of the pace. As a remote worker I can't meet with someone in the office who doesn't respond to my pings. I can't commit my code if reviewers only respond once per day. If people have an across-the-desk conversation without me that invalidates what I just spent a day implementing, I'm screwed - either by losing that work or by having to spend time (and become The Bad Guy) by persuading them back to the right path. The only way around these issues is to multitask more, which we should all know by now creates its own productivity problems. If you think deadlines alone work, you can't have tried it for any but the most trivially separable kinds of work.
  - auiya 7y ago
    What you've described are symptoms of an office who doesn't know how how to scale distributed work loads with remote workers. Across-the-desk conversations for instance don't scale to large workforce numbers.
    - notacoward 7y ago
      Yes, they are symptoms, but the point is that "just give people deadlines" does nothing to address either the symptoms or the underlying problem. It's facile advice that doesn't lead to actual improvement.
powerapple 7y ago
I think for most people makes job is something you have to do, you do it to make a living. Work is not fancy outside tech world: the pay is less, task is more repetitive than challenging, work is not dynamic.
icebraining 7y ago
Well, of course you can't just switch to remote work overnight without any preparation, and expect everything to work well immediately! But, for example: how do you know those workers are treating it as a small vacation? You're not there to see them either! Managers can do the same, they don't need to know what the worker is doing instead of working; they can see the work is not getting done.
- hkai 7y ago
  I think one obstacle is that in practice, it is difficult to tell someone "your performance is bad today and you are not getting work done".
  - pas 7y ago
    I agree, but. People skills. Allegedly managers have them. Plus until corps can fire and replace the slackers, they are not in danger. (Because it's unlikely to hire someone while the quarantine is in effect.) But simply tying pay to daily performance usually works.
    - blowski 7y ago
      How do you set daily targets? All known measures (e.g. lines of code, bug counts) produce bad software because they are gamed.
      - asynch8 7y ago
        By reporting progress, daily targets should not be a certain tangible goal necessarily, rather than that some progress has been done and reported. This isn't perfect of course but I think it's possible to evaluate whether or not the tasks/progress someone has made reflects a days work.
        raxxorrax 7y ago
        Daily targets are a waste of time in my opinion. Weekly targets make much more sense. But as a team meeting, not for a performance evaluation. That said, people constantly measuring performance should be replaced by productive people. It is always a management failure if your people are slacking off. Otherwise I would just do something that makes me look good on daily reports. That can have massive negative implications for general business interest. That creates the typical blinders that make large corps unproductive. Daily targets make sense in production, but not for evaluating employees, but because you need it for other business processes to allow supply and demand fit the productivity. The current trend for more employee surveillance is mostly a scam and doesn't even help productivity. On the contrary it tends to create unnecessary overhead, like daily meetings. It is one of the most non-creative employment of information technology. That said, daily meetings can be extremely important for remote teams. But those are mostly about other topics anyway.
robjan 7y ago
As another HKer, I just think that working practices at many companies in our city are not set up for remote work yet. There is a lot of reliance on micromanagement, paternalism and face-to-face communications. Working from home is too different from this.
- woutr_be 7y ago
  I've also seen this in HK. The team I worked in, used to work mainly with people in Singapore, my local colleagues just didn't know what to do with their manager not being in the office with them. Half of the time they would just sit around and do nothing, until our manager explicitly told them what to do, and even then they struggled.
  - auiya 7y ago
    Sounds like the military.
    - woutr_be 7y ago
      I found it immensely frustrating, eventually my local colleagues got let go because it just wasn't working out (even though it's a HK office, we mostly worked with people overseas). There were plenty of other reasons why it didn't work out as well.
kqr 7y ago
Are you saying manager oversight is what's keeping your co-workers from slacking off all day? Is this a place that produces quality of any kind?
- dx034 7y ago
