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I'd be fine with popping into the office once every couple of weeks if it was a nice environment and it was used as an opportunity to have meetings and a catered lunch while my travel costs were reimbursed, but the office is a shithole and doing the round trip twice costs the same as my monthly internet bill.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:23
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So from a RTO perspective the place I work for keeps doing the dumbest poo poo. Long read, I tried to make an entertaining because it's loving hilarious from an outside perspective. This is my department but this saga will be coming to me soon. About a year into COVID they formally announced a flexible work arrangement, which pretty much meant full remote but you can come in and use the office for meetings or just come in if you want to but no one really gave a drat. The people who had a wife and kids at home and wanted to get away came into the office and people would occasionally have meetings and then go get drunk at the bar afterwards, but pretty much just do whatever the gently caress you want. After this announcement they tore down everyone's permanent cubicles and put up rent a cubes. If you were coming into the office you could scan a QR code on the cubicle and then it's like yours for the day or whatever, same for conference rooms etc. They also actively eliminated several floors in our high rise and just a ton of floor space in general because they didn't need it. The cubicle leveling and getting rid of floors and remodeling and everything was absurdly expensive because it's all union labor and all of our poo poo was old and needed updated anyways. So now two years later they're trying to get everyone to come back. People are obviously like "well what the gently caress? I am here every day but I don't have my own space? So I have to tote all of my poo poo back and forth?" So then they installed little cubbies with smart locks to keep your poo poo that you would normally just leave in your cube, Cubbies as a service if you will  I don't know why they needed to have smart locks but whatever. Then they completely overlooked the fact that they completely eliminated a bunch of floor space and gave it back to the owners of the high rise to lease to other companies. Okay okay you can come in 2 days a week and sort of own your own cubicle with someone else and alternate. Now they have to install more cubbies because (I forgot to mention) early on it wasn't gonna be the whole company, now it is. Hence, more cubbies. So this ignores the fact that you can't split a workforce down the middle with a work week that's 5 days in such a way that you don't have overlap, but you can't have overlap, we don't have the cubicles. That's why we have the cubbies. Okay so Fridays are meeting days then, certain teams are in cubicles and other teams are doing meetings in big conference rooms. Conference room reservations are first come first serve per the QR code scanning thingy. I don't think I have to explain any further as to how well this works in practice.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:25
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Handsome Ralph posted:My old gig pre-pandemic was very big on WFH and flexible schedules. Then about a year before the pandemic, they announced they were getting rid of it and everyone had to return to the office and could only WFH one day a week. Said "ok" and just didn't show up at all? That's what I would do
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Aug 2, 2023 22:27
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Cup Runneth Over posted:Said "ok" and just didn't show up at all? That's what I would do This was me since July last year but it's been brought up again so I'm going to shoot for coming in once every 5 or 6 weeks.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:30
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feedmegin posted:We sold our office because the lease was up and moved to a smaller cheaper one which can only physically fit 50% of our employees so we are definitely all in on at least reasonable hybrid. Yeah we cut back/are cutting back on office space in a bunch of places. They're pushing for hybrid for the people in the corp HQ as much as possible, and I already lived 15 min away (by walking) before COVID hit so I don't particularly care for myself. For my team though, I've pushed back very hard on anything approaching forced return to office. Some of the best technical talent on the team is hybrid or fully remote, and I would absolutely lose them if we made a demand to come back in. Some of these people have already relocated elsewhere so they don't even have a nearby office to come back to. They'd just leave. It's just dumb. People who are productive and motivated can do that from home or in a cube somewhere. If they want to do nothing and gently caress off all day they can do that from anywhere. You do not solve those kind of people issues by making people more demotivated by dragging them to a place they don't want to be.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:43
