We had a skip-level with a director today who told us our 3 day in office is going to become a 5 day. When asked why, he couldn’t articulate a single good reason. It was a “management decision” made by a bunch of tone-deaf fucks who never go to the office or get paid so much money that the cost is trivial. It’s time to start unionizing everywhere. Fuck these class traitors.
Time to brush up that resume, WFH or hybrid is the new norm.
Fully remote is the only way. In my experience hybrid workplaces are just as toxic. It could turn into full time office out of the blue like mentioned here or generally the ones showing up to the office get a bit of a preferential treatment if the boss also regularly shows up at the office.
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Not all jobs can be remote, while some can. Not all remote jobs can be 100% remote. That’s great if you can, but someone has to go swap out failed disks or see things hands-on because of whatever reason. And there are isolated networks too.
I’m curious why even bring that up? No one is suggesting jobs that physically require your presences in a geographic location to be Fully Remote. When people are saying things like “all jobs should be fully remote” they’re referring to all jobs that can be fully remote should be fully remote.
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I enjoy hybrid…
I hate online meetings, so i go to the office 2x a week on days i schedule a lot of meetings
It also helps that i’m a very quick subway ride to the office, and i understand not everyone has that luxury. But that’s a choice i made to live in the city instead of a 1hr drive to work
Hybrid work only works if you actually coordinate what happens in the office.
My employer softly demanded everyone return for 3 days a week to “collaborate”, but I work with customers all day so coming to the office just meant taking Zoom calls on my laptop in the middle of a barebones open floorplan office, instead of in the quiet of my well-equipped home office. Thanks to my sane managers, I’m getting away with only one day a week right now, but that’s my least productive day.
If I’m ever demanded to be present the majority of the time, I intend to haul the mountain of IT equipment my employer doesn’t understand that I need for my job into the office to make a point. I’m doing them a favor by running that shit at home, really. I’d probably blow a breaker plugging it all in, knowing the state of the office wiring. Sorry, looks like I need my own office for all this if you want me here.
LOL My employer wants us to come in at least two days every pay period (every two weeks). But, of course, we’re not all going to go in the same day - we can’t, there’s literally not enough space - so instead of calling in to meetings from home on those days, we’ll be calling into meetings from a cubicle.
WHAT IS THE POINT? They’re having a difficult time convincing us this is a good idea.
A little more backstory: We’ve been fully work-from-home since the pandemic began. They decided to renovate the building, so we all brought our stuff home and archived or destroyed stuff we no longer needed. So we’ve been work from home for almost four years now and things are rolling along nicely. It’s really difficult to argue that we somehow need to be in the office now.
I had an employer who fully renovated their offices to the cost of multiple millions and then dragged staff back in. I got a full remote job and haven’t looked back.
Not only that, but any hybrid job ties your location within some reasonable distance from physical offices. Sure, I don’t need to commute daily, but I also can’t like 100 miles away from any office.
I wish there was a union for office workers who were forced back into the office
I’d join in a heartbeat
Same, now if only one existed…
We need to start founding them on our own, it isn’t just going to happen. These fucking CEOs and investors need to be put in their place. They’re deliberately flexing on us, deliberately increasing our stress levels and impacting our lives and health. These fucking leeches would be nothing without us doing the real work for them.
I agree, but have no knowledge on how to create a union but I’m sure someone much smarter than me has experience out there in the lemmyverse so made the below post asking for help:
People should unionise anyway. Even if ots a good place to work
RGE
When I was going to the office, parking downtown was $21 a day.
So $105 a week just to park to go to work.
Now, I COULD have taken a bus/train for $5.60 a day… But that would mean adding an extra hour to my commute in the morning and an extra hour and a half at night.
$21 - $5.60 = Saving $15.40 a day, but losing 2.5 hours.
My time is worth more than $6.16 an hour.
WFH I save ALL $21, plus gas money, plus not eating out for lunch or dinner.
