vaguely spicy take
People joke about "expensing hacker events as work trips" but actually I think that's genuinely a reasonable thing to do, even under the 'conventional' understanding of what constitutes a 'work trip' (for training and education).
There's no rule that says a trip must be boring to qualify as "materially useful to your job"! That idea is just some puritan(?) ideological nonsense, it has no bearing on how the world works.
vaguely spicy take
@joepie91 I thought there are actually rules about that made up by executives and HR people and stuff? 😅
vaguely spicy take
@hazelnot The actual rules you have to comply with (as enforced by eg. tax authorities) generally just specify that it must be concretely useful to the job in some way. This is trivially satisfied by hacker events if you're remotely working in tech.
Crucially, that specifies what property the trip *must* have. It doesn't specify what property the trip *must not* have. Whatever rules executives layer on top of that is 100% their own ideology, and that is on them.
(Also, it's standard practice for people to get completely and utterly drunk at 'boring' industry conferences too, so it's not like "injecting some kind of fun into events" is exclusive to hacker events anyway)
vaguely spicy take
@joepie91 fair, I figured they could just, deny your request to have it filed as a work trip or something
vaguely spicy take
@hazelnot They could, but it would be unreasonable
vaguely spicy take
@joepie91 lol fair I'm terrified of bosses and the government, if I actually had a job I'd probably make my life a living hell bending over backwards to please everyone just out of sheer fear of getting fired
