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by draebek 478 days ago
Thanks for your comment. I agree with a lot of what you said, in particular that trying to have it both ways (hybrid) often ends up with everyone being frustrated, in my experience.

I want to say very clearly that I don't doubt that "grift and fraud" happens. What percentage of the workforce are engaged in this grift? If you have 100 remote workers in your average IT shop at BigCo, how many of them do you think are truly running a scam that would never pass if they were in person? My guess is 3 or less, but that's just a guess.

In case it's not obvious, what I'm working towards is: If 3% of your workforce is engaged in grift, but a lot of the other 97% are happier and more productive, is it worth pissing off a substantial portion of that 97% just to shut down the 3%?

> The majority of the quality of life improvements are really about time freedom. You’d get most of it by giving employees sufficient paid time and allowing them to use it.

This leaves out one of the main things to like about WFH for many (most?) Americans, at least: I get to avoid wasting 30–90 minutes of my day in a stressful commute that comes with its own share of expenses.

1 comments

With contractors, I’d guess 40% or more. I’ve discovered things that are pretty shocking.

With employees, I agree it’s much lower, it’s mostly just lazy loafing that is harder to spot if the employer doesn’t have clear evidence of performance. The bigger issue for them are people who move away, lie and invent medical problems to avoid work rules.

The majority of my folks are in IT infrastructure and support. It’s pretty easy to spot on the operations side if you understand the tickets. The other side of the shop, who do more dev work relies on having good managers and leads. The documentation isn’t a fair evaluation— a single change may require weeks of work for a developer, so using counts isn’t fair unless you really understand the workflows. For those roles, hybrid makes hiding easier.

> The bigger issue for them are people who move away, lie and invent medical problems to avoid work rules.

Don’t worry, people are perfectly capable of doing that in the office too.

I find it a lot easier to hide not doing anything in the office? If you are sitting at your desk the default assumption is that you are hard at work.