8 ms·

Remote workers more likely to start their own business

55 points by rntn 1y ago

ashoeafoot 1y ago
The question of "do you really need them" does creep in easier if they cant drum the row galley of self importance that is cooperate hierarchy
bad_haircut72 1y ago
This is a good thing for the economy at large
JoeAltmaier 1y ago
They weren't paranoid because nobody was out to get them. They could keep employees by treating them better. Employees leaving was only a reflection of their own inadequacies. So yeah, maybe bosses were out to screw themselves. Is that paranoia?
- nkmnz 1y ago
  Where can I find an inadequate boss so that I can finally start my own biz?
- izacus 1y ago
  There hasn't been a more pampered worker than a programmer during COVID. What else could the employers have done to "treat them better" during that time to avoid having workers exploit it?
  - vineyardmike 1y ago
    Nobody wants to work anymore /s People can be paid better, given better hours, more flexibility, more responsibilities, less responsibilities, better benefits, etc. If lots of people don’t want to do a job, and that job has trouble keeping quality employees, it’s the job that’s broken, not the people. Plenty of people were treated great when WFH, but it’s not a universal truth that everyone was.
    - izacus 1y ago
      During COVID, developers were among the highest comped individuals in US, could work from home, could work flexible hours. So concretely, what more could they give? How much is the comp that wouldn't get abused?
      - Chinjut 1y ago
        What does it mean to "abuse" compensation?
        const_cast 1y ago
        There's this strange belief that work (labor) isn't like other types of goods and that a good pay should result in above-and-beyond performance. Rather than that pay simply just being the cost of labor. When eggs went up from 4 dollars to 8, nobody expected them to taste twice as good. That's just what they cost now. But when developers go from 80,000 to 160,000 on average or something (arbitrary numbers), people do expect them to work twice as hard. Otherwise, they're abusing their employer. As if employers even could be abused.
        izacus 1y ago
        People ran their own businesses or worked multiple jobs in time they were paid for by the employer. As in - took the money and didn't do the job.
  - JoeAltmaier 1y ago
    That's a bold statement. How about pay them commensurate with their value to the product? Have reasonable work hours? Whatever made them leave, fix that. For instance. Wait, that above comment sounds like a disgruntle 'boss' who is lashing out. So, no answer will be adequate. That poisonous attitude is typical of why programmers were leaving.
  - nitwit005 1y ago
    They paid my CEO tens of millions to keep them. Apparently that's reasonable. If you have to pay people more to keep them, you have to pay people more to keep them. People picking the best option isn't exploitation. They don't owe you or anyone else anything.
recursivedoubts 1y ago
"I need you to generate more shareholder value." "WAIT NOT LIKE THAT"
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
agos 1y ago
Alternate title: "employees weren't being paranoid: RTO was about control, not teamwork"
alabastervlog 1y ago
The boss: you must work for me, and only for me. Also the boss: claims to hold five jobs at five different organizations. (I don't even mean Elon, I mean the median "founder" type, but him too I guess, except that I think he's up to more than five)
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  > The boss: you must work for me, and only for me. It's not the boss saying that. It's the contract you voluntarily signed.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    That reference to one-sided exclusivity via contract law reminds me of a recent Doctorow piece [0]: > Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses. > They want to be able to fire employees at will – but they want those same employees to be bound to them just as surely as serfs were bound to their lords’ land. [0] https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/ https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-...
  - alabastervlog 1y ago
    How many workers would succeed at so-restricting the people at the top of the company, in that contract? Pretty much none, right? Probably you're thinking it'd be absurd for them to even ask such a thing. Why? Because this is a matter of class, and the worker isn't of the right social class to be afforded such liberty, while others are. And the worker can't force such a clause despite that resistance. Why? Because they're by-far the weaker party in the negotiation. If these weren't true, it wouldn't seem so immediately absurd to even suggest such a thing. Why don't people who can avoid these clauses embrace them anyway, since the justification is that the company needs and deserves your undivided attention to the greatest legally allowed degree, when they have far more power over the company and are being rewarded far more for their effort? The same reasoning applies far more to them! Because it's very undesirable to be restricted in that way, of course, so damn the company's best interests. If it's very undesirable to be restrained by these, and the benefit to the employer is evidently not so large that it's necessary to restrict those for whom the reasoning applies 1,000x more than for some lowly peon, why do normal workers accept those clauses approximately 100% of the time they're demanded? Because they don't feel they have a choice. "Voluntary" isn't binary.
t-writescode 1y ago
