841–850 of 969 posts
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For some people and some kinds of work, talking to other people is important. And talking in person is much higher bandwidth for reasons we don’t completely understand.
Love how when it comes to RTO there’s always “some people”, “some work”, “for reasons we don’t completely understand”.
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Trump is probaby too senile to even know what RTO is, and even if he does, I'm pretty sure he doesn't own Microsoft's office buildings. And the premise that Microsoft would let themselves get bullied into RTO, causing a lot of their best employees to quit, without raising a public stink about it? Far fetched. This is the doing of Microsoft's own leadership, not Trump.
It surprises me when I see people call Trump senile given how far Biden got before most people were willing to acknowledge it at all. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things you can justifiably call Trump. He just doesn't seem senile in any way similar to those in my life I've watched go down that road.
Can you imagine you have an entire room hanging on every truth coming out of your mouth and suddenly you blurt out, “And he’s also from Mars!”
Imagine the confused looks in the crowd as they realize they’re listening to someone who isn’t completely aligned with reality.
It is funny to see how in one (IT) culture there is two narratives, often supported by same people: 1) Office is bad, people more productive working remote from their homes, and corporate C-levels issue and enforce RTO, which is silly and anti-productive. 2) All jokes about Zoom/Meet/Teams, with all these «Each meeting consists of “are you hear me?” questions», etc. Maybe, I'm unique (I'm sure I'm not), but I was twi…
You’re speaking from a very privileged position. A 15–20 minute commute and an office with a canteen is not the reality for most workers. Many spend 1–3 hours daily stuck in traffic or on crowded trains, which is pure wasted time. Add in rising transport costs, pollution, and the fact that not everyone can afford to live near their workplace, and commuting becomes one of the biggest drains on productivity and well-be…
But when we speaking about Microsoft, Google, FaceBook, etc., workers, I think canteen is a norm, not reality for most workers.
And many workers outside IT cannot WFH at all. You cannot be salesman or welder or teacher or plumber WFH... We all are very privileged, no matter how long is our commute.
It is funny to see how in one (IT) culture there is two narratives, often supported by same people: 1) Office is bad, people more productive working remote from their homes, and corporate C-levels issue and enforce RTO, which is silly and anti-productive. 2) All jokes about Zoom/Meet/Teams, with all these «Each meeting consists of “are you hear me?” questions», etc. Maybe, I'm unique (I'm sure I'm not), but I was twi…
Oh, I agree fully. I enjoy going to office. I also enjoy WFH. But after two days of WFH I am so bored. Like many above like to call managers 'managers' I like to call developers/devopsengineers/* 'IT people'. Office is not a 'manager' or 'c-suite' thing. Put it differently: not going to office is an 'IT people' thing. Being productive is not only the number of lines of code you crank out. Being productive is cranking…
I'm a big believer in empowerment. 90% of employees will usually do the right thing for themselves and the business IF YOU JUST LET THEM. For example, mandating 5 day RTO only to have your sales engineers take a full meeting room by themselves to sit on sales calls all day is idiotic for everybody.
The only "problem" I've noticed in office vs. remote mixes, has been that it really unevens the playing field as far as office politics and influence goes. The long short of it is that the remote workers become alienated, while the office gang has a good chance of becomes a good ol' boys club.
This is what it becomes anyway whether I’m in office or not.
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No CEO cares about commercial real estate profits. It isn't a factor in any major company decision. Why not extend the baseless paranoia and say it is because they want to see auto company profits go up? And also support petroleum companies? Or is it just real estate that is boogeyman secretly running the country behind the scenes?
The City of Philadelphia sent all of its workers back to the office with an explicit statement from the Mayor about struggling commercial office real estate in the city center. They may not be "running the country" but they are definitely heavyweight players in the market.
This commercial real estate take is so backwards you have to wonder if it's a plant to make the anti-RTO movement look like idiots.