After doing that for 3 years, I had $30,000 in the bank and bought a house.
Same here brother. I went from almost a decade of 1.5 hour or more commutes to feeling healthier and happier than I had ever been. It was sad when we were kicked out of our apartment at the end of 2021, but we moved in with my parents temporarily and ended up buying a house in the spring using all the money we saved as a down payment. Thinking back, we saved far more than we had ever anticipated without even trying. We saved on gas, train fare, car maintenance, a dog walker, coffee or eating lunch at work. And then we also saved on just not going anywhere due to the pandemic like not vacationing or going out with friends. Even with all that, we definitely spent more money at the time on delivery orders, alcohol, and investing in home entertainment. But we still saved a shit ton and I wish every day that we could all just work from home if possible. Even aside from all the savings, think of how much less wasteful people were and how much less pollution we put into the air. Think of the extra sleep and the time spent with family instead of commuting. Having kids seemed so much more possible for the future working from home. But naw you gotta have that in-person interaction there isn’t any other way except over the last 2-3 years but just forget that ever happened.
Demand better of your trasit system. they can do it but if people don’t demand it they won’t. Don’t forget the proplem is often those elected not the tranit agency
There are other benefits aside from money that you enjoy when riding a train/bus compared to driving.
Buses/trains have drivers themselves, so you don’t have to engage with traffic to and from work - and during rush hour when the most people are on the road during the day.
Then, when you ride a bus/train, you lower the impacts and demands on the natural world, like reducing GHG potential per capital, reducing the vehicle waste from oil leaks, tire dust, smog, etc. per capita, and reducing the fuel demand per capita needed to get you where you need to go.
Downside with public transit is that people don’t like to be around other people in that kind of setting (for reasons like increased social contact for illness transmission, people might smell bad, might be loud, might pose a threat to others, etc.).
This being said, remote work is a wonderful alternative to even public transit. Agree with you there for jobs that don’t need to commute. Some jobs still do, and public transit would be my next best choice. Still, some jobs need to travel more than a fixed route, so hybrids or EVs would be better than ICE cars for that. Etc etc
The cost of commuting is just the tip, honestly.
The biggest expense is having to live near your employer, typically centrally-located in big cities with a high cost of living.
Also lost time commuting (especially if you can’t afford to live nearby).
And also increased emissions, not only from driving yourself but a collective increase by way of traffic congestion.
Also allowing employees to work remotely massively increases the pool of employees to pull from.
Also allowing employees to work remotely massively increases the pool of employees to pull from.
This is why it’s inevitable that remote work will win out. The companies which embrace it are going to beat their competition.
Yeah, the whole “get people back in the office to help real estate prices” isn’t going to work either because it’s false demand. A new company starting up has no reason to buy the bags the companies that decided to get into business real estate are now holding unless they actually need the office space, which isn’t the case for most office jobs.
The last four decades of public policy and industry are largely an exercise in creating false demand for things.
Giant companies / industry will decide what happens, and they’ll use the government if need be to get whatever it is they want.
It may not be a 1:1 but the costs (financial and time) are largely offset.
I live in a city, I don’t own a car, I walk and ride a bike, and use public transportation and ride sharing. Granted, the convenience and cost savings can greatly depend on the city, how well it values pedestrians and public transportation, and if the housing market isn’t stupid. I mean, I’m not talking about SF or NYC here.
The more people move back to cities, the more human-friendly they become. The more that people stay and spread further into the suburbs, the more they rely on private transportation and commuting for something like a quarter of their lives. Relative to a suburban life that relies on driving everywhere, my life is very low on stress and high on comfort. “Comfort”, certainly, is relative. I can walk or take public transportation no more than twenty minutes to get to work or anywhere else.
City life can take a little more effort than stepping out of your front door into your car and dealing with traffic and spending money on gas and car insurance. But, aside from a decent pair of shoes and “comfort”, it doesn’t cost me anything to walk 10 minutes to my local market to spend $80 on a week’s worth of food.
