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80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

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Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#591

Post by heavyset_go »

ascotan wrote: post #378
wonderwonder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open offices are terrible. Management knows they are as well because Sr. leadership almost always have their own offices. The peons sit in the pit. Until the CEO is sitting next to everyone else they are all speaking lies when preaching the benefits of an open office. The only benefit is that its cheaper and they can keep an eye on you.

it's a millennial thing. they grew up working on laptops and their dream office is to make the workplace look like starbucks. Open seating, no cubicles, a barista. It's a knee-jerk reaction to the old office place standard of 'cubes'. Managers hire out to consultants that hype this type of office layout because it will supposedly attract a talent. To be fair, cubes weren't any better. I remember having a guy slerping…

The open office trend happened before millennials started having careers, open offices are always an economic choice. It's cheaper to cram more people into less space.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#592

Post by starttoaster »

wizofaus wrote: post #583
starttoaster wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty common in “DevOps” teams, in my experience. Some people are working on some autoscaling CI runner server initiative, some are working on writing code, some are fixing issues in CI pipelines, some are hardening the security of kubernetes clusters, etc. Their goals are completely unrelated to the others but is all work that falls under their team’s umbrella, and needs doing. Equally common in operations roles fo…

Why even call it a team then, and what would be the point of stand-ups for such a group?

Because it is a team in the sense that it made no difference (or little difference) who on the team picked up a specific work item off the kanban board. Theoretically, we should all be able to fill in for each other if we’re absent. But most of the time we’re all present and working on our individual tasks that don’t rely on other individual tasks. It might be hard to imagine if you’ve never been in devops or a traditional operations role, I suppose.

And exactly, ask that to our managers.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#593

Post by skirmish »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #587
skirmish wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this problem and solved it by tracking time spent in a spreadsheet. I have time targets for work and personal projects per week. If they are above, next week I switch some time e.g. from work to personal projects. I found this greatly reduces risk of burnout for me.

Why not just use a time tracking app like Toggl instead of a spreadsheet? I guess the spreadsheet isn't so bad if you work in long, 2-4+ hour chunks. I often work in 30-minute bursts so just being able to click the start and stop buttons in my browser is less tedious than entering the time manually

Sure, that would work as well. I have macros in the spreadsheet, so starting/stopping a timer is quick too. I like to see at the beginning of the day what is my current ideal work/project ratio.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#594

Post by wizofaus »

starttoaster wrote: post #592
wizofaus wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why even call it a team then, and what would be the point of stand-ups for such a group?

Because it is a team in the sense that it made no difference (or little difference) who on the team picked up a specific work item off the kanban board. Theoretically, we should all be able to fill in for each other if we’re absent. But most of the time we’re all present and working on our individual tasks that don’t rely on other individual tasks. It might be hard to imagine if you’ve never been in devops or a tradi…

If you're all picking unrelated tasks off the same kanban board I would think a quick daily stand-up would still be worthwhile then. Just needs to be sensibly run so individuals don't get bogged down in describing every little detail of what they'd been working on.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#595

Post by midoridensha »

Zigurd wrote: post #366
wonderwonder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open offices are terrible. Management knows they are as well because Sr. leadership almost always have their own offices. The peons sit in the pit. Until the CEO is sitting next to everyone else they are all speaking lies when preaching the benefits of an open office. The only benefit is that its cheaper and they can keep an eye on you.

There is an exception to this observation about senior management: Andy Grove used to sit in a cubicle. It was a big cubicle in a labyrinth of his assistants' cubicles. It didn't make cubicle farms any better though.

There's an exception to almost everything. Intel was a famous exception on cubicles for upper management; the CEO had a cubicle just like normal employees (except the CEO's was bigger and not accessible from the aisle of course). The CEO also didn't have his own special floor, special bathroom, special elevator, etc.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#596

Post by midoridensha »

0xblinq wrote: post #171
deaddodo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open offices are the literal reason (after commuting/traffic) that I no longer want to go into the office. My work doesn't require a ton of person:person engagement and it's much easier for me to just zone out in my own headspace to do it. When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions, but I would have to deal with 2-3hrs of driving/day on top of it. This meant that my employer…

The headphones thing reminds me of a big events ticketing company I worked for that, when people complained about noise, distractions, etc they came up with the amazing solution of using your health and wellness budget to buy noise cancelling headphones. Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.

