371–380 of 410 posts
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Just look at the comments in this thread. Plenty of people seem to assume that no one actually wants to go to the office.
I see some comments where people mention that they prefer to work remote/FH, not that everyone who wants to work in an office is an idiot.
For the other 63%, I think an interesting possibility is to use a robot Turk machine type of arrangement. Take for example, the "flag person" at a road construction site, it is an outdoor job and hence would be categorized as not possible to do from home, but, one could easily design a very simple machine with a camera and the stop/slow sign that could be operated remotely. That could actually be safer and lower cost…
1. Flaggers often go from site to site throughout the day. You would need someone to set up and take down the machine
2. The flagger is in constant radio contact with the work crew. They need to know which equipment is blocking which lane etc. And this is always changing.
3. Flaggers need to respond to emergency vehicles, busses, their own work trucks etc. You have to have your head on a swivel at all times
4. Pedestrians/bikers/other road users need to be considered as well, and may be outside of camera shot
5. What if the connection is choppy/equipment breaks. Does a tech go site to site? Does the crew stop working? Labor is the single biggest cost of construction by a large margin. Everyone minute the crew isn't working is CrewNumber * PrevailingWage lost.
6. Flaggers work at night/all weather/complex intersections. All this would need to be accounted for.
7. Like self driving cars, there are about 12 billion edge cases that take a combination of experience/reasoning.
I don't mean to be dismissive of your idea or anything. But this attitude is pervasive in our industry, that "I saw someone doing a job that looks easy, I bet I know everything about it and can design a better way to do it". That attitude is both great (inspires bold ideas) and terrible. The right question isn't "I bet this could be automated" but rather, "I should job shadow someone doing this job, see if there are any ways to improve it".
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Until rural areas cost of living goes up because 37% of people decided to move out to unsustainable rural areas. Overall - moving to somewhere more rural is a fix for an individual looking to solve their financial problem but it is not a society wide solution. Rural homes are a net drain on society and are subsidized by city workers.
I bet there are plenty of medium-sized cities, with good universities and small tech poles (because let's just say it, you want to be around educated people, and yes, it's nice) with much lower costs of living than where most techies end-up living.
Many young educated techies are also not really keen on the whole suburban hellscape and being completely reliant on (dino-fuel) cars either.
Cost is one factor but sustainability is another that I think is important to highlight. You can get both in a favorable position but I think it's easier to make things sustainable and less costly in a place that has people to begin with (e.g. Tokyo) than one where everyone is adamantly against building up or creating less sprawl (most lower density cities that exist in the USA).
heh it must hurt to have paid for all that commercial real estate that's now sitting empty. I bet a decent portion of the motive to get employees back in the office is to just validate the rent bill.
And no decibel meter, that ruins the fun, when he whispers and retaliates for you not hearing him, or when he squelches "I'M AN ASSHOLE" the decibel meter can't say "oh that was inaudible, but the other one was this far from a shotgun." Ruins the fun. Because later in court, if the plaintiff repeats the scream, not only with the words, but with the tone, and with the VOLUME, THE COURT HAS TO STOP AND CHECK THE ACOUSTICS, HOW WELL INSULATED IS THIS ROOM, WE CAN'T INTERRUPT THE COURT NEXT DOOR. IS THAT REALLY HOW LOUD HE SAID IT? DECIBELS? METRIC SYSTEM? IF THE JUDGE HAS TO COVER HIS EARS THROUGH THE TESTIMONY, HE WILL HAVE TO FIND A VERY GOOD CLAUSE TO JUSTIFY--I SAID JUSTIFY--THE VERDICT IN FAVOR OF THE DEFENSE [explosives starting went off as I wrote this paragraph].
The basic problem with work from home is that it's digital. Gaslighting requires analog.
(And I have had virtuous bosses, and even the boss who screamed "I AM AN ASSHOLE" into a recorded call center phone call had many virtues. In many ways employees, through their lack of work ethic, bring this upon themselves. But at the same time, he screamed "I AM AN ASSHOLE" into a recorded call center phone call. I'm not sure I disagree or agree with his confession, he said it and what is said is said.)