Not wasting 2+ hours a day on commuting and being able to do little chores to help you think every time you would have wandered to the watering hole to help you avoid work really does give you a lot more time to self-actualize, yes.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  Don’t have to waste time working either. Just mute yourself on calls and work on your own business.
jawns 1y ago
This article suggests that this is a win-lose scenario. It's a win for the workers and the economy at large, but a loss for employers. However, it might very well be a win-win. While the employer might lose a worker to an entrepreneurial venture, isn't this the sort of self-selection out that leads to a more engaged workforce overall? Retaining those employees, who would really be doing something else, by introducing more friction through an in-office policy seems like a recipe for low engagement and mediocre business impact.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  While the employer might lose a worker to an entrepreneurial venture, isn't this the sort of self-selection out that leads to a more engaged workforce overall? Mmmm.. I don't know man? Be careful with this line of reasoning. Someone, say, an employer, might be forgiven for concluding from your line of reasoning, that not allowing for remote work in the first place then leads to a more engaged workforce overall. Since remote workers are more entrepreneurial, they'd self-select out by not taking the job.
- garyfirestorm 1y ago
  We only want billionaires to create jobs. Not you peasants! Back to pits.
- alistairSH 1y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. Plus, treat people well enough (salary, benefits, work you assign, etc) that they want to stay. IE, as a manager, part of my job is to ensure my employees feel challenged/stimulated, satisfied with their comp plan, etc. If they aren't they'll go elsewhere (start their own, or jump to CapOne/Amazon/some other big tech company in DC).
j45 1y ago
I'm not sure what is wrong with this - other than the wrong kind of employers wanting employees not to grow.
yesbut 1y ago
The number of wfh workers starting their own business is tiny. This is more anti-wfh propaganda. Don't fall for it.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  Agreed; the article is a complete red herring. Bosses don't lose 2 minutes a year worrying that Drone #685 might leave to begin a startup. They DO worry the drone isn't working; isn't working efficiently (if it's a good boss); isn't working at their highest quality (if it's a great boss).
Brajeshwar 1y ago
This reminds of; “What if I train my people and they leave?” “What if you don’t train them and they stay!”
chriskanan 1y ago
If they only studied remote work around the time of COVID, I'm not sure if findings will generalize. I think the pandemic caused a lot of people to reassess their lives and careers, and I don't know if increases in new venture creation can be entirely attributed to remote work.
- Manfred 1y ago
  The Register should have mentioned that the article has not been peer reviewed.
buyucu 1y ago
which is really good for the economy
hennell 1y ago
Were bosses being paranoid that workers were setting up their own businesses though? I thought they were more concerned workers wern't working? This rather suggests workers can actually work very well at home - well enough to set up their own business anyway. I appreciate what this is trying to say is - workers weren't doing their jobs and were instead setting up business. Except this could also quite easily show that if you get rid of peoples long commutes, and they have a space in their home they consider 'work' space - they might have the time and space to start their own biz. And as this seems to be only people who left to do so, it rather suggests people were doing their jobs. Might not be doing 'their hours', but the argument against remote work rarely seems to be 'we can't allow remote work because its so effective people complete their jobs much faster'
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  What it shows is managerial insecurity. Despite the obsession with monitoring "productivity", managers really haven't the faintest idea of what they're doing. A healthy relationship is one in which managers don't monitor and don't micromanage and don't rely on Jira or commit logs to lazily monitor employees. A manager isn't there to lord over employees. He is there to support employees and help them do their jobs. But to do that, you need to know what they're doing. Talk to them. Listen. Hold 1-on-1s on a regular basis. Assume they're doing their jobs instead of defaulting to a defensive and adversarial posture. If you treat employees like adversaries, they'll behave like adversaries. Grant them reasonable trust and they will take initiative and view the relationship as one that is cooperative. They will be less likely to want to risk losing the reasonable trust they have been gratuitously given; if you default to suspicion, then employees have little to lose. You already think poorly of them, so who cares. If someone is genuinely slacking or not well-suited, that will come out sooner or later. 1-on-1s, individually and taken in aggregate, will give the manager an idea of what is really happening, especially if the manager is competent and knowledgeable of the domain, which he should be. 360 EOY reviews can also help here, not as an adversarial tactic, but as a way to share feedback. A competent manager can read the tea leaves.
  - deepsun 1y ago
cwillu 1y ago
Oh no, the horror of the slaves exercising their free will.
homeonthemtn 1y ago
It should be pointed out that we glorify blue collar workers for having multiple jobs (see: single mom working 2 jobs trope), and we fully accept C-level people working multiple roles and advisories But for anyone in between, we're shocked-SHOCKED that they'd do such a disloyal and underhanded thing. As though their work is theft outside of the confines of a single employer Utter nonsense. Work and get paid. The end.
