Today i wrote a piece for @theatlantic on why managers and executives are so terrified of the remote work future – because it lays bear the inefficiencies of the workplace, and drags work back to being an exchange of labor for money https://t.co/W2tNOyNr9I
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) July 29, 2021
Seemed like a good time to share Mr. Zitron’s ‘Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future‘:
… Some of the people loudly calling for a return to the office are not the same people who will actually be returning to the office regularly. The old guard’s members feel heightened anxiety over the white-collar empires they’ve built, including the square footage of real estate they’ve leased and the number of people they’ve hired. Earlier this year, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, rolled out an uneven return-to-office plan for its more than 130,000 employees—the majority of workers must soon come back to the office three days a week, while others are permitted to keep working exclusively from home. One senior executive at the company has even been allowed to work remotely from New Zealand.
Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line…
Some people really do need to show up in person. I live in Las Vegas, a city of more than 600,000 people with more than 200,000 hospitality workers, and thus I’m keenly aware of which tasks require someone to physically be there to complete them. You can’t wash dishes over Zoom. You can’t change bed sheets over Slack. Blue-collar workers are the backbone of the city, as well as the Consumer Electronics Show that the tech elite uses to champion code-based products. Local hospitality workers suffered painfully during the pandemic as tourism in the city dried up, because their jobs depend on thriving physical spaces.
But for the tens of millions of us who spend most of our days sitting at a computer, the pandemic proved that remote work is just work. Every company that didn’t require someone to physically do something in a specific place was forced to become more efficient on cloud-based production tools, and the office started to feel like just another room with internet access. While many executives and managers spent the early months of the pandemic telling their employees that “remote work wouldn’t work for us in the long term,” they are now forced to argue with the tangible proof of their still-standing business, making spurious statements like “We’ll miss the office culture and collaboration.”…
The reason working from home is so nightmarish for many managers and executives is that a great deal of modern business has been built on the substrate of in-person work. As a society, we tend to consider management a title rather than a skill, something to promote people to, as well as a way in which you can abstract yourself from the work product. When you remove the physical office space—the place where people are yelled at in private offices or singled out in meetings—it becomes a lot harder to spook people as a type of management. In fact, your position at a company becomes more difficult to justify if all you do is delegate and nag people…
Even if we’re discussing some sort of theoretical, utopian office in which everybody is contributing and everyone gets along, each day during which a business doesn’t fail because of going remote proves that the return-to-office movement is unnecessary. Those in power who claim that remote work is unworkable are delaying an inevitable remote future by using logic that mostly comes down to “I like seeing the people I pay for in one place.” I have yet to read one compelling argument for a company that has gone remote to fully return to the office, mostly because the reasoning is rooted in control and ego…
encephalopath
Wait… who’s laying a bear?
craigie
I read this a few days ago and thought it made a lot of good points, the biggest one being that you can’t say we can’t work remotely if we are still in business.
But “in business” and “working optimally” are still potentially different things.
Baud
@encephalopath:
Don’t kink shame.
Just Chuck
@encephalopath: Tormund Giantsbane, if you believe him.
debbie
What they’ll miss are their inane power games.
Major Major Major Major
I have had managers/worked at organizations that thought like this. Now I work at a company that totally understands things like “I did four hours of pair programming and it broke me so I’m calling it a day.” I am much happier and hope everybody else (as appropriate) can have workplaces like this too.
As for hourly workers, we should pay them more most places & improve their backstop… but this is alas not focused on them.
Baud
OT.
I always assumed Japan had mild summers. This Olympics taught me otherwise.
Nora
In a better world, the last year would have taught us as a society how much we rely on the people doing the lowest level jobs, the people who couldn’t work remotely but who kept everything going. Live and don’t learn, that’s us, to quote from Calvin and Hobbes.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Stephanie Labbé = Athena, goddess of heroic endeavor (photo)
?? Oh, Canada
Spanky
Few things are as worthless to the bottom line than middle management. Most in my experience failed at their primary job, which was to shield the people under them from the shit raining down from above.
