171–180 of 263 posts
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Buses also are useless. Thry routinely waste you hours due to their slowness and inconsistency. The choices really are two: subway (or any dedicated rail thing) or car.
Buses can be very dependable and cheaper than rail if they run in dedicated bus lanes. You’re right that they aren’t much use if they get stuck in the same traffic as everyone else.
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Well said. During the span of my career, the office went from being a perfectly fine place to get work done; then degraded to a cube farm environment which was worse, but you you could work around it and get stuff done anyway; then to an open office environment which was hellish enough that it got me to quit my job and vow to never work in such an environment again. Commute is certainly an important aspect, too, but…
> then to an open office environment which was hellish enough that it got me to quite my job and vow to never work in such an environment again. We're moving to an open plan office design, to help people collaborate and interact in new emergent ways and improve productivity. Also, please don't talk to people at their desks, it's very distracting. Book a meeting room if you want to have a real conversation.
But act fast, the next available slot is in two weeks, assuming an exec doesn't claim the room for that full day that morning.
I work in an admnistrative office on a university campus. Work from home was great for IT folks, but not so much for a lot of regular staff. Some people had young children that didn't understand that "you can't bother mommy or daddy right now" and it was a constant fight. Some of them had to use their own computers to connect to their machine at work through a vpn, and had a lot of trouble getting that to work. Some…
> Some people had young children that didn't understand that "you can't bother mommy or daddy right now" and it was a constant fight. When you're working from home, you yourself have to treat it as being "at work" just as much as you expect others to. This means that if both parents are working from home, you still need someone else to look after your kids. Either out-of-home daycare (preferred) or an in-home babysit…
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…
Oh, and the chairs make my arse* hurt.
This isn't a stupid little startup either, it's a listed and profitable company worth billions.
I stay because they know how bad it is so I just go in a few times per month to socialise.
(* Please forgive the lewd British slang).
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…
Remote work for developers is a viable option. We are rapidly moving the majority of our software development to India, and only keeping product leads in Europe and the US.
For the longest time, we tech workers have convinced ourselves we're special. We believe we can act on our own behalf against our employer on equal footing. We start to believe in the myth of meritocracy. 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 n…
Because we are. In the sense that we own the means of production: our education and experience are the tools we take with us wherever we go. We own the process of (for example) software development like the craftspeople of old used to own production processes of material things.
We can dictate terms, because when we walk away, we take our workshops with us. The laptops and networks and all the infra any tech company owns/maintains, these are simply interchangeable shells.
The RTO struggle is incidental here; what really threatens our productive autonomy are the nascent AI tools, where big capital again threatens to hold a new generation of tools captive. If we're not careful, what has played out over the course of the Industrial Revolution (fragmentation of workflows, despecialization into piece work, transfer of ownership of tools, etc) will happen again in the Information Age.
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Buses also are useless. Thry routinely waste you hours due to their slowness and inconsistency. The choices really are two: subway (or any dedicated rail thing) or car.
Or get this, a bike (in case you live under ~10 km away). Just rolls the gym hours into the commute for double efficiency, and you can be always on time since traffic can't really affect you.
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I bike every day to work because I finally live in a place where there's bike paths/roads almost everywhere there's car roads. I would never dare to do so where I lived before: I'd almost certainly be a blob of blood and guts splattered on the road by now. It's infuriating how little thought is given to anything that is not a road for The Car. Billions of taxpayer money spent on massive road construction and repair b…
The majority of people can't rely on biking. They're too old, too fat, the weather is bad, or too hot, or too cold, they're going too far, or they have to take two kids somewhere and pick up groceries, etc. If biking works for you, where you are, great. But it's at best a pretty small part of the solution.
In the Netherlands kids bike everywhere with their friends, because it's safe and comfortable to do so. If they want to play sports they grab their bikes and go, they don't have to sit in traffic for 45mins in the back of their parents SUV. The Netherlands also has some of the happiest children on earth according to studies. Go figure :)