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> Information workers and factory workers are different. Should they be, in terms of work-life balance?
by ethbr0 3y ago
> Information workers and factory workers are different.
Should they be, in terms of work-life balance?
- joeblubaugh 3y agoThe answer is to improve the lot of factory workers, not worsen that of the others.
- somethoughts 3y agoThat would cost Elon money though...
- zarzavat 3y agoYes. 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 agoThere 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 agoIt seems unavoidable without artificially making life worse for some. But it should also be properly compensated.
- hamburglar 3y agoZero 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.