  For many jobs that's how it works. A lot of work is not about quality, tasks just have to be completed according to schedule.
  - iso947 7y ago
    in which case it should be easy to measure performance
  - kqr 7y ago
    Could you give an example of a task where you cannot make a difference in quality? I have trouble coming up with any.
    - Karunamon 7y ago
      Any task that is a rote, skill-less application of a list of procedures. Success in that case is a binary "did you do the thing", not "how well you did the thing".
      - kqr 7y ago
        ...such as? All jobs I can think of -- even the most low-status or menial -- requires a certain skill and can be done with varying levels of quality. All jobs I can think of involve some sort of outcome that is desired by the one purchasing the work. Furthermore, that outcome can be of insufficient quality and therefore rejected by the purchaser, or at least not fulfilling the needs they were expecting to have fulfilled.
- rtpg 7y ago
  I mean most people when they first start working remotely have trouble adjusting. After all, up until then their home is a place for rest, not for work! It's probably that people are not accustomed to this flow
asiachick 7y ago
no idea about HK law but in USA law not getting your tax bill has no bearing on your obligation to pay. Even getting bad info from the IRs does not give you an excuse to not pay it correctly and on time.
konschubert 7y ago
I think it's a misconception that remote work has to be async. You can breath down people's neck just as well over a video link, and there are multiple apps to help scale that. Whether that's desirable or not is another topic, but why not solve one problem at a time?
diebeforei485 7y ago
If I was forced to be at home, I would probably not work much either. My productive WFH days are when I actually want to be at home.
sz4kerto 7y ago
I'm running a fully remote engineering team. There are plenty of difficulties and downsides unique to being remote, but one of the major benefit is that performance evaluation becomes much simpler, as you're not biased by seeing people sitting or not sitting at their desk.
- notacoward 7y ago
  Fully remote is very different than partial remote, which is the situation here and one that companies still need to learn how to deal with.
feanaro 7y ago
The fact that most people have never before had exposure to work from home (due to not being given the option until now) has to be taken into account. I doubt people would continue to treat it as an excuse to slack in the long-term.
pritovido 7y ago
For working for home you need a system in place designed for remote work. Nothing to do with work ethic. And this system will provide the feedback that controls the worker works or not. In fact with remote work done right you control productivity much better, because you measure the real work or output a worker does. With remote work you are not as influenced to subjective bias like how young or beautiful someone is, the neckline or skirt(if you are a man) that could affect you without you even realizing. You don't need to reward someone looking productive, going early to work and leaving late, staying in place but pressing a key to watch facebook when nobody is looking. You also don't need to punish someone who is productive, using way less time for doing the work and then leaving home or whatever. This "theater of work" is very real and as a manager it could trick you. With remote work you can measure the work what is critical for your business to succeed and demand it. Someone told me once: How do you know your workers are not masturbating while working from home? Playing games or watching TV? Playing with their kids? The fact is that I don't care if they remain productive and generate the work. In fact if they do the work, enjoining life is a bonus. There is this Puritan mentality that for doing work you have to suffer and people that believe in that demanding not just work, but watching other people suffer while doing that. Because they actually do suffer, they need everybody that works for them to suffer too. They are sadistic. I have seen that attitude in entrepreneur or managers colleagues: "Someone who works for me is enyoing the work and I can't stand it""I have to show him what real work is" They prefer showing their workers how hard and miserable life is that earning money!!
socialdemocrat 7y ago
