Comment by fnordpiglet

Just because we have it great as tech workers and much of the rest of labor is absolutely fucked up in many ways, doesn't mean we should stop fighting to make our situations even better and use the privilege to advocate for those in worse situations.

Why is it mutually exclusive? There are tyrants in all aspects of life, rich or poor. Privilege has nothing to do with it.

The difference between someone making $50k/year and $500k/year is functionally irrelevant as compared with the C-levels. It's a rounding error to their multi-million comp packages.

There shouldn't be anything distasteful about advocating for yourself and others who rely on their labor to survive, even if they're well paid for that labor.

> Having to work in an office for $300k/year

More like $98k/year on average

I didn’t ask for pity I pointed out their requirements are petty and in the labor market it’s my choice as a worker to not take their offers no matter how much money they throw around. I am fortunate that I’m in demand and make a great living. This gives me more power to refuse their petty mandates, but that in no way makes it any less petty or tyrannical. Most people don’t have my optionality but that doesn’t mean I can’t call things the way they are, because it’s petty and tyrannical for everyone everywhere who doesn’t have to be in the office but is forced to be.

There are petty tyrants in all aspects of our lives and your boss being a petty tyrant spans classes.

Saying organ transplant is a health care issue misses the point. Even with the best health offerings you have to take powerful immunosuppressives for life. People who are severely immune compromised live longer the more they can isolate from infections. But requiring them to go into a crowded open floor plan office in a company mandating presenteeism is a, risk adjusted, significantly worse trade for the immune compromised. (Speaking as someone whose wife is in this situation)

300k a year is what they get paid for making the company 3-4x as much, if not even more. If they can generate that value remotely, then being forced to waste another 1-2 hours of your life every day to go to the office should be worth even more pay.

I consider you wrong since an alliance presupposes a unity of interest whereas the interest of a worker (get more money, work less or maybe more nuanced: have as much control over own work as possible, have as much exposure to fruits of work as possible) is directly opposed to that of what you call the "company" or, really, the owners of the company (compel the worker to produce as much as possible, and pay as low a wage as possible to extract as much profit as possible).

Brushing this dynamic under the rug by conceptualizing it as a mutual agreement of "I will work for you for this wage" is at best glib, even if we ignore the elephant in the room that the worker doesn't choose to work since unfortunately we all need to buy food and a place to live, doesn't choose his wage since the entire labor market is practically the same and not in his power to influence nor shop for an alternative (we don't live in a text book where people can make purely rational economic choices since are born to a context and we live in places and have access to a given pool of resources etc) and lets not even glance at the lack of political alternative to this economic arrangement in this historical flash of time.

If you need to refer to a system where those at the top don't give their reports adequate leeway to get results but instead choose to make all-encompassing proclamations about how the entire hierarchy must behave, then "tyranny" isn't so bad a word.

Money is just violence that got too old to carry a sword anymore, so the threat if violence and the threat of termination are pretty well linked. It's only different in that once the money runs out the violence will come from elsewhere.

You will have a hard time being heard over the hoards content to tear down their houses out of anger that they are not palaces.

I have an expectation of democratic rule outside of work. In work I expect to be told what to do top down. If tyranny is too strong a word, how about feudal or dictatorship or top down? Not only is this unpleasant it is information theoretical inefficient, and greatly damages espirit de corps and the development of a group dynamic that inspires the best performance people are capable of.

Tyranny is pissing in a bottle lest ye be fired for malfeasance.

Now the rest of the workers can experience it!

For me it’s at will absolutely and I won’t work there no matter how much money they offered me to go back.

For most people it’s only at will in one direction. They need the job, often for home and board, and always for insurance benefits. Saying it’s at will ignores the worker needs the benefits more than management needs the individual worker. Management absolutely uses that asymmetry to force people to do their petty whims. If you’ve ever worked for anyone else before we all know this to be true. It’s so true and pervasively experienced it’s almost vacuous to even say it.

I for one am pretty sick of the endless litany of bullshit in my career and am probably going to go it on my own again or just retire. Almost no one is so lucky as me and that’s a fucking tragedy of epic proportions.

> Much of the creative work and important decisions _does_ happen face to face, let alone the ad-hoc ideation and brainstorming from being in the same space.

Maybe for you. This is not a universal experience.

https://basecamp.com/books/remote

As someone who spent half his career in executive management of globomegacorps management is for the most part total bullshit.

Every global company is already working remotely because teams are spread out everywhere. Even if your team isn’t your dependencies are. The more senior you get the more you work on zoom these days. Before the pandemic it was in conference calls.

In fact the half assed in office approach is worse because not everyone is on the same foot. The remote offices from the leaders don’t get to have the on mute influence with the leader. When the call ends the people in the local room with the leader have a little meeting to make the real decisions. That’s grossly inefficient and unfair, to the point it’s started to make me sick to my stomach when I see it happen and I refuse to book rooms for in the office meetings.

In fact a role I had prior to the pandemic was figuring out how to shut down most offices of a megacorp to save money. We called it “bring your own office.” We analyzed deeply the interactions and determined in a global corporation the percent of time we make better decisions in office was less than 20% or 1 day a week. When the pandemic hit our predictions came true. But our elderly CEO couldn’t understand how the strategy he agreed to to save money would work once his ideological hackles got raised so he mandated everyone return 5 days a week even tho we were then 5 years into the bring your own office plan he agreed to. There were no metrics or reason other than, basically, he likes working in the office because it made him successful in his career and he can’t conceive that anyone could do anything different.

There are people who work better in the office and having a small office with plenty of high quality meeting areas and private places to work is smart. Management should allow knowledge workers to work the way they work best and figure out how to maximize team efficiency as managers are required to do. It’s a hard job. I know. I’ve done it. But RTO is a short cut that fails to recognize the incredible inefficiencies inherent in the approach, especially in a global company.

On the other than people working at home frequent their neighborhood businesses more leading to broader economic activity. Downtown can take care of itself and can become relevant for a better reason than people are forced against their will to be there. I shed no tears over this - cities evolve over time as we as humans change in structural ways. It’s time to move on.

This can happen regardless, it's worse than Detroit, which ar least had 3 big companies supporting it.

Seattle needs to hedge.

If someone spits in your food, you better eat it because there are millions of people who don’t have food reliably.