So yeah, maybe bosses were out to screw themselves. Is that paranoia?
People can be paid better, given better hours, more flexibility, more responsibilities, less responsibilities, better benefits, etc.
If lots of people don’t want to do a job, and that job has trouble keeping quality employees, it’s the job that’s broken, not the people.
Plenty of people were treated great when WFH, but it’s not a universal truth that everyone was.
So concretely, what more could they give? How much is the comp that wouldn't get abused?
"WAIT NOT LIKE THAT"
Also the boss: claims to hold five jobs at five different organizations.
(I don't even mean Elon, I mean the median "founder" type, but him too I guess, except that I think he's up to more than five)
It's not the boss saying that. It's the contract you voluntarily signed.
Why don't people who can avoid these clauses embrace them anyway, since the justification is that the company needs and deserves your undivided attention to the greatest legally allowed degree, when they have far more power over the company and are being rewarded far more for their effort? The same reasoning applies far more to them! Because it's very undesirable to be restricted in that way, of course, so damn the company's best interests.
If it's very undesirable to be restrained by these, and the benefit to the employer is evidently not so large that it's necessary to restrict those for whom the reasoning applies 1,000x more than for some lowly peon, why do normal workers accept those clauses approximately 100% of the time they're demanded? Because they don't feel they have a choice.
"Voluntary" isn't binary.
It's a win for the workers and the economy at large, but a loss for employers.
However, it might very well be a win-win.
While the employer might lose a worker to an entrepreneurial venture, isn't this the sort of self-selection out that leads to a more engaged workforce overall?
Retaining those employees, who would really be doing something else, by introducing more friction through an in-office policy seems like a recipe for low engagement and mediocre business impact.
Mmmm..
I don't know man?
Be careful with this line of reasoning.
Someone, say, an employer, might be forgiven for concluding from your line of reasoning, that not allowing for remote work in the first place then leads to a more engaged workforce overall. Since remote workers are more entrepreneurial, they'd self-select out by not taking the job.
Back to pits.
“What if I train my people and they leave?”
“What if you don’t train them and they stay!”
I appreciate what this is trying to say is - workers weren't doing their jobs and were instead setting up business. Except this could also quite easily show that if you get rid of peoples long commutes, and they have a space in their home they consider 'work' space - they might have the time and space to start their own biz.
And as this seems to be only people who left to do so, it rather suggests people were doing their jobs. Might not be doing 'their hours', but the argument against remote work rarely seems to be 'we can't allow remote work because its so effective people complete their jobs much faster'
A healthy relationship is one in which managers don't monitor and don't micromanage and don't rely on Jira or commit logs to lazily monitor employees. A manager isn't there to lord over employees. He is there to support employees and help them do their jobs. But to do that, you need to know what they're doing.
Talk to them. Listen. Hold 1-on-1s on a regular basis. Assume they're doing their jobs instead of defaulting to a defensive and adversarial posture. If you treat employees like adversaries, they'll behave like adversaries. Grant them reasonable trust and they will take initiative and view the relationship as one that is cooperative. They will be less likely to want to risk losing the reasonable trust they have been gratuitously given; if you default to suspicion, then employees have little to lose. You already think poorly of them, so who cares.
If someone is genuinely slacking or not well-suited, that will come out sooner or later. 1-on-1s, individually and taken in aggregate, will give the manager an idea of what is really happening, especially if the manager is competent and knowledgeable of the domain, which he should be. 360 EOY reviews can also help here, not as an adversarial tactic, but as a way to share feedback. A competent manager can read the tea leaves.
It's like leaving your bicycle on a street, in Japan you don't need a lock, in San Francisco a lock wouldn't help. Even when 99% people are honest and responsible.
But for anyone in between, we're shocked-SHOCKED that they'd do such a disloyal and underhanded thing. As though their work is theft outside of the confines of a single employer
Utter nonsense. Work and get paid. The end.
Some people see salary jobs as exchanging a fixed amount of money for 40 hrs/week average. If you're spending 10-20 of those hours moonlighting for company B, those people would say you're depriving company A of what they're paying for.
If you instead see salary work as producing a certain amount of work regardless of the hours worked, then again there's no issue here. This is inconsistently applied to executives far more than rank and file office workers, since no one really expects (or wants) board member Bob to provide 40 hrs/week to each of the 6 companies he's involved with.
If I assign 20 hours of work and it takes 40 hours, I should not be surprised the employee does something else with the 20 remaining hours.
If I assign 40 hours of work and it takes 40 hours, and is of the expected quality, I really don't care if the employee take a part-time job elsewhere (assuming that doesn't conflict with expected online hours, etc).
Little things like a functional work environment with good screens and peripherals that isn't inundated with noise and fairly constant interruption.
Big things like a long commute (and at roughly half an hour mine was better than most) and not having to work alongside, sitting under the gaze of, someone who just emotionally abused me.
Those were simply solved and I could just fix other major problems myself.
Examples include the obvious fixes of the above issues but also include my option to increase the amount of vacation I take, adopt a 4-day week, and other things that have greatly improved my productivity and far more greatly improved my quality of life. Fuck the endless "always more" and "but what have you done for me lately?" even when I'm outperforming everyone else and have become the "go to".
Most impactfully, I have created an emotionally safe and deeply honest environment for myself and my cofounder where we can express our humanity and support each other in our struggles and joys. It is "unprofessional" and completely glorious and loving. Or work had become something that is part of our thriving rather than something that erodes our well-being.
Of cause one can deliver more per hour when working 8h/d instead of 12h/d. But the output of a 12h day will still be massively more than from a 8h day.
Many pilot programs have found that 4 day weeks are at least equally productive compared to 5 day weeks.
That just means, this is non-reproducible. So this is not science. Actually, there is a another paper, reproducible, it's non conclusive.
The social explanation of the phenomena (if there is any) are clearly politically oriented.
For example the types of jobs that are easiest to do remotely may correlate with employees likely to start their own business?
If this research prompts more businesses to RTO or non-WFH -- for the reason of reducing employees leaving to do a startup, or doing a potentially competing startup after termination -- is this effectively leveraging surveillance capitalism to suppress labor (and innovation, as we say)?
Working from home means you don't have to commute which saves you hours a week. Of course it will increase the chance that you can start up a business.
I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen more employers offer to pay people a bit more so that they can work during the hours they would normally commute... That seems like it would be a win-win, and would probably drop the number of people doing startups if they so desired.
Sounds like a benefit to society to me. When people do not waste time on commutes, they spend it either with their families and friends or thinking about solving problems, which occasionally turn into new businesses. Without such time freed up, these business ideas would never have come to fruition.
I also don't see why how employees spend their time off (as almost no employer counts commuting as work time) should factor into remote policies.
> analyzed IP address data in conjunction with LinkedIn data to cross-reference those working from home with those who formed new businesses. ... a title change and employment change on LinkedIn indicating a shift from being an employee to a founder.
Is this more likely to tell us something about the people and roles selected to work remotely, or an outcome of working remotely? At this scale the influences of each are absolutely inseparable. Do cohorts robustly account for education, experience, skillsets, tenure, etc.? The same values which improve one's ability to start a business strongly overlap with the considerations for employing someone remotely. I'm not saying they're comparing a "remote" cohort including developers to a "not remote" cohort including construction workers, but it's important to confirm.
ashoeafoot•2h ago