As a worker, I don’t care about squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in me. I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city, not having lunch with my loved ones.

I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us). So, either you are one of them, or you don’t have the priorities of life clear.

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sugarpimpdorsey 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city

Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. This is usually met with "but people WANT to live there!" If this was true, walking to work wouldn't be an issue.

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const_cast 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities.

The trouble is that if you require in-person work, you're already artificially limiting your talent pool by 1000x. You just can't risk adding on another 1000x limiter onto that.

Ultimately yes, you could HQ in Ponder, Texas and pay people 100K and say that's the same as san fran. But then you're gathering talent in Ponder, Texas. Good luck!

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UltraSane 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Epic the EMR company requires very nearly all employees to work in Verona, Wisconsin and they somehow get people to move there.

	▲	Starman_Jones 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Madison has a well-earned reputation as a great city to live in. Epic is able leverage their location in the Madison metropolitan area to attract talent that they couldn't attract in a more rural or less well-known city.

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fwip 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you reinvest the money you save on office buildings into employee salary, you might find that people are willing to move to Ponder for the combination of low-CoL and high salary.

Probably not enough to entirely offset the fewer local workers, but it's not nothing.

	▲	slyall 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The problem is that then you have to make sure workers feel secure about moving to work for you. So good pay, good local environment and most importantly a secure job because if they get laid off they'll have to move their whole family somewhere else. Some companies do it (Walmart I believe) but most tech companies tend to base themselves in relatively large cities with other tech firms. I remember a couple of years ago that people were saying Amazon had trouble hiring because even in tech-hubs they had run out of qualified people who would want to work for them.
	▲	AlotOfReading 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The problem is that the venn diagram of executives willing to cut office costs and executives willing to stomach paying "above market rate" is two completely distinct circles. There's many ways companies could make it work, but the number of ways they're willing to consider is dramatically smaller.

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brendoelfrendo 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Easily solvable for whom? It's not easily solvable for the worker.

Perhaps it is easily solvable: imagine a distributed network of office locations, such that each employee is able to work a reasonable distance from where I want to live. We could even hyperscale this concept, to the point where every employee has an office within their own home. I call it "edge officing."

	▲	ghthor 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Hire this person!

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rtomaven 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So true. Jamie Dimon can bear being in the office 5 days a week because he has private limos and helicopters ferrying him around.

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BoorishBears 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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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nixosbestos 4 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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BoorishBears 4 days ago | parent [-]

> 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.

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nixosbestos 4 days ago | parent [-]

> 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.

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BoorishBears 4 days ago | parent [-]

Have a good one.

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christhecaribou 4 days ago | parent [-]

I hope your mediocre manager ass gets canned.

	▲	BoorishBears 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'd be upset too after seven years at AWS. Brush up on that leetcode!