Management are assholes and idiots.
Nothing will get better without demands. People need to organize.
But if I've learned anything from history, it's that the ownership class would rather murder all of their employees than give a few dollars more a day.
I have an unusual situation - immaterial commute, flexible hours - and enjoy working in the office more than working from home. Have done both and working from home is a drag.
Doesn't mean I'd force others to come in! But the only thing worse than a meeting is a teams meeting, and there is a lot of value for me getting that space back in my house, and in the incidental learning I both receive and provide to others when we are in person. Also it's entirely possible I'm too introverted to happily work from home.
So as long as work provides a common space to work I am happier here. I do think the environment benefits from fewer commuters but I don't drive to work because it's so close.
The real problem is usually not the office itself, but the journey there and back.
Yeah I am very,very sensitive to commute time, and recognize my situation is uncommon (arranged on purpose though - I won't take a job far or more than one city bus away) I wonder how the answers would change if the office was in the same building as your apartment, or within a mile as mine is. I really don't want any part of my home life to be my employment.
I couldn’t agree more: if the commute took less than 20 minutes (on foot or by bike), remote working would probably be rated less favourably.
Capitalism as we know it, isn't about effectiveness nor efficiency, it is primarily about power. So long as this remains the case, workers will continue to be abused for the amusement of the higher ups.
If they would get rid of these terrible open plan offices, where people can hear the silent fart you try to squeeze out gently, and go back to offices where you at least would have a smidgen of privacy, this would improve office attendance.
Surprise surprise
I just changed careers from 100% remote for the last 6yrs, to 100% on-site, and it's bittersweet. I'm really going to miss the freedom.
After more than 20 years of working remotely, I can’t imagine working on-site at all anymore. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you!
Whether it's a mix of control or egos, I think it is mostly about the fallacy that they are leaving unspent productivity on the table. Yet, COVID proved that people can be effective at home. It's nonsense to assume that you won't do the job and then somehow get paid for it. It's a strawman.
That is why, after all logical arguments were made, and bad faith responses dispelled, they chose to say it was about culture. That undefinable metric exist solely in the validation of HR and management. Pizza lunches, recognition events, and captive audiences.
Yes, and...
those in upper management need us to see them there, in front of us, IN CHARGE.
That's all it's about. They need you to kneel and scrape and fucking bow, and for that, you gotta sit in a car ten hours a week and work in an uncomfortable open-space cubicle where you can hear everything, including Betty from finance chewing.
All day, every day, so that Brent the VP can feed off your collective energy admiring him like he's a big shot. That's why he's the only asshole who wears a tie to an office of business casual colleagues.
Can confirm. How Money Works talks about it (Here on YouTube) regarding the recent mass layoffs by big tech, first, by pressure through RTO mandates, then blaming layoffs on AI, only they got rid of too many people and their businesses couldn't run.
So why did they do it? Vindictiveness. Because of the great resignation during which workers had some negotiating power, and the C-suite resented that and wanted to show everyone who's boss.
I've been following the trend since the early 2010s when we realized that crunching development teams is useless for meeting deadlines, but dev companies crunch anyway, traumatizing the team.
I'm pretty sure billionaires aren't especially bright, rather started with generational wealth and then got richer through luck and ruthlessness, to the point that they only failed upwards. (There are a few exceptions who understand the social contract, but they really are exceptions.)
And they surround themselves with sycophants so that their psyches are completely comfortable. They stop actually considering data or news that might hurt their feelings, which means they make bad decisions that cost their companies money.
extroverts can't understand that not everyone is like them. more at 11
Even if they do understand that, I’m not sure it matters. I’m an introvert so I know how easy it is to think of extroverts as annoying, overbearing sausages. However they have needs just like I do. Isolation genuinely harms them just like over stimulation harms me. I think it brings some realism to this topic if we remember that maybe they aren’t doing everything they’re doing just for the sake of shoving extroversion down your throat: maybe they are just trying to meet their own needs. It’s like the flip side of what introverts always say: don’t take it personally if I need to withdraw from you, I’m just meeting my own needs. Can you make the same allowance for them?
Sure, but they have the easier solution. They can socialize anywhere. Meanwhile, for us: income isn't optional.
To say nothing of the ethics of using a captive audience to meet your 'needs.'
Right? I often like being around people. I don't want to do it in the fucking office
As an extrovert, please let me work from home. It'll save me a commute so I can spend more time with people I like
Yeah. COVID lockdown was my golden era.
