š¾šššš šæšššThere is zero need for millions of office drones to be on the road daily.
voracitudeWell, having the office was nice because I like my colleagues. Iām lucky in the regard though, and as nice as it was to socialise at work, working from home is nicer. Not to mention much much cheaper by every metric. In concussion fuck ever going back to the office, thank you for coming to my TEDx Talk.
ScrubblesI personally like it too, but not daily. I average 1-2 days in office now and itās healthy for me. See my coworkers, they know my name, we catch up, have our meetings, then I go home for a few days again. Iāve just learned everyone is different, and the company definitely shouldnāt be telling people how to work, people are grownups and can decide themselves. (And if they canāt, then fire them instead of punishing everyone).
However for this meme, another great way to get people off the roads would beā¦ trains
I like trains.
RivalarrivalI like freight trains, but I wouldnāt want to live anywhere that commuter trains would make sense.
Why in the world not? I specifically moved to be close to mine, I hate driving for my commute
Passenger trains can only operate efficiently in areas of extremely high population density. If Iām living somewhere serviced by trains, then everywhere I go, Iāll be in a crowd.
Iām enough of an introvert that this sounds like an extraordinarily uncomfortable proposition. Iād need an exorbitant financial benefit to even consider it, and thatās not going to happen. Instead, Iām expected to pay a very high premium for the āprivilegeā of being miserable everywhere I go.
No thanks, Iāll stay out here in the sticks.
ladfrombrad š¬š§Youāre absolutely spot on, and itās evidenced by house prices here in the UK where theyāre next to or near a rail line.
They are noisy fuggers and people do not like living by them.
Unless you are near a train stop when it skyrockets
Small towns built around a train station are absolutely lovely though
I suspect those are mostly outposts. Rail junctions. Water stops for the old steam trains. Remote mining towns. Places that either provided services to railway operation, or primarily needed freight service rather than passenger.
And I agree: I would love to live in a small railroad town. But I would move out long before that town had enough people to justify commuter rail service.
Ah, no in europe where I live is fairly normal for rail service to small villages even.
Some people donāt have the space at home to set up a working area and really want to just go to an office that their employer pays for, and thatās fine.
This, and I do a lot of gaming on my pc, have a nice setup etc, usually not great trying to work there (donāt have space for another desk and canāt really justify having two sets of monitors, keyboard etc
r00tyWhy do you need all that? I have my work laptop sitting at the back of my desk. Most monitors have two inputs. I've got an older 1080 with HMDI+DVI and a newer 1440p with DP/2xHDMI.
So I have the laptop in HDMI on both screens (it needed a USBC to HDMI cable for one of the outputs), and a simple USB3 switch for the mouse+keyboard.
So when I'm working I fire up the laptop, switch the USB over to that and swap the screens to the HDMI inputs. When I'm done working I can fire up the desktop, swap inputs and USB and in seconds I'm switched over.
I've been doing it this way for years and years now.
Thatās normally what I do, the problem is the context for me, I sometimes prefer just sitting across the room with a laptop so Iām in a slightly different environment
It can help draw a line I'd agree, but I've gotten used to it now I think. I used to have it worse. I operated out of the bedroom for the first few years I was remote and that wasn't good at all. The new house had a bedroom that was really too small to be a bedroom. So it became an office room.
This is why coworking spaces exist.
I donāt know in other countries but it is working quite well in France, you can get a subscription to the closest working space and have a desk, meeting rooms ā¦ To work remotely.
I like that it gives a separation between home and work but without long commute.
Unnecessary RTO should be outlawed
The worst part of it is most big companies are forcing RTO to either justify the leases they donāt want to play to break, or to satisfy tax incentives agreements they made with municipalities.
In both cases, theyāre deciding itās better if you pay - in time, gas, car maintenance, mental health, productivity, and stress - for their business decisions that went bad instead of paying money out of their own bloated pockets.
