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Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

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Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#241

Post by dsyrk »

sam0x17 wrote: post #231
sam0x17 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually illegal, and the information you have provided is enough to get a search warrant in the U.S. I have forwarded this thread to my local FBI field office. Have a nice day :)

If you are doing this on US soil, it is a felony to surveil employees without their express knowledge and consent. Hacker News has your IP address information so unless you are using a proxy or are outside of the US you'll be hearing from the FBI shortly.

I think you might be confusing audio and video surveillance with computer system logging. We can log anything we want it’s in their employee contract that they have no expectation of privacy on company computer systems and it should not be used for any personal business, which again WFH is great because clearly they have their own personal computer they use to access remote access and all our logging is on the server side. If I have timestamps of every key stroke and every mouse move and screenshots of their desktop every 1 minute there is nothing illegal about that. Even if it was remotely grey area it would be covered by their employee agreements, confidential agreements and proprietary information agreements. Your fake outrage is a joke.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#242

Post by wolverine876 »

People are not atomic units at work. They are part of teams and part of a larger organization. The question is not where you work best, but where the teams and larger organization work best.

Silicon Valley leaders, such as Google, have long invested significant resources in incentivizing people to stay at the office - great food, massages, ping pong, lectures, etc. The value of being at the office hasn't changed, and Silicon Valley already experimented with mostly remote work and rejected it, years ago. I remember Yahoo (IIRC) abruptly canceling their experiment and bringing people back to the office.

I'm surprised to see some SV companies now planning for WFH. Nothing has changed in that regard, especially for them - it's not like their employees didn't understand how to use Zoom and were forced to do it by the pandemic, like people in less tech-savvy industries.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#243

Post by ilaksh »

durovo wrote: post #207
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #4

By “quitting” they mostly mean getting new jobs or career changes. Not necessarily refusing to work in an office. The headline is misleading. It’s also still a relatively small number in absolute terms: > In April, the share of U.S. workers leaving jobs was 2.7%, according to the Labor Department, a jump from 1.6% a year earlier to the highest level since at least 2000. The higher turnover is expected in a booming ec…

What people miss in these discussions about going full remote is that the market for software developers is very good right now but this won't last forever. Many companies are surely going to embrace full-remote once they have built up the right processes and infra. When that happens, it is not going to matter whether you live in California or Mexico or Brazil. It is much easier to replace an employee who is working…

One of the reasons I moved from California to Mexico a few years ago. Much more affordable and can live on outsourcing wages while working from home.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#244

Post by gpm »

dsyrk wrote: post #185
davedrouin wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is illegal without employee consent in the EU and in most other civilized countries around the world.

Can you provide a reference for that? I am logging the employee’s use of the corporate computer system that they don’t own and are being paid to work on. That is total nonsense it can be illegal, there is zero legal expectation of any privacy on a private companies computer systems. Why in the world should there be?

In the EU, what you are claiming you do is illegal under the GDPR, you would be required to give prior notice at the very least.

See the "notice" section starting at bottom 3 of this for the lay persons summary on the notice requirement (or read the whole thing to see what laws around this look like in Germany) https://www.bakermckenzie.com/-/media/files/people/lutz-holg...

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#245

Post by doctor_eval »

Managers are getting a pretty bad rap in these threads, and maybe (or maybe not) in BigCo’s that’s reasonable, but I run a tiny shop and I’ve asked my team to come to the office as often as possible, despite the fact that half of us have been working together for years - and we get on just fine online.

The reason is that the other half of the team haven’t got this experience; they are young and relatively inexperienced, and I want them to see how we work, how we solve problems, how their peers communicate and how we think about different aspects of the business. I want to be able to jump on the whiteboard at a moments notice and maybe pull in a couple of others, while other people in the office can also listen in. This is every bit as important to the professional growth of our juniors as it is to my new business. If the sales guy and I are having a discussion and the junior front end developer hears us, he gets a sense of how we work that he’ll never get if the meeting is held in PMs on Slack or Discord.

I have no problem with WFH in principle, but my position is, if you are able to come in, then come in. If you have kids or other commitments then fine, work from home a couple of days a week. But by default, it’s better for everyone if you’re in the office.