Eolirin
I don’t feel like that take is entirely fair. I know Microsoft has actually done a good amount of research on this topic, and more importantly made it public, and there are a number of things that need to be managed very differently in a remote work setting than an in person one, and some things are much harder to deal with. They ran into a lot of issues with on boarding new hires and new issues around work life balance and burnout. It’s harder to for good managers to notice when the people they’re responsible for are struggling, in places with non toxic cultures it makes personal issues more invisible which makes it harder for coworkers to support each other. There’s lots room for incidental social interaction and bonding, which can have an effect on morale and team cohesion. And more.
Now, these things are all resolvable, and MS actually has published a set of guidelines around them from their own learnings, and they certainly think hybrid work is how things are going to go. But I think there are a number of really solid reasons beyond ego and control for why having in person interactions on a regular basis is important, why there being some kind of physical space is important. And that’s not even thinking about the people who need to be away from their family members or home environment in order to be productive, or who lack access to the infrastructure necessary to do remote well.
ETA: and let’s note, MS has a vested interest in remote work, well, working. They provide a lot of services that people will want to use if they’re doing remote work. And even they don’t think going full remote is a reasonable solution for most companies.
raven
I was in higher ed and worked on online courses and distance ed for 15 years. It was swell and I always got everything done ahead of time!
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: Tokyo and NYC have fairly similar weather as I recall
Heidi Mom
@Just Chuck: She was no ordinary beast.
The Thin Black Duke
As a guy, I’m astonished at how many women who worked from home tell me that they never want to wear a bra ever again.
Eolirin
@Baud: Oh God no. Japanese summers are brutal.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Baud:
big shock to me as well. who knew the humidity would range from 80 to 90 percent on top of the heat
Old School
Balloon Juice can be read at home as easily as it can in the office.
glc
Seeing the title, I first thought this was about the Presidency.
Gvg
My office pushed us to go back last summer and I resented it. Thought it was unnecessary for my specific task and that I had gotten more done at home. I did miss casual conversations and tips plus just some unnecessary conversations with people I liked but on the whole, I thought a hybrid with some in office days would have been best. It turned out other people had different experiences with working from home, especially those with multiple family members all at home trying to do work and school at the same time in houses too small. I heard that some people barely got anything done and bosses couldn’t tell if it was lazy or family circumstances. I guessed they also didn’t want to try and allow some to stay and some required to come in with the same level job. The pandemic because of kids out of school was not the best test of working from home anyway. I don’t know what the future will hold, but it is always fraught when bosses appear to be playing favorites.
i don’t know if my job will bother to figure out how to permanently work from home. Some of us could, some front desk people need to be there. Also the work socializing actually does help working together.
that said, I think the covid situation is bad enough that most of us should be working from home again.
schrodingers_cat
I just finished the first book in the trilogy of the Buddhism and Brahminism by a Swiss historian of Buddhism. It is fascinating, it upends the conventional wisdom and chronology of the faiths of ancient India. Mainly that Buddhism was some kind of protest movement to Brahminism
If I blog about this would it be interesting?
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I would be interested.
Suzanne
@The Thin Black Duke: Try wearing one and see how it feels.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: Yes it would be interesting.
Gvg
@Baud: No. As a gardener, and from one geography class that explained the patterns of repeating climates I knew they weren’t mild. Basically Japan is a very long Island that kind of duplicates the east coast of the US. The southern part of the island has a climate like the US south, including plant genus’s that are the same. They have magnolias, azaleas, and dogwoods that grow very well here in the south, including Florida. The genus’s are the same because the continents used to be joined, and the plants migrated to the climates they were suited for. I look at where plants in catalogs were native too and if they come from the southern half of Japan, they usually do well here but stuff from say England or Peru won’t.
They also get Hurricanes (typhoons) just like Florida.
NotMax
It’s the confluence of tech tools, too. Ten years ago while it wasn’t quite stone knives and bearskins neither was it beer and skittles when it came to working from home.
debbie
@The Thin Black Duke:
?
Baud
@NotMax:
With all the conspiracy theories out there, I’m surprised no one has blamed Zoom for engineering the virus.
