11–20 of 263 posts
It shouldn't take me an hour and 30 minutes in congested, underbuilt roads to drive 20 miles into the office. Cities and their wealthy politically-connected commercial office building owners have had decades to fix this problem. No sympathy.
There is your problem. Personal automobiles aren't a feasible method of transportation past a certain population density.
It shouldn't take me an hour and 30 minutes in congested, underbuilt roads to drive 20 miles into the office. Cities and their wealthy politically-connected commercial office building owners have had decades to fix this problem. No sympathy.
>drive There is your problem. Personal automobiles aren't a feasible method of transportation past a certain population density.
It shouldn't take me an hour and 30 minutes in congested, underbuilt roads to drive 20 miles into the office. Cities and their wealthy politically-connected commercial office building owners have had decades to fix this problem. No sympathy.
It shouldn't take me an hour and 30 minutes in congested, underbuilt roads to drive 20 miles into the office. Cities and their wealthy politically-connected commercial office building owners have had decades to fix this problem. No sympathy.
>drive There is your problem. Personal automobiles aren't a feasible method of transportation past a certain population density.
The choices really are two: subway (or any dedicated rail thing) or car.
I think that companies might have more success getting people back to the office if they had not also spent the past decade or two systematically updating offices to be beautiful to look at in CAD renderings but awful to actually occupy and try to work in. This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse. Open plan offices are a bit of a product…
Remember the "Day in the Life" vidoes? When was the last time you saw someone showing their amazing workspace, the free food, the amentities and all that? A few years ago they were everywhere. Now? Nowhere.
We are now in permanent layoff culture. Some of us still believe this is companies trimming the fat. It is not. It is wage suppression. If you get rid of 5% of your staff and just make the remaining 95% do what the 5% were doing then you've saved money. Even better, the reamining 95% won't be asking for or demanding raises. After all, aren't you luck to have your job?
But severance packages cost money. You know what's cheaper? Return to office mandates. A certain percentage of people will quit. That's a cheap layoff.
Now some of you think your WFH status is safe. You may even take a pay cut to continue WFH (even though it's objectively cheaper to employ people remotely).
Trust me when I tell you that the flood waters are rising. You're just temporarily on the high ground. Your remote status won't last. For a handful it might but for the vast majority, you will be faced with the choice of losing your job or going back to the office.
This is more wage suppression. It is employers forcing their will on you so they can walk around the cubicle farm and see what you're doing. It's the compliance of having you there regardless of whether you need to be or not.
As a tech worker, you are just like any other worker. You are not immune. The only effective counter is to act collectively with your fellow employees. Unfortunately we've spent the last 50+ years completely dismantling any kind of collectivism.
It’s vital. Most large companies think that as they are hiring “the best from around the world” that leaving them around the world is fine. Look leaving people on different floors of the same building screws up team cohesion.
So from a certain standpoint, it does not matter. Companies have long ago chosen to cripple their productivity and WFH simply helps, but frankly it annoys me.
Get better at building and releasing great code. In the same office. Move people, pay them well. Or maybe I am wrong - maybe the extra cost to co-locate and do the job well is more than the loss of productivity by seperated teams
But I bet you the CEO of Crowdstrike is rethinking that idea right now