L4sBotReturn to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why
_number8_because absolutely no one wants to be forced into it while being denied the incredible quality of life benefits of being able to stay at home?
4gramsI say this as a rare person who prefers to work in office.
Good.
Seriously, would much rather work with productive happy people. the remote work phenomenon has proven that between reduced traffic, the commercial real estate bubble, the fact that we’re literally all connected to each other 24/7 through the series of tubes means it’s about time we restructure the workforce.
it’s about time we restructure the workforce.
I suppose a big part of that will be managers learning how to measure productivity more accurately than your clocked-in hours. That’ll be the most interesting change.. the “corporate welfare” program of just getting paid to occupy a desk space will have to be replaced with more sophisticated real performance measurements.
I have no idea how that pans out in software. Every bug is vastly different so they can’t merely count the number of bugs you fix. SLOC is a bit of a sloppy measure too.
Sadly, I don’t think so. The pandemic-era cash grab solution was software that’s basically spyware, logging keystrokes, mouse movements, taking screenshots, etc. Some clever individuals just taped vibrators to their mice and walked away for breaks. You’re asking middle management to do real work here, ya silly.
I think the bigger problem is that a lot of middle management was shown to not really do much useful in the pandemic.
Thanks to Goodhart’s Law, that doesn’t work. Any number used as a performance target ceases to be a useful measure, because people minmax them. You need to be able to look at a feature in a system, and evaluate if they completed it in an amount of time commensurate with their experience.
You need to think of productivity more abstractly, and have a lot of relevant expertise to assess it. Good management is hard, basically.
I’m a manager of an entirely WFH team, it’s easy. I have weekly one on one catch-ups with everyone in my team, where we discuss the work they are doing any blockers or anything like that that has come up. And a fortnightly team meeting.
And if anything urgent does come up they just call or message me at the time.
You measure the output not some BS KPI or how long they worked that day. I trust my people to be adults and come and go from work as needed, as long as they are still getting their work done idgaf how many hours a day/week they work.
Ultimately as their manager I’m there to try to remove as much of the corporate or political BS from my team’s lives as possible, so they can focus on doing great work (whilst also being accommodating to any personal issues that crop up for them)
Lifecoach5000You remind me of my manager. She is so freaking awesome but we have a great team as well that does not need micromanaging or hand holding. Thanks for all that you do!
Thank you for being such a great manager. For all I know you’re my manager, as that’s basically my experience with my team.
Maybe it’s because I reached management right as the pandemic started. Got my first management job in Jan of 2020, we were home in March and I hadn’t even some of my direct reports yet. It was an incredibly stressful few months but learned a lot and fast. Wound up being the only department that maintained a full staff and in fact grew the team during the pandemic.
Among the primary benefits: no commute, flexible work schedules and less time getting ready for work, according to WFH Research.
They forgot: being able to secretly simultaneously work 3 full-time overlapping jobs to triple your income.
I had a coworker who did exactly this back in the '90s. He was an expert in a really obscure programming/database platform/language from the 1970s (called “Cyborg”) that only had a few people left that knew anything about it. It took literally hours to compile even the tiniest code changes so his job mostly involved sitting around doing nothing waiting for the compiler to finish. He managed to eventually get a WFH situation (with dialup lol) that paid him $300 an hour, then went out and got two other similar WFH jobs that paid the same since his actual work load was just a few minutes per day for each. $900 an hour in the 1990s.
Cons: *Added stress of fighting traffic for no reason *Added expense of gasoline for no reason *More burning of fossil fuels for no reason *Worse bathrooms that you have to share *Worse kitchen that you have to share *Worse dress code *Less ergonomic office chair *Worse monitors *Slower Internet (in my case, at least) *More annoying disruptions from coworkers *Less peace and quiet needed for concentration *Have to sit in traffic yet again after you get off work
Pros: *Managers get to feel more important when seeing all their little worker bees’ butts in their chairs. *Promotes shitty “office culture” *Corporate real estate owners get to keep collecting rent
Some companies have taken this as an opportunity to lower wages for remote workers, but honestly, I kind of don’t mind too much. Between being able to cook my own food and not having to commute, not having to pay for car repairs, etc, working from home honestly saves thousands per year. Plus, you really can’t put a price on the enjoyment of not having to commute like 2+ hours per day. The quality of life benefits are immense. It’s pretty great.
