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Tragedy of return to hostile offices
41–50 of 306 posts
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#42So, I have often worked remotely, think it's fine, and makes sense in some cases. But, honestly, this is a professional-class issue, and every article about it seems written from a viewpoint that has forgotten about most of the population. The waitress and cook never had the option of working remotely, nor did the factory worker, the construction worker, the taxicab driver, the truck driver, etc. etc. Most of the pop…
My wife works customer service remotely. > The longer we bemoan being forced to go to work in order to get paid, the more the rest of the population becomes convinced that the professional class is entitled and a bit spoiled. I stopped caring about what random strangers think when I was in high school. The correct answer to this is to tell these random people who have no skin in the game to fuck off.
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Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#43So, I have often worked remotely, think it's fine, and makes sense in some cases. But, honestly, this is a professional-class issue, and every article about it seems written from a viewpoint that has forgotten about most of the population. The waitress and cook never had the option of working remotely, nor did the factory worker, the construction worker, the taxicab driver, the truck driver, etc. etc. Most of the pop…
WFH isn't about not going to the office. It's about breaking real estate. If the professional class can do that, it actually benefits everyone by taking some of the pressure off hyperinflated real estate markets in major cities. We could also see some repurposing of commercial space to residential, which would further take the pressure off.
If you as a professional class worker think the rent is too damn high, consider how insane it is for people who make less and work longer hours.
It's become clear to me that real estate is the economic problem, at least in the US. I said the economic problem, singular. I don't think any other issue compares.
The phenomenon of younger generations feeling poorer than their parents is largely attributable to real estate costs. I think real estate is at the root of a ton more problems too: homelessness (for obvious reasons), collapsing birth rates, low rates of family formation, even crime. Real estate is basically cannibalizing the future.
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#44I have two wonderful examples of a hostile work environment, both caused by the same boss:
He had the habit of playing music really, really loud from his speakers. It got so bad that they tried to relegate him to different floors and build a separate office, just for him and the lucky few that worked with him (me included).
Another thing he did was being his dog to the office despite there being people allergic to dogs in the office.
And people are trying to force everyone nack to the office because of "collaboration".
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#45In some ways, OP’s suggestions are a recipe for building hostile teams! Why would I be entitled to interrupt someone to review my code, just because they are sitting next to me? Always on zoom? No, thanks. It invariably devolves into micromanaging. Constant KPI awareness? Most companies cannot even agree on how a valuable KPI looks like. Remote pair programming? Honest question here, is pair programming still a thing…
Pair programming isn't widely practiced for obvious reasons: It looks like you just made your code twice as expensive. There are studies justifying the cost by showing it can be recovered with less testing, code review, and bug hunting. But that evidently hasn't been persuasive. Also, anyone familiar with statistical quality control (SQC or SQA) would look at pair programming and see 100% inspection. Very suboptimal in manufacturing.
Still, pair programming makes sense in the abstract: Coding is not manufacturing. Applying SQC to code is nonsensical. Under the circumstances, 100% inspection is all you've got. Pair programming probably makes sense in cases where minimizing bugs at every step, right down to the creation of every line of code, is needed because the cost of a bug explodes the longer it exists. Probably rare cases. But worth knowing to know that coders are not working on a production line.
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#46One of the primary reasons that remote work improves productivity is that it allows employees to tailor their environment to their needs, rather than be forced into a hostile office space that requires kafkaesque bureaucratic bullshit to make even minor changes. I once had a former employer force me to take an espresso machine home that I had brought to work because it created a situation where a different shift was…
I think this is correct. It's why, before the pandemic normalized remote work, offices were popular. What's disheartening is that a lot of "return to office" plans I've heard of from friends involve conditions even worse than what was there before. For example, hot-desking replacing the previous (also terrible) open office. I'm too young to have lived through the golden age of engineers actually having an office to w…
> For example, hot-desking replacing the previous (also terrible) open office.
I doesn't actually replace it. It's an additional horror on top of all the old ones.
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#47Having your own private bathroom is a really underrated perk of WFH. There are of course many more benefits to WFH, but using your own bathroom is something no office and their disgusting communal bathrooms could ever compete with.
We really need a closed-loop video system with AI to inspect bathrooms after use, with an alarm of course.
Something like:
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#48So, I have often worked remotely, think it's fine, and makes sense in some cases. But, honestly, this is a professional-class issue, and every article about it seems written from a viewpoint that has forgotten about most of the population. The waitress and cook never had the option of working remotely, nor did the factory worker, the construction worker, the taxicab driver, the truck driver, etc. etc. Most of the pop…
Sorry, this does not compute. Your whole argument is that since we cannot do all jobs remotely we shouldn't do any jobs remotely?
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#49I work in Cork, Ireland. My boss is in Dublin, his boss Singapore, my staff in Nova Scotia, Devs in Manila, clients in London and New York. I'm always working remotely, no matter where I am, as is anyone who works in any multi office company. The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple wit…
How does that work? Are institucional investors writing "plz return to office or we are going bust" emails to every company?
They don't need to explain themselves. Big enough shareholders just can express their needs to the board, a vote can be held and, if the decision is not implemented, courts can get involved.
Re: Tragedy of return to hostile offices
#50I work in Cork, Ireland. My boss is in Dublin, his boss Singapore, my staff in Nova Scotia, Devs in Manila, clients in London and New York. I'm always working remotely, no matter where I am, as is anyone who works in any multi office company. The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple wit…
How does that work? Are institucional investors writing "plz return to office or we are going bust" emails to every company?
No they just have board meetings where they stress the importance of being in the office for "spontaneous exchange of ideas" and "culture" while also floating think pieces in business magazines about how important having people in the office is to success.