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Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

I mean you can read what I said in the worst possible faith, totally ok!

I point out how I:

- recognize there are people who do as well (or better) at home

- emphasize it's significantly worse work I'm referring to

- point out cases where it can work (and these are cases that any motivated person can find mind you, not every company has Amazon-sized)

I guess it'd be really boneheaded to conflate all that with "squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in a human"... but that's the beauty of discourse for some folks: they can take any point in as silly a way as they want.

I can't relate to that though, just like I can't relate to "wanting to have reliable, motivated coworkers means you don't have your priorities straight". What a truly baffling level of mediocrity to aim for.

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What point are you making then? Someone stuck their gun under the desk so the school banning gum is entirely fair and reasonable?

What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work.

This smells like middle manager puedo justification so bad I can't stand it.

> This smells like middle manager puedo justification

Feel free to read up on my path so far, but you'll be disappointed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45134398

> Someone stuck their gum under the desk so the school banning gum is entirely fair and reasonable?

Assume you mean gum, and yes if we're scraping gum off the underside of desks every night, please for the love of Christ ban the gum: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32090420

> What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work.

I don't know if you're in the Bay Area and talk to people in tech, but they're increasingly doing that.

But firing is disruptive and expensive, and it's not like all these people are inherently incapable of doing their jobs. It just turns out some aspect of the office thing everyone (even myself if you read the first post) thought was unimportant turned out to matter a bit more than expected.

Honestly it's crazy this is even contentious 5 years post-COVID: saying WFH works for some people, works for orgs where there's good alignment-and works better at smaller scale while properties inherent to larger organizations cause WFH to break down specifically in large orgs really shouldn't be controversial.

But if the mentality that thinking about more than collecting a check makes you a middle-manager is as common as these replies imply, it makes sense.

> firing is disruptive and expensive, and it's not like all these people are inherently incapable of doing their jobs.

Do you even hear yourself?

I'm done. You are so completely entirely missing the point it's not funny.

You can say that about ALMOST ANYTHING!!!! But somehow WFH is the line where businesses should put their foot down, give up on actually managing people (at all!), and then treat every employee like a child, because "firing is disruptive"? But hey, instead, if we acted like they were conscripted property, we can force them into the office, and... Then... manage them into compliance... Right.

Regular alcohol and marijuana use directly affect employee behavior. As you say, firing is disruptive. We should probably piss test every employee, right?

This is not a serious conversation. I can't believe this is how you doubled down.

Have a good one.

I hope your mediocre manager ass gets canned.

I'd be upset too after seven years at AWS. Brush up on that leetcode!

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