A VPN is only as secure as the endpoints. You have to figure cyber criminals are seeing countless opportunities. Breaking into the right home kit could get you into fortune 500 servers.
You’d have an easier time just social engineering people to get into servers than trying to actively break into a both the home network and the VPN.
I suggest you read up on Zero Trust. Corporate networks often aren’t any more hardened than the average home router NAT device. VPN done right is no less secure on a home network because you control the endpoints you let connect. But the best plan is not using VPN at all, and instead authenticating the person and device on a per service basis.
Unpeeled7905What monitors are those?
It’s hard to say. Here’s a high res version I found, but it’s a stock image and usually they remove branding in those.
iongroup.com/…/T5502_Blog-Featured-Image_1-2048x1…
chrisgpzThe stands look very much like a few models of Dell i have at my work.
My wife is a high school teacher. We returned to her classroom one evening after dinner this week so I could help her put together some shelves. After 30 minutes of assembly, I realized I needed to use the bathroom. She gave me her keys and pointed me towards the staff bathrooms. Whilst sitting on the porcelain throne, I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I did a #2 in a public bathroom. I’ve been WFH since March of 2020 when COVID started, and while I’m sure I’ve crapped in a public restroom in the past 3+ years, it’s so infrequent that I can’t remember.
That’s not really the point though, more that I’ve actually been thinking about it all week and reflecting on what working in an office used to be like - crapping next to your coworkers, packing a lunch, trying to look busy when you just aren’t feeling it that day, the small talk, and everything else that result in me being absolutely drained by the time I got home. Seriously, sometimes I would just sit on the couch and stare at the wall for 30 minutes when I got home.
It took the greatest global event of the 21st century to shift us to WFH. We can’t let companies force us into backsliding into these out-dated work practices when all common sense says otherwise.
The company I work for and the company I used to work for are doing return to office right now. Thankfully I’m not impacted because I live halfway across the country.
because I live halfway across the country.
best of luck.
It sadly hasn’t stopped a lot of companies to still do RTO
I appreciate it. Not to sound conceited, but I’m very secure in my position.
I know you guys are going to hate this, but I’m seeing a trend develop that no one is talking about. Work in our office is being divided up differently, jobs are morphing. There’s the work that can be done from home, and the work that can’t. Guess which one the bosses are talking about farming out to third world countries.
In my opinion hybrid is the way. Go in three days a week, do the things that require a physical presence, don’t worry about your job getting off shored.
Guess which one the bosses are talking about farming out to third world countries.
guess what quality will be affected.
There’s amazing workforce in those countries. But also some very bad. And companies that try to sell you their cheap labor generally aren’t known for good QC
They’ve been trying to offshore for decades. They’re gonna keep trying. It’s little more than a dog whistle to tell you what kind of dysfunctional they are.
I’ve thought this occasionally, but at least in my job, we’ve had lots of “remote work” for years by dint of being in a different building than other people. If that was going to be outsourced, I think they would have tried by now. It’s really surprisingly hard to get effective consultants when they’re based in the same country, but as you go overseas, you quickly end up with paying simply for “check the box”, which probably is already mostly self service clicking and AI at the cutting edge (Amazon support “chat” anyone?). The problem is, you can tell an auditor you have function X, but in many cases that function becomes useless to others in the org.
IDK, I think there’s been multiple indicators we’re not currently on an offshoring swing.
This was already done 20 years ago in my industry. WFH changes nothing.
IMHO hybrid is the worse. Before Covid, when we worked in the office, I had my own desk, my parking space and all the meetings were held in meeting rooms. Now I have to be in the office 3 days a week and we have hot desk system, limited parking spaces and everyone is on a video call all the time. The office is now super loud and just not a nice place to work. There’s not enough desks for everyone because the company can hire more people without expanding office, Parking spaces are reserved using some appa and disappear in 10 seconds. Hybrid just add some much hassle without any real benefits. Just bring everyone to the office or let everyone work from home.
We only go in once/week and I do all my people catchups at that time + whiteboard brainstorming/planning etc.
It works out ok with flexible desks in that case.
If think it should be up to the team. If they think it’s useful to meet at the office they go be it weekly, monthly or quarterly. My commute is like 15 minutes so I don’t mind going to the office at all but the experiences is way worse now that it’s hybrid.