5 of us wrote Microsoft Works for the Macintosh while working at home from 1984 to 1992. Without the internet, we got together as needed to merge code, usually once a month, but sometimes once a week. We talked on the phone. We went to Microsoft once in awhile. It was ideal and worked very well. Maybe it was just our personalities that made it work, but I am astonished that any programmer would rather go into the off…
> I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face Anecdata from Hacker News suggests this is true. A lot of lonely young men here freely admit their coworkers are the only people they regularly interact with in-person, and remote work takes that away from them.
heh it must hurt to have paid for all that commercial real estate that's now sitting empty. I bet a decent portion of the motive to get employees back in the office is to just validate the rent bill.
Mostly it's invasion of privacy. Your boss can invade your privacy trivially at work, and get reads on you about how little you can be paid, how much abuse you can actually take, to what degree he can injure you long-term so you have a worse negotiating position, what the consequences will be of going over that, all kinds of things. Like a typical boss will spend all day plotting how to get an employee to work unpaid…
No, no it doesn't. Sometimes the most powerful gas-lighter is oneself. Silence can cause me to gaslight myself. Shit, my boss isn't responding.. is he mad at me? Or fuck, a Zoom meeting at 4 PM on Friday fuck fuck. It must have been that PR.. I thought I removed the creds.. Of course I didn't, I never remember that. Fuck. Again. Damnit. I can't stand to look at it..
Also human communication is more than words and sounds, but expressions, body movement, minor twitches etc. Someone can be terrible at lying or obfuscating the truth in person and write some convincing shit in an email.
People are the problem my friend, not where you work. Your isolation at home, and the ability to force isolation by closing an app, treats the same symptoms but you misidentified the disease.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mostly it's invasion of privacy. Your boss can invade your privacy trivially at work, and get reads on you about how little you can be paid, how much abuse you can actually take, to what degree he can injure you long-term so you have a worse negotiating position, what the consequences will be of going over that, all kinds of things. Like a typical boss will spend all day plotting how to get an employee to work unpaid…
> Gaslighting requires analog. No, no it doesn't. Sometimes the most powerful gas-lighter is oneself. Silence can cause me to gaslight myself. Shit, my boss isn't responding.. is he mad at me? Or fuck, a Zoom meeting at 4 PM on Friday fuck fuck. It must have been that PR.. I thought I removed the creds.. Of course I didn't, I never remember that. Fuck. Again. Damnit. I can't stand to look at it.. Also human communica…
On the note of gaslighting, it just doesn't work if the lamp is binary.
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> That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky. "At best"? The average commute in the US is 27.6 minutes, according to the Census Bureau. My commute is a 10 minute bike ride. Luck had nothing to do with it, just a different set of priorities in life. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
> 27.6 minutes Something’s wrong with this stat. Almost nobody can get from chair at home to chair at work in that time. My present office is 1.6 miles of which ~1 mile is Interstate, yet it’s at best 22 minutes house door to office door (not chair to chair) if I hit traffic lights, as low as 14 minutes if all greens. Google Maps and Apple Maps say it’s 6 - 8 minutes in off hours. Once car is on street, only greens,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face Anecdata from Hacker News suggests this is true. A lot of lonely young men here freely admit their coworkers are the only people they regularly interact with in-person, and remote work takes that away from them.
I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. There are already a number of options in even the smallest town. I expect that will increase as more people move to WFH and seek social outlets. And at the end of the day "interacting with coworkers in the break room" is a pret…
I have no idea what you meant by this.
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> Hybrid is a sufficient compromise. No it isn't.
What is a sufficient compromise, in your view, that satisfies the need of some workers to have regular face to face interactions with coworkers and prevents corporations unprepared to manage a remote team from whipping back to full in-office? I do not want to put words in your mouth, but since you offered so few of them, I am tempted to believe you are one of the few lucky workers who has sufficient leverage to whole…
And that's before we engage with the climate impacts, the waste of time, the idiotic open office plans, the interruptions, etc.
I'm not interested in compromise, I'm not buying anything about the entire concept.
We're going to split into different kinds of workplaces, and remote-only employees are going to go to remote-only/remote-first workplaces.
Large tech employers who want offices are going to have to deal with the fact that they're not going to be able to hire a group of tech workers that have those demands. Those employers would probably do well to consider spinning off remote-first divisions. That isn't my problem at all though, and "hybrid" is a hard no for me, and a lot of other people.
People are making decisions about their life. This isn't something that you compromise with them over, you don't actually have a negotiating position.
It does look like the people who want everyone else back to the office are now entering into the 3rd stage of Grief though (Bargaining).