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Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

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Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#741

Post by Spooky23 »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #501
Spooky23 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that simple - it’s a stupid control thing. When you have these top down mandates with measurements, now you’re introducing new surveillance and metrics that are both disruptive and counter-productive. I’m not a remote zealot - I probably average two days a week, sometimes half days. I live a 20 minute walk/5 minute drive from work in a central business district. I’m a senior leader with hundreds of employees…

>Personally, I’d prefer smaller offices with hotel space and generously equipped collaboration space. Doesn't everyone, you know, hate this kind of stuff? I know I do.

People hate reporting to work every day where you need to fight for a chair. If you're WFH, you can gather adhoc, do your thing with the team and get out.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#742

Post by Tainnor »

sdfghswe wrote: post #587
Tainnor wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the comment you replied to didn't say that they'd send inappropriate messages to female coworkers. It was about giving examples for reasonable ultimatums that contradict the point of the blog post.

> Sure thing buddy. Are we talking about an ultimatum not to send creepy as fuck text messages to female colleagues (...) Why would anyone make an ultimatum not to send creepy text messages to female colleagues, if they're not sending creepy text messages to female colleagues?

They were giving general examples of things where giving an ultimatum in the workplace makes sense and not explicitly addressing OP's workplace behaviour. I feel like you're the only person here bringing up that OP is a furry (you, and some other comment that is thankfully dead).

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#743

Post by diogenes4 »

grumblingdev wrote: post #446
diogenes4 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world. I'm guessing the most spoiled people in the world wouldn't be working at all. This sort of contempt is a very specific and odd attitude to have.

Imagine being an Amazon delivery driver. Monitoring to the extreme. Constant boring shit all day. Running up apartment stairs. Then imagine an office worker... It's a world of difference and puts things in perspective. People take things for granted too easily.

> People take things for granted too easily.

If this were a widespread attitude surely the office workers would be paid less than physical laborers (and, frankly, they probably should be). I do a lot of physical work (that's my two primary jobs) and people don't spend their time fuming over people with soft hands—that's kind of a "loser" thing.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#744

Post by cableshaft »

fieldcny wrote: post #721
cableshaft wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Remote work is here to stay and will never go away" early on and often. It wasn't until about a year in that they started changing their tune and gaslighting us with "we never said remote work was here to stay, where did you get such a silly idea?" Pretty much exactly this happened at my company. They started touting these new offices they got for a steal, but in the all-hands said "our company has never required…

Correction, the company was not performant enough to keep them working there…

Considering several of them were in between client projects through no fault of their own (a few of the people laid off I worked with personally and were only transitioned off my project because the client was trying to save some money and didn't really need graphic design work at that point), yeah I'd agree.

The company has already had to revise down their earnings estimates a couple times this year, and hasn't bothered to replace about 20-30 other employees that have quit in the months since then (despite several of them being star employees).

That's why it felt like gaslighting to me, claiming these people weren't good employees and that's why "it wasn't a layoff" (even if that were true, it's still a layoff).

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#745

Post by Tainnor »

flashback2199 wrote: post #185
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed the flexibility of WFH but I still prefer working with local teams in the office. There are pros and cons to both, but it's silly to assume everyone has the same preference as you just because your preference is strongly held. This is my response to both your comment and TFA. There is less consensus on this topic than the very-vocal WFH crowd would have you believe. I know plenty of other talented engineers…

From what I observed during the pandemic, I sincerely believe that the only reason remote work is worse than working in person is how little effort teams tend to put into making remote work equivalent to in person work. The biggest thing I saw throughout the entire pandemic on multiple teams was zero effort to create a culture of meet on camera for quick ad hoc, hey I have a quick question on this, ah cool thanks bye…

I feel the exact opposite. People should make an effort to make as much communication async as possible. Usually, I don't need a ton of 1:1 interaction, and if you really do feel there's something to discuss synchronously, you can schedule a meeting in advance. The situation where you're so completely blocked that you can't make progress on your own or switch to a different task (or where the house is on fire and something needs to be done now) are rare in my experience.

Of course, sometimes it makes sense to do check-ins (e.g. for onboarding) or a pairing session, but that can also be scheduled.