I do fully agree that remote work increases the employee pool and benefits employers. I’m just arguing on behalf of city life being more affordable and convenient than it’s given credit for.
I’d also argue that the loss of office workers is having a very real impact on small businesses. Some of my favorite and dearly beloved businesses have closed in the past couple years because of the loss of office workers.
I think remote workers should be given a bonus, either by the state or their employer, for living in the city their company is based in. Ironically and with immense frustration, here in Philadelphia, our city actually taxes us for living AND/OR working here. Still, I would never move back to frustration of suburban life.
NYC and the costs are NOWHERE NEAR offset.
Then again, that is primarily because landlords are disgustingly greedy.
Higher cost of living (COL) areas do (at least sometimes) offset their costs. I think public transit availability is a very tiny piece of the puzzle in the US because unless you’re talking a handful of cities the public transit in cities isn’t guaranteed to be good enough to go car free. Additionally, many large offices are not located in transit available, urban locations (i.e. they’re near cities, but not in cities).
However, the areas that offset their costs do so because people in low COL areas often make a pittalence in comparison to those living in high COL areas.
In a high COL area, you can forgo some of the COL by living a more meager lifestyle, but in a low COL area you cannot as easily make up the additional $20-30k a year salary difference.
If you work for a company and move, sometimes they’ll even do the adjustment as a part of your move, and if you go from higher COL to lower COL they’ll make sure your paycheck reflects that.
I live in a city, I don’t own a car, I walk and ride a bike, and use public transportation and ride sharing.
That’s great that you have that but those options don’t exist in most of the US.
I know. Most of the US is suburban and rural areas. That’s my point - that living in a city is more convenient.
We’re talking about cities…
83% of Americans live in urban areas. Maybe 10% of those have useable public transport. My city has a single train line and some buses that take roughly 4x longer to get where I’m going.
Public transportation is certainly an option in cities. Most suburbs I’ve been to at least have buses and ride share. Still, “most of the US” is rural and sprawling suburbs that do not have these options. If more people lived and worked in and near cities, the public transportation would have more public funding for improvements. Thankfully, this administration is looking into some very exciting improvements in our rail systems and offering more funding for cities for their own improvements. Fingers crossed.
Public transportation is certainly an option in cities.
Not in US cities.
I don’t know how people feel the need to lie about things like this.
You’re telling me that in the United State of America, there are cities that exist that do not have buses or subways or trollies or taxis or Ubers or bike shares? Please, tell me which city has none of these options?
I used to live in the city and then moved out because rent is 4500 a month for a one bedroom and I don’t feel like spending around 50k a year on housing for a small little rathole, especially when my salary cannot bear that
Also, now I’m not in the city, I have parks and trails and farms all right near me and I feel way healthier
Maybe I have to accept that I’m just super lucky to live in such a walkable and affordable city surrounded by so much open space and wildlife with better public transportation that we give it credit for. I mean, I spend less than $15k a year for 800 sq ft (plus large backyard) in of one of the more vibrant neighborhoods.
You’re either rich as fuck or live in a dump you go out of every night to spend as little time there as possible and spend the rest of your money.
Fuck off, never going back to a city.
London is hell on earth. I live an hour away and rent my own 1-bed that I leave as little as possible. Life is amazing.
EDIT: pretty hotheaded comment, sorry I was insulting, but basically what it comes down to is that city housing is small and expensive in the UK, so it makes sense to leave to a suburb/town and I would never come back, maybe not so in the US.
Your experience is not universal.
I’m not rich as fuck nor do I live in a dump. I don’t go out every night spending my money.
I can’t speak to London since I’ve never been there, but living in Brooklyn has been better on every metric I care about than living in the suburbs. It’s walkable. There’s stuff I want to do. There’s people.
If you’re an anti social hermit who never leaves their house then sure I guess you can live wherever. But that sounds unhealthy.
