Well, having the office was nice because I like my colleagues. I’m lucky in that regard though, and as nice as it was to socialise at work, working from home is nicer. Not to mention much much cheaper by every metric. In conclusion fuck ever going back to the office, thank you for coming to my TEDx Talk.
I personally like it too, but not daily. I average 1-2 days in office now and it’s healthy for me. See my coworkers, they know my name, we catch up, have our meetings, then I go home for a few days again. I’ve just learned everyone is different, and the company definitely shouldn’t be telling people how to work, people are grownups and can decide themselves. (And if they can’t, then fire them instead of punishing everyone).
However for this meme, another great way to get people off the roads would be… trains
I like trains.
I like freight trains, but I wouldn’t want to live anywhere that commuter trains would make sense.
Why in the world not? I specifically moved to be close to mine, I hate driving for my commute
Passenger trains can only operate efficiently in areas of extremely high population density. If I’m living somewhere serviced by trains, then everywhere I go, I’ll be in a crowd.
I’m enough of an introvert that this sounds like an extraordinarily uncomfortable proposition. I’d need an exorbitant financial benefit to even consider it, and that’s not going to happen. Instead, I’m expected to pay a very high premium for the “privilege” of being miserable everywhere I go.
No thanks, I’ll stay out here in the sticks.
You’re absolutely spot on, and it’s evidenced by house prices here in the UK where they’re next to or near a rail line.
They are noisy fuggers and people do not like living by them.
Small towns built around a train station are absolutely lovely though
I suspect those are mostly outposts. Rail junctions. Water stops for the old steam trains. Remote mining towns. Places that either provided services to railway operation, or primarily needed freight service rather than passenger.
And I agree: I would love to live in a small railroad town. But I would move out long before that town had enough people to justify commuter rail service.
Some people don’t have the space at home to set up a working area and really want to just go to an office that their employer pays for, and that’s fine.
This, and I do a lot of gaming on my pc, have a nice setup etc, usually not great trying to work there (don’t have space for another desk and can’t really justify having two sets of monitors, keyboard etc
Why do you need all that? I have my work laptop sitting at the back of my desk. Most monitors have two inputs. I’ve got an older 1080 with HMDI+DVI and a newer 1440p with DP/2xHDMI.
So I have the laptop in HDMI on both screens (it needed a USBC to HDMI cable for one of the outputs), and a simple USB3 switch for the mouse+keyboard.
So when I’m working I fire up the laptop, switch the USB over to that and swap the screens to the HDMI inputs. When I’m done working I can fire up the desktop, swap inputs and USB and in seconds I’m switched over.
I’ve been doing it this way for years and years now.
That’s normally what I do, the problem is the context for me, I sometimes prefer just sitting across the room with a laptop so I’m in a slightly different environment
It can help draw a line I’d agree, but I’ve gotten used to it now I think. I used to have it worse. I operated out of the bedroom for the first few years I was remote and that wasn’t good at all. The new house had a bedroom that was really too small to be a bedroom. So it became an office room.
This is why coworking spaces exist.
I don’t know in other countries but it is working quite well in France, you can get a subscription to the closest working space and have a desk, meeting rooms … To work remotely.
I like that it gives a separation between home and work but without long commute.
The resistance to allowing WFH really shows how bullshit the push for EVs “to help the environment” is.
I’m not anti-EV and do believe they are better than ICE. But even better than an EV-driven mile is a mile that isn’t driven at all.
It’s not bullshit at all. It is a lot better for cars that are being used to not shoot out smoke from combusting refined oil. There will always be cars in use, so it will always be better for them to not shoot out smoke.
It’s not possible for all workers to live inside dense cities and use public transport and work in offices or at home. MANY other jobs are out there and still need doing every day. Everyone who physically maintains all of our critical infrastructure, manufacturing, and food supply industries is pretty much going to commute to work one way or another. Millions of those people don’t live in cities with public transport and/or don’t work where public transport can take them to. EVs are an improvement for all of those necessary use cases, because the vehicles they need could not be shooting out smoke.
