[HN Gopher] More Disabled Americans Are Employed, Thanks to Remo...
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More Disabled Americans Are Employed, Thanks to Remote Work
Author : petethomas
Score : 238 points
Date : 2024-06-20 19:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://archive.today/4f2Ix
| advisedwang wrote:
| One way to look at this is that some conditions are less of a
| disability than they used to be. In the same way that medical
| advances can make some diseases curable or inconsequential so
| social changes can also make a disease irrelevant.
|
| This is an important lesson, as it should alert us that there
| likely are other ways our society operates that make a disease
| into an impediment that could be changed. If you want to know
| what they are, go talk to disabled rights advocates!
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| https://www.scope.org.uk/social-model-of-disability
|
| > The model says that people are disabled by barriers in
| society, not by their impairment or difference. Barriers can be
| physical, like buildings not having accessible toilets. Or they
| can be caused by people's attitudes to difference, like
| assuming disabled people can't do certain things.
|
| > The social model helps us recognise barriers that make life
| harder for disabled people. Removing these barriers creates
| equality and offers disabled people more independence, choice
| and control.
|
| > Not everyone uses the social model and that's ok. How anyone
| chooses to talk about their impairment is up to them.
| squigz wrote:
| I'm not trying to deny there are plenty of barriers for
| disabled people in society, and we should certainly try to
| reduce them... but I think even in an ideal society, being,
| for example, blind, or deaf, would still be very difficult. I
| think pretending that it's all about how society reacts to us
| is ignoring the reality of disabled people's lives.
|
| (I'm disabled myself, in case it matters)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _even in an ideal society, being, for example, blind, or
| deaf, would still be very difficult_
|
| Correct. The technological model OP posited would involve
| technologies that let blind and deaf folks navigate the
| world. The social model hits a barrier at that point.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| That's why we have the disability / impairment distinction.
| Many impairments don't _have_ to be disabilities. Some are,
| inherently.
|
| I'd argue that deafness can be completely mitigated by
| societal improvements, for most purposes except birdsong
| etc. and certain genres of music. Blindness is more
| difficult (e.g. vision is useful for navigation, and we
| can't choose the surfaces in a forest to make echolocation
| easier), but _in principle_ computer technology can help
| with that. (I 'd say a decent automated audio description
| is still a hundred years out, but we'll only get it if we
| make progress.) Certain mental impairments (e.g. some
| depression, some sensory issues) have no known mitigations,
| even in theory, so remain disabilities in all
| circumstances.
| squigz wrote:
| You're focusing on mechanical issues and ignoring social
| issues. You mention birdsong, and certain genres of
| music... what about your partner's voice? Your child's
| laugh?
| keeptrying wrote:
| That is really freaking cool. Creating a platform that's location
| independent really helps people with disabilities.
|
| I do think LLMs by enabling people to work indepedently (in
| adiditon to remote) should add degrees of freedom that would help
| people with disabilties.
|
| LLMs should enable this by easing creation of work contracts (ie
| allow more accomodations by changing contracts), automation of
| most of most business operations, ability to quickly get to
| "average level" on a lot of business concepts, automation of
| finances (eg: using Runway).
|
| Hopefully the creative piece of building a business will no
| longer get drowned out by the operational pieces.
| keeptrying wrote:
| Whoa - Can anyone explain why I'm getting downvoted?
| nickff wrote:
| Probably because you're bringing LLMs into a conversation
| when there's no clear link, and adding nothing else to the
| conversation.
| randomdata wrote:
| Your assertion that it is unrelated is true, but doesn't
| explain why someone would take time and effort out of their
| day to press an arbitrary button. If one was concerned with
| the conversation, that time and effort would have logically
| gone into actually adding to the conversation.
| avgDev wrote:
| We are talking about remote work. Not AI and Not LLM. Your
| comment is completely off-topic.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| " _Please don 't comment about the voting on comments. It
| never does any good, and it makes boring reading._"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| jebby wrote:
| I'm one of them. I'm pretty terrified that the gears of
| capitalism will eventually lead to remote work being outlawed.
| brink wrote:
| It's capitalism that created that remote job in the first
| place.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| After years of companies insisting that working without being
| physically in the office 5 days a week was impossible, it was
| the government saying "Your offices are closed" that made
| remote work at all common. I know remote work existed as a
| small niche before that, but I can't give capitalism credit
| for normalizing it.
|
| Disabled people have been begging for years to have more
| flexible working arrangements, and have been constantly told
| "sorry it's impossible." But then covid shows up only for
| everyone to discover it's been possible the whole time.
| ghaff wrote:
| > I know remote work existed as a small niche before that
|
| You have to distinguish not physically being in the office
| from "working from home." A LOT of jobs (e.g. many sales
| job, on-site consultants, even my oil delivery guy) didn't
| involve being physically in the office much but weren't
| WFH.
| brink wrote:
| Covid didn't invent remote work. I had been working remote
| for almost 10 years before Covid arrived. It merely
| accelerated a force that was already in motion.
