[philwelch]

This article is garbage. It can be boiled down to one sentence: "if working from home makes me happy at the cost of productivity, forcing me to come into the office just because it's more productive is the moral equivalent of requiring me to take Adderall."

To which the appropriate response is: "bullshit". Requiring someone to take physically harmful and addictive drugs is not even remotely in the same galaxy as requiring them to come into the office. Maybe instead of working today, I'd be happier staying home and reading novels and playing with the cat. You don't get paid to be happy though, you get paid to be productive.

[coldtea]

>To which the appropriate response is: "bullshit". Requiring someone to take physically harmful and addictive drugs is not even remotely in the same galaxy as requiring them to come into the office.

Not sure. The things some companies demand of their employees do have a health toll, and it's higher than Adderall. Working 14+ hours for days (EA style) is not better than taking Adderall. And a "death march" type of project is even worse.

[philwelch]

Not working from home isn't even the equivalent of working 14+ hour days.

[coldtea]

OK, let's see it this way:

Even for a 8-hour, 5 days/week job, the daily commute + wasted office time + coworker disruptions add up to 3-4 hours per day for most.

Thats years off of your life.

Adderal might be better after all.

[philwelch]

You're double-counting "wasted office time" and "coworker interruptions", which leaves commuting. If your daily commute time is measured in hours, maybe you should live closer to work.

It's not like software developers are poor. Maybe if we were we wouldn't develop these prima donna attitudes.

[coldtea]

>You're double-counting "wasted office time" and "coworker interruptions", which leaves commuting.

Not really. Even if I had double-counted them, that would live both ONE of them AND commuting.

Working at home you have far fewer interruptions (mostly through IM and email) not BS meetings, people breaking your concentration and such.

>It's not like software developers are poor.

Sure, but it's also not like they all work in the US, or have a > $30.000 annual salary.

[Nursie]

"wasted office time + coworker disruptions"

These are part of the 8 hours of work and many might argue that interaction with coworkers is both healthy for the individual and a useful, productive part of your job.

[mylons]

What if requiring coming into the office subtly introduces stress of commuting, dealing with people on a day to day basis that you might necessarily not want, wasting your down time, potentially forcing you into a very sedentary lifestyle for 8 hours a day? Not to mention that the 40 hour work week is a remnant of the industrial revolution. Relative to the speed of tech innovation over the last 20-30 years, it's an outdated relic of a time long forgotten.

Those are unhealthy things that can cause cancer, depression, anxiety, obesity, etc. They ultimately lower your potential and functional ability. If working from home can ease and circumvent a lot of those things, why wouldn't you do it? If nothing more than just for your own personal health, which is more important than work anyway..

[philwelch]

Yeah, working in an office is practically the equivalent of coal mining. This prima donna attitude really makes me sick.

[coldtea]

>Yeah, working in an office is practically the equivalent of coal mining.

Yes, because coal mining is the absolute criterion of unhealthiness in the workplace.

And given that people do coal mining, "working 10+ hours, 5 days a week in an office" can never be viewed as bad, right?

[philwelch]

Who said anything about working 10+ hours?

[coldtea]

Tons of employers.

[jxf]

I agree that you get paid to be productive, not happy. However, companies should care a great deal about happiness.

Guess where unhappy, highly productive employees go to work? At your competitors.

[aetherson]

But the stipulated scenario is not about highly productive employees. The author is saying that even if he's less productive, he thinks that he should be allowed to work at home.

Obviously, "less productive" is an implicit comparison with some base level of productivity, and we don't know what that level of productivity is. I think that the author implies that he thinks his base level of productivity is "high enough." On the other hand, reading between the lines, his coworkers may think that his base level of productivity is "not actually all that high." And we don't know how much less "less" is.

