431–440 of 838 posts
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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To me it beggars belief that companies spend so much on humans only to put them in an environment where it’s impossible to concentrate. I reckon at some point someone will figure out that the physical environment can be modified to make knowledge workers more productive, and start walloping their competition. I am on a distributed team with no in-person interaction, and I love commuting even though I don’t see anyone…
Anecdotally I think a a lot of the IT work that requires extreme focus has become commodified. That is, it's either done by some open source library or a SaaS or something. I had a lot more of the stuff that required focus at the beginning of my career. In my last few jobs it's been more about hooking together subsystems from 11 different teams/companies in six different timezones. Most bugs seem to happen because of…
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Personally, the commute is secondary. I hate being at the office. The office could be right next door to me and I still wouldn't want to go. Offices are cold, sterile, mentally unstimulating environments of constant surveillance. I never want to go into another one ever again
That’s the benefit of having your own office — you can make it comfortable. In mine I have music playing, I have a guitar for when I need to stop thinking about a problem, I have a bookshelf of books I love, I have a plant I care for, I have my own whiteboard, I have artwork, I have a balance board, and (fortunately) I have an amazing view. When I need a break, I can close my door to read, watch something, call a fri…
>> In mine I have music playing, I have a guitar for when I need to stop thinking about a problem
I had a chessboard in my office at one time. It was basically a decoration, I think it was a secret santa gift or something, and it was never used until another guy and I started playing once every other week or so, at lunch.
One day, over lunch, we were playing a game (and eating at the same table), and something $PRODUCTION crashed. Someone came into ask about the problem, we stopped what we were doing, and fixed it.
Sometime after that, something else crashed, and then it became, "All they are doing in there is playing chess, no wonder x isn't working!".
I took the chessboard home.
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Not everything is a class dynamic. “Analyst at GS hanging out in the Hamptons” doesn’t scream working class. The CEO and analyst are both upper class, just different levels of power and seniority. That CEO is just a power-tripping asshole.
A 150k-250k analyst isn’t upper class. Nor is it really middle-class (although that would depend on the cost of living). It’s that weird in-between, where one still needs to earn a living and make even more money for someone else. A 25M / year CEO is far past "earning a living" and really only works because they want to.
Upwards mobility my ass.
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>My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility. Exactly. I've been working 100% from home since 2017 (3 years before covid). I'd rather take a 50% paycut than go back to the office. Don't get me wrong. I did enjoy my life when I lived 15 min walk /5 min on a bike, from my job in a city. Before I got tha…
" 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. .
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This wasn’t true for any kind of collaborative work requiring physical presence.
Well to be fair, peasants helping eachother to raise a barn is technically working from home. This idea of commuting has only been possible with a means to move labor from one region to another versus having cottage industries ran out of the home. That came with the horsedrawn streetcar.
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Personally, the commute is secondary. I hate being at the office. The office could be right next door to me and I still wouldn't want to go. Offices are cold, sterile, mentally unstimulating environments of constant surveillance. I never want to go into another one ever again
Constant surveillance. It really is like that.
But at home I have side projects or learning projects. I get the 3 hours back and can spread them throughout the day. One hour in the morning, another one when I'm bored or tired of the job etc. If I go to the office it's nothing but a rather unappealing job domain and nothing else. Too tired in the evening to learn anything anymore, too stressed and still sleepy in the morning as well.
So fuck the office, they'd have to pay me 50% more to compensate for the time lost in transit and I would still not take it.
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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.
OTOH, a good small company can be really good. Decisions get made quickly, you know most of the people and can talk with them, much less BS, and more of a sense of purpose in what you're doing there rather than being a cog. I worked in one a few years back and loved it. They are tough to find, though, as a real 'small company' is different than a startup in that they're a bit less crazy in terms of growth.
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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…
Why are you pretending like flexibility is something you cannot give freely ? 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.
After you've been there a while, learned more and are more effective at your job, you're more likely to get the benefit of the doubt but even that has limits.
Why are we pretending like this is all weird? New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up and it's inappropriate that they just get the same consideration when compared to someone that's been there longer than the analyst has been alive. Have you guys ever worked a normal job before?