Fortunately the "good" ones are able to disassociate how much of that emotion is just them being lonely vs how much of it is actual synergy-seeking or whatever. The worst cases are people who get real tyranical, on top of just like... outright not showing up to do the actual day-to-day work that they are blockers on. A proper theory of the mind can often be quite absent.

My really glib take on this phenomenom is that a not-insignificant chunk of decision making for HR stuff is "make the CEO fill the tip-top of their Maslovian pyramind". And to a lesser extent other executives who have decided that their job is their life.

Very annoying to listen to post-facto RTO arguments when you can feel the loneliness as the driving factor. Make a fun space, and make people's work schedules be loose enough to where they can actually relax in the space, and some people will show up! Or at the very least, give the CEO a fun side project to work on or something.

Anecdotally, I have seen companies that have "oscillations" in their WFH policy and this, in my experience, has often been the driver of it. Instead of putting trust in the process or the data, you will simply have a situation where the CEO or (especially) where a group of the top level execs are all in the office on a particular day when the office 'feels empty', which then results in a "where is everyone" conversation. Couple that with a sniff of an internal deadline being missed or something behind schedule and suddenly you have a perfect storm of discontent resulting in updated WFH rules and policies being hastily fired off without regard to actual performance data or previous commitments or conclusions drawn around WFH policy.

> Make a fun space, and make people's work schedules be loose enough to where they can actually relax in the space, and some people will show up!

Personally, I don't care about having my workplace be fun or loaded with too many amenities. But if I'm going to be in a company workplace, I do need an office with a closing door if I'm expected to be able to focus and be productive. So much of the insanity with the WFH debate is employers who think that people can be productive or enjoy their work when working in loud, open-concept office configurations. For a lot of employees the WFH vs. office debate then feels very much a "my private, quiet home office vs. chaotic, loud office environment" debate.

In the interests of “fairness” they are being ordered back to the office post-Covid even when their work processes mean they can be done perfectly well remotely, and even if they have widely geographically-distributed teams.

Anecdotal, but we had a team that was split with 50% working remotely before Covid, and we saw an improvement when everyone was forced to work remotely: conversations that were being held in person were shared openly.

Productivity is way down.

Even more interesting, a team lead lives in another country 6 times zones away. Some times they visit the main office for 1-2 weeks. Productivity shoots through the roof those weeks.

The most effective solution in my experience has been when working remote, and having a culture where a team has open discussions on their own Slack channel, with threads for particular conversations. That way, everyone can contribute to the conversation, it’s asynchronous so you don’t have to be in exactly the right place and right time to participate, and people can go back and review details very easily if needed.

You are right that that doesn’t apply if the conversations are happening in private DMs, but that’s a matter of team culture. You have to be intentional in a remote setting, just the same as you do in an office setting. But if you are it can work very well in my experience, perhaps even better than in person.

IME a lot of the really useful "in earshot range" conversations are those that were intended privately but were overheard by someone that has an idea.

Engineer A might go to engineer B to ask B on how to do X. B is being asked because they are usually knowledgeable about similar topics. In this case they don't know.

In slack A would message B directly. B answers that they don't know.

In the office C might overhear it and have an idea and chime in.

I think this unintentional broadcasting can be really helpful to productivity and spreading ideas. It just doesn't work so well in a messaging app.

Sorry, is this a real thing? I've never experienced this.

We all have cubes and sure, maybe sometimes I can hear someone kind of close to me. But not very often. And typically, people actually speak in a low voice as to not disturb others.

We have many floors in the office too, so all our meetings are on Teams. I can't remember the last time I went to a conference room.

I actually really enjoy the async nature of chats. Because you can come and go in the conversation, and you don't have to grind everything you're doing to a halt. Plus, I can go back later and refresh my memory.

