The growing inequality of who gets to work from home

Yet more &quot;please return to the office&quot; pseudo-journalism bollocks.<p>Front-line staff have to clock on, get their toilet breaks timed, get drug tested, have weird random shift patterns, have to work at least one day on the weekend, have to cover for colleagues by doing a 16-hour shift, get paid overtime, can&#x27;t nip out for a doctor&#x27;s appointment, etc, etc, etc.<p>Happy for bosses to consider making the workplace more equal, but let&#x27;s start by making front-line staff&#x27;s lives easier rather than making everyone else&#x27;s lives harder.

The same inequality exists with drug testing too. A lot of low wage roles get drug tested on a regular basis while higher paying careers don’t.<p>Outside the military, pilots rarely get tested despite the fact they’re responsible for many more lives than fork lift operators or truck drivers (who often do get tested). Doctors pretty much only get tested if they botch a surgery or someone reports them. Lawyers? Wallstreet traders? There would be a nation wide solidarity strike.<p>Bill Gates famously joked in the 90s that Microsoft would lose a third of their engineers instantly if they drug tested. The NSA even had to make an official exception on past drug use so people would stop failing the security screening (although they still get tested iirc).

So everybody needs to be miserable as if you are not miserable the rest of miserable people will look at you and say: That&#x27;s not fair!! I am miserable so you must be miserable too!<p>Of all the &quot;arguments&quot; used by hired Public Relations companies hired to spin &quot;work from home&quot; in a bad light, this is the most stupid argument I have ever heard.<p>This makes me uncomfortable as probably because of that it could be the most successful.

The same inequality between c level and frontline workers exists on so many levels with other perks is it possible that the c level just don’t want to lose its privileges? In Europe as a manager you get subsidized cars where the company pays for gas, private corner offices, equity or special bonus programs not always are benefits packages available for frontline workers… and now they talk about inequality if more staff could have perks like wfh, there always was a divide between staff that needs to be on site and other, only other staff also starts to get some perks in the form of wfh… why don’t give the frontline workers a company car, a private rest zone and better amenities or cash?

The amount of effort to make inequality a fight between a white collar worker making 100,000 and a blue collar working making 30-40,000 and not about a CEO making 10Million or an investor making 100 million is clear and insidious.

I feel like this is missing the forest for the trees. Perhaps salt in the wound, if you will.<p>Pay a forklift driver or warehouse worker 150k a year, and see how many complain about not working from home.

The discussion is pulled by big income of office space owners and builders. Secondly there is shortage of good mid and line management that cannot cope without looking over shoulder due to various reasons. Any argument to support their profit is good.

&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt; Business leaders rightly worry that this divide could hurt morale among front-line staff, undermine perceived fairness, and create new rifts in the workforce.<p>Working at a multinational, people have had varied work arrangements, perquisites, social hierarchies, and pay scales, for a long time. WFH is just a new wrinkle, where you&#x27;re one of the &quot;remotes&quot; but you live in the same town for some reason. Also, if you think about it, the network of suppliers, contractors, and customers represent quasi-remotes in the sense that they&#x27;re also involved in the business but are not locating themselves on site, and are jockeying for advantages just like everybody else.<p>The remotes are mostly invisible. The winds of self-interest that fill our sails continue to blow even if no other ship is in sight.

I studied at university and chose a programmer path quite indirectly and rather much because the thought of being physically and temporally bound to external and impersonal locations and tools and interactions, for labor, made me nauseous. I worked &quot;remote&quot; also at the office, reclusively, seen somewhat as an alien by colleagues (not unjustly) for whom meeting room bookings were actually critical. I&#x27;m not complaining, but it&#x27;s not all glamour either. You get what you stake out.

I understand the problem, but it feels like this existed for a while and no business manager cared about it until they started losing the RTO battle. This seems like a way to boost that argument without actually caring for the employees.

I will agree to abolish the inequality caused by WfH when CEOs agree to abolish the inequality caused by salary discrepancies (i.e. never). We leave in an inequal society, and for good reasons.