I’m not sure what percentage of workers could do their job from home if they were allowed to. It’s probably a small minority, though a quick glance of numbers from COVID would suggest 15-20%. I’ll use 15% for sake of argument but would welcome a more “confident” number if someone has it.
Reducing the number of miles is and important way to reduce impact. Additionally, even those who cannot work from home benefit from reduces congestion and reduces vehicle idling. Although idling has less impact on EVs (though they still have to run HVAC), ICE vehicles are still the majority of vehicles being sold today in most nations and will be in circulation for decades.
Not everyone can WFH, but it needs to be part of the strategy of reducing emissions from transportation. Not pushing WFH (for those who can) is leaving a lot on the table. This is not a replacement for EVs, rather in addition to.
I’m all for WFH and EVs personally. Haven’t bought an EV yet but I would like to have a non-spyware-laden one for a reasonable price.
The spyware part. Agh!!
A big motivator for keeping my early-2000’s car with almost 215,000 miles on it is just how CREEPY modern cars are.
Mozilla’s “Privacy Not Included” column really highlighted this. It’s terrible and it’s currently all legal and you can never really trust you’ve circumvented it.
Sucks too, because those “Canoo lifestyle vehicles” or the new VW bus EV look so cool…but they have crap like face-monitoring cameras and app-connectivity in them. What the heck.
I’m not sure how you equate that first paragraph at all. Can you expound? The second one just nullifies the first lol.
My point is that if they were serious about protecting the environment, they would promote WFH (for those who can…not everyone can obviously) in addition to EVs. Instead, there seems to be a big push for return to office.
Got it. Thanks. It definitely read like you were saying EVs were some secret not as good as you thought it was issue…
When they’re pretty damn fantastic at lowering pollution over time.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110016823009055
Yeah, I think he was explaining that EVs ARE more efficient, but like everything with industrial capitalism, the idea is that they’re solving for:
“How can we increase efficiency, while keeping inefficient traffic jams and pointless office commutes?”
When, if they actually cared for the environment, reducing office commutes in the first place has proven to work wonders in dropping pollution. There’s just no psychopathic control and exponential corporate real estate profits involved.
An EV is more efficient than an ICE, but industry wants never-ending constantly-exponentially-growing production and purchasing of EVs, so they can enjoy a future of EV-majority traffic jams, instead of gas and diesel traffic jams.
We’ll then get emotional-piano commercials about how they saved the planet by mass producing a product that was mass consumed.
But we could simply not have traffic jams, and everybody knows it. That would make people too happy though, and give them time to think. Like 2020, it would once again be difficult to find people who will put up with corporate nonsense.
Solving problems by putting dents in demand also has a way of making quarterly projections inconvenient. :p
While true I think most people understand that most of our modern economies that sustain billionaire corpos and the stock market are almost purely run by the magic that unstainable growth based gdp. This will always be the case until we work properly on fusion and a Dyson swarm.
We will reach a point when we hit 11 billion people and growth levels off. People will revolt en masse when they realize they can’t retire without the magic rich made richer money generation machine that is the stock markets compounding interest. Turns out you’ll have to save for a retirement by not magically generating more money from just hoarding it.
Until then, keep putting in your 401k and understand that any large change to an American economy to fix commute problems is going to cost way more than Europe due to our land size and heavily suburbian population centers.
Everyone is down for mass transit until they realize they have to pay for it lol.
I save $7 per day working from home while I can listen to death metal.
None of my coworkers drive to the office and we actually like seeing each other… Hybrid remote work is great for us
I think 90% of the problem is people being forced to drive everywhere
Traffic would be so much better with a staggered work force. We might actually enjoy the commute.
Or if they actually cared, they could build trains.
Because of traffic, the workforce started staggering by themselves here if possible. The result was that bad traffic was spread out over the entire day instead of just two peaks in the morning and evening. Good traffic is only at night and working at night defeats the purpose of having business hours.
Basically just further proof that car traffic doesn’t scale well. It’s just an incredibly space inefficient way to get around.
Another factor is the spaces that offices take up or the power used whilst unoccupied, these space could be used for housing or maybe even industry.
Its great that no one drives to your work but this is more uncommon than common.
In conclusion: work from home is better.
