12 ms·

The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

117 points by samaysharma 3y ago

throwup238 3y ago
The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t. Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstreet traders? There would be a nation wide solidarity strike. Bill Gates famously joked in the 90s that Microsoft would lose a third of their engineers instantly if they drug tested. The NSA even had to make an official exception on past drug use so people would stop failing the security screening (although they still get tested iirc).
- todd3834 3y ago
  Could it simply be data driven? Is there any truth that the jobs that drug test most often are or were more likely to have drug related incidents than the others? I don’t know the data but my guess would be it is based on past performance as a whole more than individual impact. Whether that is wrong or right I could see how there is an argument to be made
  - throwup238 3y ago
    If it were at all data driven everyone would test for alcohol. That usually doesn’t happen unless there’s an accident and even then, a doctor wouldn’t be subject to a blood test or breathalyzer like a driver would. They’d just be allowed to go home and the matter would be handled in litigation and before the medical board.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Perhaps a reason for this is that not everybody agrees that drugs are all that bad. Half of silicon valley allegedly is micro-dosing all sorts of things and apparently benefiting from that. Steve Jobs famously advocated using LSD. The Vietnam war famously had a lot of drug abuse. WW II soldiers and leadership were consuming epic amounts of amphetamines. And that wasn't just the Nazis. Companies aren't testing for this because they couldn't care less. Drugs isn't killing their business and they like having access to smart people who might fail a test. The main reason testing is more common in the public sector is not that drugs are bad but that the optics of people using drugs has negative political consequences when political leaders are waging this war on drugs. Also with drugs being illegal, using them necessarily means breaking the law and interacting with criminals. Which looks bad politically as well. Remote work is different. People and companies disagree about the effects but a lot of companies seem to prefer having their people not work remotely. Not because of the way it looks but because of at least the perception of its impact on productivity. Whether you agree with that or not doesn't matter. Some people are concerned about it and acting accordingly. The inequality here relates mainly to the value of the work people do. Just like companies don't like losing access to people who are smart and may use drugs, they also don't like losing access to people who have valuable skills that insist on working remotely. So they allow some people to work remotely. But of course some skills are more valuable than others so the inequality mainly relates to how easy it is to replace people with more compliant ones.
  - freddie_mercury 3y ago
    > Perhaps a reason for this is that not everybody agrees that drugs are all that bad As an explanation, this is implausible to the point of impossible. The same employers drug test lower-level employees but (e.g. in the warehouse) but don't test other employees (e.g. in the office). Amazon drug tests warehouse workers but not AWS engineers. It is difficult to come up for a coherent theory for that that includes "as an organisation, we don't think drugs are all that bad"
    - chii 3y ago
      obviously it is the belief of upper management that low level workers cannot be trusted to behave and work to their maximum if they're on drugs, while the "elites" require such drugs to reach their maximum potential.
      - calvinmorrison 3y ago
        No its because usually low level jobs require you to operate heavy machinery like driving a truck or operating a forklift or work on the floor of the factory, or being around those things. Or for example handling cash at registers etc. I feel like this conspiracy is the author, and apparently hn needs to touch grass a little bit
        6510 3y ago
        A friend from Yugoslavia told me about his job there. Their lunch room looked like a grand cafe with every possible kind of liquor and a variety of beer on the tap. Around 11 am some of his coworkers had a few beers, in the sun, in front of the building. Around 1 they had some whiskey or vodka etc. At the end of the work day some went home, others stuck around. They had a few more drinks, some went home, others went out to eat together, some went home after dinner, some went back to the office. He regularly got very drunk. Sometimes he would make a row of chairs and sleep there. 7 am his boss would be the first to arrive. He was always happy to see someone was already there and made coffee. They sat around and chatted some more and he would start his shift an hour early (not paid ofc) It wasn't that everyone got drunk at work every day, some more often than others, some rarely which made it kind of a special occasion if they stuck around. He had the same assignments as his coworkers but completed them in half the time. Sometimes, at 11 am, he would just continue drinking beer while sitting in the sun and go home an hour early. The funniest part was that they mostly talked about work. It was one lengthy extended meeting till 1 am, if they had some kind of deadline they would just work in their spare time while drinking (without pay) No culture is strange until compared. I drink 2 liters of coffee, smoke a lot and consume lots of sugar. This is perfectly normal here. edit: it was a desk job
- jghn 3y ago
  > The NSA even had to make an official exceptio The way I had it explained to me in the 90s was while drug use was disqualifying for things like the FBI, for the NSA it was fine-ish provided you were open about it.
  - Duanemclemore 3y ago
    I have had personal conversations with people who went through involved security clearance processes in the 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's. Between those times I can tell you that everyone but the FBI got more lax about pot (but not cocaine) and homosexuality (even the FBI didn't care about that by the mid 2000's) but not more lax about gambling - even in states where it was already legal. They aren't on the lookout for straight arrows to hire, they're on the lookout for people who can be blackmailed to steal information. Once things like simple weed possession became nothing more than a small civil penalty, there wasn't any way to use the threat of exposure as a way of blackmailing someone. Once people knew they couldn't generally be fired / blackballed for homosexuality, that lever disappeared.
    - locallost 3y ago
      Sounds like a circular argument. The FBI fires gay people, so they had to fire them to prevent them from leaking information because of possible blackmail. But once they stopped firing them for homosexuality there was no need to fire them because of fear they might be blackmailed because of the possibility to fire them. It's probably true for gambling, but the rest sounds like whitewashing. They fired gay people because society was hostile towards them and those agencies were part of society.
      - Duanemclemore 3y ago
        Yes, it was a completely circular argument. I am 100% not defending it. But you're completely correct that all they had to do to keep someone from being blackmailed because otherwise they'd be fired was... to not fire them. I'm sure there's a lot of moral-highgrounding about everyone outside the group being untrustworthy, and looking for confirmation of this in the most paranoid ways.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  this comment represent a weird sentiment: if you drugt test in one field, you should equally drug test I all fields. How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs? it seems like introducing a whole machinery to just have the same resting is an industrial scale waste of resources. However, people regularly die because of drunk and tired drivers.
  - sshine 3y ago
    There is some implicit assumption that drug testing is a safety measure. I am quite convinced it is a productivity measure.
    - goodpoint 3y ago
      It's neither.
    - Broken_Hippo 3y ago
      it is neither. Otherwise, you'd see productivity being better in places that allow drug testing of normal employees and worse off in places that do not. But that's not the case: Retail employees in Norway aren't really less productive than those in the US. Plus, if it really were a productivity measure, why would you not drug test more professionals and salaried employees? Does their productivity not matter? Wouldn't more small businesses find drug testing worth the money?
