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One quote that really stuck with me is from the YouTuber “Practical Engineering”
He was talking about how we often call road construction workers lazy for standing around, while one person is doing the work.
At one point he says something to the effect of “Next time you’re working, pay attention to the actual amount of time you spend actively doing things, you might be surprised to realize it’s not that much. It’s just natural to need time to break and think to do your job properly - the only difference between them and you is your work activity isn’t publicly visible”
Similarly I take the stance it’s none of my business what people do at work as long as it doesn’t interfere with me. Results are what matter, and even then that’s between them and their boss.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve watched apparent slackers achieve great accomplishments (and not because they got someone else to do their work). Conversely those who complain about the amount of work they are putting in often turn out to be unproductive (sometimes covering up their laziness with that narrative, or just doing their job really inefficiently).
Another thing I noticed in school is when you’re in an exam, take a look around - you will notice nearly everyone is just sitting staring and doing nothing. You haven’t entered the twilight zone, they’re just thinking, you don’t notice when you do it because you’re too busy…thinking!!
There are also loads of safety regulations on work sites. If someone is going into a confined space like a sewer, someone is monitoring their air, someone is in direct communication with that person, someone is watching over any lines or cables that have to go with the worker, and a whole group is directing traffic to make sure no one drives into the work crew.
Yes good points. He also covered how work has to be done in sequence so there is inevitably lots of waiting as dependencies are completed.
Precisely. You don’t pay an electician to dig a hole. You don’t let a machine operator do electrical work, and so on.
And the long lunches and the birthday parties and the “oh someone brought in x, we better run and get some before it’s gone” too many reasons NOT to work when in an office.
What? Those are some of my favorite parts, it’s free food after all lol
…maybe I’m more extraverted than I thought…
You might like them but it would be hard to argue that they improve productivity while people are busy eating the free food.
Work that’s all about pure productivity is boring and monotonous, the little bit of randomness from a birthday or pot luck is nice to break up the monotony.
I swear some of y’all on these comments are actually middle managers who hate fun LMAO
The explanations given for requiring return to the office 99% of the time are related to productivity. They’re pointing out the blatant hypocrisy because there is a lot of shit that reduced in office productivity and that’s being ignored in all of these articles.
Exactly. The point is that work from home is probably more or at the very least not less productive. Other preferences and considerations exist of course but it is not as clear cut based on productivity as many return to office types make it out to be.
Let’s not forget the passing around of the collection plate at least once per month, e.g. because someone’s niece graduated from kindergarten.
Girl Scout cookies. I was like the only one to not buy any. I don’t like cookies and I’m not buying them just so your kid can win something for selling a bunch of sugar.
I worked in the IT department for a small bank with multiple branches in the region. Certain branches would frequently order in food or someone would bring goodies and we would always find an excuse to go to that particular branch.
I find it interesting that “attend meetings” is said in the same breath as “walk around” and “take lunch or bathroom breaks”.
Meetings are way worse for productivity than breaks and water cooler bullshitting, at least in my experience. There’s more of them, they take longer, and they tend to leave me with a vague sense that nothing’s really getting done and everybody’s sort of okay with that. AND they’re treated as an obligation in a way that taking breaks is not.
At least when I get back to my desk after walking around, I feel a bit more refreshed and ready to get back to work. In fact, it’s usually meeting burnout that prompts the walk-around in the first place.
Useful meetings do exist. A lot of stuff can be lost in communication and one meeting can save a lot of time in getting everyone aligned in a short time. But figuring out when a meeting would be useful and when it’s unnecessary is a skill in itself and a lot of times the people calling for meetings are not the ones who have the necessary information to make that call.
The useful meetings usually happen organically. A group of people are trying to accomplish something and at one point they decide ok, let’s all get in a room / on a call together and iron this out.
That’s fair. I won’t dispute that sometimes they’re helpful. If I spend more time typing the message than it’d take to just talk it out, then meeting up is a viable option.
But gosh, the number of meetings I’ve had where I send the email, we meet anyway, and I simply read the email to them and they go “Ohhhh”… Sigh.
are CEOs really working
all dayat all? No. here’s what they’re doing instead.fuck all.
What, you mean to imply Elon Musk couldn’t possibly be simultaneous CEO and Chief Engineer of five separate companies with wildly different technical specialties, all while spending twelve hours a day on social media if CEOs actually had a job to do?
Commie.
twelve hours a day on social media? holy shit is he finally trying to cut back?
He spends 12 hours on main and the rest is spent pretending to be a toddler
Middle management especially basically only exist in the numbers they do because of in office work culture, which is very often just distractions from actual work.
80% of their ‘job’ is either useless or counterproductive to what the organization is actually, or at least supposedly, designed and intended to do, and they know that a mass adoption of a paradigm that makes this obvious would lead to them not having jobs.
So we get masses of propaganda to disabuse us of the notion that their mostly useless ‘work’ needs to exist in the way that it can.
