Bosses are fed up with remote work | Hacker News Reader

Bosses are fed up with remote work

yahoo.com

This again. If this was truly the case, then they would put an immediate stop to the offshoring / nearshoring that has been rampant in the industry for the last 20 years.

Not a single push back against the H1B/Offshoring happening in the US. Keep it up corporate america... you going to have your next competiton being created by you from those remote workers banding together.

Absolutely. Something is different between the very-very-remote worker and the remote worker and the news will do anything to keep from making that comparison.

The price

> push back against the H1B/Offshoring

Or against satellite offices. I drive 30 minutes into the office twice a week per corporate standards... and spend the whole day on zoom calls with co-workers in other offices in different cities.

Money talks. If I'm paying $150k for a US-based engineer and I'm getting poor output as a result of them working remotely, the downside is considerable and I have a strong incentive to improve their output, especially since I can, assuming they are located near an office. If I'm paying $40k for an off/near-shore engineer, the financial downside is lower, and besides what can I really do about it since they don't live near an office?

All caveats apply, of course. It kinda depends on how bad it is with each worker.

Worth mentioning, by the way, that many professional off/near-shoring agencies have offices that the workers can work from -- often a necessity if home internet is not available or stable in their countries. So while these workers remain remote to YOU, they're presumably getting the benefit of being without the distraction of home, and the opportunity to collaborate and build relationships with colleagues in-person.

Money doesn't always talk. Me (programmer) a sysadmin and a DBA ran a Visa level 1 merchant's credit card processing for 2 years. The last year we had zero downtime outside of scheduled maintenance windows. The company offshored my job ("we can pay 3-4 people in Bangalore with your salary"). The next year they had lots of downtime, probably more than enough to pay my salary. I expect offshoring was considered a success, because that company has outsourced and offshores everything but lawyers and C-levels. Now, they can no longer offer static IP addresses to customers, and haven't managed to do IPv6.

Research mostly seems to indicate that remote work increases productivity.

> This again. If this was truly the case, then they would put an immediate stop to the offshoring / nearshoring that has been rampant in the industry for the last 20 years.

I'm on your side but your logic doesn't really follow here. Firstly because most offshoring arrangements are not work-from-home arrangements, they involve hiring people working in an office, just in another country. Secondly because it's a lot more palatable to pay someone who you suspect isn't giving the job 100% when you're paying them one tenth the salary of a local hire.

Employees are fed up with managers who exist only to justify their existence as well.

A yapping line manager throwing endless status update meetings for filling a spreadsheet must be easily automated even with today's AI, far more than replacing actual productive jobs such as software development.

The only thing holding this back is empire building pyramid constructions.

They think in person rather than zoom will save their ass.

Can they not solve this problem? This shows the lack of creative problem solving that is widespread across companies. They've known only one way to work and they're convinced it's the only way, when in theory there is probably multiple ways of achieving the same amount of productivity, and it's probably just a shift in work ethic and culture. This is of course assuming the work can be done remotely, like any job that has digital deliverables and meetings can be done online. All the pieces of the puzzles are there.

TFA claims remote workers work 3.5 hours per day less than in person workers. This makes me question the whole article honestly.

On one hand, I am not surprised given the tiktok remote worker trends during early pandemic. But I doubt this holds for all job types, workers, or industries.

OTOH, I work 10-11 hrs per day because I can. It's relaxing to have extra time or to get ahead and not have to commute. I can work when I'm productive (early AM). When I can't, I work 8 and it feels light. That flexibility is incredible and I'd bargain hard for it.

I refuse to believe I'm an outlier I've only ever worked with folks like me.

I joined four companies since COVID. All but the latest company did onboarding remotely. All of them made me take twice as long to ramp up on my duties compared to an in-person experience

Also, virtual onboarding are TORTUROUS (for me). You're in a Zoom all day, sometimes for multiple days, trying your best to look into the camera and absorb mountains of information while trying very hard to not be distracted by the wonderful things happening in and outside of your house.

If I'm going to be in all-day meetings, I much prefer to be in an office with other people when they happen.

No, they’re fed up with underperforming fraudsters that work 3 hours per day and have the productivity of 10% of proper working employees, yet still get paid 200k+

So fire them? Someone with 10% output should easily be recognizable.

But that is the thing:

- this requires effort on behalf of the manager ( it can be harder to do remotely ) - manager's openly say they want you to ask for more ( they don't know how to manage you or how much you can do, because they just throw what they think sounds about right )

I guess what I am saying is:

Managers don't know if your output is below expected 10% ( especially the bad ones, which, anecdotally based on corporate experience, is a non-trivial percentage ).

Can’t do that in the Netherlands.

Plus the whole “movement” creaties a lower baseline of performance. Most managers or engineers have no idea how much can be done and what quality means

I just had to fire a remote worker for egregious and persistent timecard fraud. I was all about remote worker before that happened.

So because of a bad actor, nobody gets anything nice?

Guess we should pull the plug entirely on this civilization idea.

In my 10+ years of being on a fully remote team, we had one person who was lying about doing their job, and it was immediately obvious since the work wasn't getting done. Generally, everyone's job has some kind of output or interaction with others that would give away that they weren't doing the job. If not, then being in the office or not isn't going to change the situation.

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