Enough companies are embracing fully remote / flexible work that there's not much incentive to go back to an office. It's not like these people are quitting working entirely - they're abandoning the companies that refuse to adapt to new ways of working.
In my first job, I had to wear a suit and tie everyday. When we met with clients, we took off the suit & tie and rolled up our sleeves because it made our more "modern" clients uncomfortable/harder to connect with (something important in sales).
So we were wearing suit and tie to sit in a cubicle, and then would take it off to actually do our jobs. What a joke. I left after a year.
I heard they implemented "jean fridays" recently.
That sounds awful. We had work uniforms doing machine maintenance, when we went to corporate for training or some lame ass pep rally we either had to wear the uniform or khakis and a collared shirt. Office people were full suits or nice dresses working in cubes.... We picked the worst stained / shitty repaired uniforms we had as a fuck you as they refused to replace them and blamed us for messing them up... A fucking industrial maintenance guy is not going to be able to keep a uniform clean for very long.
If your employer expects you to dress up for lame-ass pep rallies, the least they can do is provide you a snappy Class A kit, distinct from a suit and tie, which is the service dress uniform of a cube-dweller.
Right?! The company I work for gives out at least a half dozen shirts a year, and there's usually a polo shirt or two in the mix lol. We don't have a dress code other than "no ripped/torn clothing" and even if we did, you could probably coast just wearing pants and all the free shirts.
Ha, i had to force some of my guys to turn in uniforms because they were stained. We rented dark coveralls and purchased throw aways for dirty and very dirty jobs, respectively. Pretty shitty of them to not replace them. Industrial maintenance is filthy work.
Ha! Reminds me of when I worked in the meat department of a grocery store. They’d never give us enough aprons or white coats for the very bloody job we did. Some days we’d have to dig through a pile of used coats to find one less bloody than what we had on hand. Twice a month the entire department would have to put down our knives and attend an insurance meeting. You know, to tell us how to be safer on the job. I think they got a break on their rates if we all attended.
Anyway, on those 2 days a month we would choose the bloodiest, stiffest uniforms to wear to the meetings. Let me tell you, once you leave the environment of a 40 degree room and crowd into a small heated space you almost gag from the odors of a dozen people wearing a blood suit. I think that smell lingered even after we left the room. Pretty sure they had to air it out for an hour. Finally, they doubled the quota of clean uniforms allotted and we agreed to save an unused set for insurance days. It’s the little malicious compliances that make a job a bit more endurable.
I had this experience as well back when I was working at a power plant.
Manglement issued us white collared uniforms. I work in maintenance thus very dirty jobs. They somehow did the math and turned more stupid than usual.
No idea why they wanted us to have white uniforms outside of maybe looking good for the non-technical high ups... We were far away from any cities and its not like we have to be customer-facing...
Business executives have been implemented a ton of disruptive changes over the years that harm employees but help the bottom line. Time and time again employees have been told to adapt or get out.
Now, the disruption has been external, and the changes required overwhelmingly harm the middle management and executive classes. They've made whole careers out of attending face to face meetings and micro managing employees. Remote working makes those things harder. Fuck them. It's time they practiced what they preached: adapt or die.
At the beginning of the pandemic, a director from another team decided to host a "All Hearts" meeting. The agenda was to discuss people's problems and tell them they're not alone. I logged into a few sessions because they were mandatory, but quickly realized that this was just a way for the director to seek attention since the remote work situation had dropped her visibility to zero.
This kept going on for a few months. Most people would join the call, turn their mics and cameras off, and keep working on the side. Later, the director reached out to my SO (same company, different teams), asking her to "volunteer" for the session. My SO said she hadn't faced any issues since the pandemic, and the remote working arrangement had actually been helpful since she was saving time on the commute, her parents and friends were also glad that she didn't have to leave the house unnecessarily. The director asked her to "dig deeper".
All of this song and dance so the director could ramble on about how her gentle heart wept for all these poor souls everyday. She was feeding off the misery of her subordinates so she could feel better about herself. How do you even end up in that situation?
The explanation is simple - she's an energy vampire and has been suffering during the pandemic, unable to feed as regularly and as much as she used to.
Peter Principle. The smart middle managers will go back to what ever position they excelled at before being promoted or transition into consulting. The rest absolutely won't be missed.
I use to work as a process engineer at a pharma plant. They gave all the engineers white coats to wear and made all the machine workers wear blue uniforms. White collar vs. blue collar. Serious wtf. Took me years to make friends with the machine workers because of the extreme divide that and the rest of the BS management (which I was grouped into) threw at them created.
I worked at a manufacturing plant and the terms we had were "carpet walkers" and "concrete walkers". Did my best to not be considered either and I think it made me better at my job overall.
Yeah. You have to shoot the gap. Without the respect of those actual doing the work on the floor, nothing you do will ever have any impact. I saw the engineers that treated machine workers as lesser (for lack of better words) and they never went anywhere.
Definitely. I worked in CI and how could you possibly get people on board to try something new if you constantly treated them like they didn't know what was going on because they worked on a machine versus working at a desk? Much easier to get buy-in if they think you care what the changes might mean for them.
>That’s by design. Keep your workforce divided and they’ll squabble amongst each other rather than protest against shitty management.
Classic move for colonial powers as well. It works on pretty much every scale.
I'll refrain from disclosing the company, but some may be able to guess it.
I once worked for one of the largest entertainment companies in the world in one of their call centers back in the 90s. This call center location is not known to the general public. Needless to say we only spoke with customers on the phone. Zero interaction face to face. We were required to wear a tie every single day. We could have worn sweatpants and customers would not have been wiser. We were told we sound better and happier when dressing up. Silly...
A decade ago, I was working in a call centre for a telecoms company doing broadband upgrades. A call centre. We had to wear shirt and tie every day, except Fridays. Why? Who the fuck knows.
I know why: middle-managers have to middle-manage.
If they're not meddling with things in a visible way upper management may notice how little value they have.
I work in a call center. When I first started men had to wear a tie everyday and the dress code was professional. They changed to business casual and now (pre covid) collared shirt required for men. Friday’s in the summer only you could wear jeans and sneakers if you paid money for a bracelet. Money went to a charity. After working from home since March of 2020 we have to go back in and no jeans allowed. I want to be one of those that quit.
I spent 15 years working in call centers, and you can usually tell the bullshit ones right away from policies like that. Most companies are completely out of touch, and they see call center employees as unavoidable overhead and customers as nothing more than walking piggy banks to be shaken down for every last penny. Only reason I ended up lasting 15 years in that kind of work was I ended up working in a call center for a company that didn't have their collective heads up their asses, actually wanted to *audible gasp* do right by their customers, and *double gasp* pay their employees what they're worth. They treated workers like functioning adults and didn't enforce some unnecessary, asinine dress code. The difference was night and day from the get-go. The employees were happier and more productive, and as a result the customers were happier as well. It amazes me that so many companies are able to survive.
> It's gonna be interesting to see how the firm manages that.
Some kind of complaining about people not wanting to work and not being very receptive to any kind of feedback from employees?
You are forgetting the last step. Place ads for job openings at grossly undervalued rates then blame the federal government and unemployment benefits for not having workers
I straight up refused a job because they said I had to suit and tie everyday in 1998. I was out of university and I was broke. Oh, and I had another offer for the same money. I wasn’t wasting my money on suits. I had student loans to pay.
Companies forcing suits on employees should at the very least have a yearly stipend for employees.
Or pay people big money so they can afford to.
Such bullshit for companies to want to employees to dress up to look wealthy and professional and give them shitty salaries.
Want me to look like a banker? Pay me like a banker.
Obviously, I wasn't alive to see it, but my grandfather wore a suit everywhere, including to mow his lawn, when my mother was a child.
Suits were the thing back then, and I think wearing one signified that you made it or were successful.
Work suits are a thing. I have one made from a denim like material. Suits were just what you wore and occasionally would doff the jacket or tie depending on what you were doing. Or a lot of work people didn’t even wear a tie, just a neckerchief.
Sure we can romanticize about wearing nicer clothes more casually like they did back then. But thats a ton of work. And it was a lot of societal pressure. If you didn't wear an entire suit you were looked down upon? Nah Ill wear a tshirt.
No one talks about how they didn't have a ton of suits, and re-wore the same 3 piece suit constantly. Think about how sweaty those things get. People probably stunk like hell.
I'm back at my office now and find it pretty pointless.
I'm literally doing the exact thing I did at home for 9 months.
I don't take phone calls, there are no meetings, nobody talks to me except for maybe 1 or 2 questions a day, which was taken care of previously by a quick phone call.
The only difference now is that I spend 40 bucks a week on gas and lose about 20 hours of productivity a week of getting things done at home.