The day after configuring the cluster and giving him the metaphorical keys, we saw low-level alert on one computer in that cluster, some monitoring daemon couldn't be reached but nothing really concerning (could still be pinged, no issues with the virtualisation). We still tried to look at it, but could't ssh on the computer (which explains why our daemons couldn't be reached). We contacted the client, said basically: 'we can remove the monitoring and our access keys if you want, but please tell us before you do this. Do you want it done on the other computers?'.

He came back the day after that saying basically 'what?' then talking about a shard that couldn't be reached (he was nice about it).

Turns out, 'chmod 777 /' is the dumbest way of breaking your workstation I've ever seen. We all hear about 'rm -rf /' but let's be real, no one has ever done it, not outside of school at least. Chmod 777 / because you couldn't manage to understand a Java stacktrace has 100% been done in a professional environment: I had to fix it.

Luckily you can copy the permissions of filesystem A onto filesystem B (can't remember how, but it was easy) so the fix didn't involve any reinstallation and Hadoop wizardry.

At that price you might as well hire in Western Europe and have better timezone overlaps.

If you already had a global org, then it was already running poorly due to bad VC hardware and inability to book conference leading to lots of drive-by chats. Great for the office which has >40% of the staff in it, bad for the 3 other offices with 20%.

Hybrid/remote/zoom leveled the playing field so that our non-primary-HQ devs were able to fully contribute whereas in many cases they were bodies in seat for follow-the-sun coverage who would do rote Jiras assigned to them.

Asking someone to be a programmer in a loud chaotic open office environment is not dissimilar to asking them to program while juggling two balls and sitting on a unicycle. Its just excess difficulty that doesn't need to be added on top of the jobs.

Then after the fact we made up a bunch of bullshit as to why this is some brilliant idea. Then this idea spread as if it was some kind of technological advancement because it worked for small tech companies trying to not spend money on furniture and walls.

We just aren't very good at any of this at scale. The open "office" and battle against remote work are different flavors of the same type of stupidity.

We have long since given up on getting any work done on our in-office days, but see them as collaborative / bonding / light planning only.

It's gotten to the point that even if we fly to each others city for a week, we might only go to the office 2~3 days, or by Wednesday/Thursday we might by physically collocated but go to different rooms in silence with headphones to actually get work done.

As a dev these days are actually pretty stressful as they have the feeling of creating work faster than doing any of it. It makes me remember how unproductive my dev teams used to be with the constant in-office interruptions. At prior jobs, I used to do most of my actual dev work after hours, and on unilaterally declared WFH days

> internal deadline being missed

What indicators would justify a change in WFH policy?

A measurable increase in missed deadlines is not what I think they meant.

I am not a superfan of actual closet office given, like, CO2 and friends, but having at least semi-closed spaces with some degree of privacy for groups of people feels totally reasonable. I always think about how some grad students at my university (paired 4 off to an office) had a nicer-feeling office space than any tech office I've been to short of a handful

And start an office pool on whether or not the boss even notices that they’re not real employees.

Bonus points for how little effort you can get the actors to put in while still getting away with it. Just have them wear shorts, some tech vendor t-shirts, and put most of them in a conference room, while two people talk about the last “feature” release.

If it’s not a tech related portion of the business, do the same, but say something about making casual “insert-day-of-the-week” and have said business group talk about how the last “feature” release impacted their section.

Triple bonus points if you get the boss to join in on the discussion with no one knowing what the actual “feature” released was, without the boss figuring the whole thing out.

later on "Hey Chandler, Did you get that WENUS problem sorted out? Chandler, I'd like you to come to the main office and give a presentation, we need your kind of can-do attitude"

And keep an eye out how long it takes the board to realize that the assistant to the CEO is no longer a pure cost, but actually returning a profit for the company. /s

That’s a great idea, we could create a web portal and basically make a techy office management rental interface. Let’s pitch the idea to YComb together, we can call the venture OurWork.

* I charge extra for so-called "high-fives" on a per-five basis due to the added physical danger.

+1 spicy!