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Cup Runneth Over posted:Said "ok" and just didn't show up at all? That's what I would do Nope. Because they did track attendance to a certain degree. So it basically turned into people showing up at 10, doing whatever work they had between 10-2, leaving at 2 on the dot to go "WFH for the rest of the day" and then just leaving email on at most while they enjoyed their afternoon/evening. So paying people as if they were 40 hour employees but for only 16 hours of in office work (remember, one day a week of WFH is fine). But it gets better. I was able to get the director to admit they had no hard and fast rule for emergencies or weather. "So if my toilet breaks and I need to work from home that day, does it count as my sole WFH day?" "Well no, but..." "Too late!" It was all very very loving stupid in a way only a C Suite type could think was smart or practical. Handsome Ralph fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Aug 2, 2023 |
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Aug 2, 2023 22:49
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A 15 minute walk commute sounds ideal, it's short enough where you can start the day from home and then come in late morning.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:50
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Handsome Ralph posted:Nope. Because they did track attendance to a certain degree. lol tracking attendance on grown adults like they're middle schoolers. middle management needs something loving better to do
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Aug 2, 2023 23:00
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Thanks Ants posted:A 15 minute walk commute sounds ideal, it's short enough where you can start the day from home and then come in late morning. I once lived 3 mins walking from my office, always came in late and it really pissed people off for some reason. Most folks started at 7.00 to beat traffic and I rolled in at 9.00. Pre covid most of my jobs had at least 45 min single trip commutes. With bad traffic that became easily 1.5 hours, making me lose 3 hours a day. Or get up at 5.30 and start before 7 which was killing me as a night person. After covid I’ve visited the office once per quarter at most. My limit is once a week and I’ve already quit a job that was actively pushing RTO and turned down a few that wanted 2-3 days a week. C Suites really want to see those offices full.
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Aug 2, 2023 23:03
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The big company that purchased our small company? There are news articles now about how the big company is putting themselves up for sale. Apparently they owned a ton of commercial real estate and you all know how valuable that is right now.
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Aug 2, 2023 23:03
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Previous job pre-covid said we could wfh one agreed on day a week (not Fridays lol). We couldn’t wfh on snow days ~because of equity~ as we supported hospital workers who had to be onsite. Note that we worked in an offsite building so nobody saw whether we were in or not. It was the dumbest implementation of wfh. Then covid hit and we were required to be remote for ~2 years, but they also never really thought through how to integrate us with onsite folks so it was also a trash fire.
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Aug 2, 2023 23:05
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Lmao how common is attendance tracking? I would literally like open a pizza stand or something before I work for a company that needs to be up my rear end that much. Who runs the attendance tracking system? Is it IT? 
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Aug 2, 2023 23:06
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Cup Runneth Over posted:lol tracking attendance on grown adults like they're middle schoolers. middle management needs something loving better to do Old company installed IoT devices under each desk when they moved offices. They moved to flex seats and the devices monitored if someone was sitting behind their desk. The idea was to show all desks on a map so people could see which spots were available. Being away for longer than an hour showed the desk as being available for use. You were allowed to ditch all equipment left on the desk if it was marked as available. C-suite made the most cringe video about it to promote not using desks when you had a meeting. It was a slapstick where they ran around the office with beach towels claiming there spots while not using it. The slogan was “work where you are most efficient”. I told them I was most efficient sitting next to my team and if there were no spots available I’d just gently caress off and WFH as that’d be more efficient than sitting alone in a random place in the office. The whole plan was executed as poorly as the idea itself.
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Aug 2, 2023 23:12
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Cup Runneth Over posted:lol tracking attendance on grown adults like they're middle schoolers. middle management needs something loving better to do If only there was a way to measure performance, say with some kind of task assignment system where one could log updates and finish the project.
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Aug 2, 2023 23:17
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An old funny in office story from years ago of mine is: My floor was a big fairly open plan cubicle farm with absolutely kink acoustics. They had white noise generators in the ceiling that for the longest time I thought was just an HVAC system but apparently it was designed to suppress annoying sounds. Well it failed one day the entire floor was like dead silent, it was super creepy... Until you realize how well the sound of a fart travels in a floor with no sound absorbing materials. Just so many farts. It was the most stressful day of my life.