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More money would do absolutely nothing for me if I had to exchange it for remote work except make my life worse in every way. I couldn’t spend the time with my 81 and 83 year old parents, I wouldn’t have nearly the amount of time with wife, I couldn’t spend months away from home.
There might be no amount of money that someone is likely to pay you , but I bet there's an amount of money that you would do it for.
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More money would do absolutely nothing for me if I had to exchange it for remote work except make my life worse in every way. I couldn’t spend the time with my 81 and 83 year old parents, I wouldn’t have nearly the amount of time with wife, I couldn’t spend months away from home.
There might be no amount of money that someone is likely to pay you , but I bet there's an amount of money that you would do it for.
The tradeoffs would be too great. I’m my parents only child. While they are as healthy as an 83 and 81 year old can be, time catches up with all of us. I’ve enjoyed the past 5 years (Covid times excepted) being able to see them and spend a couple of weeks with them multiple of times a year.
When the time comes that I do need to pack a bag and see about them for an extended period of time, my wife and I can do that. There is no amount of money that I would trade for that.
It’s the same about travel. I wouldn’t give up our travel now and put it off any longer than we already have because of financial and family obligations (raising my two step sons).
What would more money do for me right now? Allow me to travel more? Allow me to get a bigger house even though we already had the big house in the burbs and sold it for twice what we had it built for and downsized to a 1250 square foot condo in a vacation community in Florida where everyone ride uses their home as vacation home.
Nicer cars? We sold both of our cars when we traveled for a year and bought the cheapest new car that we could stand when we settled down.
A better retirement? By the time I retire, we will have traveled to every place we could possibly want to go and plan to go back and forth between our current home and spend extended periods of time in other cities both domestically and internationally. We are experimenting with that now. But in US time zones.
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Two things about backdoor layoffs. Mostly its about who. When its corporate dictat, those most likely to leave are those with other options, ie the best talent. So sure a business might save on severances in aggregate, but it doesn't get to decide on who, but simple statistics show it will be the best who move on. So a demoralised and increasingly mediocre workforce is then faced with a much tougher hiring environmen…
The move of offshoring in many projects, changed my mindest that companies care one second about their talent, at a size like Microsoft is all about replaceable cogs, little ants every doing their own small task.
I think a large part of it is that they want people physically and culturally close to themselves for projects they care about. Piles of companies have tried outsourcing core development and in my experience whatever minimal home team thats left keeps growing and growing and the oversess guys get pushed to the least desirable jobs. It's almost always a failure in the end, or at least the overseas team ends up being given limited scope, simple tasks while complex work finds it's way back home. I say this having worked with many talented overseas colleagues; I think this is a management level effect, not individual developer
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It surprises me when I see people call Trump senile given how far Biden got before most people were willing to acknowledge it at all. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things you can justifiably call Trump. He just doesn't seem senile in any way similar to those in my life I've watched go down that road.
For the silent down voters, when has Trump shown signs of senility? There's plenty to dislike about him, and he does seem to have health issues, but I just haven't seen signs of serious cognitive decline.
For quite a while. Even compared to the already generally incoherent speaking style of his first term, his speech has been unfocussed, his grasp of facts worse, etc., during his second term. Even before that, the cognitive test he bragged about passing his first term isn't sonething that is ever indicated without symptoms of cognitive impairment, his speaking style, grasp of facts, etc., in even his first term shows significant decline from his earlier public life, heck even his extreme forward leaning stance, while it can have other source, is a symptom of certain kinds of dementia.
Aside from fairly extreme media bias issues stemming from business and political interests of media owners that became undeniable with the public active intervention of a number of media owners late in the 2024 campaign, he gets a pass for this for a number of reasons, including the fact that critics generally have a lot of bigger fish to fry, some critics see pointing to cognitive dysfunction as mitigating arguments they want to make about conscious moral evil, incoherence and looseness with facts being a noted feature of his speaking style making people less likely to note changes that are changes in degree rather than kind for him, etc.