> Make a fun space, and make people's work schedules be loose enough to where they can actually relax in the space, and some people will show up!

I've tried to tell this to a couple of places that wanted me to work in a office. The conversations didn't go anywhere - perhaps because of your prior quote? :)

This is key. CEO is one individual, maybe you luck out with someone thats self aware and doesn’t have their head up their behind. But with the exec team, almost certainly there will be one motherfucker that needs their ego stroked by having minions around when they’re in an office, taking calls or meetings.

5 jobs later, its been the same at any company that isn't a startup. Execs have never been in the office, they have "offsite" meetings.

Edit: In case it wasn’t clear, this is not just about CEOs and “executives”. A director level can sometimes be just “manager of managers”. I’m talking about upper middle management here.

The next version of the equal-pay-for-equal-work fight is going to be pretty interesting, and will probably start to boil over sometime in the next 5-10 years.

More telecommuting is going to be generally unstoppable despite a few fits and starts, but since NYC and SF can't afford to just get completely hollowed out in the space of a few years, they need Kansas City to help out with the rent. And it will work too, since some places are more politically important than others. But it won't work forever.

The reasoning is that it reduces traffic and reduces stress.

This existed since 2000 ish. It has expanded since covid. I now only go to the office once every two weeks. Used to be two times a week.

Which just sounds like a union, anyway. So why not just unionize instead...

Now, I love me a good union - and there’s something to be said about a healthy tension between management and labour in terms of keeping management a bit more honest, just like management and capital - but in smaller orgs, a co-op will probably do the job.

Think about how absurd it is to argue that Zoom is enough to sustain family or intimate relationships over the long haul.

Zoom isn’t enough. Having that walk with a potential client, that colleague or that supplier might well be.

Often quite a bit less than it looks on-paper when you remove the "working lunch" and "client dinner" and "meeting (at the country club)" and "reading emails while lounging on the private jet" bits.

Hypothetically, if all a programmer did was, once a quarter, come in in person to maintain some piece of software that created $300k of value per year for the company, is that a problem for you?

Unsolicited career advice: cultivating a reputation and a network within your industry, such that you're the one regularly receiving those calls, can be highly lucrative - look into it

I will ask: why is it your CEO doing this, not your sales team?

And if your CEO is doing only 4 meetings a year, why can’t they do more ?

If you have a billion dollars in revenue per client, how many potential clients can you have ?

Won’t they run out of work in a few years?

At that point what value does the CEO add ? Will they still be going on trips for meetings which will never result in billion dollar revenues ?

I get the spirit of your point. To use it further, to understand it, we should scrutinize even the CEO role.

Assuming im a shareholder, why should we ‘subsidize’ a useless CEO at any point ?

The CEO is also an employee in the end.

I'm sorry but this concept should be immediately clear, if not, you really shouldn't be discussing what a CEO should or shouldn't be doing with his time.

This additional information added narrows the options.

As stated, the CEO is simply a source of prestige, who satisfies the other party’s ego.

None of this, information changes my questions or makes them irrelevant.

If anything, it is clear that the CEO is completely fungible. They are only needed 4 times a year, to satisfy the ego of 4 potential revenue sources.

The core ‘work’ is done by the rest of the firm.

That means, of the 1 bn dollars in revenue that you ascribed to the CEO, they represent a very small part of the actual effort.

What shareholder value do they bring the rest of the year?

In essence - CEO positions are not immune to economic logic. They, like the firm, work for shareholders.

Based on the added data, it would seem that there is reason to take umbrage with CEO privileges - such as their ability to work remotely.

After all, if they are doing nothing the rest of the year, they can be paid less for it.

————

For me, communication is at its core, problem solving.

Stating that someone shouldn’t problem solve, while being oblivious to your own thin hypothetical, is perilously close to ignorance and close mindedness.

It is a certainly a form of gatekeeping, and blindness to one’s own biases.

Why not check our assumptions? They are obvious to you, but

1) Will anyone else come up with those same assumptions given a short 1 para of text?