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Aug 2, 2023 23:18
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My office has a pretty nice gym and I started actually exercising on my lunch break like a month ago because I usually eat at my desk anyway be sauté my lunchs too late. I feel great and more confident than ever but they tricked me into being office briefly even on my days off because I’m too cheap to get a gym membership
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Aug 2, 2023 23:35
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Honestly, I am one of the crazy IT people who likes being in an office. The commute is nice podcast time luckily my traffic is minimal with where I live and work. There's no real space in my place for an office so I basically had to Frankenstein my Gaming PC desk, it was a pain in the dick. Frankly my ADD is really rough when at home too many things I could be doing ya know. Also this RTO job is paying me 83k for Deskside Techwork/ C Level Babysitting.
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Aug 2, 2023 23:50
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Usually I provide support to Serious Professionals Using Our Technical Software and honestly I low key love it when they throw some (pleasant) personality or an emoticon/emoji in our conversation If someone sends me a smiley face I’m gonna give 110% on that ticket
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Aug 3, 2023 00:13
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I’ve never worked anywhere that allowed meaningful WFH even during the peak of Covid. Current job is pretty anti-wfh and we just signed a 5 year lease for a building 3x the size so it won’t be changing any time soon. There’s zero reason for the company to be in an office; we are 100% SaaS based in the corporate office and everything we sell/manage is remote to us. I was upfront with my boss when I was hired that I’ll be moving in 2025 so it’s WFH or nothing so I’ll see what happens then but it’ll mark three years in my current role so it’d be about time to move on anyways.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:21
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I know this is deeply uncool of me, but I am still worried about covid, which is my main reason for not wanting to be in the office. Being in the office also sucks in other ways -- I eat worse, I sit in traffic and risk accidents, I can't do things that have no real impact on my productivity but are huge helps to me, like being home to accept deliveries or let someone in to do work elsewhere in the house while I'm working -- and creates little inefficiencies all over the place, but that's my main reason. We are back in the office 1 day a week right now and I just go when few other people are there and wear a mask. I do go in for things that can't be done remotely, like when I have to physically touch gear in a DC or whatever. EDIT: They did try to reassure me that if I was there and other people also needed to be there, they would do the neighborly thing and wear a mask to honor my concerns. That was true for a little while and then I had to go in with like half a dozen other people and nobody wore masks but me.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:26
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guppy posted:I know this is deeply uncool of me, but I am still worried about covid, which is my main reason for not wanting to be in the office. Being in the office also sucks in other ways -- I eat worse, I sit in traffic and risk accidents, I can't do things that have no real impact on my productivity but are huge helps to me, like being home to accept deliveries or let someone in to do work elsewhere in the house while I'm working -- and creates little inefficiencies all over the place, but that's my main reason. We are back in the office 1 day a week right now and I just go when few other people are there and wear a mask. I do go in for things that can't be done remotely, like when I have to physically touch gear in a DC or whatever. Are you immunocompromised? If not, you're going to start seeing pushback on being worried about covid and not all of the pushback is going to be unwarranted. I wouldn't be one of the pushback people and you are probably already aware of this, but it deserves to be said in a way to also ease people's worries.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:37
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I mean offices are cesspools to begin with, and ironically the place I'm at always tries these return to office things going into the fall and run smack face into a new wave. I'm pretty sure the entire world has just said "COVID is over" regardless of the facts. Personally these past couple years have made me realize how loving miserable a cubicle is and I said to myself a while back that I'm just not going to do it anymore. IT is definitely my trade and my strongest skillset but I'm adaptable and if I have to completely shift careers down the road because we have to be physically present in the "data building" for whatever stupid rear end reason I'll go do something else.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:39
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cr0y posted:I mean offices are cesspools to begin with, and ironically the place I'm at always tries these return to office things going into the fall and run smack face into a new wave. I'm pretty sure the entire world has just said "COVID is over" regardless of the facts. Oh yes, I should have said I totally concede I share the same feelings and last few years definitely bring attention to how crappy a stuffy building can be, stuff getting transmitted included for sure. Commercial real estate was uncertain after 2020 and it doesn't seem to be any clearer what's going to happen yet. Love your avatar by the way
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Aug 3, 2023 00:42
