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Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#181

Post by llampx »

ainiriand wrote: post #61
dx034 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only mid-sized towns, really. At least currently, very rural areas often lack the infrastructure to allow several people in the household to use video streaming (calls for the parents, youtube etc for kids) simultaneously. Starlink could change that, let's see. But unless you get at least 50mbit/s to every household, remote work won't really be possible for many. And sadly, many countries are far from having 50mbit/s…

What about lte connections? I live 40km from Berlin and I get 5G. 4G would be quite decent too.

You are lucky. Germany is the absolute worst for good 4G connection outside the cities and along some autobahns.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#182

Post by dang »

krageon wrote: post #47
sn_master wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with friends and family can't gauge how bad of a toll this has taken on lonely single guys like me. For most of them WFH been a Godsend. I really wish this ends or at least there remains enough places which require working from the office.

> lonely single guys like me Just like every other human being you can socialise with the people around you (unless you live in the middle of the desert with nobody around, in which case I apologise). If that's pathologically impossible due to fear or something along those lines, you need therapy. Working from home isn't taking a toll on you, it's the problems that already existed but that you have ignored.

That's unduly personal and crosses into IPD (Internet Psychiatric Diagnosis). Please don't do that here–the odds that it will land well with the other person are vastly smaller than you expect, no matter how helpful your intentions are.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

What works better is to share some of your own relevant personal experience, if you want to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#183

Post by laurent92 »

prepend wrote: post #151
laurent92 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an employer (given our revenue didn’t deflate), I’d be happy to do that, but the administrative hurdles is what annoys me. Laws of France says I can offer an allowance, but only if I gather every single receipt and do a pro-rata of, for example, the additional electric consumption caused by WFH. The administrative overhead of admitting a dozen invoices per employee of $7 each is probably around $7 each (their time…

> those who had the Aeron chair I was always a “pay for your own telework stuff if you want to telework” kind of person, but after teleworking for a year in a crappy chair, I really wish my org would buy me decent office equipment. I took a chair and a desk for granted. And it seems like a good deal for orgs if employees all start buying their chairs and desks and whatnot.

At least in France it’s an OHSA equipment. They did mandate stupid stuff (they required me to give wireless keyboards); but shoulder, back, elbow and wrist inflammation are serious in IT jobs, and if an employee is at risk, the employer must fund the risk mitigation, i.e. the chair. I’m happy to do that.

Fun stuff, I work more than my employees, so OSHA asked me to have an Aeron-type chair (500€, Enjoy model), while my employees will be fine with just a good work seat for 7hrs a day. I actually wish I could give more stuff to my employees but they are a bit afraid to ask - It’s important to have regular talks about comfort.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#184

Post by em-bee »

rkangel wrote: post #127

Is there a risk of wide adoption of home working becoming discriminatory against people with low incomes? I am lucky enough to have a 4 bedroom house that I share with just my fiancée. This means that I have space to have a nice office, that is separate from whatever else is going on in the house. This is not a luxury that everybody has. In most cases it will be because they can't afford it, but in some cases it will…

that's a very good point. i could not get any work done if i didn't have a separate room. it's a small one (4-5sqm) but that's enough.

however that's the thing. most apartments i looked at in one particular city didn't have any small rooms. in order to get four bedrooms (one to be converted to an office) i could not find anything smaller than 150sqm. a friend of a relative has a 100sqm apartment with 5 rooms. two of them are mere closets with a window, but that's the perfect size for a home office.

another issue is tax relief. if you don't have your office in a separate room, you can't write off the full cost for that office as a work expense (which would be subtracted from your income, so you pay less income taxes). if your office is a desk in the living room, then you only get to write off half of the cost for that desk (or less) just because the room is also used for other purposes, and your kids, god forbid might use your desk for other activities when you are not working.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#185