I secretly despised people at my company that wanted to demolish remote working completely after COVID on the pretence that people are traumaticed by the solitude and need to get back on the horse 100%.
Eventually only max. 30% remote was allowed and became company norm.
Even then some of these pieces of shit actually forbid remote working from their subordinates.
Those subordinates then gave them absolutely garbage employee reviews and made their worklife hell. Now they are in some other company torturing some other poor souls.
It was everyone's golden era. And then the owner class pressured the political class to memory hole the period so we forgot all the lessons we learned.
It's why we need to bring unions back to forcibly make sure those lessons are applied.
These are the same people who create useless team building exercises.
Here's the actual study if anyone cares to read it.
Skimming it, a couple things I noticed: This was a study of over 7,000 people across all departments at a large healthcare system. They found on-site workers skewed younger with shorter tenure and remote workers skewed older with longer tenure.
One potential pitfall: They didn't control in any way for department or role, and so floor nurses and housekeeping staff who must work fully on-site are being compared to tenured nurses working utilization review or revenue cycle staff whose job is billing/coding and who don't have to interact with anyone in their roles. In-person and remote jobs in healthcare tend to be very different jobs. I don't know how well this study could be generalized to other types of job settings based on this info
They signed a 20-year lease 10 years ago so they feel like they have to use the building.
Source: wild assumptions, i know nothing about commercial real estate.
It’s more the canteen and coffee shops onsite I think.
Our place guarantees minimum revenue to the canteen.
The company has to pay extra if the staff aren’t there.
Then there’s all the other businesses in the area. I imagine they come under pressure from local government to bring workers back to save those businesses
I betcha a nickle that the fines paid to the canteen would be more than offset by the increase in profits due to worker productivity.
It's like the time theft myth, the belief that workers will intrinsically slack unless you micromanage them. In fact the opposite is true, when workforces are allowed to chat with loved ones and surf the internet their productivity improves.
Curiously, when a company mandates that 15-minute breaks are taken and lunch is eaten during lunch break (even when workers are obsessive and want to work through breaks) then their productivity improves even more.
But the upper management of companies don't actually want to manage in a way that data shows maximizes profits.
Turns out the commute, fluorescent lighting, constant interruptions and performative desk sitting weren’t secretly essential ingredients for human happiness after all. Shocking. Next study: 7,700 managers discover that seeing someone in a chair is not actually a productivity metric.
Yeah it’s interesting to think about. I’ve been 100% remote for more than SIX YEARS now. Since the first days of COVID. And I’m so deep into it that I’m suffering the ill effects of remote: lack of social interaction with coworkers. Feeling shut up at home all the time. Having to work with people in crazy times zones because remote means you work with whoever, wherever. Zoom fatigue. Lack of separation between work and home life. There are definitely downsides. And some of them are pretty serious. The isolation has really eaten at me, especially.
But would I go back to full time? Heck no.
True, similar here. I go to coworking space to eat lunch in the commom area and talk to people.
I’ve been working remotely for over 20 years. One of my subsidiaries is entirely decentralised and remote. I can’t imagine doing anything else now.
I would like to have the option to assemble at an office when we want to, but our company embraced remote so completely that they let a bunch of leases expire and closed whole regional offices. Saved a ton of cash. But it does mean that I never see even my coworkers who are in the same metro area. And that’s a bit of a bummer.
To some extent, work has always been a way to make friends, and that’s also completely off the table now. There just aren’t those spare moments at the water cooler or drinks after work to be the basis of that. I’m older so this is hardly a dealbreaker for me but if I think back to my younger years where I was still building myself and my life, it would be a serious deficiency.
We meet up regularly. The whole team, too. It’s expensive, but priceless.
How often do you do it? What does it look like (Lunch - weeklong visit?)? And who pays for it?
If you don’t mind my asking. I don’t meet many people with 20YOE doing this :)
Copy: »Based on two decades of experience: As a general rule, there should be regular in-person team events (around two a year and just for fun). In addition, there should be joint training sessions (also around two a year). … Cooking together is brilliant: just two days ago we held our summer strategy meeting at a cookery school, where we cooked and enjoyed a three-course meal together. Basically, anything that encourages plenty of interaction and offers a completely different setting to the usual one is ideal.« We (the company) pay everything. It’s a »regular« workday.
And 7,600 of them discover that aside from micromanaging and degrading the well-being of their employees, they have no other substantive job duties, and their employment is completely pointless.
