You can send an email to an effectively infinite amount of recipients
Remote makes it easy to look busy without making progress.
Boy, oh boy, do I have some news for you…
Im the office you can bullshit all day about sports and it is considered networking by developing relationships, which counts as working!
Office Space: Meeting with the Bobs comes to mind.
If someone can’t tell if work is being completed or understand why something is held up, they really shouldn’t be supervising that team.
Then why do the highest paid people sit alone in a office away from everyone else ?
Where is the accountability when the C level a-hole separate themselves from their entire company ?
You are trying to counter corpo propaganda with common sense…
You ain’t wrong but this ain’t what this is about.
Peasants will be working these fields and daddy owner will be “superving” since you can’t trust these field ***** to do anything right without his greatness
That’s why they golf all the time.
They golf all the time because it’s an easy venue to make sure you’re not being heard making illegal deals.
“We want to iterate really, really fast.”
No. YOU want that…
You mean you don’t love having your direction changed all the time?
A software company i was gonna do an internship at actually had every programmer switch projects every hour. They had so many clients, you would switch between 8 different projects every work day.
I did not do the internship. No thankyou.
What kind of cartoony social experiment was that? Is there any rational behind it other than making excuses to overwork employees?
The logic behind it is that if the project requires being handed off constantly that they will be designed in a way that all developers are interchangeable and anyone can work on anything.
My office tried that like a decade ago and the problem was that there is a ton of needs that aren’t directly part of the code that impact how the system should function and vary wildly between projects. Project A has legal requirements, B is a fun thing but is for someone with very specific expectations, and C has different legal requirements than A. The same kind of change request for all three may be implemented differently in all three in a way that makes both designing and fixing bugs very different and constant switching means nobody has time to be up to speed on everything at the same time because software is more than whether or not it passes testing.
Example: Names for individuals in A might need to be limited to last names only for display purposes for all roles except system administrators who can see full names. Full names can be displayed in B. Full names can be displayed in software C for system administrators, but limited to initials for everyone else. Try keeping that stuff straight when adding something new involving names after changing systems constantly!
I’m not a professional coder but I have coded and when I do it takes me more than an hour to get into the groove, maybe because I’m shit at it, but I need to get my head into the code before I can add/improve it. This would make it impossible for me to do anything useful as I’d never get to my groove.
It takes at least 15 minutes to get back into it if you get interrupted for even a minute or two. An hour is not unreasonable for a cold start, so no, that is normal, you are not shit at it.
I’ve been doing this for 15 years and switching every hour sounds batshit
ehehe I actually had five different projects at a software house I worked for. I was productive, mostly, but not very healthy tho.
Decisions that don’t last more than a day are the best kinds of decisions!
Contrast this with the guy in Seattle who like tripled the size of his company in a year simply because offering remote work options made it super easy to scalp software engineers from his competitors.
Is this guy in Seattle still hiring?
I’ve been trying for years to get a software job in Seattle.
Its the only city that made me feel “at home”
Unfortunately, this was a few years ago, and the only thing I can find that resembles my memory of the article I was thinking of is this photo in my phone:
I think I might have had that mixed up with the story of that CEO who cut his pay from 1 million dollars to $70,000 and bumped up the salary of everybody else who worked at the company to $70,000.
Of course he’s into “AI”, but healthcare decisions? Where is Luigi when you need em…
Being in the same space with teammates
Ah, so what you mean is that you create an environment that is hostile towards people with sensory sensitivities or issues, while also standing menacingly over everyone’s shoulders all day.
Hard pass.
They’re counting on it. Anything to wield a little bit of power. It’s pathetic.
Motherfucker, I want you to schedule meetings with me, so that I can effectively manage my own time, and not get jerked around at your whim whenever you decide that “we” should do something completely stupid. If you don’t want to have to schedule meetings with people, you don’t value their time.
What you perceive as “looking busy” is quite often me letting things cook a little bit when I’m at an obstacle (technical or otherwise). My taking space to think and make sure I am not just flailing around in a panic all the time or saying the wrong thing the wrong way to the wrong people makes me more effective.
But you wouldn’t know any of that, because you’re a chode.
Interrupting your flow and work to play foosball in the break room 🙄
we’re in the office one day a week, mandatory for everyone regardless of seniority.
My direct reports have begged me to miss it on occasions where they really want to meet a deadline and know that the in office day means they’ll barely get anything done.
I have to push the deadline back rather than honor their request because my boss’ boss is fanatical about it.
It’s so fucking stupid.
Why can’t you do the same at the office compared to at home? Do you simply work more hours at home since you don’t have to commute?
I work at home in relative silence with two big screens. In office there is constantly music playing, and everyone’s cheek by jowl, I’m working on a laptop, and there’s a lot of big personalities and I can’t just go to my kitchen to make lunch or get coffee, I have to leave the building and buy something. Plus there’s a “team building” thing at 4pm. Its constant interruptions about look at this quilt I made, did you see Jim’s new shoes, look at my new puppy, even on topic conversations are disrupting because I’m trying to work on project A while two people are talking about project B two feet from my ear.
Depends on the person I guess. I’m bored as fuck working from home. The only positive about it was that I didn’t have to commute. I’d stop working after 4 hours basically. Get less done. It’s not for me.
At work the kitchen is nearby. Everyone is on the same floor. 5 departments on one floor. Can just go over there when I need them instead of waiting on some email that take days to be replied to.