      - sshine 3y ago
        Doing drugs may affect your productivity at work. Depending on the drug, and the circumstances. I'm sorry to say.
        lumost 3y ago
        I don’t believe that this has any bearing on why individuals are drug tested at work. Particularly when tests with longer durations are used. What business does an employer have with employee drug use outside of work?
- jojobas 3y ago
  I would hazard a guess that low-skilled workers are much more likely to come to work cooked than someone like pilots who have a lot on the line.
- hypercube33 3y ago
  Is there a citation of Gates comment? I wasn't able to find anything
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Some companies require it for everyone. When I did consulting work for Home Depot, I was required to get a drug test. It didn't matter that I wasn't a W2 nor a 1099 for them but a W2 of a consulting company who HD hired to do a project for them, all of us had to be drug tested, with the reason being that Home Depot didn't think it was fair to test people working in their stores if the white collar people weren't tested too. My employer didn't require the test of anyone but since this was a big contract, as far as I know, no one refused. If I were a recreational drug user, it might have been a rather unwelcome situation to come up after years of working for the company where drug use outside of the office wasn't a concern.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    At a prior employer, they simple staffed these types of projects with people who could pass the test. “you’ll get to work for X big client, but you’ll need to be drug tested”
- TrackerFF 3y ago
  ...I can guarantee you that most SpaceX workers are held to much higher standards, than their big boy CEO, when it comes to security clearance.
  - steveoscaro 3y ago
    Musk submits to drug tests. But yeah just skimming news headlines would give you a different idea.
silisili 3y ago
I feel like this is missing the forest for the trees. Perhaps salt in the wound, if you will. Pay a forklift driver or warehouse worker 150k a year, and see how many complain about not working from home.
- starttoaster 3y ago
  I don't think those are the kinds of jobs that have workers that expect to work from home. If you deal with physical assets, machinery, direct-customer communication, etc, you probably don't expect to be able to do your job outside of your company-assigned post anyway. On the other hand, anybody that works in a cubical and mostly deals with a phone/computer could probably easily expect that they would be able to work from home. Many of those jobs have fairly modest pay. And I think if you have that aspiration to work from home, you would probably still be a little annoyed about the inability to work from home, regardless of the pay. But I agree there is likely a price where one would be fine with letting that dream stay a dream. I feel that the far greater problem is that employers are now painting this neat picture where it's employees vs employees in this dilemma over inequality. Foreshadowing that it may be something they need to bother to step in the middle of in the near future. When in reality we are fairly united against employers in their seeming lack of willingness to just treat all of their employees well. Speaking generally of course.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    "I don't think those are the kinds of jobs that have workers that expect to work from home." I think especially for forklift drivers and alike - this is about to change. With teleoperating semi autonomous machinery, most of these jobs could be then remote as well. But it will take some time as currently humans and simple forklifts are way cheaper.
  - silisili 3y ago
    I for some reason think about these things a lot, even though I guess I'm not in the front line anymore and have it pretty nice. I can remember in 2010 or so having two friends who worked from home - one doing generic helpdesk in a small apartment, and one doing medical coding in a trailer. Neither paid well at all, and never did I get this sense of jealousy. Perhaps their lives were easier because of it, but it was far from the giant sun lit home offices people seem to imagine. I also think a lot about how retail has changed. As a child, you had actual sales people in a lot of places who seemed happy to help. Probably on commission. Even the non-commissioned jobs people didn't seem so miserable. Probably because the wage gap wasn't as huge as it is today. So many people I encounter seem bothered by my presence and genuinely miserable, I try to avoid even going to stores anymore. It's a lose lose lose situation. Of course, I have no answers for any of this, just observations from a middling age man.
figassis 3y ago
I understand the problem, but it feels like this existed for a while and no business manager cared about it until they started losing the RTO battle. This seems like a way to boost that argument without actually caring for the employees.
- Simon_ORourke 3y ago
  Are they losing the RTO battle though? Amazon don't seem to be too bothered if you quit rather than go back to the office at the moment - there again Amazon might be just looking to reduce headcount on the cheap too. There's a glut of office space where I live, something like 35% of new offices are unoccupied, so maybe that's due to over-supply or failing RTO policies?
  - zelphirkalt 3y ago
    Maybe Amazon with loads of cheap work and a huge name that still holds a lot of reputation in the tech sector for engineers is not the best example. But a smaller business with their main workforce quitting losing hundreds of thousands of dollar/euro might reconsider.
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    One of the top stories today on LinkedIn is that CEOs are increasingly waiving the white flag and admitting surrender in the RTO battle. There's work that needs to get done and companies fighting wars against themselves and their employees is a needless distraction. Now it's a race to see who can put an end the self inflicted wounds the fastest and get a leg up on those still fighting themselves. https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/ceos-give-up-on-full-time-rto-5651913/ https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/ceos-give-up-on-full-tim...
- guilhas 3y ago
  Everyone is still experimenting what works Most companies are settling for hybrid, and workers not returning are slowly being left behind. Mostly because "classic" companies processes are not ready for remote workers
Throw84949 3y ago
> remote-work opportunities are rare in jobs with annual pay around $30,000 Remote workers with lower salaries are usually contractors. Sometimes with multiple parallel gigs.
bitschubser_ 3y ago
The same inequality between c level and frontline workers exists on so many levels with other perks is it possible that the c level just don’t want to lose its privileges? In Europe as a manager you get subsidized cars where the company pays for gas, private corner offices, equity or special bonus programs not always are benefits packages available for frontline workers… and now they talk about inequality if more staff could have perks like wfh, there always was a divide between staff that needs to be on site and other, only other staff also starts to get some perks in the form of wfh… why don’t give the frontline workers a company car, a private rest zone and better amenities or cash?
- rapidaneurism 3y ago
  I think that this is partly because in Europe taxation is progressive and it quickly becomes quite high. (In the UK £100k-£120k is effectively taxed at 60%+ more if you have young kids) So there is a point where giving someone 10k take home pay rise costs the business much more than giving a frontline worker a 10k take home pay rise. But an EV car in the UK is taxed 98% less than the same amount in cash. Rest zones, work from home etc have 0 tax implications . Arguably lower paid staff is better off getting the cash instead of the benefits and using it as they see fit Edit typo
  - Jochim 3y ago
    Weren't there changes in the last few years that mean benefits in kind are now treated as taxable income? I know I recently began paying tax on employer provided health insurance for example.
    - rapidaneurism 3y ago
      Yes but an EV car is treated as a 2% benefit in kind. E.g. (simplifying) your employer can buy you a 40k Tesla and you get taxed as if they gave you 2% of that as salary. In the 40% braket that is £800 benefit in kind so you pay 320 extra tax. Edit: I think it is better explained here: https://electriccarguide.co.uk/what-are-the-benefit-in-kind-bik-rules-for-electric-vehicles/ https://electriccarguide.co.uk/what-are-the-benefit-in-kind-...
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