American suburbs are extra hellish tbf. I don’t own a car or even have a driver’s license, my suburban area is a small walkable town with tons of restaurants, convenience stores and grocery stores, all on one street thats pedestrianized most of the day. It’s not crowded and easy to avoid people.
I think housing in the US is generally better, but in the UK when I last lived in a city a family of three moved into an attic with a prison style shower I lived in for £1k PCM, except they paid £1300 for the privilege. I now rent my own 1-bed for less and can save money.
If anything honestly living in a city is actually factually unhealthy, people weren’t meant to be around that many people, not to mention the pollution. Being a good amount of space away from any other people is the best feeling tbh.
Each to their own though I respect you for having a well formed take. Most city people like some friends who stayed after uni just deny the problems of cities, rather than simply state they care more about the advantages.
Your suburb sounds way nicer than the one I grew up in. It was like a 45 minute walk to the “main Street”, with no sidewalks for most of it. A guy got hit by a car and killed at the intersection closest to the house when I was living there, too. Visiting any friends without a car impractical and/or “walk along the highway” dangerous.
A friend of mine lived in Beacon, NY for a year. It was kind of nice to visit. Walkable main street, restaurants and shops. Lots of space and nature. I don’t think I’d want to live there full time though. Like it’s cool that they have a Thai restaurant, but they have A Thai restaurant. There’s like 20 that deliver to me here, and a handful I can walk to.
If anything honestly living in a city is actually factually unhealthy, people weren’t meant to be around that many people, not to mention the pollution. Being a good amount of space away from any other people is the best feeling tbh.
This is interesting and I wonder how much is just individual. I get sad in the suburbs when there’s not a lot of people around. It feels lonely. The crowds here feel like a comfortable blanket. I like knowing that if I wreck my bike people will be there to help (that happened to me once, memorably)
I don’t know about pollution. That probably varies a lot by specifics. My parents lived in a suburb really close to a highway, so that probably wasn’t good for our air. New York I think is pretty good air quality because of its location and mass transit, where like Houston or LA I think have much worse smog problems.
It was like a 45 minute walk to the “main Street”, with no sidewalks for most of it.
It doesn’t sound like you grew up in the suburbs, man. It sounds like you grew up in a fairly small town.
That’s just American suburbs, honestly. Many if not most subdvisions are designed to be pedestrian-hostile with the specific intent of excluding – shall we say – a certain class of person who doesn’t have access to a car, and are thrown up wherever a builder managed to snag a contiguous chunk of greenfield site vaguely near a major city rather than being planned and positioned to for convenience to mass transit and amenities.
Heck, I live in a old streetcar suburb, that’s basically in the city proper, and while it’s only a ten minute walk to the nearest grocery store, I don’t walk it because a) it’s a fucking Walmart and I’m not giving them any of my money if I can help it and b) it’d require me to walk along two busy stroads, one way while lugging sacks of groceries. I’d prefer not to get mowed down by somebody coming off the highway who’s not paying attention at the crosswalk if I can help it.
Wikipedia describes it as a suburb. It’s within 40 miles of Manhattan. It might have been a little less than 40 minutes walking to parts of main Street. I checked on Google maps and asked it how long to walk from my parents house to the town library, which was pretty central.
people weren’t meant to be around that many people
There’s a middle ground between a population living on top of one another and sprawling suburbs. I would strongly argue that humans are creatures that thrive on social interaction. Today’s culture has twisted that on end driving us away from one another - THAT is unhealthy.
I do take the point that crowded environments sometimes aren’t good for our physical health. Indoor plumbing and sewage systems solved that issue on one hand, but on the other hand we just lived through a pandemic that may or may not have been exasperated by close living quarters.
Maybe if we were less prone to be dicks to one another (because governments and corporations thrive on our anger, fear, and division) we wouldn’t have been so polarized during the pandemic and had saved a few hundred thousand lives.