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  Blue collar workers are almost always paid hourly (or some other unit where time = money). They're being paid in proportion to the amount they work, and the only common reason to take a second job is that the first won't give you enough hours/work to meet your financial needs. Some people see salary jobs as exchanging a fixed amount of money for 40 hrs/week average. If you're spending 10-20 of those hours moonlighting for company B, those people would say you're depriving company A of what they're paying for. If you instead see salary work as producing a certain amount of work regardless of the hours worked, then again there's no issue here. This is inconsistently applied to executives far more than rank and file office workers, since no one really expects (or wants) board member Bob to provide 40 hrs/week to each of the 6 companies he's involved with.
  - alistairSH 1y ago
    A manager should have at least a vague notion of how long a given set of tasks should take an employee. If I assign 20 hours of work and it takes 40 hours, I should not be surprised the employee does something else with the 20 remaining hours. If I assign 40 hours of work and it takes 40 hours, and is of the expected quality, I really don't care if the employee take a part-time job elsewhere (assuming that doesn't conflict with expected online hours, etc).
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      You are either managing factory workers, or living in a dream world. My boss has no idea what I'm working on, day by day. My assignments take as long as they take; he makes WAGs at the project start, and I get informed if I am burning more hours than he expected. But at the end of the project, a "40-hour" project may take me 10, or 100 hours. Or, rarely, 40.
isk517 1y ago
Considering that the research paper states that the new businesses were started post-pandemic, I wonder how many of these remote workers were encouraged to start their own business due to not wanting to deal with return to office.
erikerikson 1y ago
The pandemic really exposed how much I had accepted being stuck in a slave mentality, taking only what was offered. Little things like a functional work environment with good screens and peripherals that isn't inundated with noise and fairly constant interruption. Big things like a long commute (and at roughly half an hour mine was better than most) and not having to work alongside, sitting under the gaze of, someone who just emotionally abused me. Those were simply solved and I could just fix other major problems myself. Examples include the obvious fixes of the above issues but also include my option to increase the amount of vacation I take, adopt a 4-day week, and other things that have greatly improved my productivity and far more greatly improved my quality of life. Fuck the endless "always more" and "but what have you done for me lately?" even when I'm outperforming everyone else and have become the "go to". Most impactfully, I have created an emotionally safe and deeply honest environment for myself and my cofounder where we can express our humanity and support each other in our struggles and joys. It is "unprofessional" and completely glorious and loving. Or work had become something that is part of our thriving rather than something that erodes our well-being.
- jdnddnbe 1y ago
  Have those measures like taking more vacations and adopting a 4-day week really increased your productivity? How have you measured that? Of cause one can deliver more per hour when working 8h/d instead of 12h/d. But the output of a 12h day will still be massively more than from a 8h day.
  - erikerikson 1y ago
    There's been a fair bit of research on that topic. Largely the studies I have read have found that especially in creative intellectual labor (perhaps some programming could be excluded), overwork leads to negative productivity, compoundingly so in the long term.
    - dang 1y ago
      > You need to do some research. Please edit out swipes, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (Your comment would be fine without that first bit)
scudsworth 1y ago
"bosses": ah, good. i shall demoralize and imprison my employees to prevent them from doing this. this will be good for productivity
gethly 1y ago
In my experience, the only risk and proven danger are sales people. I've seen and met many former sales people whom developed relationships with their customers and then one day just quit their job and went into business of their own, with a lot of their former employer's clients as their new customers. I doubt there is anything anyone can do about it as this is about personal relations and the only defence could be to never allow one customer to be handled by a single account manager so there cannot be personal relationship developed. But on the other hand, will such customer feel good doing business with such a company? It might just be one of those things that just is what it is and will never change.
_ache_ 1y ago
Objectively, this article is bullshit. What is the source ? An unidentified "data partner". That just means, this is non-reproducible. So this is not science. Actually, there is a another paper, reproducible, it's non conclusive. The social explanation of the phenomena (if there is any) are clearly politically oriented.
graemep 1y ago
What about confounding variables? For example the types of jobs that are easiest to do remotely may correlate with employees likely to start their own business?
russdill 1y ago
