Comment by jacquesm

Comment by jacquesm 21 hours ago

> We’ve hired some real duds into remote roles who had years of remote experience, apparently doing the same thing they tried to do with us: Work a couple hours a week or maybe collect paychecks from multiple jobs.

Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?

> The remote world changed a lot since COVID and the rise of /r/overemployed and “Four Hour Workweek” junk has only made it worse for those of us who just want to work remote without shenanigans.

A four hour work week is very normal in plenty of countries and in some there are common constructs built around even shorter work weeks.

matwood 21 hours ago

> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?

Bingo. I had an exec ask me once how will we know people are working if they are remote? I asked back, how do we know they are working now?

Remote work is harder on management and leadership. It’s easy to see if someone is at their desk and seems friendly, it’s hard to really think about what value a person brings.

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jacquesm 21 hours ago

I've worked at a bank where one of the oft heard jokes was that 'I spend 8 hours per day there but I really wouldn't want to work there'. It was true too. 145 people in the IT department, and absolutely nothing got done.
This was a bit of a let-down for me, all these people, so much fancy hardware. I had a hard time believing it at first. The whole place was basically caretakers that made the occasional report printing program and that based their careers on minor maintenance of decades old COBOL code that they would rather not touch at all.
Something as trivial as a new printer being taken into production would turn into a three year project.
On Friday afternoons the place was deserted. And right now I work 'from home' and so do all of my colleagues and I don't think there are any complaints about productivity. Sure, it takes discipline. But everything does, to larger or lesser degree and probably we are a-typical but for knowledge work in general WFH can work if the company stewards it properly. It's all about the people.

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Aurornis 14 hours ago

> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?

Of course, but that's obviously a deflection.

In person hires can't physically be in two offices at the same time.

In person employees can't get a new in-person job and then not resign from their last job because they want to extract as many paychecks as they can before they get caught and fired.

In person employees can't substitute in a hired interview taker for the interview and then hope nobody notices their voice sounds too different when they start the job.

These are all real things that we've encountered with remote work (and more)

Saying X can also happen in Y! Is a classic fallacious argument used by people who want you to think two things are equal, when in fact they can have very different probabilities and risk profiles.

When I was working at a hybrid company we even had a few cases where people either couldn't focus at home (kids, family, distractions) or were insufferably combative in chat. Bringing them into the office solved it.

The two environments are not equal, no matter how many times someone tries to deflect with "That problem can also happen in the office!"

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jacquesm 14 hours ago

I am not going to continue this conversation, I hope you understand.

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AnimalMuppet 21 hours ago

> Did you ever hire any duds when you were not hiring remote?

That only worked a couple hours a week and collected multiple paychecks? Probably not.

Sure, they hired duds. Just not that level of dud. And if they were, they found out much more quickly.

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jacquesm 21 hours ago

That doesn't happen remote either. Unless management is utterly incompetent, another variable a study like this should probably compensate for by increasing the sample size and pool diversity.

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- Aurornis 14 hours ago
  
  > That doesn't happen remote either.
  I don't know where you got this idea, but this happens all the time. The two most common topics in the remote channel of the big management peer group I'm in are:
  1. People cheating on remote interviews (including substituting another person to take the interview)
  2. People getting multiple jobs and being too obviously distracted to get work done, or the increasingly common getting a new job and not resigning from the last job because they know they can collect potentially $100K+ in paychecks and/or severance by waiting to get let go instead.
  If you don't believe these things happen in remote jobs then I understand your resistance throughout this thread to any suggestion that remote and in-office are different.
  
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- parliament32 13 hours ago
  
  It absolutely happens, and often. I don't know when the last time you tried to hire was but things are absolutely brutal right now. The most common is personnel who think they can get away with an hour or two of work a day (whether they're working multiple jobs or just screwing around at home is hard to say). Second is bait-and-switch where the interviewee is not the person who shows up day 1.. after four (!) incidents in a quarter we had to mandate at least one in-person interview during the hiring process which seems to have helped.
  
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