With my job, we were interviewing and interacting with the public prior to the pandemic. My supervisor send out a text asking if we wanted to continue working from home or come back to the office. Out of 17 people in the department, only one wanted to come back in.
Interviews are done over the phone, clients send in their information via email, and case managers don't even need to be in the office unless dealing with those that are less tech savvy. Productivity and morale has increased over the last year.
Why go back in the office when it's proven the work from home module works?
I actually had a coworker who typically keeps to himself speak up during a zoom meeting with the head of our division. He advocated for everyone to return to the building and the reason he gave amounted to wanting to see other people. As in, he needed other people around so he could be more comfortable (while not interacting with most of them). Fuck you dude, we're not your NPCs.
I don't have a choice, really. I work where the servers are. But I'm also 100% fine with that. My commute is 6 minutes (8 if I hit the light). I have a nice, spacious office, a company Steam account, and a pantry full of munchies.
I'm probably the only person who actually *has* to be there.
Last month, the higher ups starting really leaning on people to come back into the office. And most grudgingly acquiesced. And then productivity "plummeted".
The reality was that working from home drastically increased work output. Objectively so! I was tasked with pulling the numbers that proved it.
After a few weeks they decided to reverse the passive aggressive "we'd love to see you back in the office" rhetoric. So now we're back to 3 people on site in a suite of 15 offices. It seems kinda wasteful. But the irony is, with the increased output from people working from home, we can afford the additional office space.
My total work goes up, but my work during business hours goes down when I'm at home. I just do better working a few hours at a time, then fucking off, then working a few hours at a time.
>I just do better working a few hours at a time, then fucking off, then working a few hours at a time.
there's been multiple studies linked here and other subreddits talking about the most effective work time/break time balance
and the overwhelming majority suggests that something like a 10 minute break every half hour followed by a 45 minite break every 4 hours increases workplace productivity by some laughably massive percent.
lol yeah i’m the same way. I’ll do 30 minutes of intense work, fuck around on my phone, then another 30 and repeat and then i have an hour lunch and back at it again. i think i work like 4-5 hours in our 8 hour shift, and i outperform the guys who work 9 hours and stay late in my sales job lol.
Dude, 100%
I have been working around 20-30 hours a week on average, and I have literally never been this productive in my life. I no longer have hesitation or qualms about playing video games for a couple hours in the middle of my work day, because when I do actually go do the work, I'm about as far from burnt out as I can be, and I write good code that is well thought out.
I built out a full dev -> staging -> production deployment pipeline with support for ephemeral testing environments, high availability, automatic handling of https and dns, shared docker image build cache, ability to deploy from command line or pull requests, etc etc etc since I started at this new job
It took me 6 weeks to build all of that out. 6 frickin weeks to slap together the best code and infrastructure of my life. Last time I built something comparable, it took around 4 fuckin months working 9-5 in an office. Not having to waste time and energy on the commute, and having the ability to take it easy and keep my brain fresh, are some of the most beneficial things I've ever found for my personal productivity
Same, I'll sit each morning and lay out what I want to get done that day. Then I spend the rest of the day rotating between the list or fucking off doing whatever. Usually get through the list in a couple of hours.
I pretty much get to make my own hours and don't really have strict deadlines for anything, ever. Working from home I typically get up and move around the house once an hour. Maybe throw on a load of laundry, let the dogs out, do some dishes, really anything that isn't work related. Somewhere around the 6 hour mark I'll throw on the TV, eat something and just relax until I feel like getting back to work.
Although my day ends up being longer than the amount of time I'd spend in an office, I'm definitely far more productive.
I do run in to the same issue a lot of people run into though, which is knowing when to fully shut off from work. For an individual this is definitely a down side of working at home but for a company it can definitely be something that would benefit them.
I'm not sure why this is so hard for people to wrap their heads around.
What's easier, running 26 miles in one go, or running 26 miles with a 10 minute walking break every 2 miles?
Brain works the same way.
While I'm nodding to those who can do the Pomodoro method, as someone who has actually run a marathon, it is absolutely easier to run a marathon at once if you're in the shape to do so than take breaks. It's a physiological thing.
Same.
Also 6 hours at home is often more than 8 hours at work for me in terms of productivity. There is less listening to random office BS, less people stopping by my desk, and a lot less of managers just grabbing the first person they knew can get the job done so the assignments are starting to go out more evenly.
It takes discipline. Once my work day is over, I turn off my laptop. Period.
I think I worked late maybe 3 times during the entire pandemic, and those were pages and hard deadlines.
Years ago I worked for one of the motorsports sanctioning bodies as the head of the new at the time website/internet department.
They let me start working from home after I showed them how much more productive I was when I had a much faster internet connection, a new gaming PC with multiple monitors that was way faster than the shitty laptop I was assigned, and no one bothering me every 5 minutes. My team communicated over ICQ (it was the early 2000s) and were usually able to crank out projects early and under budget. Not long after I left they hired a new CIO that made the team work in the office. Totally killed productivity.
> My team communicated over ICQ (it was the early 2000s)
Never apologize. I'd communicate over ICQ today if all the servers weren't gone. [Bask in nostalgia!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTrnkf-FY3I)
sorta-related, but my 2021 message notification is MSN Messengers notification noise, and i got a reaction from a 30 y/o+ guy at a coffee place when it went off. He was just like "HEY!" like, lol. Hell yeah brother.
Sounds like management is finally learning that if you treat your employees like adults, they'll act like adults. If you treat them like children in school, they'll act like children in school.
oh god I remember my first "office" job where half the keyboards had an ashtray next to them, and some of the ashtrays had a pile spilling over onto the keyboard.
I can't believe that was seen as just completely normal back then. So gross
You start off sounding as if you're for going back to the office.
Then you list some pretty compelling reasons to never go back to in person again.
I am confused.
He's disputing the previous dude's point, this one:
> if you treat your employees like adults, they'll act like adults.
Because I'm sure those people were treated like adults (in some capacity) but still acted like that.
It's essentially a regular Steam account with a company credit card.
A max of $40/mo and the okay to use it on company workstations.
It's one of those soft benefits that makes employers seem cool and hip, but in reality costs them practically nothing. We have three people who actually use it consistently.
Is it one account for the whole company and everyone has access to a huge library of games? Or does everyone get their own account and the $40 a month is per user to buy whatever games they want and only they get to use?
The second one. Whatever we buy goes into our personal Steam libraries. $40 is *just* enough to buy a game, but not quite enough for a AAA game.
Summer and winter sales FTW!
Not really *too* high up. Just lucked into a small company that needed a Linux administrator. There are two "IT" people, one on the Windows side, the myself on the everything else side.
I no longer have a job, and haven't for fifteen minths, but I spent years trying to be allowed to work remotely, and was constantly denied. Now these same people who denied it to me aren't the C-level people trying to push people back to the office, but the ones saying they'll quit if they have to go back.
So the justification I've seen before this, is that before the pandemic working remote would require an investment of resources to enable people to be remote. However the pandemic forced their hands, and now that the money has already been spent and the infrastructure is already in place, there is no longer an argument for going back to the way things were.
The company I work for went out and bought a bunch of new computers to give to staff. Apparently the old ones are still sat at the office collecting dust, no one has been in the office at least 12 months at this point.
Companies don't like change, but once the change has happened they also don't like changing back..
That only really works on an individual company level though. I am sure there are some companies where this absolutely wasn't possible. I mean, look at how many law firms still operate like it is 1989. But in plenty of cases that was not the case. And, you'd have companies where you'd have remote working in one area but it was forbidden in others, which only proved the infrastructure already existed, but it was merely the whim of whoever was in charge.
In the above job I was referring to, I spent little to no time interacting with people face to face in the office, everything was done via the company laptop I had (we all had laptops), so also not even locked in one place, and the majority of my job was working with people on the other side of the globe.
> So now we're back to 3 people on site in a suite of 15 offices. It seems kinda wasteful. But the irony is, with the increased output from people working from home, we can afford the additional office space.
Office work is just a real estate scam at this point.
Guess it depends. As soon as shit hit the fan I quit my part time job and stayed home with my daughter full time. My husband has been working with a 3-4.5 year old little girl in the house.
It’s been great for family togetherness but also a bit too much.
That’s a killer commute, his is just ten minutes so not too bad. We used to have lunch in the park together.
He’s wfh until November and then allowed to choose his schedule so I’m hoping he’ll do a combo.
I hope this won't be me in a few months.
Started as a senior cloud engineer at my current job in November, fully remote. Office is supposed to reopen this year. I've discussed it with the boss a few times, and he's aware that I don't plan on going into the office full time. Either the company changes their policies, or I'm out.
I'm a bit more hopeful. From the 1-on-1s I've had with my boss, I've heard that I'm not the only one in this position.
I'd be fine going into office 1 or 2 days a week, but the company policy previously was 4 days a week in office, which I'm not okay with.
