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Comment by dpcan | Hacker News Reader

This may seem mean, and feel free to argue with me and prove my statement below wrong.

Well, which was it? Was he taking his daughter to therapy or working from home? If his daughter requires additional care, he needs to care for his daughter, but that can't interfere with work. If your kids are not disabled, they may not be interfering with your work, and therefore, when you are working from home - you are, in fact, "working" from home.

Why is this person entitled to being paid to "work at home" when he's not actually "working" while at home, he's actually caring for his daughter?

People are confused. Working from home still means "working". It doesn't mean, be at home and do what I want but get paid, or not work as hard.

Maybe he thinks it should mean: I'll get the work done on my own time. But, if the work needs to be done that day, he still needs to be WORKING from home - and not doing something else.

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You seem to be confused. Being able to bring someone someplace at a certain time can be, depending on the locations, much easier and less time intensive if done from home.

So, for example: If your commute takes twenty minutes and therapy is twenty minutes from your home taking someone to therapy who is at home takes 40 minutes if you do home office or between 60 and 80 minutes of you have to be at work.

Nowhere does it say that he wanted to do home office to take care of someone. That’s nonsensical and a nonsensical interpretation of what was said. The most straightforward interpretation is that this is a simple case of simplifying logistics.

No, working from home means working, as in getting particular things done.

Working from home often means that your (equivalent of) lunch break is a time you can spend elsewhere, e.g. take your child to therapy. You don't waste time commuting from your office if the doctor's office is nearby.

You can also spend more time for off-work activities in the middle of the day, but work until a later hour, again because you're not commuting back from the office.

As long as you get done what you planned to, and participate in whatever communications you planned to participate (video calls work well these days), I don't see why working from home would be a materially inferior way of working, at least if practiced in moderation.

Taking a day off is a different matter.

Your statement may be right. I am inclined to believe that he means he needed to take her to therapy and then back. This means he might start the day a bit later or he might be unavailable for some time. People generally WFH in those situations as it saves the time of commute and they can get something else done. Overall it might be an hour or 2 that he might not be available or it might be just the same as before as he saves commute time both ways and can work later in the day as he is already home.

No need to jump to nefarious meaning. Also further he mentions how others in the team were working from home anyways once a week and he was ordered to come and sit at 7am.

I understand the need and curiousity to dissect each and every line but please don't let this 'one potentially, open to clarification' statement take everything else from the author.

I apologize if you didn't mean to, but since this is the top child of current top comment, I felt the need to. Let's not lose the forest for the trees.

Hmm, doesn't

> I need to bring her to therapy

imply that he doesn't have to be there all the time? And if therapy is only of short duration, nonetheless he could "set up shop" somewhere nearby and start working from remote, if he were allowed to do so.

And why get hung up on the term "from home" when it really means "from remote"? After all, his remote access won't be geo-fenced.

Dunno if you have kids but until a certain age, they don't "pack themselves". You can easily add 30 min. for a two year old, e.g.. Driving his daughter could easily take away 1hr in each direction.

If his colleagues don't show up until 11, instead of making him show up at the office at 7, he could easily manage working from remote and driving around his daughter.

Normally I'm the free market guy in those situations, but I have a really hard time in this case to not see Uwais Khan as a complete ahole.

Yeah, I can see how one could make an amoral, pedantic argument around the definition of working from home. But to do that you have to 1) remove the argument from it's surrounding context, which is flawed reasoning and 2) successfully prove that there is a significant difference in the practical outworking of the definition of working from home between the subject and their workmates. The latter is immediately and significantly relevant to the definition and, unfortunately for the oppressor, drags context back into play.

Thank you. I've seen a lot of abuse of the term. One time I worked with a recruiter [1] and said I was feeling really bad that day and took the day off from work and was resting at home. She replied, "ah, gotcha, so you're working from home today". And I was like, "no, I'm resting."

(With that said, it could still be a good-faith usage here -- like, he legitimately does work from home, and the therapy is relevant here because all the back-and-forth pickups would otherwise eat up much of the day.)

[1] Yes, I know -- never again.

I have been working from home for almost 5 years now, and one thing that I learned in the first 18 months was that it is important to take sick days. In the beginning I would just sit at my desk and try my best to work even though I was sick, but not be able to concentrate and ultimately not get anything done. Then I would stress about it and work extra time, which would just make things worse. Now I take off any time I think I would have if I were in an office.

Unless you don't have sick days or your company cuts PTO in half. In that case, in front of the computer or in bed, that's still working from home. Fuck them for not providing sick days and cutting PTO in half. Fuck them for no raises in half a decade. This is the way one can get more money in the same time from the same company without a raise. The less I work, the more money I make per hour, so my incentive is to work as little as possible while still getting the minimum amount of shit done. It's management that sets the incentives. Welcome to the idiots of corporate America. Sure they could give some raises sometimes or increase vacation or add sick time or really do anything whatsoever to show employees that they are appreciated and that their salaries are not going down each month due to inflation. Instead, they try to force extra work like trying to squeeze water out of stone. In the office, it's no different. People waste time in other ways. I'm just shocked that corporate executives and managers are so fucking oblivious to the incentives they create and the empty praises they try to placate their employees with. Fuck them. This isn't a situation where one should be ethical. The cards are stacked against employees and employees need to use any dirty trick to get the most out of their shitty employers.

This sort of attitude does not help. I'm sorry that you've had bad management experiences, but things don't need to be like this, and part of that is the attitudes of both parties.

Ball's in the employer's court. It's their turn to make a move. The employee (me) can only react. Therefore as long as the employer continues to be like this, I have no choice in how I respond because I'm a human being with dignity and I deserve to be treated as such. On the other hand, this is the best job/employer I've ever had out of dozens in the industry. This is nothing compared to not getting the health insurance promised, being physically assaulted, having to work weekends/evenings for no reason at all and the other bullshit employers feel entitled to do to their employees. I couldn't disagree with your statement more, however. My attitude is one of responding to things out of my control. If my employer wants to fix this and improve my attitude, they just have to make good on the promises for a raise I was given multiple times or give me back the vacation time they cut in half. It's very simple and extremely easy for them. By saying that I should change my attitude, you're blaming the victim and implying that the employer is right to treat their employees like shit, without a shred of respect, perpetuating this bullshit forever. Nope, I will not accept the blame for their failing to be decent human beings who keep their promises and respect their employees.

Or it could be about reducing the impact of taking his child to therapy on work time. If it saves him an hour or more of travel during the day then it makes sense to let him WFH.

a specific therapy session unlikely lasts the entire day and a flextime (starting work at 11) probably covers a single day being split up a little bit.

>Why is this person entitled to being paid to "work at office" when he's not actually "working" while at office, he's actually [getting coffee | taking a walk | socializing | etc?

does that help why this makes sense?

I judge my teem members by the quality of their work and the efficiency with which they do it. Ass in the seat time is a dumb metric and is always used in a power play.

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