Princess Leia
@schrodingers_cat: Sounds fascinating!!! Please blog on this!
sab
My tiny office does not have a large turnover. A dozen people, maybe three have left since I started 15 years ago. But they lost 1 and a half this year (the half was me.) They are a good company but recruiting is hard. I have no idea how new people will fit in because they do not train anyone. I came in with twenty years experience and it was very difficult. How will people train themselves when all the trainers are remote? Nobody even gave the woman who took over my files my phone number.
debbie
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes.
TheOtherHank
Computer geek here. The first couple months of the lockdown were rough, but I went back to the office and got a couple monitors, keyboard, mouse, etc and set up an actual work space. Now I don’t really want to go back. It helps that the company I work for was designed around the idea that a large fraction of the company would be composed of remote workers. On my current team, my nearest coworker is about 40 miles away. The others are in Colorado and Boston, so all my meetings would be on zoom even if I drove into SF.
Emma from Miami
I would love it.
For schrodingers_cat, because suddenly the only thing I got is a disastrous version of text.
Adam L Silverman
@encephalopath: This guy!
The Thin Black Duke
@Suzanne: I tried panty hose once. That was enough.
sab
@Suzanne: Sorry, I put mine on as soon as I get up in the morning. Flat-chested in my youth, but alas not since menopause. I cannot believe I wanted to be busty in my teens.
Adam L Silverman
@The Thin Black Duke: And that’s just Cole!
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: Yes. But I’m funny that way. If you want to guest post it here, write it up and email it to me and I’ll put it up as a guest post.
debbie
@sab:
I had breast reduction in the mid-1980s and those fuckers grew right back.
Betty
@The Thin Black Duke: Amen to that! Free at last!
Another Scott
@Eolirin: We quickly transitioned to a secure version of MS Teams early in the pandemic. It works nothing like the TV ads for us. I don’t know what the issue with the chain of bits is, but we can barely have a meeting with even one person using video over VPN. The networking people swear that there’s plenty of bandwidth and it’s not the network. When people have to use video to show their faces, they use their phones.
There’s still a lot of problems with remote working.
I do agree that this pandemic has caused organizations to seriously rethink how to structure things, and there’s still a lot of work to be done. E.g. How does one calculate and bill overhead rates for organizations with remote workers, especially with sites with lots of legacy facilities??
Cheers,
Scott.
The Thin Black Duke
@Adam L Silverman: John wears a bra when he mops?
Adam L Silverman
@The Thin Black Duke: There are things I don’t want to know…
BeautifulPlumage
@schrodingers_cat: Yes! Always intrigued by new interpretations of history.
Just Chuck
@The Thin Black Duke: You owe me a gallon of brain bleach.
Xantar
I’m glad that people are getting the option to work remotely. People shouldn’t be forced into the office.
But I personally don’t want my home to also be my workplace. I also get free public transit to work, so the commute is not a problem for me. I’ve been happier when I came back to the office. If people want to work remotely, then that’s more office space for me.
That being said, I also have lots of meetings for my job. These aren’t just meetings for the sake of having meetings either. We hash out work and make real decisions. And it’s all so much more efficient in person when we can read body language, when we can just hand documents over to someone instead of sharing our screen, and when people don’t have to deal with, “Go ahead. No sorry I interrupted. You go first.”
Again, it’s not necessary for everyone. It isn’t even technically necessary for me. But I can’t pretend there’s no trade off.
CaseyL
I’d love to keep on doing what we’re doing: go into the office one day per week. That’s enough to do nearly anything I need to be around in-person for. But we’re going back 3 days per week – I am suitably grateful for the 2-day WFH option – for reasons that aren’t quite clear. We’re an academic office, not a clinical one. I imagine a lot of it is inertia, “we’re resuming what we’ve always done,” and a desire to maintain an office culture (whatever that is).
Mind you, I like everyone I work with. I don’t dread going back.
I just really really like WFH. I don’t have to dress up (no bra! no makeup!), I don’t have to commute, and I can spend the day with the kitties.