(2023) More previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38762747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38762747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38721032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38721032
krystianantoni 3y ago
The discussion is pulled by big income of office space owners and builders. Secondly there is shortage of good mid and line management that cannot cope without looking over shoulder due to various reasons. Any argument to support their profit is good.
- deepsquirrelnet 3y ago
  I agree. Notably missing from the conversation is the struggling commercial real estate industry and investments that have already been committed into that market.
  - sgt101 3y ago
    Also a vast amount of commercial real estate is money laundering.
unsupp0rted 3y ago
The other day I phoned a service provider and the lady’s kid was babbling in the background and a children’s show was playing throughout the call. I couldn’t get off the phone fast enough. Either invest in voice isolation or don’t work from home. Functionally this lady brought her kid to my home office and blasted a cartoon during our meeting. Is this harsh of me and an unpopular opinion? Yes. I agree that Human beings should be able to have work-life balance and kids are a natural and necessary part of that balance. I just don’t want them in my ear. If the lady had had gangster rap music or 8-bit video game music on in the background of the call I’d have been equally annoyed. Work calls are for doing work.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  Huh, I have the opposite reaction. Whenever I’m on a work call and my colleagues apologize for their children shouting in the background I’m mostly fine with it. If anything it makes them seem more human when they’re otherwise just some disembodied voices.
  - caddemon 3y ago
    I think it depends a lot on the specifics, if the background noise is loud and persistent enough it makes it harder to understand the other person. Hard to tell from OP's description but I'm guessing it was actively impacting the conversation if they're complaining about it.
    - unsupp0rted 3y ago
      Admittedly it wasn’t loud enough to make it hard to hear words. You know when you call your cell phone company and you’re routed to a Call Center in India/Philippines and you hear snippets of other people’s support calls in the background? It sort of throws you off throughout the call. You wonder if the agent is getting everything you’re saying, given the distraction. It was that, but with a children’s cartoon and a toddler.
- BossingAround 3y ago
  I totally understand the reaction. Then again, people with kids have it hard enough, let alone those that with low paying jobs. When that happens to me, I get annoyed, but then, I remind myself that I get to exit the call while the other person has to stay in that environment, trying to hustle for money, and I try to show them as much kindness and grace as is possible for me in that moment.
j7ake 3y ago
Unsurprisingly, workers whose skills are in high demand and short supply (eg highly educated, highly experienced people) can demand better work conditions such as pay and commute flexibility.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  [dead]
- MagicMoonlight 3y ago
  Honestly a lot of the “low skill jobs” actually have a high skill threshold but we just arbitrarily decide to suppress them. Take somewhere like Starbucks. They pay them minimum wage, churn em constantly so they’re never trained and make them work arbitrary shifts like 4 hour -> 2 hour unpaid break -> additional 4 hours. Those staff end up “low skilled” but in reality someone who was treated fairly and respected would get very good at running the shop. They’d be able to turn out twice as many drinks and they would actually care about running costs and cleanliness. You wouldn’t get the constant underlying corruption by mistreatment where they can’t be bothered to check stock levels and throw away a grand of material a week on inefficiency.
  - j7ake 3y ago
    Those skilled baristas are welcome to open up their own shop to compete though (which probably many do , successfully). Problem is VCs don’t fund coffee shops, otherwise Starbucks would be “disrupted” overnight.
    - larrykubin 3y ago
      Was reading about Blank Street Coffee raising money recently to compete: https://www.fastcompany.com/90867251/blank-street-coffee-raises-20-million-from-general-catalyst-and-tiger-global https://www.fastcompany.com/90867251/blank-street-coffee-rai...
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    This feels like a tortured argument to me. Starbucks seems to do fine using existing strategic so seems like they are “right” about the appropriate level of skill and investment. Maybe someone else could have a strategy more like yours but it’s clearly not required. An airline on the flip side cannot “try” this with their pilots.
Aeolun 3y ago
What nonsense. The divide is not in highly paid vs low paid jobs. It’s between jobs that can be done from home (which happen to be highly paid) and jobs which need specialized equiment/location (which do not). If I were working a highly paid job where I had to manage a server farm I’d also need to be on location simply due to the requirement of constant physical access.
arketyp 3y ago
I studied at university and chose a programmer path quite indirectly and rather much because the thought of being physically and temporally bound to external and impersonal locations and tools and interactions, for labor, made me nauseous. I worked "remote" also at the office, reclusively, seen somewhat as an alien by colleagues (not unjustly) for whom meeting room bookings were actually critical. I'm not complaining, but it's not all glamour either. You get what you stake out.
cracrecry 3y ago
So everybody needs to be miserable as if you are not miserable the rest of miserable people will look at you and say: That's not fair!! I am miserable so you must be miserable too! Of all the "arguments" used by hired Public Relations companies hired to spin "work from home" in a bad light, this is the most stupid argument I have ever heard. This makes me uncomfortable as probably because of that it could be the most successful.
- cowsandmilk 3y ago
  The article doesn’t recommend forcing more people to come into the office, so your comment reflects experiences outside of this article, not what they’re saying.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > So everybody needs to be miserable as if you are not miserable the rest of miserable people will look at you and say: That's not fair!! I am miserable so you must be miserable too! This argument gets used a lot in politics, whenever a situation is to be improved people claim "but we suffered, that's not fair!!!". Personally, I know this from fellow second-generation migrants here in Germany that are opposed to how "easy" refugees have it - their claim is that they had to fight German bureaucracy for years until they were allowed to work and whatnot. Which is valid, yes, but they seem to be unaware that times have changed.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Crab mentality is dangerous. It seems like a lot of people would rather pull others down to where they are than allow everyone to be lifted up to somewhere better.
    - vladvasiliu 3y ago
      Indeed. But it seems widespread. The issue seems to be that many people don't consider their situation in absolute terms, but tend to look at how others have it. An interesting book on the subject is Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (original German title: Der Neid: Eine Theorie der Gesellschaft) by Helmut Schoeck.
oldpersonintx 3y ago
I read the title much differently than HN! My take is, you get to work from home if your job isn't that crucial. Jobs that are driven by cost rather than result. I don't think most remote workers understand that eventually they must be cost competitive with any legally-applicable competitive workers. Are you ready to become cost-competitive with Mexican devs who know React well enough? In ten years I predict most "remote" work will be pay-per-ticket: 1. Log in to hiring site to complete aptitude test. 2. If pass, get a ticket and propose solution. 3. If solution isn't accepted, goto 1. If another worker solved same issue for less money, goto 1. 4. Close another ticket within X hours. If not, goto 1. Anyone stuck in this loop may very well fantasize about aspirational careers like being a UPS driver.
badpun 3y ago
I will agree to abolish the inequality caused by WfH when CEOs agree to abolish the inequality caused by salary discrepancies (i.e. never). We leave in an inequal society, and for good reasons.
- afarviral 3y ago
