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I’m in favor of remote work. The question was why discussion of remote work on HN is one sided. My argument was that it’s one sided because proponents of remote

I’m in favor of remote work. The question was why discussion of remote work on HN is one sided. My argument was that it’s one sided because proponents of remote work are loud and borderline toxic, so people don’t bother posting in favor of the opposing view. That’s my case, and in my estimation, the responses thus far have entirely proven it.

chii 3y ago
> proponents of remote work are loud and borderline toxic i think that's a very unfavourable way to view it. The reason they are so "toxic" is becauses this remote work privilege is very easy to remove by those who own the company (or have power within the company). Employees are used to be abused - after all, they are mostly a commodity and cannot really command control over the operation of a company. The bargaining power is next to zero. The remote work happenstance is luck - and grasping it hard doesn't seem illogical when they see the risk of it being removed without their consent. Loss aversion is real.
- clocot 3y ago
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- jdlshore 3y ago
  I think that makes a lot of sense, and explains the behavior I see. It doesn’t excuse it, though. It’s still shitty behavior, and the opposite of the kind of reasoned discourse I’d like to see on HN. I think there’s an interesting debate to be had on the pros and cons of remote work, and even more interesting discussions to be had about how to compensate for its flaws. (Such as difficulty integrating new hires into the social fabric of the company, challenges experienced by junior devs, a slow burn of “othering” in interactions, lack of serendipitous conversations, challenges with creative group work, tendency towards long scheduled meetings over “pop your head into my office” moments.) Those are actually of intense interest to me, since I’m dealing with these challenges in my real-world work. I have solutions to some of them, but not all. I’d love to learn from other people’s experiences. But that doesn’t seem to be possible on HN, where the barest hint that remote work isn’t perfect brings out the shouters.
  - chii 3y ago
    > how to compensate for its flaws... brings out the shouters. that's because the flaws are irrelevant to the employee. Those flaws are problems for the company (e.g., they are all related to extra value extraction from the work of the employee). The simple answer is - pay more for working in the office, and you will get people to come. There's a monetary value associated with WFH, and you just need to the pay to exceed that value (as determined by the market of course).
  - zrn900 3y ago
    > It doesn’t excuse it, though It does. People's actual happiness is at stake. From being able to be with their family and loved ones more to being able to live closer to their families, the places they grew up in and the extremely-important social support networks that those create constitute a survival-level benefit for those people, and they naturally react harshly to sick sociopaths who want to control people and improve the percentage of the imaginary-value of companies that is tied to real estate. There is absolutely no rational, justifiable reason for rto other than very, very ugly, sociopath-grade reasons. This includes those extroverts who want to force people to 'socialize' by forcing them to move away from their families, relatives, friends and places they were born and grew up in and forcing them to !waste! their lives commuting to and back from work. 'Waste' is emphasized here, because there is no taking back the time that is collectively lost in commuting. Its a gigantic loss for the commuters, the company they work in, the local economy and the society at large.
kcplate 3y ago
Well I agree with you. I love working remote and don’t want to RTO. However after several discussions on here where I simply asked the question of remote work proponents to just provide real evidence of the benefit of remote work to the organization and not just the personal benefits to them…I generally got argued and downvoted and told the same “brick and mortar savings” and “happier workers work harder” as the crust of the argument—both of which are usually highly subjective to the specific org and employee and not a hard and fast rule. Reality because of the HN audience is heavy on tech workers, which is one of the few disciplines that can actually and effectively WFH en masse, it’s out of balance to the real world. Add to that we tech folk already tend to believe we are the smartest humans to walk the earth, it makes for a fun combination of lack of real world awareness coupled with arrogance on the subject.
- zrn900 3y ago
  Maybe you were downvoted because the benefits of remote work to everybody and the society are obvious: - Avoid MASSIVE loss of time, and as a result, productivity and happiness to entire society by having people commute. That is time that can never be taken back. The time lost commuting is lost to the individual who's commuting, the company he or she works in, the economy and the society in general. No need to even talk about the cognitive cost that commuting carries. - Avoid ripping people off from their families, relatives, friends and their entire social support network which exist in the places they were born and grew up in. The cost of this is immeasurable as the loss of this support network involves a lot of costs ranging from detrimental psychological impact to the person to financial costs as the person must replace this support network by paying strangers to fill in those positions ranging from babysitting to care taking. The result is an entire society dumbed-down by xanax to cope. Which directly affects the companies that they work for as lost productivity. But of course, like real estate, there is an industry that profits from this misery - the pharma - and their profit is society's loss. - Avoid cramming millions into already overcrowded urban centers and creating innumerable problems ranging from social ones to infrastructure. There isnt any megapolis on the planet that solved these problems yet. And there wont be any until we invent something like 'space/time compression' and succeed in cramming more people into a place than what's physically possible. These should be enough by themselves as benefits as they are massive benefits to everybody involved and the society itself, while many more arguments can be made for remote work.
intended 3y ago
I mean, yeah? These are comment sections, where people are responding to a force they have little power over, as it puts together an unpopular position. The people who enjoy RTO wont even be in these threads, they are getting what they want. Why actively spend time in a thread to engage with someone who has no impact on their glowing future to come?

