insomn1ac

When Yahoo decided "no more remote working" there was a fair amount of backlash in techie circles that this was pretty silly and backwards for a tech company.

Speaking for myself, I do "web stuff" for a living, and despite being not even 10% the standard to work at a high-profile / high-traffic site like Yahoo or Reddit (therefore not exactly in a position to dictate terms), I personally feel any company with a "no remote working ever" policy would entirely dissuade me from applying.

Firstly - I genuinely feel remote working makes me more productive for my employer as well as enabling much better "work/life balance", I can't imagine giving it up from a selfish perspective.

Secondly - I feel like that sort of stance is just a 'red flag' in a company. It implies to me likely inflexibility with employees in other matters, and a kind of 'defeatism' around online communications that is highly ill-fitting in a company based around the same - i.e., if a company does not believe they can get even a few dozen employees to positively and productively interact without being in the same place, how do they suppose their platform can support millions of users positively and productively interacting from remote locations?

What is the reddit counterargument to all this sort of rambling?

New thought: having all employees in SF decreases the hours in the day where some member of staff will naturally be working. Are people going to be adding night shifts/availability to their contracts?

I wake up, immediately begin work, work all day with necessary breaks, and end my day with work

Exactly! On an in-the-office day, I'll be sure to take every minute of my lunch break, and once I'm back home from my return commute, I'm switched off. On a work-at-home day, I'll be taking ad-hoc (reddit) breaks all day, but I'll end up eating my lunch in front of git, and find myself still pushing commits gone midnight. I'm sure I end up working more.

Admittedly though my situation isn't directly comparable to reddit's, since my working at home is a few miles from the office, I can always come in at short notice if needs be, it's not AK or FL to CA.

As a brit that is a particularly amusing statement

An English Parliament would be too close in size to UK and inevitably focussed on London

London should be its own region within the federation, not part of England. Any other arrangement would be insanity, given only the simple fact that London has about the same population as Scotland and Wales put together, let alone the way the economy, demographics, culture etc are as different (or more) from other English regions as Scotland is from England.

So many other federated countries have their capitals as a separate region precisely to avoid it biasing one of the other regions.

Unfortunately a lot of people in this country seem to enjoy having London as an all-purpose whipping boy to blame all problems on, rather than actually restructuring things to improve the situation. Others (like your future electoral nemesis DC) seem to be proposing laughable sticking plasters, like having Scottish MPs not vote on certain things, but otherwise keeping Westminster as is, out of their own self-preservation I expect. Nobody seems to prepared to give the UK the thorough constitutional shake-up it so clearly needs after last month, because they daren't risk their current FTTP-entrenched comfortable party-political gravy trainy status quo. Just look at the pathetic deliberately-built-to-fail AV proposal a few years ago.