  Who wouldn't agree that difficult work should be payed more? Work that requires the acquisition of skills should be payed a bit more too, no? There should be a system in place which determines the appropriate compensation, not arbitrary compensation as determined by the market.
  - badpun 3y ago
    1. I agree that difficult work should be payed more. For example, military service is as difficult as being a CEO (just in a different way), but pays a fraction of CEO's salary. 2. Should job requiring acquisition of skills pay more? Probably, but the discrepancy shouldn't be large. Most high-end jobs require 4 extra years of schooling (and thus forteited income) - whereas the job will be performed for 30-40 years. Thus, in a fair world, high-end jobs would pay around 10% than jobs requiring only high-school diploma. Right now, the high-skill jobs largely go to children of parents with higher social and financial capital, which are able to roll out a red carpet for their children to the well paying jobs (via being role models on how to land a place in corporate hierarchy, choosing good schools, paying for tutors, encouraging choosing a profitable major in college etc.). Many people in high-end jobs are largely there because of their parents.
    - rangestransform 3y ago
      So good parenting is an inequality that needs equalizing now?
      - badpun 3y ago
        It is already being equalized to some degree. That's what's public schooling or child protection services are about.
kkfx 3y ago
Ah, ok... So I suppose since many starve to death for lack of water and food we should do the same. And of course, only workers, executives MUST work as they want. I think the office PR have almost exhausted all ideas to try pushing people back in the smart city or interment champ for slaves who should not be aware of they status...
dmezzetti 3y ago
My biggest question after reading the article is why did they use a LLM to do what is basically a binary classification task? Why not use a BERT-like standard text classifier?
- ProjectArcturis 3y ago
  An LLM is much easier to set up, sounds much cooler, and probably does a better job.
MichaelRo 3y ago
Doesn't even the Bible say "For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance. But from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away."? On a serious note, there are obvious restrictions on who can work from home with intellectual jobs preferred over physical labor. And wasn't it always this divide? Even in communist countries it was sought after to get a college degree and perform intellectual work because it's better paid and has advantages.
aaomidi 3y ago
This is one of the reasons I left Google. I did not like being one of the “exceptions” to remote work. I was anticipating some team dynamic problems going forward.
testHN1ac 3y ago
WFH isn't inequality, WFH is a perk.
- paulcole 3y ago
  > WFH is a perk To some people. If you don’t see it as a perk, you should take that into account when negotiating salary. For me personally (someone who doesn’t see it as a perk), I’d need a higher salary (compared to an in-office job) to consider a remote work arrangement – because I’d need to cover the cost of my coworking space.
marcus_holmes 3y ago
Yet more "please return to the office" pseudo-journalism bollocks. Front-line staff have to clock on, get their toilet breaks timed, get drug tested, have weird random shift patterns, have to work at least one day on the weekend, have to cover for colleagues by doing a 16-hour shift, get paid overtime, can't nip out for a doctor's appointment, etc, etc, etc. Happy for bosses to consider making the workplace more equal, but let's start by making front-line staff's lives easier rather than making everyone else's lives harder.
- phatskat 3y ago
  I don’t know which part of that article you read, but the main takeaways were to have front line workers have a better quality of work. Have managers onsite more, increase pay for frontline workers to compensate for not being able to commute, and shift to four day weeks instead of five to reduce commute. I agree that flexibility such as doctors appointments are important, and also that can be difficult if you’re one of two employees working a storefront, particularly if it’s busy. Heading out to an unplanned appointment (what I assume you mean by “nip out”) may be difficult, but accommodating planned and scheduled appointments could certainly be made easier - this is a time when the onsite manager should say “I will be in that day and I will cover for the time needed for your appointment”.
  - marcus_holmes 3y ago
    > Business leaders rightly worry that this divide could hurt morale among front-line staff, undermine perceived fairness, and create new rifts in the workforce. This from the article. My point is that this is absolute bullshit. Front-line staff already have massive inequality of working standards, and have done for decades. The need for people to go back to the office is not driven by some sudden compassionate drive to equalise workplace differences. It's driven by an entire class of asset for the very wealthy becoming almost worthless.
    - phatskat 3y ago
      I will agree that that particular part of the write up is suspect, who exactly said this beyond those nameless “business leaders” that are just now realizing remote work is a thing? I wouldn’t argue that frontline workers haven’t harbored some resentment to remote coworkers as remote work got more widespread, the framing of it being a new thing seems disingenuous. The overall takeaway I got is that the better approach is to bring better value to the frontline workers to make up for the discrepancies in “fairness” - honestly, this should have been the thinking from the on-set. > The need for people to go back to the office is not driven by some sudden compassionate drive to equalise workplace differences. It's driven by an entire class of asset for the very wealthy becoming almost worthless. I didn’t see anything suggesting this as a remedy in TFA, though I’ll go read it again in a bit. Completely agree that the only reasonable defense of any push to end work from home is to make up for real estate investment
gumballindie 3y ago
Most people that want to work onsite are the people without an inner voice. They need someone to talk to compensate for it.
analog31 3y ago
>>>> Business leaders rightly worry that this divide could hurt morale among front-line staff, undermine perceived fairness, and create new rifts in the workforce. Working at a multinational, people have had varied work arrangements, perquisites, social hierarchies, and pay scales, for a long time. WFH is just a new wrinkle, where you're one of the "remotes" but you live in the same town for some reason. Also, if you think about it, the network of suppliers, contractors, and customers represent quasi-remotes in the sense that they're also involved in the business but are not locating themselves on site, and are jockeying for advantages just like everybody else. The remotes are mostly invisible. The winds of self-interest that fill our sails continue to blow even if no other ship is in sight.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
The amount of effort to make inequality a fight between a white collar worker making 100,000 and a blue collar working making 30-40,000 and not about a CEO making 10Million or an investor making 100 million is clear and insidious.
- pcmaffey 3y ago
  Culture warfare 101
lebean 3y ago
In other news, someone having something nice is unequal to someone who doesn't.
diogenescynic 3y ago
Life is built on inequality, but HBR wants to guilt us into all going back to the office out of some sense of equality? What a fucking joke. The only group this benefits are those at the very top. Either that or my commute is included in my working hours. I'll never go back to the office and wasting so much time commuting per week and not being compensated.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lepus 3y ago
If business leaders actually cared about "inequality" they would slash their own compensation down closer to the people who work for them.
raphar 3y ago
Hbr worried about inequality, that's not common!
kbos87 3y ago
> “…tested the model on a part of our sample that it was not trained on and found that it achieves a 98% accuracy rate in replicating the human classifications. Armed with our highly accurate LLM…” So concerned with checking the box of incorporating AI into their work, the writer managed to quickly associate AI’s classification with “must be right”.
horns4lyfe 3y ago
Ah yes. The old “if everyone can’t have it, no one can have it” argument. Journalists are just elementary school tattletales at this point. Aren’t we also being told that because we can work from home we’re going to be outsourced?
silexia 3y ago
Does anyone trust anything published in HBR anymore?

