echoing others here, the cost of living in the bay area and hours of daily commuting aren’t worth the proclaimed “innovative water cooler conversations”. i wish the executives would at least be honest about why they are forcing us back on location. i suspect it is to try to keep their real estate values high. to my knowledge none of the big companies have published data showing wfh being less profitable than on campus work. anecdotally i am much more productive wfh from my sweet affordable mountain home than trying to sleep in my expensive but still crappy sf apartment then risk my life driving for hours for some badge swipe kabuki. icing on the cake is my manager and colleagues are in other countries. not surprisingly i’m looking for another job.
Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
611–620 of 838 posts
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 150k-250k analyst isn’t upper class. Nor is it really middle-class (although that would depend on the cost of living). It’s that weird in-between, where one still needs to earn a living and make even more money for someone else. A 25M / year CEO is far past "earning a living" and really only works because they want to.
This recent (and self-serving) tendency of reducing “class” to only the extremely wealthy and everyone else is reductive and obscures important economic dynamics. It’s ridiculous to treat a master plumber that owns a plumbing business as “bourgeoise” while treating an Amazon engineer who has tremendous human capital as being a “proletariat.” Even in Marx’s time, there was substantial debate about how to classify the…
You think software engineers aren’t fungible? Facebook hires SWE’s based on generic technical interviews and doesn’t even assign them a team until week six.
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the timeline. Things are changing very rapidly. Automation seems to be coming at us at an exponential rate. The expectation that it's going to be business as usual is just as short sighted and archaic with regard going into an office as it is with the idea of work in general.
So far automation helps rich people get richer, and that's about it
Is this not true of every watershed technological breakthrough?
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#614Joel Spolesky has made this very point many times in the past: "Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation." I work on a Data Sci team that moved to an open floor plan in 2018. What happened? Anyone who needed to work intensively on a project would work from home instead of in the office.
I think it was the Amazon CEO that said the "office" is great because you can just walk up to someone and ask them questions. Fuck no.
We went into the office a few weeks ago, and I was much less productive due to us walking up to each other and asking questions. Rather than shoot chats to each other, or quick phone calls, each question/discussion was by far more disruptive to workflow. I didn't expect that, but it was undeniable!
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but the funny thing is that.. for a guy worried about how hard his worker bees are working / how focussed they were during COVID.. he dropped A LOT of tracks during COVID. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Solomon In fact, almost his entire track history was during COVID.. in a time that the company he runs has had some headline-grabbing losses in their consumer division. So I think its fair to say he sho…
Did Solomon actually produce those tracks though? I always assumed it was a ghost producer.
He flies around doing live sets, so maybe?
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#616Amazon has decided the worst of all worlds: a return to office mandate (stick) and agile seating plans with no assigned seating (stick). No carrots…
But it's a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. And not having assigned desks? Don't you know that this way you accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense. Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
/s obviously https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#617> If you want to watch your employees work, build glass walls. I hope this is dark humor and not meant to be taken seriously. For me, about half the reason I prefer my home office is that I don't feel like I have to look productive. I can get my stuff done in my way, and as long as my boss is happy with the result it doesn't matter if my way "looked" right.
Often it comes down to your boss/manager wanting to get their "moneys worth".
In their minds, they don't pay you for results - but rather for your time. If you complete your tasks fast, and deliver the desired results, in let's say 20 hours instead of 40 - that means you have 20 more hours to do something else. It's the "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean" mantra brought to the white-collar world.
If you work from home, they can't micromanage or monitor your hours as well as in the office. They don't know if you're a very efficient or average worker. Their fear is that you finish your tasks, and then spend time "slacking" at home - doing house chores, watching tv shows, or whatever, on their time.
That was literally the first thing I learned when I entered the workforce. It's always better to do nothing and look like you're doing something, than to do something and look like you're doing nothing.
I don't say this often, but I feel blessed to have a remote boss that doesn't give two shits about what I / we do with our time, as long as we deliver results. But so far he seems like an anomaly.
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#618Joel Spolesky has made this very point many times in the past: "Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation." I work on a Data Sci team that moved to an open floor plan in 2018. What happened? Anyone who needed to work intensively on a project would work from home instead of in the office.
I believe this concept came from the PeopleWare book by Demarco/Lister. Its common sense that for work requiring deep periods of concentration, eliminating distractions is key. Easiest way to eliminate distractions in an office environment is being in a room behind a closed door. Cheapest way to do that these days is WFH, assuming people have that space where they live.
The title of chapter 12 is "Bring Back The Door"
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Employees have realised we are equally as effective working from home and simply do not want to waste 2+ UNPAID hours of every day travelling to a corporate building for the sake of it. Not only is it unpaid, it actually costs the employee money. In the worst case you need a car + the insurance, fuel and maintenance costs associated. In the best case you still need to pay for public transportation. > Nor do people…
That's all fair, though there is one clear advantage that commuting has (via certain modes of transport) and that is exercise. I say this as someone that loves working from home, but before I did so I would get thousands of steps in every day running towards the tube in London and around all the platforms. Dunno, maybe the positive health benefits of the steps are outweighed by how polluted the air in London (and lik…
As someone recovering from a back injury, I was excited as hell to work from home.
6-8 weeks later, I wondered why my back hurt so damn much.
I had no idea how much my office’s slow elevators and 5 flights of stairs had been helping, had to manually add that back into my life.
Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office
#620[deleted]