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Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

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Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#151

Post by kevingadd »

bobthepanda wrote: post #14
kevingadd wrote: post #3

"One worker’s company “had everyone come into the office for an outdoor luncheon a week ago,” according to a post" Some of the stuff companies do truly baffles me. It's only the beginning of June, you can't really assume your whole team is fully vaccinated. Why would you bring everyone in for lunch and then send them home? All downside and near-zero upside. It'd be another matter if it was a full day event where you…

Outdoors is a pretty low risk for a lunch event given adequate distance between tables, no?

Depends on whether you get everything right. If done correctly, yes. But for example in my local area, most "outdoor dining" was inside tents with poor ventilation and tables at most 6 feet apart where nobody was wearing masks. Once we understood the aerosol transmission model it became obvious that this was bad, but it kept being done.

In a sense, an outdoor lunch event is potentially much worse than a seminar or meeting since at least during a seminar/meeting people don't have an excuse for taking off their masks and they can socially distance more easily vs sitting at a table together.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#152

Post by kevingadd »

mikestew wrote: post #47
lenitabinol wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every 16+ year old in the Bay Area has had access to a vaccine for 6 weeks.

Seattle area has had access at least as long, and I drove 90 minutes to get that shot as early as I could. I hit full vaccination status on Monday of this week, so no outdoor lunches for me last week. Which makes me kinda wonder what point you're trying to make.

Yeah, that's my model here. I'm still waiting on full immunity and I got shot 1 a day after eligibility opened up. I am not particularly concerned about my safety but I'm still wary of accidentally exposing someone who's unvaccinated and it bothers me to see businesses and other organizations just dismiss the risks posed by actions they could simply avoid taking.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#153

Post by pochamago »

narrator wrote: post #82
phkahler wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with fully remote work is that once you accept that a job can be done from anywhere, you have to compete on a global level. It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people willing to work for less than you! So don't get too excited about it ;-)

This is why it's good to be a lawyer. It's one of the last remaining guilds of knowledge workers with any power. It's literally illegal to have someone from wherever do certain tasks if they are not properly licensed.

I'm not sure I'd classify licensed professions as rare, frankly most US states have an overabundance of occupational licensing in my view.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#154

Post by pochamago »

pinkybanana wrote: post #101
mywittyname wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait for the mass exodus. Remote work is turning out to be a requirement for hiring people. So once the company starts bleeding (good) people who find remote jobs with other companies, they are going to be difficult/impossible to replace. At some point, the execs will have to suck it up and offer remote work.

If remote work is a winning concept on the market, why we needed coronavirus crisis for it to get adopted? Are markets not working?

Inertia, perhaps. We certainly have been seeing reports of digital nomads growing over the last decade, but major shocks can be useful in speeding up transitions. Likely very few CEOs previously imagined how robust the remote work infrastructure had become, and certainly didn't have obvious incentive to implement all the tools until now.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#155

Post by sidlls »

pinkybanana wrote: post #115
post_break wrote: post #4

We were told for years, there is no flex time, don't even think about it. While the higher ups obviously flexed whenever they wanted to. Suddenly covid hits and I'm scrambling to get everyone setup so they can work remote. We go a whole year working remote with almost no issues or lost productivity. And now we're back in the office and the mood has definitely changed.

> We go a whole year working remote with almost no issues or lost productivity I've heard a lot about this claim "no lost productivity". However that is for the employer to be evaluated, not for the employees. The complaining employees lose credibility when they make claims like that in complex fields, because productivity is very complex metric to be measured in many jobs.