I donāt have the kind of job that can be done remotely, but Iām all for remote work where itās possible and desired. My best friend hated working from home at the height of covid because heās an extrovert who canāt really afford to go out much. Now he works from home Mondays and Fridays and I think itās kinda the best of both worlds for him. I think that employers that already have office space for workers that could effectively do their job from home should give workers a choice. Maybe hybrid workers have required scheduled days in the office just to make sure theyāre there to attend necessary meetings or collaborations or whatever rather than it just be them coming in when they feel like it, but the technology has caught up to allow way more flexibility than ever before. If I had a 100% desk job, I would move somewhere cheaper and never come in. I know Iām not alone there, and I think thereās no reason to hold that option hostage. Covid proved that it could be done for most white collar work, and we canāt let them try to squeeze that Pandora back into its box.
Honestly I think weāre going to hit a wall where we realize we need about half as many āoffice dronesā as we have in a couple years.
So many people with office jobs drive in, sit at a desk, and do maybe 2 hours of actual work in the entire day. Or they work from home and do the same. And then they collect their 95k/year salary.
I really dunno if people are prepared for businesses to start going āwait, what are all of these people doing?ā And axing their workforce and replacing most of them with AI or existing other employees
The thing youāre not accounting for is that work that primarily involves thought, which is what āoffice dronesā are doing, arenāt productive in the same way that physical or service jobs are.
Looking off into space thinking is part of the work. People average about four hours of productive work in an eight hour day.
The thing you canāt do is get rid of half the people and then expect the other half to magically be eight hours productive per day. Businesses keep trying and weirdly it just tanks their output.
AI is not the panacea that so many people think it is. Do you feel happy when you need help with something you bought and you get an AI trying to offer you helpful articles or tips? I donāt. Do you want the same level of service from the entity that controls where your paycheck gets deposited or fixed your HSA contributions?
If you definition of work is butts in chairs typing, office workers donāt do too much work. But thatās a very naive definition of what most office workers are actually doing.
Me thinks thou dost protest too much
Incredibly well said. Iām saving this.
The thing youāre not accounting for is that work that primarily involves thought, which is what āoffice dronesā are doing
Found the office drone.
Our office drones are not āthinkingā for half the day like you, and input and manipulate data. You could also include half these āmanagersā too who sit in an office sending emails all day, and never hit the shop floor.
Given that office drone would cover any job that isnāt service, manufacturing or laborer, itās not exactly surprising that youād find one. Iām a software developer.
Itās almost always best to assume that other peopleās jobs actually take some form of skill, because they always do. People get paid for a reason. Otherwise you fall into the trap of calling huge swaths of work āunskilled laborā and thinking they donāt deserve much pay, just because theyāre just moving stuff around on the shop floor.
What do you think those emails the managers are sending are, if not work?
You donāt understand though, because itās not physical (software of any kind) and even if it is (any hardware) because you arenāt constantly doing something itās not work!!
A software developer!? On Lemmy!? Say it aināt so
The old; how do you know someone is a software developer? Yup, they tell ya!
I think I really touched a nerve with that guy though, and it seems like they want to be an office drone instead of working from home (this is the bit where the āsenior software devs + team managerā argue they need to collaborate, in person) with a nice life balance.
I know exactly what those emails are because I have to deal with them asking me if a wagon that Iām looking at has arrived yet.
So I email them back telling them that itās arrived (they knew that already because goods-in already updated the checking in sheet) and they get to validate their job somehow by asking me, shit.
Itās quite amazing how they keep their jobs.
So you can dismiss someoneās job because you, a person whose job it is to look at wagons, got an email you didnāt see the point of?
If they have the sheet, why do they need you to work there and look at the wagon at all?
Now, I know your job definitely has more to it than looking at wagons and confirming their existence.
My point is that the person who sent the email does too. Itās rare for a job to actually have no point and no work associated with it.
Well, maybe your workplace wouldnāt put up with these people but I can confirm that besides them not being able to use SAP to check the quantity of a BOM, to like I said - they have access to the other functions / data but prefer to delegate them to others.
