Posted on 07/07/2022 7:01:48 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
I noticed the shoes first. That I was wearing them. Real shoes, the leather kind, with laces. After a year and a half, I was finally returning to the office, and that meant giving up the puffer slippers and slides that had sustained me for so long. Real shoes, I quickly remembered, are terrible. Likewise pants. Likewise getting to work, and being at work. Whew.
That was summer 2021. I’ve since acclimated to the office once again: I don the uniform; I make the commute; I pour the coffee; I do my job; and then I go back home. There are costs to this arrangement, clearly. I lose some time—time I could spend working!—transporting myself, in shoes and pants, from one building to another. I miss the chance to finish household tasks between my meetings, or fix myself a healthy and affordable lunch. As a university professor and administrator, I have more flexibility than most professionals, and I’m not required to go in each and every day. But even so, I have less control over each hour of my life than I used to—a fact that could very well be making me less productive overall. Indeed, it’s possible, or even likely, that my employer—and yours—could help their workers and the bottom line, simply by allowing us to work from home or come in on a hybrid plan. Remote, flexible employment might be a win for everyone.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
It depends on the person’s ability to get stuff done.
Yes, correct.
And the location of the resources to get stuff done.
Road repair can’t be done from a home setting.
Road repair project management can’t be done from a home setting.
Seems the professor is telling everyone to “learn to code”.
Eff the roads ‘cuz aren’t going to need them.
The only way to convince the boss to allow work from home is to provide metrics that you’re MORE PRODUCTIVE from home.
Most people are good at self-motivating. I wouldn’t call them rare exceptions, but I do believe they are a minority. The proper place for most employees is the work place, away from the distractions of home
The alphas want us all in the same cage so they can dominate. I get it.
Ugh! Most people are NOT good at self motivating. /correction
I do notice this big push from a lot of banks to try to get employees and contractors to come back to the office at least on a hybrid basis. I refuse. I am able to work from home and thanks to my experience level am desirable enough to employers to keep getting contracts to work from home. As long as I have any choice in the matter, I’m not going back to the office. If I’m forced to do so and I can get another gig that let’s me work from home, I’ll quit the one that makes me come into the office ASAP.
There is no advantage to coming into the office. They just want to be able to look over your shoulder all day even when you don’t have something to do. Its a huge waste of time and money to me.
I been working from Home since 3/13/2020.
I don't think your employer should be concerned about your ability to perform personal tasks during work hours. I realize that's an unenlightened view.
Exactly. Execs also like it so they can get in the pants of subordinates/interns.
In a required course for my BS in computer science I had to make a pre-compiler from scratch. In my operating systems class I had to write the memory management module. My learning to code required a lot more real work than simply writing essays about the evil of white people like a lot of others did to get their "education".
It was only the antiwork freaks on Reddit who thought that train would run forever. They still do. A rude awakening is coming.
Then when covid made us all work from home every day it was already second nature to do so.
On its face, a "hybrid" work arrangement is highly inefficient and costly. Within five years, I'd predict that almost every person who was working in a corporate office before COVID-19 is going to fall into one of two categories:
1. Working back in the office 100% of the time.
2. Working at home 100% of the time.
Keep in mind that this doesn't mean Group 2 will NEVER appear in an office. They may show up for an occasional meeting. But these are people who will not have a dedicated workstation in a corporate office. This idea that a company is going to pay a commercial lease for office space that is only used 1-3 days in a typical 5-day work week is ludicrous and was never going to be permanent.
For each company, what's going to trigger the change is one thing: When the office lease is up for renewal, the company's leadership will make a decision about planning their space for 100% "onsite" or nearly 100% "off-site" staffing.
Yep. But as you know there is a very WIDE range of skill level. So called coders making bank actually suck (but are great at interviewing and those awful tech tests they give now). The very best coders I’ve worked with are on the autistic spectrum and can’t interview worth a damn. They often get overlooked by hiring managers and HR... so we get stuck with the social butterfly idiots.
>>Most people are good at self-motivating. I wouldn’t call them rare exceptions, but I do believe they are a minority. The proper place for most employees is the work place, away from the distractions of home
I agree - I have been a WFH for over 30 years (as a freelancer / consultant) - most of the people that I know that were WFH *before* covid as just as productive (or more productive) at home - almost all of the people who became WFH just since covid have failed miserably at getting their work done without supervision, and I have had to get many of them fired.
I see almost all employees that were only WFH from covid being forced back into the office - the lower productivity is pretty clear to everyone, and backed up by a lot of studies and articles I have read.
All this work from home business, depends on how the job is structured, what tasks you perform, and who else you interact with.
If your job is mostly talking on the phone, having meetings which can be done through zoom, and pulling up files online to work with, then you can work effectively off site.
Many jobs simply aren’t structured to enable someone to work from home. Or work from home all the time.
I agree and I am in the same boat but I was working from home for about 6 years prior to COVID.
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