we’re in the office one day a week, mandatory for everyone regardless of seniority.
My direct reports have begged me to miss it on occasions where they really want to meet a deadline and know that the in office day means they’ll barely get anything done.
I have to push the deadline back rather than honor their request because my boss’ boss is fanatical about it.
It’s so fucking stupid.
Why can’t you do the same at the office compared to at home? Do you simply work more hours at home since you don’t have to commute?
I work at home in relative silence with two big screens. In office there is constantly music playing, and everyone’s cheek by jowl, I’m working on a laptop, and there’s a lot of big personalities and I can’t just go to my kitchen to make lunch or get coffee, I have to leave the building and buy something. Plus there’s a “team building” thing at 4pm. Its constant interruptions about look at this quilt I made, did you see Jim’s new shoes, look at my new puppy, even on topic conversations are disrupting because I’m trying to work on project A while two people are talking about project B two feet from my ear.
Depends on the person I guess. I’m bored as fuck working from home. The only positive about it was that I didn’t have to commute. I’d stop working after 4 hours basically. Get less done. It’s not for me.
At work the kitchen is nearby. Everyone is on the same floor. 5 departments on one floor. Can just go over there when I need them instead of waiting on some email that take days to be replied to.
Working with people younger than me, they need support. A lot easier to do on site. I don’t even communicate to the coworkers not working at the office. To me it’s as if they are taking a day off.
If their work is done, they get more work. If it’s not done then they have that work to do when at the office.
Pretty sure there’s a lot of fraud. Because I frauded.
I’m an agency marketer, I essentially run 5 SME marketing departments simultaneously. Everything has to be logged both w/r/t time tracking, dollar spend on behalf of clients and activity tracking in Asana. Usually I complete about 5-8 tasks a day every day (where a task might be - write 15 emails, segment a database into frozen vs shelf stable food manufacturers, work with the translation department to make this case study Spanish-language…), and have to divide my attention 25/25/15/15/10/10 between 5 accounts and internal admin (budgets, stand ups, reports, 1:1s).
My ability to be consistent, organized, and hold lots of things in my head to cover the previous-current-and-next quarters is just part of my job. I enjoy it, I love being busy, but man is the office an anathema to that process. Not to mention, I don’t hit my 4 business hour SLA to reply to a client ask, I turn up to a meeting unprepared without a deck, or my other stakeholders don’t get their collateral, you’d know in less than a day.
The “emails that go days without a reply” can’t happen because of the 4h SLA I mentioned, “going over to a department” doesn’t work because everyone is also split between 3-5 accounts, or at the VP level, all 30+ accounts.
I would suggest starting your own business and invoicing those 5 SMEs. That does not seem like a fun work structure to me. I’d forego the 7h36 min work day then.
Especially if you aren’t even using that company’s building. Those costs they make do nothing for you. You should invoice as an external party, invoice your building costs to them as well. As they now have a spot open for another employee at their building.
My job is just being an accountant at a Belgian hospital. My boss doesn’t even want me to do any overtime unless it’s “necessary”.
I prefer being at the office, accountancy here has a labour shortage. Main reason is boredom. I won’t be able to keep the new juniors on board if I don’t entertain them. The department’s main problem is people leaving after a couple of months.
When others left, work stacked up. New people feel overwhelmed. They leave. Cycle continues.
i need to be good at accountancy, but more importantly I need to be good with people in order to advance my position within the department.
A potential leadership role in the future won’t happen if I sit at home every day.
starting ones own business requires a lot of “unpaid” bizdev, contract management, accounts payable/receivable, plus dealing with PnL, EBITDA, tax, business rates, expenses… and then although I handle the marketing my colleagues handle media appearances, ad deck bidding optimization, Gartner analyst relations, and I have direct reports to manage CRM/ERP integrations and graphic design. It’s just not a 1:1.
Depends on the country. Where I live it’s beneficial to start your own company once your income reaches 10k euros a month. Being an employee here is for the sake of security. Unemployment benefits, difficulty to be fired. Parent leave. Shocks during an economic crisis are absorbed by the company.