I think this is highly dependent on culture. If you have a strongly hierarchy based culture where the boss is breathing down your neck all the time, then people are not going to deal well with being given freedom. I have seen this time and again as a Norwegian, when living abroad. I come from a culture where power hierarchies are quite flat and there is a very high trust level between people. Bosses don't breath down your neck. I remember an Indian manager who had worked long in Norway remarked on the difficulty of going back to India. People there are used to be bossed around and micromanaged all the time. The result is that it is difficult for them to manage themselves when the boss is gone. He remarked on the frustration of having to be present all the time for work to get done. I had gotten accustomed to not needing that in Norway. But you don't have to go as far as India to see it. I got family and friends who observed the same in the UK. As soon as the boss left everybody started chatting and chilling. I could see similar things when I studied in the US. American teenagers were often quite bad at managing themselves away from home. When I stayed over at people's places I realized why. Their parents where far stricter and far more micromanaging than I was used to. Even on campus there was far more rules and control than what would be normal in Northern Europe. Stuff like that gives short term benefits of people behaving. The long term problem is that people get little to no training in managing themselves and setting their own boundaries. Autonomy and self control is not something you are born with. You have to train on it and learn it. I find Scandinavian parents are far more tolerant towards kids screwing up and wasting their time. Part of that I think is they know kids must learn to handle situations themselves. My wife is Asian-American and I know from all the stories she tells me that in Asia where it is even more control oriented and more ambitious it becomes even harder. Parents and teachers make all the "optimal" choices for you all the time, to push for success. She has family members who never chose even what clothes they wore all through childhood. Parents made all the choices. I had a friend from Singapore. She remarked on how difficult it was coming to the US as a teenager. Suddenly teachers wanted to know her opinion on a variety of issues and subjects. But nobody had ever asked her opinion on anything before. So I can imagine that remote working in Asia is going to be a lot harder than for many western countries. Even within the West there will be big differences in how well it can work. But just so it is clear. I don't think the ability to work remote is inherent in people. I think with training Asian societies and workers can develop a culture for more independent working and working from home.
minipci1321 7y ago
Remote work is a skill, it takes time to acquire, just like office work and barely less. (Have you forgotten how hard it was to stay put for 8+ hours in the same place? I still remember.) My personal estimations -- it takes 18 month to work out an established routine, so any RW "decreed" on the worker before that time, is indeed effectively vacations. The worst scheme is working from home 1-2 days a week, and coming to office for the rest. Beside the established routine it also requires adapting the sleep schedule (which is twice as hard if the RW days are floating, not fixed).
- bradstewart 7y ago
  Why does working from home 1-2 days a week require changing your sleep schedule?
  - minipci1321 7y ago
    Because when one works from home, there is no need to allot time for commute. People with short commute times (==> no need to adjust sleeping schedule), are much keener to go work from the office.
    - bradstewart 7y ago
      But if I wake up at 7am to commute, I can still wake up at 7am when working from home. You don't have to convert commuting hours to sleeping hours.
      - minipci1321 7y ago
        Of course you don't have to. But, to be honest, waking-up at 7am spells "no commute" to me.
woutr_be 7y ago
Also working in HK, everyone is encouraged to work from home. I’ve been going into the office since my company issued laptop just isn’t equipped for software engineering. Our company VPN was also down the entire day, so not sure how anyone could’ve done any work. On the upside, my commute to work has been quiet, and there’s no distractions in the office.
abarringer 7y ago
Enforce the use of https://www.rescuetime.com/ https://www.rescuetime.com/ may help.
- danesparza 7y ago
  Considering they might be worried sick about friends and family (and therefore using social media) this would be awful. The world needs less authoritarianism and more compassion right now. We're all human.
danesparza 7y ago
They are often not online and will only complete a few small tasks per day, because there is no threat from the boss who sees that you are browsing facebook instead of working. And I'm sure they're worried about their friends, family and relatives that might be sick (and they can't get to). That worry will cause a productivity drop BECAUSE WE'RE ALL HUMAN. If I were an employer, I think I'd probably give folks a bit of slack for the next several weeks.
richard78459 7y ago
> from my subjective point of view, people seem to treat it as an extra vacation. Every middle level managers job is depending on this belief. Once they accept people can work from home,their job becomes extinct its understandable but not true.