So what you're telling me, is that remote workers tend to be the most innovative and industrious. Got it.
neilv 1y ago
> The IP address information came from an unidentified "data partner" that uses first- and third-party cookies to create user profiles and ultimately infer their place of employment. The LinkedIn data – user profiles and resumes – came from Revelio Labs, and was supplemented with US census data and corporate data from Aberdeen CiTDB and People Data Labs. If this research prompts more businesses to RTO or non-WFH -- for the reason of reducing employees leaving to do a startup, or doing a potentially competing startup after termination -- is this effectively leveraging surveillance capitalism to suppress labor (and innovation, as we say)?
DragonStrength 1y ago
When I worked in Big Tech, there were Slack channels for discussing real estate investment and one of my coworkers routinely fielded calls about the maid service he ran. I imagine it's much easier, and more appropriate, to do such things when working remotely and not having normal office etiquette as part of your job responsibilities.
adverbly 1y ago
Isn't it to be expected that anyone with more free time is more likely to have time to start a business? Working from home means you don't have to commute which saves you hours a week. Of course it will increase the chance that you can start up a business. I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen more employers offer to pay people a bit more so that they can work during the hours they would normally commute... That seems like it would be a win-win, and would probably drop the number of people doing startups if they so desired.
hbartab 1y ago
> The authors cite various other studies on remote work showing how it frees up time by reducing commuting, increases productivity, offers more flexible hours, and reduces employee monitoring. Sounds like a benefit to society to me. When people do not waste time on commutes, they spend it either with their families and friends or thinking about solving problems, which occasionally turn into new businesses. Without such time freed up, these business ideas would never have come to fruition. I also don't see why how employees spend their time off (as almost no employer counts commuting as work time) should factor into remote policies.
nabilhat 1y ago
Reading summaries like this requires great skepticism. It's exceptionally difficult in this particular case to avoid directing results to arbitrary conclusions through cohort selection and grouping. > analyzed IP address data in conjunction with LinkedIn data to cross-reference those working from home with those who formed new businesses. ... a title change and employment change on LinkedIn indicating a shift from being an employee to a founder. Is this more likely to tell us something about the people and roles selected to work remotely, or an outcome of working remotely? At this scale the influences of each are absolutely inseparable. Do cohorts robustly account for education, experience, skillsets, tenure, etc.? The same values which improve one's ability to start a business strongly overlap with the considerations for employing someone remotely. I'm not saying they're comparing a "remote" cohort including developers to a "not remote" cohort including construction workers, but it's important to confirm.
y-c-o-m-b 1y ago
Why is the headline written like another remote work hit-piece? They go on to state overwhelming positive traits of remote work policies in the actual content. WTF? The article also uses COVID-19 as the catalyst. If you consider that most people were fearing losing their jobs or were under threat to lose their jobs (and RTO mandates were occurring even in the early days of the pandemic!), it makes sense that an increase in entrepreneur activities would have happened. > "It's good that we have people creating new firms, new jobs, and new innovation. This is presumably better reallocation, because essentially remote work allows you to better explore outside options in entrepreneurship." Maybe don't put a rage-bait spin on the title of the article?
bravetraveler 1y ago
With the ever-increasing scope of responsibilities as an IC, I might as well fucking own the place
anarticle 1y ago
It's a good time to be small, never been a better time to do your own thing. After 15y~ of doing megacorps, I was terrified to be on my own, but I got out there and talked to friends about what they were doing and how I can help. I'm wielding two contracts and two retainers all while building software I sell for myself. It feels absolutely crazy to send someone an invoice and they send me money, as if I've unlocked some secret ability. This month is the first month I'm making more than I was as a corper. Don't let the game tell you how to play anymore. The tools are out there and are better than ever.
Tuperoir 1y ago
[dead]
sparklingdata 1y ago
Well, remote work brings multiple advantages, to remote workers but also to employers: * companies offering flexibility will attract the best talent * 47% of businesses noticed increased productivity levels amongst employees who work remotely (tech.co) * in an inflation-affected economy remote work means lower office-related utilities' costs for companies (16% of companies operate fully remote, without a physical office - Forbes 2024; this gives them a competitive advantage over their competition) More relevant, interesting stats re: remote jobs, are available here: https://www.workbeyond.io/remote_work_advantages/ https://www.workbeyond.io/remote_work_advantages/ https://www.workbeyond.io/remote_jobs_market_stats/ https://www.workbeyond.io/remote_jobs_market_stats/ The stats on workbeyond.io are based on a sizable remote jobs dataset.

