This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Management are assholes and idiots.
Nothing will get better without demands. People need to organize.
But if I've learned anything from history, it's that the ownership class would rather murder all of their employees than give a few dollars more a day.
It's because the few more dollars per day empowers people not to have to deal with exploitative practices, to be able to save an emergency fund, to be able to look elsewhere for opportunities.
They had literal segments on Fox where they were complaining that companies couldn't strong arm people anymore because COVID turned the balance in labor value. Uber is known to give desperation compensation much lower then drivers who are more selective. Data is used to min-max labor exploitation.
Hybrid mode do me well.
Allows to have the advantages that on site have ( real contact with the collegues ) while allowing to take a breath from transportation.
Worked from home for 8 years, and routinely finished projects ahead of schedule which left me with a ton of time to work on furthering my education, personal projects, home maintenance and hobbies. Work life balance!
Been working an in-person role for 2 years now, have zero time during the day to do anything else, couldn't do most of those things at the office anyway, and I make no additional money. These last two years have felt like my life has largely been on hold.
Companies with remote work will harvest all the talents from RTO ones, so a difference in productivity and costs (rent) will do the rest.
RTO will fail
Rto does a great job of scaring off talent that has options.
You get to keep all the losers who can't get a better job. You also get to waste a ton of money on rent and office space.
My company went rto. Then they closed a downtown office and forced everyone out to their exurban campus an hour from the city.
Anyone with an ounce of talent left. My remaining team is mostly duds. I need to gtfo, but the money is good--which means they are paying (me at least) a high premium.
Rto is fucking moronic.
I have an unusual situation - immaterial commute, flexible hours - and enjoy working in the office more than working from home. Have done both and working from home is a drag.
Doesn't mean I'd force others to come in! But the only thing worse than a meeting is a teams meeting, and there is a lot of value for me getting that space back in my house, and in the incidental learning I both receive and provide to others when we are in person. Also it's entirely possible I'm too introverted to happily work from home.
So as long as work provides a common space to work I am happier here. I do think the environment benefits from fewer commuters but I don't drive to work because it's so close.
The real problem is usually not the office itself, but the journey there and back.
Yeah I am very,very sensitive to commute time, and recognize my situation is uncommon (arranged on purpose though - I won't take a job far or more than one city bus away) I wonder how the answers would change if the office was in the same building as your apartment, or within a mile as mine is. I really don't want any part of my home life to be my employment.
I couldn’t agree more: if the commute took less than 20 minutes (on foot or by bike), remote working would probably be rated less favourably.
Turns out the commute, fluorescent lighting, constant interruptions and performative desk sitting weren’t secretly essential ingredients for human happiness after all. Shocking. Next study: 7,700 managers discover that seeing someone in a chair is not actually a productivity metric.
And 7,600 of them discover that aside from micromanaging and degrading the well-being of their employees, they have no other substantive job duties, and their employment is completely pointless.
I became a manager about a year ago. Now that I'm part of the "inner circle", I can see firsthand what I suspected for the past 20 years.
There are 2 types of managers.
There are cunts bosses who treat their employees as property for their personal gain and advancement. They demand productivity at all costs (see: LLM-cogsuckers), punish for mistakes and pressure people into responsibilities they should take. They are the ones who want RTO to exert control on their employees. They are the ones who "joke" you must take a half-day leave if you need to go before 6PM. They are the ones who openly shit on their employees (or other teams employees FWIW) because they're not benefiting them enough. They are not part of the team, they feel and act above everyone in it.
The second type, which I strive to be and most of my closest "manager friend" are, are servant-leaders. They want to get shit done by easing roadblocks and making technologically informed decisions. They understand that productivity is a consequence of a functional team and happy employees. They take on responsibility for mistakes and push the team towards finding solutions to prevent them. They understand that Life^TM^ is more important than work. They are an integral part of the team, they're not the boss but a full member with a different role and different responsibilities, like a PO or a data analyst.
