Hacker News Reader

A: It's more productive, and easier to supervise employees.

75% of knowledge worker telecommuters that I've run across who aren't doing tracked tasks are doing very little.

We do have a lot of empty office blocks, especially in midsized cities. Even in NYC, there are plenty of mid rise buildings that are minimally occupied, as automation ate up the armies of clerks who once inhabited them.

View on HN

I would guess many people see "office work" as a form of UBI, where people self-regulate how much they work. Office blocks may not be physically empty, but the amount of work getting done appears to vary drastically. Lot of (logical) places to hide in large enterprises.

That's a good point. But how do you track non-task work which is mostly creative work, be that in the office or remotely?

In my experience as both and employee and employer, you can't. Even in the office it's not like you can tell people "come up with good solutions". It all turns into make believe work.

As an employer we simply don't hire people anymore who need that type of supervision. As a result our possible talent pool expanded from our city to the entire world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com