Posted on 01/29/2023 3:49:19 PM PST by nickcarraway
I’m glad I have the option to work from home.
My health tanked in December. I wound up collapsing twice in a 2-week period. It’s been a never-ending round of doctors and tests. Had an angiography done in early January which confirmed my heart was in excellent shape and was not the issue. Now they are checking my brain.
I’m restricted from driving.
Were it not for being able to work from home, I would be out of luck.
Agree - Taxation (payroll, income) Without Representation Is Tyranny.
I think it has a lot to do with what you do. In IT, at least in the technical/engineering roles (as opposed to the managerial roles), there’s not much benefit to being in an office. I don’t really need to be in a conference room to communicate technical details. In fact, I find it much more effective to communicate in writing, and it gives me a written record of everything I say and do (which can be pretty important when/if the SHTF).
> I would much rather be in the office where I can engage my workers and clients in a more professional setting.
That’s cool but who pays for the lost hour(s) commuting, costs of transport, the building, the light, heat or cooling, water, maintenance, and assorted other businesses taking up more space, energy, and people meeting needs from parking to food, so you can have your rather?
Then, at least in my work, if I went into an office, I’d be in daily calls with people across the country anyway. Maybe we could slow things down for a week and put everyone on planes for that face to face feeling, and incur all the expenses and per diems.
That said the actual meet itself is better in person, but the overhead is massive.
Japan is protecting their country by keeping it Japanese. We would be well advised to take note. In 100 years Japan may not be a powerhouse but it'll still be Japan, in 100 years the U.S. will look like the movie Idiocracy with a population of spanish speaking imbeciles lorded over by Hindi speaking executives. We have 330 million people in the U.S., more than enough to satisfy our labor demands as well as home grown executive talent. Bringing in cheap labor from third world countries and H-1B talent because we don't want to pay going rates for home grown engineers will be the destruction of the U.S. as we know it. The Japanese know this, that's why they don't allow it.
More likely we will have some sort of Spanish machismo prevailing over our population. The woke nonbinary liberals are not going to reproduce themselves. Personally, I don't have a problem with our population becoming more Spanish. I like tacos. Besides we will all continue to speak English because that is the lingua franca in North America just like Latin back in the Roman Empire.
I figured out how to make tacos a long time ago. I'd have preferred the nice hometown I grew up in hadn't morphed into one with every other business sign in Spanish instead of English. I could do without the drug gangs that came along with the invasion also.
Actually we have more problems with our native born minorities. But yeah, we need to control the borders. The Democrats refuse to do that for political reasons. Immigration is propping up our economy. Otherwise we would be more like Japan right now.
Many people work very well remotely. Others use it as an excuse to slack off. I did it for two years during Covid, and previously for a year doing different work. I never worked harder or more diligently, but that wasn’t true of everyone.
I’m retired now, but my husband still works; and he’s finding that some people got so used to telework that they resent being in the office now and use every excuse to get out of real work.
I agree on our native born minorities but there's not much we can do about them, they're born here and are citizens. What we can do is enforce our immigration laws and not admit other troublesome minorities in the pursuit of cheap labor. They're coming in quicker than our home grown ones reproduce so it won't be long before they're causing more problems than our native born ones.
I'm in Japan right now and being more like them wouldn't be a bad thing in many respects. There's not a place in the country that I couldn't walk at any hour of the night. I could leave my suitcase on the sidewalk and walk away for an hour, when I return it would still be there. When they tell you they'll do something they do it and they don't try to rip you off. They have honor and dignity, something that's sadly missing in 95% of America's population. Our cultural rot is astounding and it isn't getting better.
I think it's up to the young to take care of the elderly and perhaps their welfare state is not as generous as ours. I don't know enough about Japan so you'll have to tell me the facts but we need to reform our social security and medicare/medicaid if we are going to cut off immigration. But we know that's not going to happen.
We have almost 60 million people on welfare in the U.S., the vast majority of them able bodied. We pay them to stay home and do nothing, except vote for democrats, that's what they're really getting paid to do. There is your pool of unskilled labor but we can't access it because they're not going to work if they can be paid to do nothing. The argument that we need immigration is bunk, we don't need more unskilled workers, we need to stop paying our own not to work. Even Obama acknowledged the problem by saying "there are some jobs Americans don't want to do". My answer is who cares if they want to work, starvation is a powerful motivator. Stop feeding them and they'll work.
I agree it won't happen though, too many people are getting rich off the destruction of our country.
Tips:
1) Be on time and show up everyday.
2) Do not gossip as the person you talk to will talk to someone else and it will get back to whoever you gossiped about. You will run into others that bad mouth people. Stay away from them. Also do not complain unless you have a solution.
3) Get training in microsoft office skills. It helps if you know how to write or do simple excel and do email.
4) Always be on the look out for something better. Go to places like salary.com to see what jobs pay what.
5) Be prepared to move either miles away from where you are or out of state. If working in state then try to find a place in the middle where there are lots of job opportunities.
My first job in California was 3 miles away. The 2nd was 40 miles and I almost moved closer and the last was about 20 miles in the opposite direction.
6) Save your money. If the companies have a 401k plan then take advantage of it. They are giving you extra money. Also invest in stock. You will retire well off someday.
I found that when I switched jobs I ended up making more money when starting then the past job. I only had 5 jobs till I retired. I wish I knew early on to get training.
The internet makes it easy to find answers and work nowadays.
I just thought I would work at the same place all the time. The grass is greener elsewhere at times so keep looking. The difference between my first job in Minnesota that paid less then $8/hr to over $14/hr for my next job over 3 decades ago and it went up and up from there. You may need to take stepping stone jobs to get the training for the better paying one.
We had people who were absent many times in the office and those same people when working from home would call in sick too....
I knew of a guy when I worked at Earthlink (ISP) almost 20 years ago who was gone like 2 years as he knew how to work the system and always had an excuse. He only showed up when the place was closing and we were offered extra pay and 1 year of schooling if we stayed till the end.
I hear many of these "work from home" people actually already serve multiple employers during their "office hours," without the employers' knowledge.
If I were an employer, I'd try to reclassify as many employees as independent contractors as legally possible. Makes them easier to fire, harder for them to sue, and you don't have to provide as many benefits. Just a fee based on work produced.
There's a lot of communication that's actually hindered when one attempts to mediate it by technology. You can say stuff face to face through random meetings in the break room or hallway that would never be said in a Zoom meeting.
>My current employer has employees in multiple states<
I would be surprised if any of them worked remotely from Colorado. If so, your employer is in for a real shock when all of the required benefits and conditions imposed by the state are not met.
Colorado isn’t the only one, just one of the worst. I know of at least a few companies that restrict the remote working from certain states.
EC
I don't have to. What I do is in demand and since Baby Boomers started really retiring in droves a few years ago, I've noticed my market power increase substantially. In my early 50's, there just aren't many people around who have the skills and experience banks are looking for in this field.
So give me 100% remote offers or move along. I won't accept anything else and I don't have to. If you refuse, your competitors will not. You'll be left high and dry.
As a Gen Xer who had a huge overhang of Baby Boomers with 10-15 more years of experience hanging over me throughout my entire career, I can't begin to tell you how awesome this is. That overhang is really being thinned out and because things were so tough in this area for so long because of it, not that many of us persevered and gained a lot of experience. The Great Recession was simply awful for me. Now its my turn. I'm going to enjoy it to the full and put the screws to banks the way they did to me 10-15 years ago. Its only fair.
The unprofessionalism goes both ways.
As it so happens I am an independent contractor and have been for 15 years. That suits me just fine.
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