by hkai 7y ago

runawaybottle 7y ago

There is one major requirement for remote work, it’s called deadlines. Give people a paycheck, some requirements, and deadlines and I promise you the work will find a way to get done. They can browse Facebook all they want.

Razengan 7y ago
What about work that does not have deadlines, but requires constant attention? Like monitoring security cameras, or the status of a medical patient or a nuclear power plant.. These types of work have the added risk of unauthorized people, such as the employee’s kids or friends, snooping in on sensitive information. That might be helped by the employer providing a dedicated computer for remote work, with screen-recording and facial recognition that locks the system if you’re not (the only person) in view. Perhaps having always-on video and voice surveillance on that computer, and announcing that fact, would force employees to create a dedicated distraction-free work environment in their homes.
- exdsq 7y ago
  There are ways you can 'force' attention. Things like semi-regular unannounced drills, audits, etc. I agree it's harder, and for things like the status of a medical patient or nuclear power plant the potential damage of someone going to the pub in the afternoon and missing something is far worse than missing a couple items in a sprint, but it is still possible to assess.
- iso947 7y ago
  What stops people just watching cat videos on Facebook in those situations?
  - teddyuk 7y ago
    What stops people watching cat videos while walking around and touching their key fob against specific points?
    - touisteur 7y ago
      Can't you walk around a familiar place whilst looking at your phone or reading a book? Been doing this for years on daily commute...
      - akamaozu 7y ago
        Yes but as a security guard, or someone monitoring patient vitals, you want them to actually pay attention to details, not reflexively act from memory
        touisteur 7y ago
        I understood that. I think OP was saying that forcing a path and specific, physical actions, meant the security guard will perform as expected. Which is... kind of not the case?
- Traster 7y ago
  You do the same thing that you do in the real world. Have you ever noticed how sometimes security guards will walk around with a little key fob and touch it to a point on the wall? That's because in order to ensure they're doing their required patrols they physically have to log they've been to a point. If you're requiring someone pay attention to a monitor you can do the same thing - for example put a square on the image and require the employee to click it. Obviously though, this requires someone to actually critically think about protocols for ensuring work is done to a standard.
  - mjevans 7y ago
    The measure becomes the mark. If touching points is all that's required, then that's all that will get done. The neural nets of all employees will eventually become trained to touch the points and not do the actual work you desire. In the case of a security guard the 'real' job is to catalogue all things 'out of place' and then react if necessary.
  - sbr464 7y ago
    One of the more interesting examples of this is the NYC subway operators pointing at signs to show attention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9jIsxQNz0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9jIsxQNz0M
    - Razengan 7y ago
      Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011793 “Why Japan’s Rail Workers Can’t Stop Pointing at Things”
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  So externalising office costs onto the workers - lovely You might want to think about how this effects the housing market if this take off long term.
  - Razengan 7y ago
    Every home of the future would/should have an office, with the kitchen evolving into a general in-house factory with 3D printers etc. :) This would have the added benefit of reclaiming the space currently taken up by many office towers, reducing traffic and the associated stress from daily commutes, improving overall health, increasing leisure time, which in turn improves the economy, and so on.
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      So an extra room per home then is going to increase housing costs longer term to the worker long term is what I was getting at.
      - andrewzah 7y ago
        Why is this companies' faults? What can they really do anwyays besides giving a small budget to situate oneself? All homes - should - begin to have offices anyway as people realize that physically going in to work isn't necessary to be productive.
      - blaser-waffle 7y ago
        Why do you need an extra room? Laptops can go anywhere, and my living room is empty until ~4pm when my kids get home. I've been remote for going on 5 years now and routinely take my work laptop to the kitchen or living room (though I'll concede I need a quiet room for some calls/tasks that involve PII).
      - st1ck 7y ago
        If remote work became a norm, I'd expect housing market in large cities to sink dramatically. Why would one move e.g. to New York if their hometown provided same same job opportunities?
- Aperocky 7y ago
  Those are the jobs that should be automated, and I imagine will be soon.
exdsq 7y ago
Exactly, and I'd argue the metrics you need to check that someone working remotely has been efficient is a much better business metric than ass-on-chair time.
knocte 7y ago
Deadlines are the incompetent manager's virtual whip.
notacoward 7y ago
It doesn't work that way, because most work is at least somewhat collaborative and that means the remote worker is not solely in control of the pace. As a remote worker I can't meet with someone in the office who doesn't respond to my pings. I can't commit my code if reviewers only respond once per day. If people have an across-the-desk conversation without me that invalidates what I just spent a day implementing, I'm screwed - either by losing that work or by having to spend time (and become The Bad Guy) by persuading them back to the right path. The only way around these issues is to multitask more, which we should all know by now creates its own productivity problems. If you think deadlines alone work, you can't have tried it for any but the most trivially separable kinds of work.
- auiya 7y ago
  What you've described are symptoms of an office who doesn't know how how to scale distributed work loads with remote workers. Across-the-desk conversations for instance don't scale to large workforce numbers.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    Yes, they are symptoms, but the point is that "just give people deadlines" does nothing to address either the symptoms or the underlying problem. It's facile advice that doesn't lead to actual improvement.

