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The piece of the WFH debate that I think is the most interesting is the “I work for someone else but think I get to dictate where and how that happens, despite

by isykt 3y ago

The piece of the WFH debate that I think is the most interesting is the “I work for someone else but think I get to dictate where and how that happens, despite the mountains of labor laws that say the exact opposite” mindset. Negotiate what you want from your employer, move on to a different employer, or hang a shingle. Leave the entitlement out of it. This has nothing at all to do with “freedom.” Business is business. If you sell your labor to someone who chooses to buy it, you’re in business.

screye 3y ago
Every workplace demand could be cast into this mold. A conversation ender like this is not productive. Your manager is just as much an employee and so are the leadership. The owners are often a faceless populace or a small team of owners. That's it. The negotiation is between the preferences of 1 set of employees and another set of employees. Every workplace tries to regress to the corporate mean. The employees expressing their opinions and injecting friction is how workplaces gain their identity. In at-will-employment cultures, the owner does what is best for the company. It isn't entitlement, it is an expression of preferences and future actions. The owner then chooses what's best for him. The recent 'return to office' push has IMO, more to do with covert layoffs and ageism than anything. The kind of people who do not want to move have social ties and are demonstrating a strong preference towards a balance between personal life and work life. Most bosses are clueless, so the only way they can evaluate employees is by how long they spend at the work place. In their impression, they can use this excuse to fire all the employees who 'would log out at 5' or 'have a family', while replacing them with *equally* talented young employees. Ofc, I think this is a fallacy, because productivity & talent are complicated. Hopefully it leads to some people continuing to stay in their new chosen town, and we see new minor tech hubs develop.
shostack 3y ago
The challenge with this mindset is it leads to violent worker uprising when employers don't give enough compared to what they take. History is littered with examples of bloody workers movements. Perhaps companies should seek to find opportunity in the shift to a better balance. For starters, commercial real estate is a major liability on their books. How much of what we are seeing now is because they can't easily get that off their books so need to justify it?
- isykt 3y ago
  Violent uprising? Good lord the self importance of the keyboard class knows no bounds. Half of you will be replaced by LLMs and the other by offshore low wage workers. In the middle term, companies will simply replace those who down tow the company line with those who will. Gather ye WFH days while ye may.
  - infamouscow 3y ago
    > Half of you will be replaced by LLMs and the other by offshore low wage workers. Prognostications with no limiting principle are intellectually lazy; they also lack the substance to be respected as cynical. The industry has gone through that once. The second time around even the MBAs learned how remarkably stupid offshoring is. All of the remote/WFH companies have been going about it for three or more years now. If all these jobs were going to be offshored why hasn't it happened by now? What exactly prevented this fantasy from happening over the last several years? In other words, what makes you so confident that someday in the future things will converge into this prediction? The timelines of your argument don't really match up, making this really no different than Pascal's wager.

by isykt 3y ago

screye 3y ago

Every workplace demand could be cast into this mold. A conversation ender like this is not productive. Your manager is just as much an employee and so are the leadership. The owners are often a faceless populace or a small team of owners. That's it. The negotiation is between the preferences of 1 set of employees and another set of employees. Every workplace tries to regress to the corporate mean. The employees expressing their opinions and injecting friction is how workplaces gain their identity. In at-will-employment cultures, the owner does what is best for the company. It isn't entitlement, it is an expression of preferences and future actions. The owner then chooses what's best for him. The recent 'return to office' push has IMO, more to do with covert layoffs and ageism than anything. The kind of people who do not want to move have social ties and are demonstrating a strong preference towards a balance between personal life and work life. Most bosses are clueless, so the only way they can evaluate employees is by how long they spend at the work place. In their impression, they can use this excuse to fire all the employees who 'would log out at 5' or 'have a family', while replacing them with *equally* talented young employees. Ofc, I think this is a fallacy, because productivity & talent are complicated. Hopefully it leads to some people continuing to stay in their new chosen town, and we see new minor tech hubs develop.

shostack 3y ago

The challenge with this mindset is it leads to violent worker uprising when employers don't give enough compared to what they take. History is littered with examples of bloody workers movements. Perhaps companies should seek to find opportunity in the shift to a better balance. For starters, commercial real estate is a major liability on their books. How much of what we are seeing now is because they can't easily get that off their books so need to justify it?

isykt 3y ago
Violent uprising? Good lord the self importance of the keyboard class knows no bounds. Half of you will be replaced by LLMs and the other by offshore low wage workers. In the middle term, companies will simply replace those who down tow the company line with those who will. Gather ye WFH days while ye may.
- infamouscow 3y ago
  > Half of you will be replaced by LLMs and the other by offshore low wage workers. Prognostications with no limiting principle are intellectually lazy; they also lack the substance to be respected as cynical. The industry has gone through that once. The second time around even the MBAs learned how remarkably stupid offshoring is. All of the remote/WFH companies have been going about it for three or more years now. If all these jobs were going to be offshored why hasn't it happened by now? What exactly prevented this fantasy from happening over the last several years? In other words, what makes you so confident that someday in the future things will converge into this prediction? The timelines of your argument don't really match up, making this really no different than Pascal's wager.