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Let me know when you can find a work from home advocate that admits it is rife with abuse. Until then, it all sounds like game to me.

crummy 2y ago
Like, people working multiple jobs at once? Doesn't that become pretty obvious?
- mozman 2y ago
  I worked 4 remote jobs for years long ago - I found companies with the same problem and resold my work. I probably put in 60-80 hours a week but made a killing. Now ADP and similar companies offer monitoring services to HR to weed these people out. You might get caught now.
iends 2y ago
You’re right. I work far more from home on average. When I worked from the office I had so many interruptions. We’d also take Wednesday and Friday afternoons to play table-top games. There was table tennis and foosball. Sometimes we’d all go out for lunch and it’d take 60-90 minutes. Now I just eat lunch at my computer, I don’t table top game or socialize. I just code and zoom all day. The abuse is real, but since I’m not commuting it’s a great trade off of an hour wasted each way.
- robwwilliams 2y ago
  What a great response. And don‘t forget the 2 x 30 minute commute you converted to a solid hour of real work. Yes, the abuse is real ;-)
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  It might be workplace specific. Most co-workers I know who went remote are 25-50% as productive as before. Only one or two did I suspect had a 2nd job. The rest were spending most of their workdays hiking, sailing, or playing with their kids. Given the choice, I would rather lead an in office team 10/10 times.
  - theideaofcoffee 2y ago
    Anecdote for exactly the other side: most co-workers I know who went remote are 50% more productive as before. They don’t have to waste their preciously short lives in pointless office drama, pointless meetings that could have been emails, waste their lives in cars commuting to a soulless office complex because an incompetent manager thinks that butts-in-seat time makes for a productive workforce. I would 100% lead a full remote team, and have done so, and will never go back.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Im not surprised. Like I said, it is likely workplace specific based on culture, management, and hiring. Some places you can coast for years working 10 hours a week.
    - mozman 2y ago
      I’ve been remote for 15 years with the past 3 in a C level position. People fuck around in the office and they do at home too. Expectation management and selling yourself (aka know how to communicate) is all that matters. I can sleep in, tell people the truth, and life is good. Offices are fucking expensive. It burdens IT and it’s a performance art at the end of the day anyway. The boards job is to fire me. As long as I maintain my roadmap and provide evidence of progress nobody who matters has time to think about this shit. Manage your SG&A expenses, risk, and be nice to legal. You’ll be fine.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        Thats cool for you, but I'm speaking from my experience about my team's productivity falling off a cliff. Employees that do work when in the office, but wont even respond to email for days when working from home.
        iends 2y ago
        If an employee cannot handle working from home then they can voluntarily return to office or be terminated for cause. I’ve been leading a team remotely since March 2020 and have had no issues with my team that wasn’t cleared up after a quick conversation in our 1-1.
MBCook 2y ago
Yeah, some will. If managers are incapable of detecting and handling that unless people are in their eye line in the office then the company has bigger problems. I don’t think remote work encourages bad behavior on the whole. It may make what was already happening more obvious. But I think there are few good workers who become bad when remote. And they can stay in the office. I think it makes poor management more obvious and bad techniques like enforcing butts-in-seats as a your main way of enforcing productivity. I’ve seen plenty of people in my career do nothing or next to nothing all day. But they were in their seat clicking on things or typing so they must be “productive”. Instead of forcing everyone to be in office, how about getting better managers through training or hiring?
shahbaby 2y ago
Do you want to optimize for output or optics? If output, WFH. If optics, WFO. If WFH is being abused then that's a problem with who you're hiring.
- mozman 2y ago
  Comment of the year. Know your requirements and find a match.
FridgeSeal 2y ago
What are you calling abuse? Not showing up for “company mandated fun time o’clock”? Also, I hate to break it to you, but the employees that are “genuinely” abusing WFH and shirking work responsibilities are doing the same thing in the office.
- hunter-gatherer 2y ago
  Absolutely. In the WFH vs Office debate people seem to forget that time-abusing employees always exsisted. I've had coworkers at past jobs who sat next to me and nobody on the team coukd come up with anything they did for a year besides browse the internet and plan vacations.
WoodenChair 2y ago
Anecdotally, knowing many people that work from home, there is definitely abuse of the system. And those people are ruining it for the rest of us! But it would be absurd to think that if everyone was really more productive at-home, companies would still be forcing everyone back in the office. I don't believe the conspiracies—most workplaces really do want collaboration and productivity. The only bit I'll buy is that some are doing it as a form of soft layoffs. But I find it hard to believe that every company doing this would act against its own interests in terms of productivity.
- 000ooo000 2y ago
  >But I find it hard to believe that every company doing this would act against its own interests in terms of productivity Ever worked in a company?
  - WoodenChair 2y ago
    Are you actually going to reply to the substance of my comment or just do a Reddit like sarcastic reply? Yes, I am middle age and have worked for multiple companies. I've seen co-workers, friends, and even family abuse the opportunity to work from home. Which as I said is unfortunate because it hurts everyone who uses it wisely. Show me or gp that there is no evidence of abuse. Anecdotally, I've seen it.
    - ITB 2y ago
      I think your original comment is entirely valid. It seems anyone who questions WFH gets downvoted. I’m involved with several startups, and I can assure you there are clear advantages to people spending time together. WFH or not, people meeting and strategizing in person is incredibly valuable. I also think people need to make a better distinction between remote and distributed teams. Because of the above opportunity to meet in person from time to time, and also because of the additional communication challenges of a distributed team with multiple time zones. There’s an assumption that all work can be perfectly partitioned and assigned to people. But more often than not, innovation requires constant exploration of ideas and negotiation of resources being invested. more cohesive teams are way more likely to innovate.
bayarearefugee 2y ago
You'll have to define "abuse" more concretely for this to have any meaning. Do most knowledge workers actually put in exactly 8 full hours a day on work tasks working from home? Probably not. But as a professional software developer since the 1990s the same was true for myself and virtually everyone I know when I worked in an office. The way I 'waste' time is different now, but arguably a lot better (eg. me taking a nap just before or just after lunch improves my productivity in the afternoon a lot more than me fucking off on slashdot for extended periods of time in the office did back in the day.) (And whether or not this not-directly-related-to-work downtime is really a time waste is extremely debatable, as switching thorny problems into the subconscious realm often turns out to be one of the best ways to actually power through them in my experience).
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  What I consider abuse is Lying and padding resources. I know people who will turn an 8 hour task into a 40 hour task, and spend the difference hiking. The other grift is when people have multiple projects to tell each manager that the workload is high on the other project right now.
  - redserk 2y ago
    This isn’t an exclusively remote problem though. This happens in-office, too. It’s extremely easy to pad a week with meetings, “I’m checking/organizing my email”, “I need to double check code from last week”, etc… if you wanted to burn time. Sure the remote worker has the opportunity to go hiking, but the business impact is the same. Except at least the hiking wastes less time from others.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Sure, lots of people waste time in office too. I just see it a lot worse from friends and colleges who are hybrid and WFH.
      - kkfx 2y ago
BigParm 2y ago
[flagged]
icehawk 2y ago
Define "abuse" first. Bonus if you add how its different from all the abuse you can do when working in an office. (I'll define "abuse" in my post after you define yours, I asked you first.)