powerapple 7y ago

I think for most people makes job is something you have to do, you do it to make a living. Work is not fancy outside tech world: the pay is less, task is more repetitive than challenging, work is not dynamic.

icebraining 7y ago

Well, of course you can't just switch to remote work overnight without any preparation, and expect everything to work well immediately! But, for example: how do you know those workers are treating it as a small vacation? You're not there to see them either! Managers can do the same, they don't need to know what the worker is doing instead of working; they can see the work is not getting done.

hkai 7y ago
I think one obstacle is that in practice, it is difficult to tell someone "your performance is bad today and you are not getting work done".
- pas 7y ago
  I agree, but. People skills. Allegedly managers have them. Plus until corps can fire and replace the slackers, they are not in danger. (Because it's unlikely to hire someone while the quarantine is in effect.) But simply tying pay to daily performance usually works.
  - blowski 7y ago
    How do you set daily targets? All known measures (e.g. lines of code, bug counts) produce bad software because they are gamed.
    - asynch8 7y ago
      By reporting progress, daily targets should not be a certain tangible goal necessarily, rather than that some progress has been done and reported. This isn't perfect of course but I think it's possible to evaluate whether or not the tasks/progress someone has made reflects a days work.
      - raxxorrax 7y ago
        Daily targets are a waste of time in my opinion. Weekly targets make much more sense. But as a team meeting, not for a performance evaluation. That said, people constantly measuring performance should be replaced by productive people. It is always a management failure if your people are slacking off. Otherwise I would just do something that makes me look good on daily reports. That can have massive negative implications for general business interest. That creates the typical blinders that make large corps unproductive. Daily targets make sense in production, but not for evaluating employees, but because you need it for other business processes to allow supply and demand fit the productivity. The current trend for more employee surveillance is mostly a scam and doesn't even help productivity. On the contrary it tends to create unnecessary overhead, like daily meetings. It is one of the most non-creative employment of information technology. That said, daily meetings can be extremely important for remote teams. But those are mostly about other topics anyway.

robjan 7y ago

As another HKer, I just think that working practices at many companies in our city are not set up for remote work yet. There is a lot of reliance on micromanagement, paternalism and face-to-face communications. Working from home is too different from this.

woutr_be 7y ago
I've also seen this in HK. The team I worked in, used to work mainly with people in Singapore, my local colleagues just didn't know what to do with their manager not being in the office with them. Half of the time they would just sit around and do nothing, until our manager explicitly told them what to do, and even then they struggled.
- auiya 7y ago
  Sounds like the military.
  - woutr_be 7y ago
    I found it immensely frustrating, eventually my local colleagues got let go because it just wasn't working out (even though it's a HK office, we mostly worked with people overseas). There were plenty of other reasons why it didn't work out as well.