Hungry Joe
My wife and I are retired, but we were both journalists and we agree that going to work in a newsroom was one of the job’s great perks: We were surrounded by so many amazing people. We wasted a lot of time gabbing with colleagues … but was it really time wasted? It kept us energized, and eager to get into work every day. As a Metro reporter she could have done ninety percent of her job from home, but would have burned out much sooner. I could have gotten away with working from home maybe half the time, but as (among other things) the Book Review editor I had to deal with hundreds of books every week (a LONG process), so I kinda hadda be there.
Don’t downplay the importance of being around others. I’m aware that I had a dream situation that may be skewing my perspective, but still: Isolation? All day? Every day? Not good. For most people, anyway.
Faithful Lurker
@schrodingers_cat: Please.
Citizen Alan
Between 70 and 90% of everything judicial law clerks do can be done from a home office. And telephonic conferences are vastly superior to in-person hearings, IMO, because its a choice between debtors calling in from home or, at worst, driving 15 minutes to their lawyers office versus driving an hour or so to the courthouse and wasting half a day on a 5-minute hearing. But most of the judges I know are eager to get back to in-person hearings. One I talked to in an interview flat-out said that he didn’t think people appreciated “the pomp” of the judicial system during video conferencing. Of course, his opinion was apparently influenced by a lawyer who wore casual attire to a video hearing which I honestly would have sanctioned if I were a judge. I wore a full suit, including dress shoes, for every video interview I did. I wouldn’t have felt in the “lawyer mindset” otherwise.
Citizen Alan
@Hungry Joe: Yeah, but when we were in-person, I never saw anyone either. I was in an office by myself where I patiently did whatever work needed doing and then sat around surfing the internet until it was time to leave. I genuinely think I was more productive at home.
Gin & Tonic
@schrodingers_cat: Yes.
BeautifulPlumage
OT (and speaking of new interpretations) the book Sex At Dawn makes a compelling case for new theories in primate sexual evolution and the nature of human competition. Much of this is accomplished by looking at historical anthropological studies and observations separated from the social biases of the day.
Hungry Joe
Correction: My wife the Former Metro Reporter could have done ninety percent of her job without going into the newsroom. She had to be out and about a lot.
scav
Fifth photo down, at the very least.
James E Powell
@Old School:
Balloon Juice is blocked on Los Angeles Schools internet.
schrodingers_cat
Thanks for the interest, I will write something up. Ever since Modi was reelected in 2019 I have been reading up on Indian history to fill the gaps in my own knowledge. As a STEM major I didn’t take any history classes in college.
Modi and his ilk has been selling a toxic brew to its base about the greatness of Hindus based on half truths and lies. And people who should know better enable him because they think that he will restore India’s glorious Hindu past which never really existed, as envisaged by the Sangh (BJP’s parent organization).
But the readings have been fascinating on their own and it will be fun to write about it and discuss it with more people than Mr. Kitteh. And most of you will have very different perspectives than my own and different knowledge bases of history of other parts of the world.
PsiFighter37
Being in the office definitely has some value. Being in a small apartment in NYC, I do not have room for a proper work setup. I also find that being at work helps put me in a better mindset for being more effective as well, and it’s not because of the fear that my boss is going to slam me with unnecessary work. I just function better when work and home life are very clearly divided.
Having the option to work remotely now and then is nice, but it is something I will use sparingly going forward.
Baud
@James E Powell:
I don’t know whether to be outraged or relieved.
James E Powell
@The Thin Black Duke:
That would be a bro or a manserrie.
debbie
@James E Powell:
?
BeautifulPlumage
@scav: yes, but farther down is
Major Alström’s wife with the owl
Just Chuck
@James E Powell: Huh, hoocudanode that the mention of skull-fucking kittens would land us in web filters?
Spanky
@The Thin Black Duke: I’m intrigued as to why so many women felt compelled to tell you that.
