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Archive: https://archive.today/55Bqw

From the post:

>I have to rant about the home office situation in general, but also specifically at my place of employment and similar places. I cannot stand the fake positivity and cute-sounding arguments for returning to the office. It falls flat for so many and it’s trying to make it sound more legitimate by evoking this image of collaboration, being social, kindness, having a good time together when that’s not the point. The point is micromanagement and needing to justify the large office spaces they invested into. Very rarely are there positions or departments who truly need to collab in person, and then they can just do that for the occasion, not a fixed amount of days per week or month where they need to go in at all times.

Archive: https://archive.today/55Bqw From the post: >>I have to rant about the home office situation in general, but also specifically at my place of employment and similar places. I cannot stand the fake positivity and cute-sounding arguments for returning to the office. It falls flat for so many and it’s trying to make it sound more legitimate by evoking this image of collaboration, being social, kindness, having a good time together when that’s not the point. The point is micromanagement and needing to justify the large office spaces they invested into. Very rarely are there positions or departments who truly need to collab in person, and then they can just do that for the occasion, not a fixed amount of days per week or month where they need to go in at all times.

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[–] • 2 pts

Many people can work at home just as, or more productively than in an office. The real problem is that managers will have to start managing and assessing real value and productivity, and then they will have to trim the fat. A lot of the fat is management, so you can see why this is problematic. Why else would they prefer to incur large overhead costs and risk poor morale. None of it makes any sense.

I used to work in IT, we had a dress code, had to work in a building far from most residential areas and with no services or restaurants nearby. It was ridiculous, since I could have been just as productive at home wearing jeans. One problem was they wanted everyone to be available for no notice meetings. If it’s not something I need to prepare for, can’t an email work just as well as dragging everyone into the conference room for a lecture?

We had chat, email and phones, and we used chat and email even for someone in the next cubicle, because what we did was mentally intensive and required concentration, we didn’t want to disturb our cube mates. It was the perfect recipe for WFH, but that was absolutely prohibited.

[–] • 2 pts

>Many people can work at home just as, or more productively than in an office. The real problem is that managers will have to start managing and assessing real value and productivity, and then they will have to trim the fat. A lot of the fat is management, so you can see why this is problematic.

Bingo. Some people can work as well or better remotely. Admittedly, some people's telework is fake and they're just hiding at home. It differs by person and position of course. But you are exactly right that it is easier for management to blanket force everyone back full time than assess who is productive and who isn't. Moreover, if they tried it would likely become apparent rather quickly that they don't need that many managers to figure these tyle things out, and the most of the one's they do have don't know how to do it.

[–] • 1 pt

Yep, this is pretty much it. Like the rant said "we are not innovating, we are doing data validation and dealing with databases and excel docs". No shit, most "work" is nothing related to "innovation".

Working in IT, I am keeping the company/servers/network/etc running so other people can do their job. I don't need to be on-site at all. Even if I am "on-site" I am probably in a different building than 99.9% of the systems/people/infra that I support. It is a stupid waste of time.

As for the management thing, that is spot on. The lockdown's made it obvious that most middle management is utterly useless and unneeded entirely. These companies are administratively top-heavy and the people in those positions are desperate to try to make it look like they provide any value at all and as a result tend to push for the ass-in-chair management style.

When I am WFH I can get over a week worth of things done in a couple of days. When I used to have to go to the office, other people would waste anywhere between 2-6 hours of my day just "chatting" or having completely unnecessary meetings. I am done with ever working in a office again if I am not forced to for some stupid reason but even then ill be looking for a new remote job if put into that position.