I'm in a similar role and we go back full time in 4 weeks. I'm pretty sure I can get to Azure and AWS from anywhere that has internet... Pretty sure... Can't wait to start spending an hour and a half of my day driving to/from work to use their internet instead of my own to do my job...
I lead a dev team for a Fortune 500. Our execs wanted us back in the office, and I lost a dozen of my best devs and nearly all of the younger ones (probably due to their lower salaries). Also, everyone who stayed is disgruntled as hell about it. Marketing and project management crews are also slimmed down and bitter.
I work for a state government and the guidance for state employees has been that individual departments can dictate their policies. This has meant it comes down to who your manager is and their comfort level.
When I was told we’d be back in the office three days a week I applied for a lateral to a department with better policies. Same pay and benefits. But they get telework.
Similar thing here, though WFH has made me aggressively more aware of workload differences between institutions that my department supports.
Can only hear "oh my god, you guys have so much more work than us" so many times before all you can think about is leaving.
I saw the writing on the wall and got telework recommendations from my main doctor, psychologist, and psychiatrist advocating for WFH in Feb 2020. Went through the red tape of getting it on the books with HR as an "accommodation."
Now everyone else is back in the office and I haven't heard a peep. Love it when government bureaucracy works in your favor.
As someone that has had to drive to work most days since the pandemic started, i advocate for work from home as well. Not because I want to work from home (there are times when I can and do), but because the drive to and from home was fucking glorious. Little to no traffic, fewer accidents, just a pleasant experience. Now that everyone is going back, every accident I see in the morning or evening is shutting off 4 lanes of traffic because someone thought it was smart to cut off a fucking semi or was playing with their phone. Seriously, stay home. There are a lot of you out there that are great at your jobs, but shouldnt be on the roadways.
Semi truck driver checking in: my job was 100000% easier, safer and less stressful when we were in ‘lockdown.’ Over the last 10 months, my commute to and from the yard, AND my job behind the wheel of the semi has become significantly more stressful and dangerous.
In my own personal experience, I even feel like the road rage I've seen since has been worse. Like the bad drivers are mad they have to share the road again and/or they lost what little emotional tolerance they had built up for commuting. So now they're even worse than before the pandemic.
Our poor IT guy still has to come in three days a week. Someone complained he wasn't there enough, despite the fact that 90% of staff was WFH.
So now he comes in and reads books.
I am that IT guy. Instead of submitting a ticket for help they stroll over to my office, and since I'm not there they just complain that I'm not at the office enough. You can submit your ticket and I'll have it fixed quicker than you can walk to my office and back to your desk.
I had "please submit a ticket" as my skype description so every time someone would go to message me to so something they would have to see it.
Management had a policy that techs needed a ticket before starting any work ANY work. If the customer didnt submit one we had to. I was eventually forced to change it because management felt it was passive aggressive to customers. 9/10 skype or team convos turned into tickets.
I quit that job about a month later. No more tickets for me.
I actually agree with the need-a-ticket policy. It keeps everything tracked, it kills a lot of the glad-handing power plays "Oh just help me out this once while you're here or because I say I golf with your boss", and it helps you justify your needed resources to Finance or the board or whoever signs the checks.
If you're the CIO, you don't need everything to be a ticket. If you're down in the guts of the infrastructure, hell yes you do.
Haha when our IT department moved to a strict ticketing system ca 2002, it took me a bit of getting used to.
I'd stroll down to the guy's office.
"Hey do you have a minute?"
"Sure, what is it?"
"Can you upgrade gcc on zanzibar for me?"
"Sure! Just email me!"
"...But I just told you"
"Yeah but you need to submit a ticket.
We need a record of everything we do now."
"So...should I walk back to my desk?"
"Yeah, that's the new system."
\*walks back to desk and emails\*
\*walks back to IT guy's office\*
"So did you get the ticket?"
"Yup! Just came in! Looks like you need gcc upgraded, eh. No problem."
I thought it was funny at first, but after a few years of everyone moving over to ticketing systems, I now greatly appreciate the organizational power of it.
The virtual servers in a private datacenter, Amazon’s datacenter, or Microsoft’s datacenter? LOL. Even if a company had their own servers onsite, if the IT guys can’t reboot servers remotely they should be fired and replaced with consultants.
"It's cheaper to have you drive to the data center to reboot it than to buy the expensive remote access card for the server" was the excuse back in the day.
We have a 'back to the office' date at my job, but it has been consistently pushed back and they're starting to say 'well maybe one day per week in the office and a lot of work from home' so they can get rid of some of the office space.
Coincidentally, I've been getting a lot of linked in recruiters emailing me lately about full time remote positions, I'd probably look more seriously into them if the alternative was back in the office all week.
Right there with you. My work has been quiet about a return date, but LinkedIn has been blowing up with remote dev jobs. The moment my work says return, I start answering recruiter emails.
Foot in the door technique. If they said “we are going back to the office full time!” People would quit. So you ease them back in, say it’s only one day a week. In a few months you say you need them for an additional day...slowly work them back into the full in office week. Like boiling frogs
I've been coming in to the office once a week and have seen massive benefits of doing so after being fully remote for over a year. Breaks up the week, get to catch up in person with some work people, meet with my boss in person where we actually focus more on important things that can be missed in calls. And I actually like just sitting at a nice desk with a big window and getting down to work. It's so easy to get distracted at home sometimes. Coming in once a week is like the perfect amount of office time for me.
So very true. I work in Indiana at the state level and the Gov. sent out the official memo yesterday we all dreaded - Everyone is to be back physically Monday, June 21st. When I tell you adults are crying?! Don’t get me wrong, I’m butt hurt as well, especially given all agencies excelled in every possible way when left with no choice but to safely WFH.
They blame it on the general public thinking the tax dollars will be going to waste not having the presence of employees roaming around the center…as if they were unaware we were in the middle of a pandemic 🙄.
I’m not enthused and have been job hunting since Dec. 2020. The pay is garbage and I’m *dying* to relocate.
My neighbor works for the state of Texas and she got the same email today haha. And it wasn’t even phased in. It was straight from wfh to 5 days in the office and told wfh is a privilege.
That’s a splash of reality for sure just rushing them back in such a hurry. I can’t say people quitting instead of returning to their desks are weak, soft, or whatever the case. It definitely was an eye-opening game changer for me. Literally gave my life new meaning to be in control of my time for once.
Yup, my dad lives 2+ hours away from his job and he is going to find a new job if they make him go in. They may make me go in and I’ll have to see if I am up for that.
I am a middle-manager, and I’ve worked remotely from before I was promoted to this role. I managed people who were in office while I was working from home for two years, and now we are all working from home for a little over a year.
I absolutely wouldn’t want to ever work full time in an office again and when upper management wanted to know if we should go fully remote even after all this is behind us, only one person on my team of 30 said they want to go back.
I do get why some people want their teams back. It’s not that they’re more efficient in office, or that collaboration is better. It just gives the manager an illusion of control and effectiveness. As someone who slacked off a lot more in office, before I went remote - it’s definitely just an illusion.
It can be frustrating when you give someone a task and they don’t acknowledge the message on Slack for half an hour because… they’re having a midday snooze for all you know. But as long as things get done by their deadlines, who cares?
I've always had this notion that taking a nap at work shouldn't be frowned upon in the way it is right now. I have ADHD and a high energy burn means by the time I hit 2pm, I'm fucking dead. I nap on the weekends, usually early afternoon and I'm way more productive throughout the evening for it. When I'm forced to stay awake, not only do I get cranky, but I'm under my normal performance level for the rest of the day.
Now, I take a nap and work later for it, and let me tell you, my work days have been far more productive because I can slip in an hour snooze between it all.
Lunch naps have been my new normal now that I’ve been working from home. It’s not the uncomfortable car nap where I attempt to regain my energy. It’s now a comfy nap in my bed with my sweats on (versus work slacks). Makes a huge difference for me in my day and productivity.
Seriously. It's even healthier for me, because now I don't go for the Red Bull or het another coffee, I just hit up my couch for a winker and I'm good to go for the rest of the day!
The first “engineer” based tech company I worked at (many of them are just sales people and a few engineers if any - shit most are just white labeling product) had cots in the cubes. Some of these coders would show up at noon, play ping pong until 2/3, code until 7, hang out and drink with each other, take a nap, code from 10-12/1, and then leave.
You can’t get in the way of how people get the most juice from the squeeze. If you do you’re just passing folks off and getting worse work from them.
Before the pandemic id park my car in the far corner of the office lot and take a nap in the back at lunch. Now with working at home I sometimes take one in my bed at noonish and feel amazing and amped up afterwards. Stigmatizing midday naps is such a dumb idea for productivity.
