4 ms·

> allowing a small percentage of people to have the flexibility to work from home all the time, actually can seem amoral as that will create two classes of work

> allowing a small percentage of people to have the flexibility to work from home all the time, actually can seem amoral as that will create two classes of workers This is kind of absurd, though, since they are already two classes of workers. Information workers and factory workers are different. But also, the deciding factor on whether you can work from home should be: can you do your job from home? Look at nurses. They have to be in a hospital, walking into rooms and tending to patients, right? Not phone nurses and poison control center nurses. They work from home nowadays.

ethbr0 3y ago
> Information workers and factory workers are different. Should they be, in terms of work-life balance?
- joeblubaugh 3y ago
  The answer is to improve the lot of factory workers, not worsen that of the others.
  - somethoughts 3y ago
    That would cost Elon money though...
- zarzavat 3y ago
  Yes. The alternative is absurd. Should it be mandatory for everybody to work shifts just because some people have to work shifts? I’ve never met a factory worker who resents the existence of cushy WFH jobs. On the contrary, many aspire to have such a job.
  - kqr 3y ago
    There are also many people in non-desk jobs who could never imagine doing one. The recent example I have in mind are the wildland firefighters described by Desmond. It's hard, grueling, dirty, long work, but for many of them, it beats sitting still stuck at home attempting to look busy for some guy in a suit. Just because our kind of people thinks of it as the dream job does not mean every type of person shares that ideal!
- int_19h 3y ago
  It seems unavoidable without artificially making life worse for some. But it should also be properly compensated.
- hamburglar 3y ago
  Zero opinion on the work-life balance question, because it's irrelevant here (this is not fundamentally a work-life balance issue, and people who work remotely have their own work-life balance problems). This is about whether or not you have to physically be in a particular place to actually perform your job duties. For a factory worker, yes you do. For an awful lot of information workers, you absolutely don't. Park rangers get to perform their jobs out amongst the majestic beauty of nature. Should we make it "fair" by forcing them to go sit in a cubicle under fluorescent lights too? 100% remote work was a thing before the pandemic and it will continue to be a thing in the future. Companies that don't learn how to adapt to this will be at a disadvantage on this point. This cuts both ways, of course. If I can do my job "anywhere" and I live in an expensive place like Seattle, I should worry that I have to compete with people in very low CoL places, and that likely pushes my own market value down. That's life. But pretending we need information worker's butts in seats downtown to operate servers thousands of miles away from them is not going to fix the problem.
somethoughts 3y ago
I agree from a technological/logical standpoint but from a human/emotional standpoint I think there are issues. People love to complain/go to press about HR decisions. The press would love to portray Musk as hypocritical about treating production line workers as second class denizens. The headline writes itself. I tthink the way you overcome it is by paying a premium to in office staff. In your scenario - onsite nurses likely get paid a very significant premium to the salary of a remote, phone nurse. But in the "Elon" case its going to hard to show how your are paying a premium for onsite factory techs when the design engineers are making $$$ plus RSUs.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  > from a human/emotional standpoint I think there are issues From an emotional standpoint, sure, but not from a moral standpoint, which is what your previous post was saying. There is no moral case for punishing an advantaged class if that punishment does nothing to help the other class.
  - somethoughts 3y ago
    I think that's a fair point - especially if one prescribes to most economically efficient == most moral - which not all subscribe to (although perhaps of all people Musk would subscribe to this theory). That said I could for see cases where the laptop class could be isolated from pain when a separate class has to do the physical work. Imagine a scenario where the laptop class engineer does some sloppy work in order to pick up the kids for soccer. The goof up requires 100 production line people to redo step 8 of 30 steps for 3 additional hours. That goof up will be less visible there - buried in the timesheets of 100 workers - than at a company that has outsourced production line work. At the outsourced production company the goof up will show up as the additional change order which will have a directly mappable line item on the quarterly accounting that the responsible engineer will need to answer for.

ethbr0 3y ago

> Information workers and factory workers are different. Should they be, in terms of work-life balance?

joeblubaugh 3y ago
The answer is to improve the lot of factory workers, not worsen that of the others.
- somethoughts 3y ago
  That would cost Elon money though...
zarzavat 3y ago
Yes. The alternative is absurd. Should it be mandatory for everybody to work shifts just because some people have to work shifts? I’ve never met a factory worker who resents the existence of cushy WFH jobs. On the contrary, many aspire to have such a job.
- kqr 3y ago
  There are also many people in non-desk jobs who could never imagine doing one. The recent example I have in mind are the wildland firefighters described by Desmond. It's hard, grueling, dirty, long work, but for many of them, it beats sitting still stuck at home attempting to look busy for some guy in a suit. Just because our kind of people thinks of it as the dream job does not mean every type of person shares that ideal!
int_19h 3y ago
It seems unavoidable without artificially making life worse for some. But it should also be properly compensated.
hamburglar 3y ago
Zero opinion on the work-life balance question, because it's irrelevant here (this is not fundamentally a work-life balance issue, and people who work remotely have their own work-life balance problems). This is about whether or not you have to physically be in a particular place to actually perform your job duties. For a factory worker, yes you do. For an awful lot of information workers, you absolutely don't. Park rangers get to perform their jobs out amongst the majestic beauty of nature. Should we make it "fair" by forcing them to go sit in a cubicle under fluorescent lights too? 100% remote work was a thing before the pandemic and it will continue to be a thing in the future. Companies that don't learn how to adapt to this will be at a disadvantage on this point. This cuts both ways, of course. If I can do my job "anywhere" and I live in an expensive place like Seattle, I should worry that I have to compete with people in very low CoL places, and that likely pushes my own market value down. That's life. But pretending we need information worker's butts in seats downtown to operate servers thousands of miles away from them is not going to fix the problem.

somethoughts 3y ago

I agree from a technological/logical standpoint but from a human/emotional standpoint I think there are issues. People love to complain/go to press about HR decisions. The press would love to portray Musk as hypocritical about treating production line workers as second class denizens. The headline writes itself. I tthink the way you overcome it is by paying a premium to in office staff. In your scenario - onsite nurses likely get paid a very significant premium to the salary of a remote, phone nurse. But in the "Elon" case its going to hard to show how your are paying a premium for onsite factory techs when the design engineers are making $$$ plus RSUs.

hackerlight 3y ago
> from a human/emotional standpoint I think there are issues From an emotional standpoint, sure, but not from a moral standpoint, which is what your previous post was saying. There is no moral case for punishing an advantaged class if that punishment does nothing to help the other class.
- somethoughts 3y ago
  I think that's a fair point - especially if one prescribes to most economically efficient == most moral - which not all subscribe to (although perhaps of all people Musk would subscribe to this theory). That said I could for see cases where the laptop class could be isolated from pain when a separate class has to do the physical work. Imagine a scenario where the laptop class engineer does some sloppy work in order to pick up the kids for soccer. The goof up requires 100 production line people to redo step 8 of 30 steps for 3 additional hours. That goof up will be less visible there - buried in the timesheets of 100 workers - than at a company that has outsourced production line work. At the outsourced production company the goof up will show up as the additional change order which will have a directly mappable line item on the quarterly accounting that the responsible engineer will need to answer for.