I have social interaction all the time, we’re having it here right now on Lemmy, I also talk on VRC and occasionally visit ppl IRL. Social interaction with strangers though, especially forced as it is in cities, isn’t supposed to be a thing, that’s like why prisons are so horrible
WTF? I make an average salary and live in an average home. I do not go “out” all the time - that’s financially irresponsible and I’m a grownass adult. You’re not even making any sense. I have no way to relate to London but I have to imagine it’s stupid expensive.
You must be middle class af then. My wage is like 80th percentile for the UK and while I could afford living in London it’d be in some studio dump or like a moldy room in a shed somewhere.
The UK is a different situation. You are experiencing the rigging of the market by people born 100 years ago more than most, though the rest will catch up.
Seems people are angry that you like a walkable city while they prefer to live in the suburbs. Or perhaps they are bitter that you get to live there and they don’t.
I wasn’t raised in the city. I grew up in a very Normal Rockwell painting suburb. I certainly had a different impression about city life as a kid before I moved here. What’s strange is that people do seem to have this anger and bitterness. I don’t know where it comes from. Fear of the unknown? Media bias?
In part, I think a large number of Americans believe in ultimate freedom and individuality in spite of all else - the country was basically founded (in my city) on this premise. So as soon as you suggest that people consider living in closer quarters and give up a personal vehicle in favor of relying on others for transportation, you’re breaking the brainwashing they’ve gown up with. I just find it ironic because humans are a social species that benefit from communication and cooperation. For me, my brain breaks when people fight so strongly in favor of suburban and rural living. I get that technology can bridge this gap but there’s still far more benefits to city life than anything else, in my opinion. I mean, I hate people but I could never live in isolation either.
I spent my childhood in a very rural area. I couldn’t wait to get away. I went to college and moved to a small-to-medium sized US city where I’ve now resided in the downtown area for over ten years.
The public transit is limited and the bus system is poor. Riding a bus to my job would take two hours each way, when driving takes 20 minutes. The jobs in my field are concentrated in the suburbs so I have no choice but to own a vehicle. Owning a vehicle in the city costs significantly more than in the suburbs or rural areas. I am unable to perform vehicle maintenance myself due to the unaffordability of homes here with garages or even off-street parking. My vehicle has been broken into multiple times. My insurance is higher and the cost to repair glass is a huge dent in one’s monthly income.
I have homeless people who jump the fence into a shared courtyard for my condominium and setup camp, leaving trash and other dangerous objects behind. The police come hours late if at all for these issues. My girlfriend gets catcalled and harassed by men who seem to spend all day propped against a building at the nearest street corner.
The most difficult thing for me to come to terms with is the fact that I’ve always dreamed of starting a business. My expertise is in physical industries. The kind where having a workshop or some land to keep equipment on goes a long way toward your success. Living in a city longterm would make that dream impossible.
Nothing in the city is free. It is impossible to exist here without each and every activity costing you something. Having everyone live in cities and use public transit is a wonderful thought, but it isn’t perfect.
I’m moving back to a rural area in a few years and building a house. It’ll be nice to walk outside, look up at the sky, have some peace and quiet, and just exist without being charged for it.
This is a really good point regarding money. At some point I stopped ever going outside in the city because it just costs money no matter what.
Philadelphia is one of the better cities I’ve ever experienced. For what its worth I lived there 4 years and never really had much of an issue. Enjoyed the spaces, got around fine, septa was totally adequate. I am originally from Baltimore though, and it is a VERY different situation. I now live in a rural setting, and would never consider a move to Baltimore under any circumstance. I don’t know if its quite anger or resentment, but I’d wager most cities around the country are closer to Baltimore than Philly in terms of developed infrastructure and overall livability and most people are trained to filter the word “city” through the lens of their nearest city.
Transit has gotten such a bad reputation in the US that people consider it an imposition, a limitation, a constraint, when good transit is completely opposite. I loved the freedoms I got from livening in the city and having a subway pass! I just don’t have that anymore, now that I’m in a suburb.
