4 ms·

At this point, there’s literally nothing useful / new that can be said on this. This is very clearly well into the territory of being a culture war issue. Both

At this point, there’s literally nothing useful / new that can be said on this. This is very clearly well into the territory of being a culture war issue. Both sides are entirely talking past each other, misrepresenting each other’s POVs, and there’s little if any room for nuanced discussion. As made evident by any HN thread on this topic, tech nerds are among those buying into this BS hook, line, and sinker.

benterix 3y ago
I disagree - the new thing is that it's the fourth year of this global revolution re. worker's rights and we partially won. I'm actually tracking the ratio of permanent/hybrid to remote jobs in my niche and I'm very happy there is no negative trend, i.e. the ratio of remote jobs is stable and they are the top-paid positions (which makes sense for other reasons). So I guess every year we can celebrate this enormous achievement that is positively affecting the lives of hundreds of millions around the globe.
- aurizon 3y ago
  You speak of worker's rights, and you use the term 'won' - this implies there is a loser(s) and this harkens back to the slavery of yore, people unpaid and later minimally paid. I recall Ford paid wages that the other car makers despised him for just around WW1, he said he wanted his workers to be able to buy the cars they made. One of the key successes of the Industrial Revolution (IR) was the added wages induced by scarce worker competition. For many hundreds of years workers were in craft guilds. The classic crafts ( carpenters/iron/weave////) were all in craft guilds with strict rules to enter a guild, and to finally become a master craftsman after they passed their final approval of their work by that guild (now you know what a masterpiece is). All of day to day life was parcelled up in these guild, it was a rigid hierarchical society. It ran this way for thousands of years, with slow progression. The printing method of Gutenberg was the first crack in this near permanent society in that it allowed people to create large numbers of printed pages to spread information to people, and they allowed a cleric (Luther) to spread the word and shatter the mediaeval corrupt theocracy (the catholic church) by revealing how crooked and corrupt they were to people at large who could read or be read to. Before this, books were made by the scribes guild, pages were hand copied word by word, and often decorated with ornate glyphs, etc = Manuscripts = written by hand. Early printed books, incunabules, were made to closely resemble manuscripts, often with several colors and small ornate blocks added later to be like the manuscripts they replaced. The RC church had a fake religious structure of a god/saints/heaven/hell/angels etc, carefully structured to control people and steal from them. One of their bogeymen was heaven/hell/purgatory. Purgatory was a half-way house. The worthy went to heaven, the permanently damned went to hell, those not that good/bad went to the half-way house = purgatory = purge your 'sins', what these RC weasels did was to monetise purgatory by an 'indulgence' = pay $$ to the RC church = less time purging = to heaven you go - this was a classic monopoly = all your $$ belong to us. So Luther printed tens of thousand of 1 pagers(there were also many books/pamphlets) that exposed this as BS = a wide protest was born = protestant church, that soon won most of Europe - the closer to Rome, the harder it was to win. The RC lost and is in the final stage of decline. Here in Canada well under 5% of people bother at all, but a higher % are bribed to pay lip service for various benefits. I digress. Print was the crack that started the Scientific Revolution (SR) as teachable data could be cranked out in huge volume at low cost, and the SR led to the IR and the decline of the crafts when the IR allowed mass production of anything. This meant more workers, more wages etc and TRIH!! Getting back to 'we partially won' = that means the maker is the classic enemy of the worker. In fact, I believe you are wrong. They need not be enemies, there is no war. There are people helping each other. One of the reasons that Japan and Korea and Europe mastered this was to get the workers and manufacturers to be on the same side. I recall the UAW refused to have 2 board members on the car makers board of directors!!. Remember, board members have full access to all financial of the company = whatever they want = they