Re:Beyond Remote
by pjc50 on Monday May 25, 2020 @08:41AM
(#23300363)
All this talk of salaries overlooks the real reason why companies already spend astonishing amounts of money to move everyone to a premium office in an area of very expensive real estate and then damage their productivity by keeping them in a fancy but noisy open-plan office: conspicuous consumption.
Every organisation inevitably ends up producing a quantity of what I'm going to call "boss-ness" for those in charge. It's a significant factor in compensation. This holds true across capitalist, communist, distributed, and even voluntary organisations, and can be seen in groups as small as a single person.
All sorts of previously inexplicable things, such as executive travel, become easier to understand through this lens. Micromanagement and abuse of employees as well. Linus Torvald's free pass to be rude to people was also a part of his compensation, until it became far too expensive. As was sexual harassment of the female staff until that got mostly stamped out in the West; see Parton, D "Nine To Five" (1980), or the more recent Rubin case.
Remote employees produce less "boss-ness"; you can't look out across your desk farm and see them, you can't look over their shoulders (unless you go for the "desktop sharing and webcam at all times" model, which some places have).
Re:Beyond Remote
by MiroF on Monday May 25, 2020 @10:20AM
(#23301386)
This pandemic has made this observation abundantly clear to me at least. As David Graeber pointed out, there are a whole host of "bullshit jobs" out there.
Every organisation inevitably ends up producing a quantity of what I'm going to call "boss-ness" for those in charge. It's a significant factor in compensation. This holds true across capitalist, communist, distributed, and even voluntary organisations, and can be seen in groups as small as a single person.
All sorts of previously inexplicable things, such as executive travel, become easier to understand through this lens. Micromanagement and abuse of employees as well. Linus Torvald's free pass to be rude to people was also a part of his compensation, until it became far too expensive. As was sexual harassment of the female staff until that got mostly stamped out in the West; see Parton, D "Nine To Five" (1980), or the more recent Rubin case.
Remote employees produce less "boss-ness"; you can't look out across your desk farm and see them, you can't look over their shoulders (unless you go for the "desktop sharing and webcam at all times" model, which some places have).