The worst part of working from home is now haunting reopened offices

This is exasperating: it’s basically saying managers aren’t doing their jobs and you should pay the consequences. If someone really did goof off that much, their supervisor should be looking for a new job too.

What I suspect is that nobody did this and what you’re really hearing is that senior management are distrustful and don’t believe people are working if they don’t see them. Everywhere I’ve heard that, it’s been pure projection.

Either way, I’d reconsider leaving. You have a stable situation so you can look for a place you really like without time pressure but the respect gradient probably won’t improve unless you have C-level turnover.

It’s easy for people to game the system and turn around and claim that it’s a discriminatory practice. It’s also easy for management to cut off an employee in bad faith to drum up a case for termination.

The easiest way to weed out the assholes is to change the rules for everyone, and purge those who are insubordinate. You’ll lose a few producers, but not as many as HN would leave you to believe.

* The office was mostly empty

* The only communication was between my manager and myself and it was pointless

* There were several people in what appeared to be 8 hour long teams meetings

* None of the people who were pushing to get people back into the office were actually in the office. None of the exec team for example none of the HR or any of the older engineers

* You had bizarre rules with the mask which was you didn't need one when you are sat at the desk but moving about you need one. Not only that most people were ignoring those rules completely

* The office actually felt even more shit than what I imagined it to be

* I still needed to do the daily stand up via teams

* I didn't have a webcam / microphone at the desk so I had to use my own headset and go without the camera

* You couldn't it right next to someone and talk to them about their computer so I had to have a teams call with the intern to get them setup

* The intern forgot everything I told him as he didn't take any notes and asked me the same questions that I had already answered for the next 2 weeks

* The normal cafeteria was shut (looked permanently) so I had to drive to get my lunch

* I had forgotten that my chair was actually broken so moving from my £300 secret lab chair to a 10 year old farty broken cheap £25 office chair was a culture shock

* The toilets had every second stall blocked off (pre-pandemic) these were always full and you would often have to wait

* If the toilets had more that X people in them you had to wait in a queue outside

* Only 1 person at a time was allowed into the kitchen not sure how that was supposed to work if the office was full

* I had never noticed this before but the décor in the place was terribad. The carpet was skanky/mostly worn away. Two walls were painted headache inducing red. They had a bunch of shit art on all the walls. The plants were all either fake or dead. There was 0 natural light. The windows didn't open and were facing a 3 story brick wall.

* I felt quite breathless when I was there as you couldn't open a window the place was very stuffy and felt like the o2 levels were low

* The AC would make a loud grinding noise every 30 minutes that felt like the building was going to collapse

My overall experience was that I felt degraded like the company had "done a Will Smith" and smacked me in the face in front of everyone. I started looking for a 100% remote job immediately after this.

I disagree as I think those people did no work while in the office and kept doing no work outside the office.

I worked in a building where one person had a personal laptop open, daytrading all day. Instead of working. Of course they should have worked, but they didn’t.

People will shirk work in the office and outside.

I think it’s silly to assume someone who would log into Teams and then play PlayStation wouldn’t just close their office door and play games on their iPad for hours.