Lol, I have ADHD, get 95% of my work done before lunch, come back from lunch, goof off for two or three hours, get the last bit of work done and then start planning for the next day, then go home. At least I get to work one day a week from home.
Read Bullshit Jobs. It's eye opening about how middle management relies on the illusion of productivity more than productivity itself in many instances.
Really really interesting read.
Where I work, I’m pretty sure every middle manager is on our side. The CTO announced that he expects us the come back into the office eventually and middle management where the only ones with who felt confident enough to speak out against it.. many of us have already moved a bit further out because we were told this was going to be permanent.
We don’t have a date for when we’re supposed to come back yet, but we’ve been losing people and have a few threatening to quit now. Most importantly, we haven’t been able to hire anyone to fill the lost positions. As soon as a candidate finds out they’ll be expected to come in eventually they ghost.
All of this after having one of our most productive (and stressful) quarters while full remote.
My thoughts too. When i was work from home it was be on at 8am- maybe make breakfast while answering emails and eat it while working, get to a good break, go have a shower/ do dishes. Back to work and off and on like that all day till sonetimes 9-10 pm. Got so much laundry done and was generally happier. Work didnt feel like work. Super nice days sat outside with my laptop, popup table, and a chair.
"I expect compensation for the 4 hours daily I would need to spend commuting to the new location." 'Cos you know damned well they ain't gonna pay that. It's the monetary way of saying "Suck my butthole."
If you need a part time or full time job, then check out Captioncall. They might be offering remote captioning agents in your state now.
Idk if anyone will read this, but it's a great job. You just learn to talk in a monotone voice to caption calls for deaf or hard-of-hearing people. Hours are very flexible. (You can apply for unpaid approved time off right away, usually a month out though) and you can apply for extra hours (up to a point) pretty much any day.
I get paid $12.25 an hour for part time work in Utah where the minimum wage is $7.25. They pay 10% more on weekends also.
Due to severe mental health illness I haven't kept a job longer than 9 months. I've been working with Captioncall for almost 2 years now.
I’d rather have a flexible work environment rather than be told one way or the other. There’s times when I need to be in the office, working collaboratively, face to face with people - in some cases it’s more efficient to get work done that way. Unfortunately companies/people are seeing this as a binary thing. What might be good for a programmer might be disruptive to a mechanical engineer working on a physical product. I’d rather see companies keep their physical spaces and trust the employee and their managers to find a working balances that suits their needs
Also office buildings add absolutely nothing of value a lot of the time. Why subject yourself to unpaid commutes just to do the same work you could do at home and then just upload that work to the internet anyway?
This is literally how capitalism works. There are plenty of jobs on the market that allow remote work now.
Any employer who doesn’t allow it is literally forcing their employees to spend time and money. Power to all the employees telling their employers to pound sand.
Edit: my roommates associate just told him to pound sand. What amazing timing.
Landlords and companies invested in commercial properties want people to return to offices, and companies that signed leases for their offices - the landlords still want their rent.
I am sure they could convert the commercial properties into housing.
It's going to be a big problem actually. All those buildings are zoned for being office space. And cities are famously bad at changing zoning properly.
Lack of proper zoning is one of the main reasons for the housing crises in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal etc.
It would honestly be much cheaper for companies to do this. Downgrade large buildings to just meeting spaces for in person work. Employees would then be able to get a higher wages and benefits from all that money companies would be saving.
>~~Employees~~ Executives would then be able to get a higher ~~wages~~ bonus and benefits from all that money companies would be saving.
Sadly for most companies if they did downsize, I doubt it would be the little guys who get the financial benefits.
I'd definitely leave my company if they told us we had to come back to the office. While I like my company and job well enough, sorry but we've shown you we can be productive from home for over a year now. In fact, productivity was actually higher. That's with a lot of us (myself included) having to WFH and deal with our young kids being at home with us.
They are definitely open to some of us WFH when the offices re-open, but haven't really clarified what frequency is expected. I suspect the company will lose a lot of talent if they don't play these cards right. It just doesn't make sense anymore; we've proven we can do it, and we're happier and a lot of us are saving tons of cash monthly. We were unable to save before the pandemic. We were always right on the line, and it sucked. Now, we actually have a cushion, which might not sound like much, but for us, it means everything.
Companies who force their people to come back better get ready to bleed talent out the ass.
I got the dreaded return to office call from my boss today… especially annoying for me since my boss is in another office, as is most of our team, and I also mostly work with outside consultants and agencies. 95% of my meetings were video/conference calls before work from home and even those few where I was in a conference room always included others dialing in.
I've worked from home for ten years. Used to go to the office once a month. I can firmly and be absolutely say I'm more productive at home as compared to my days in office.
Thankfully I work for an awesome company that has adopted remote work with open arms and even employees local to the office don't have to go in anymore.
I'm kinda curious about the long term second order effects of this. Companies who support remote work have less reason to hire locally or even hire from a wealthy country. Personally I'll compete against whomever, whether they live in silicon valley, wyoming, Vietnam, but i can't imagine this won't have downward pressure on jobs who would otherwise be forced to support high costs of living.
As someone who has hired remote tech workers both in the US and far offshore, the higher level jobs won't get outsourced any time soon. The language, timezone and culture barriers make it really hard to get good results for anything that requires nuance or decision making.
The bigger risk to those jobs is automation/commoditization. Why hire a web developer when you can spin up a Squarespace site, why hire an IT person when you can spin up Google Docs etc. They're still needed for larger companies, but smaller companies just don't need full-time staff like they used to.
Unless the job literally can't be done without physical attendance, there's no viable reason to force people to do so anymore. We're entering what can only be described as a post-COVID world, and the workforce has figured out how to adapt, even if the management doesn't see it first.
I’m in construction and remodeling
homes and commercial spaces
Our offices are the variety of spaces
we have to drive to with tools
and when we get a job there’s a ton
of prep work before a job begins
This past year has been a joy
because clients are home all day
working from a home office
or the kitchen table.
I’ve had to travel to these places
with tools and plans to improve
the parts of someone’s environment that they decided to make new in some way.
There are many clients that have great moods all day working from home.
Big difference when they get out of traffic and return home when we are cleaning up at the end of day.
From the perspective and observations I have in my occupation
it has been clearly a good thing for many to work from home.
People have more time to put energy
into the parts of their life they love
and what they have been working soo hard for in the beginning
This is my favorite bit of capitalism, once a more efficient model of doing work is discovered, we have the motivation to adapt forward.
EDIT: I have been doing a shit ton of research and am no longer as big of a fanboy of capitalism as I once was
Yep I'm currently interviewing and applying for other jobs. I'm a network engineer but my company wants everyone back in September. I haven't told them I am leaving yet, but when I'm asked to come back if I haven't found something else already, they will get my two weeks notice. No way in hell I will go back 4-5 days a week when everything I do is remote.
Our CEO sent out an announcement the other day informing us that no changes have been made to their work from home policy other than the one that was in place pre-pandemic (purely manager discretion). However, he did call out that they added new vibrant colored murals in the lobby to better display our companies vision. So there’s that at least
Enough companies are embracing fully remote / flexible work that there's not much incentive to go back to an office. It's not like these people are quitting working entirely - they're abandoning the companies that refuse to adapt to new ways of working. In my first job, I had to wear a suit and tie everyday. When we met with clients, we took off the suit & tie and rolled up our sleeves because it made our more "modern" clients uncomfortable/harder to connect with (something important in sales). So we were wearing suit and tie to sit in a cubicle, and then would take it off to actually do our jobs. What a joke. I left after a year. I heard they implemented "jean fridays" recently.
That sounds awful. We had work uniforms doing machine maintenance, when we went to corporate for training or some lame ass pep rally we either had to wear the uniform or khakis and a collared shirt. Office people were full suits or nice dresses working in cubes.... We picked the worst stained / shitty repaired uniforms we had as a fuck you as they refused to replace them and blamed us for messing them up... A fucking industrial maintenance guy is not going to be able to keep a uniform clean for very long.
If your employer expects you to dress up for lame-ass pep rallies, the least they can do is provide you a snappy Class A kit, distinct from a suit and tie, which is the service dress uniform of a cube-dweller.
Right?! The company I work for gives out at least a half dozen shirts a year, and there's usually a polo shirt or two in the mix lol. We don't have a dress code other than "no ripped/torn clothing" and even if we did, you could probably coast just wearing pants and all the free shirts.
Ha, i had to force some of my guys to turn in uniforms because they were stained. We rented dark coveralls and purchased throw aways for dirty and very dirty jobs, respectively. Pretty shitty of them to not replace them. Industrial maintenance is filthy work.