This is made all the more ironic (and horrifying) when you know that most of these people also profess to care about the poor, the climate, but that’s less important than feeling like queen bees in their corpo hives, so fuck anything that might actually significantly reduce co2 emmissions and significantly increase the quality of life for a huge amount of workers.
Nah, a good manager would change your opinion. A good manager is a filter and barrier from corporate bullshit. They’ll enforce on you what clearly needs to be done, and they’ll handle menial paperwork shit on their own. It’s more efficient for the manager to fill out the same form five times for five people than it is for each person to fill out that form individually. For an individual, it might take half an hour each. For the manager doing it five times, it’ll take twenty minutes for the first one, and 5 minutes for each additional form.
A good manager will argue back until what whatever they want you to do with your timesheet makes sense before they have you do it. A good manager is a great asset and a huge benefit for everyone involved.
One thing I learned over the years is that there is zero training in being a good manager. Promotions to management are based upon two things: technical expertise or relationships (brown-nosing/nepotism etc.) Having managerial skills is completely unnecessary for the job.
Very few “managers” take the time to observe, study, and gain the skill set needed when they are in the job. Most end up regurgitating the most recent MBA bullshit fad.
Time to get your Seven Sigma black belt so you can synergize silo’d teams into efficient fusion collaborators via Lean Agile development paradigms and maximize productivity!
Did I make up or misuse some of those terms?
Maybe! I don’t care!
In my experience its all just ‘I learned some new lingo which makes me very cool and also very serious and important’, but its only function is to create social etiquette hierarchies and obfuscate and overcomplicate meetings and directives to the point they don’t mean or accomplish anything.
100% this. My first manager at my current job was in middle management at the time and is far and away the best manager I’ve ever had and one key reason I’ve stayed at my current job for nearly 10 years. He kept the typical corporate bullshit away and allowed his team to thrive. He’s a director now but thankfully the managers under him have maintained a similar philosophy.
I have worked many different tech jobs precisely because all the managers were as I described, or, they outright told me I was being exploited and should work elsewhere, and showed me the documentation to prove it.
My last manager was a very, very wonderful person who I got along with great.
Someone who actually fostered employee’s ability to work and grow and gain skills, as opposed to just issuing orders one moment, being unreachable without explanation most of the day, and then popping by with a new personality hours later to explain how to do something i already knew how to do.
He did almost everything you mention and more, it was the shock of my life up to that point to find someone like that.
We hit it off so well that I was basically his double within 6 months and began taking on many of his tasks so he could catch up on things he was behind on.
That is when I began much, much more interactions with managers and team leads of other departments, and found that most of them were so totally incompetent that I had to interview most of them team members to figure out what the process I was supposed to be documenting even were.
Team after team, each manager and each of their underlings described entirely different and contradictory work processes which we were attempting to just understand, before attempting to evaluate how or if to streamline and standardize many disparate digital and physical paper procedures.
I unfortunately lost that job due to a series of crimes happening to me that ruined my life, but I absolutely would have loved to stay at that job despite being surrounded by incompetent morons, because I had at least finally found my own really good manager and team.
I am not saying all managers are as awful as my previous post, that everything they do is useless.
I am saying that a vast majority of them are incompetent and a vast majority of them would be obviously seen as basically just chit chatting as 80% of their job, which is at best a waste of time, and at worst, actively harmful to the work of others, when you remove the physical office environment.
Of course there are exceptions to this, good managers do exist, but they are by far the exception.
I’m in a hybrid position with the office pretty close to where I live and I’ll just say it: slacking off is much more comfortable in the office than at home.
If it’s a really slow day I don’t have the same thoughts that I need to keep my work phone with me, or make sure I’m “available” in teams every hour or so (running Linux with Teams in a browser means I’m away or offline most of the time when actively using my PC). Being in the office gets you the “looks busy” effect almost for free, and it reinforces the fact that not being instantly available is not a bad sign for productivity.
My office environment is fortunately pretty decent though, so going in isn’t a nightmare compared to home other than the whole thing where I have to get moving and make myself presentable for venturing into public.
If you have a good office environment, I agree. Slacking off at work can be more comfortable than just brooding alone at home. Even if I’m just hanging out in my cubicle while my coworkers do the talking.
Those who do best in office positions are the ones that are particularly skilled at making it seem like they are busy and productive. Ie staying late, or getting in early
Be the first at work,
either have your coffee and take care of something in peace, or have your coffee and read the news while sending one or two e-mails, until your colleagues arrive.
I mean, it’s not really a “in office” v “remote working” debate - people will slack off and make themselves look busy regardless of where they are. That’s caused by a case-specific mix of motivation, discipline, or other factors. That’s a line management issue rather than a work location issue - WfH just gets scapegoated for that.
