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"We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride..."All of this WFH network activity whereby humans are rarely seen has just reduced the Skynet takeover timeline by 100 years.
Oncen companies realize that work from home "works" they will start hiring further and further away. Remember when technical support centers were based in your home country?
If you can work from home, so can someone else.
I dont have an opinion on wfh one way or the other. But its not going to be long before we will see the same people crying "they took our jobs!"
I'm inclined to agree. Our company wants us to be WFH right now, but allows us to come into the office if we want. I've been working in the office every day since this thing started. I really can't do WFH on a full-time basis. WFH gives me a bad psychological feeling...my mind keeps saying 'Something's obviously gone horribly wrong...'Productivity is up and suicides will follow.
People can't stay at home all the time.
While IMO largely true, the company I worked with right out of undergrad had a huge engineering center in Beijing and started to move some of the engineers over here. Some of them were the worst co-workers I have ever worked with. One had a Masters degree and apparently 2+ years of experience after graduating and was asking me how to do things constantly when I just got out of undergrad.It depends. Most upper level management is realizing that the outsourced labor is typically lacking in critical thinking skills. For brain dead help desk jobs? Sure. But for admin/engineering the outsourcing experiment has largely failed, because they just don’t have the education system in place outside of the western countries that really grows critical thinkers. They do great on tests, and have a degree. That’s about it, and when it comes to doing the actual work they aren’t worth it. Not to mention the national security risks.
To some degree this is an artifact of the current generation. People in western countries tend to take for granted how much they learn outside of school. Some years ago I had to train a team in China on some automotive engineering topics. It was a young team but, on paper, all well educated - mostly Masters degrees. They were shockingly ill-versed in the fundamentals such that I was myself struggling to understand how this team would be expected to do what they were tasked to. But, over time I came to realize that most of them had never seen nor sat in a vehicle until their last couple of years of school. They were trying to learn an engineering discipline for an industry that many of them--one generation out of rural / poverty--had no exposure to, even as a consumer. Me? It's been a part of my life since my parents drove me home from the hospital after I was born.While IMO largely true, the company I worked with right out of undergrad had a huge engineering center in Beijing and started to move some of the engineers over here. Some of them were the worst co-workers I have ever worked with. One had a Masters degree and apparently 2+ years of experience after graduating and was asking me how to do things constantly when I just got out of undergrad.
The negative is outsourcing. If you can work from anywhere you have internet, why employ anyone in a high cost of living state? Or why in an expensive country at all? Why not some guys in India where the per capita GDP is $2K?The positive side of all this increased WFH business is housing.
If we enter a period where you can work from anywhere you have internet, many can and will combine the best of big city salaries, with more suburban and urban real estate costs.
Provided they can get decent internet, of course.
Already happened/ing. Most orgs have figured out, while they may not get a single quality engineers in NYC, they'll get three ok-ish engineers in Bangalore for the same price. The only thing holding back the floodgates of shipping all quality dev jobs overseas before Covid was efficiencies of having dev co-located with users. Now with Covid, no one is co-located (time zones not withstanding) so that blocker for organizations to keep people in SF, NYC, HK, Tokyo, London etc is less of an issue. Cultural and language differences are largely disregarded by management at this point.Oncen companies realize that work from home "works" they will start hiring further and further away. Remember when technical support centers were based in your home country?
If you can work from home, so can someone else.
I dont have an opinion on wfh one way or the other. But its not going to be long before we will see the same people crying "they took our jobs!"
One side effect of WFH that I've seen, much of the silly paperwork seems to be going away. some of the stuff that used to take an email and a form or two is now 'hit the portal and it's done'. I wonder if some of the people that do nothing but push office paperwork are going to (rightly, finally) be out of a job.
Best consensus I have read was:
Introverts are happy just doing their work. Extroverts like a to create a lot of (mostly) useless meetings and spend time chit chatting to cultivate relationships. Admittedly, for some job roles, this is necessary.
- Introvert: WFH = good
- Extrovert: WFH = bad
Also, for new people, it will be harder to get the on the job training and establish relationships when working from home. For those already there, WFH is generally a better option.
Lastly, WFH will be a blessing and a curse. I'm sure it has already been said, but you know the bean counters are wondering why are they even hiring AMERICANS when they could be outsourcing everything? Keep working diligently so they don't decide you are expendable!
I have been WFH since 2010,in Commercial RE management,and like it,but this will bite most in the butt,as it will make many 'on-call/247' slaves going forward.now that your office is your home,your employer will push things to insane levels, mine always has but since March its gone from 12 hr days to 18. Its all with compensation increase.
Yup. And guess what - this is fine for the rest of us. Those same folks who get in early / leave late won't be seen now as "going above and beyond" and be considered for promotion sooner than those who don't put in the "extra" hours.it went from “staying late at the office and ignoring my family” to “going home and ignoring my family”.
100% yes please, as a software engineer. Half the tooling I use is geared squarely at "enhancing collaboration".
Yup. And guess what - this is fine for the rest of us. Those same folks who get in early / leave late won't be seen now as "going above and beyond" and be considered for promotion sooner than those who don't put in the "extra" hours.
Actually, its the opposite. People who are putting in the extra work still stand out. For those that don't, the rest of think "Why do we need them them?" It becomes very apparent who is carrying the load when everyone is WFH. That's how it is in our environments at least.
It's very easy to see who is cutting out early or leaving right on time by simply checking their online status. When you try to message someone and they don't respond, it stands out a lot more than it did before.
The different is there won't be promotions. The useless people will just be cut and everyone else will do their work as they've always done.
I don't think we are disagreeing at all. People notice who pulls that type of shit.We'll have to agree to disagree then. Our productivity as developers gets tracked on other metrics, moreso along the lines of actual deliverables like code commits, story progress, that kind of thing. Perhaps moreso appropriate for WFH than many other professions.