55 points by rntn 1y ago

The question of "do you really need them" does creep in easier if they cant drum the row galley of self importance that is cooperate hierarchy

bad_haircut72 1y ago

This is a good thing for the economy at large

JoeAltmaier 1y ago

They weren't paranoid because nobody was out to get them. They could keep employees by treating them better. Employees leaving was only a reflection of their own inadequacies. So yeah, maybe bosses were out to screw themselves. Is that paranoia?

nkmnz 1y ago
Where can I find an inadequate boss so that I can finally start my own biz?
izacus 1y ago
There hasn't been a more pampered worker than a programmer during COVID. What else could the employers have done to "treat them better" during that time to avoid having workers exploit it?
- vineyardmike 1y ago
  Nobody wants to work anymore /s People can be paid better, given better hours, more flexibility, more responsibilities, less responsibilities, better benefits, etc. If lots of people don’t want to do a job, and that job has trouble keeping quality employees, it’s the job that’s broken, not the people. Plenty of people were treated great when WFH, but it’s not a universal truth that everyone was.
  - izacus 1y ago
    During COVID, developers were among the highest comped individuals in US, could work from home, could work flexible hours. So concretely, what more could they give? How much is the comp that wouldn't get abused?
    - Chinjut 1y ago
      What does it mean to "abuse" compensation?
      - const_cast 1y ago
        There's this strange belief that work (labor) isn't like other types of goods and that a good pay should result in above-and-beyond performance. Rather than that pay simply just being the cost of labor. When eggs went up from 4 dollars to 8, nobody expected them to taste twice as good. That's just what they cost now. But when developers go from 80,000 to 160,000 on average or something (arbitrary numbers), people do expect them to work twice as hard. Otherwise, they're abusing their employer. As if employers even could be abused.
      - izacus 1y ago
        People ran their own businesses or worked multiple jobs in time they were paid for by the employer. As in - took the money and didn't do the job.
- JoeAltmaier 1y ago
  That's a bold statement. How about pay them commensurate with their value to the product? Have reasonable work hours? Whatever made them leave, fix that. For instance. Wait, that above comment sounds like a disgruntle 'boss' who is lashing out. So, no answer will be adequate. That poisonous attitude is typical of why programmers were leaving.
- nitwit005 1y ago
  They paid my CEO tens of millions to keep them. Apparently that's reasonable. If you have to pay people more to keep them, you have to pay people more to keep them. People picking the best option isn't exploitation. They don't owe you or anyone else anything.

recursivedoubts 1y ago

"I need you to generate more shareholder value." "WAIT NOT LIKE THAT"

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

agos 1y ago

Alternate title: "employees weren't being paranoid: RTO was about control, not teamwork"

alabastervlog 1y ago

The boss: you must work for me, and only for me. Also the boss: claims to hold five jobs at five different organizations. (I don't even mean Elon, I mean the median "founder" type, but him too I guess, except that I think he's up to more than five)

robertlagrant 1y ago
> The boss: you must work for me, and only for me. It's not the boss saying that. It's the contract you voluntarily signed.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  That reference to one-sided exclusivity via contract law reminds me of a recent Doctorow piece [0]: > Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses. > They want to be able to fire employees at will – but they want those same employees to be bound to them just as surely as serfs were bound to their lords’ land. [0] https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/ https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-...
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  How many workers would succeed at so-restricting the people at the top of the company, in that contract? Pretty much none, right? Probably you're thinking it'd be absurd for them to even ask such a thing. Why? Because this is a matter of class, and the worker isn't of the right social class to be afforded such liberty, while others are. And the worker can't force such a clause despite that resistance. Why? Because they're by-far the weaker party in the negotiation. If these weren't true, it wouldn't seem so immediately absurd to even suggest such a thing. Why don't people who can avoid these clauses embrace them anyway, since the justification is that the company needs and deserves your undivided attention to the greatest legally allowed degree, when they have far more power over the company and are being rewarded far more for their effort? The same reasoning applies far more to them! Because it's very undesirable to be restricted in that way, of course, so damn the company's best interests. If it's very undesirable to be restrained by these, and the benefit to the employer is evidently not so large that it's necessary to restrict those for whom the reasoning applies 1,000x more than for some lowly peon, why do normal workers accept those clauses approximately 100% of the time they're demanded? Because they don't feel they have a choice. "Voluntary" isn't binary.

t-writescode 1y ago

Not wasting 2+ hours a day on commuting and being able to do little chores to help you think every time you would have wandered to the watering hole to help you avoid work really does give you a lot more time to self-actualize, yes.