2) How do yours assumption hold up to scrutiny unless they are exposed and discussed?

TLDR: Providing a hypothetical isn’t a full stop in a discussion. It’s the opposite.

My team and I are fully remote but our execs are not and are not permitted to be.

When layoffs came around the COO was so out of touch at that point he literally complained about having to fly his family back from Europe.

A few executives were over there when they got word that mass layoffs needed to happen and were called back to HQ in the states. The COO complained in the office that these layoffs ruined his families Europe trip. Confirming what we all suspected.

I come to this conclusion, b/c I think its extremely rare that the 'best' person to be the executive on day0 is rarely the 'best' person to be an executive in every stage of a company's lifecycle. but the executives can cling on, b/c they have low accountability (especially when they are the board).

Is it easy to win the lottery? No. Once you win the lottery, is life easier? Yes.

Have you ever seen any process of filtering job candidates that doesn't have massive failures? Look no further than sports. There is no profession with more accessible information about candidate qualifications, and we still see significant failures, signing people to hundreds of millions of dollars who never produce any value over a replacement player. Does that mean the process is no better than throwing darts at phone book? No. There are still actual skills that are hard to attain, and are decent predictors of performance.

When it comes to CEOs, despite the fact that this process doesn't value YOUR skills very highly doesn't mean it's purely random. It means you've either chosen to ignore this filtering process, you never learned what the process is, or you aren't good enough to stand out within it. But that doesn't mean it's a zero-signal filtration.

Also funny thing, typically people consider the "golden area" of US capitalism on which most of current prosperity is built the 50s and 60s, the ratio between exec pay and average employee pay is orders of magnitude different now. Interestingly, the US has lost most of its engineering and manufacturing abilities in the same time. Not sure if that is an indication of the greatest country in the world.

Wow, it's like you've been in our company Zoom calls.

> Both executives have agreed to commute frequently for their role. Starbucks will allow Niccol to use its corporate plane, and Victoria’s Secret will cover Super’s travel expenses.

They'll probably be ferrying the VIPs on said jet, making a brief appearance, then golf and a fancy dinner.

And they're so insulated from what it's like to be a normal non-Ivy-League rank-and-file worker that they probably don't even know how tone deaf it is. Either they don't know or they know and don't care. They get off the Zoom call and call their chauffeur to drive them to their jet to fly to their third home, thinking just how wonderful a leader they are.

But if the company is _coincidentally_ doing great, then the CEO gets credit. If it's tanking, the CEO leaves for another CEO position because the main prerequisite of being a CEO is having been a CEO, regardless of performance.

The reality is that few people have the mental and psychological constitution required to do the job of CEO at any decent sized company. You don’t need to look further than startups to empirically know that most people, even when self-selecting, can’t do the job of CEO even when playing the easy mode of a small company.

A big portion of the job is just being able to not crumble apart, over a long period of time. Another metric: How prone are you to making a horrible decision when under extreme stress, instead of an average one?

The depths at which the worst case scenarios can bottom out are deep. However, when the downside does not materialize, all that is left is an average decision. And average decisions are easy to critique in hindsight, for the CEOs themselves, as well as for most other people.

In that sense, programming is similar: When you steer clear of horrible code, consinstently and over a long period of time, the plain looking stuff that comes out the other end can look like a given to somebody who hasn't been through enough code filled with bad decisions to appreciate their absence.

Where I work, the people higher than me (remote or not) work constantly, around the clock, to the point where I worry about their health.

I also like going into the office 3 days a week. It's a nice space, I like the separation between work and home, and there's good food nearby. As long as I'm allowed to WFH a couple days a week and when I have an appointment or something.

You can argue that these two aren't representative and put in more effort than the average CEO, but you can't argue that their experience of being CEO isn't extremely intense.