| randomdata wrote:
| Government and capitalism are terms that ultimately refer
| to people. In this case, given the context of caitaliso-
| democratic America, the _very same_ people.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't see any particular need to assume the ownership
| structure implies something about remote work. We could
| easily imagine that in a market socialist system people might
| be more willing to have WFH policies that benefit their co-
| workers.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Kind of ironic, isn't it? Capitalism should be happy you're
| contributing to the economy...
| willcipriano wrote:
| Almost makes you want to check your priors. Almost.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The Market, as in the free exchange of goods and services,
| should be happy to get more work out of another person.
|
| For Capitalism, as in the system wherein the means of
| production are privately owned, it might be a toss-up. A
| person who works from home isn't going around the world
| providing as much value to the landlord class.
| therobots927 wrote:
| Try to stay optimistic. There are market forces _in favor_ of
| remote work:
|
| 1) Employers who allow remote work will have lower office costs
|
| 2) Employers who allow remote will be able to poach employees
| from competitors who do not offer remote work
|
| These are both strong incentives for employers to allow remote
| work. Obviously not all do, but over time employers who allow
| remote work will outperform their peers due to the two reasons
| above, which can help encourage other employers to allow it in
| order to stay competitive.
| miki123211 wrote:
| And don't forget about:
|
| 3) Employers who are fully remote (as opposed to even 1 day
| per month in office) can hire in different locations. For
| many roles, you can find great employees in places like
| Eastern Europe for far cheaper than in Silicon Valley, for
| example.
| rty32 wrote:
| It could work against you as a US worker. They would set up
| branches in Europe (and other places) and just hire there,
| instead of having headcounts in the US.
|
| Just look at Google.
| zinodaur wrote:
| My remote company has been doing this. Layoffs in NA and
| EU, hiring frenzy in Poland
| rty32 wrote:
| For (1) , that ship has sailed for any company that actually
| owns their offices -- and there are a ton of them. Unless
| they sell the property, which many never will for as long as
| company is in a good financial state, one desk not utilized
| is money thrown in the water.
|
| (Interestingly Charles Schwab is a notable counterexample --
| they were forcing people back into office, until the
| company's finance is in a bad shape, and they rushed to halt
| that and actually closed down many offices.)
| tomoyoirl wrote:
| How big a trend is that, though? Most companies are all too
| happy to do a capitalism and move office expenses into
| OpEx, to improve their return on capital by being a pure-
| play widget company instead of a hybrid widgets / real
| estate development and holding corporation.
|
| Sure, there are some big sprawling HQs of the gigacorps who
| just can't find enough space to rent otherwise, but that
| seems to be a minority of office employment to me?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _for any company that actually owns their offices_
|
| Most companies lease their office space.
| pwg wrote:
| > I'm pretty terrified that the gears of capitalism will
| eventually lead to remote work being outlawed.
|
| Unlikely. The current "RTO" push is simply executive management
| not wanting to take the write-down hit on all that unused
| office space that is a loss now that no one is working inside
| of it. Once they've either jettisoned the space, or taken the
| write-down anyway (because they were forced into this) you'll
| find all these RTO calls dying down.
| miki123211 wrote:
| This is just one theory, another that it's a way to legally
| do layoffs without facing the consequences of actual layoffs.
| burningChrome wrote:
| It depends on where you work and what industry you're in.
|
| A majority of the leads I get from recruiters about dev work
| are from companies who now have hybrid or full on-site
| requirements. It's being outlawed like you say, but there is a
| push from certain companies to be back in the office.
|
| The last three contacts I've gotten from recruiters always ask
| me if I'm ok being in the office three days a week on job req's
| they've contacted me about. So take solace in the fact more
| people are opting out of these kinds of jobs and recruiters are
| telling me the more companies require in office or hybrid, the
| smaller the pool of worthy candidates - regardless of whether
| they're disabled or now.
|
| There is push to get people to go back into the office, but at
| this point, I'm not seeing a real willingness for people to
| jump at those jobs right now.
| cut3 wrote:
| Remote work is very inclusive.
| GarnetFloride wrote:
| Surprise, surprise making it easier to work allows more people to
| work. Taking a phrases I read about the latest iPad. If they stop
| neutering the workplace by not allowing remote work then more
| people will work. Sort of like how cities are neutered because
| they are car centric and not people centric. And it's not just
| the currently disabled but caregivers as well. I had a PM that
| was caring for aging parents and we could hear her feeding them
| as we were on calls trying to unbork a business process that
| wouldn't let us give customers the software licenses they paid
| for.
|
| This is a good thing but there are some people who hate the idea
| of remote work because they can't comprehend a management style
| that isn't their First Grade teacher's.
| WWLink wrote:
| > And it's not just the currently disabled but caregivers as
| well. I had a PM that was caring for aging parents and we could
| hear her feeding them as we were on calls trying to unbork a
| business process that wouldn't let us give customers the
| software licenses they paid for.
|
| I fall into the caregiver bucket, and I'll present an argument
| I was hearing a lot on linkedin and those kinda places in favor
| of RTO: Some companies and bosses think that if you're on the
| clock you shouldn't be taking care of your family.