crummy 2y ago

Like, people working multiple jobs at once? Doesn't that become pretty obvious?

mozman 2y ago
I worked 4 remote jobs for years long ago - I found companies with the same problem and resold my work. I probably put in 60-80 hours a week but made a killing. Now ADP and similar companies offer monitoring services to HR to weed these people out. You might get caught now.

iends 2y ago

You’re right. I work far more from home on average. When I worked from the office I had so many interruptions. We’d also take Wednesday and Friday afternoons to play table-top games. There was table tennis and foosball. Sometimes we’d all go out for lunch and it’d take 60-90 minutes. Now I just eat lunch at my computer, I don’t table top game or socialize. I just code and zoom all day. The abuse is real, but since I’m not commuting it’s a great trade off of an hour wasted each way.

robwwilliams 2y ago
What a great response. And don‘t forget the 2 x 30 minute commute you converted to a solid hour of real work. Yes, the abuse is real ;-)
s1artibartfast 2y ago
It might be workplace specific. Most co-workers I know who went remote are 25-50% as productive as before. Only one or two did I suspect had a 2nd job. The rest were spending most of their workdays hiking, sailing, or playing with their kids. Given the choice, I would rather lead an in office team 10/10 times.
- theideaofcoffee 2y ago
  Anecdote for exactly the other side: most co-workers I know who went remote are 50% more productive as before. They don’t have to waste their preciously short lives in pointless office drama, pointless meetings that could have been emails, waste their lives in cars commuting to a soulless office complex because an incompetent manager thinks that butts-in-seat time makes for a productive workforce. I would 100% lead a full remote team, and have done so, and will never go back.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Im not surprised. Like I said, it is likely workplace specific based on culture, management, and hiring. Some places you can coast for years working 10 hours a week.
  - mozman 2y ago
    I’ve been remote for 15 years with the past 3 in a C level position. People fuck around in the office and they do at home too. Expectation management and selling yourself (aka know how to communicate) is all that matters. I can sleep in, tell people the truth, and life is good. Offices are fucking expensive. It burdens IT and it’s a performance art at the end of the day anyway. The boards job is to fire me. As long as I maintain my roadmap and provide evidence of progress nobody who matters has time to think about this shit. Manage your SG&A expenses, risk, and be nice to legal. You’ll be fine.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Thats cool for you, but I'm speaking from my experience about my team's productivity falling off a cliff. Employees that do work when in the office, but wont even respond to email for days when working from home.
      - iends 2y ago
        If an employee cannot handle working from home then they can voluntarily return to office or be terminated for cause. I’ve been leading a team remotely since March 2020 and have had no issues with my team that wasn’t cleared up after a quick conversation in our 1-1.