If an employer has a choice between "happy, unproductive employee" and "unhappy, productive employee," I'll suggest that the rational approach is to get "unhappy, productive employee." In that scenario, you'll get useful work out of the person until they quit, and then you'll have another chance to hire someone who's happy and productive. In the happy, unproductive scenario, that person is a drain on your resources until you fire them, which is inherently more expensive than someone quitting, and often more of a morale hit than an unhappy person quitting is.

(Any real scenario will be more complex than the previous paragraph).

[MicahWedemeyer]

I guess I've been doing it so long that I don't really think of it as allowed anymore. It's just something that I feel is my choice. I've gone so far as to co-found my own consulting company so that no one will get to make that decision for me in the future. I will make my own decisions about how and where I should work.

[aetherson]

Well, if you own your own company, I'm not sure who you're justifying yourself to.

If, however, you are in a situation where you have an employer, I'm sorry; you're just wrong. Working from home is not a fundamental human right. You are, or are not, allowed to.

[milfot]

This idea cuts straight to the heart of the argument.

If you view your employer as a master who gets to tell you how and where and when to work, for the pittance he affords you so you can live to work another day, and so he can take all your extra productivity and initiative and IP and profit from it as he wishes, then I guess you are right.

If you view your contract with your employer as a mutual agreement where you provide a set amount of work for a set amount of money, then your productivity is your own. You can use it for a better life or more money.

I guess this is why I contract. I happen to think my pay should be directly linked to the value I create, rather than an arbitrary amount based on how much it costs me to live, and how long it takes me to find work.

[Nursie]

How do we know they're highly productive? The guy as much as admits that productivity is a secondary concern to his own happiness!

(Not that I am saying this is bad, happiness is very important to me and why I've gone contractor)

[smosher]

Yeah, a more honest comparison between working from the office and taking dangerous drugs is to actually make that comparison: "come into work or stay home and take Adderall."

Bonus: you will find out which of your staff would rather stay home and do drugs than come to work.

[roland37]

I think your critique is using a major false equivalence. I don't see any suggestion in the article that keeping someone from working from home is on par with forcing them to take Adderall. Instead, both were being held up as examples when discussing the question of what changes employers ask you to make in your life to create productivity. I agree that the Adderall example was hyperbolic and the article would probably be stronger without it, but I don't think any moral equivalence was being asserted.

As to your last point, you don't get paid to be productive (necessarily). You're paid to provide work, and different jobs have different metrics for that. There are for instance substantial differences between salary, hourly wage, and commission work - someone being paid a flat fee for a project has no obligation to be efficient or productive, only to fulfill their stated terms. Diminishing efficiency in favor of happiness is a perfectly reasonable aim, particularly in certain jobs.

[john61]

Yes, but I live to be happy not to get paid.

[philwelch]

That's your tradeoff to make. There are lots of happy people in the world who don't get paid.

[3minus1]

He's using a reductio ad absurdem arguement. He takes the principle of "a company valuing productivity over happiness" and extends it to an absurd degree to argue that company's shouldn't prohibit telecommuting in order to increase productivity. It's a pretty stupid argument that is equivalent to saying companies shouldn't do things that are in their own self-interest.

[MicahWedemeyer]

You're right that I'm using reductio ad absurdum, but my goal is to call into question the idea that productivity is all that matters. If we're going to argue things based solely on productivity, then all sorts of absurd policies become viable (Adderall, not hiring pregnant women, not hiring people with disabilities)

[3minus1]

You're wrong. Policies like you listed are not viable because of either government regulation or the mere fact that a company will not be able to hire and retain good people if it treats them like shit. You offer an absurd and totally unrealistic situation.

It's also naive to expect companies to be concerned with anything other that making a profit. At any moment, another company can come in and implement changes that the first company was unwilling to make and undercut it's business.

[philwelch]

You can make a reductio argument either way, which is what I demonstrated.

[Executor]

This is a very rude comment. You are implying that you must sacrifice happiness in order to be productive. But many people are able to be both productive at home AND be happy.

Why doesn't HN have a downvote...