|
| The reality is a lot more complicated. WFH means I can spend 20
| minutes resolving a problem that would've taken me half a day
| before - driving home, resolving the issue, driving back,
| finding parking, getting back into the right mindset to do
| work, etc.
|
| It also means I can join meetings that I otherwise wouldn't
| have been able to join. (like in your example, the coworker
| feeding their parents). Admittedly your coworker should
| probably invest in a mute button lol.
|
| Anyway, yea, WFH is a huge enabler! But I guess some people are
| kinda ableist/unfair about it.
|
| It's silly. Life goes on. We shouldn't be playing this game of
| competing on how hard we can lick boots.
| TylerE wrote:
| Pretty much me at this point. I've had the same remote job for 9
| years, and while I could work an office job at the time I was
| hired (I was 31 then), now at 40 and with a number of my chronic
| conditions rather a bit less background than they used to be. Not
| to mention that pretty much everything I have is either
| respitory, or one of the major comorbidities for COVID, which is
| still very much in circulation.
|
| To give one example... about 2 years ago I had to spend about 10
| months on near-total bed rest to get a healing-resistant foot
| ulcer to finally heal. I was able to work from bed for almost all
| of that. If I'd been working an office job it basically would
| have been a choice - keep my job, or keep my foot.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Would FMLA or ADA have helped? I believe companies would have
| to justify denying you reasonable accommodations.
| TylerE wrote:
| FMLA no because it's _unpaid_ leave.
|
| I actually was just having to navigate that/short term
| disability as I'm coming off missing about 3.5 weeks from an
| extended period of extreme unpleasantness that ended in me
| getting my gallbladder 86'ed last week.
|
| ADA potentially but a lot of my stuff basically boils down to
| "being out of the house and active is both physically and
| mentally draining and more likely to get me sick with some
| random thing". So the reasonable accommodation is basically
| remote work (I'm a software dev, which is about as remote-
| friendly a career as it gets).
| Jtsummers wrote:
| FMLA also has a twelve week limit, and for "highly
| compensated" employees (a lot of software devs in the US
| would qualify) you can lose the right to return to the
| same, or equivalent, position as when you left.
| SatvikBeri wrote:
| FMLA provides unpaid leave, and usually only up to 12 weeks.
| I'm not sure how well ADA would apply here, but my wife had a
| lot of trouble using ADA to even get her employer to use
| video meeting software with captions (she's deaf, and Zoom
| didn't have captions at the time.) It eventually worked but
| took something like 6 months.
| TylerE wrote:
| The other thing with ADA it's always distinctly had the
| feel of the kind of thing that sure, they have to
| (eventually, maybe) comply with, but I can't help but feel
| it's the sort of thing that will implicitly count against
| you when it comes to things like promotions. Similar debate
| (also applicable to me) to "I have diagnosed high-function
| autism. Do I disclose?"
| nullindividual wrote:
| > implicitly count against you when it comes to things
| like promotions.
|
| Illegal, if you can prove it. So functionally, legal.
|
| > "I have diagnosed high-function autism. Do I disclose?"
|
| Nope. There's zero reason to disclose until there is an
| actual barrier that can fall under ADA.
|
| And ADA isn't a guarantee you'll get what you need, it is
| asking the employers for a modification, one which they
| don't have to grant if they have a legitimate reason.
| squigz wrote:
| I really wish more people would realize this about the ADA
| and other similar legislation in other countries - yes, a
| company is legally required to make reasonable
| accommodations... but they don't have to be happy about it
| or hop to it right away. They will delay as long as they
| can and try to avoid it like the plague if it's going to
| cost them money.
| WWLink wrote:
| > They will delay as long as they can and try to avoid it
| like the plague if it's going to cost them money.
|
| The worst part: It's a tax writeoff like all the other
| business expenses they're so happy to buy without
| question. Sometimes it's even covered by grant money.
| BadCookie wrote:
| Working from home is not considered a reasonable
| accommodation in the U.S. as a general rule. I hope that
| changes someday soon.
| nullindividual wrote:
| "Reasonable accommodation" is a negotiation between you and
| the employer. There is nothing that defines what a
| "reasonable accommodation" is, up to and including remote
| work. The ADA gives potential examples, one of which is
| working at an alternative location.
|
| https://www.dol.gov/agencies/odep/program-
| areas/employers/ac...
|
| Your employer may find WFH unreasonable and deny it. Or
| they may find it reasonable and let you go for it.
|
| But there are no "general rules" when it comes to ADA work
| accommodations.
| BadCookie wrote:
| An employer can legally deny WFH no matter how disabled
| the employee is even if the employee has already been
| doing the same job from home for years. To me, that means
| that legal protections are nonexistent in this regard and
| therefore practically meaningless.
|
| I don't think anything you said contradicts what I have
| been told, though maybe I didn't explain it very well.
| BadCookie wrote:
| If an employer is required to allow "reasonable
| accommodations" but is never required to allow working
| from home, then logically it would seem to follow that
| working from home is not a reasonable accommodation ...
| or so I had concluded, but technically that might be
| wrong in some way that's not very interesting to people
| actually affected by these laws.