There’s pros and cons to each. But if you are handling 5 SME’s. Working productively all the time. From your own home. Then I’m guessing it can be beneficial for yourself to start your own company.
With such a job, you’ll likely have a safety buffer in your finances for the unpaid period. No clue why there’d be an unpaid period though, you already have your connections.
Once again… easier here in Belgium. Taxes on labour are quite high, becoming an independent can cost the company less money while putting more money on the independent’s bank account.
A lot of people here complaining about the taxes, but unwilling to give up the security of employment
I have too go into the office for the first time in a year this Tuesday. I am completely at peace with the fact I will get nothing done.
I have a training seminar to run on Wednesday and intend to make sure everything is ready before I leave Monday evening.
This is one of those areas in my mental health journey where I’ve learned to accept that what my brain needs is not necessarily what my conscious personality thinks would be ideal.
I love my home and my family, and I’m an introverted reclusive nerd like I’m sure many others here. But whether it’s the ADHD or some other factors, I not only get way more done in the office but I feel better mentally and physically when I drive to work to do work things, then drive home to be in home mode. It helps that my “commute” is only a few miles on a fun quiet twisty country road.
In the last few weeks I’ve gone into the office every single day and had zero work from home days (I work on embedded systems and have needed to interact with certain in-office hardware) and I have actually felt great. Younger me would probably be horrified to hear this realization that that must somehow be wrong, lol.
The funny thing is that the rest of my team works from home so often that nobody bothers me all day!
Having separate areas for separate things is great for switching gears mentally, even for neurotypical people. I did a remote class for a month or so and I had to open a separate desktop on my computer because it was so easy to get distracted by my open fun tabs.
It’s also the reason they recommend using your bed for ONLY sleep (and fuggin).
I just quit my work from home days, I like where I work. The area is well invested so it’s a higher quality than just my own pc space at home.
Being there indeed has me more focused on working. It’s like when you try to leave an addiction behind, then you need to change your environment. Well, the opposite works as well. If you need to work a lot, then do it always in the same environment.
The ability to work with my co workers is a lot easier at office. Otherwise it would just be phone calls or emails. When a coworker is working from home, I honestly don’t interact with that person the whole work day.
Commuting to work is fun. I just bike 14 km to work. Mostly car free. Get paid 10 euros per day for biking. If I worked 5 days a week from home then I’d be giving 50 euros up just like that. Which is basically the difference between my pay level as accountant and adjunct accountant.
It would be silly.
Getting paid to do something that’s massively beneficial to your health? (…I squint at your post and notice euros & kms…) ohhhh.
Here in the US I had a past employer with medical benefits that charged you more if you were a smoker or didn’t engage with their wellness training. Almost the same, right? /s
Distance-wise, I could totally ride my bike to work. The shorter, more level route is only like 4km. But those kms are through American suburbia & neighboring commercial areas. And I would be the only bicycle they would see all day while angrily driving and texting in their 3-ton vehicle going 50mph(80km/h)+ on multi-lane roads.
Yeah I rode via the main road once as a test ride, no thanks. A bus, followed by a truck, followed by a farm tractor on a part without bike lane.
Like a third of my bike lane of 8,8 miles is dirt/gravel road but it’s fine. It being more difficult doesn’t matter when it’s without cars.
Also, not to be an asshole but I get to keep my tax money 🙈 big daddy government so kind to me. My end of year bonus’ personal income tax, employee and employer social contribution are spent on my e-bike. Took one of 10k USD because it costs me only… nothing. If I went with car then i would receive 1000 USD less over the span of 3 years.
On top of that, the car would cost like 4k dollars a year on loss of resale value, taxes, maintenance and gas.
Ah, I almost feel guilty.
shut up shut up shut up SHUT UP JUST SHUT UP
Remote makes it easier to seem busy and not get anywhere? This is why you have progress reports. Wtf? It’s way easier to slack off in the office because the assumption is you’re working. At home, someone like this guy would assume you’re slacking off so you’d have to work harder to convince him otherwise.
Wasn’t there a study done that showed that remote workers are more productive?