117 points by samaysharma 3y ago

The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t. Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstreet traders? There would be a nation wide solidarity strike. Bill Gates famously joked in the 90s that Microsoft would lose a third of their engineers instantly if they drug tested. The NSA even had to make an official exception on past drug use so people would stop failing the security screening (although they still get tested iirc).

todd3834 3y ago
Could it simply be data driven? Is there any truth that the jobs that drug test most often are or were more likely to have drug related incidents than the others? I don’t know the data but my guess would be it is based on past performance as a whole more than individual impact. Whether that is wrong or right I could see how there is an argument to be made
- throwup238 3y ago
  If it were at all data driven everyone would test for alcohol. That usually doesn’t happen unless there’s an accident and even then, a doctor wouldn’t be subject to a blood test or breathalyzer like a driver would. They’d just be allowed to go home and the matter would be handled in litigation and before the medical board.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Perhaps a reason for this is that not everybody agrees that drugs are all that bad. Half of silicon valley allegedly is micro-dosing all sorts of things and apparently benefiting from that. Steve Jobs famously advocated using LSD. The Vietnam war famously had a lot of drug abuse. WW II soldiers and leadership were consuming epic amounts of amphetamines. And that wasn't just the Nazis. Companies aren't testing for this because they couldn't care less. Drugs isn't killing their business and they like having access to smart people who might fail a test. The main reason testing is more common in the public sector is not that drugs are bad but that the optics of people using drugs has negative political consequences when political leaders are waging this war on drugs. Also with drugs being illegal, using them necessarily means breaking the law and interacting with criminals. Which looks bad politically as well. Remote work is different. People and companies disagree about the effects but a lot of companies seem to prefer having their people not work remotely. Not because of the way it looks but because of at least the perception of its impact on productivity. Whether you agree with that or not doesn't matter. Some people are concerned about it and acting accordingly. The inequality here relates mainly to the value of the work people do. Just like companies don't like losing access to people who are smart and may use drugs, they also don't like losing access to people who have valuable skills that insist on working remotely. So they allow some people to work remotely. But of course some skills are more valuable than others so the inequality mainly relates to how easy it is to replace people with more compliant ones.
- freddie_mercury 3y ago
  > Perhaps a reason for this is that not everybody agrees that drugs are all that bad As an explanation, this is implausible to the point of impossible. The same employers drug test lower-level employees but (e.g. in the warehouse) but don't test other employees (e.g. in the office). Amazon drug tests warehouse workers but not AWS engineers. It is difficult to come up for a coherent theory for that that includes "as an organisation, we don't think drugs are all that bad"
  - chii 3y ago
    obviously it is the belief of upper management that low level workers cannot be trusted to behave and work to their maximum if they're on drugs, while the "elites" require such drugs to reach their maximum potential.
    - calvinmorrison 3y ago
      No its because usually low level jobs require you to operate heavy machinery like driving a truck or operating a forklift or work on the floor of the factory, or being around those things. Or for example handling cash at registers etc. I feel like this conspiracy is the author, and apparently hn needs to touch grass a little bit
      - 6510 3y ago
        A friend from Yugoslavia told me about his job there. Their lunch room looked like a grand cafe with every possible kind of liquor and a variety of beer on the tap. Around 11 am some of his coworkers had a few beers, in the sun, in front of the building. Around 1 they had some whiskey or vodka etc. At the end of the work day some went home, others stuck around. They had a few more drinks, some went home, others went out to eat together, some went home after dinner, some went back to the office. He regularly got very drunk. Sometimes he would make a row of chairs and sleep there. 7 am his boss would be the first to arrive. He was always happy to see someone was already there and made coffee. They sat around and chatted some more and he would start his shift an hour early (not paid ofc) It wasn't that everyone got drunk at work every day, some more often than others, some rarely which made it kind of a special occasion if they stuck around. He had the same assignments as his coworkers but completed them in half the time. Sometimes, at 11 am, he would just continue drinking beer while sitting in the sun and go home an hour early. The funniest part was that they mostly talked about work. It was one lengthy extended meeting till 1 am, if they had some kind of deadline they would just work in their spare time while drinking (without pay) No culture is strange until compared. I drink 2 liters of coffee, smoke a lot and consume lots of sugar. This is perfectly normal here. edit: it was a desk job
jghn 3y ago
> The NSA even had to make an official exceptio The way I had it explained to me in the 90s was while drug use was disqualifying for things like the FBI, for the NSA it was fine-ish provided you were open about it.
- Duanemclemore 3y ago
  I have had personal conversations with people who went through involved security clearance processes in the 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's. Between those times I can tell you that everyone but the FBI got more lax about pot (but not cocaine) and homosexuality (even the FBI didn't care about that by the mid 2000's) but not more lax about gambling - even in states where it was already legal. They aren't on the lookout for straight arrows to hire, they're on the lookout for people who can be blackmailed to steal information. Once things like simple weed possession became nothing more than a small civil penalty, there wasn't any way to use the threat of exposure as a way of blackmailing someone. Once people knew they couldn't generally be fired / blackballed for homosexuality, that lever disappeared.
  - locallost 3y ago
    Sounds like a circular argument. The FBI fires gay people, so they had to fire them to prevent them from leaking information because of possible blackmail. But once they stopped firing them for homosexuality there was no need to fire them because of fear they might be blackmailed because of the possibility to fire them. It's probably true for gambling, but the rest sounds like whitewashing. They fired gay people because society was hostile towards them and those agencies were part of society.
    - Duanemclemore 3y ago
      Yes, it was a completely circular argument. I am 100% not defending it. But you're completely correct that all they had to do to keep someone from being blackmailed because otherwise they'd be fired was... to not fire them. I'm sure there's a lot of moral-highgrounding about everyone outside the group being untrustworthy, and looking for confirmation of this in the most paranoid ways.
madsbuch 3y ago
this comment represent a weird sentiment: if you drugt test in one field, you should equally drug test I all fields. How many airplanes crashed due to The pilot being on drugs? it seems like introducing a whole machinery to just have the same resting is an industrial scale waste of resources. However, people regularly die because of drunk and tired drivers.
- sshine 3y ago
  There is some implicit assumption that drug testing is a safety measure. I am quite convinced it is a productivity measure.
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    It's neither.
  - Broken_Hippo 3y ago
    it is neither. Otherwise, you'd see productivity being better in places that allow drug testing of normal employees and worse off in places that do not. But that's not the case: Retail employees in Norway aren't really less productive than those in the US. Plus, if it really were a productivity measure, why would you not drug test more professionals and salaried employees? Does their productivity not matter? Wouldn't more small businesses find drug testing worth the money?
    - sshine 3y ago
      Doing drugs may affect your productivity at work. Depending on the drug, and the circumstances. I'm sorry to say.
      - lumost 3y ago
        I don’t believe that this has any bearing on why individuals are drug tested at work. Particularly when tests with longer durations are used. What business does an employer have with employee drug use outside of work?
jojobas 3y ago
I would hazard a guess that low-skilled workers are much more likely to come to work cooked than someone like pilots who have a lot on the line.
hypercube33 3y ago
Is there a citation of Gates comment? I wasn't able to find anything
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Some companies require it for everyone. When I did consulting work for Home Depot, I was required to get a drug test. It didn't matter that I wasn't a W2 nor a 1099 for them but a W2 of a consulting company who HD hired to do a project for them, all of us had to be drug tested, with the reason being that Home Depot didn't think it was fair to test people working in their stores if the white collar people weren't tested too. My employer didn't require the test of anyone but since this was a big contract, as far as I know, no one refused. If I were a recreational drug user, it might have been a rather unwelcome situation to come up after years of working for the company where drug use outside of the office wasn't a concern.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  At a prior employer, they simple staffed these types of projects with people who could pass the test. “you’ll get to work for X big client, but you’ll need to be drug tested”
TrackerFF 3y ago
...I can guarantee you that most SpaceX workers are held to much higher standards, than their big boy CEO, when it comes to security clearance.
- steveoscaro 3y ago
  Musk submits to drug tests. But yeah just skimming news headlines would give you a different idea.

