391–400 of 838 posts
I've personally and workwise developed hugely in the last 3 years, despite being remote. I have built networks with people I've never met and picked up skills and work I'd never considered before.
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I have not run into this attitude in tech from executives. Finance is much more of a heiracy culture I guess. I have run into this at a peer level though. I've negotiated WFH and extra vacation and have learned to keep it in the down low. They get mad at me, but I'm not the one that is their boss and I couldn't care less if they WFH.
Small biz bros are worse. My wife left finance to work for a small (50-200) person business for a few years. Couple brothers that inherited it from daddy. Got all their kids / kids friends nepobaby jobs. Probably the worst scenario of business owners you can work for.
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Respectfully, this is an example of rigid thinking that isn't productive or accurate. Apply marginal thinking the way economists do. People's propensity to return to the office falls on a spectrum ranging from 0 ( the people who are already back in their cubicles ) to 9 ( "You'll need a SWAT team to get me back to the office" ). A 5 on that scale is a marginal worker. Provide an incentive for them to return, like a n…
Depends on the distribution though, doesn't it. My personal hunch is that it's strongly bimodal, and that there actually aren't that many in the middle.
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" I'd rather take a 50% paycut than go back to the office." People should stop saying this. Otherwise it will soon be the standard to take a serious paycut for WFH. .
Your employer should actually pay you more to WFH. Aside from saving them rent on the office space, you should be able to expense several office-supply things that they would have provided previously. Office chair and desk, internet bill (pro-rated by usage), maybe printer ink.
My company recently did a forced 3-day return-to-office to "gain the immeasurable benefits of face-to-face collaboration" bullshit. Except they used the pandemic to close down a site and merge two offices, so there aren't enough desks. So, everyone who isn't full time in the office has to use hotel cubes, so I had my cube taken away a few weeks ago. I quickly found out that most of the hotel cubes are several floors…
My hotel cubes are several states away from my team, so I drive downtown, sit in my hotel cube, and get on zoom calls with my team that's in a different time zone.
People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home (they may be forced to, but they won't want to). For many people the time and cost savings of avoiding a daily commute cannot be offset by a nicer office. Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery. A nicer office…
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My favorite story on this thread is that during the hybrid period, GS CEO threw a fit when out in the Hamptons because some analyst (fairly junior role almost at the bottom) had the balls to go introduce themselves during a workday lunch at a restaurant. He couldn't articulate a specific, valid complaint like "I was out at a client lunch and they were goofing off" or "I was on a vacation day while they were supposed…
Why are you pretending this analyst is the same or even should have the same affordances as the CEO? You might be shocked to find out the CEO even gets paid more! Most people come up through the ranks and you can bet the CEO was one time an analyst with a demanding boss. After decades of work he made it to boss. You see this everywhere where you move up the ranks and things get better. That's the apprentice deal for…
That's like saying all junior-level employees MUST carry a book on top of their heads all the time, and only C-Level executives get to skip that. If you give someone flexibility, you are not taking anything away from other people, so not giving it is only an unnecessary punishment for junior level employees.
How does the dual income effect never get mentioned? In these articles its like you work from home in a vacuum, and going from remote to back to the office should be as trivial as flipping a lightswitch. The vast majority of coupled these days are dual income. It is so much simpler to find a place to live when you both work remotely, than to try and find some middle ground that is as convenient as possible to both wo…
People need to stop trying to make things return to the original office model. Employees have realised we are equally as effective working from home and simply do not want to waste 2+ UNPAID hours of every day travelling to a corporate building for the sake of it. Nor do people want to spend £10+ a day on food and drinks which they have in their fridge, at home. Then there is also the social pressure of having to go…
It doesn't stop there. When I'm actually at work, I'm constantly waiting for hours for responses unless I pull in a manager to move things along. While it's true that with today's tech we can collaborate anywhere, that's not what I see happening in practice. I constantly see miscommunication and misunderstandings that normally would take 10 minutes at someone's cube to resolve that end up taking DAYS to resolve.