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Inner Light posted:Are you immunocompromised? If not, you're going to start seeing pushback on being worried about covid and not all of the pushback is going to be unwarranted. I wouldn't be one of the pushback people and you are probably already aware of this, but it deserves to be said in a way to also ease people's worries. No, just paranoid. I was a little bit of a germaphobe pre-covid, so as you can imagine, the covid era has not been fun for me. The risk of serious complications is low -- kind of, we don't really know yet what the long term looks like and we won't until it's too late to do anything about it -- but, IMO, higher than the public has been led to believe, and if you do suffer serious complications, it's not like employers are going to take care of people, and if you do develop serious complications, the quality of life at any level of care is poor. More saliently, as far as anyone without a vested interest in RTO can tell, RTO has no real benefit to anyone and plenty of downsides, both in terms of quality of life and financial costs. So the idea that I should have to justify not wanting to go to the office, instead of the people who want everyone to go to the office for no reason having to justify that, seems a bit rich. EDIT: Lest anyone think I'm selective about this and just don't want to go to the office and do work, I also don't go out to eat unless there's outdoor seating and I wear a mask to anything crowded and indoors, including the grocery store. And if anything I put in more hours now. It's not an act. I actually think this is partly because of my involvement as a kid with things like the Boy Scouts. I don't fault the program, I think it's great. But while it has helped me to plan ahead so I can respond to bad situations when they arise, I am not good at evaluating the likelihood of those situations. guppy fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Aug 3, 2023 |
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Aug 3, 2023 00:46
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Even “thinking like an MBA” I can’t think of a single argument for one day a week in the office outside of making sure employees live within driving distance of the office. There’s no way you can convince me productivity doesn’t plummet on that day.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:49
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Cyks posted:Even “thinking like an MBA” I can’t think of a single argument for one day a week in the office outside of making sure employees live within driving distance of the office. There’s no way you can convince me productivity doesn’t plummet on that day. Despite the data, a certain type of manager assumes people who are WFH are goofing off and not doing their jobs. The data indicates that people do more work when WFH and a ton of the time spent in offices is unproductive, but the data don't matter because it's not based on data, it's based on vibes.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:54
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guppy posted:Despite the data, a certain type of manager assumes people who are WFH are goofing off and not doing their jobs. The data indicates that people do more work when WFH and a ton of the time spent in offices is unproductive, but the data don't matter because it's not based on data, it's based on vibes. I can have a 3-hour discussion on the latest popular show over Slack and be productive, if I was in an office I'd be drinking the free coffee and talking to people about it instead of on my laptop and multitasking. That's my problem with office work, I will get distracted, and I will go smoke more because the smoking area is where all the teams gather and cross-platform work happens. Yes, it's nice to get up and go bother someone to their face about a question you had but you're just distracting them now. No remote work is clearly superior, especially in the IT field. It's not perfect for every company but if you are in a dotcom like me you'll never see people fighting for an office.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:00
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guppy posted:Despite the data, a certain type of manager assumes people who are WFH are goofing off and not doing their jobs. The data indicates that people do more work when WFH and a ton of the time spent in offices is unproductive, but the data don't matter because it's not based on data, it's based on vibes. Yeah I mean we all know this but if it's a rainy day and I'm going to be at my house all day my work day doesn't end and four or five. I'll walk by my work computer at 7:00 and kick a couple jobs off that finished pre-processing at 6:00, and then at 8:00 I'll make sure they look good for the next morning meeting yada yada yada. And I seriously don't mind doing it, it makes my "work day" a lot more manageable knowing that I can kick silly quick tasks off to the evening or the next day because I know how to manage my time and what I need to get done. This is largely because I have a proper home office and a work computer that is functionally on my company's network that I can just plop down in front of for a couple minutes here and there "after hours" But gently caress if I'm going to do that if I'm spending 40+ hour in the office plus another 10 or whatever it is before and after in prep and commuting.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:05
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guppy posted:Despite the data, a certain type of manager assumes people who are WFH are goofing off and not doing their jobs. The data indicates that people do more work when WFH and a ton of the time spent in offices is unproductive, but the data don't matter because it's not based on data, it's based on vibes. those people's brains must implode when they consider the enormous benefits of a 4 day work week
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Aug 3, 2023 01:06
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CLAM DOWN posted:those people's brains must implode when they consider the enormous benefits of a 4 day work week I loved having a 4 day work week
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Aug 3, 2023 01:11
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guppy posted:Despite the data, a certain type of manager assumes people who are WFH are goofing off and not doing their jobs. The data indicates that people do more work when WFH and a ton of the time spent in offices is unproductive, but the data don't matter because it's not based on data, it's based on vibes. Regardless of if the data supports it or not, I’ll accept “people goof off at home that’s why we are back in the office” as their reasoning for wanting a full return to office. But in this case, are they just ok with employees goofing off 4 days a work week (in their mind) and only being productive for one day a week?