silisili 3y ago

I feel like this is missing the forest for the trees. Perhaps salt in the wound, if you will. Pay a forklift driver or warehouse worker 150k a year, and see how many complain about not working from home.

starttoaster 3y ago
I don't think those are the kinds of jobs that have workers that expect to work from home. If you deal with physical assets, machinery, direct-customer communication, etc, you probably don't expect to be able to do your job outside of your company-assigned post anyway. On the other hand, anybody that works in a cubical and mostly deals with a phone/computer could probably easily expect that they would be able to work from home. Many of those jobs have fairly modest pay. And I think if you have that aspiration to work from home, you would probably still be a little annoyed about the inability to work from home, regardless of the pay. But I agree there is likely a price where one would be fine with letting that dream stay a dream. I feel that the far greater problem is that employers are now painting this neat picture where it's employees vs employees in this dilemma over inequality. Foreshadowing that it may be something they need to bother to step in the middle of in the near future. When in reality we are fairly united against employers in their seeming lack of willingness to just treat all of their employees well. Speaking generally of course.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "I don't think those are the kinds of jobs that have workers that expect to work from home." I think especially for forklift drivers and alike - this is about to change. With teleoperating semi autonomous machinery, most of these jobs could be then remote as well. But it will take some time as currently humans and simple forklifts are way cheaper.
- silisili 3y ago
  I for some reason think about these things a lot, even though I guess I'm not in the front line anymore and have it pretty nice. I can remember in 2010 or so having two friends who worked from home - one doing generic helpdesk in a small apartment, and one doing medical coding in a trailer. Neither paid well at all, and never did I get this sense of jealousy. Perhaps their lives were easier because of it, but it was far from the giant sun lit home offices people seem to imagine. I also think a lot about how retail has changed. As a child, you had actual sales people in a lot of places who seemed happy to help. Probably on commission. Even the non-commissioned jobs people didn't seem so miserable. Probably because the wage gap wasn't as huge as it is today. So many people I encounter seem bothered by my presence and genuinely miserable, I try to avoid even going to stores anymore. It's a lose lose lose situation. Of course, I have no answers for any of this, just observations from a middling age man.

figassis 3y ago

I understand the problem, but it feels like this existed for a while and no business manager cared about it until they started losing the RTO battle. This seems like a way to boost that argument without actually caring for the employees.

Simon_ORourke 3y ago
Are they losing the RTO battle though? Amazon don't seem to be too bothered if you quit rather than go back to the office at the moment - there again Amazon might be just looking to reduce headcount on the cheap too. There's a glut of office space where I live, something like 35% of new offices are unoccupied, so maybe that's due to over-supply or failing RTO policies?
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  Maybe Amazon with loads of cheap work and a huge name that still holds a lot of reputation in the tech sector for engineers is not the best example. But a smaller business with their main workforce quitting losing hundreds of thousands of dollar/euro might reconsider.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  One of the top stories today on LinkedIn is that CEOs are increasingly waiving the white flag and admitting surrender in the RTO battle. There's work that needs to get done and companies fighting wars against themselves and their employees is a needless distraction. Now it's a race to see who can put an end the self inflicted wounds the fastest and get a leg up on those still fighting themselves. https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/ceos-give-up-on-full-time-rto-5651913/ https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/ceos-give-up-on-full-tim...
guilhas 3y ago
Everyone is still experimenting what works Most companies are settling for hybrid, and workers not returning are slowly being left behind. Mostly because "classic" companies processes are not ready for remote workers

Throw84949 3y ago

> remote-work opportunities are rare in jobs with annual pay around $30,000 Remote workers with lower salaries are usually contractors. Sometimes with multiple parallel gigs.

bitschubser_ 3y ago

The same inequality between c level and frontline workers exists on so many levels with other perks is it possible that the c level just don’t want to lose its privileges? In Europe as a manager you get subsidized cars where the company pays for gas, private corner offices, equity or special bonus programs not always are benefits packages available for frontline workers… and now they talk about inequality if more staff could have perks like wfh, there always was a divide between staff that needs to be on site and other, only other staff also starts to get some perks in the form of wfh… why don’t give the frontline workers a company car, a private rest zone and better amenities or cash?

rapidaneurism 3y ago
I think that this is partly because in Europe taxation is progressive and it quickly becomes quite high. (In the UK £100k-£120k is effectively taxed at 60%+ more if you have young kids) So there is a point where giving someone 10k take home pay rise costs the business much more than giving a frontline worker a 10k take home pay rise. But an EV car in the UK is taxed 98% less than the same amount in cash. Rest zones, work from home etc have 0 tax implications . Arguably lower paid staff is better off getting the cash instead of the benefits and using it as they see fit Edit typo
- Jochim 3y ago
  Weren't there changes in the last few years that mean benefits in kind are now treated as taxable income? I know I recently began paying tax on employer provided health insurance for example.
  - rapidaneurism 3y ago
    Yes but an EV car is treated as a 2% benefit in kind. E.g. (simplifying) your employer can buy you a 40k Tesla and you get taxed as if they gave you 2% of that as salary. In the 40% braket that is £800 benefit in kind so you pay 320 extra tax. Edit: I think it is better explained here: https://electriccarguide.co.uk/what-are-the-benefit-in-kind-bik-rules-for-electric-vehicles/ https://electriccarguide.co.uk/what-are-the-benefit-in-kind-...