(2023)<p>More previously:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38762747">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38762747</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38721032">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38721032</a>

&gt; remote-work opportunities are rare in jobs with annual pay around $30,000<p>Remote workers with lower salaries are usually contractors. Sometimes with multiple parallel gigs.

Life is built on inequality, but HBR wants to guilt us into all going back to the office out of some sense of equality? What a fucking joke. The only group this benefits are those at the very top. Either that or my commute is included in my working hours. I&#x27;ll never go back to the office and wasting so much time commuting per week and not being compensated.

Ah, ok... So I suppose since many starve to death for lack of water and food we should do the same. And of course, only workers, executives MUST work as they want.<p>I think the office PR have almost exhausted all ideas to try pushing people back in the smart city or interment champ for slaves who should not be aware of they status...

My biggest question after reading the article is why did they use a LLM to do what is basically a binary classification task? Why not use a BERT-like standard text classifier?

This is one of the reasons I left Google. I did not like being one of the “exceptions” to remote work. I was anticipating some team dynamic problems going forward.

What nonsense. The divide is not in highly paid vs low paid jobs. It’s between jobs that can be done from home (which happen to be highly paid) and jobs which need specialized equiment&#x2F;location (which do not).<p>If I were working a highly paid job where I had to manage a server farm I’d also need to be on location simply due to the requirement of constant physical access.

If business leaders actually cared about &quot;inequality&quot; they would slash their own compensation down closer to the people who work for them.

Most people that want to work onsite are the people without an inner voice. They need someone to talk to compensate for it.

WFH isn&#x27;t inequality, WFH is a perk.

Doesn&#x27;t even the Bible say &quot;For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance. But from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.&quot;?<p>On a serious note, there are obvious restrictions on who can work from home with intellectual jobs preferred over physical labor. And wasn&#x27;t it always this divide? Even in communist countries it was sought after to get a college degree and perform intellectual work because it&#x27;s better paid and has advantages.

Does anyone trust anything published in HBR anymore?

Hbr worried about inequality, that&#x27;s not common!

&gt; “…tested the model on a part of our sample that it was not trained on and found that it achieves a 98% accuracy rate in replicating the human classifications. Armed with our highly accurate LLM…”<p>So concerned with checking the box of incorporating AI into their work, the writer managed to quickly associate AI’s classification with “must be right”.

Ah yes. The old “if everyone can’t have it, no one can have it” argument. Journalists are just elementary school tattletales at this point. Aren’t we also being told that because we can work from home we’re going to be outsourced?

In other news, someone having something nice is unequal to someone who doesn&#x27;t.

Unsurprisingly, workers whose skills are in high demand and short supply (eg highly educated, highly experienced people) can demand better work conditions such as pay and commute flexibility.

I read the title much differently than HN!<p>My take is, you get to work from home if your job isn&#x27;t that crucial. Jobs that are driven by cost rather than result.<p>I don&#x27;t think most remote workers understand that eventually they must be cost competitive with <i>any</i> legally-applicable competitive workers. Are you ready to become cost-competitive with Mexican devs who know React well enough?<p>In ten years I predict most &quot;remote&quot; work will be pay-per-ticket:<p>1. Log in to hiring site to complete aptitude test.<p>2. If pass, get a ticket and propose solution.<p>3. If solution isn&#x27;t accepted, goto 1. If another worker solved same issue for less money, goto 1.<p>4. Close another ticket within X hours. If not, goto 1.<p>Anyone stuck in this loop may very well fantasize about aspirational careers like being a UPS driver.

The other day I phoned a service provider and the lady’s kid was babbling in the background and a children’s show was playing throughout the call.<p>I couldn’t get off the phone fast enough.<p>Either invest in voice isolation or don’t work from home.<p>Functionally this lady brought her kid to my home office and blasted a cartoon during our meeting.<p>Is this harsh of me and an unpopular opinion? Yes.<p>I agree that Human beings should be able to have work-life balance and kids are a natural and necessary part of that balance.<p>I just don’t want them in my ear.<p>If the lady had had gangster rap music or 8-bit video game music on in the background of the call I’d have been equally annoyed.<p>Work calls are for doing work.