chii 3y ago

> proponents of remote work are loud and borderline toxic i think that's a very unfavourable way to view it. The reason they are so "toxic" is becauses this remote work privilege is very easy to remove by those who own the company (or have power within the company). Employees are used to be abused - after all, they are mostly a commodity and cannot really command control over the operation of a company. The bargaining power is next to zero. The remote work happenstance is luck - and grasping it hard doesn't seem illogical when they see the risk of it being removed without their consent. Loss aversion is real.

clocot 3y ago
[dead]
jdlshore 3y ago
I think that makes a lot of sense, and explains the behavior I see. It doesn’t excuse it, though. It’s still shitty behavior, and the opposite of the kind of reasoned discourse I’d like to see on HN. I think there’s an interesting debate to be had on the pros and cons of remote work, and even more interesting discussions to be had about how to compensate for its flaws. (Such as difficulty integrating new hires into the social fabric of the company, challenges experienced by junior devs, a slow burn of “othering” in interactions, lack of serendipitous conversations, challenges with creative group work, tendency towards long scheduled meetings over “pop your head into my office” moments.) Those are actually of intense interest to me, since I’m dealing with these challenges in my real-world work. I have solutions to some of them, but not all. I’d love to learn from other people’s experiences. But that doesn’t seem to be possible on HN, where the barest hint that remote work isn’t perfect brings out the shouters.
- chii 3y ago
  > how to compensate for its flaws... brings out the shouters. that's because the flaws are irrelevant to the employee. Those flaws are problems for the company (e.g., they are all related to extra value extraction from the work of the employee). The simple answer is - pay more for working in the office, and you will get people to come. There's a monetary value associated with WFH, and you just need to the pay to exceed that value (as determined by the market of course).
- zrn900 3y ago
  > It doesn’t excuse it, though It does. People's actual happiness is at stake. From being able to be with their family and loved ones more to being able to live closer to their families, the places they grew up in and the extremely-important social support networks that those create constitute a survival-level benefit for those people, and they naturally react harshly to sick sociopaths who want to control people and improve the percentage of the imaginary-value of companies that is tied to real estate. There is absolutely no rational, justifiable reason for rto other than very, very ugly, sociopath-grade reasons. This includes those extroverts who want to force people to 'socialize' by forcing them to move away from their families, relatives, friends and places they were born and grew up in and forcing them to !waste! their lives commuting to and back from work. 'Waste' is emphasized here, because there is no taking back the time that is collectively lost in commuting. Its a gigantic loss for the commuters, the company they work in, the local economy and the society at large.

kcplate 3y ago

Well I agree with you. I love working remote and don’t want to RTO. However after several discussions on here where I simply asked the question of remote work proponents to just provide real evidence of the benefit of remote work to the organization and not just the personal benefits to them…I generally got argued and downvoted and told the same “brick and mortar savings” and “happier workers work harder” as the crust of the argument—both of which are usually highly subjective to the specific org and employee and not a hard and fast rule. Reality because of the HN audience is heavy on tech workers, which is one of the few disciplines that can actually and effectively WFH en masse, it’s out of balance to the real world. Add to that we tech folk already tend to believe we are the smartest humans to walk the earth, it makes for a fun combination of lack of real world awareness coupled with arrogance on the subject.

zrn900 3y ago
Maybe you were downvoted because the benefits of remote work to everybody and the society are obvious: - Avoid MASSIVE loss of time, and as a result, productivity and happiness to entire society by having people commute. That is time that can never be taken back. The time lost commuting is lost to the individual who's commuting, the company he or she works in, the economy and the society in general. No need to even talk about the cognitive cost that commuting carries. - Avoid ripping people off from their families, relatives, friends and their entire social support network which exist in the places they were born and grew up in. The cost of this is immeasurable as the loss of this support network involves a lot of costs ranging from detrimental psychological impact to the person to financial costs as the person must replace this support network by paying strangers to fill in those positions ranging from babysitting to care taking. The result is an entire society dumbed-down by xanax to cope. Which directly affects the companies that they work for as lost productivity. But of course, like real estate, there is an industry that profits from this misery - the pharma - and their profit is society's loss. - Avoid cramming millions into already overcrowded urban centers and creating innumerable problems ranging from social ones to infrastructure. There isnt any megapolis on the planet that solved these problems yet. And there wont be any until we invent something like 'space/time compression' and succeed in cramming more people into a place than what's physically possible. These should be enough by themselves as benefits as they are massive benefits to everybody involved and the society itself, while many more arguments can be made for remote work.

intended 3y ago

I mean, yeah? These are comment sections, where people are responding to a force they have little power over, as it puts together an unpopular position. The people who enjoy RTO wont even be in these threads, they are getting what they want. Why actively spend time in a thread to engage with someone who has no impact on their glowing future to come?