kqr 7y ago

Are you saying manager oversight is what's keeping your co-workers from slacking off all day? Is this a place that produces quality of any kind?

dx034 7y ago
For many jobs that's how it works. A lot of work is not about quality, tasks just have to be completed according to schedule.
- iso947 7y ago
  in which case it should be easy to measure performance
- kqr 7y ago
  Could you give an example of a task where you cannot make a difference in quality? I have trouble coming up with any.
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    Any task that is a rote, skill-less application of a list of procedures. Success in that case is a binary "did you do the thing", not "how well you did the thing".
    - kqr 7y ago
      ...such as? All jobs I can think of -- even the most low-status or menial -- requires a certain skill and can be done with varying levels of quality. All jobs I can think of involve some sort of outcome that is desired by the one purchasing the work. Furthermore, that outcome can be of insufficient quality and therefore rejected by the purchaser, or at least not fulfilling the needs they were expecting to have fulfilled.
rtpg 7y ago
I mean most people when they first start working remotely have trouble adjusting. After all, up until then their home is a place for rest, not for work! It's probably that people are not accustomed to this flow

asiachick 7y ago

no idea about HK law but in USA law not getting your tax bill has no bearing on your obligation to pay. Even getting bad info from the IRs does not give you an excuse to not pay it correctly and on time.

konschubert 7y ago

I think it's a misconception that remote work has to be async. You can breath down people's neck just as well over a video link, and there are multiple apps to help scale that. Whether that's desirable or not is another topic, but why not solve one problem at a time?

diebeforei485 7y ago

If I was forced to be at home, I would probably not work much either. My productive WFH days are when I actually want to be at home.

sz4kerto 7y ago

I'm running a fully remote engineering team. There are plenty of difficulties and downsides unique to being remote, but one of the major benefit is that performance evaluation becomes much simpler, as you're not biased by seeing people sitting or not sitting at their desk.

notacoward 7y ago
Fully remote is very different than partial remote, which is the situation here and one that companies still need to learn how to deal with.

feanaro 7y ago

The fact that most people have never before had exposure to work from home (due to not being given the option until now) has to be taken into account. I doubt people would continue to treat it as an excuse to slack in the long-term.

pritovido 7y ago

For working for home you need a system in place designed for remote work. Nothing to do with work ethic. And this system will provide the feedback that controls the worker works or not. In fact with remote work done right you control productivity much better, because you measure the real work or output a worker does. With remote work you are not as influenced to subjective bias like how young or beautiful someone is, the neckline or skirt(if you are a man) that could affect you without you even realizing. You don't need to reward someone looking productive, going early to work and leaving late, staying in place but pressing a key to watch facebook when nobody is looking. You also don't need to punish someone who is productive, using way less time for doing the work and then leaving home or whatever. This "theater of work" is very real and as a manager it could trick you. With remote work you can measure the work what is critical for your business to succeed and demand it. Someone told me once: How do you know your workers are not masturbating while working from home? Playing games or watching TV? Playing with their kids? The fact is that I don't care if they remain productive and generate the work. In fact if they do the work, enjoining life is a bonus. There is this Puritan mentality that for doing work you have to suffer and people that believe in that demanding not just work, but watching other people suffer while doing that. Because they actually do suffer, they need everybody that works for them to suffer too. They are sadistic. I have seen that attitude in entrepreneur or managers colleagues: "Someone who works for me is enyoing the work and I can't stand it""I have to show him what real work is" They prefer showing their workers how hard and miserable life is that earning money!!

