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Comment by rlewkov | Hacker News Reader

My (unnamed) employer does too unless you live greater than a certain distance from the office. Have had several high-caliber engineers quit. They had reqs out for their replacements within a week. It sucks but their company their rules.

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My wife’s company did this, and then backpedaled after a bunch of good people quit.

I would like to talk to the executives making these boneheaded decisions. What is going through your head when you decide to arbitrarily give some people the benefit of working from home and forcing some to come to the office as a function of where their current home address happens to be?

Their general theme is that we, as a company, are more productive if working collaboratively together. The CEO has been asked many times to change policy and has not. At this point I somewhat think it's more "because I said so". I'm sure the distance from office that will allow you to work from home was decided in a meeting and published in someone's TPS report.

I do not think there is anything boneheaded with executives calling everyone into the office, if they think that is what will help them. The stupid part is pissing off some or much of your team by giving the benefit of working from home to those who happen to live in a certain location.

I haven't heard anyone complain that Fred can work from home because he lives more than X miles away from the office. Everyone, at least it seems to me, is OK with distance being used to determine if someone is allowed to work at home. There may be people who are irked about it but they aren't particularly vocal. I think it's more that company X just down the road allows it so why not us.

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