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Comment by DougN7 | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure I agree. Our industry isn’t full of people that have more integrity than the general population, and “your problem for hiring the wrong people” is short sighted, or even victim blaming. I’ll share this recent HN post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35767280

Remote work only makes sense when everyone has integrity, but that seems less and less likely in my experience, sadly.

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I see nothing particularly bad about the post you shared (it's just a personal account of someone that doesn't really care about their job), and the only thing that it tied to remote work is the mention of "multiple full time jobs".

But then I have to ask - if his employers are happy enough with his work to keep him around, what is the problem there?

Keep in mind, I am also the sort of guy that doesn't rage against employers doing layoffs when they have record profits. It's a natural cycle of business.

Once you take personal feelings off the table and see it all as business relationships, everything is alright. As long as nothing illegal is being done, of course.

Just saw this article. The guy isn’t doing anything illegal per se, but I would call him dishonest and say he is cheating both companies with his approaches. Few people could work two jobs without needing to apply these techniques.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-genz-working-2-remote-jo...

> But then I have to ask - if his employers are happy enough with his work to keep him around, what is the problem there?

In SW environments, having the time to do more work is supposed to mean actually completing more projects. They hire you to "perform duties for x hours a day", not "complete x tasks/x story points per sprint", so if everyone on a team is taking a similar approach, your velocity might be half or less what it could be if everyone ended up on-site.

> They hire you to "perform duties for x hours a day", not "complete x tasks/x story points per sprint"

Then why hire salaried workers while tracking work via sprints?

>your velocity might be half or less what it could be if everyone ended up on-site.

This is assuming more work actually gets done in an office and that offices don't have their own set of distractions. People can also slack off in an office too, or become so distracted by others that their velocity suffers.

Measuring employee performance seems to be a continual struggle that has no relation to in-office vs remote workers. If you can't accurately measure success & value generation of remote workers, you probably also can't measure office worker's either. Just checking that someone is physically in their seat doesn't actually mean they're adding tangible value.

I'm not super convinced most people will do more work on-site either, I'm just pointing out the immoral position you put yourself in by working two full-time jobs at once.

I agree that one should not deceive their employer. At the same time, if their employer does not notice a drop in productivity/performance from the employee, what's that say about that company's ability to actually measure employee performance?

I think a lot of companies have poor project management & employee performance measurements, so half the time, people only have half the picture or don't know what the heck people are supposed to be doing and if that's actually getting done. That only becomes more complicated when projects are abandoned and/or requirements shift every quarter.

So people like the guy with two jobs should be fired if management was better. And more employee surveillance is needed to help managers do their jobs better. The other option is integrity and trust.

I agree on the latter, measure deliverables & people's contributions to the deliverables. Having paranoia that someone is working two jobs, so you need people in office or you need to install aggressive spyware is extreme.

At what point does this become just creating meaningless work or pursuing initiatives that mean nothing? Do we know if the companies in the example given even support employee initiatives?

And working on-site does not mean people will be more productive. A lot of people are very good at giving out the impression that they are very busy day in day out even when productivity is rock bottom.

"victim blaming" your boss, the person hired to have responsibility. You can't make this up.

You can defraud people in positions of power. It’s often more lucrative to do so.

That’s happens and the boss also has the power to fix it. It’s part of that whole responsibility thing. If a majority of a bosses employees are defrauding them, then it sounds like they aren’t good at hiring. If it’s a minority then it’s their job to get rid of those people. It’s shocking to see people complain about coworkers literally not logging in for weeks as why remote doesn’t work. That just means your supervisor’s aren’t doing their job either.

The boss often has little power or agency to fix it. You have never been a middle manager. The amount of red tape you need to go through to fire someone for cause, cover your ass from lawsuits, etc is overwhelming.

Managers are people too, often struggling because they’re squashed between challenging top down directives and the needs of all their reports.

So in dysfunctional organizations force managers to keep poorly performing employees? This is somehow related to remote work how? Such a problem exists regardless of where the employee is working.

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