Time to repeat my topical story.
I worked for a startup that prided itself on being “data driven”. They’d talk about how other startups were doing stupid things because they followed their feelings instead of data.
One day in one of those all hands meetings, the CEO was taking questions. Someone said, “Studies are showing that four day work weeks are more effective on like every metric. Can we look into that?”
The CEO said "No, we’re not doing that ". Didn’t read the linked studies. Didn’t entertain it at all. His mind was made up, and the data was irrelevant.
Because he doesn’t really care about data. He cares about feeling smart and irreverent. He cares about being seen as a cool disruptive startup guy who’s going to grind his way to success.
The dishonesty makes me want to puke.
But you know what also makes me sick? All the sycophantic boot lickers that would gather round and tell him his every idea was great. The people who would work unpaid long hours to “get shit done”. Bunch of fucking wormtongues who would sell out their coworkers for crumbs.
Maybe he was a real person once who really did care about data. But by the time I met him, he was an empty suit
Lol, did we work at the same place?
“Empty suits” it’s the realest statement.
I resigned my position because I couldn’t take it anymore. I told leadership that I refuse to use my skills and talents for those who I do not respect, and they responded by saying that there was a lot of money on the line.
They can fucking keep it. Fucking ghouls.
maybe we all met. i worked at the same place.
except there wasn’t a lot of money on the table, just money shaped carrots they dangled in front of us to have us overworked to death.
That’s exactly it.
When they said that there’s a lot of money on the line they meant for themselves since they were partners.
They offered to share some of it with me in the shape of a very generous 3% contingent salary increase, which would come with strings attached like everything they ever offered me.
I’ve been learning to grow veggies, cook dry beans, and bake bread since money is tight after I resigned, and my partner and I are way happier because I’m not as stressed out from dealing with sociopaths and morons at work all day long.
You just reminded me of a similar incident at a company I worked at. Larger than a startup, but still not huge. Same situation where it was a question at an all hands, the response from the CTO was simply that he had not seen that data and immediately moved on.
Funny thing was, the guy that asked the question wasn’t even adding about a 32 hour work week, he just wanted to option to do 4 10s over 5 8s but they moved on from his question so fast they never gave him a chance to clarify.
I love the way any article which says remote work is good still has to use the word, “surprisingly” as often as possible. Nobody is surprised.
So much of this is just slop for the White Collar hogs. You’re not “Working from Home” as a retail employee or a grease monkey or a machinist. They spilled a thousand bytes to tell you what you already know “surprisingly”, but I don’t see word one in there about paid sick leave or vacation time.
Advancing tech was sold as a way to make all our lives better. Here is an instance of tech making our lives better, but instead companies dismiss it because the real purpose of tech for the capital class is control.
I bet they aren’t going to make the AIs come into the office.
Working in an office for 8 hours a day costs me an additional hour getting ready and commuting to to work, an hour away from home for lunch, an hour commuting back home and unwinding after work, turning 8 hours of paid labor into 11 hours of doing shit for other people.
Working at home claws back 15 hours a week.
It’s also how I got into a head on collision when some oblivious guy who pulled out in a left turn with oncoming headlights (me) driving straight in the lane. Close to home like most crashes are statistically, had I not been made to drive down to the office building then the rental car and repairs would never have been needed. There are costs everywhere that can be factored into this.
As well as 15-20 more hours that you don’t really work while at the office, and you have to actively disguise as work-related activity. Add that to your prep time, and you’ve clawed back 30+ hours of time.
You could get that second job you need to survive!
Sleep. Precious beautiful sleep. I can roll out of bed, rip a huge wet fart, log into Teams, pretend to care for 5 minutes, go right back to sleep (and still be able to smell that fart, thankfully), take a long nap, get up to take a big smooth dump, then put in the same 3 hours of actual work I’d do at the office, then play Sokoban all afternoon. All the while reducing resource usage.
This is the UBI/leisure society I was promised as a kid.
If you spend most of your day getting to and from work, then pretending to be busy at the office, you don’t have time to think or be a threat to the billionaires by starting your own competing company/product.
You paint a beautiful, utopian picture of how life could be.
Nope. Never mind I nearly shoved a bundle of iron rods into a co-workers head in a moment of anger. If it were not for that bit of self-control, and pulling back I was mid-swing, well yeah. Very safe.
Of course. Saving an hour of meaningless commute every day is a huge positive change.
God I’d love it if my commute were only an hour.
It’s 90-minutes each way if traffic cooperates. I put about 30k miles on my car in a given year.
My back was injured so they let me work from home yesterday, and other than the pain it was magical. I also got SOOO much done.
This is the wild thing, most people work better at home but no no, must be in office and have performance reviews…
In my case, I work for a municipality and I legitimately do need to be in the office to meet with citizens, attend public hearings, etc. abut I think they could come up with a schedule where I work remote on Mondays and Fridays or something. It would also make those days “no meeting days” so I could catch up on my actual job.
We get raked over the coals for how long development review takes, but then every developer wants to meet with us for an hour every week, so instead of reviewing plans we’re attending meetings 25 hours a week where they’re bitching at us for how long it takes us to review their plans.
You’re managing 25 developers?! That’s way too many IMO!
Not software development. Municipal development.
I work in the planning/ building department. We review and permit developments.
The developers aren’t my staff, they’re applicants who want to build something and we have to review it for drainage, engineering, building code, lighting, environmental impact, septic/sewer, etc.
Aah okay that clears it up, cheers!