Good CEOs are constantly juggling all kinds of complex thought-work, to a much greater extent than the average line worker would be happy doing. Programmers in particular get stressed and unhappy if you ask them to context switch between unrelated tasks, deal with interruptions and regularly make decisions that are completely ambiguous. They also probably won't be happy if they have to spend a lot of time on relationship building, performance evaluations or managing the performance of people under them.

A good CEO's typical day will easily switch between a dozen different things - a product review in the morning where they're expected to give immediate and ideally insightful feedback to a team that's been preparing for months (remembering to manage their own expectations and happyness, you wouldn't want your star designer quitting on you), then immediately after a meeting with the finance team about some complicated tax issue, and then a recruiting call with someone to replace the head of sales who you just had to fire because they {missed their targets, leaked confidential info to the press, insulted a key customer, got targeted by a woke mob} and then you move on to lunch, briefly, which you probably eat alone because none of your immediate reports particularly want to hang out with the boss and anyway you need to read a report on your competitor's new product launch. Oh and then it's time to go to the airport because {a key customer the other side of the country is upset, the government is demanding to question you, your PR team set up a speaking event at a conference and only told you yesterday}, so hopefully your spouse isn't too upset that you won't be home for dinner tonight. On the way to the airport you'll have to be on the phone with a lawyer because your company is getting sued, again, and so you need to know the status of the case but couldn't find time to fit an in-person meeting (which you'd have much preferred). You'll probably also need to plan for how to pay if you lose that case, which realistically means who you'll have to lay off or break comp promises to.

And then dawn breaks, and it all begins again. That's a good day, when you didn't have to do layoffs or explain to the board why the new product you'd hoped would turn things around is now subject to a recall.

I've seen how this stuff affects people up close. You do need to be very tough, and even then it can grind people down pretty catastrophically. There's nobody to blame at that level and you can't just quit because you don't like it anymore. If it starts going wrong you're sort of trapped.

The FAANG (and other letter group) global mega corp survivors have one or two valid grievances.

I'm not at all saying all FAANG bosses are great, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone argue that all they do is "make a couple decisions a week and then play golf." Anyone that says that is just showing how clueless they are as to what goes in to running a large company.

This condescending "entry level employee good" thing is total nonsense. It's absolutely common for many 30 year career stretches to never actually see a decent hard-working executive out in the wild. And if you do actually encounter one, then there's a decent chance that you also got to watch that person get dethroned and replaced with someone worse by political machinations of the rest of the executive suite!

What is crazy is dismissing thousands of man-years of lived experience with completely broken "leadership" as.. what exactly, jealousy? But most of the people that hate the C-suite probably don't want to work there, and probably don't even really expect fair compensation at this point, they just want a little more accountability, and a little less hypocrisy.

And just in case you actually want to understand the angst and the zeitgeist around this stuff, I'll add this more subtle point. Engineers that work in tech today are increasingly seen by outsiders as roughly equivalent to, IDK, blood-diamond tycoons. But the fact is that lots of engineers are struggling too, and anyway we didn't ruin the world, the MBAs did while they told us (and everyone else) they were building something different. There's a strong reluctance to shoulder all this blame for the executive class, because at the end of the day or the end of our careers, most engineers actually still have to live next to normal people and won't get to fuck off to the Hamptons or whatever monied enclaves executives use to insulate themselves from the world.

Really? In my bubble this is far from common and more likely ignorance to what executives are doing. Execs tend to become so because they are highly motivated people willing to dedicate themself to their jobs.

I had an employee once would would constantly complain about their old bosses, all of them as far as I could see. He was a really smart guy with potential but so negative about anyhting leadership. One day I decided to roll the dice and said something like "you always talk about how bad your bosses are, and no doubt you'll add me to the list when you move to the next company. Have you ever considered we all get a bad boss or two, but when every boss is bad maybe you're the problem not them". I knew this was a risky move but it worked. He took it on board and became a much better contributor and dropped this 'all bosses are bad' type approach.