| rockooooo wrote:
| multiple people at previous jobs joked about how using FMLA
| would get you fired or at minimum banned from promotion
| ricc wrote:
| Not really related to the article but I always tell myself that
| one of these days, I will dedicate more time working on something
| that improves the lives of a certain group of people with
| disabilities. The trigger was a single simple sentence that I
| read a year or two ago: "Everybody is just temporarily abled."
| dogman144 wrote:
| Civically we allegedly care about these topics, and note their
| solutions via remote work
|
| - disabled accommodations: this article, and anecdotes from
| people we know in this situation
|
| - finding some method for a dramatic enough state change in
| environmental conditions as to back up from disconcerting climate
| change barriers we're pushing into: I can't recall the specifics
| but within a week of COVID lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and
| pollution in atmosphere plummets
|
| - preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at work:
| can't sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully
| auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office.
|
| - accommodating parents and their child raising needs with
| policies that don't come out of 1950: every working parent I know
| with remote jobs experience significant flexibility here.
|
| - affordable housing space: office space conversions are
| starting.
|
| The longer the debate goes on about hybrid/wfh and the above
| tangible proven benefits vs RTO for "The Collaboration" and "My
| Socialization Needs," the more I speculate our society doesn't
| actually care about the above topics, at all.
|
| Or, if we do care, this should be called out over and over and
| over. Bc it's not getting discussed this way.
| squigz wrote:
| It's not (often) workers calling for RTO. It's not hard to
| imagine why.
| dogman144 wrote:
| I see a lot of workers in HN taking that position, or at
| least some very persistent sock puppet corporate accounts
| hah.
| squigz wrote:
| I tend to see a lot of managers calling for it. I see some
| workers calling for hybrid (which is perfectly reasonable)
| but not full RTO. Just my impressions though.
| ghaff wrote:
| I doubt you'd see many workers calling for in the office
| every day, no exceptions for in-office workers, which was
| mostly the norm (outside of travel and customer visits)
| for many professionals in, say, the 80s. However, there
| is a subset today that would like to see co-workers with
| a regular office presence.
| squigz wrote:
| Yes, hybrid work is a reasonable position to take, I
| think. One cannot deny the benefits of occasional in-
| office meetings/socialization while accepting the
| benefits of WFH.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If someone says they care, observe their actions. This is the
| revealed intent. The words are meaningless, and cost nothing to
| speak.
|
| If it is clear someone is being dishonest due to action speech
| delta, say so, loudly and in a manner that leaves a durable
| paper trail. Accountability dies in the darkness and silence.
| briffid wrote:
| Plus according to Jonathan Haidt in Happiness Hypothesis,
| commuting, noise and lack of control are among the most
| significant things that make people unhappy. All of them are
| manageable at home. And also these are rarely taken into the
| discussion.
| throwaway8456 wrote:
| If you are going to quote Jonathan Haidt, I suggest you take
| a look at his latest book, the Anxious Generation published
| in 2024. My reading is that reducing face time is definitely
| NOT a positive factor for happiness.
| FredPret wrote:
| Then let's have clubs and hobbies and so on again
| MenhirMike wrote:
| Third Places really took a hit in the pandemic :( But
| yes, as someone who re-discovered them last year, I
| absolutely agree.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Replace work FaceTime with a third place FaceTime.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| Your primary source of face time should _not_ be coming
| from your work.
| basisword wrote:
| Work is half of your waking day 5 days out of 7 - it's
| probably your primary source of face time whether you
| like it or not. You might have more valuable face time
| elsewhere (family, friends, hobbies) but those 40-50
| hours should probably be taken more seriously than they
| are.
| askonomm wrote:
| I'd love to take work a lot _less_ seriously, tbh. I
| don't live to work, after all.
| dogman144 wrote:
| If you're going to imply the office saves that, worth
| noting there's a lot of non-forced organic face time from
| wfh available from your neighborhoods and communities, and
| that "Anxious Generation" screen time probably refers to
| teens and adults piping their lives into a phone, and not
| the important tradeoffs of staring at a screen in an office
| park or starting at a screen in your home.
|
| Constantly the office is treated as the only existing
| socialization source and it really makes me wonder what
| people's lives at home are out of work.
| briffid wrote:
| That's a good point. Eliminating commute let me play with
| my children after school. Even started to have a pizza
| together for lunch. Started to have lunch almost every day
| with my wife, instead of my colleagues or looking at our
| phones in the canteen.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > My reading is that reducing face time is definitely NOT a
| positive factor for happiness.
|
| This is an extremely common problem for juniors in the
| mentoring program where I volunteer: They graduate college,
| take remote jobs, and then slide into depression while
| working from home. It takes a while to work with them to
| get to the bottom of their issues, but often they'll
| realize that they're much happier in the weeks following
| company on-site meetings, then they slowly decline again.
|
| Remote work doesn't work for everyone. Many people struggle
| in remote environments, especially juniors. The way remote
| work gets pushed as being perfect for everyone can be very
| confusing for people who discover that they don't like it.
|
| It's even harder because the internet tends to be very
| hostile to these people rather than supportive. The correct
| answer, obviously, is that some people do better at
| different types of jobs. Yet every time this comes up,
| people come out and try to criticize the person, blame it
| on their lack of hobbies, blame it on something else, and
| refuse to allow that some people need face-to-face
| coworkers to thrive.
