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Comment by germs12 | Hacker News Reader

I've found a new level of self worth not being told when I have to be in a seat and when I'm allowed to leave it.

Fewer restrictions and less questioning of your use of time and your activities is typical the higher one observes the class ladder. WFH (absent remote monitoring tools, which take it back down below an in-person job without such tools) is like bumping up to the upper-middle, or professional, class, which most programmers are not in, ordinarily, socially speaking.

... and yes, a taste of class privilege is, frankly, wonderful.

You nailed it. I may never have much class privlage, but I can emulate it with WFH, location flexibility and by cultivating small amounts of financial independence.

I truly think class-anxiety will make the freer kinds of WFH fairly uncommon over time, if it persists on a large scale at all, the more savvy managers get to it. I'm seeing non-programmer, bog-standard office drone friends get their work done in a couple hours and have the rest of the day basically to themselves (though no fault of their own, as they've sought more work in the past and found no-one to give it to them, and just happen to be way more efficient than some of their peers). They did the same in the office, but they weren't free there. I don't think managers will like mere office drones, or even huge numbers of programmers (just office drones they have to pay more, while resenting it every day, really), gaining those kinds of privileges, which ordinarily aren't available to such a degree even for middle managers.

I expect work spyware and spying services to be a booming market, even more than it has been. :-(

The relationship between employer and employee is founded on control and power. The employer is absolutely going to claw back as much of that power as possible post-pandemic. More spyware is a possibility. Even more likely is that most roles will switch back to on-site because control over the physical bodies of others is the most primal kind of power. One WFH insight I've had is that at home you are able to control your physical comfort to a much greater degree. You don't have to dress like they tell you, you have control of the thermostat, your chair, desk, keyboard, mouse, monitor, noise environment, air quality, odors, food, lighting, body position, and so on. This is an enormous bodily freedom and it won't be continued to be given without fighting for it. People go on about the social benefits of work, though I think back to Maslow's Hierarchy and that the social is less important if your office is noisy, freezing and your chair is causing severe back pain.

After 7 years of remote work, the times I have spent a few weeks or months back in an office have been an enormous shock. You always feel what you are currently missing most strongly, so I suspect once most people get back into the office, the enormous lack of freedom will weigh more heavily than they could have realized before experiencing it.

Why don't you consider most programmers to be upper-middle class? The only explanation I can come up with is that it is based on the fact that most programmers are junior level due to the rapid growth of our industry and that junior level professionals haven't made it to the upper-middle rung yet.

Class isn't just money, it's habits, attitudes, and the way others treat you, some of which are related to money, in a necessary-but-not-sufficient way. Besides, the vast majority of programmers in the US, let alone abroad, don't make enough money to sit in that class comfortably.

Upper-middle is "why of course our kids are going to a private prep school, what else would they do?" and "oh, where will you Summer? We're planning to just do Nantucket again" territory.

The dude who's made it at age 45 running a plumbing business is his own boss, has employees, has maybe triple or quadruple median take-home income because he's decent at business and works hard—but will still almost certainly not be perceived, or treated, by anyone, as "upper-middle". Not like a surgeon would be, almost by default, even in residency, or perhaps a junior investment banker.

My observation has been that programmers are mostly treated either as just expensive middle-class office drones, or pandered to as a substitute for actual upper-middle treatment. One key indicator, for office workers like us: where the hell are our private offices with doors that close? (yes, I know some places have them, but they're rare) Oh but we have foosball tables and catered lunch, so oh, look how respected you are, you little programmer.

We're probably closest to accountants, overall, in the social class we're treated as inherently belonging to and the class toward which admitting to being a "programmer" will drag you in most anyone's mind. Solidly, solidly middle.

Which, maybe, who'd give a shit, except that you actually do get treated better as upper-middle.

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