Many. Also his first point is why remote workers would be able to attend the meeting more often, making “iteration” faster. His second point doesn’t make any sense either. People don’t do their jobs for sheer fun. They do it for a paycheck. Yet people actually got more work done while at home more often than not because less distractions from coworkers and stupid in person meetings. Plus some would go eat dinner, and then say 'im going to go finish this so I don’t have to deal with it tomorrow". Which only benefits the company.
I actually agree about his points 1 and 2, and I also think remote work is still more productive.
When I worked remote, I worked for 4 hours and then chilled for 4 hours.
It’s boring as fuck to be alone in a room working 8 hours. I just walked around, drank some coffee, scrolled my phone. Basically when I achieved something that was decently enough to call a day’s work, then I just chilled. Just how I am.
I feel a lot more job secure when I work in office.
So they don’t make chalk, but are called chalk.
Had anyone explained to them that chalk is brittle and easy to erase?
Skill issue
I’m super unproductive when I work remote. I don’t attend all my meetings, I average about 0.4 MRs per day, and probably only 10 lines of code. I make lazy post-development tickets just to check the box. I sometimes take hours to respond to messages, and I frequently end my day at only 5-7 hours worked.
Mysteriously, none of those things is a good way to measure productivity for software development, and mandating that everyone look like they’re working hard does not ensure optimal creative problem solving.
You don’t attend all your meetings?
I mean, ya many meetings are largely unnecessary, but if you’re missing a fair bit of them and still employed the middle managers aren’t doing their job I guess 😂
My situation might be unique there (and I realize describing this that calling them “my meetings” might be deceptively inaccurate). I support tools used by multiple teams, so when they’re upgrading or planning, I should be there, but the rest of the time I have nothing to add to their efforts. The result is I’m invited to roughly 20 hours of meetings per week, and attend closer to 8.
He sounds like a cokehead
When I worked in office, there was one guy who literally brought in a gaming laptop. People would sit on their phones all day playing games or scrolling through Facebook. Or take a half hour smoke break every hour. Oh and so many people getting up to go just chit chat with somebody else, not about work, just to talk.
Oh yeah. I’ve never gotten as much reading done as when working in-office.
I have never spent more time pretending to be busy than when I’ve had to work in an office. And god help the person who drags me away from what I’m doing every five minutes for “meetings”.
I swear these people are just extroverted and lonely. If it can be summed up in a text or email, then don’t bother me.
I like being around people and arguably am extroverted, but I sure as fuck don’t want to do that at work. Don’t cross the streams, man.
I’ll go out for drinks or food or whatever after work. But if I’m supposed to be doing work stuff, I don’t want to have all the office distractions
Yeah that’s fair. I mean the ones that have endless meetings for the sake of having someone to talk to. Or mandatory fun.
Remote makes it easy to look busy without making progress.
Boy, oh boy, do I have some news for you…
If someone can’t tell if work is being completed or understand why something is held up, they really shouldn’t be supervising that team.
Im the office you can bullshit all day about sports and it is considered networking by developing relationships, which counts as working!
Office Space: Meeting with the Bobs comes to mind.
Then why do the highest paid people sit alone in a office away from everyone else ?
Where is the accountability when the C level a-hole separate themselves from their entire company ?
That’s why they golf all the time.
They golf all the time because it’s an easy venue to make sure you’re not being heard making illegal deals.
You are trying to counter corpo propaganda with common sense…
You ain’t wrong but this ain’t what this is about.
Peasants will be working these fields and daddy owner will be “superving” since you can’t trust these field ***** to do anything right without his greatness
Contrast this with the guy in Seattle who like tripled the size of his company in a year simply because offering remote work options made it super easy to scalp software engineers from his competitors.
Is this guy in Seattle still hiring?
I’ve been trying for years to get a software job in Seattle.
Its the only city that made me feel “at home”
Unfortunately, this was a few years ago, and the only thing I can find that resembles my memory of the article I was thinking of is this photo in my phone:
I think I might have had that mixed up with the story of that CEO who cut his pay from 1 million dollars to $70,000 and bumped up the salary of everybody else who worked at the company to $70,000.