get. The UAW wanted to be a pure adversary. From the 1940's they have done this. What did it get them? Good wages for one, but they lost 85% of their jobs as the high wages allowed Japan/Korea/Germany/UK/Italy the ability to make cars for the US/Canada market because those high wages made US/Canada costs high = allowed their entry. European/Korean/Japanese unions had board memberships that properly and rationally allowed their unions to chart a reasonable wage where at the end of their process their members had good wages and the products they made could achieve good market sales, which is a win-win for company as well as employees. Thus the USA/Canada needs to move from this adversarial positioning at both the union and maker management level for the good of all. /rant
  - benterix 3y ago
    I have to admin I had fun to read your digression. So while in principle I agree with your proposal, they shouldn't be enemies and they should help each other (and some of them do!) unfortunately very often it is the opposite. I might disagree about the reasons Japanese etc. cars got more popular though. Also, I don't think you can extend your example easily - Nvidia doesn't have record profits because they treat their employees well but because of their near-monopoly on GPUs used for "AI"-related tasks (it will take decades for AMD and Intel to get there). It would be nice if your theory was true, though.
    - aurizon 3y ago
      Yes, Nvidia, Apple and in past days many monopolies, abetted by IP or copyright have acted badly = making profits while their regnum lasts. Often they get careless, sure of their dominant position, and some become so arrogant they crash/burn = Kodak/Xerox. Nvidea looks smart enough to stay on it's feet - but you never know.
aurizon 3y ago
Yes, at one time people owned certain other people called slaves, and many wars were fought, then they had indentures = more wars, now they are called restrictive covenants = selective slavery - these are being outlawed place by place in a haphazard manner. Workplace evolution is the latest buzz. A form of gig labor is evolving. Instead of work from home, we might get a task pool format = bid for task = race down a hole. This is widespread and is allowing many so-called third world countries to get hard currency by exploiting the fact that a USA worker wants $30/hour for a data task and a smart lady in Nigeria can do this for $3/hour with both people happy at their local hour's wage because they can buy the same breakfast/lunch/dinner/rent for the same number of hours used. We see many of these tech migrants doing this between Thailand and Silicon Valley, and many other places. I think there is a 'great levelling' under way with the migrants in the vanguard. When it is fully levelled, with a robot work force and work from (any home)to (any workplace) has been achieved we will be inching towards a world government - by AI of course, politicians will be happily shed along the way, as they die their inevitable death by uselessness...
alkonaut 3y ago
The debate about whether WFH is good/bad works/doesn't is pretty much had already yes. But I never found it very interesting. The key insight at this point really is that employees, I think, mostly don't care whether WHF is more or less effective, or whether companies function better or worse with WFH. They are going to work from home regardless. So they'll end up at companies that either believe that "it works". And after that, there is a second insight that follows from that: it becomes self fulfilling. If enough people refuse to work in an office then companies that force office work are going to recruit from an ever shrinking talent pool. Eventually they'll be less effective even if they would function much better given the same employees or salary budgets as the companies with WFH.
- benterix 3y ago
  > mostly don't care While I agree with you in general, I believe there is a substantial group who knows that in their particular case the company will be as effective or even more effective if they WFH. Why? Because they worked in (usually) open-plan offices before and they work in their own spaces now and they can estimate how much time was spend on work and non-work activities. For example, I communicate on Slack quite often, we have huddles as needed - but only when needed. If someone like, they can have smalltalk on dedicated channels and socialize as mach as they want - but only with the ones who explicitly choose to do so. In other terms, you control your time and the execution of your tasks much better.