Okay, here’s some unsolicited advice from an IT manager. Please take with a heap of salt.
25 hours is too many for 1:1 weekly meetings unless that’s your whole job description. That leaves 15 hours for overhead, project management, team meetings, leadership meetings, scrum-of-scrums, town halls, mentorship, breaking ties on MRs, performance reviews, etc. At that scale, and assuming you have other responsibilities, 1:1’s really should be monthly, optional 3/4 of the time, or cut back to 15 minutes unless there’s an ask for more time. Also: ya gotta delegate those plan reviews if you can. With a labor pool that size, you probably have at least a few seniors or principals that can take it on.
Also, with 25 direct reports you’re practically a Director without any supporting management under you. It’s entirely possible that you’re being underpaid, especially if this arrangement pushes you into overtime (more than 40hrs a week) a lot.
Not software development. Municipal development.
I work in the planning/building department. We review and permit developments.
The developers aren’t my staff, they’re applicants who want to build something and we have to review it for drainage, engineering, building code, lighting, environmental impact, septic/sewer, etc.
Facts don’t matter anymore, get your ass to the office!
Mostly US companies
It is seeping into Canada as well. Not a lot of fully remote jobs. A lot of forced hybrid (usually 3 days).
Also here in Denmark. Novo Nordisk just reimplemented 5 required office days per week.
Working from home also proved that the “middle-manager” was at best, a part-time job, maybe not necessary at all.
Easily replacable by AI
IMO It’s still useful to have an actual human in the loop who is up to date on what a bunch of people are doing, to help coordinate as well as deflect ad hocs
It’s the shareholders who own our government that make money off commercial real estate that want everyone back at work. Shareholders don’t give a fuck about your wellbeing. They’re literally looting our government, destroying any and all global safety nets and installing facism worldwide quite publicly.
You mean we had a worldwide event that proved to us that an incredible technology that allows us to work remotely could actually be used to work remotely, then our overlords chose to ignore that and now studies are proving what we already knew was true, is true?
Neat.
I’ve been studying managers for much longer, and I’ve reached a very clear conclusion: they don’t care.
Managers are playing the game. Rules vary from company to company but are broadly similar.
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Take credit for your subordinates work as if you did it.
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Make sure you have enough scapegoats to cover the fuckups.
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They know this. A schismed individual is a compliant employee.
Evidence shows performance holds or climbs when people choose flexible setups with solid support from managers and peers.
That’s the part these chuckle-head RTO folks willfully ignore. In a virtual environment you have to lead differently, and since they’re never the ones who are wrong it must be everyone else who is broken.
With the right leadership and support mechanisms virtual work absolutely can raise all boats. But that means you have to be willing to change. And open-mindedness is not typically an attribute selected for in corporate senior leaders.
B-b-but I was told big tech companies love disruption!
Does anyone have a link to the actual study? The article doesn’t seem to have it.
I’m having a tough time finding it. I found this citation from an article that appeared to reference the same four year study.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0248008
And to be clear, that study does not have those conclusions:
Participants slept 27 minutes longer (95% CI 9–51), got up 38 minutes later (95% CI 25–50), and did 50 fewer minutes (95% CI -69–-29) of light physical activity during COVID-19 restrictions. Additionally, participants engaged in more cycling but less swimming, team sports and boating or sailing. Participants consumed a lower percentage of energy from protein (-0.8, 95% CI -1.5–-0.1) and a greater percentage of energy from alcohol (0.9, 95% CI 0.2–1.7). There were no changes in weight or wellbeing. Overall, the effects of COVID-19 restrictions on lifestyle were small; however, their impact on health and wellbeing may accumulate over time.
What? You don’t automatically trust “The Editorial Team’s” assertion at the bottom that “This article is based on verified sources and supported by editorial technologies” is valid? I mean they linked to a few other articles - the fact they’re only ones on their own site shouldn’t matter…
🙄 “Trust me, bro!”
I got it from this totally legit article.
I know it’s legit because it has a picture of a Man Working At Home With A Laptop, Wearing A Shirt.
Wearing A Shirt
And nothing else!
Yeah I’m a researcher in the field that studies stuff like this and it’s infuriating that there is no citation for this. I can probably find it but it’s just horrible “journalism” to have no citation to the subject of your article.
I haven’t looked extensively, but for the past ten minutes I’ve not been able to find any article. About 20 different news stories to say the same thing, but none of them actually link a peer reviewed published article.
When you have to conduct a literature review just to find the results of one study there is something deeply wrong
All about balance. Working from home is such an improvement from past times. Face to face contact with your peers should not be underestimated though - very valuable.
It’s bad enough having to hear my colleagues in teams meetings, I don’t see why I have to smell them too.
This simply means that your local culture is flawed. Where I am, everyone looks and smells beautiful.
While this sounds intuitive, I’ve crunched side-by-side with a coworker (literally couch-coop, sshing into pods to solve a production issue), and then having also done the same over Discord with screen sharing, I can confidently say that once you actually embrace remote there is no marked tangible advantage to in person.
Other than it’s easier to recruit for a union push on company time because people are constantly jawing, rather than doing their job when in person.
Are you painting the whole picture here?
First thing that comes to my mind is: You have met the person, thus connected, then worked together remotely.
That is a physical presence. How much physical presence is required for a good working relationship differs from individual to ~; having personally experienced a coworker is invaluable in my opinion.
The second paragraph does not resonate with me, I am from across the pond. To each their own!