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

(2023) More previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38762747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38762747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38721032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38721032

krystianantoni 3y ago

The discussion is pulled by big income of office space owners and builders. Secondly there is shortage of good mid and line management that cannot cope without looking over shoulder due to various reasons. Any argument to support their profit is good.

deepsquirrelnet 3y ago
I agree. Notably missing from the conversation is the struggling commercial real estate industry and investments that have already been committed into that market.
- sgt101 3y ago
  Also a vast amount of commercial real estate is money laundering.

unsupp0rted 3y ago

The other day I phoned a service provider and the lady’s kid was babbling in the background and a children’s show was playing throughout the call. I couldn’t get off the phone fast enough. Either invest in voice isolation or don’t work from home. Functionally this lady brought her kid to my home office and blasted a cartoon during our meeting. Is this harsh of me and an unpopular opinion? Yes. I agree that Human beings should be able to have work-life balance and kids are a natural and necessary part of that balance. I just don’t want them in my ear. If the lady had had gangster rap music or 8-bit video game music on in the background of the call I’d have been equally annoyed. Work calls are for doing work.

Aeolun 3y ago
Huh, I have the opposite reaction. Whenever I’m on a work call and my colleagues apologize for their children shouting in the background I’m mostly fine with it. If anything it makes them seem more human when they’re otherwise just some disembodied voices.
- caddemon 3y ago
  I think it depends a lot on the specifics, if the background noise is loud and persistent enough it makes it harder to understand the other person. Hard to tell from OP's description but I'm guessing it was actively impacting the conversation if they're complaining about it.
  - unsupp0rted 3y ago
    Admittedly it wasn’t loud enough to make it hard to hear words. You know when you call your cell phone company and you’re routed to a Call Center in India/Philippines and you hear snippets of other people’s support calls in the background? It sort of throws you off throughout the call. You wonder if the agent is getting everything you’re saying, given the distraction. It was that, but with a children’s cartoon and a toddler.
BossingAround 3y ago
I totally understand the reaction. Then again, people with kids have it hard enough, let alone those that with low paying jobs. When that happens to me, I get annoyed, but then, I remind myself that I get to exit the call while the other person has to stay in that environment, trying to hustle for money, and I try to show them as much kindness and grace as is possible for me in that moment.

j7ake 3y ago

Unsurprisingly, workers whose skills are in high demand and short supply (eg highly educated, highly experienced people) can demand better work conditions such as pay and commute flexibility.

oldpersonintx 3y ago
[dead]
MagicMoonlight 3y ago
Honestly a lot of the “low skill jobs” actually have a high skill threshold but we just arbitrarily decide to suppress them. Take somewhere like Starbucks. They pay them minimum wage, churn em constantly so they’re never trained and make them work arbitrary shifts like 4 hour -> 2 hour unpaid break -> additional 4 hours. Those staff end up “low skilled” but in reality someone who was treated fairly and respected would get very good at running the shop. They’d be able to turn out twice as many drinks and they would actually care about running costs and cleanliness. You wouldn’t get the constant underlying corruption by mistreatment where they can’t be bothered to check stock levels and throw away a grand of material a week on inefficiency.
- j7ake 3y ago
  Those skilled baristas are welcome to open up their own shop to compete though (which probably many do , successfully). Problem is VCs don’t fund coffee shops, otherwise Starbucks would be “disrupted” overnight.
  - larrykubin 3y ago
    Was reading about Blank Street Coffee raising money recently to compete: https://www.fastcompany.com/90867251/blank-street-coffee-raises-20-million-from-general-catalyst-and-tiger-global https://www.fastcompany.com/90867251/blank-street-coffee-rai...
- xyzelement 3y ago
  This feels like a tortured argument to me. Starbucks seems to do fine using existing strategic so seems like they are “right” about the appropriate level of skill and investment. Maybe someone else could have a strategy more like yours but it’s clearly not required. An airline on the flip side cannot “try” this with their pilots.

Aeolun 3y ago

What nonsense. The divide is not in highly paid vs low paid jobs. It’s between jobs that can be done from home (which happen to be highly paid) and jobs which need specialized equiment/location (which do not). If I were working a highly paid job where I had to manage a server farm I’d also need to be on location simply due to the requirement of constant physical access.

arketyp 3y ago

I studied at university and chose a programmer path quite indirectly and rather much because the thought of being physically and temporally bound to external and impersonal locations and tools and interactions, for labor, made me nauseous. I worked "remote" also at the office, reclusively, seen somewhat as an alien by colleagues (not unjustly) for whom meeting room bookings were actually critical. I'm not complaining, but it's not all glamour either. You get what you stake out.

cracrecry 3y ago

So everybody needs to be miserable as if you are not miserable the rest of miserable people will look at you and say: That's not fair!! I am miserable so you must be miserable too! Of all the "arguments" used by hired Public Relations companies hired to spin "work from home" in a bad light, this is the most stupid argument I have ever heard. This makes me uncomfortable as probably because of that it could be the most successful.

cowsandmilk 3y ago
The article doesn’t recommend forcing more people to come into the office, so your comment reflects experiences outside of this article, not what they’re saying.
mschuster91 3y ago
> So everybody needs to be miserable as if you are not miserable the rest of miserable people will look at you and say: That's not fair!! I am miserable so you must be miserable too! This argument gets used a lot in politics, whenever a situation is to be improved people claim "but we suffered, that's not fair!!!". Personally, I know this from fellow second-generation migrants here in Germany that are opposed to how "easy" refugees have it - their claim is that they had to fight German bureaucracy for years until they were allowed to work and whatnot. Which is valid, yes, but they seem to be unaware that times have changed.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Crab mentality is dangerous. It seems like a lot of people would rather pull others down to where they are than allow everyone to be lifted up to somewhere better.
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    Indeed. But it seems widespread. The issue seems to be that many people don't consider their situation in absolute terms, but tend to look at how others have it. An interesting book on the subject is Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (original German title: Der Neid: Eine Theorie der Gesellschaft) by Helmut Schoeck.

oldpersonintx 3y ago

I read the title much differently than HN! My take is, you get to work from home if your job isn't that crucial. Jobs that are driven by cost rather than result. I don't think most remote workers understand that eventually they must be cost competitive with any legally-applicable competitive workers. Are you ready to become cost-competitive with Mexican devs who know React well enough? In ten years I predict most "remote" work will be pay-per-ticket: 1. Log in to hiring site to complete aptitude test. 2. If pass, get a ticket and propose solution. 3. If solution isn't accepted, goto 1. If another worker solved same issue for less money, goto 1. 4. Close another ticket within X hours. If not, goto 1. Anyone stuck in this loop may very well fantasize about aspirational careers like being a UPS driver.

badpun 3y ago

I will agree to abolish the inequality caused by WfH when CEOs agree to abolish the inequality caused by salary discrepancies (i.e. never). We leave in an inequal society, and for good reasons.