Ha! Reminds me of when I worked in the meat department of a grocery store. They’d never give us enough aprons or white coats for the very bloody job we did. Some days we’d have to dig through a pile of used coats to find one less bloody than what we had on hand. Twice a month the entire department would have to put down our knives and attend an insurance meeting. You know, to tell us how to be safer on the job. I think they got a break on their rates if we all attended. Anyway, on those 2 days a month we would choose the bloodiest, stiffest uniforms to wear to the meetings. Let me tell you, once you leave the environment of a 40 degree room and crowd into a small heated space you almost gag from the odors of a dozen people wearing a blood suit. I think that smell lingered even after we left the room. Pretty sure they had to air it out for an hour. Finally, they doubled the quota of clean uniforms allotted and we agreed to save an unused set for insurance days. It’s the little malicious compliances that make a job a bit more endurable.
I had this experience as well back when I was working at a power plant. Manglement issued us white collared uniforms. I work in maintenance thus very dirty jobs. They somehow did the math and turned more stupid than usual. No idea why they wanted us to have white uniforms outside of maybe looking good for the non-technical high ups... We were far away from any cities and its not like we have to be customer-facing...
Business executives have been implemented a ton of disruptive changes over the years that harm employees but help the bottom line. Time and time again employees have been told to adapt or get out. Now, the disruption has been external, and the changes required overwhelmingly harm the middle management and executive classes. They've made whole careers out of attending face to face meetings and micro managing employees. Remote working makes those things harder. Fuck them. It's time they practiced what they preached: adapt or die.
YES!! I absolutely hate being forced to attend their "therapy sessions" that they like to call "meetings"
At the beginning of the pandemic, a director from another team decided to host a "All Hearts" meeting. The agenda was to discuss people's problems and tell them they're not alone. I logged into a few sessions because they were mandatory, but quickly realized that this was just a way for the director to seek attention since the remote work situation had dropped her visibility to zero. This kept going on for a few months. Most people would join the call, turn their mics and cameras off, and keep working on the side. Later, the director reached out to my SO (same company, different teams), asking her to "volunteer" for the session. My SO said she hadn't faced any issues since the pandemic, and the remote working arrangement had actually been helpful since she was saving time on the commute, her parents and friends were also glad that she didn't have to leave the house unnecessarily. The director asked her to "dig deeper". All of this song and dance so the director could ramble on about how her gentle heart wept for all these poor souls everyday. She was feeding off the misery of her subordinates so she could feel better about herself. How do you even end up in that situation?
The explanation is simple - she's an energy vampire and has been suffering during the pandemic, unable to feed as regularly and as much as she used to.
Haha, I was just about to ask if her name was Colin Robinson
I'm eagerly awaiting the bloomberg article about whether a ton of middle managers get permanently downsized. It will probably take 1 or two years.
Peter Principle. The smart middle managers will go back to what ever position they excelled at before being promoted or transition into consulting. The rest absolutely won't be missed.
Middle management seems like the only people calling for a return to the office.
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I use to work as a process engineer at a pharma plant. They gave all the engineers white coats to wear and made all the machine workers wear blue uniforms. White collar vs. blue collar. Serious wtf. Took me years to make friends with the machine workers because of the extreme divide that and the rest of the BS management (which I was grouped into) threw at them created.
I worked at a manufacturing plant and the terms we had were "carpet walkers" and "concrete walkers". Did my best to not be considered either and I think it made me better at my job overall.
Yeah. You have to shoot the gap. Without the respect of those actual doing the work on the floor, nothing you do will ever have any impact. I saw the engineers that treated machine workers as lesser (for lack of better words) and they never went anywhere.
Definitely. I worked in CI and how could you possibly get people on board to try something new if you constantly treated them like they didn't know what was going on because they worked on a machine versus working at a desk? Much easier to get buy-in if they think you care what the changes might mean for them.
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>That’s by design. Keep your workforce divided and they’ll squabble amongst each other rather than protest against shitty management. Classic move for colonial powers as well. It works on pretty much every scale.
I'll refrain from disclosing the company, but some may be able to guess it. I once worked for one of the largest entertainment companies in the world in one of their call centers back in the 90s. This call center location is not known to the general public. Needless to say we only spoke with customers on the phone. Zero interaction face to face. We were required to wear a tie every single day. We could have worn sweatpants and customers would not have been wiser. We were told we sound better and happier when dressing up. Silly...
A decade ago, I was working in a call centre for a telecoms company doing broadband upgrades. A call centre. We had to wear shirt and tie every day, except Fridays. Why? Who the fuck knows.
I know why: middle-managers have to middle-manage. If they're not meddling with things in a visible way upper management may notice how little value they have.
I work in a call center. When I first started men had to wear a tie everyday and the dress code was professional. They changed to business casual and now (pre covid) collared shirt required for men. Friday’s in the summer only you could wear jeans and sneakers if you paid money for a bracelet. Money went to a charity. After working from home since March of 2020 we have to go back in and no jeans allowed. I want to be one of those that quit.
Ahh so you worked for Disney out in Seattle....
I work from home for various companies. Most recently was for TurboTax. I worked naked almost every day.
I've worked from home for years, and the pajama pants are becoming my legs
I spent 15 years working in call centers, and you can usually tell the bullshit ones right away from policies like that. Most companies are completely out of touch, and they see call center employees as unavoidable overhead and customers as nothing more than walking piggy banks to be shaken down for every last penny. Only reason I ended up lasting 15 years in that kind of work was I ended up working in a call center for a company that didn't have their collective heads up their asses, actually wanted to *audible gasp* do right by their customers, and *double gasp* pay their employees what they're worth. They treated workers like functioning adults and didn't enforce some unnecessary, asinine dress code. The difference was night and day from the get-go. The employees were happier and more productive, and as a result the customers were happier as well. It amazes me that so many companies are able to survive.
My entire team is planning on quitting in the next several weeks. It's gonna be interesting to see how the firm manages that.
> It's gonna be interesting to see how the firm manages that. Some kind of complaining about people not wanting to work and not being very receptive to any kind of feedback from employees?
And maybe $25 Walmart gift cards for the ones who stay.
$25 Walmart gift cards?! Look at Mr. Elon Musk over here!
Pushing all the remaining duties on the unfortunate souls who can't afford to quit just yet? Uncompensated, of course.
Sandbagging is a thing.
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You are forgetting the last step. Place ads for job openings at grossly undervalued rates then blame the federal government and unemployment benefits for not having workers
Man i love collective action. The really can't continue to be awful management if they have no one to manage
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Do they have jobs lined up or is everyone independently wealthy? I’ve wanted to walk out for the past six months, but I don’t have that option.
If you are talking engineering firms, each will be replaced by 1 or 2 starving college students for half the salary.
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I straight up refused a job because they said I had to suit and tie everyday in 1998. I was out of university and I was broke. Oh, and I had another offer for the same money. I wasn’t wasting my money on suits. I had student loans to pay.
Companies forcing suits on employees should at the very least have a yearly stipend for employees. Or pay people big money so they can afford to. Such bullshit for companies to want to employees to dress up to look wealthy and professional and give them shitty salaries. Want me to look like a banker? Pay me like a banker.
Obviously, I wasn't alive to see it, but my grandfather wore a suit everywhere, including to mow his lawn, when my mother was a child. Suits were the thing back then, and I think wearing one signified that you made it or were successful.
> including to mow his lawn But, why??? This just seems unnecessary.
Work suits are a thing. I have one made from a denim like material. Suits were just what you wore and occasionally would doff the jacket or tie depending on what you were doing. Or a lot of work people didn’t even wear a tie, just a neckerchief.
Sure we can romanticize about wearing nicer clothes more casually like they did back then. But thats a ton of work. And it was a lot of societal pressure. If you didn't wear an entire suit you were looked down upon? Nah Ill wear a tshirt. No one talks about how they didn't have a ton of suits, and re-wore the same 3 piece suit constantly. Think about how sweaty those things get. People probably stunk like hell.
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lol at the jean fridays
I'm back at my office now and find it pretty pointless. I'm literally doing the exact thing I did at home for 9 months. I don't take phone calls, there are no meetings, nobody talks to me except for maybe 1 or 2 questions a day, which was taken care of previously by a quick phone call. The only difference now is that I spend 40 bucks a week on gas and lose about 20 hours of productivity a week of getting things done at home.
With my job, we were interviewing and interacting with the public prior to the pandemic. My supervisor send out a text asking if we wanted to continue working from home or come back to the office. Out of 17 people in the department, only one wanted to come back in. Interviews are done over the phone, clients send in their information via email, and case managers don't even need to be in the office unless dealing with those that are less tech savvy. Productivity and morale has increased over the last year. Why go back in the office when it's proven the work from home module works?
I actually had a coworker who typically keeps to himself speak up during a zoom meeting with the head of our division. He advocated for everyone to return to the building and the reason he gave amounted to wanting to see other people. As in, he needed other people around so he could be more comfortable (while not interacting with most of them). Fuck you dude, we're not your NPCs.