Gigachad 1y ago
Don’t have to waste time working either. Just mute yourself on calls and work on your own business.

jawns 1y ago

This article suggests that this is a win-lose scenario. It's a win for the workers and the economy at large, but a loss for employers. However, it might very well be a win-win. While the employer might lose a worker to an entrepreneurial venture, isn't this the sort of self-selection out that leads to a more engaged workforce overall? Retaining those employees, who would really be doing something else, by introducing more friction through an in-office policy seems like a recipe for low engagement and mediocre business impact.

bilbo0s 1y ago
While the employer might lose a worker to an entrepreneurial venture, isn't this the sort of self-selection out that leads to a more engaged workforce overall? Mmmm.. I don't know man? Be careful with this line of reasoning. Someone, say, an employer, might be forgiven for concluding from your line of reasoning, that not allowing for remote work in the first place then leads to a more engaged workforce overall. Since remote workers are more entrepreneurial, they'd self-select out by not taking the job.
garyfirestorm 1y ago
We only want billionaires to create jobs. Not you peasants! Back to pits.
alistairSH 1y ago
I was thinking the same thing. Plus, treat people well enough (salary, benefits, work you assign, etc) that they want to stay. IE, as a manager, part of my job is to ensure my employees feel challenged/stimulated, satisfied with their comp plan, etc. If they aren't they'll go elsewhere (start their own, or jump to CapOne/Amazon/some other big tech company in DC).

j45 1y ago

I'm not sure what is wrong with this - other than the wrong kind of employers wanting employees not to grow.

yesbut 1y ago

The number of wfh workers starting their own business is tiny. This is more anti-wfh propaganda. Don't fall for it.

IAmBroom 1y ago
Agreed; the article is a complete red herring. Bosses don't lose 2 minutes a year worrying that Drone #685 might leave to begin a startup. They DO worry the drone isn't working; isn't working efficiently (if it's a good boss); isn't working at their highest quality (if it's a great boss).

Brajeshwar 1y ago

This reminds of; “What if I train my people and they leave?” “What if you don’t train them and they stay!”

chriskanan 1y ago

If they only studied remote work around the time of COVID, I'm not sure if findings will generalize. I think the pandemic caused a lot of people to reassess their lives and careers, and I don't know if increases in new venture creation can be entirely attributed to remote work.

Manfred 1y ago
The Register should have mentioned that the article has not been peer reviewed.

buyucu 1y ago

which is really good for the economy

hennell 1y ago

Were bosses being paranoid that workers were setting up their own businesses though? I thought they were more concerned workers wern't working? This rather suggests workers can actually work very well at home - well enough to set up their own business anyway. I appreciate what this is trying to say is - workers weren't doing their jobs and were instead setting up business. Except this could also quite easily show that if you get rid of peoples long commutes, and they have a space in their home they consider 'work' space - they might have the time and space to start their own biz. And as this seems to be only people who left to do so, it rather suggests people were doing their jobs. Might not be doing 'their hours', but the argument against remote work rarely seems to be 'we can't allow remote work because its so effective people complete their jobs much faster'

lo_zamoyski 1y ago
What it shows is managerial insecurity. Despite the obsession with monitoring "productivity", managers really haven't the faintest idea of what they're doing. A healthy relationship is one in which managers don't monitor and don't micromanage and don't rely on Jira or commit logs to lazily monitor employees. A manager isn't there to lord over employees. He is there to support employees and help them do their jobs. But to do that, you need to know what they're doing. Talk to them. Listen. Hold 1-on-1s on a regular basis. Assume they're doing their jobs instead of defaulting to a defensive and adversarial posture. If you treat employees like adversaries, they'll behave like adversaries. Grant them reasonable trust and they will take initiative and view the relationship as one that is cooperative. They will be less likely to want to risk losing the reasonable trust they have been gratuitously given; if you default to suspicion, then employees have little to lose. You already think poorly of them, so who cares. If someone is genuinely slacking or not well-suited, that will come out sooner or later. 1-on-1s, individually and taken in aggregate, will give the manager an idea of what is really happening, especially if the manager is competent and knowledgeable of the domain, which he should be. 360 EOY reviews can also help here, not as an adversarial tactic, but as a way to share feedback. A competent manager can read the tea leaves.
- deepsun 1y ago

cwillu 1y ago

Oh no, the horror of the slaves exercising their free will.

homeonthemtn 1y ago

It should be pointed out that we glorify blue collar workers for having multiple jobs (see: single mom working 2 jobs trope), and we fully accept C-level people working multiple roles and advisories But for anyone in between, we're shocked-SHOCKED that they'd do such a disloyal and underhanded thing. As though their work is theft outside of the confines of a single employer Utter nonsense. Work and get paid. The end.