I've had great bosses, but that's not what we're discussing. This is about executives. And while I agree that executives are certainly highly motivated, I just think that at a certain level mostly that is motivation to lie, misdirect, deflect, and steal. This also isn't about small businesses, which are much more likely to have legitimate entrepreneurs or merit-based processes, even at the top. For most medium-sized businesses and certainly for large ones, everything is different and anyone can see that pedigree, nepotism, and failing upwards all become more dominant factors. Take an honest look at yourself and your bubble and the line workers. Who can do who's job, really? Which work is more skilled?

Yeah, I've done less than two hours of work, but that doesn't mean I had 22 hours of free time.

Some may receive compensation of this nature, many more may not. You are making wild assumptions. Just putting that out there.

Doctors are often on call 24/7 and do significantly more work than the average C-suite, yet you're complaining about a two hour work day?

The lack of self awareness is astounding.

Yes, I can imagine in some odd situations (say family businesses) you might have "figurehead" CEOs, but every CEO I've ever worked with put in a huge number of hours. I think there is plenty to honestly debate regarding CEO compensation, especially when it comes to egregious wealth inequality, but this idea that CEOs are just a bunch of lazy schmoozers sounds like an r/antiwork fever dream to me.

Nobody is suggesting this but you. It’s understandable that leadership would make more money. But 39x more money is harder to justify, especially with historical context.

Almost everyone in my network that can't get a job is running a "company".

I think whats happening is that non-technical leaders can't assess why projects aren't being delivered. No engineer is going to say "sorry I wasn't really working that hard, thats why we missed". Instead there will be some rationale as to why the project couldn't ship on time - not enough resources, incomplete spec, tech debt, whatever. Non-technical leaders want to be able to remove one variable from the equation - the cause being the team didn't put in the effort. With return to office, they can see with their own eyes if people are putting in the "time".

So there might be a long term benefit to the team, even if individual productivity of high performers goes down slightly.

Holding someone "accountable" means firing them very quickly for a drop in performance. This is hard in large companies for many reasons.

If you're talking about a small company, to some extent this makes sense. I mean, if Alice or Bob starts a company, they're risking more than you are; of course they get to decide. When you're talking about a multi-national corporation with an employee count similar to that of a medium sized city in Europe, I'd argue that logic breaks down, because most people in positions of power are just men-at-arms brought in by the bureaucracy.

The CEOs are no longer the "founders", they're just exotic strangers from far-off lands that happen to know other CEOs and marry other CEOs. They dress differently, they talk differently, they act differently, and finally, just like the nobility, they often have personal agendas that may or may not align with the interest of the "company" (I'm referring here to the employees, not the shareholders).

There's a quote I really like said by a frenchman (can't remember the name, so sources are welcome) that goes something like: "You cannot manifest the republic in society as long as monarchy reigns in the factory". And sure, I realize for many readers this is just commie gobbledygook, but I'd encourage everyone to at least think about the area inbetween extremes, and alternate ways we could structure "work", because the older I get the more absurd this culture becomes, which is weird because I was kind of expecting my political skepticism to start wearing off with age.

It is the intense competition between companies (for the same customers, the same employees) that puts constant pressure on companies to develop better products, treat employees well and pay them well.

The main problem with feudalism was that nobles had family titles to the land, and serfs were effectively their property. Therefore competitive pressure to treat people well was entirely absent, and peasants were completely exploited. There is really no analogy to modern companies that compete with each other to shower perks on their employees.

To be fair, there was a bunch of people saying that the 10's were the best time to unionize, precisely because tech employees did have leverage.

As someone who has done shift work before, it seems to me that the real dividing line is between professionals and non-progressional, not CEOs vs professionals.

This is correct, and unfortunately describes a nontrivial fraction of articles submitted to HN from traditional media outlets. Use that flag button!

I sense that, CEOs are often ignorant of day-to-day (and even month-to-month) realities of what's going on in their own company (probably unavoidable at large corps).