Poe Larity
Render unto Caesar what is Caesars. Imagine yourself at 22 entering the workforce in a new city and building your knowledge base and network via Zoom.
artem1s
this is a problem created by HR. the primary way to justify a promotion in my workplace is dependent on how many people you manage. HR has even determined who gets an office with a door by their supervisory level. It’s infuriating. And it’s becoming apparent who needs supervision and who doesn’t very quickly. So of course the central management is pushing for a return to work as soon as possible.
on the other hand, I recently became aware of a major problem that has arisen because of WFH. Some white flight, Raygunomics, glibertarian jackass decided to sue the city over collecting income taxes. they claimed that WFH means they shouldn’t have to pay income tax where they work. It’s something I hadn’t considered before. That municipalities that provide critical infrastructure that draws big employers will be taking a significant hit in revenue due to this lawsuit – unless the biggest employers in the county put pressure on their employees to return to in-person work for at least whatever minimum time that will allow the city to continue to collect income tax. Of course the white flighters could never get equivalent paying jobs in their NIMBY bedroom communities. But of course the first thing they decided to worry about in a WFH environment was figuring out a way to not have to pay any income taxes – not whether their particular unincorporated tax haven might not be the best place to live if the nearby municipalities don’t have any infrastructure. I hate that this country has become all about tax avoidance no matter the cost – no wonder we can’t have nice things.
VeniceRiley
The first thing I take off when I get home from work is the bra. Sometimes I even unhook it in the car for the commute!
Oooh I see I’m not the only one that likes to play with matches! 14K!!!!
tinare
I work for a large international company and outside of the six people on my immediate team, no one I work with is in the same physical location as me. As I am not in the headquarters office, I feel that the pandemic forced senior management to communicate better with the company as a whole because they couldn’t just hold a meeting in person and then expect information to filter down through the ranks like a giant game of telephone. Of course they are the ones that promote the “collaboration” need to get back to the office ignoring that the majority of the company’s employees are not physically located where they are so “water cooler conversations” really aren’t leading to the best work because only certain people are in on the conversations. Anyway, 80% of my job is reading and writing which I never did I well in a loud open cube farm. I dread going back to the office.
Another Scott
@artem1s: +1
There are too many pathological things about taxes in the USA. States bidding against each other for companies to build facilities; states preventing localities from raising their own taxes for infrastructure; fights over commuter taxes; etc. And that’s before one gets to rates and deductions and estate taxes!
When I’m benevolent despot, things are going to change!!1
Cheers,
Scott.
scav
@BeautifulPlumage: That was my second hook for the locals!
(But more apt from you).
dmsilev
I had a conversation this morning with some coworkers about remote vs. on-site work in general, and one person was quite emphatic that even if we transition back to largely remote operations (we’re about 50-50 right now), she’ll just come on campus and close the door to her office rather than work from home. For her, it was the context switch of “work” vs. “home” that was important, being able to leave work in the office rather than seeing it every time she walked by the spare bedroom or whatever.
PJ
@sab: working in a workplace (not necessarily an office) makes learning how to do a job much easier than trying to figure things out on your own at home, and, mentoring aside, networking is also critical in advancing in a job and is much more difficult to do in a remote setting. For these two reasons (and I’m sure there are others), I don’t think all remote work will be a reality for many workers, though working from home a few days a week will probably be more frequent.
Wag
@schrodingers_cat: Absolutely. Or a good Twitter thread to unroll
Gin & Tonic
@dmsilev: That context switch was important for me, too. Particularly when I was bicycling to and from work, which I did often, although not exclusively. The fresh air, scenery and cardio workout really helped me transition. Since I’d worked in an office almost my entire working life, the pandemic-related WFH thing was difficult for me – although technically my work could have been done from anywhere I had an Internet connection. But the WFH served as practice for retirement, frankly, and helped me with *that* transition earlier this year. I’ve heard through the grapevine that my former employer will likely be going to not more than three days a week in the office for almost all staff.
PJ
I will also add that having a separate work space from living space is very important to me in terms of getting actual work done without the distractions of “home”.