AlotOfReading 1y ago
Blue collar workers are almost always paid hourly (or some other unit where time = money). They're being paid in proportion to the amount they work, and the only common reason to take a second job is that the first won't give you enough hours/work to meet your financial needs. Some people see salary jobs as exchanging a fixed amount of money for 40 hrs/week average. If you're spending 10-20 of those hours moonlighting for company B, those people would say you're depriving company A of what they're paying for. If you instead see salary work as producing a certain amount of work regardless of the hours worked, then again there's no issue here. This is inconsistently applied to executives far more than rank and file office workers, since no one really expects (or wants) board member Bob to provide 40 hrs/week to each of the 6 companies he's involved with.
- alistairSH 1y ago
  A manager should have at least a vague notion of how long a given set of tasks should take an employee. If I assign 20 hours of work and it takes 40 hours, I should not be surprised the employee does something else with the 20 remaining hours. If I assign 40 hours of work and it takes 40 hours, and is of the expected quality, I really don't care if the employee take a part-time job elsewhere (assuming that doesn't conflict with expected online hours, etc).
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    You are either managing factory workers, or living in a dream world. My boss has no idea what I'm working on, day by day. My assignments take as long as they take; he makes WAGs at the project start, and I get informed if I am burning more hours than he expected. But at the end of the project, a "40-hour" project may take me 10, or 100 hours. Or, rarely, 40.

isk517 1y ago

Considering that the research paper states that the new businesses were started post-pandemic, I wonder how many of these remote workers were encouraged to start their own business due to not wanting to deal with return to office.

erikerikson 1y ago

The pandemic really exposed how much I had accepted being stuck in a slave mentality, taking only what was offered. Little things like a functional work environment with good screens and peripherals that isn't inundated with noise and fairly constant interruption. Big things like a long commute (and at roughly half an hour mine was better than most) and not having to work alongside, sitting under the gaze of, someone who just emotionally abused me. Those were simply solved and I could just fix other major problems myself. Examples include the obvious fixes of the above issues but also include my option to increase the amount of vacation I take, adopt a 4-day week, and other things that have greatly improved my productivity and far more greatly improved my quality of life. Fuck the endless "always more" and "but what have you done for me lately?" even when I'm outperforming everyone else and have become the "go to". Most impactfully, I have created an emotionally safe and deeply honest environment for myself and my cofounder where we can express our humanity and support each other in our struggles and joys. It is "unprofessional" and completely glorious and loving. Or work had become something that is part of our thriving rather than something that erodes our well-being.

jdnddnbe 1y ago
Have those measures like taking more vacations and adopting a 4-day week really increased your productivity? How have you measured that? Of cause one can deliver more per hour when working 8h/d instead of 12h/d. But the output of a 12h day will still be massively more than from a 8h day.
- erikerikson 1y ago
  There's been a fair bit of research on that topic. Largely the studies I have read have found that especially in creative intellectual labor (perhaps some programming could be excluded), overwork leads to negative productivity, compoundingly so in the long term.
  - dang 1y ago
    > You need to do some research. Please edit out swipes, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (Your comment would be fine without that first bit)

scudsworth 1y ago

"bosses": ah, good. i shall demoralize and imprison my employees to prevent them from doing this. this will be good for productivity

gethly 1y ago

In my experience, the only risk and proven danger are sales people. I've seen and met many former sales people whom developed relationships with their customers and then one day just quit their job and went into business of their own, with a lot of their former employer's clients as their new customers. I doubt there is anything anyone can do about it as this is about personal relations and the only defence could be to never allow one customer to be handled by a single account manager so there cannot be personal relationship developed. But on the other hand, will such customer feel good doing business with such a company? It might just be one of those things that just is what it is and will never change.