afarviral 3y ago
Who wouldn't agree that difficult work should be payed more? Work that requires the acquisition of skills should be payed a bit more too, no? There should be a system in place which determines the appropriate compensation, not arbitrary compensation as determined by the market.
- badpun 3y ago
  1. I agree that difficult work should be payed more. For example, military service is as difficult as being a CEO (just in a different way), but pays a fraction of CEO's salary. 2. Should job requiring acquisition of skills pay more? Probably, but the discrepancy shouldn't be large. Most high-end jobs require 4 extra years of schooling (and thus forteited income) - whereas the job will be performed for 30-40 years. Thus, in a fair world, high-end jobs would pay around 10% than jobs requiring only high-school diploma. Right now, the high-skill jobs largely go to children of parents with higher social and financial capital, which are able to roll out a red carpet for their children to the well paying jobs (via being role models on how to land a place in corporate hierarchy, choosing good schools, paying for tutors, encouraging choosing a profitable major in college etc.). Many people in high-end jobs are largely there because of their parents.
  - rangestransform 3y ago
    So good parenting is an inequality that needs equalizing now?
    - badpun 3y ago
      It is already being equalized to some degree. That's what's public schooling or child protection services are about.

kkfx 3y ago

Ah, ok... So I suppose since many starve to death for lack of water and food we should do the same. And of course, only workers, executives MUST work as they want. I think the office PR have almost exhausted all ideas to try pushing people back in the smart city or interment champ for slaves who should not be aware of they status...

dmezzetti 3y ago

My biggest question after reading the article is why did they use a LLM to do what is basically a binary classification task? Why not use a BERT-like standard text classifier?

ProjectArcturis 3y ago
An LLM is much easier to set up, sounds much cooler, and probably does a better job.

MichaelRo 3y ago

Doesn't even the Bible say "For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance. But from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away."? On a serious note, there are obvious restrictions on who can work from home with intellectual jobs preferred over physical labor. And wasn't it always this divide? Even in communist countries it was sought after to get a college degree and perform intellectual work because it's better paid and has advantages.

aaomidi 3y ago

This is one of the reasons I left Google. I did not like being one of the “exceptions” to remote work. I was anticipating some team dynamic problems going forward.

testHN1ac 3y ago

WFH isn't inequality, WFH is a perk.

paulcole 3y ago
> WFH is a perk To some people. If you don’t see it as a perk, you should take that into account when negotiating salary. For me personally (someone who doesn’t see it as a perk), I’d need a higher salary (compared to an in-office job) to consider a remote work arrangement – because I’d need to cover the cost of my coworking space.

marcus_holmes 3y ago

Yet more "please return to the office" pseudo-journalism bollocks. Front-line staff have to clock on, get their toilet breaks timed, get drug tested, have weird random shift patterns, have to work at least one day on the weekend, have to cover for colleagues by doing a 16-hour shift, get paid overtime, can't nip out for a doctor's appointment, etc, etc, etc. Happy for bosses to consider making the workplace more equal, but let's start by making front-line staff's lives easier rather than making everyone else's lives harder.

phatskat 3y ago
I don’t know which part of that article you read, but the main takeaways were to have front line workers have a better quality of work. Have managers onsite more, increase pay for frontline workers to compensate for not being able to commute, and shift to four day weeks instead of five to reduce commute. I agree that flexibility such as doctors appointments are important, and also that can be difficult if you’re one of two employees working a storefront, particularly if it’s busy. Heading out to an unplanned appointment (what I assume you mean by “nip out”) may be difficult, but accommodating planned and scheduled appointments could certainly be made easier - this is a time when the onsite manager should say “I will be in that day and I will cover for the time needed for your appointment”.
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  > Business leaders rightly worry that this divide could hurt morale among front-line staff, undermine perceived fairness, and create new rifts in the workforce. This from the article. My point is that this is absolute bullshit. Front-line staff already have massive inequality of working standards, and have done for decades. The need for people to go back to the office is not driven by some sudden compassionate drive to equalise workplace differences. It's driven by an entire class of asset for the very wealthy becoming almost worthless.
  - phatskat 3y ago
    I will agree that that particular part of the write up is suspect, who exactly said this beyond those nameless “business leaders” that are just now realizing remote work is a thing? I wouldn’t argue that frontline workers haven’t harbored some resentment to remote coworkers as remote work got more widespread, the framing of it being a new thing seems disingenuous. The overall takeaway I got is that the better approach is to bring better value to the frontline workers to make up for the discrepancies in “fairness” - honestly, this should have been the thinking from the on-set. > The need for people to go back to the office is not driven by some sudden compassionate drive to equalise workplace differences. It's driven by an entire class of asset for the very wealthy becoming almost worthless. I didn’t see anything suggesting this as a remedy in TFA, though I’ll go read it again in a bit. Completely agree that the only reasonable defense of any push to end work from home is to make up for real estate investment

gumballindie 3y ago

Most people that want to work onsite are the people without an inner voice. They need someone to talk to compensate for it.

analog31 3y ago

>>>> Business leaders rightly worry that this divide could hurt morale among front-line staff, undermine perceived fairness, and create new rifts in the workforce. Working at a multinational, people have had varied work arrangements, perquisites, social hierarchies, and pay scales, for a long time. WFH is just a new wrinkle, where you're one of the "remotes" but you live in the same town for some reason. Also, if you think about it, the network of suppliers, contractors, and customers represent quasi-remotes in the sense that they're also involved in the business but are not locating themselves on site, and are jockeying for advantages just like everybody else. The remotes are mostly invisible. The winds of self-interest that fill our sails continue to blow even if no other ship is in sight.

tracerbulletx 3y ago

The amount of effort to make inequality a fight between a white collar worker making 100,000 and a blue collar working making 30-40,000 and not about a CEO making 10Million or an investor making 100 million is clear and insidious.

pcmaffey 3y ago
Culture warfare 101

lebean 3y ago

In other news, someone having something nice is unequal to someone who doesn't.

diogenescynic 3y ago

Life is built on inequality, but HBR wants to guilt us into all going back to the office out of some sense of equality? What a fucking joke. The only group this benefits are those at the very top. Either that or my commute is included in my working hours. I'll never go back to the office and wasting so much time commuting per week and not being compensated.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lepus 3y ago

If business leaders actually cared about "inequality" they would slash their own compensation down closer to the people who work for them.

raphar 3y ago

Hbr worried about inequality, that's not common!

kbos87 3y ago

> “…tested the model on a part of our sample that it was not trained on and found that it achieves a 98% accuracy rate in replicating the human classifications. Armed with our highly accurate LLM…” So concerned with checking the box of incorporating AI into their work, the writer managed to quickly associate AI’s classification with “must be right”.

horns4lyfe 3y ago

Ah yes. The old “if everyone can’t have it, no one can have it” argument. Journalists are just elementary school tattletales at this point. Aren’t we also being told that because we can work from home we’re going to be outsourced?

silexia 3y ago

Does anyone trust anything published in HBR anymore?