|
| It's a real phenomenon that gets downplayed on the
| internet.
| askonomm wrote:
| These people should maybe go to co-working places then.
| Can still work without the butts-in-seats managers over
| looking every move you make while also getting the social
| aspect.
| saulpw wrote:
| I don't want to work next to random people. I want to
| work with my co-workers. I don't want to have to come in
| every day for no good reason. I want to be able to come
| in to a shared space with my coworkers and have a
| productive day with them. Trying to bring a group of
| people into a coworking space doesn't work if there are
| more than 2 people.
| askonomm wrote:
| Yeah but you can't force people who don't want to come to
| the office to come there just because you prefer it that
| way. And in any case, I'm sure there would be more than
| just 1 person who'd prefer a social aspect / whose home
| life prevents them from being productive at home, in
| which case you could most likely band together into the
| same co-working, no? Most co-workings I know also rent
| out entire rooms for companies, not just individual
| desks.
|
| Unless we're talking remote and international, in which
| case that obviously wouldn't work, but I assume you
| wouldn't apply to those jobs anyway.
|
| That way you can get your office and some coworkers, and
| others can do what is best for them, and the company
| doesn't have to lease a huge office space. Win-win-win?
| Guid_NewGuid wrote:
| I think -- on the basis of this same argument playing out
| for years at this point -- it's because the 2 views are
| talking past each other.
|
| Sure, in office works better for some people and remote
| makes them miserable. They're real people.
|
| But the side suffering economic compulsion is the remote
| preferred people being forced back to the office against
| their will.
|
| If everyone can work how they prefer then great. But
| that's not the world we live in and to draw a false
| equivalence between the dominant (at exec level) RTO view
| and remote workers forced into unpaid commutes and time
| away from families gets our hackles way up.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > If everyone can work how they prefer then great.
|
| The problem with this is that people's work _preference_
| doesn 't always match up with the environments where they
| actually work well.
|
| I've managed remote and hybrid teams for years. I've done
| this long enough to realize that a lot of the people who
| struggle to be productive at home will swear up and down
| that they're much more productive working remote.
|
| The reason is simple: People aren't just expressing their
| preference for where they work best. They're expressing
| their preference for where they want to be. When it comes
| to low performers and difficult employees, they almost
| universally don't want to be at the office.
|
| That's why it's not as simple as letting everyone work
| according to their preference.
|
| Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the
| biggest challenges is filtering for people who can
| actually work remote. Many people will claim they work
| well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible
| at communicating, can't manage their own time, are
| constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window
| agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's
| hard to start removing these people from the company, but
| it's the only way to make it work.
|
| All of those companies that switched everyone to WFH
| during COVID learned the hard way that you can't just
| take everyone and go remote. You have to build the team
| for it from the start. And it takes more than just asking
| people what they prefer.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Yeah people forget that when you graduate college you go
| from an environment where you're surrounded by hundreds
| or thousands of potential social contacts who all have
| lots of free time and lots in common to being surrounded
| by whoever is on your block, and, if you commute, by your
| co-workers. I'm a remote worker but the only reason I
| make this arrangement work is because I'm married, have a
| family, and have things to do with my time outside of
| work. If I did this in my 20's I would have been totally
| unprepared to deal with it.
|
| When I take a junior or mid-level on I try to make sure
| that we talk about remote work during one-on-ones and
| that I make sure they have stuff outside of work to focus
| on or at least that they have a handle on this type of
| arrangement. In the first year I started doing this in
| 2018 I tried spending a couple of weeks just working and
| not leaving my apartment and by the end of it I had gone
| pretty toasty.
|
| People forget that just as individuals have to work
| differently to do remote work, managers have to manage
| differently to do it too. To truly transition will
| require different habits of mind and a good understanding
| of what we actually need as people to survive.
| FredPret wrote:
| A week has 168 hours.
|
| I used to commute 1.5 hours each way until I got a car,
| then it dropped to 1 hour.
|
| 10-15 hours per week = 6-9% of my life - including time
| asleep.
|
| Taking 16 hours of waking time per week, that gives me
| 112 hours to work with. Now that commute eats 9-13% of my
| conscious time.
|
| Let's assume a standard 40 hour workweek - 35% of my
| waking time. Add in those compulsory daily highway
| joyrides, and conscious time spent on work rises up to
| 48%. Depressed yet? This includes the weekend. During the
| workweek you'll spend between (8 + 2) / 16 and (8 + 3) /
| 16 = 62.5-68.75% of your waking moments on work.
|
| Now consider that car ownership + fuel + insurance could
| eat up to 30% of an average person's post-tax income.
|
| Fuck all of that, a lot.
|
| Employees can get together at quarterly / monthly off-
| sites, and juniors should be encouraged to get involved
| in community activities straight out of college. I'm not
| sacrificing my life and family time so you can stare at
| my grumpy face in the next cubicle.