Don’t forget giant slammed parking lots! :D
Honestly I think we’re going to hit a wall where we realize we need about half as many “office drones” as we have in a couple years.
So many people with office jobs drive in, sit at a desk, and do maybe 2 hours of actual work in the entire day. Or they work from home and do the same. And then they collect their 95k/year salary.
I really dunno if people are prepared for businesses to start going “wait, what are all of these people doing?” And axing their workforce and replacing most of them with AI or existing other employees
The thing you’re not accounting for is that work that primarily involves thought, which is what “office drones” are doing, aren’t productive in the same way that physical or service jobs are.
Looking off into space thinking is part of the work. People average about four hours of productive work in an eight hour day.The thing you can’t do is get rid of half the people and then expect the other half to magically be eight hours productive per day. Businesses keep trying and weirdly it just tanks their output.
AI is not the panacea that so many people think it is. Do you feel happy when you need help with something you bought and you get an AI trying to offer you helpful articles or tips? I don’t. Do you want the same level of service from the entity that controls where your paycheck gets deposited or fixed your HSA contributions?
If you definition of work is butts in chairs typing, office workers don’t do too much work. But that’s a very naive definition of what most office workers are actually doing.
Incredibly well said. I’m saving this.
Me thinks thou dost protest too much
The thing you’re not accounting for is that work that primarily involves thought, which is what “office drones” are doing
Found the office drone.
Our office drones are not “thinking” for half the day like you, and input and manipulate data. You could also include half these “managers” too who sit in an office sending emails all day, and never hit the shop floor.
If it is so easy to be an office drone, why weren’t you able to get a job like that?
Is it maybe because it involves skills you aren’t aware of?
I once worked in an office doing what I described above.
I absolutely hated it stuck in a cubicle, and now work outside with lots of other people grafting, instead of listening to gossiping over the cubicles all day long. Think I lasted 2 months.
Given that office drone would cover any job that isn’t service, manufacturing or laborer, it’s not exactly surprising that you’d find one. I’m a software developer.
It’s almost always best to assume that other people’s jobs actually take some form of skill, because they always do. People get paid for a reason. Otherwise you fall into the trap of calling huge swaths of work “unskilled labor” and thinking they don’t deserve much pay, just because they’re just moving stuff around on the shop floor.
What do you think those emails the managers are sending are, if not work?
A software developer!? On Lemmy!? Say it ain’t so
The old; how do you know someone is a software developer? Yup, they tell ya!
I think I really touched a nerve with that guy though, and it seems like they want to be an office drone instead of working from home (this is the bit where the “senior software devs + team manager” argue they need to collaborate, in person) with a nice life balance.
You don’t understand though, because it’s not physical (software of any kind) and even if it is (any hardware) because you aren’t constantly doing something it’s not work!!
As an admin who got push back from the sales team, everyone has… Unique perspectives on what is and isn’t work.
I know exactly what those emails are because I have to deal with them asking me if a wagon that I’m looking at has arrived yet.
So I email them back telling them that it’s arrived (they knew that already because goods-in already updated the checking in sheet) and they get to validate their job somehow by asking me, shit.
It’s quite amazing how they keep their jobs.
So you can dismiss someone’s job because you, a person whose job it is to look at wagons, got an email you didn’t see the point of?
If they have the sheet, why do they need you to work there and look at the wagon at all?
Now, I know your job definitely has more to it than looking at wagons and confirming their existence.
My point is that the person who sent the email does too. It’s rare for a job to actually have no point and no work associated with it.Well, maybe your workplace wouldn’t put up with these people but I can confirm that besides them not being able to use SAP to check the quantity of a BOM, to like I said - they have access to the other functions / data but prefer to delegate them to others.
So it ends up going down a hierarchy until someone else does what these managers could do themselves in the first instance.
And they spend all their time forwarding these queries to people lower down the hierarchy and that’s all they do, eh?
You should probably get a new job if your company has that much dead weight and no direction.
Experimental solution proposal:
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Fire all management. They’re expensive and exponentially less productive. Their stupid large offices and pricey desks also waste space.
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(Office) workers collectively do the thing they do without being micro managed and stuffed into pointless meetings.
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???