Unless you're talking about something that can be objectively measured--widget output from an assembly line, average times to retrieve/place something in a warehouse, and so on--the "complexity" you note is just fertile ground for gaming. It's downright trivial for an employer to massage "productivity" numbers in a way that supports their agenda.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#156

Post by hinkley »

dcolkitt wrote: post #133
phkahler wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with fully remote work is that once you accept that a job can be done from anywhere, you have to compete on a global level. It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people willing to work for less than you! So don't get too excited about it ;-)

> It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people Software engineers in these countries are significantly less competent than their American counterparts. This has been documented by academic literature.[1] That still doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers in Pakistan, but what makes you think you have the ability to recruit, interview, hire and retain the top decil…

I hesitate to earmark this as competence, but what I see again and again is that my colleagues in Asia (India, China, Russia on one occasion) have a much higher tolerance for pain than the majority of their North American and Western European contemporaries.

This is not a good thing. The dominant form of 'bullshit' in code is pointlessly self-inflicted pain, and so people who don't hit the 'enough is enough' point are wallowing in bullshit code most of the time, and writing more bullshit the rest of the time. We politely call this 'accidental complexity' to water it down and not point fingers. It wasn't an accident. It was deliberate, or thoughtless.

Anyone who hits the 'enough' point now starts to consider high threshold people as mess-makers. As being less than 1x employees (worst case, -x employees). Doing that kind of janitorial work for long is a quick road to burnout. It's taking and challenging to explain to people that 'okay' is not universal and just because you think something is 'okay' doesn't mean anyone else does and as you work on a team you need to adjust your levels to match expectations.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#158

Post by rufus_foreman »

qchris wrote: post #42
emc3 wrote: post #2

In-office work needs to be compensated differently than WFH. They will try to decrease WFH compensation initially, like the loss of benefits threat in the article, but the number of potential employers is higher for WFH workers, giving them leverage.

For one, I'd argue that working from home probably requires additional pay over working in the office. I'm sure some people have a "spare" bedroom that they can convert into an office, but there's a lot of people, including almost all the tech-oriented professionals under 30 that I know, that don't even have their own one bedroom apartment, let alone are able to pay for a second bedroom just in case. Working at the k…

>> If workers are also now expected to provision their own work space (space, desk, chairs, monitors, etc.), then the compensation model around those jobs also needs to be adjusted to account for that

I've been working from home for 5 years. Standing desk, Aeron chair, dual ultra wide monitors, it goes on and on.

It all adds up to about 1% of my compensation over those years.

I spend whatever it takes to have a great working environment, if I see something that will incrementally improve the 8 hours a day I spend working I immediately buy it. As far as my income goes it amounts to a rounding error.

>> there's a lot of people, including almost all the tech-oriented professionals under 30 that I know

That's called selection bias.

You have chosen to live in a location with expensive real estate. Good for you. Other people made different choices. I have rooms in my house I haven't been in for months.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#159

Post by bitcuration »

darth_avocado wrote: post #34

The whole pushback against remote work is absolutely nuts. When the companies were staring at shutdowns and loss of revenue, everyone gladly accepted the idea that people can work from home. And contrary to the popular belief, productivity increased (our own CEO admitted at one point in an all hands). But the minute there was a sign things are opening up, there's a complete opposite viewpoint being pushed from the sa…

Spot on. The management is having an existential crisis when butts are not in seats and everything appeared to work just fine.

Re: Why workers are calling BS on leaders about returning to the office

#160

Post by bitcuration »

cmuguythrow wrote: post #62
darth_avocado wrote: post #34

The whole pushback against remote work is absolutely nuts. When the companies were staring at shutdowns and loss of revenue, everyone gladly accepted the idea that people can work from home. And contrary to the popular belief, productivity increased (our own CEO admitted at one point in an all hands). But the minute there was a sign things are opening up, there's a complete opposite viewpoint being pushed from the sa…

Just want to provide a counter-story to your anecdote. Many of my colleagues are excited to go back to the office to increase collaboration and work satisfaction. Personally, wfh is really difficult for me and I can't wait to get back in the office. Working from home feels like grinding away at an endless list of tasks and waiting for the day to be over. Working at an office feels like playing a sport with a team - e…

Oh, those Extroverts. They don't understand what working means except it brings them social joy.
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