That being said, I have run into so many who are quiet as a mouse / virtually invisible all. day. long. - but sure as rain are "on" and "productive" right at that closing hour and minute. I'll see them asking questions in our slack channels, running into baseline technical "issues", asking folks to do this or that in regards to something complex. It's gotten down to a science with a few of them. I can expect that DM at 4:45pm, 5pm, 5:15pm. Annoying to say the least. A couple of these types will then have to the gall to speak up in our retros and talk about the "long hours". Please. ;-)
Best consensus I have read was:
Introverts are happy just doing their work. Extroverts like a to create a lot of (mostly) useless meetings and spend time chit chatting to cultivate relationships. Admittedly, for some job roles, this is necessary.
- Introvert: WFH = good
- Extrovert: WFH = bad
Also, for new people, it will be harder to get the on the job training and establish relationships when working from home. For those already there, WFH is generally a better option.
Lastly, WFH will be a blessing and a curse. I'm sure it has already been said, but you know the bean counters are wondering why are they even hiring AMERICANS when they could be outsourcing everything? Keep working diligently so they don't decide you are expendable!
I loved the one job I had that had daily safety meeting where we also had to do stretches every morning. Sure glad I got those stretches in before sitting at a desk for 8 hours. Could of pulled something picking up my mug.Corporate America is designed for extroverts and they do their very best to force everyone to conform. I’m sure everyone in this thread has been forced to engage in worthless team-building activities and other warm/fuzzy BS at work. The excuse is “we want to make you get out of your comfort zone.” Riiiiight - because professionals who have worked 20+ years in their field really need that at that stage of their careers.
At one place I worked, they had yearly retreats (they called them “advances”) where we were forced to engage in really stupid activities with other departments. When I left the company and had an exit interview with the CFO, I brought those up as an example of extreme time wasting as I didn’t care if I “got to know” Bob in accounting as I literally NEVER worked with accounting. It fell on deaf ears but I’m glad I got the chance to say it.
The corporate mantra used to be “you don’t have to like your coworker, but as professionals, you must work together.” Now, it’s becoming more like preschool with mandatory play time, show and tell, and getting graded on “playing well with others.” Thank GOD for WFH.
Agreed. Less gas use, less mileage on car, as you said more time back.I've been WFH since March 2020 after being in the office 5 days a week with a 1-hour commute each way. Not the worst commute I've ever had but that's 20 hours a week that is now mine again. I'd be ecstatic if the result of all this was that I was only in the office 50% of the time, and it's looking like that will be the reality. I quite like being in the office but 5 days a week turns it into a grind. Work/life balance is important.
It depends on where you are and what you do. I admit I was being a bit flippant about the situation, but I work for a very large software company and they absolutely do care about job performance and institutional knowledge. I've been there for 10 years and it's not really possible to replace me because I know everyone and I know how to get things done across the entire LOB that I work in. You can't outsource my role. Now clearly, that's not possible for all roles and I recognize that, especially if you work for a small employer. Honestly though I don't think the real risk right now is further outsourcing, it's the encroachment of AI into replacing workers that have in the past been protected in "high skill" roles. They've already shown that AI is consistently more accurate at detecting cancer when reviewing radiograph data than doctors, for example.
Corporate America is designed for extroverts and they do their very best to force everyone to conform. I’m sure everyone in this thread has been forced to engage in worthless team-building activities and other warm/fuzzy BS at work. The excuse is “we want to make you get out of your comfort zone.” Riiiiight - because professionals who have worked 20+ years in their field really need that at that stage of their careers.
At one place I worked, they had yearly retreats (they called them “advances”) where we were forced to engage in really stupid activities with other departments. When I left the company and had an exit interview with the CFO, I brought those up as an example of extreme time wasting as I didn’t care if I “got to know” Bob in accounting as I literally NEVER worked with accounting. It fell on deaf ears but I’m glad I got the chance to say it.
The corporate mantra used to be “you don’t have to like your coworker, but as professionals, you must work together.” Now, it’s becoming more like preschool with mandatory play time, show and tell, and getting graded on “playing well with others.” Thank GOD for WFH.
Tell me about it.
Years ago, I had an exercise like something straight out of office space.
Those fuckers actually made me "sculpt my future career out of clay". It made me want to stab everyone.
I got laid off when the financial crisis hit. Best thing that ever happened to me (after some short term employment pain during the crisis)
Tell me about it.
Years ago, I had an exercise like something straight out of office space.
Those fuckers actually made me "sculpt my future career out of clay". It made me want to stab everyone.
I got laid off when the financial crisis hit. Best thing that ever happened to me (after some short term employment pain during the crisis)
I like to imagine it was a machete.Dude, you can't share that without telling us what you sculpted!
Dude, you can't share that without telling us what you sculpted!
Yeah I always thought of myself as an introvert, but damnit if I'm not a chatty cathy around some people... I think I I have extrovert tendencies around the right type of people, and I can say most people I work with yeah I don't want to spend a whole lot of time around them, but I think that's for reasons other than being an introvert.I never thought of myself as an introvert, but I guess I am.
I used to always be the life of the party back in college, but back then I also had a lot of alone time to force me to miss people.
These days I find I have lots of shit to do all the time, and I find people just to be an annoying time suck.
If I were to suddenly win the lottery, not have to work all day, and slowly knock down the chore list and the Steam game backlog, I'm sure I'd get around to missing people again, but the chance of that happening before I am dead seem slim.
Yeah I always thought of myself as an introvert, but damnit if I'm not a chatty cathy around some people... I think I I have extrovert tendencies around the right type of people, and I can say most people I work with yeah I don't want to spend a whole lot of time around them, but I think that's for reasons other than being an introvert.