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Probably profit, actually. But then how would the “in-club” kids reap all the rewards without working? :( :( :(
I have direct experience with the management that only work days since I work continental hours, so get to see how we run during the night without them.
Like I said, half is probably a number we could run with at my place. Sorry state of affairs.
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I’d be fine with going into the office if public transportation could get me there, but it’s a 15 minute drive vs 1.5 hours on the bus. And when I go into the office I just put in headphones with a YouTube documentary and don’t talk to anyone. What’s the point?
Unnecessary RTO should be outlawed
The worst part of it is most big companies are forcing RTO to either justify the leases they don’t want to pay to break, or to satisfy tax incentives agreements they made with municipalities.
In both cases, they’re deciding it’s better if you pay - in time, gas, car maintenance, mental health, productivity, and stress - for their business decisions that went bad instead of paying money out of their own bloated pockets.
Boss: you are not allowed to with from home
Same boss: I’ll be working from work, I need to service my car
I don’t have the kind of job that can be done remotely, but I’m all for remote work where it’s possible and desired. My best friend hated working from home at the height of covid because he’s an extrovert who can’t really afford to go out much. Now he works from home Mondays and Fridays and I think it’s kinda the best of both worlds for him. I think that employers that already have office space for workers that could effectively do their job from home should give workers a choice. Maybe hybrid workers have required scheduled days in the office just to make sure they’re there to attend necessary meetings or collaborations or whatever rather than it just be them coming in when they feel like it, but the technology has caught up to allow way more flexibility than ever before. If I had a 100% desk job, I would move somewhere cheaper and never come in. I know I’m not alone there, and I think there’s no reason to hold that option hostage. Covid proved that it could be done for most white collar work, and we can’t let them try to squeeze that Pandora back into its box.
Working from home reduces emission much faster than electric cars.
Working from home is also considerably safer. The most dangerous part of most people’s work day is their drive to and from work. If that time had to be covered by workplace injury insurance, management would be begging for as many people as possible to stay home just to keep insurance costs down.
Yeah it really doesn’t help when everyone is driving worn out, pissed off, and/or fearing of retribution from being late due to things out of their control, like traffic, accidents, and sudden construction.
I have terrible time-blindness, so I’d frequently be one of those stressed out trying to make my commute. More often than not, I’d make it to the clock within 5 minutes or less!
There was a few times I felt pushed to make a risky turn where you’re allowed to go but yield to oncoming traffic (who were also speeding to not get yelled at or fired, surely!)…, so I could clock in on time…then I thought…
“I refuse to die on my way to work. That would be so pathetically stupid.”
Thankfully I quit when they wanted to get on people for being literally sixty seconds late.
Their answer is always “Just leave earlier?” If they had it their way you’d just be wasting hours of your life unpaid in the parking lot just for them. As if they’re remotely worth it.
How many deaths are caused by a ridiculous obsession with punitive punctuality, which is hampered by forced office commute traffic, which encourages panicked angry driving?
I too, miss “covid traffic.” Roads actually made sense then…
I always turned up 30 mins early to avoid all of this shit. I know people dont want to be at work this early but fuck it, give yourself some leeway. Bosses had the option years back to have flexible hours and spread out that traffic. The 9-5 is bullshit and ancient.
Why does anyone care what time you turn up at the office? People have different sleep preferences and family commtiments. Just schedule any all-hands meetings for a mutually agreeable time and let people live their lives.
I trust my people to spend their time wisely and to self direct if we’re not online at the same time. Shit gets done. Why would I fuck up someone’s sleep in, or put them under unnecessary pressure when they’re trying to prep their kids for school, just to have our clock-ins line up on a spreadsheet I’m never going to look at?
Its easier to communicate with other pepole if you work at the same time. And if your work is mostly based on comunicating with other buisnes clients you need to have at least somewhat fixed shedule
agree
True
People going on about how much electric cars suck are usually shocked when I agree with them… And moreso when I point out that they suck because they’re still cars, and that’s not a conversation the anti-EV crowd is ready to have.
Also, goes into the old “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” mantra which it seems nobody understands is ordered that way intentionally as that’s the order they should be implemented. Reducing usage is by far the most effective tactic for positive environmental impact or environmental harm reduction.