| saulpw wrote:
| There's a lot more noise from leafblowers and construction
| that penetrates my noise cancelling headphones at home, than
| I have ever experienced in an office. There is more in-office
| noise, yes, but that seems to be better managed by
| aforementioned headphones.
| hun3 wrote:
| [delayed]
| whimsicalism wrote:
| revealed preference is for there to be minimal change in what
| people can do and material abundance
| sdfgtr wrote:
| > I can't recall the specifics but within a week of COVID
| lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere
| plummets
|
| I don't deny the impact of lessening the number of people
| commuting, but how much of that was commuting and how much was
| everything being shut down?
|
| I don't know that there would be as large an impact as people
| may hope.
| atlgator wrote:
| Or because the conversation is being driven by the banks that
| provide liquidity to the S&P500 and, coincidentally, own most
| of the commercial real estate.
| burningChrome wrote:
| Anecdotal data but UHG one of the largest health care
| companies in the world had a huge stake in commercial real
| estate pre-covid. They owned virtually every building their
| employees worked out of all over the country.
|
| Once covid hit, they saw the writing on the wall and have
| been liquidating their real estate holdings over the past 3
| years or so. I live in Minnesota and they've sold five of
| their buildings here alone, including one of their older main
| HQ buildings.
|
| They now have one HQ which is a three building campus and
| have gone to an almost 100% WFH model with an optional office
| arrangement where you can reserve a desk if you know you need
| to be in the office.
|
| Many of the downtown Minneapolis buildings have also changed
| hands including the Wells Fargo and Capella towers. If
| anything, what you're seeing is a lot of the S&P 500
| companies are divesting their commercial real estate holdings
| since it doesn't appear as though in office time is going to
| increase or be anywhere near what it was pre-covid.
| basisword wrote:
| >> I can't recall the specifics but within a week of COVID
| lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere
| plummets
|
| That was more because half the planet was told not to leave
| their homes. Sure, stopping commutes had an impact on
| pollution, but the roads were literally empty in major cities -
| that wasn't because people could suddenly WFH.
| dogman144 wrote:
| The roads being empty at their peak commute hours probably
| had something to do with it...
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I think the point is jobs that can be done from a computer
| are not necessarily the bulk of jobs that require
| commuting.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Somehow, all those jobs got done without commutes for
| years during COVID. So a lot don't seem to require
| commuting.
| squigz wrote:
| They all got done? What?
| threetonesun wrote:
| One could argue that in an ever so slightly better
| society all jobs wouldn't require commuting because you
| could live near where you work. Most of commuting comes
| down to the other side of the remote work problem, people
| can only find affordable housing that's so far from their
| jobs that it requires them to commute.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > - accommodating parents and their child raising needs with
| policies that don't come out of 1950: every working parent I
| know with remote jobs experience significant flexibility here.
|
| Flexibility for parents is great. I've worked remote for a long
| time and having additional flexibility to take care of sick
| kids and still get some work in while they're asleep and later
| in the evening is great. Much better for everyone than forcing
| another PTO day just to stay home.
|
| However, I've also been seeing remote work and parenting being
| pushed way too far since COVID. One of my friends cancelled
| daycare for their 3 year old, thinking they'd just watch him at
| home while they worked. Didn't take long to realize that they
| weren't getting much work done while tending to the demands of
| a 3 year old, and it became impossible to hide when the child
| would interrupt every meeting multiple times over.
|
| One local company I'm familiar with went remote during COVID
| and had significant problems with quality of work and
| communications. The kind of quality problems that impacted
| customers (not a traditional tech company, their product
| required employees to do specific work for each customer). When
| they started narrowing down on the problem employees, one of
| the top causes they uncovered was parents of young children
| trying to do the job while watching their kids. It can work
| with a 13 year old home for summer break, but it just doesn't
| work for very young kids who need a lot of attention.
|
| > - preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at
| work: can't sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully
| auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office.
|
| I'm going to have to disagree with this one. My friends in HR
| said the number of inter-employee problems went way, way up
| during COVID remote work. Employees communicate outside of
| official channels, in voice meetings that aren't recorded, and
| in chat rooms you don't control. Some people get extremely
| difficult to work with when they're arguing with a screen name
| instead of talking to a person face to face.
| kortilla wrote:
| "Difficult to work with" is a totally different dimension
| from ageism, sexism, harassment.
|
| I can definitely see the former going way up but the latter
| going way down.
| dogman144 wrote:
| - so, again, no luck for parents of young children? Ship the
| parents back to the office and those issues you mention which
| have some sort of root cause forcing the home-rearing just...
| go away/out of sight out of mind? As I said, a mindset out of
| the 1950s. Also, hiring/firing is still a solution, wfh or
| not.
|
| - I work in cybersec, all those alternative channels can be
| monitored or blocked just fine, and still better than "closed
| office door + handsy VP" which has plagued the workforce for
| years and years.
|
| - you mention conflict resolution as the remote challenge
| examples. I mentioned sexual harassment and ageism. Very
| different.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Ship the parents back to the office and those issues you
| mention which have some sort of root cause forcing the
| home-rearing just... go away/out of sight out of mind? As I
| said, a mindset out of the 1950s. Also, hiring/firing is
| still a solution, wfh or not.