This was Boston, which has pretty good transit for the US, but even then there were too many limitations that I eventually gave it up (that was before Uber, zipcar, rail trails, electric mobility, etc, so may be different now)
The solution is the revival of transit. Good transit. Even medium to smaller cities where trains aren’t appropriate can have good transit giving that freedom of not dealing with cars or traffic or parking. How do we make this happen?
I grew up in the city (beacon Hill in Boston) then ended up in the suburbs for a while, then back to the city again. Most of my suburban friends refused to come visit me, they tend to see “the city” as one thing, like they hear about rougher parts of town and think everywhere is like that… And they were afraid of the subway…
The cost of it doesn’t bother me as much as the time involved. If I’m showing up and leaving at the assigned hour I’m burning 30 or 40 minutes in the car each way. Adding another 15 to 30 minutes to get ready to go in versus my just getting dressed and walking into my home office.
Driving’s always subliminally stressful. The whole time you’re driving your subconsciously watching the cars around you and looking for problems. Your heart rate goes up and whenever you get to your location It takes a little while to get back in your groove. There’s a nonzero transition period there. The last thing I want to do after driving home for 40 minutes and heavy traffic is to barrel right into chores but there I am.
what’s even worse is the facr that if they ruled transport was clock in time everywhere would magically be embracing work from home.
My last 3 jobs have had a 45-1.25 hour commute. The city is too expensive to live in, plus traffic, plus trying to find a midpoint between my job and my wife’s all kind of lead to this. I get some of my coworkers prefer to go in because they can’t work from home because the environment there isn’t conducive to working, but that doesn’t mean I should have to pay for that. I never realized how much of my time was being sucked up commuting until I the pandemic lol.
my just getting dressed
You got dressed when you worked from home?
never work naked. even partially. eventually something will happen where an emergency meeting happens or you need to get up real quick. nope not worth it. i don’t get fancy, but not pajamas 100%
I always kept my shirt on (I would be cold otherwise anyway), but I guess the way my home office is set up, you couldn’t see that I was just in my boxers even if I had to get up. I didn’t really think about it.
Pajama gang rise up! Camera on in meetings and all…
<3
Office jobs are BS in the internet era. You go to work to look at a screen. You come home to look at a screen. You go to bed, you look at a screen.
Your bosses are taking calls from their hot tubs while smoking big spliffs and making fun of you for not being as smart as them. They figured it out and they’ll be retiring any day now. I’m not even being facetious, I know these people. They’re the Pakleds of the human race.
I don’t know what a “Pakled” is, but yes.
Pakleds are an alien race from star trek. They’re known for tricking smarter people into helping them only so they can take advantage of them, ensnare them, and then dominate them. They also on average have low IQ (in universe).
Yes, please ask me to effectively take a pay cut to pay to drive across town so I can sit at a non-customizable hot desk to join virtual meetings with resources all over the globe. But it’s ok because in return I get to be interrupted constantly by people physically bothering me with a question in the name of “collaboration” instead of opening a ticket or sending an email like a normal person. Genius. I can’t understand why everyone’s complaining. (/s in case it wasn’t obvious).
Also I have to pay for parking and lunch
Is this really the norm in the USA? In the Netherlands most office lots have free designated parking and virtually everyome brings their own lunch.
My white-collar arse has never had to pay for parking while at work. But it probably depends a bit on occupation and location.
Everywhere I’ve worked has had free parking, but when I interviewed at Amazon I noticed they didn’t.
I work for a FANG company and 2 years ago I willingly took a 13% pay cut on the condition I could work from home permanently. The pay cut hurt but my productivity and output jumped so high that received a promotion along with bump in pay a year later. Being a tech company, they track a lot of metrics around productivity and I know I am 28% more productive when working from home. I refuse to return to an office just because of office politics and drama that distracts me from doing my job. I’m not there to socialize.