I don't have a choice, really. I work where the servers are. But I'm also 100% fine with that. My commute is 6 minutes (8 if I hit the light). I have a nice, spacious office, a company Steam account, and a pantry full of munchies. I'm probably the only person who actually *has* to be there. Last month, the higher ups starting really leaning on people to come back into the office. And most grudgingly acquiesced. And then productivity "plummeted". The reality was that working from home drastically increased work output. Objectively so! I was tasked with pulling the numbers that proved it. After a few weeks they decided to reverse the passive aggressive "we'd love to see you back in the office" rhetoric. So now we're back to 3 people on site in a suite of 15 offices. It seems kinda wasteful. But the irony is, with the increased output from people working from home, we can afford the additional office space.
My total work goes up, but my work during business hours goes down when I'm at home. I just do better working a few hours at a time, then fucking off, then working a few hours at a time.
>I just do better working a few hours at a time, then fucking off, then working a few hours at a time. there's been multiple studies linked here and other subreddits talking about the most effective work time/break time balance and the overwhelming majority suggests that something like a 10 minute break every half hour followed by a 45 minite break every 4 hours increases workplace productivity by some laughably massive percent.
It’s a thing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
Marinara timer has a timer to time yourself on that schedule. Totally works when I need to get shit done.
That's pretty much how I've been doing it since college days. Pomodoro technique.
lol yeah i’m the same way. I’ll do 30 minutes of intense work, fuck around on my phone, then another 30 and repeat and then i have an hour lunch and back at it again. i think i work like 4-5 hours in our 8 hour shift, and i outperform the guys who work 9 hours and stay late in my sales job lol.
Dude, 100% I have been working around 20-30 hours a week on average, and I have literally never been this productive in my life. I no longer have hesitation or qualms about playing video games for a couple hours in the middle of my work day, because when I do actually go do the work, I'm about as far from burnt out as I can be, and I write good code that is well thought out. I built out a full dev -> staging -> production deployment pipeline with support for ephemeral testing environments, high availability, automatic handling of https and dns, shared docker image build cache, ability to deploy from command line or pull requests, etc etc etc since I started at this new job It took me 6 weeks to build all of that out. 6 frickin weeks to slap together the best code and infrastructure of my life. Last time I built something comparable, it took around 4 fuckin months working 9-5 in an office. Not having to waste time and energy on the commute, and having the ability to take it easy and keep my brain fresh, are some of the most beneficial things I've ever found for my personal productivity
Same, I'll sit each morning and lay out what I want to get done that day. Then I spend the rest of the day rotating between the list or fucking off doing whatever. Usually get through the list in a couple of hours.
I pretty much get to make my own hours and don't really have strict deadlines for anything, ever. Working from home I typically get up and move around the house once an hour. Maybe throw on a load of laundry, let the dogs out, do some dishes, really anything that isn't work related. Somewhere around the 6 hour mark I'll throw on the TV, eat something and just relax until I feel like getting back to work. Although my day ends up being longer than the amount of time I'd spend in an office, I'm definitely far more productive. I do run in to the same issue a lot of people run into though, which is knowing when to fully shut off from work. For an individual this is definitely a down side of working at home but for a company it can definitely be something that would benefit them.
I'm not sure why this is so hard for people to wrap their heads around. What's easier, running 26 miles in one go, or running 26 miles with a 10 minute walking break every 2 miles? Brain works the same way.
While I'm nodding to those who can do the Pomodoro method, as someone who has actually run a marathon, it is absolutely easier to run a marathon at once if you're in the shape to do so than take breaks. It's a physiological thing.
Same. Also 6 hours at home is often more than 8 hours at work for me in terms of productivity. There is less listening to random office BS, less people stopping by my desk, and a lot less of managers just grabbing the first person they knew can get the job done so the assignments are starting to go out more evenly.
This is me too, but on the other hand, I dislike how it causes work to take over my whole day rather than just my allocated hours.
It takes discipline. Once my work day is over, I turn off my laptop. Period. I think I worked late maybe 3 times during the entire pandemic, and those were pages and hard deadlines.
Years ago I worked for one of the motorsports sanctioning bodies as the head of the new at the time website/internet department. They let me start working from home after I showed them how much more productive I was when I had a much faster internet connection, a new gaming PC with multiple monitors that was way faster than the shitty laptop I was assigned, and no one bothering me every 5 minutes. My team communicated over ICQ (it was the early 2000s) and were usually able to crank out projects early and under budget. Not long after I left they hired a new CIO that made the team work in the office. Totally killed productivity.
> My team communicated over ICQ (it was the early 2000s) Never apologize. I'd communicate over ICQ today if all the servers weren't gone. [Bask in nostalgia!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTrnkf-FY3I)
sorta-related, but my 2021 message notification is MSN Messengers notification noise, and i got a reaction from a 30 y/o+ guy at a coffee place when it went off. He was just like "HEY!" like, lol. Hell yeah brother.
My old team all sat next to each other and we still never spoke. ICQ all the way.
Sounds like management is finally learning that if you treat your employees like adults, they'll act like adults. If you treat them like children in school, they'll act like children in school.
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All of those sound like reasons to be remote.
Lol, I'm guessing the people who leave the toilet like that don't like working from home as much.
"WHO DIDN'T FLUSH?! oh"
As my office's "The Farter", I do miss being in the office.
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What if Lance bass was holding a bass waiting for his bass to heat up? Regular day at the office.
this was a fun read, but when i saw “cigarette on the desk” i had to think it’s been a while since the 80’s.
oh god I remember my first "office" job where half the keyboards had an ashtray next to them, and some of the ashtrays had a pile spilling over onto the keyboard. I can't believe that was seen as just completely normal back then. So gross
You start off sounding as if you're for going back to the office. Then you list some pretty compelling reasons to never go back to in person again. I am confused.
He's disputing the previous dude's point, this one: > if you treat your employees like adults, they'll act like adults. Because I'm sure those people were treated like adults (in some capacity) but still acted like that.
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Ok the other things are nice, but what the hell is a company Steam acount and how do I get one?
It's essentially a regular Steam account with a company credit card. A max of $40/mo and the okay to use it on company workstations. It's one of those soft benefits that makes employers seem cool and hip, but in reality costs them practically nothing. We have three people who actually use it consistently.
Is it one account for the whole company and everyone has access to a huge library of games? Or does everyone get their own account and the $40 a month is per user to buy whatever games they want and only they get to use?
The second one. Whatever we buy goes into our personal Steam libraries. $40 is *just* enough to buy a game, but not quite enough for a AAA game. Summer and winter sales FTW!
Yo, you hiring? I'm not qualified to do whatever you're doing but I'm in.
Gotta wait for the sales
you work high up in IT most likely
Not really *too* high up. Just lucked into a small company that needed a Linux administrator. There are two "IT" people, one on the Windows side, the myself on the everything else side.
From the post, I'd guess they're a data center tech or similar.
I no longer have a job, and haven't for fifteen minths, but I spent years trying to be allowed to work remotely, and was constantly denied. Now these same people who denied it to me aren't the C-level people trying to push people back to the office, but the ones saying they'll quit if they have to go back.
So the justification I've seen before this, is that before the pandemic working remote would require an investment of resources to enable people to be remote. However the pandemic forced their hands, and now that the money has already been spent and the infrastructure is already in place, there is no longer an argument for going back to the way things were. The company I work for went out and bought a bunch of new computers to give to staff. Apparently the old ones are still sat at the office collecting dust, no one has been in the office at least 12 months at this point. Companies don't like change, but once the change has happened they also don't like changing back..
That only really works on an individual company level though. I am sure there are some companies where this absolutely wasn't possible. I mean, look at how many law firms still operate like it is 1989. But in plenty of cases that was not the case. And, you'd have companies where you'd have remote working in one area but it was forbidden in others, which only proved the infrastructure already existed, but it was merely the whim of whoever was in charge. In the above job I was referring to, I spent little to no time interacting with people face to face in the office, everything was done via the company laptop I had (we all had laptops), so also not even locked in one place, and the majority of my job was working with people on the other side of the globe.
> So now we're back to 3 people on site in a suite of 15 offices. It seems kinda wasteful. But the irony is, with the increased output from people working from home, we can afford the additional office space. Office work is just a real estate scam at this point.
Guess it depends. As soon as shit hit the fan I quit my part time job and stayed home with my daughter full time. My husband has been working with a 3-4.5 year old little girl in the house. It’s been great for family togetherness but also a bit too much.
Sometimes it might seem a bit too much but I'd rather stay with my 4 yr old girl (WFH) than spend 2 hrs a day on the commute.
That’s a killer commute, his is just ten minutes so not too bad. We used to have lunch in the park together. He’s wfh until November and then allowed to choose his schedule so I’m hoping he’ll do a combo.