As a tech lead first and a trained Scrum Master second, I feel much more comfortable in the second role. I help the team internally and report and manage external roadblocks with other teams. It's what I already know. I hate the hierarchical part of the job.
I had 2 such 2^nd^ type bosses in over 20 years.
You really notice they're how you described when they're gone - the deluge of shit begins almost immediately.
Yeah it’s interesting to think about. I’ve been 100% remote for more than SIX YEARS now. Since the first days of COVID. And I’m so deep into it that I’m suffering the ill effects of remote: lack of social interaction with coworkers. Feeling shut up at home all the time. Having to work with people in crazy times zones because remote means you work with whoever, wherever. Zoom fatigue. Lack of separation between work and home life. There are definitely downsides. And some of them are pretty serious. The isolation has really eaten at me, especially.
But would I go back to full time? Heck no.
True, similar here. I go to coworking space to eat lunch in the commom area and talk to people.
I’ve been working remotely for over 20 years. One of my subsidiaries is entirely decentralised and remote. I can’t imagine doing anything else now.
Performative desk sitting is the worst. Got nothing to do so I have to just click on things.
extroverts can't understand that not everyone is like them. more at 11
As an extrovert, please let me work from home. It'll save me a commute so I can spend more time with people I like
Yeah. COVID lockdown was my golden era.
I secretly despised people at my company that wanted to demolish remote working completely after COVID on the pretence that people are traumaticed by the solitude and need to get back on the horse 100%.
Eventually only max. 30% remote was allowed and became company norm.
Even then some of these pieces of shit actually forbid remote working from their subordinates.
Those subordinates then gave them absolutely garbage employee reviews and made their worklife hell. Now they are in some other company torturing some other poor souls.
These are the same people who create useless team building exercises.
Even if they do understand that, I’m not sure it matters. I’m an introvert so I know how easy it is to think of extroverts as annoying, overbearing sausages. However they have needs just like I do. Isolation genuinely harms them just like over stimulation harms me. I think it brings some realism to this topic if we remember that maybe they aren’t doing everything they’re doing just for the sake of shoving extroversion down your throat: maybe they are just trying to meet their own needs. It’s like the flip side of what introverts always say: don’t take it personally if I need to withdraw from you, I’m just meeting my own needs. Can you make the same allowance for them?
Sure, but they have the easier solution. They can socialize anywhere. Meanwhile, for us: income isn't optional.
To say nothing of the ethics of using a captive audience to meet your 'needs.'
To the surprise of no one.
Whether it's a mix of control or egos, I think it is mostly about the fallacy that they are leaving unspent productivity on the table. Yet, COVID proved that people can be effective at home. It's nonsense to assume that you won't do the job and then somehow get paid for it. It's a strawman.
That is why, after all logical arguments were made, and bad faith responses dispelled, they chose to say it was about culture. That undefinable metric exist solely in the validation of HR and management. Pizza lunches, recognition events, and captive audiences.
Here's the actual study if anyone cares to read it.
Skimming it, a couple things I noticed: This was a study of over 7,000 people across all departments at a large healthcare system. They found on-site workers skewed younger with shorter tenure and remote workers skewed older with longer tenure.
One potential pitfall: They didn't control in any way for department or role, and so floor nurses and housekeeping staff who must work fully on-site are being compared to tenured nurses working utilization review or revenue cycle staff whose job is billing/coding and who don't have to interact with anyone in their roles. In-person and remote jobs in healthcare tend to be very different jobs. I don't know how well this study could be generalized to other types of job settings based on this info
Capitalism as we know it, isn't about effectiveness nor efficiency, it is primarily about power. So long as this remains the case, workers will continue to be abused for the amusement of the higher ups.
If they would get rid of these terrible open plan offices, where people can hear the silent fart you try to squeeze out gently, and go back to offices where you at least would have a smidgen of privacy, this would improve office attendance.