Rene Magritte is supposed to have put on a suit every work day before he left his house, walked down the street to his studio, and changed into a smock to paint. Someone asked him why he did this, and he replied that because his work was so strange, he needed the physical change of clothing to mentally separate it from his home life.
Gin & Tonic
Anyway, old story about Robert Caro, the eminent historian, who lives in NYC and, quite obviously, works for himself and can work anywhere. He has an office, away from his home, and puts on a jacket and tie to go there and work every day.
Urza
@Eolirin: Aside from the work from home studies at Microsoft, the company has also tested 4 day work weeks. That was done in Japan which is a generally workaholic culture. 4 days was just as efficient as more
There is a vested interest in people working from home in other companies with the recent release of the Win365 remote desktop for business. Having a secure desktop backed up at all times for a monthly fee, potentially less cost than a normal work desktop or laptop drew enough early tryouts that the program had to be closed off temporarily. That will take up alot of Azure cloud space and be a hefty chunk of income that its easier for Microsoft to realize than most other companies trying the same thing.
persistentillusion
@debbie:
I went to school with a woman who had breast reduction surgery in tandem with her mom. After recovery my classmate said “Now, when I ask a guy I’m interested in my eye color, there’s a reasonable chance he’ll know”. It was the late 70’s.
Chetan Murthy
@artem1s:
I’m proud to pay city & local taxes here in SF. I’m proud that my state and city have done a decent job [ok, ok, Newsom coulda done more, but still …] protecting Californians from covid. But …. this can’t be a reasonable position. A company pays taxes for its operations in a locality. Workers who don’t physically work or live in that locality, shouldn’t be liable for taxes in that locality. Otherwise, what stops a county that is the site of an AWS datacenter from deciding that every company hosted in that datacenter owes taxes ?
Another example: I just finished a contract gig with a company based in PA, working with their French subsidiary. How are taxes apportioned? I was a 1099 worker, but I have no idea how that works in France. Should my work with the French be bound by French labor laws? Should I be paying French taxes? How about “obligatory social contributions (health, pension, unemployment, etc)” ? What about PA taxes?
The right solution is to stop the race-to-the-bottom and get every locality to raises taxes, funding decent services. Sure. But absent that, there’s only one way to collect income taxes, and that’s based on physical presence. BTW, I know that localities used to have guys who went around dunning (e.g.) NBA players for the taxes they owed, for their away games in that city. Stuff like that.
Kay
They got away with it. massive, blatant corruption and they’re paying a fine.
Urza
@Another Scott:
Have you submitted a report to the Teams helpdesk? That is not a problem that I’ve run across. We use Teams for everything, while we don’t use video often, its never been a problem and we have VPNs on by default all the time. To be fair, even when we do use video its never showing more than 9 feeds at a time even if more people are broadcasting, so if you’re doing more I dont know how that might act.
Villago Delenda Est
These assclowns are not leaders. They are managers. People are just another widget to them.
Chetan Murthy
@Urza: I’ve used teams thru a Cisco firewall VPN, to videoconf with people in the US and France, no problemo. No signs of bandwidth issues.
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Scott:
You handle the benevolent part. I’ll handle the punish parasites part.
MagdaInBlack
@Kay: And of course, Kay, they’ll pass that fine on to the customers.
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodingers_cat:
Anyone who’s read Siddhartha can tell you that!
Kayla Rudbek
@schrodingers_cat: yes! One of my favorite alternative history series is set in the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire under Justinian the Great (I.e. late 6th century) and about half of the action takes place in India. And there’s a lot of philosophy, so I would learn from your discussion about the Indian religious and philosophical background preceding the series
Chief Oshkosh
@The Thin Black Duke: Nah. Nekkid as a bluejay. That’s the legend, and anyway.
Kay
When they released the First Energy (federal) deferred prosecution agreement, a set of completely new crimes were discovered by the public –
Gin & Tonic
@Chetan Murthy: Try being a US citizen expat, working for a company with no US presence. You still owe US Federal income tax.
WaterGirl
@VeniceRiley: The matching person just put the $1,000 in, so within a small number of minutes we should be at 15,211!