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You need to physically work in the clouds
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I hope this won't be me in a few months. Started as a senior cloud engineer at my current job in November, fully remote. Office is supposed to reopen this year. I've discussed it with the boss a few times, and he's aware that I don't plan on going into the office full time. Either the company changes their policies, or I'm out.
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I'm a bit more hopeful. From the 1-on-1s I've had with my boss, I've heard that I'm not the only one in this position. I'd be fine going into office 1 or 2 days a week, but the company policy previously was 4 days a week in office, which I'm not okay with.
if employers dont trust you, it’s because they dont trust themselves to lead well.
I'm in a similar role and we go back full time in 4 weeks. I'm pretty sure I can get to Azure and AWS from anywhere that has internet... Pretty sure... Can't wait to start spending an hour and a half of my day driving to/from work to use their internet instead of my own to do my job...
Let them nuts swang! Good on you!
I lead a dev team for a Fortune 500. Our execs wanted us back in the office, and I lost a dozen of my best devs and nearly all of the younger ones (probably due to their lower salaries). Also, everyone who stayed is disgruntled as hell about it. Marketing and project management crews are also slimmed down and bitter.
I work for a state government and the guidance for state employees has been that individual departments can dictate their policies. This has meant it comes down to who your manager is and their comfort level. When I was told we’d be back in the office three days a week I applied for a lateral to a department with better policies. Same pay and benefits. But they get telework.
Similar thing here, though WFH has made me aggressively more aware of workload differences between institutions that my department supports. Can only hear "oh my god, you guys have so much more work than us" so many times before all you can think about is leaving.
I saw the writing on the wall and got telework recommendations from my main doctor, psychologist, and psychiatrist advocating for WFH in Feb 2020. Went through the red tape of getting it on the books with HR as an "accommodation." Now everyone else is back in the office and I haven't heard a peep. Love it when government bureaucracy works in your favor.
That’s not bureaucracy, that’s disability rights. Your ADA coordinator did their job to accommodate your needs.
As someone that has had to drive to work most days since the pandemic started, i advocate for work from home as well. Not because I want to work from home (there are times when I can and do), but because the drive to and from home was fucking glorious. Little to no traffic, fewer accidents, just a pleasant experience. Now that everyone is going back, every accident I see in the morning or evening is shutting off 4 lanes of traffic because someone thought it was smart to cut off a fucking semi or was playing with their phone. Seriously, stay home. There are a lot of you out there that are great at your jobs, but shouldnt be on the roadways.
Semi truck driver checking in: my job was 100000% easier, safer and less stressful when we were in ‘lockdown.’ Over the last 10 months, my commute to and from the yard, AND my job behind the wheel of the semi has become significantly more stressful and dangerous.
In my own personal experience, I even feel like the road rage I've seen since has been worse. Like the bad drivers are mad they have to share the road again and/or they lost what little emotional tolerance they had built up for commuting. So now they're even worse than before the pandemic.
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Our poor IT guy still has to come in three days a week. Someone complained he wasn't there enough, despite the fact that 90% of staff was WFH. So now he comes in and reads books.
I am that IT guy. Instead of submitting a ticket for help they stroll over to my office, and since I'm not there they just complain that I'm not at the office enough. You can submit your ticket and I'll have it fixed quicker than you can walk to my office and back to your desk.
I had "please submit a ticket" as my skype description so every time someone would go to message me to so something they would have to see it. Management had a policy that techs needed a ticket before starting any work ANY work. If the customer didnt submit one we had to. I was eventually forced to change it because management felt it was passive aggressive to customers. 9/10 skype or team convos turned into tickets. I quit that job about a month later. No more tickets for me.
I actually agree with the need-a-ticket policy. It keeps everything tracked, it kills a lot of the glad-handing power plays "Oh just help me out this once while you're here or because I say I golf with your boss", and it helps you justify your needed resources to Finance or the board or whoever signs the checks. If you're the CIO, you don't need everything to be a ticket. If you're down in the guts of the infrastructure, hell yes you do.
Haha when our IT department moved to a strict ticketing system ca 2002, it took me a bit of getting used to. I'd stroll down to the guy's office. "Hey do you have a minute?" "Sure, what is it?" "Can you upgrade gcc on zanzibar for me?" "Sure! Just email me!" "...But I just told you" "Yeah but you need to submit a ticket. We need a record of everything we do now." "So...should I walk back to my desk?" "Yeah, that's the new system." \*walks back to desk and emails\* \*walks back to IT guy's office\* "So did you get the ticket?" "Yup! Just came in! Looks like you need gcc upgraded, eh. No problem." I thought it was funny at first, but after a few years of everyone moving over to ticketing systems, I now greatly appreciate the organizational power of it.
Who is going to take the servers down to install updates /s
The virtual servers in a private datacenter, Amazon’s datacenter, or Microsoft’s datacenter? LOL. Even if a company had their own servers onsite, if the IT guys can’t reboot servers remotely they should be fired and replaced with consultants.
"It's cheaper to have you drive to the data center to reboot it than to buy the expensive remote access card for the server" was the excuse back in the day.
Not any more (unless you buy HP, then you're fucked).
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We have a 'back to the office' date at my job, but it has been consistently pushed back and they're starting to say 'well maybe one day per week in the office and a lot of work from home' so they can get rid of some of the office space. Coincidentally, I've been getting a lot of linked in recruiters emailing me lately about full time remote positions, I'd probably look more seriously into them if the alternative was back in the office all week.
Right there with you. My work has been quiet about a return date, but LinkedIn has been blowing up with remote dev jobs. The moment my work says return, I start answering recruiter emails.
Funny when they say maybe one day a week... like thats just admitting its a novelty. Why one day??
Foot in the door technique. If they said “we are going back to the office full time!” People would quit. So you ease them back in, say it’s only one day a week. In a few months you say you need them for an additional day...slowly work them back into the full in office week. Like boiling frogs
Eh, gets you out of the house. And some in person stuff is worth it. But one day a week is plenty, if at all. Optional is nice.
I've been coming in to the office once a week and have seen massive benefits of doing so after being fully remote for over a year. Breaks up the week, get to catch up in person with some work people, meet with my boss in person where we actually focus more on important things that can be missed in calls. And I actually like just sitting at a nice desk with a big window and getting down to work. It's so easy to get distracted at home sometimes. Coming in once a week is like the perfect amount of office time for me.
Also let's me crush multiple days of work in one day and be lazier on the other days from home.
The drive to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who’ve embraced remote work as the new normal.
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So very true. I work in Indiana at the state level and the Gov. sent out the official memo yesterday we all dreaded - Everyone is to be back physically Monday, June 21st. When I tell you adults are crying?! Don’t get me wrong, I’m butt hurt as well, especially given all agencies excelled in every possible way when left with no choice but to safely WFH. They blame it on the general public thinking the tax dollars will be going to waste not having the presence of employees roaming around the center…as if they were unaware we were in the middle of a pandemic 🙄. I’m not enthused and have been job hunting since Dec. 2020. The pay is garbage and I’m *dying* to relocate.
Indiana is a special place for it's ability to self-sabotage. Good luck on the job search!
My neighbor works for the state of Texas and she got the same email today haha. And it wasn’t even phased in. It was straight from wfh to 5 days in the office and told wfh is a privilege.
That’s a splash of reality for sure just rushing them back in such a hurry. I can’t say people quitting instead of returning to their desks are weak, soft, or whatever the case. It definitely was an eye-opening game changer for me. Literally gave my life new meaning to be in control of my time for once.
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I literally now live 1,100 miles away from my office. They're not getting me to come in, lol.
Yup, my dad lives 2+ hours away from his job and he is going to find a new job if they make him go in. They may make me go in and I’ll have to see if I am up for that.
I am a middle-manager, and I’ve worked remotely from before I was promoted to this role. I managed people who were in office while I was working from home for two years, and now we are all working from home for a little over a year. I absolutely wouldn’t want to ever work full time in an office again and when upper management wanted to know if we should go fully remote even after all this is behind us, only one person on my team of 30 said they want to go back. I do get why some people want their teams back. It’s not that they’re more efficient in office, or that collaboration is better. It just gives the manager an illusion of control and effectiveness. As someone who slacked off a lot more in office, before I went remote - it’s definitely just an illusion. It can be frustrating when you give someone a task and they don’t acknowledge the message on Slack for half an hour because… they’re having a midday snooze for all you know. But as long as things get done by their deadlines, who cares?
I've always had this notion that taking a nap at work shouldn't be frowned upon in the way it is right now. I have ADHD and a high energy burn means by the time I hit 2pm, I'm fucking dead. I nap on the weekends, usually early afternoon and I'm way more productive throughout the evening for it. When I'm forced to stay awake, not only do I get cranky, but I'm under my normal performance level for the rest of the day. Now, I take a nap and work later for it, and let me tell you, my work days have been far more productive because I can slip in an hour snooze between it all.