benterix 3y ago

I disagree - the new thing is that it's the fourth year of this global revolution re. worker's rights and we partially won. I'm actually tracking the ratio of permanent/hybrid to remote jobs in my niche and I'm very happy there is no negative trend, i.e. the ratio of remote jobs is stable and they are the top-paid positions (which makes sense for other reasons). So I guess every year we can celebrate this enormous achievement that is positively affecting the lives of hundreds of millions around the globe.

aurizon 3y ago
You speak of worker's rights, and you use the term 'won' - this implies there is a loser(s) and this harkens back to the slavery of yore, people unpaid and later minimally paid. I recall Ford paid wages that the other car makers despised him for just around WW1, he said he wanted his workers to be able to buy the cars they made. One of the key successes of the Industrial Revolution (IR) was the added wages induced by scarce worker competition. For many hundreds of years workers were in craft guilds. The classic crafts ( carpenters/iron/weave////) were all in craft guilds with strict rules to enter a guild, and to finally become a master craftsman after they passed their final approval of their work by that guild (now you know what a masterpiece is). All of day to day life was parcelled up in these guild, it was a rigid hierarchical society. It ran this way for thousands of years, with slow progression. The printing method of Gutenberg was the first crack in this near permanent society in that it allowed people to create large numbers of printed pages to spread information to people, and they allowed a cleric (Luther) to spread the word and shatter the mediaeval corrupt theocracy (the catholic church) by revealing how crooked and corrupt they were to people at large who could read or be read to. Before this, books were made by the scribes guild, pages were hand copied word by word, and often decorated with ornate glyphs, etc = Manuscripts = written by hand. Early printed books, incunabules, were made to closely resemble manuscripts, often with several colors and small ornate blocks added later to be like the manuscripts they replaced. The RC church had a fake religious structure of a god/saints/heaven/hell/angels etc, carefully structured to control people and steal from them. One of their bogeymen was heaven/hell/purgatory. Purgatory was a half-way house. The worthy went to heaven, the permanently damned went to hell, those not that good/bad went to the half-way house = purgatory = purge your 'sins', what these RC weasels did was to monetise purgatory by an 'indulgence' = pay $$ to the RC church = less time purging = to heaven you go - this was a classic monopoly = all your $$ belong to us. So Luther printed tens of thousand of 1 pagers(there were also many books/pamphlets) that exposed this as BS = a wide protest was born = protestant church, that soon won most of Europe - the closer to Rome, the harder it was to win. The RC lost and is in the final stage of decline. Here in Canada well under 5% of people bother at all, but a higher % are bribed to pay lip service for various benefits. I digress. Print was the crack that started the Scientific Revolution (SR) as teachable data could be cranked out in huge volume at low cost, and the SR led to the IR and the decline of the crafts when the IR allowed mass production of anything. This meant more workers, more wages etc and TRIH!! Getting back to 'we partially won' = that means the maker is the classic enemy of the worker. In fact, I believe you are wrong. They need not be enemies, there is no war. There are people helping each other. One of the reasons that Japan and Korea and Europe mastered this was to get the workers and manufacturers to be on the same side. I recall the UAW refused to have 2 board members on the car makers board of directors!!. Remember, board members have full access to all financial of the company = whatever they want = they get. The UAW wanted to be a pure adversary. From the 1940's they have done this. What did it get them? Good wages for one, but they lost 85% of their jobs as the high wages allowed Japan/Korea/Germany/UK/Italy the ability to make cars for the US/Canada market because those high wages made US/Canada costs high = allowed their entry. European/Korean/Japanese unions had board memberships that properly and rationally allowed their unions to chart a reasonable wage where at the end of their process their members had good wages and the products they made could achieve good market sales, which is a win-win for company as well as employees. Thus the USA/Canada needs to move from this adversarial positioning at both the union and maker management level for the good of all. /rant
- benterix 3y ago
  I have to admin I had fun to read your digression. So while in principle I agree with your proposal, they shouldn't be enemies and they should help each other (and some of them do!) unfortunately very often it is the opposite. I might disagree about the reasons Japanese etc. cars got more popular though. Also, I don't think you can extend your example easily - Nvidia doesn't have record profits because they treat their employees well but because of their near-monopoly on GPUs used for "AI"-related tasks (it will take decades for AMD and Intel to get there). It would be nice if your theory was true, though.
  - aurizon 3y ago
    Yes, Nvidia, Apple and in past days many monopolies, abetted by IP or copyright have acted badly = making profits while their regnum lasts. Often they get careless, sure of their dominant position, and some become so arrogant they crash/burn = Kodak/Xerox. Nvidea looks smart enough to stay on it's feet - but you never know.

aurizon 3y ago

Yes, at one time people owned certain other people called slaves, and many wars were fought, then they had indentures = more wars, now they are called restrictive covenants = selective slavery - these are being outlawed place by place in a haphazard manner. Workplace evolution is the latest buzz. A form of gig labor is evolving. Instead of work from home, we might get a task pool format = bid for task = race down a hole. This is widespread and is allowing many so-called third world countries to get hard currency by exploiting the fact that a USA worker wants $30/hour for a data task and a smart lady in Nigeria can do this for $3/hour with both people happy at their local hour's wage because they can buy the same breakfast/lunch/dinner/rent for the same number of hours used. We see many of these tech migrants doing this between Thailand and Silicon Valley, and many other places. I think there is a 'great levelling' under way with the migrants in the vanguard. When it is fully levelled, with a robot work force and work from (any home)to (any workplace) has been achieved we will be inching towards a world government - by AI of course, politicians will be happily shed along the way, as they die their inevitable death by uselessness...

alkonaut 3y ago

The debate about whether WFH is good/bad works/doesn't is pretty much had already yes. But I never found it very interesting. The key insight at this point really is that employees, I think, mostly don't care whether WHF is more or less effective, or whether companies function better or worse with WFH. They are going to work from home regardless. So they'll end up at companies that either believe that "it works". And after that, there is a second insight that follows from that: it becomes self fulfilling. If enough people refuse to work in an office then companies that force office work are going to recruit from an ever shrinking talent pool. Eventually they'll be less effective even if they would function much better given the same employees or salary budgets as the companies with WFH.

benterix 3y ago
> mostly don't care While I agree with you in general, I believe there is a substantial group who knows that in their particular case the company will be as effective or even more effective if they WFH. Why? Because they worked in (usually) open-plan offices before and they work in their own spaces now and they can estimate how much time was spend on work and non-work activities. For example, I communicate on Slack quite often, we have huddles as needed - but only when needed. If someone like, they can have smalltalk on dedicated channels and socialize as mach as they want - but only with the ones who explicitly choose to do so. In other terms, you control your time and the execution of your tasks much better.