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Comment by mtmail | Hacker News Reader

Summary as the title is a bit clickbait:

Senior executive thought fake beach background in video meeting means employee wasn't at home. Enacts new policy employees can only work from home.

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There was a viral video of some PMs working from a pool. On one hand, it doesn't really matter where you work from as long as you get your work done. But on the other hand, I find it hard to believe that someone can have focus in an environment like that. It might be unpopular opinion online, but I think its entirely reasonable to put some restrictions on where you can work from home, if only to allay the feelings of colleagues. Ideally everyone would have a work environment where there is a set standardized output of X that needs to be produced by each employee in which case how it gets done is irrelevant. But in modern work environment, there is a level of trust and autonomy employees are granted. There are dark patterns people can use to minimize the amount of work you're doing without drawing too much attention. And sure, you can think cynically that you should do the minimum amount of work required, because your employer will pay you the minimum amount they have to. But that just sounds overly adversarial and could create a toxic environment and resentment amount colleagues. Not to mention its terrible for you in the long run.

https://twitter.com/coldhealing/status/1533093790503821315?t...

I would be a little worried about somebody working from inside the pool (laptop may get dunked).

By the pool -- seems like a bit of a fuzzy thing. I can definitely imagine working from a deck could be quite relaxing which could help with focus. And some decks happen to have pools built in. I can't imagine a good manager would micromanage, like, distance to the pool or something like that.

We've accepted programmers working from coffee shops for ages, and that environment seems much more distracting.

I dunno. In the end, the metric that matters is, does the work get done? If you can get it done by the pool, fair enough, right?

What do you mean by "an environment like that"? It was just them outside by a pool...it's not like they were at a Vegas pool party... Different kinds of people work well in various environments.

I sit outside and work all the time, often by the pool. It's actually very relaxing and I can get a lot done when I have my headphones in... Sure, sometimes it gets distracting...and that's when I go back to my desk.

God I hate the internet grapevine. The PMs in question were literally on a company retreat. All of their colleagues were at the pool with them.

If you look on their TikTok profile the 2 videos preceding that one makes this extremely clear.

By this logic, you shouldn’t be allowed to listen to music while working, because I don’t think anyone can focus under those circumstances.

I don't post on HN often. Should I have modify the title to be less clickbaitey or be true to the post? I thought about changing it to give more context.

Personally I would only call it "clickbait" if it didn't fulfill expectations. Instead it was an entertaining story.

HN would nitpick the second coming of christ until he apologized for it and agreed to start all over again.

Most criticism comes from changing or replacing the title but I think adding something in brackets at the end would be ok.

The site guidelines cover this: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

In this case the title was linkbait so it would be correct to change it. When changing it, the goal is to represent the article accurately and neutrally (i.e. not putting a spin on it, which would be editorializing). The best way to do this is to find a representative phrase from the article itself which has those qualities—if you can find one.

I took a quick look at that Reddit post and couldn't find one. That might be a sign that this article is too sensationalistic/shallow to make a good HN submission.

My first response from dang! Thank you, I will be more cautious next time.

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