So it ends up going down a hierarchy until someone else does what these managers could do themselves in the first instance.
And they spend all their time forwarding these queries to people lower down the hierarchy and thatās all they do, eh?
You should probably get a new job if your company has that much dead weight and no direction.
Nah, I wouldnāt want to become an office drone because Iād go from calling people on the internet liars to then trying to give others career advice when they donāt even know 2% of my job.
Hilarious, the self-righteousness must come from being an office drone, right?
Who told you to become an office worker? I said your business is fucked if all of your managers are as incompetent as you think, so change jobs. You know, like "work for a different employer who you think is competentā?
I do think itās kind of ironic that youāre really indignant that someone who doesnāt know what you do might judge you, when youāre judging others because you donāt see the point to emails they sometimes send you, and you donāt know what they spend their time doing.
My immediate manager is fine and like I said above, half of their managers could be given the chopping block but that doesnāt mean I need to find new employment as you suggest. I quite like my job since I can walk it there, work outside all day with wonderful views even if the weather does get a bit poop sometimes.
In fact it tells me youāre relatively sheltered with experience in workplaces if you think most places donāt have lazy ass managers, office drones (I like this term), and good luck asking if they even have them during an interview.
If it is so easy to be an office drone, why werenāt you able to get a job like that?
Is it maybe because it involves skills you arenāt aware of?
I once worked in an office doing what I described above.
I absolutely hated it stuck in a cubicle, and now work outside with lots of other people grafting, instead of listening to gossiping over the cubicles all day long. Think I lasted 2 months.
Experimental solution proposal:
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Fire all management. Theyāre expensive and exponentially less productive. Their stupid offices also waste space.
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(Office) workers collectively do the thing they do without being micro managed and stuffed into pointless meetings.
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???
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Probably profit, actually. But then how would the āin-clubā kids reap all the rewards without working? :( :( :(
I have direct experience with the management that only work days since I work continental hours, so get to see how we run during the night without them.
Like I said, half is probably a number we could run with at my place. Sorry state of affairs.
triplenadiror you could let everyone work half as many hours for the same pay, but sure why should anyone except business owners get to benefit š
That would be hard to balance around all the people who actually do work 8-12 hours a day
Iād be fine with going into the office if public transportation could get me there, but itās a 15 minute drive vs 1.5 hours on the bus. And when I go into the office I just put in headphones with a YouTube documentary and donāt talk to anyone. Whatās the point?
None of my coworkers drive to the office and we actually like seeing each otherā¦ Hybrid remote work is great for us
I think 90% of the problem is people being forced to drive everywhere
Traffic would be so much better with a staggered work force. We might actually enjoy the commute.
Because of traffic, the workforce started staggering by themselves here if possible. The result was that bad traffic was spread out over the entire day instead of just two peaks in the morning and evening. Good traffic is only at night and working at night defeats the purpose of having business hours.
Basically just further proof that car traffic doesnāt scale well. Itās just an incredibly space inefficient way to get around.
Or if they actually cared, they could build trains.
squid_slimeAnother factor is the spaces that offices take up or the power used whilst unoccupied, these space could be used for housing or maybe even industry.
Its great that no one drives to your work but this is more uncommon than common.
In conclusion: work from home is better.
Donāt forget giant slammed parking lots! :D
But the company culture.
The culture:
What a depressing sight to behold
At least itās empty
Better than an open office setting.
Which is better still than open office āHot Deskingā
Yep I know all about it. Shit sucks.
UpperBroccoliI worry that the widespread acceptance of work from home without any other societal changes will increase the level of loneliness. Itās a solution that has to come packaged with other quality of life enhancements or social trust is going into an even faster free fall. I wonder what a wfh/social solution would look like
Fucking go outside and go to social gatherings
Most of the social gatherings Iāve been to have been set up with coworkers. Maybe I was conditioned by the American education system but I donāt think Iāve ever made a friend outside of a place that we both were expected to go to consistently. Iām not very familiar with constructs outside of that if Iām honest.