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Aug 3, 2023 01:12
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jaegerx posted:That's my problem with office work, I will get distracted, and I will go smoke more because the smoking area is where all the teams gather and cross-platform work happens. Yes, it's nice to get up and go bother someone to their face about a question you had but you're just distracting them now. I converted to FTE because of opportunities I got through people I met at the smoking area. I'm not saying you should start smoking, but career success is as much about who you know as it is about what you know.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:15
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i support a zero-day work week where we all just let the robots take care of stuff and gently caress around anyway I'm trying to get foxit pdf editor delivered via Dell (a cursed loving sentence if I've ever found one) to work with intune app deployment and it sucks so much trying to find either a) nice simple msi files for the various versions we use or b) finding out if I can make dell digital delivery download software via command line and then remove itself. -_- A decently fun project poisoned by atrocious companies that seem to be actively hostile to IT people trying to make their garbage work
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Aug 3, 2023 01:18
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anyway on the topic of WFH I'm hoping demographics are destiny and as soon as the last boomer and xer fucks off we can all have WFH
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Aug 3, 2023 01:19
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mllaneza posted:I converted to FTE because of opportunities I got through people I met at the smoking area. I'm not saying you should start smoking, but career success is as much about who you know as it is about what you know. I think I only restarted it because I worked in an office, now I will have like 2 cigarettes a day or 3 sometimes on the stress days.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:20
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cr0y posted:Yeah I mean we all know this but if it's a rainy day and I'm going to be at my house all day my work day doesn't end and four or five. I'll walk by my work computer at 7:00 and kick a couple jobs off that finished pre-processing at 6:00, and then at 8:00 I'll make sure they look good for the next morning meeting yada yada yada. Exactly -- if you treat people like adults and professionals, and give them some flexibility, they will return the favor and then some. Everyone wins. Now, I'm not saying that everyone working from home is a perfect output machine every day. Everyone has days where they are very productive, everyone has days where they just can't get anything done. But that was true in the office too. And there will always be people who take every opportunity to do nothing, just as there were in the office, but that's no reason to penalize everyone else. But a huge swathe of this country is obsessed with the idea that someone, somewhere is getting away with something, and adamant that it must not happen, regardless of the cost and whether it's worth it.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:27
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guppy posted:Exactly -- if you treat people like adults and professionals, and give them some flexibility, they will return the favor and then some. Everyone wins. We do this thing where if someone is working on something cool they'll start up a Zoom and we'll join, they'll share their screen and we all work on our own poo poo but casually look at Zoom while talking. I do that for about 2 hours a day.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:32
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I do way more at home than I did at the office. But I spent all my office time bullshitting and leaving early for ‘team building’ drinks at 3 PM on my corp cc and wound up bringing my work home anyways if I really had to do something. Part of me does miss my secret work life, I was a total piece of poo poo. At one point I had a home office and was leading multiple local projects that also had offices and no one ever knew where I was going to be. That was cool. and having a budget of ??? For client drinks and lunches and dinners and ‘team building’ and poo poo led me to meeting some cool people. But now that my life isn’t centered around an office it seems gauche and lame that it took up so much of my life
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Aug 3, 2023 01:36
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jaegerx posted:I loved having a 4 day work week 4 day full remote crew checking in, it's amazing.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:52
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Vulture Culture posted:Elder millennial. The AOL/Time Warner split was only 2009 Oh wow. It felt so 2003 for that in my head and now I realize that we’re about the same age so now I feel old.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:54
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