>they came up with the amazing solution of using your health and wellness budget to buy noise cancelling headphones. >Most full of bullshit company I’ve ever worked for.

At least they bought you NC headphones; that's a LOT more than I can say about most companies. And the fact that you had a "health and wellness" budget at all.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#597

Post by midoridensha »

renegade-otter wrote: post #500
lamontcg wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then when it isn't required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for...productivity. The decades of evidence that open office plans are utter shit for productivity already proved that the emperor wears no clothes and they have no idea what makes for better produc…

Oh, l@@k: "Meta ditches open plan office structure to bring back cubicles" https://www.chargedretail.co.uk/2023/02/21/meta-office-space...

What's old is new again. From your link:

>Mark Zuckerberg’s firm says it is attempting to avoid returning to the cubicle culture of the 70s and 80s by introducing its own design.

>The Cube helps to asorb sound instead of reflecting and echoing it around colleague’s workspaces.

>Meta claims that its new design reduces sound levels by approximately 20 decibels.

This is BS. Either Meta is actively lying, or they really are SO clueless they've never seen cubicles in the 90s and 00s (when they were really phased out, not the 80s), and really believe somehow that cubicles were made of sound-reflecting materials. They weren't. They were made of cloth, with what I think was cardboard behind it. The cloth worked very well to absorb sound and keep the ambient noise level down. (The cardboard was to give some structure, and also so you could use push-pins/thumbtacks on them to hold things in place.)

The only thing "new" here is maybe using some kind of recycled plastic material to make the cloth. BFD.

90s/00s cubicles were a dream to work in, compared to the open offices of today. Everyone complained about them at the time because they sucked compared to walled offices with doors, but in reality, most workers never had those in the decades before. You can see photos online of engineers working in the 1950s: it was all open offices with a bunch of big desks in a grid.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#598

Post by midoridensha »

Plasmoid wrote: post #100
r00fus wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, I'm just as supervised at work, honestly (which is to say, not at all). I still have 1:1s with my manager, am still accountable for my targets and organizational goals, and generally do the same thing whether I'm WFH or in office. Office work has several advantages: 1) I like discussing in person with coworkers - sometimes coming up with fun/interesting ideas 2) office itself is more conducive to a particul…

I think RTO would have been a lot more palatable if most offices weren't intentionally built with 1hr+ commutes from residential areas.

It's not "intentional", at least on the part of the company. It's intentional in that this is the product of American car culture and suburbia, and it's something that Americans have been buying into willingly for many decades now. The company can't just locate down the street from your house: that's zoned for residential use only. They can't locate at the shopping center near your subdivision: that's zoned for commercial use only (for storefronts/shopping, not corporate offices). And even if they did, that wouldn't help: it would be a nice short commute for you, but not for the other employees that all live in other subdivision scattered at a similar radius from the city center. The employees that live on the other side of town will have a horrible commute. What you're complaining about is simply what you get by building with such low density and making everything dependent on cars.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#599

Post by midoridensha »

ajkjk wrote: post #139
imbnwa wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the intention?

Lol. The intention was to build the suburbs far away from the offices, not the other way around.

Exactly: the problem isn't the corporate employers, it's the middle-class Americans who bought into the suburban dream. Now that they got away from the black people downtown, they're complaining about the commute.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#600

Post by BearfootCoder »

wizofaus wrote: post #583
starttoaster wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty common in “DevOps” teams, in my experience. Some people are working on some autoscaling CI runner server initiative, some are working on writing code, some are fixing issues in CI pipelines, some are hardening the security of kubernetes clusters, etc. Their goals are completely unrelated to the others but is all work that falls under their team’s umbrella, and needs doing. Equally common in operations roles fo…

Why even call it a team then, and what would be the point of stand-ups for such a group?

Group of people == team because all report to same manager.

Manager in charge of multiple different projects because "success in organisation" == "number of people managed" regardless of whether they are being managed well or not.

Manager needs daily updates of all things going on his "team", because otherwise not have fucking clue about what manager is "managing" and clearly far too difficult for manager to read JIRA board, look at commit histories etc. Much more efficient for everyone to sit around for an hour during which they maybe have ten minutes of productive discussion.

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