|
| I think you didn't read my comment. The problem was parents
| _cancelling daycare_ because they thought they could take
| care of kids and work simultaneously without impacting
| their work.
|
| They literally had daycare, _cancelled it_ , and brought
| the problem on themselves after WFH was instituted.
|
| > I work in cybersec, all those alternative channels can be
| monitored or blocked just fine,
|
| You are deluding yourself if you think none of your
| employees are using their personal phones to talk to each
| other, or that groups of employees don't gather in personal
| Discords and chat app groups.
| cevn wrote:
| If you find out that parents have no form of daycare, and
| are taking care of their child while doing their remote
| job they should be fired, end of story.
|
| As a parent, taking care of a child is itself a full time
| job. Your friend is either an idiot or was banking on his
| work being stupid enough to let it slide.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Oddly, while I think the approach is overly restrictive (
| and it would drive a good chunk of parents out of the
| market ), there are some benefits to one parent doing
| some actual parenting. I think your characterization is
| harsh, but I am biased.
| j-bos wrote:
| >You are deluding yourself if you think none of your
| employees are using their personal phones to talk to each
| other
|
| Why is that the company's concern? I genuinely don't
| understand what responsibility the company has for
| employees actions outside of work.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Eh, some companies ( financial institutions, brokerages
| and so on ) may have regulatory requirements that puts
| onus on those organizations[1]. That is mostly the
| argument for keeping personal and work life separate, but
| that ship has sailed a long time ago.
| bravura wrote:
| Employees were arguing online outside of work channels,
| and HR became aware of it?
| ipaddr wrote:
| One parent cancelling daycare during covid one year (lets
| assume they went back the next year) seems like a solved
| problem (they tried didn't work for them and went back to
| other method).
|
| Parents leaving work early and not staying late because
| of kids is an office problem you didn't mention.
|
| Employees using a personal discord sounds positive. Work
| relationships are building remotely. When employees in
| person become close they call personal cells and go to
| bars to discuss how clueless leadership is. Leadership
| isn't capturing those conversation why is it suddenly a
| problem if a discord is used?
| samtho wrote:
| > I'm going to have to disagree with this one. My friends in
| HR said the number of inter-employee problems went way, way
| up during COVID remote work.
|
| *reported
|
| It could be that people felt more empowered to report
| incidents, but the reality is probably just that the nature
| of harassment has changed and is just different from how it
| was like in-person.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It could be that people felt more empowered to report
| incidents,
|
| Or it could be that the number of incidents actually just
| went way up? I don't understand why everyone tries to
| inject alternate explanations to wave away inconvenient
| situations.
| squigz wrote:
| The point is both are reasonable explanations, and
| without further data, it's hard to say with certainty
| it's one or the other.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Dismissing uncomfortable things becomes so much easier
| when you can make up an alternate explanation (without
| any knowledge of the details) and declare them both
| equally likely.
| squigz wrote:
| Nobody's trying to dismiss them. If they're not equally
| likely, I'm sure you'll have no problem demonstrating
| that?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Nobody's trying to dismiss them
|
| The parent commenter was absolutely trying to dismiss the
| core of the story by injecting an alternate reality into
| it.
|
| > If they're not equally likely, I'm sure you'll have no
| problem demonstrating that?
|
| The situation I'm referring to was not a simple reporting
| change. It involved employees quitting over bullying, and
| in one case there were issues severe enough that law
| enforcement became involved.
|
| So, not, it was not a simple case of people reporting
| things differently. These problems did not exist pre-WFH
| at this company.
|
| But if you're dead set on finding ways to reject this and
| substitute your own reality, I suspect even this won't
| convince you.
| squigz wrote:
| > But if you're dead set on finding ways to reject this
| and substitute your own reality, I suspect even this
| won't convince you.
|
| I really don't know why you're so aggressive. You did not
| include the context in your original comment that you did
| with this one, and so someone put forward a very
| reasonable explanation as to why reports may have went
| up.
| Swizec wrote:
| It's a lot easier to report a problem when you have
| screenshots.
|
| Will HR do anything about a handsy VP in a he-said-she-
| said situation? Maybe. Will they do anything when you
| send them screenshots of a VP's icky chats? You bet.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Will HR do anything about a handsy VP in a he-said-she-
| said situation? Maybe
|
| Actually, they will likely transfer the woman or
| otherwise screw over her career to protect the handy VP.
| samtho wrote:
| This discussion started with a hypothesis based on a
| second hand anecdote.
|
| For all we know, it could be worse. Given the fact that a
| lot us have trouble separating work and home when we work
| remotely, maybe there is more pressure to let coworkers
| in that space more.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > I'm going to have to disagree with this one. My friends in
| HR said the number of inter-employee problems went way, way
| up during COVID remote work.
|
| Note that your HR friends is not a good measure of
| harassment. Maybe more people filed HR complaints because
| asshole and abusive behavior was easily documented over chat,
| etc. Whereas before, you had abusive behavior, for example,
| inappropriate touches but no witness that a person might not
| feel comfortable bringing up to HR especially if the abuser
| is somebody important.