socialdemocrat 7y ago

I think this is highly dependent on culture. If you have a strongly hierarchy based culture where the boss is breathing down your neck all the time, then people are not going to deal well with being given freedom. I have seen this time and again as a Norwegian, when living abroad. I come from a culture where power hierarchies are quite flat and there is a very high trust level between people. Bosses don't breath down your neck. I remember an Indian manager who had worked long in Norway remarked on the difficulty of going back to India. People there are used to be bossed around and micromanaged all the time. The result is that it is difficult for them to manage themselves when the boss is gone. He remarked on the frustration of having to be present all the time for work to get done. I had gotten accustomed to not needing that in Norway. But you don't have to go as far as India to see it. I got family and friends who observed the same in the UK. As soon as the boss left everybody started chatting and chilling. I could see similar things when I studied in the US. American teenagers were often quite bad at managing themselves away from home. When I stayed over at people's places I realized why. Their parents where far stricter and far more micromanaging than I was used to. Even on campus there was far more rules and control than what would be normal in Northern Europe. Stuff like that gives short term benefits of people behaving. The long term problem is that people get little to no training in managing themselves and setting their own boundaries. Autonomy and self control is not something you are born with. You have to train on it and learn it. I find Scandinavian parents are far more tolerant towards kids screwing up and wasting their time. Part of that I think is they know kids must learn to handle situations themselves. My wife is Asian-American and I know from all the stories she tells me that in Asia where it is even more control oriented and more ambitious it becomes even harder. Parents and teachers make all the "optimal" choices for you all the time, to push for success. She has family members who never chose even what clothes they wore all through childhood. Parents made all the choices. I had a friend from Singapore. She remarked on how difficult it was coming to the US as a teenager. Suddenly teachers wanted to know her opinion on a variety of issues and subjects. But nobody had ever asked her opinion on anything before. So I can imagine that remote working in Asia is going to be a lot harder than for many western countries. Even within the West there will be big differences in how well it can work. But just so it is clear. I don't think the ability to work remote is inherent in people. I think with training Asian societies and workers can develop a culture for more independent working and working from home.

minipci1321 7y ago

Remote work is a skill, it takes time to acquire, just like office work and barely less. (Have you forgotten how hard it was to stay put for 8+ hours in the same place? I still remember.) My personal estimations -- it takes 18 month to work out an established routine, so any RW "decreed" on the worker before that time, is indeed effectively vacations. The worst scheme is working from home 1-2 days a week, and coming to office for the rest. Beside the established routine it also requires adapting the sleep schedule (which is twice as hard if the RW days are floating, not fixed).

bradstewart 7y ago
Why does working from home 1-2 days a week require changing your sleep schedule?
- minipci1321 7y ago
  Because when one works from home, there is no need to allot time for commute. People with short commute times (==> no need to adjust sleeping schedule), are much keener to go work from the office.
  - bradstewart 7y ago
    But if I wake up at 7am to commute, I can still wake up at 7am when working from home. You don't have to convert commuting hours to sleeping hours.
    - minipci1321 7y ago
      Of course you don't have to. But, to be honest, waking-up at 7am spells "no commute" to me.

woutr_be 7y ago

Also working in HK, everyone is encouraged to work from home. I’ve been going into the office since my company issued laptop just isn’t equipped for software engineering. Our company VPN was also down the entire day, so not sure how anyone could’ve done any work. On the upside, my commute to work has been quiet, and there’s no distractions in the office.

abarringer 7y ago

Enforce the use of https://www.rescuetime.com/ https://www.rescuetime.com/ may help.

danesparza 7y ago
Considering they might be worried sick about friends and family (and therefore using social media) this would be awful. The world needs less authoritarianism and more compassion right now. We're all human.

danesparza 7y ago

They are often not online and will only complete a few small tasks per day, because there is no threat from the boss who sees that you are browsing facebook instead of working. And I'm sure they're worried about their friends, family and relatives that might be sick (and they can't get to). That worry will cause a productivity drop BECAUSE WE'RE ALL HUMAN. If I were an employer, I think I'd probably give folks a bit of slack for the next several weeks.

richard78459 7y ago

> from my subjective point of view, people seem to treat it as an extra vacation. Every middle level managers job is depending on this belief. Once they accept people can work from home,their job becomes extinct its understandable but not true.