“And to disprove that working from home made you more productive, we demand you return to the office and work twice the hours!”
Some small companies really are like families. But with large companies “family” usually means when they’re in trouble you should pitch in and help by working extra for free, but when you’re in trouble you’re on your own.
It’s uncanny, it’s almost as if removing office politics, drama, “team building”, and endless useless meetings from the equation improves productivity.
Who knew?
“we’re all a family here” fuck off
It also has to with the tyranny of distance. People end up trapped in shitty jobs that aren’t right for them. They end up in roles where they aren’t doing the things they want to do or where their talents truly lie. Economically, this causes them to be much less productive than they could be in a position that’s a better fit for them.
And the main reason people end up trapped in jobs is the tyranny of distance. Maybe there’s only two employers in your town that can really use your specific skills. For someone who owns a home, moving costs tens of thousands of dollars. And often you can’t find out a position won’t be a good fit until you actually work there for awhile.
Work from home overcomes much of this tyranny of distance. It allows employers and employees to find much better matches for each other, unconstrained by physical distance. And for this reason, shitty employers hate it. Shitty employers thrive on transaction/switching costs and employee lock-in.
The tea & coffee fund
Team building is fine, even beneficial, when done right. Which is almost never.
I mean, a dysfunctional family is still a family. 🤣
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First they forced us back to the office despite a mountain of evidence showing hybrid work is more productive.
Now they’re forcing us to use AI even if it’s pure garbage.
I’m so sick of these micromanaging, power-tripping buffoons. I can’t wait to retire.
retire
lol
we are not going to retire
For real. At best, we’re all going to become impromptu homesteaders/farmers. At worst, we starve before we can
I just straight-up refuse to use the AI tools at work.
Boss’s boss bitches at my boss about it regularly, but I do the work of three people for the salary of 3/4 of a person, so chasing me off would only cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars in recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training my replacements and gain them nothing.
Know your worth and be willing to walk away.
I do the work of three people for the salary of 3/4 of a person
Know your worth and be willing to walk away.
Congrats! You’re too thick to understand what hyperbole is. And four highly regarded fellas upvoted you?
LMAO it’s nice to know that the younger generation isn’t smart enough to be able to take our jobs.
That was oddly specific
My comment has 7 upvotes actually 💪😤
You’re bad at hyperbole dude
“Other dipshits around here agree with me” is not the flex you think it is.
You decided to rage at my completely innocuous comment an entire day after I posted it, I’m not the one trying to flex here. Why are you so mad
The only thing they care about more than money is power and control.
The mayor of my city is actively campaigning for going back to 5 day full workweeks for all office workers, under the bullshit guise of ‘support small business’. She’s a corporate shrill and has pivoted to because she wants to run for higher office and needs their campaign donations.
No, the company that owns all the business downtown, are giant mega real estate corps. That’s who you are trying to benefit. My own company is downsizing our lease to 33% of our pre-pandemic square footage, because it makes no sense and our productivity is through the roof compared to being stuck in a open-office plan with people distracting each other for 50% of the work day.
I work less, and I get way more done because my time is much more focused, and more gets documented. Unlike in-office where more than half my daily workload was invisible because it was face to face/verbal interactions that never got recognized because they were not digitally recorded.
Holy shit this is big!
Are you telling me that giving better work conditions to your workers (and therefore making them happier) INCREASES PRODUCTIVITY?!?!
I
AM
SHOCKED.
Giving everyone an office is too costly.
I’ve got an idea, since cubicle went so well, lets shorten the walls to half walls.
Since half wall cubicles went so well, lets take the walls down complete.
Since the fully open design worked so well, lets squish all the desks together as closely as possible.
Since bench desking worked so well, lets take away personal desks all together and go to a hot desking system.
Since hot desking went so well, lets replace the desks with side tables, and benches with empty cat littler buckets.
Excerpt from “Leadership’s Guide to Call Centers”
It’s not that simple, there’s also esprit de corps and discipline and networking.
Yes, for work productivity right now right here it makes sense that working remotely is good.
That has always been known and normal for people who can work remotely. Writers, or anyone who can synchronize their work through runners with envelopes or, later, fax and telephone.
But also people who can work remotely would always have situations where they’d prefer not to.
My sympathies with remote work are because I’m spoiled and because of retrofuturistic promises of (almost) everyone working like that, my concerns are because you’d want sometimes to see people you’re working with, and if many people work in one place and some work remotely, then even if the latter work well, they are ruining discipline.
You’re talking different neurotypes here. Why should we prioritize the neurotype that prefers in-office vs the neurotype that prefers out-of-office? If anything, shouldn’t we prefer the working style that saves the company money and is more productive on average?
I dunno if I’m more productive on average
“Ruining discipline”, ha! What idiocy. Suggesting that working from office is the right way and anything that deviates from it is “ruining” something.
How about the people working from the office are “ruining discipline” of the remote workers by taking decisions behind closed doors? No? Seems unfair?
Maybe let people work the way they work their best except for very specific circumstances instead, and stop blaming structural failures within companies against remote workers.
I worked in a traditional office environment for the full decade before the pandemic, and I was constantly being distracted by “undisciplined” people. There was always someone having a loud conversation in a quiet workspace or coming to my cubical to interrupt me with pointless bullshit.
Going full remote has finally isolated me from the lack of discipline in office environments.
Yeah, we were all sitting in the office with headphones to isolate from the office noise and distractions so we could concentrate and getting work done.
Can confirm. Was stuck in an “open office”. It was hell on earth until they decided to build brand new offices for the sales team… Because why the fuck not
we had a massive no wall cubical farm. To get rid of noise they hung active noise canceling speakers above our cubes. There were times you couldn’t even hear yourself breathing. Was TOO quiet.
