alt Hacker News> Oh no, someone dared to lie to a business, the horror! Only the reverse is acceptable.
I never said businesses lying to employees is acceptable. You seem to be arguing something else that I haven’t written: General class war content where everything is viewed through the lens of business versus employees, and since businesses are bad then anything employees do is fair game.
The reason I know so much about Tim Ferriss’ remote work garbage isn’t because I was on the business side of your simplified view. I was a coworker of someone trying to practice these techniques.
The fatal flaw in your line of logic is that it can only view interactions as 1:1 between employee and the business. What you’re missing is that these workplace games punish the team members most of all. When you’re on a team of 3-4 people and 1 of them is gallivanting around the world, responding to messages once a day if you’re lucky, and submitting PRs produced by the cheapest overseas “assistant” they can find (modern version being ChatGPT, obviously) then you start to realize the problem: When the team has an assignment and one person is playing games instead of doing work, the rest of the team has to do more work.
It’s outsourcing your work to your teammates, basically.
The obvious rebuttal is that managers need to stop this, and they do. It takes time, though. At some companies it takes 6-12 months to build a case to fire someone. The Tim Ferriss book also has defensive advice about working extra hard to impress your boss and taking steps to avoid having your lack of work discovered by your boss. Notably absent is content about being respectful of your coworkers.
So before you jump in and defend everything any employee might do to be selfish, remember that it’s not just the company they’re extracting from. It’s their coworkers. And being on the receiving end of this behavior as a coworker sucks.
> lying to employees
Not necessarily to employees, but in general - could be customers or other businesses too.
> everything is viewed through the lens of business versus employees
Not business vs employee but business vs individual. There's a lot of shit in the business world that is considered good when done by a company, but bad when doing by an individual.
Corporation-on-consumer fraud has been normalized. Outlandish claims in advertising are even enshrined in law so that you can't even sue for that (not that it would go anywhere either way).
It sometimes correlates with class but has nothing to do with class per-se (in fact it's very cheap to set up an LLC and engage in a lot of dubious practices that would land someone in jail if practiced under their personal capacity).
> I was a coworker of someone trying to practice these techniques.
I've been a coworker of some incompetent employees too - in fact it's even sadder that they didn't practice those techniques because at least then someone would benefit - in their case nobody was benefiting, not even them.
I'm not blaming them though; they match what is expected of a "senior" developer nowadays and passed all the interviews. It's the same reason my coffee is now both smaller and more expensive, but applied to employment. Companies are welcome pay more to get better talent.
The other employees who take on the slack without extra pay are engaging in philanthropy so the company has no reason to fire the slackers and hire more expensive talent if ultimately everything works out anyway.
The company could of course preemptively compensate them for the extra workload, but if you believe this actually happens I have a very nice bridge to sell you.
> At some companies it takes 6-12 months to build a case to fire someone
That sounds like a hiring or performance management problem. In the meantime, if someone can pocket 12 months of salary as a result of such incompetence, more power to them - it ain't my problem to solve unless I get a cut of the savings!
> being on the receiving end of this behavior as a coworker sucks
It gives the few that actually do work more leverage to negotiate higher salaries/fees/benefits. But of course you have to capitalize on it instead of engaging in charity/volunteering.
Edit: funny thing about ChatGPT and LLMs, companies are intentionally encouraging and tracking their usage, thinking more slop is somehow going to get them out of the hole they dug themselves in.