I know this doesn’t work for all companies, but its not like this policy is poorly considered or arbitrary. I guess my company is going to attract people who prefer this mode of operation, and I know other companies are WFH first. But there are reasons for why we do what we do.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#246

Post by dimmke »

benrbray wrote: post #199
dimmke wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am reasonably productive WFH (I was 2 days a week remote before pandemic and have had fully remote jobs in the past)- but the way some people talk about it really bothers me. The people that want it, really want it, are almost like zealots about it. Where if anybody mentions that they struggle with WFH, they get mad almost like it's a kid raising his hand to tell a teacher they forgot to collect the homework. And I…

I really like your point about losing our "second place". It's a great way to verbalize the feeling I've had that permanent WFH on a major scale takes American individualism to the logical extreme. Rather than learning to live with each other, we'll all just retreat to our own little castles (or shacks), taking all focus away from making public spaces enjoyable for everyone. Who needs public transit when we never lea…

>takes American individualism to the logical extreme.

It's funny that you opened your comment complimenting how I verbalized something, but this feels like an even better verbalization of it.

What's the answer to my crappy 2 hour a day commute? Remote work, not funding public transportation.

It's all about convenience without stopping to think of what we're losing as humans. We didn't evolve to live these siloed lives without any sense of community. I feel like American society forments a lot of loneliness.

And the tone of it really comes through in the people who advocate so fiercely for it - there's an entitlement there.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#247

Post by [deleted] »

gnicholas wrote: post #194

Can someone whose company is doing hybrid WFH share a bit about how zoom and in-person meetings are scheduled and happen? Do people coordinate their in-person days so that meetings can be in-person? How do zoom meetings happen when some employees are in a meeting room together, and others are on zoom? It’s easy enough to have a big screen in that room to put remote participants on-screen, but how do remote people kno…

[deleted]

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#248

Post by ilaksh »

bootlooped wrote: post #69
marcinzm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being the only one talking to the VPs and CEO in the office during lunch is probably going to be a great career boost. So don't be surprised when the people who go into the office get the nice promotions and you don't. Interestingly my whole team is very much in favor of being in the office a few days a week.

I think a lot of people on the 100% remote side of the debate are heavily underestimating the value of relationship building and team cohesion (for most people). You can't replace the frequent face to face social interactions, lunches, and drinks after work with a Zoom call. We are social animals and the more channels there are in an interaction (words, voice, body language, etc...) the richer that interaction is, an…

Can't you have multiple Zoom calls with some one-on-one rather than a single Zoom call?

Do you have good internet? If not, upgrading it might improve the video signal.

What about something like Discord with voice setup so you can literally chat every five minutes if you want?

Could you not use one of the VR programs on Oculus Quest that create virtual meeting rooms like Spatial?

What about playing a game together once a week online? Could be something that requires a ton of cooperation like Rainbow Six.

I'm not saying that real lunches or whatever are not great and a step up in bandwidth, but I feel like if you really take advantage of all of the possibilities then you can still have social opportunities online that can build real cohesion. Which I think you are not really trying.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#249

Post by learc83 »

dsyrk wrote: post #122
ratsforhorses wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen an increase in productivity?

Absolutely, I’m able to use the insights to work to increase productivity. Remember I don’t disclose I can see this. It has let me better manage cases, first the slacker that assumes because I’m old and a manager I’m stupid and they can BS me and not work, but also importantly find the hidden skilled developers, there have been a few that have completed complex tasks very quickly considering their activity on the sys…

Your posts are clearly designed to elicit as much outrage as possible.

Either that our you need treatment for paranoia. Not only are your incompetent employees screwing you over, but your competent employees are also out to get you by “hiding” their abilities from you. Come on.

Re: Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead

#250

Post by lainga »

okareaman wrote: post #158

Social and Economic Effects of the [Bubonic] Plague Since it was so difficult (and dangerous) to procure goods through trade and to produce them, the prices of both goods produced locally and those imported from afar skyrocketed. Because of illness and death workers became exceedingly scarce, so even peasants felt the effects of the new rise in wages. The demand for people to work the land was so high that it threate…

And for about 150 years they enjoyed such a rise in living standards, until the gains were erased in the early 1500s, leading to the Great Peasants' War in Germany.
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