I like the way my office does it. All the engineers and drafters are on the ground floor. The sales guys work in a loft at the back of the building. We keep them in the attic like they would keep dementia patients in the attic back in the olden days.
Yes, convenience is often ruining discipline, not for me (ASD) and perhaps not for you, but social ties form between coworkers. That part about behind closed doors - see, they always will.
I mean, we live in a society. Not seeing the faces of the others is a weakness. It’s not all about work.
Important meetings and decisions should be made with remote workers present and with their full participation. If your team frequently cuts people out and is prone to forming cliques of in-groups and out-groups, return to office won’t help you. Those same middle school politics happen in entirely in-person offices. People get cut out and isolated whether remote or in person when management decides their input isn’t valuable.
Those same middle school politics
Sorry, but as far as I have seen, not having what you called that at all is a precious rarity.
How is it a weakness? If anything it seems like it would help address inequity in how people are treated based on race, age, gender if people are interacting more anonymously, and maybe we could also dispense with this whole coworkers are a family bs that is meant to instil loyalty to a company that doesn’t care about you and offset a lack of work life balance
Because those who see each other’s faces coordinate closer socially and might eat you. We live in a society, not a friendly place sometimes.
I have never found that face to face interaction caused people to act nicer. If anything all of my face to face jobs I have had coworkers drop the ball countless times where the next person in the chain gets screwed over. It was more demoralizing when you confronted them because they don’t give a shit unless THEY are geting screwed.
Not nicer. Just you’d be more likely to see those going to backstab you deliberately. OK, everyone has their own opinion
An it sounds like it might be part of this so called problem in society. You can’t make the world a better place without starting.
It’s not that simple, there’s also esprit de corps and discipline and networking.
fuck that, not having to commute for over 2h every day beats anything you could list as being good in pro-return-to-office
I get depressed after long periods of remote work, go to office, then remember why I didn’t particularly value the experience, get back to remote.
But also people who can work remotely would always have situations where they’d prefer not to.
[citation needed]
I’ve described a situation - where you’d want to talk something over a cigarette or a cup of tea with your coworker, for example. Or participate in sporadic conversations while walking around the office, help some colleague, get help from some other colleague.
I’m a millennial, I grew up in chat rooms and web forums. There is nothing unique to in-person interaction in what you just described.
You are saying this as if you were flexing your old age to me, while so am I.
No. You can’t see their face.
Chat rooms and web forums were in some sense safe spaces. There would be intrigue, but somewhat limited by what concerns a specific forum, or even a specific part of it, or a specific chat. Even conflicts in one place between two people would often not extend to some other place.
And also, believe it or not, people frequenting same spaces would sometimes have offline meetings and know each other personally. Especially moderators and such.
But I agree that what you mentioned was like halfway there from today’s online communication which sometimes seems just useless.
You are commiting a category error: Work is not recreation.
I want to get to know people in similar hobbies so yes I would want to see them face to face. I don’t care to interact with my coworkers beyond what I am paid for. For the coworkers I do want to interact with socially, can do that outside of work.
You can do all these things remotely. You are not sharing the ciggarette or tea.
Sporadic conversations around the office, set up water cooler or drop in chats. Hard to get going, sure but not impossible. Or side channels for conversations with people you like.
Surely you can get help from anyone anyways right?
I recall reading an article the first few months into lockdown that nationally, productivity was up a surprising 17% average.
I guess commercial landlords, micromanaging bosses, and the ultra rich realized it started to loosen their grip on the rest of us and we might like our lives a little. Every article after that was the complete opposite, and basically misinformation hit everywhere hard to pound out of our minds it was ever mentioned!
Maybe managers woke up and focused on productivity rather than 'are you in office on time? ’
I hope they found a good way to measure productivity, because I never came across a convincing one.
At my company they came up with a great plan. Count our pr merges lol.
It’s been going on a few weeks and they are just realizing that we have a ton of prs but still haven’t shipped a ton of features lol.
They have played their hand and shown they have no idea what they are doing.
Haha. Better or worse than, ‘jira tickets’ or ‘story points’?
They’re doing a f-ing reporting database migration just now, just measure tables created that match the old DB. And standard user queries that output the same.
“Oh hang on, does the new database have to have the same data as the old one?” "We’ve reviewed all of our non existing requirements gathering notes and the “business " never wrote that as a requirement. we can squeeze it in later on the roadmap, when some dev resources have been freed up. Can you tell us more about these ‘queries’; is that a power bi thing? - i think another team does that?”
Sack 3 or more layers of “management/director/head of/architect/strategy”, that have a lot more impact on productivity than letting people wank from home.
We did. Projects move ahead faster, problems got solved quicker, problems went down.
Frankly, it was never remote working per se, it was embracing the elements that make it work: asynchronous work. Documenting EVERYTHING, completely open infrastructure (everyone can see what everyone is doing/working on), requiring dedicated YOU do this tasks, assignments etc.
But from then on, we didn’t need an office anymore. We don’t even need regularly scheduled hours for everyone, what ever works for them is fine. I think that gives people opportunity to do things when they like, and without the commute there is a lot more actually doing the work when they are there.
Individual worker / team / prod line. Sure you can measure those. That’s great for those at thst level… But I don’t know how you add them up across the whole of “America” without some very dubious economic statistics bullshit.
Empirically , economy wide measures are generally useless i reckon. And often manipulated. It’s very hard to add up output of different production lines (or different goods or services) in a single meaningful measure and account for all the variables like quality, product mix, availability and if you’re using price-weights all stuff that distorts market power. Econo-statisticians will calculate it, because they get paid to, but the honest/aware ones should fess up it’s got serious weaknesses however you calculate it.