_ache_ 1y ago

Objectively, this article is bullshit. What is the source ? An unidentified "data partner". That just means, this is non-reproducible. So this is not science. Actually, there is a another paper, reproducible, it's non conclusive. The social explanation of the phenomena (if there is any) are clearly politically oriented.

graemep 1y ago

What about confounding variables? For example the types of jobs that are easiest to do remotely may correlate with employees likely to start their own business?

russdill 1y ago

So what you're telling me, is that remote workers tend to be the most innovative and industrious. Got it.

neilv 1y ago

> The IP address information came from an unidentified "data partner" that uses first- and third-party cookies to create user profiles and ultimately infer their place of employment. The LinkedIn data – user profiles and resumes – came from Revelio Labs, and was supplemented with US census data and corporate data from Aberdeen CiTDB and People Data Labs. If this research prompts more businesses to RTO or non-WFH -- for the reason of reducing employees leaving to do a startup, or doing a potentially competing startup after termination -- is this effectively leveraging surveillance capitalism to suppress labor (and innovation, as we say)?

DragonStrength 1y ago

When I worked in Big Tech, there were Slack channels for discussing real estate investment and one of my coworkers routinely fielded calls about the maid service he ran. I imagine it's much easier, and more appropriate, to do such things when working remotely and not having normal office etiquette as part of your job responsibilities.

adverbly 1y ago

Isn't it to be expected that anyone with more free time is more likely to have time to start a business? Working from home means you don't have to commute which saves you hours a week. Of course it will increase the chance that you can start up a business. I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen more employers offer to pay people a bit more so that they can work during the hours they would normally commute... That seems like it would be a win-win, and would probably drop the number of people doing startups if they so desired.

hbartab 1y ago

> The authors cite various other studies on remote work showing how it frees up time by reducing commuting, increases productivity, offers more flexible hours, and reduces employee monitoring. Sounds like a benefit to society to me. When people do not waste time on commutes, they spend it either with their families and friends or thinking about solving problems, which occasionally turn into new businesses. Without such time freed up, these business ideas would never have come to fruition. I also don't see why how employees spend their time off (as almost no employer counts commuting as work time) should factor into remote policies.

nabilhat 1y ago

Reading summaries like this requires great skepticism. It's exceptionally difficult in this particular case to avoid directing results to arbitrary conclusions through cohort selection and grouping. > analyzed IP address data in conjunction with LinkedIn data to cross-reference those working from home with those who formed new businesses. ... a title change and employment change on LinkedIn indicating a shift from being an employee to a founder. Is this more likely to tell us something about the people and roles selected to work remotely, or an outcome of working remotely? At this scale the influences of each are absolutely inseparable. Do cohorts robustly account for education, experience, skillsets, tenure, etc.? The same values which improve one's ability to start a business strongly overlap with the considerations for employing someone remotely. I'm not saying they're comparing a "remote" cohort including developers to a "not remote" cohort including construction workers, but it's important to confirm.

y-c-o-m-b 1y ago

Why is the headline written like another remote work hit-piece? They go on to state overwhelming positive traits of remote work policies in the actual content. WTF? The article also uses COVID-19 as the catalyst. If you consider that most people were fearing losing their jobs or were under threat to lose their jobs (and RTO mandates were occurring even in the early days of the pandemic!), it makes sense that an increase in entrepreneur activities would have happened. > "It's good that we have people creating new firms, new jobs, and new innovation. This is presumably better reallocation, because essentially remote work allows you to better explore outside options in entrepreneurship." Maybe don't put a rage-bait spin on the title of the article?

bravetraveler 1y ago

With the ever-increasing scope of responsibilities as an IC, I might as well fucking own the place

anarticle 1y ago

It's a good time to be small, never been a better time to do your own thing. After 15y~ of doing megacorps, I was terrified to be on my own, but I got out there and talked to friends about what they were doing and how I can help. I'm wielding two contracts and two retainers all while building software I sell for myself. It feels absolutely crazy to send someone an invoice and they send me money, as if I've unlocked some secret ability. This month is the first month I'm making more than I was as a corper. Don't let the game tell you how to play anymore. The tools are out there and are better than ever.

Tuperoir 1y ago

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sparklingdata 1y ago

Well, remote work brings multiple advantages, to remote workers but also to employers: * companies offering flexibility will attract the best talent * 47% of businesses noticed increased productivity levels amongst employees who work remotely (tech.co) * in an inflation-affected economy remote work means lower office-related utilities' costs for companies (16% of companies operate fully remote, without a physical office - Forbes 2024; this gives them a competitive advantage over their competition) More relevant, interesting stats re: remote jobs, are available here: https://www.workbeyond.io/remote_work_advantages/ https://www.workbeyond.io/remote_work_advantages/ https://www.workbeyond.io/remote_jobs_market_stats/ https://www.workbeyond.io/remote_jobs_market_stats/ The stats on workbeyond.io are based on a sizable remote jobs dataset.