Same. It's been 6 years of "work from home", starting mid-March 2020. It has become very, very old. I would love to find a local startup that embraces hybrid work.
i am guessing you dont have kids. i get extra 2 hrs with my son that wouldnt trade for anything.
My kids are 12 and 13 - wfh was is getting very old for me, especially during the school holidays when I’m constantly in ‘dad mode’. Don’t get me wrong - I love them with all my soul but sometimes I really want a break.
Management & their HR henchmen, sorry, henchpersons: "But think of all the in-person collaboration that gets missed without the in-office presence!" The actual in-person collaboration in the office: 50-100 person open space office with everyone wearing noise canceling headphones all the time to drown out everyone else talking in zoom/teams calls, not talking to anyone in person, reading reddit and watching youtube on…
And there's the people that more or less require the use of headphones if you want to get anything done: the two or three people that continually narrate every aspect of what they're doing loud enough for everyone to hear, the handful of people who desperately need attention and validation at every possible juncture, the project managers having a ball pretending every day is an episode of The Office, and if you're re…
Some older people don't hear well so they talk louder due to that. It's not that they intend to be loud, it's just they don't hear as well as younger people do. Many vets also having hearing loss due to service related injuries. So next time you hear someone talking loud... remember that.
Same. It's been 6 years of "work from home", starting mid-March 2020. It has become very, very old. I would love to find a local startup that embraces hybrid work.
i am guessing you dont have kids. i get extra 2 hrs with my son that wouldnt trade for anything.
I have kids and would prefer to work in-office or hybrid. There's lots of reasons people might want that.
I have heard a large impetus for the RTO push was to prop up commercial real estate. Permanent WFH would change the value of trillions of dollars of properties and reshape the commercial centers of cities. A lot of people with a lot of money at risk got really scared and decided the easiest thing to do was to go back to the status quo.
The incongruent part of that theory is that the RTO push came from middle to upper-middle management (and some top-level ones on occasion). The owners of commercial real estate are not these people. And it doesn't seem likely that these commercial real estate owners would have sufficient push by themselves to make such a large scale RTO mandate.
It came from the very top. The owners own both real estate companies and software companies and much in between. Many also copied the RTO directive to fit in.
And there's the people that more or less require the use of headphones if you want to get anything done: the two or three people that continually narrate every aspect of what they're doing loud enough for everyone to hear, the handful of people who desperately need attention and validation at every possible juncture, the project managers having a ball pretending every day is an episode of The Office, and if you're re…
Some older people don't hear well so they talk louder due to that. It's not that they intend to be loud, it's just they don't hear as well as younger people do. Many vets also having hearing loss due to service related injuries. So next time you hear someone talking loud... remember that.
Yeah, in my open space office there's an old guy that talks in Teams calls all day like he learned to whisper in a helicopter, and me and others complained to management about him disturbing everyone trying to focus on our work, and boss said "he's deaf, what do you want us to do about it, give him a private office?" and my answer in my head was "no, but have you heard of this wild idea called WFH where people can't disturb others or get disturbed by others talking too loud? Crazy idea, right?"
In Texas where BCBS is based, the city asked them to re-instate in-office policies, as all those people drive a large amount of tax income in the city.
I have heard a large impetus for the RTO push was to prop up commercial real estate. Permanent WFH would change the value of trillions of dollars of properties and reshape the commercial centers of cities. A lot of people with a lot of money at risk got really scared and decided the easiest thing to do was to go back to the status quo.
There were a lot of downstream effects as well -- local businesses that depended upon those office workers being in the area. Those ripples hurt a lot of people. That said, it shouldn't be the driver of RTO, it should be the need to actually have in-person collaboration.
True. Many large cities also depended on that tax revenue.
It's almost as if we should find an economic system that doesn't rely on forced consumption, waste, etc in order to be "prosperous."
I don't know about you guys, but RTTO was the biggest signal to me that corp america is lost and beyond recovery. The benefits are so obvious, yet here we are.
yeah, when you work in the office, there's no way to get your Costco shopping done.
There were a lot of downstream effects as well -- local businesses that depended upon those office workers being in the area. Those ripples hurt a lot of people. That said, it shouldn't be the driver of RTO, it should be the need to actually have in-person collaboration.
True. Many large cities also depended on that tax revenue. It's almost as if we should find an economic system that doesn't rely on forced consumption, waste, etc in order to be "prosperous."
A win-win in this regard would be to repurpose the empty office space into living spaces so that the local businesses would have local people and those tenants would be able to possibly abandon the need for car ownership if the density of the area fosters all the necessary services.
The smackdown of this idea is that office spaces have different requirements than living spaces and the conversion of those buildings is too expensive to make it viable. As an unrepentant optimist, I would hope that could be mitigated by supporting those transitions via tax rebates, collaborative zoning and permitting processes, and investing in methodologies that could address the infra needs (plumbing, etc).
I'm hybrid, but most weeks get called to site due to the nature of my job. Supposed to be 50/50 but often it's full in office. Air gapped networks that look like museum pieces are fun...