|
| Everyone knows that HR basically exists to protect the
| company. Unless you have ironclad proof, you may not want to
| involve them. Remote work would leave more of an undeniable
| paper trail.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Lots of the daycares and preschools shut down during COVID.
| It was a shitty time and not exactly comparable to normal
| remote work for a _lot_ of reasons.
|
| Your friend, however, is an idiot. I know lots of people who
| have worked remotely for 10+ years, and none of them tried to
| work their job while taking care of a 3 year old - except
| maybe during COVID (because it was either that or quit).
| wildzzz wrote:
| While childcare can be expensive, a "mother's helper" type
| nanny would be a better option if one parent can work from
| home. You still need to pay them a competitive wage but it's
| one person rather than all the admin and facilities overhead
| that a daycare has.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's the same thing as everything else. Everyone cares about
| those things conditional on business going well. Do I care
| about Somalian kids starving? Yes. But conditional on my not
| starving. If I'm starving, and I have just enough money to eat,
| you bet I'm not sending shit to that kid in Africa. He's going
| to die. You can bill that as "This guy doesn't care about
| starving African kids" if you'd like.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Except all the topics/benefits I mention apply to our day to
| day lives and communities, not Somalia.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Everyone cares about those things conditional on business
| going well.
| rty32 wrote:
| The hypocrisy is that my company boasts about eliminating
| carbon emissions with all the solar panels and carbon credits,
| yet ask people to come in to work three days a week, some of
| which drive one hour one-way, as if that has nothing to do with
| the company (it's actually in the so-called "scope 3
| emission").
|
| There is nothing new here.
| gedy wrote:
| Ha yeah, my previous company had some "most green employee"
| award, and praising people who biked in or took transit to
| office - I was told I wasn't eligible because I worked from
| home..
| cmgriffing wrote:
| I really wonder if some organization like the ACLU could bring
| cases against "Return to Work" initiatives as being
| discriminatory?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _wonder if some organization like the ACLU could bring cases
| against "Return to Work" initiatives as being discriminatory?_
|
| Most people can't WFH. If the courts actually sided with that,
| the popular backlash would likely be so severe as to
| overcorrect.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| That's very good. All the DEI brochures I have seen portrayed
| young good looking people of different colors. I hope we will get
| more diversity and inclusion for disabled people.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I've always liked that being disabled in America isn't
| necessarily the death sentence it is in other countries that have
| no accommodation for disabled people.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| It's not perfect, but gliding around in a few hundred year old
| American city is way more dignified than somewhere like Paris.
| It's not just the generously-sized sidewalks and curb cuts, but
| also knowing that you can go into almost any McDonald's or
| Starbucks and expect a toilet you can use (Parisian Sanisettes
| are great, but they aren't everywhere).
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Employers systemically illegally discriminated against employees
| by falsely alleging that accommodating them with work from home
| was an undue hardship, and would just point at other employers
| not doing it to demonstrate this.
|
| COVID forced WFH for business reasons and thus employers are no
| longer as easily able to illegally discriminate against their
| disabled employees since it's patently obvious that the
| accommodation is possible and it doesn't present some existential
| threat to a business to provide it. It's also that employers are
| simply more geared up to allow work from home and it's less of an
| actual burden in time and money.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Employers systemically illegally discriminated against
| employees by falsely alleging that accommodating them with work
| from home
|
| If someone has a legally recognized disability that can be
| reasonably accommodated by working from home, that's one thing.
|
| But there's nothing illegal nor discriminatory about companies
| having their workforce be in the office.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| COVID acted like a coordinated forcing function. So it's unfair
| to claim that things would have been just as easy to move to
| WFH before COVID. Even the FAANGs of the world had to do a LOT
| of work to make smooth WFH happen, from working on optimizing
| capacity for teleconferencing software to actually making their
| corp networks work smoothly remotely at scale.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| I think that's a harsh take. Your last sentence is where the
| balance of the truth lies: COVID was a watershed event that
| ushered in new technologies and practices that have made WFH
| more viable and generally acceptable.
| dudul wrote:
| Zoom and Google Meet existed before COVID. What COVID did was
| force employers to choose between letting people work from
| home or shut down. Suddenly, what was impossible a few months
| ago became totally fine.
|
| It didn't make WFH more viable or acceptable, it exposed the
| hypocrisy of employers.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| You have an ax to grind. Good luck.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| it makes me wonder if we should, in stead of retire have a second
| round of organized education around 45-55 to prepare for a job
| that doesn't involve physical acrobatics that one can do from
| home. With laws to accommodate the process. You could for example
| tap into the pension for the duration of the training.
| 5555624 wrote:
| I'm one of them. Even when still in the hospital and rehab center
| -- Lost my lower leg to necrotizing fasciitis and sepsis -- I was
| able to keep working. (And I wanted to do something.) I thought
| I'd be going back to the office at some point; but, my supervisor
| and EEO office decided I'd work from home. when I got home from
| the hospital and rehab, there was a letter authorizing full-time
| telework.
|
| I keep arguing I don't need to take our annual Workplace Violence
| Prevention training; but, I have to go online and take it every
| year. (I just took it a week ago.)
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