Hacker News Reader

Comment by xt00 | Hacker News Reader

Many people have brought this up, but there are definitely things to consider for a job to be done while working from home:

1) worker productivity (does it go up or down for all of these professions)

2) do companies want to pay you as much if you work from home?

3) is it sustainable for large swathes of people vs. small groups of people who self-select to like this work-style

4) will people abuse the system such that it ruins it for everybody else

I can see a far more likely implementation of this would be a mixed case -- "work from home wednesdays" or something like that.. not friday or monday because then basically people would assume there is a certain amount of abuse of people working for 1 hour on Friday then starting their weekend early..

View on HN

> 4) will people abuse the system such that it ruins it for everybody else

> I can see a far more likely implementation of this would be a mixed case -- "work from home wednesdays" or something like that.. not friday or monday because then basically people would assume there is a certain amount of abuse of people working for 1 hour on Friday then starting their weekend early..

This is a pretty fake concern in my experience driven by butts-in-seats culture. I'm gonna take hours off and work when I feel like it when working remotely. If that means working 8 hours, sure. If it means I don't do any work on a Tuesday, who cares? All that matters is if I'm delivering what is expected of me (e.g. my spring tickets) and available for communication. If I spend 4 hours a day working & 4 hours studying & playing mahjong online, what's it to you, you know?

>If it means I don't do any work on a Tuesday, who cares? All that matters is if I'm delivering what is expected of me (e.g. my spring tickets) and available for communication. If I spend 4 hours a day working & 4 hours studying & playing mahjong online, what's it to you, you know?

Enlightened employers realize this. It's not super common in the industry yet, but if you can find an employer who doesn't track your productivity by seeing how many meetings you attend and how often you're sitting at your desk alt-tabbing between VS Code and Github to look productive, you've hit the jackpot.

Success should (ideally) be measured by value-add to the company, and dependability of the employee. Not many employers/managers know how to track value-add though. For a non-tech-savvy manager to measure the success of an engineer is difficult. They might look at your code commit and see that you removed 400 lines of code and added 20 and think of this as a "negative" impact because the numbers don't look nice. It's a frustrating aspect of the industry, but possible to work around if you work with decent people.

The relationship you're describing is contracting. Salaried employees don't have a pre-negotiated scope of work; "what's expected of you" isn't fixed in advance. This cuts both ways. If something runs late, you don't take a financial loss. But if something runs early, you don't get the time back either. The company has purchased everything you can get done in a workday. If that's more than average, it's more than average.

> The relationship you're describing is contracting.

The relationship I'm describing is actually at-will employment. I have quite a bit of freedom to do whatever I want with my time so long as my employer is still willing to pay me. I have no obligation to operate at my personal 100% unless my employer demands it (in times of need, it can be the case. But that's rare!)

I have found it easier to work a full day on Friday when I'm at home, because people aren't gathering in the kitchen pouring beer and making cocktails at 4pm.

(I'd love that if I started working at 7am like some of my coworkers, but when I start at 9:30am, the day feels a little truncated.)

yea I think the reason its worth mentioning is that when you talk about a report that will claim that 30%+ of jobs could be done from home, then the question is how many of those jobs can be setup in a way where it can be measured in a way that doesn't switch from "butts in seats at the office" to "keep your webcam on all the time or you are fired".. certain jobs may have the right combination of "not very fun to do" and "hard to measure output".. so as a result the default state for people would be to likely trend toward lower productivity without somebody minding them. So the helpful metric to add to these 30+% of jobs that could be done from home would be how likely they can be done without a manager that either pushes people to perform in some way or requires assistance on a regular basis to more junior employees to keep their productivity and learning curve moving.

I feel you, and you are likely right for software, but for any business that e.g. needs to do things when markets (or other businesses) are open, this will never be the case in practice.

> 2) do companies want to pay you as much if you work from home?

Is there anyone out there with a good argument for why remote workers should be paid less?

Especially interested in hearing from anyone not incentivized by this practice (eg not the CEO or Chief People Officer of an org that practices this)

> will people abuse the system such that it ruins it for everybody else

An inevitable question and likely consequence.

A counter question: are the myriad ways in-office employees game/abuse the system working materially worse than how remote workers might?

> Is there anyone out there with a good argument for why remote workers should be paid less?

Right now people working in cities with a high cost of living have a large salary to make up for their living costs. When you make a job remote you suddenly increase the pool of possible employees to anyone in the world, including people living in places that may have a lower cost of living. Those people will be happy to work for less.

If you have a remote employee, why pay them 200k to live in SF if you can pay someone in India 50k?

On one hand, if you are worth $N to the company sitting in an office and produce the same output working from home, that output is still worth >$N to the company.

On the other hand, if the company isn't limited by geographic restrictions, it can find people who may produce an equivalent output and are willing to work for less.

So it is a balance between how in demand your skills are and how competitive the market is for those skills. In my opinion, if a company is in need of an employee and is willing to pay $N for the employee, simply being remote should not reduce that amount. It has advantages for all parties involved (improved employee satisfaction, lower office overhead, etc).

Ultimately it is a negotiation, the the company can try to justify paying you less because of cost of living adjustments unless you can negotiate otherwise. It's in their interest to get your labor for the best price possible.

> Is there anyone out there with a good argument for why remote workers should be paid less?

There is more demand for remote jobs, therefore they pay less.

> Is there anyone out there with a good argument for why remote workers should be paid less?

supply and demand competition. Anything that makes labor easier increases supply, applying downward pressure on prices.

Assuming equal value created, companies should pay remote workers more: normal pay + savings from not using office related overhead (rent + equipment + amenities)

Compensation isn't just about value created, though. Costs, remote versus local efficiencies (cannot be assumed to be identical), and a given person's other options also enter into the negotiations.

The argument also goes the other way. The company pays you now for the work in the office and for the inconvenience you incur from commuting. No more commuting, so you should get paid less.

The company isn't paying for your time in the car but it is paying for the space your desk in the office occupies. Would you argue that someone who drives 30 minutes more to the office than an otherwise equivalent coworker should be paid more?

It's possible, isn't it? The person with the longer commute may be able to use it to negotiate for a higher salary. Particularly if they have another option with a shorter commute.

Perhaps I misunderstand you or have overlooked something.

If everyone switches to pay for outcome instead of paying for hours then they will pay the same or even better. Where better comes from I could do it in 1 hour and other 3 hours I was able to do whatever else.

Though not everyone likes that because there is a lot of people who benefit from hourly based pay. They don't do much but they put their hours in.

The second part is also quantifying outcome is hard... Should we pay that guy that fixed the machine in 5 minutes the same as if we would spend a week to fix it ourselves? Maybe we would fix it in one week instead? Should we spend one week trying to fix it and then call that guy ... or we would break the machine so the guy would charge us 5x more? Then you get all companies charging a lot more if someone tries to fix something on their own because they usually mess up.

> Is there anyone out there with a good argument for why remote workers should be paid less?

If I don't care where my team members are, why would I want two when I could have four of the same quality? Sounds attractive, I should think.

> Is there anyone out there with a good argument for why remote workers should be paid less?

Lower expenses from commuting. Perhaps initially somewhat offset by the need for home office equipment/space.

Lower expenses for the employer as well by not having to maintain a physical office, which I have to imagine is a greater per-employee saving for the company than commuting is for the individual.

"Work from home Wednesday" could be marketed by pajama companies, in the same way that "casual Friday" was marketed by Levi Strauss. ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com