They just get to “recycle” and see that they can change pretty much nothing more than putting trash in a different bin and figure that’s all they need to do. Even though it’s a really poor overall impact.
Them: I need you in the office so I can keep you under my finger!
Me: Bro do you know how much in rent and power you’re gonna save keeping them at home?
the only expenses businesses ever complain about are wages. they don’t seem to care how much is wasted elsewhere if they could save a few dollars cutting some shift workers allowance
those first 3 months or so of covid were bliss. every office drone was off the road. it was so fucking easy to get everywhere, and it was quick too
It was mostly quicker on my pushbike too. I wasnt having to keep swerving and braking for idiots. Though I did get chased 3 times, by special kinds of idiots (one in a dinosaur suit ffs).
Hey boss, you want to put these servers in the cloud?
Oh and by the way, me working from home is the human equivalent of working in the cloud.
It’s somebody else’s server (clouds) and somebody else’s office (yours instead of theirs)
But the company culture.
The culture:
What a depressing sight to behold
At least it’s empty
Better than an open office setting.
Which is better still than open office “Hot Desking”
Yep I know all about it. Shit sucks.
Here’s my theory: bad bosses want you to be there in person because they think you’re lazy.
My old job: there was a constant cloud of mistrust I got when I worked there, just a feeling of unease. I can’t really describe it. Like everyone was just a little bit unhappy with their job. It wasn’t related to the work we were doing, it was the working conditions. Everyone seemed unhappy with some policy. I consistently heard bickering about management and idiotic decisions, plus the usual customer complaints about clients making bad decisions or doing ridiculous things, but that’s normal and nobody seemed miffed about it, just discussing it.
They had a “hybrid” work setup, each person was “allowed” to work remotely one day of the week, each week. The selection of which day was up to each worker and their team/manager to schedule. The expectation was that someone would be in office at all times on every team. Most teams were 3-4 people, so it generally meant that only one person was working remotely at a time.
So let me compound this, and I’ll note, there’s no exaggeration here, this is what happened. While working, we were obligated to be in a teams meeting all day long, 9 times out of 10 it was expected that we were on cam the entire day. Frequently these teams meetings were only the team in question, but the justification was that we were in there in case a manager/team leader/whatever, could pop in and talk to the team if they needed to, and/or if the manager was working remotely. It was pretty rare that happened. The other excuse was so that the team could chat about challenges and discuss any client issues they needed to collaborate on, which most teams just used text chat to do, so the meeting was unnecessary. During my time there, I made several suggestions for improvements and they all fell on deaf ears. Nothing changed. The excuses were poor, and I don’t recall them very clearly because they were largely nonsense. Needless to say, the situation sucked.
I had to drive into the office for about 1h+ each day, and at least the same coming home, so around 2.5h of my day was my commute. I pleaded for more work from home/remote, but it was denied at every turn. Add this to the fact that there was no company provided parking, and parking in that area started at about $70/mo, and went up from there. The nearest parking areas were the most costly at $130+ and they were in high demand, some had wait lists for monthly passes because they simply did not have enough parking spots for everyone that wanted them.
There were probably dozens of other frustrations I could list, I’ll limit myself to one more: my job is IT support, and we largely use remote access software for everything, so it literally does not matter where I work from. As long as I have an internet connection, I can do my job.
I didn’t last 2 years under those conditions. I barely made it to 1 year… There’s a whole story as to why I don’t work there anymore, but it’s not relevant to the point. My point is, I was untrusted, and treated as though I should just shut up and create value for the shareholders, and be happy about it. By the way, the shareholders were the managers.
Contrast with the place I’m working now: I’m provided with $1000 of home office set up funds up front. I have a home office already set up, but I found some nice-to-have things that I was able to get with that money. I was shipped a brand new laptop and dock, which the old place gave me a used, old, crappy, end of life/end of support system. They also provided me with a UPS, keyboard, mouse, and three monitors, webcam, headset, etc. Before I even worked my first shift, all shipped to me directly. This job is 100% work from home, and this workplace doesn’t even have an official office space. The only exception is when hands-on is required, or there’s a team event, and we take over a client’s board room for a day, so we can work from there, which has been less than once a month. I’ve met my team in person exactly twice in the three+ months I’ve worked at this place.