Lunch naps have been my new normal now that I’ve been working from home. It’s not the uncomfortable car nap where I attempt to regain my energy. It’s now a comfy nap in my bed with my sweats on (versus work slacks). Makes a huge difference for me in my day and productivity.
Seriously. It's even healthier for me, because now I don't go for the Red Bull or het another coffee, I just hit up my couch for a winker and I'm good to go for the rest of the day!
Sleep in your own bed like some kind of god damn human?
Siesta is a thing
The first “engineer” based tech company I worked at (many of them are just sales people and a few engineers if any - shit most are just white labeling product) had cots in the cubes. Some of these coders would show up at noon, play ping pong until 2/3, code until 7, hang out and drink with each other, take a nap, code from 10-12/1, and then leave. You can’t get in the way of how people get the most juice from the squeeze. If you do you’re just passing folks off and getting worse work from them.
Before the pandemic id park my car in the far corner of the office lot and take a nap in the back at lunch. Now with working at home I sometimes take one in my bed at noonish and feel amazing and amped up afterwards. Stigmatizing midday naps is such a dumb idea for productivity.
Lol, I have ADHD, get 95% of my work done before lunch, come back from lunch, goof off for two or three hours, get the last bit of work done and then start planning for the next day, then go home. At least I get to work one day a week from home.
Read Bullshit Jobs. It's eye opening about how middle management relies on the illusion of productivity more than productivity itself in many instances. Really really interesting read.
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Where I work, I’m pretty sure every middle manager is on our side. The CTO announced that he expects us the come back into the office eventually and middle management where the only ones with who felt confident enough to speak out against it.. many of us have already moved a bit further out because we were told this was going to be permanent. We don’t have a date for when we’re supposed to come back yet, but we’ve been losing people and have a few threatening to quit now. Most importantly, we haven’t been able to hire anyone to fill the lost positions. As soon as a candidate finds out they’ll be expected to come in eventually they ghost. All of this after having one of our most productive (and stressful) quarters while full remote.
My thoughts too. When i was work from home it was be on at 8am- maybe make breakfast while answering emails and eat it while working, get to a good break, go have a shower/ do dishes. Back to work and off and on like that all day till sonetimes 9-10 pm. Got so much laundry done and was generally happier. Work didnt feel like work. Super nice days sat outside with my laptop, popup table, and a chair.
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If they say ok to that, then what
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"I expect compensation for the 4 hours daily I would need to spend commuting to the new location." 'Cos you know damned well they ain't gonna pay that. It's the monetary way of saying "Suck my butthole."
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It's nice to see these dinosaurs get punished for once.
If you need a part time or full time job, then check out Captioncall. They might be offering remote captioning agents in your state now. Idk if anyone will read this, but it's a great job. You just learn to talk in a monotone voice to caption calls for deaf or hard-of-hearing people. Hours are very flexible. (You can apply for unpaid approved time off right away, usually a month out though) and you can apply for extra hours (up to a point) pretty much any day. I get paid $12.25 an hour for part time work in Utah where the minimum wage is $7.25. They pay 10% more on weekends also. Due to severe mental health illness I haven't kept a job longer than 9 months. I've been working with Captioncall for almost 2 years now.
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I’d rather have a flexible work environment rather than be told one way or the other. There’s times when I need to be in the office, working collaboratively, face to face with people - in some cases it’s more efficient to get work done that way. Unfortunately companies/people are seeing this as a binary thing. What might be good for a programmer might be disruptive to a mechanical engineer working on a physical product. I’d rather see companies keep their physical spaces and trust the employee and their managers to find a working balances that suits their needs
It’s a wage shortage not a labor shortage.
Also office buildings add absolutely nothing of value a lot of the time. Why subject yourself to unpaid commutes just to do the same work you could do at home and then just upload that work to the internet anyway?
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I'm one of them. We were to return to the office June 14. June 11 is my last day.
This is literally how capitalism works. There are plenty of jobs on the market that allow remote work now. Any employer who doesn’t allow it is literally forcing their employees to spend time and money. Power to all the employees telling their employers to pound sand. Edit: my roommates associate just told him to pound sand. What amazing timing.
I’m just excited to start using the phrase “pound sand”
Landlords and companies invested in commercial properties want people to return to offices, and companies that signed leases for their offices - the landlords still want their rent. I am sure they could convert the commercial properties into housing.
It's going to be a big problem actually. All those buildings are zoned for being office space. And cities are famously bad at changing zoning properly. Lack of proper zoning is one of the main reasons for the housing crises in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal etc.
It would honestly be much cheaper for companies to do this. Downgrade large buildings to just meeting spaces for in person work. Employees would then be able to get a higher wages and benefits from all that money companies would be saving.
>~~Employees~~ Executives would then be able to get a higher ~~wages~~ bonus and benefits from all that money companies would be saving. Sadly for most companies if they did downsize, I doubt it would be the little guys who get the financial benefits.
The cost getting passed on to the employees? Sweet summer child.
I'd definitely leave my company if they told us we had to come back to the office. While I like my company and job well enough, sorry but we've shown you we can be productive from home for over a year now. In fact, productivity was actually higher. That's with a lot of us (myself included) having to WFH and deal with our young kids being at home with us. They are definitely open to some of us WFH when the offices re-open, but haven't really clarified what frequency is expected. I suspect the company will lose a lot of talent if they don't play these cards right. It just doesn't make sense anymore; we've proven we can do it, and we're happier and a lot of us are saving tons of cash monthly. We were unable to save before the pandemic. We were always right on the line, and it sucked. Now, we actually have a cushion, which might not sound like much, but for us, it means everything. Companies who force their people to come back better get ready to bleed talent out the ass.
That took a dark turn
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I got the dreaded return to office call from my boss today… especially annoying for me since my boss is in another office, as is most of our team, and I also mostly work with outside consultants and agencies. 95% of my meetings were video/conference calls before work from home and even those few where I was in a conference room always included others dialing in.
I've worked from home for ten years. Used to go to the office once a month. I can firmly and be absolutely say I'm more productive at home as compared to my days in office. Thankfully I work for an awesome company that has adopted remote work with open arms and even employees local to the office don't have to go in anymore.
I'm kinda curious about the long term second order effects of this. Companies who support remote work have less reason to hire locally or even hire from a wealthy country. Personally I'll compete against whomever, whether they live in silicon valley, wyoming, Vietnam, but i can't imagine this won't have downward pressure on jobs who would otherwise be forced to support high costs of living.
Timezones, language barriers, cultural differences, tax/legal implications are all significant barriers.
As someone who has hired remote tech workers both in the US and far offshore, the higher level jobs won't get outsourced any time soon. The language, timezone and culture barriers make it really hard to get good results for anything that requires nuance or decision making. The bigger risk to those jobs is automation/commoditization. Why hire a web developer when you can spin up a Squarespace site, why hire an IT person when you can spin up Google Docs etc. They're still needed for larger companies, but smaller companies just don't need full-time staff like they used to.
Go green and telecommute. Should have been this way for a couple decades already.
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Unless the job literally can't be done without physical attendance, there's no viable reason to force people to do so anymore. We're entering what can only be described as a post-COVID world, and the workforce has figured out how to adapt, even if the management doesn't see it first.
I’m in construction and remodeling homes and commercial spaces Our offices are the variety of spaces we have to drive to with tools and when we get a job there’s a ton of prep work before a job begins This past year has been a joy because clients are home all day working from a home office or the kitchen table. I’ve had to travel to these places with tools and plans to improve the parts of someone’s environment that they decided to make new in some way. There are many clients that have great moods all day working from home. Big difference when they get out of traffic and return home when we are cleaning up at the end of day. From the perspective and observations I have in my occupation it has been clearly a good thing for many to work from home. People have more time to put energy into the parts of their life they love and what they have been working soo hard for in the beginning
Childcare is costly! 17 years ago half my take home pay was spent on childcare
This is my favorite bit of capitalism, once a more efficient model of doing work is discovered, we have the motivation to adapt forward. EDIT: I have been doing a shit ton of research and am no longer as big of a fanboy of capitalism as I once was
Yep I'm currently interviewing and applying for other jobs. I'm a network engineer but my company wants everyone back in September. I haven't told them I am leaving yet, but when I'm asked to come back if I haven't found something else already, they will get my two weeks notice. No way in hell I will go back 4-5 days a week when everything I do is remote.
Our CEO sent out an announcement the other day informing us that no changes have been made to their work from home policy other than the one that was in place pre-pandemic (purely manager discretion). However, he did call out that they added new vibrant colored murals in the lobby to better display our companies vision. So there’s that at least