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.
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.
Surprise surprise
It’s difficult to work remotely in a factory, in a field, collecting trash, in a kitchen, in a hospital, putting out fires, … maybe that’s why.
dealing with micromanagers, toxic workplaces, commute, rude customers for certain jobs.
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
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.
Extroverts can’t understand that not everone wants to listen to them yap. Updates at the hour.
As someone that is bring changed from fully remote to hybrid in the next few weeks, I am already sad.
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.
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
Thank you, this was exactly what I was wondering. I’m all for remote work, however it’s not really fair to compare completely different roles.
Job satisfaction has so many variables, I don’t envy the difficulty of designing an accurate study of this.
That domain is “Frontiers In”, but it would be so much cooler if it were “Frontier Sin”. I want to stay apprised of all the latest developments in crimes against morality
“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.
The point of the study is to generate knowledge, not to set policy.
For me it seems true. Most of the jobs are straight stressful unnecessary bullshit in your face. Like a cocaine addict, fryed brain, retarded millionaire fucks up everything. Then you handle the customer complaints and die worn out after only some years. Even there is case and purpose as the original aims were noble and good.
Doing some social service, you already did that with your idiotic parents, adorable kids. Beautiful wife and the dog and the cat and the hamster. Sucking your blood dry like a bad vampire.
People celebrating the opposite of it should try this instead of being virgin lesbians in commie flat. Also I am happy they are happy. But often hearing like zombie like entity on this night train, is like a baseline. I am glad they can make a minimum wage and could choose me as the third one for a lesbian climate collapse mourning threesome.
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.
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 LifeTM 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 had 2 such 2nd type bosses in over 20 years.
You really notice they’re how you described when they’re gone - the deluge of shit begins almost immediately.This guy manages and gets it.
Most of my managers have been the second type, although how effective they are at it has varied a lot. Some are very passive and that has been good and bad, being left alone is great when things are going well. But when you need help they are useless.
The best have been the ones that know a decent amount about the job, they can either help you directly or know exactly where to point you for it. That or they understand the pain and you can both cry together for 4 days with a SQL database and increasingly vague error messages.
A note, they demand their own SUBJECTIVE PERCEPTION of productivity, not objectively measured productivity itself.
Of course. In this case productivity is a shorthand for obedience. If you do everything I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it and have it done before I need it so I can look good to my managers, then I will deem you productive. Meanwhile, their requirements are completely fucked up and impossible to implement as is, and the deadline is impossible to achieve.
Keep at the good stuff, managers with a functional brain are rare. Best of luck keeping sane with all the dumb politicking and other “inner circle” BS.
I fucking hate politics so much…
There’s a guy in my team. I need to push him into a more advanced role. Because he deserves it, and because otherwise I might lose him. I brought him in from another team where things were going bad. Real bad. Turns out, all he needed was a human working with another human, not an type 1 cunt demanding output from a walking, breathing toolset. He already fits and fills that role within the team, but I need to make it official. Better pay, more perspectives. I know I’m gonna get cockblocked by the fuckers who still hate him for the wrong reasons. Career reviews are at the end of the year and I already dread it. I need to get involved in politics and I’m terrified of it.
Good job. You’re one of the 100 out of that 7,700 managers who actually do something productive and manage properly.
Obviously, that number of 100 is arbitrary to make a wider point. To be fair, it’s probably a significantly higher percentage than I provided in my hypothetical. But holy shit are there waaaaay too many of the type 1 and far too few of the type 2 that you outlined.
But then who will ask you for a pointless status update during a daily sync up everyday
Performative desk sitting is the worst. Got nothing to do so I have to just click on things.
Has anyone done a study yet to see how many managers’ insecurities about remote work can be handled by placing mannequins in chairs at the office?
I’m about to support a satellite launch later this month. Guess what, I have supported the development from my house for the last 5 years. Surprise surprise, butts in seats aren’t necessary.
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.
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.
Sounds like a company that somehow has no boomers dragging it down.
Bosses are in their 50s, but they came from a giant corporation then decided to make their own business.
You guys hiring? How’s your benefits package?
Unfortunately no.
Benefits are actually kinda bad, honestly. We have insurance but insurance companies don’t want to give good insurance to really small businesses like this. No vision or dental.