MBCook 2y ago

Yeah, some will. If managers are incapable of detecting and handling that unless people are in their eye line in the office then the company has bigger problems. I don’t think remote work encourages bad behavior on the whole. It may make what was already happening more obvious. But I think there are few good workers who become bad when remote. And they can stay in the office. I think it makes poor management more obvious and bad techniques like enforcing butts-in-seats as a your main way of enforcing productivity. I’ve seen plenty of people in my career do nothing or next to nothing all day. But they were in their seat clicking on things or typing so they must be “productive”. Instead of forcing everyone to be in office, how about getting better managers through training or hiring?

shahbaby 2y ago

Do you want to optimize for output or optics? If output, WFH. If optics, WFO. If WFH is being abused then that's a problem with who you're hiring.

mozman 2y ago
Comment of the year. Know your requirements and find a match.

FridgeSeal 2y ago

What are you calling abuse? Not showing up for “company mandated fun time o’clock”? Also, I hate to break it to you, but the employees that are “genuinely” abusing WFH and shirking work responsibilities are doing the same thing in the office.

hunter-gatherer 2y ago
Absolutely. In the WFH vs Office debate people seem to forget that time-abusing employees always exsisted. I've had coworkers at past jobs who sat next to me and nobody on the team coukd come up with anything they did for a year besides browse the internet and plan vacations.

WoodenChair 2y ago

Anecdotally, knowing many people that work from home, there is definitely abuse of the system. And those people are ruining it for the rest of us! But it would be absurd to think that if everyone was really more productive at-home, companies would still be forcing everyone back in the office. I don't believe the conspiracies—most workplaces really do want collaboration and productivity. The only bit I'll buy is that some are doing it as a form of soft layoffs. But I find it hard to believe that every company doing this would act against its own interests in terms of productivity.

000ooo000 2y ago
>But I find it hard to believe that every company doing this would act against its own interests in terms of productivity Ever worked in a company?
- WoodenChair 2y ago
  Are you actually going to reply to the substance of my comment or just do a Reddit like sarcastic reply? Yes, I am middle age and have worked for multiple companies. I've seen co-workers, friends, and even family abuse the opportunity to work from home. Which as I said is unfortunate because it hurts everyone who uses it wisely. Show me or gp that there is no evidence of abuse. Anecdotally, I've seen it.
  - ITB 2y ago
    I think your original comment is entirely valid. It seems anyone who questions WFH gets downvoted. I’m involved with several startups, and I can assure you there are clear advantages to people spending time together. WFH or not, people meeting and strategizing in person is incredibly valuable. I also think people need to make a better distinction between remote and distributed teams. Because of the above opportunity to meet in person from time to time, and also because of the additional communication challenges of a distributed team with multiple time zones. There’s an assumption that all work can be perfectly partitioned and assigned to people. But more often than not, innovation requires constant exploration of ideas and negotiation of resources being invested. more cohesive teams are way more likely to innovate.

bayarearefugee 2y ago

You'll have to define "abuse" more concretely for this to have any meaning. Do most knowledge workers actually put in exactly 8 full hours a day on work tasks working from home? Probably not. But as a professional software developer since the 1990s the same was true for myself and virtually everyone I know when I worked in an office. The way I 'waste' time is different now, but arguably a lot better (eg. me taking a nap just before or just after lunch improves my productivity in the afternoon a lot more than me fucking off on slashdot for extended periods of time in the office did back in the day.) (And whether or not this not-directly-related-to-work downtime is really a time waste is extremely debatable, as switching thorny problems into the subconscious realm often turns out to be one of the best ways to actually power through them in my experience).

s1artibartfast 2y ago
What I consider abuse is Lying and padding resources. I know people who will turn an 8 hour task into a 40 hour task, and spend the difference hiking. The other grift is when people have multiple projects to tell each manager that the workload is high on the other project right now.
- redserk 2y ago
  This isn’t an exclusively remote problem though. This happens in-office, too. It’s extremely easy to pad a week with meetings, “I’m checking/organizing my email”, “I need to double check code from last week”, etc… if you wanted to burn time. Sure the remote worker has the opportunity to go hiking, but the business impact is the same. Except at least the hiking wastes less time from others.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Sure, lots of people waste time in office too. I just see it a lot worse from friends and colleges who are hybrid and WFH.
    - kkfx 2y ago

BigParm 2y ago

[flagged]

icehawk 2y ago

Define "abuse" first. Bonus if you add how its different from all the abuse you can do when working in an office. (I'll define "abuse" in my post after you define yours, I asked you first.)