Post by em-bee »

nonameiguess wrote: post #177

Something I haven't seen brought up much, probably because most of the people commenting on these posts aren't disabled, is the positive impact on disabled people. I have spine problems that effectively prevent me from being able to commute. I was able to get around that in the past by taking trains I could stand/sit on, but that required me to both live and work within walking distance of a train station, which in t…

i do hope that you are still taking a break when the pain flares up but i can totally see the difference to being out of commission for a week just because it's to painful to get in a car, when you could otherwise work, as long as you can sit comfortably and lie down for breaks, or whatever it is you need to do to get relief.

not to mention the difficulty of finding work that will accommodate your needs, since, even if it's required by law to not discriminate, some companies still find an excuse to not hire, or are making it difficult to get your workplace adjusted to your requirements.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#186

Post by fatnoah »

aseerdbnarng wrote: post #120

I have two comments on this: a) I feel sympathy for the young, single-types who benefit most from working in a busy environment. The WFH change is wonderful for the older types a bit fed up with long-commutes and open plan offices. I hope the hybrid approach allows us to treat the office like an old-school marketday where once or twice a week, everyone is there and the goal is to be as social as possible. The softer…

> I feel sympathy for the young, single-types who benefit most from working in a busy environment

In my own company of almost 50k people, the ones clamoring the loudest for offices to open are, by far, those with kids at home.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#187

Post by Firadeoclus »

xvector wrote: post #88
scandox wrote: post #23

Flexibility sounds good but what I have seen over the last year is that all boundaries in terms of when and where work begins and ends are being eroded. This started accidentally but it is now being actively exploited on an unprecedented scale.

Setting boundaries is your job , not your job’s job. Almost everyone I know works normal hours or less even during WFH. To be perfectly clear, this is true regardless of WFH. Your work will never set boundaries for you as they benefit from you working harder and longer.

> Your work will never set boundaries for you as they benefit from you working harder and longer.

Some workplaces do set boundaries, and it is not universally true that "harder and longer" working brings benefits.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#188

Post by RHSeeger »

pdimitar wrote: post #143
RHSeeger wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why?! Because it costs a lot of money to buy a house with enough room for 2 separate offices. Paying for that if you have no reason to believe you'll ever need it would be well into the stupid range for most people.

You have a lot of reasons to believe you'll need the more space -- and I enumerated a few. Ignoring those might be the venturing into the irrational range that you mentioned.

Prior to the pandemic, if you and your spouse both had jobs where you worked in company offices, then paying extra for a house that would support home offices for both of you is a huge expense. If you think every couple should do so just because they might both need to work from home some day, then you seriously overestimate how much extra money most families have available. Or underestimate how much money those extra rooms add to the cost of a house.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#189

Post by stuaxo »

carmen_sandiego wrote: post #152
dx034 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the link you posted: > Even though an employee has fewer employment rights in the first two years of their employment, an employer would be foolish to assume they have carte blanche to dismiss at will. So while it's true that there's less protection for workers, there is no at will employment in the UK. Probation period probably comes closest to it but is much shorter.

What are you talking about? The US doesn't give carte blanche either. Discrimination law exists. Other labor laws exist. Exactly as this article refers to as being 'not carte blanche' in the UK. 'At will' in the US and the 2 year qualifying period in the UK are practically identical, apart from that the UK has a 2-week statutory notice period. The protections that remain in both the US and UK are almost entirely abou…

Although now we have "Inside IR35 Contractors" - which is in effect a zero rights employee. I wonder how long until that is the standard.

Re: Nationwide tells 13,000 staff to 'work anywhere'

#190

Post by hnedeotes »

oblio wrote: post #165
hnedeotes wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you should add number of lines written for it to be scientific.

Let me introduce you to my friend, --funroll-loop: https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge... Well, that's just a fun detour, I meant manual loop unrolling: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/for-gotten-about-loops

I only had time to go through the gentoo one. Although I never used gentoo and think that minimal perf improvements like those mentioned throughout are silly in exchange for having to know all the incantations and borking your OS every other monday, vs having something that works out of the box, I don't disagree entirely with the binary/source idea.

But it would need a different kind of OS and lib organisation than the ones we have right now to make it feasible.

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