I became a manager about a year ago. Now that I'm part of the "inner circle", I can see firsthand what I suspected for the past 20 years.
There are 2 types of managers.
There are cunts bosses who treat their employees as property for their personal gain and advancement. They demand productivity at all costs (see: LLM-cogsuckers), punish for mistakes and pressure people into responsibilities they should take. They are the ones who want RTO to exert control on their employees. They are the ones who "joke" you must take a half-day leave if you need to go before 6PM. They are the ones who openly shit on their employees (or other teams employees FWIW) because they're not benefiting them enough. They are not part of the team, they feel and act above everyone in it.
The second type, which I strive to be and most of my closest "manager friend" are, are servant-leaders. They want to get shit done by easing roadblocks and making technologically informed decisions. They understand that productivity is a consequence of a functional team and happy employees. They take on responsibility for mistakes and push the team towards finding solutions to prevent them. They understand that Life^TM^ is more important than work. They are an integral part of the team, they're not the boss but a full member with a different role and different responsibilities, like a PO or a data analyst.
As a tech lead first and a trained Scrum Master second, I feel much more comfortable in the second role. I help the team internally and report and manage external roadblocks with other teams. It's what I already know. I hate the hierarchical part of the job.
"I think flexibility is here to stay," she said.
This is the problem with academics. They do a study, find something is logically better, then assume humans will act logically.
Unfortunately, most CEOs don't give a shit if their employees are more happy, productive, and less likely to quit if they work remotely. They just want to feel like they have control over people's lives, which is why we're seeing more return to office initiatives.
As the other reader says, the point of studies is to develop objective truth.
After one generation, this new objective truth starts getting ingrained in people's minds. That's usually because after one generation the people who held old beliefs are out of the scene and new young people who believe in obvious things come to be part of the scene.
That's how society changes over time. Not people changing their minds, but new people with a different way of seeing the same things.
An old saying is change comes one funeral at a time.
As someone that is bring changed from fully remote to hybrid in the next few weeks, I am already sad.
RTO work often is about control and not about cost or efficiency.
Or encouraging people to quit on their own. It's a lot cheaper than firing people.
they got tired of RTO, since people dint quit fast enough, htey just did layoffs after layoffs.
I can’t believe how much more I get done when I’m left alone and focused on the task at hand.
I don’t feel particularly isolated. Everybody is different but a once-week team chat and seasonal social lunches fill my cup.
Turns out when you can do errands and meet non-work friends for coffee as you please you don’t need to lean on your office family so much for connection and purpose.
I'm very fortunate to have a job with a very small company (literally 4 people) where we get to set the rules.
It is funny to see the ingrained notion we (collective "we") once had that working from home could never work. I started this job in 2018, and I often suggested we do a work from home day each week since we all had laptops. My bosses (co-owners of this company) always shot it down. "Oh we'd never get any work done!"
Then, of course, COVID. And while I certainly would rather COVID not have happened, it did convince them that working from actually works. And, of course, they loved it as well. So since 2020 I have not had to go back to the office. We still have office space for some minor things, and once in a blue moon we might gather there. But in six years I've probably spent six days in the office.
Heck, I'm fortunate enough to finally have convinced them we should take Fridays off, too. We piloted that program two years ago over the summer, and it, of course, stuck because everyone likes that—though we actually just take every-other Friday off. But still. Hard to beat.
I worked on site for 4 months before my remote work was approved and it was literally the most unfulfilling life I had
I would work 9 to 630, come home so tired that all I could do is throw something quick to eat and watch TV (didn't process what I was watching) then later fall asleep and rinse and repeat
How anyone is able to do this lifestyle is a testament to humanity's ability to adapt
Working culture is fucked up and needs to change
I was in the same boat for about a year. It was beyond fucked, and now with hindsight my wife and I call that period "the great fog", because I was so absent even when I was home and "rested".
It was like I was living as a ghost, unable to perceive much beyond the feeling of fatigue.
The assholes at HR were doing everything they could to make the process harder. And even more insulting the company had the entire workforce remote for building maintenance they chose to do on a building they didn't even own.
So it's OK to work from home when the business needs us to do so, but not when our disability needs us to do so? Hypocritical motherfuckers had no line they wouldn't cross.
My company was perfect except for their strict stance on in-office hours (I broke them routinely)
I recently quit my job and just as of the last few days I finally feel reset, or close to
mental peace, clear mind, a lot of energy and wit slowly coming back
Employers don't care if you're happy at work, they just need to lord over you.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