While some part of me misses my fortress cubicle and undershelf lamp, complete with pillar obstructing the window so I had just two vertical slits...
I still only did good work there when I was alone in the office, usually before or after most people's office hours.
Once enough people showed up it just became a daily social event ritual. This was well before covid.
RTO work often is about control and not about cost or efficiency.
Or encouraging people to quit on their own. It's a lot cheaper than firing people.
Quit my last job over being asked in once a week. It was the commute rather than the office that I really wanted to avoid but it was also an awful open plan hotdesk office for a company of hundreds of people I didn't know or care about.
New role is office based but I don't need to drive or take public transport and teams have their own rooms to work in. Much smaller company too, under 30 people. Banter is far better here and that helps quite a bit.
I can’t believe how much more I get done when I’m left alone and focused on the task at hand.
I don’t feel particularly isolated. Everybody is different but a once-week team chat and seasonal social lunches fill my cup.
Turns out when you can do errands and meet non-work friends for coffee as you please you don’t need to lean on your office family so much for connection and purpose.
"I think flexibility is here to stay," she said.
This is the problem with academics. They do a study, find something is logically better, then assume humans will act logically.
Unfortunately, most CEOs don't give a shit if their employees are more happy, productive, and less likely to quit if they work remotely. They just want to feel like they have control over people's lives, which is why we're seeing more return to office initiatives.
They signed a 20-year lease 10 years ago so they feel like they have to use the building.
Source: wild assumptions, i know nothing about commercial real estate.
I'm very fortunate to have a job with a very small company (literally 4 people) where we get to set the rules.
It is funny to see the ingrained notion we (collective "we") once had that working from home could never work. I started this job in 2018, and I often suggested we do a work from home day each week since we all had laptops. My bosses (co-owners of this company) always shot it down. "Oh we'd never get any work done!"
Then, of course, COVID. And while I certainly would rather COVID not have happened, it did convince them that working from actually works. And, of course, they loved it as well. So since 2020 I have not had to go back to the office. We still have office space for some minor things, and once in a blue moon we might gather there. But in six years I've probably spent six days in the office.
Heck, I'm fortunate enough to finally have convinced them we should take Fridays off, too. We piloted that program two years ago over the summer, and it, of course, stuck because everyone likes that—though we actually just take every-other Friday off. But still. Hard to beat.
Surprise surprise
I worked on site for 4 months before my remote work was approved and it was literally the most unfulfilling life I had
I would work 9 to 630, come home so tired that all I could do is throw something quick to eat and watch TV (didn't process what I was watching) then later fall asleep and rinse and repeat
How anyone is able to do this lifestyle is a testament to humanity's ability to adapt
Working culture is fucked up and needs to change
When we got a new CEO one of the first things he mandated was RTO. He said the alternative was to shut the office down, and that he was fine with that (I highly doubt that) but a decision had to be made. And so RTO it was, because that had better vibes or something. It's fascinating, the leadership has during several meetings mentioned how much nicer it is now that people are in the office, but none of the "grunts" I've spoken to like it.
HR drone always talks about how nice it is to see everyone collaborating in the office when we come in for quarterly meetings.
Nobody is getting work done. We’re all “collaborating” about sportsball or coffee machines or whatever it is, or just trying to tune it out. It’s a full day of productivity lost for nearly everyone there. Not to mention the early rise for a commute, cost of the commute, missed workouts, and exhaustion on the return home.
I’m all for as much remote work as possible, but I would love a study to include commute length and mode of transport. When I lived a 20 min walk from my office it was great and didn’t mind being at the office full time.
I moved away and it’s now a 30 min car drive which I really hate, a 1 hr bus journey, or 45 min bike ride.
I wouldn’t mind the bus journey so much, as I can read a book on my way, but the unreliability makes it feel so much worse.
And despite being longer than the drive, I much prefer to cycle into work, and I’ll usually do extra days in the office during the summer as an “excuse” to be on the bike.