I also tend to forget things that were just said in personal interactions or meetings. If it's written down, I can look it up.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#746

Post by cultureswitch »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #144
tgma wrote: post #116

Remote "work" is fine (with pros and cons). The problem is lots of people don't "work" remotely. Also, inevitably remote/async work flips the priority such that employee would be much more responsive to interrupts/errands of their own life than to focus their full attention on the employer's concerns.

It’s so rare to see anyone admit the truth on this topic. That’s how I know it’s BS on both sides. No one has ever admitted they exploit it - but we all know it happens.

One could also argue that dedicating 100% of your scheduled work time to the service of an employer down to regulated pee breaks is exploitation and should not be how employment contracts are legally written or generally understood.

Besides, it is absolutely not clear that home workers "waste" more time than office workers. The number one reason people who prefer the office cite as a reason for preferring the office is that it surrounds them with other people. That is, working in an office surrounds you with distractions and occasions to "waste" one's time.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#747

Post by JSavageOne »

The_Colonel wrote: post #656
JSavageOne wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Tesla employees quit because they became millionaires, or because there was no further direct upside to their additional labor? I explicitly mentioned profit sharing because that is different from simply owning stock in your company. Owning stock / options, although better than nothing, is not a meaningful incentive for most as the value of it is generally so far removed from your individual labor unless your com…

> By profit sharing, I mean literally giving workers a cut of their direct contributions. That to me sounds like a bad incentive in engineering. Everybody wants to work only on new features, things like code quality, maintenance, refactoring, infrastructure don't matter anymore.

If a code refactoring can increase dev productivity and shipping speed, then that is certainly worth something - though obviously can be hard to measure. Infrastructure updates can directly reduce server costs, latency, or have other benefits.

For tasks that aren't straightforward to measure impact on bottom line, perhaps their impact can be approximated via product owners setting bounties on them.

In any case as important as things like code quality are, they are ancillary to the bottom line of a business. Employers hire employees to increase the profitability of their business, and code quality is not the top priority.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#748

Post by danaris »

The_Colonel wrote: post #635
bit_logic wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the #1 argument against WFH before COVID? It was fear of productivity drop, that the company simply can't function with WFH. Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. At this point, it shouldn't be called RTO, it should be called STO (Switch To Office), because WFH is the default existing state. And the companies that want to STO, they admit there's NO DATA to support this: http…

> Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. I don't think we have good data on that "worked fine" part. Personally I saw a significant degradation of our team performance during COVID remote. Some people slacked a lot (difficult to catch, though), many people worked hard (perhaps even harder than in office), but the bad communication reduced the overall team productivity a lot.

And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby?

And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? "Easy communication" can be a double-edged sword, and Slack/Discord/email can be silenced for specified periods of time.

Re: Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

#749

Post by guhidalg »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #736
guhidalg wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unask this question. Every industry, every company, every team, and every project is different. What works in some places and times doesn't work in others. You have to decide for yourself and your team/company if RTO is what is best, and don't take other's lived experience as your own.

> Unask this question. I don't understand this response and it come off as incredibly rude. What I'm asking is whether it ever makes sense for a firm to do something against the preferences of employees if it demonstrably increases productivity. > You have to decide for yourself and your team/company if RTO is what is best, and don't take other's lived experience as your own. I genuinely think you might be responding…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#Non-dualistic_me...

I am not trying to be rude, but the way you asked the question "Hypothetically, would you still feel this way of it turned out that everyone being in the office (remember this is a magical hypothetical) has a significant and demonstrable improvement in productivity?" is leading to a yes or no answer to a hypothetical question with a lot of missing quantifiers (the lived experience). Neither answer is wrong, and neither answer is right.

A better question would have been: "_Have you_ experienced a demonstrable improvement in productivity from being in the office in yourself or others?" Personally, I have not. Going to the office wastes a lot of my day getting ready to leave the house (unhooking laptop and charger), commuting back and forth, etc. The only time being in the office is a net positive is when I need to get like 6+ people into a conference room for a few hours and get them all to agree to something. These type of meetings only happen every few months.

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