Ultimately it will be the money starting to talk - if the accountants start complaining about expensive office space not being used to its maximum, then they’ll start instructing folk back to the office. It’s a shit reason but unless your contract specifically says remote, it’ll be the balance sheet making the decision for you (edit: unless it really doesn’t work for you and you go nuclear with the “resign” button of course)
I’ve read that the “resign button” is one of the biggest motivators for back to office bullshit. If you resign, it cheaper than them laying you off. Saves a shitload of money, to my understanding.
Here are some sources.
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4800828-office-mandates-cause-attrition/
I have to be in office one day a week. Mondays. Just get it over with. Sometimes, I have nothing to do. I piddle. I listen to music on my phone. I check the weather 47 times. I read the news.
Those days suck.
The thing is that with WfH you can’t just “look busy” as easily as you can in the office. You actually have to produce some results.
How many breaks did Jessica Guynn have during the day she wrote that text?
I kinda do miss the office chatting and gossip/drama (hearing it, not being a part of it lol)
Not enough to go back to the office though lmao
This must be a generation gap thing.
Most millennials and basically all gen z use discord or phones to gossip all the time, about work or the rest of their lives.
Theres not much functional difference between discord and Teams or Slack or Zoom, in terms of their capacity to facilitate basic communication, all the differences are UI, under the hood administration and security stuff, integration with other workplace software, etc.
There is 0 barrier preventing a remote worker from participating work gossip.
In fact, in many top tech firms this is highly encouraged if not functionally mandated.
MSFT, Amazon etc all have their own internal software that is very intentionally aimed at being a kind of internal facebook/linkedin while also facilitating work related communications, and its fairly difficult to advance if you don’t have a hyper amicable, politically correct (office politics and otherwise) social presence internally.
Am millennial, but I would never use work provided tools to gossip that leaves a paper trail. Gossiping in an office environment is different because it doesn’t leave hard evidence. All it would take is gossip that crossed the line or gossiping about the wrong person and BOOM HR is hitting you up
Oh, same, I personally agree and do likewise.
The ‘OpSec’ thing to do would be to have a signal chat, or discord or something disconnected from work software/hardware to do the gossip so said paper trail is harder to establish.
Cleverer tech savvy folks will do this, but many don’t.
I basically hate all work related gossip of any kind, but my point was that gossip is completely normalized and common and widespread whether you are working remote or not…
… its just that in a largely remote work environment, it becomes exceedingly obvious that many middle manager types both don’t really do many actually useful things, and they need in person social stimulation to maintain their egos in a way they can’t when someone can just not join a gossip group chat, when they can’t randomly barge in to your workspace for a check in.
These are the MBA, team building types that basically have the skillset of a failed motivational speaker and also typically know so little about the specifics of any given employee’s work that you have to spend an hour explaining what your precise, technical block is at this exact moment, when you probably could have fixed it in 15 minutes were they not wasting your time and interpreting their own actions as somehow beneficial.
Turns out that for a great majority of remote capable work, socially awkward people can be astoundingly more productive when they’re not constantly distracted, and that if you just say hey, if you need help with something, schedule a quick video chat with me and I’ll see if I, or someone with relevant experience can help.
They can’t accept the flipped power dynamic of themselves being on call (within schedule constraints) to provide assistance, they need to be the ones that police, monitor and ‘morale boost’ others whenever they feel like it.
This kind of dynamic is part of why mouse jigglers are a thing. If middle management can be a social butterfly and only do one or two hours of actually productive work a day but get paid for 8, why shouldn’t a less socially inclined person be able to do the same?
Agreed. There are pros and cons to both, but I feel WFH pros far outweigh their cons.
Found a link to the article here: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/09/18/remote-work-from-home-survey/75266226007/
Which references this survey with no access to the data or methodology used: https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/surveymonkey-research-workplace-culture-and-trends/
So it’s an opinion piece with no real justification or factual foundation you’d expect from a journalist.
It kinda reminds me of Snow Crash, where one character works in an office where everything is monitored, so she slowly reads a stupid note about toilet paper with backtracking and making superfluous lists to game the tracking algorithms. Working is not about productivity, but gaming the KPI.
I was so annoyed the other day because on my walk to the bathroom I caw 4 people watching Netflix with a teams meeting on closed caption.
And then I saw 2 people in one cube playing a multiplayer phone game next to their manager wearing headphones in a teams meeting.
So that’s the reason we got called RTO…
Thank Atlassian for continuing to do unbiased research on the subject.
Huh. I don’t despise atlassian anymore. Nice.
I bet that won’t last for more than one interaction with JIRA.
Having used it before and given I will use it again… You are correct. It will be short lived.
No Shit! I wonder which corporate real estate consortium financed that article.
There are four kinds of office jobs. They ones where you don’t have enough work but they pay you for 8 hours, the kinds where you have too much work and they only pay you for 8 hours, overpaid executives, and the grunts who are only in the office when they apply and work their asses off for zero appreciation in the manual labor jobs.