Forget socializing… it’s all “hey, can you join a meeting?” that has absolutely fuck all to do with you. Slack invites? Ignore. Outlook calendar items? Delete. Much harder to dodge in person.
I feel like it’s worse virtually.
Saying “Sorry, can’t walk and chat with you, have to catch up on shit” in person vs
Hearing “saw you were free at 430pm, so I threw a zoom on there. Oh? Well you should block out you’re picking up your kid” remote
This. And those 5 minute walk and chats, although annoying at times (also they could be fun and productive at times), were less painful than the endless meeting invites I get now. Because a 5 minute walk and chat folks know you are busy. If they see you at your desk plugging away they no you’re busy. But for some reason people now think they are entitled to unscheduled time on your calendar.
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Because I need to accept some meetings, but not any meeting. But the difference is the volume of meeting invites coming in. And folks expecting me to show up even when I didn’t respond yes.
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I genuinely have no sympathy for anyone who works for these parasites.
They weren’tasking for sympathy
I am not asking for your sympathy either. You are however VERY misguided. I totally understand the perspective of “big bad company” but without people like me fighting behind the scenes, I guarantee you things would be a million times worse for everyone on planet earth. I have been targeted in the past due to my stance on privacy but I refused to cave to the pressure. Even after high level managers demanded my “obedience” I resisted and won. You can call them parasites but if all they good people leave (and we do exist) then you might as well just give up now and welcome 1984 with open arms.
A bit weird for those with no choice.
You have no choice but to work for these companies? Lol.
How does anyone survive without working for them?
People get tied into locations because of family and mortgages, it’s reductive to say what you did.
So there’s no way for those people to leave?
Doing so would mean death?
Or do you think the only viable solutions are easy ones?
I am not in that situation, but it would be great to not live in Indiana.
It would also be great if my mother wasn’t in her 80s and my wife’s mother wasn’t in her 70s and didn’t need our help for things.
But they do and we wouldn’t abandon them.
Don’t be silly.
They do have a choice.
I am a software developer and I would never work for say a gambling company. I’m not skilled enough for a FAANG company but I wouldn’t do it even if I was.
If you can get a job at a FAANG the you can get a job anywhere. Certainly for less money but money is meaningless after a point.
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Amazon and Apple.
Have fun getting another job in tech in this market.
Already done.
Good for you buttmunch
Thanks, there’s no reason to be angry though.
Does anyone have knowledge and or experience with forming a union in the US? After doing some mild research I failed to find a union that represents telework / work from home employees, specifically those who are facing return to office mandates from their corporate overlords
Can confirm. I have to be in the office way more now and everyone hates it. I work way less than I used to to recoup the misery of commuting.
Most people only have around 4 hours of highly productive work in them a day. The rest is just filler on an 8+ hour day when nothing much is accomplished. Or even worse, it’s when errors are made that take away from productivity as they fix them.
Commuting sucks out of the highly productive time. So if someone commutes for 2 hours a day, that’s 50% less productivity to the company.
For the managerial types out there. The old adage is completely wrong. Time is not money, productivity is money.
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Dude, you’re making someone work when they’re probably pretty sick.
Why not just tell them to take the time they need to rest, and don’t worry about the PTO?
No one’s making you punish someone for being sick.
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Sure sounds like you enforce them though.
When I got COVID, my boss told me to just rest until I was better and explicitly told me not to put in PTO because there’s better things to use it for.
Sorry, but the way you’re angry at someone for not being productive while sick makes me assume you’re in the wrong here.
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The most challenging aspect of returning to the office is the commute. This isn’t surprising because commutes of only 30 minutes are linked to higher stress and anger, while 45 minutes or more is linked to poorer overall well-being, daily mood, and health.
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That explains a lot actually, damn. Is that cumulative, or just one way?