Basically, they have an "astronaut's eye view", so their decisions/strategy are essentially just them operating while untethered to Reality, just going off of intuition. Sometimes, that guides them well, and they do a good job of "running things". Other times, they're just "ruining things"

When they do the former, the public valorizes them, and when they fail... well, they get to try again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

CEOs are just picking lanes. Lanes defined by their crew. (The Captain doesn't determine the answer, they pick the answer from options provided by the crew).

And AI can factor in much more than any human.

So...feed the workers data into the AI CEO.

I'm building on lots of Adam Smith ideas - let the worker pick the optimum path.

A CEO has much more autonomy to set their daily schedule as they see fit, which one day might be showing up at 6am if they're in that grind mindset, and the next day might be showing up at 11am after a tee time and casual breakfast with colleagues or friends. They may have a schedule full of internal meetings but can choose to skip whichever they feel like isn't a good use of time at their own discretion. They don't ask permission from their supervisor or get passive aggressive texts asking if they're planning to come in if they don't show up by 9:30AM.

Psychologically speaking having that much freedom to direct one's own schedule fundamentally changes one's relationship with work. Obviously they have their own non-negotiable obligations so it isn't completely in their control but the typical office worker at most companies is rarely entrusted to manage their own schedule to that degree even if they're keeping up with their tasks and a high performer.

It doesn't bother me that the nature of the CEO job is much different than a lowly software dev but instead it's the lack of awareness or deliberate dishonesty that I find grating in the RTO debate.

If anybody sees him in a Starbucks retail location, post that to social media. Let's see if he gets out much to check on things.

Almost all of my previous employers have been some variation of the above for the past 10 years. If instead I chased the highest paying jobs without thinking about quality of life, becoming a small cog in some behemoth of a company that doesn't care if I wear down, then that'd be on me.

If you're in tech, nobody forces you to work for a company that may pay you 200k/year, but asks you to work and commute 60 hours a week. There's plenty of other choices once you realize that beyond a certain point, salary matters much less than everything else for your quality of life.

My current job pays 90k when converted to USD, but my employer is based in Germany. Most employees live all over Europe, and nobody is forced to live in any particular expensive city we have an office at.

You probably should be able to negotiate a better wage in those 60k jobs based on experience.

I swear to god American business has its head up its own ass, from the VPs to the ELT, and it's the easiest thing in the world to have some goddamn self awareness and empathy.

A office worker having to drive somewhere to look at a screen they can have at home, shouldn't be an impediment to a nurse that has a real job that requires them to be where they work.

This is all I hear.

Only in IT are we supposed to just accept our fate, because some guy on HN called us "the laptop class" or something.

I have friends who are doctors. They chose their specialties not out of passion, but because of the lifestyle perks that come with them—benefits unique to their profession. Their entire education and career choices were driven by a desire for those perks. Similarly, I transitioned to an IT career to pursue the lifestyle advantages it offers. Which was not the same perks or lifestyle advantages they were looking for.

Regarding farming: I was a farmer myself, working our own farm (pork and stud cattle) as well as a farmhand on others. Farming is an incredibly flexible role, and for many, it involves working from home because the farm is the home. I’ve been doing "WFH" since childhood.

Many people choose farming or stay on family farms because they enjoy the unique perks it offers—just like those who pursue "laptop class" work for its lifestyle benefits.

If there is one thing that would significantly improve the quality of living of all employees, it would be remote work. The fact that leadership wont give that (which costs nothing) I believe demonstrates some personality characteristic that is arguably sociopathic, and I do not throw that word around lightly.

If employees had a say in who gets to be leadership - which is how most of nature works - then CEOs would be be acting drastically different.

And what the "face to face conversations" narrative really means is: 1) I don't want to put things in writing, 2) I want to tell if you are lying.

RTO sucks

I always take a run through these comment threads and flag every one of these that I see, as they clearly break the HN guidelines. If other people start to do that too, then violent comments like the above will also become less common.