Working with people younger than me, they need support. A lot easier to do on site. I don’t even communicate to the coworkers not working at the office. To me it’s as if they are taking a day off.
If their work is done, they get more work. If it’s not done then they have that work to do when at the office.
Pretty sure there’s a lot of fraud. Because I frauded.
I’m an agency marketer, I essentially run 5 SME marketing departments simultaneously. Everything has to be logged both w/r/t time tracking, dollar spend on behalf of clients and activity tracking in Asana. Usually I complete about 5-8 tasks a day every day (where a task might be - write 15 emails, segment a database into frozen vs shelf stable food manufacturers, work with the translation department to make this case study Spanish-language…), and have to divide my attention 25/25/15/15/10/10 between 5 accounts and internal admin (budgets, stand ups, reports, 1:1s).
My ability to be consistent, organized, and hold lots of things in my head to cover the previous-current-and-next quarters is just part of my job. I enjoy it, I love being busy, but man is the office an anathema to that process. Not to mention, I don’t hit my 4 business hour SLA to reply to a client ask, I turn up to a meeting unprepared without a deck, or my other stakeholders don’t get their collateral, you’d know in less than a day.
The “emails that go days without a reply” can’t happen because of the 4h SLA I mentioned, “going over to a department” doesn’t work because everyone is also split between 3-5 accounts, or at the VP level, all 30+ accounts.
I would suggest starting your own business and invoicing those 5 SMEs. That does not seem like a fun work structure to me. I’d forego the 7h36 min work day then.
Especially if you aren’t even using that company’s building. Those costs they make do nothing for you. You should invoice as an external party, invoice your building costs to them as well. As they now have a spot open for another employee at their building.
My job is just being an accountant at a Belgian hospital. My boss doesn’t even want me to do any overtime unless it’s “necessary”.
I prefer being at the office, accountancy here has a labour shortage. Main reason is boredom. I won’t be able to keep the new juniors on board if I don’t entertain them. The department’s main problem is people leaving after a couple of months.
When others left, work stacked up. New people feel overwhelmed. They leave. Cycle continues.
i need to be good at accountancy, but more importantly I need to be good with people in order to advance my position within the department.
A potential leadership role in the future won’t happen if I sit at home every day.
starting ones own business requires a lot of “unpaid” bizdev, contract management, accounts payable/receivable, plus dealing with PnL, EBITDA, tax, business rates, expenses… and then although I handle the marketing my colleagues handle media appearances, ad deck bidding optimization, Gartner analyst relations, and I have direct reports to manage CRM/ERP integrations and graphic design. It’s just not a 1:1.
Depends on the country. Where I live it’s beneficial to start your own company once your income reaches 10k euros a month. Being an employee here is for the sake of security. Unemployment benefits, difficulty to be fired. Parent leave. Shocks during an economic crisis are absorbed by the company.
There’s pros and cons to each. But if you are handling 5 SME’s. Working productively all the time. From your own home. Then I’m guessing it can be beneficial for yourself to start your own company.
With such a job, you’ll likely have a safety buffer in your finances for the unpaid period. No clue why there’d be an unpaid period though, you already have your connections.
Once again… easier here in Belgium. Taxes on labour are quite high, becoming an independent can cost the company less money while putting more money on the independent’s bank account.
A lot of people here complaining about the taxes, but unwilling to give up the security of employment
I have never spent more time pretending to be busy than when I’ve had to work in an office. And god help the person who drags me away from what I’m doing every five minutes for “meetings”.
I swear these people are just extroverted and lonely. If it can be summed up in a text or email, then don’t bother me.
I like being around people and arguably am extroverted, but I sure as fuck don’t want to do that at work. Don’t cross the streams, man.
I’ll go out for drinks or food or whatever after work. But if I’m supposed to be doing work stuff, I don’t want to have all the office distractions
Yeah that’s fair. I mean the ones that have endless meetings for the sake of having someone to talk to. Or mandatory fun.
Wasn’t there a study done that showed that remote workers are more productive?
Many. Also his first point is why remote workers would be able to attend the meeting more often, making “iteration” faster. His second point doesn’t make any sense either. People don’t do their jobs for sheer fun. They do it for a paycheck. Yet people actually got more work done while at home more often than not because less distractions from coworkers and stupid in person meetings. Plus some would go eat dinner, and then say 'im going to go finish this so I don’t have to deal with it tomorrow". Which only benefits the company.
I actually agree about his points 1 and 2, and I also think remote work is still more productive.
When I worked remote, I worked for 4 hours and then chilled for 4 hours.
It’s boring as fuck to be alone in a room working 8 hours. I just walked around, drank some coffee, scrolled my phone. Basically when I achieved something that was decently enough to call a day’s work, then I just chilled. Just how I am.
I feel a lot more job secure when I work in office.
There’s so many of these Mommy’s Special Boys who think their singular genius must be reflected on to others in meat space.
All hail the maladjusted narcissists and their performative office BS and the incompetents who cannot plan more than 15 seconds ahead in life.
He sounds like a cokehead
So they don’t make chalk, but are called chalk.
Had anyone explained to them that chalk is brittle and easy to erase?
Remote makes it easier to seem busy and not get anywhere? This is why you have progress reports. Wtf? It’s way easier to slack off in the office because the assumption is you’re working. At home, someone like this guy would assume you’re slacking off so you’d have to work harder to convince him otherwise.