Love WFH for taking care of animals, stress free guilt free breaks, all my home comforts, but I do feel extra sedative when working for hours and do get a bit lonely wishing I could make more coworker friends, but they’re on the other side of the continent
Yeah, that’s what’s crazy about some of the back-to-the-office pushes: come sit in this cubicle and speak to people online who are sitting in similar cubicles in an other city or country…
Me too. I miss my chill office culture where everyone showed up, but the norm was roll in anytime before 1030 or 11am and leave early if you need to. And expected to work from home a day or maybe 2 a week if needed. As long as you showed up for the important meetings in person and attended had a known presence in the office while you were there, it was all good. And being in the office felt good because it was a good collaborative environment. Now I can opt in to go to the office, and have all the sedative isolation of home without the comforts.
You’re the first person I’ve seen to describe my experience too, I feel like I’m the sole crazy person who wouldn’t mind more in office time. But I’m also lucky in that my office is a 15 minute bike ride away, I’d drive off a bridge if I had to commute an hour by car every day
New yorker here. Sometimes the MTA sucked, but my 40m door to door gave me time to listen to a podcast in the subway and decompress from work before stepping in my front door. I also read the news a lot more. I don’t do those things nearly as much now. Also beers in the office and happy hours where team workers forced me to stop working at a reasonable hour were helpful to make me turn off the workaholic side of me.
Curious. Are you fully remote or do you still have an office to go into? Is there any culture left in your office if you do go in?
Public transport is a huge benefit; it is sadly non-existent here although we have alternatives.
Of course Fortune can’t close an article about how stupid RTO is without turning around and advising the (probably employee rather than employer) reader of all the good things they can do back in the office.
So what can you do if your employer mandates your return-to-office? First, focus on maximizing the benefits of this life change…
I mean, I account for $10k salary increase for in office work compared to what I’d take 100% remote.
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That’s based on an offer with a 15 minute commute and free parking. It scales up and I’ve had this conversation when being offered a job.
That look of surprise when they realise they can be outbid by someone paying less salary!
Cities are expensive if your time is free. All the bullshit really adds up.
However, our research found that returning to an office often is a major disruption to one’s routine, foundational work, and overall life experience.
Damn work. Disrupting their routine and life experience.
What? It’s a return to the office, not work. It’s not the 8 hours; it’s the additional hour (if you’re lucky) getting there and back which, for some jobs, brings no discernable benefit.
Well, the office is obviously the place where the work takes place. It was probably relatively okay for you when you started the job, then the pandemic hit and now you think it should be different. But it’s not up to you to decide whether it makes sense to go to the office, that’s for your employer to decide - you know, the guys who pay your salary.
Yep, but it’s up to me to decide to fuck those execs and leave. And guess what? Almost all of my coworkers who were the same age left too. Within 2 years, my cohort was largely gone.
I took a mild pay cut to live closer to home and work remotely in a field that I feel more passionately about. My only regret is that I miss the people I work with, but half of them are gone or reassigned anyway.
But hey, the people who paid my salary are more than welcome for investing in my early career training. All in all, they spent more money on me than I earned for them.
Joke’s on you – I started work during the pandemic. And, more to the point, my company was doing flexitime and WFH long before I joined, because their employees like it and because they’re the kind of employer that values the input of their workforce.
Also, I could flip your last argument. It’s the workers that turn up and generate value for the business. Salaries aren’t paid out of the goodness of the employer’s heart. It’s a transaction, selling labour, and as with any transaction there has to be good will on both sides for the relationship to function.
Yes. Get used to it corpo shill, or we’ll unionize.
My heartfelt condolences to all those affected. Having to drive to work is certainly very cruel and completely unexpected. Life is one of the hardest.
You joke, but my quality of life nosedived significantly when an accident caused my commute to become 2-2.5 hours total each day for like a full month.
Which repeated like 6 months later because of another accident.
I hope whatever hardship you’re going through passes soon.
I don’t even have a driver’s license lmao, nobody I know does either. Cry harder, corpo shill.
What you would say with irony, I say with conviction.
You are free not to work and live the life you’re dreaming of.