Any suggestions I have are discussed and considered. I feel heard. Some suggestions have already been implemented, others are still under consideration or have been denied with good reasons (usually a technical limitation regarding the systems we use). I don’t need to sit in on useless meetings all day that accomplish nothing, I can listen to music while I get things done without being distracted by my co-workers eating their lunch and forgetting to hit mute. I “see” my team once a day for a stand up to check in on progress and workload. I feel supported, trusted, and I’m free to work in whatever conditions I find are most condusive to getting things done.
As a matter of fact: both jobs require time tracking, the old job I struggled to account for ~5 hrs of my 8 hour shift, at the new job, I frequently can account for ~7 hours of my day without issue.
My boss is good, trusting, and friendly. Compared to the cloud of discontent my old boss would inspire, and the work shows through on that. I’m happier, and I enjoy work again.
I recently heard that the old job nixed hybrid and went full RTO.
QED: Good bosses trust that you’ll do your job and let you do that from wherever you can. Bad bosses want to control you into doing it “their way or the highway”.
It’s micromanaging. They don’t know how to lead properly. When I went through McDonald’s shift manager training they taught the concept of letting your workers do their job, so you could do yours. They literally said to work with your hands in your pockets so that you wouldn’t be tempted to take over and get distracted by going back to what you used to do. A Managers job is to provide their team with whatever they need to do their job effectively. A baseball coach wouldn’t go out on the field and bat or play the outfield.
That manager probably started off doing the job you were doing and got promoted by kissing ass or being a toxic worker and therefore causing everyone else to leave/ perform lower because they were avoiding that person.
They literally said to work with your hands in your pockets so that you wouldn’t be tempted to take over and get distracted
Yeah this is my experience with managers, alright. When they weren’t around, the actual work to be done always seemed to go just fine! Happy worker anarchy!
My supervisor’s role in various jobs I’ve had was usually to hang out in their back office or chat up other management -level staff all day. Occasionally opening Excel and punching in some numbers once a week. Not to mention the hard labor of scheming up something they could neg you about so you’d feel pushed to make them look better.
That manager probably started off doing the job you were doing and got promoted by kissing ass or being a toxic worker
This. The company will promote its “true believers” who think shift-managing a MickeyD’s is their life’s plateau, who will take the company line as sacred gospel and punish any whiff of potential heresy.
Provide what their workers need? Maybe it was this way at one point. I feel the role of manager now is the job of an idiot task-master, to convince their employees to work harder without what they need.
I will add that the best manager I ever reported to, always took on things that impeded my ability to do work. If a client was being rude or unreasonable, I would shoot him a note about it and he would usually tell me to drop it and move on, that he would deal with the problem… And he did.
I’d take a job under him again in a heartbeat.
Thanks Jeff, you’re awesome.
In that case, the management was basically the founders. They grew the business without any employees, and when it came time to bring on employees, instead of stepping back and letting the employees figure out the best way to get their job done, they’ve rigidly enforced their work methodology on their employees. When you deviate, they get unhappy.
That specific company was a bit of an outlier, the majority shareholder “brags” that he has fired more people than… I don’t remember, I couldn’t have given less of a shit when he said that. I was busy trying to keep my eyes from rolling out of my head. But that’s literally something he said to me in person, with nobody else in the room. Needless to say, that company is shit for more reasons than controlling management.
Needless to say I was already starting to look for the exit after being there for less than a year.
I can’t really talk about why I am no longer employed there, but I can confirm that I did not, at any point, provide two weeks notice as required by law when quitting. Beyond that, my lawyer advises me not to discuss it.
Needless to say, I’m thankful that I’m not working there anymore.
The reason good bosses can trust you is that they can quantify your output. Bad bosses just assume an ass in a seat is getting something done.
This is part of the reason sales positions are often the only WFH positions at a company. Their metrics are clear and easily quantifiable, so if someone’s not doing their job you can tell.
The time entries on my tickets would disagree with this logic.