Another Scott
@Urza: I don’t want to give too many details, but let me just say that It’s a huge, really big, Teams deployment. We don’t deal directly with MS at my level. It’s a well known problem in my organization – to the extent that we don’t even use one video camera in meetings of more than about 5 people. Screen sharing of PPTx slides by one person with dozens works fine.
The networking folks are convinced there’s no problem.
I assume there’s something weird in our larger organization’s case, but I’m not convinced it’s fixable given all the constraints. I was on a Teams call with someone at in another city recently and she said they had the same issues over VPN.
YMMV, and probably does!
Cheers,
Scott.
Steeplejack
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes, and the author’s name would be interesting, for starters.
oldster
Switching to remote work from here out is going to work well for some industries.
But remote teaching has been a disaster, for students and teachers alike. Not a viable substitute for in-person.
persistentillusion
@scav:
I’m a quarter Norwegian and those were all familiar faces. Kind of like visiting Minnesota and startling to see someone familiar you don’t know.
schrodingers_cat
@Steeplejack: Johannes Bronkhorst
The Trilogy is as follows
Greater Magadha
Buddhism in the Shadow of Brahminism
How the Brahmins won
Chetan Murthy
@Gin & Tonic: Yes, but that’s true regardless of where your company is located, or even if you work for a foreign government. This would be tax liability for -individuals- based on where they worked, or where their employer was based, or had facilities, or …. what?
Kay
@MagdaInBlack:
Oh, they planned to. The crime(s) are about bribing Ohio lawmakers and officials to pass a law that would collect 1 billion dollars from Ohio utility customers and give it to First Energy.
They didn’t even bribe them to pay the 1 billion out of existing state tax funding. They wanted a law that would add it to utility bills. They planned on the corrupt lawmakers staying bought, too. Part II of the plan was to have their crooks pass another law to end term limits.
raven
Fucking Peacock.
Sure Lurkalot
@Another Scott:
I worked for a man who often told me that he wanted to run his company like a benevolent dictatorship to which I would reply “don’t forget the benevolent part.” Which he pretty much did.
Chetan Murthy
@artem1s:
I remember either earlier here, or elsewhere, reading that munis that do this are making a *mistake*. Instead of “investing” to draw employers, they need to invest to draw workers: make it a great place to live, raise children, etc. And I agree with that analysis. I remember reading about Ferguson, MO, and how the big businesses there had massive tax incentives from the city that meant they paid nearly no taxes. So hey, the residents got to pay those taxes, via predatory policing regime that sucked them dry of every last possible cent.
Sure Lurkalot
@raven: How’s the pooch Artemis? I hope she is settling in to your home and hearts. She’s a beauty.
Villago Delenda Est
DING DING DING DING DING
sralloway
@schrodingers_cat: Yes. I am interested.
Sure Lurkalot
@raven: How’s the pooch Artemis? I hope she is settling in your home and hearts. She’s a beauty.
sralloway
@The Thin Black Duke: I did too as part of a pumpkin costume.
Dyed them orange (they were white). They were uncomfortably warm.
MagdaInBlack
@schrodingers_cat: These are books that I would /will read, so yes, please.
CaseyL
@Kayla Rudbek: Please, can you tell me the title of that book? It sounds right up my alley!
Florida Frog
@schrodingers_cat: yes, it certainly would. Please do. I was also taught the same explanation about the origins of Buddhism.
Kent
It’s blocked at my school district in Camas WA too. I can read the posts using Feedly but then I can’t comment unless I pull out a phone and use LTE instead of school WiFi. They must use the same internet filter.
School is one place where remote doesn’t work. Well, it works fine for about 20% of students who can handle the self-discipline of online learning. But a lot of kids really fall through the cracks. And it is really hard to teach science online, especially to kids who need a more tactile experience of labs.
WaterGirl
@Kay: You were in moderation for too many links.
different-church-lady
It’s all well and good to dump on middle managers who micro manage. But we are social animals, and productivity and innovation sometimes occurs more easily when the catalyst of in-person interaction is part of the process. I’ve seen it first hand. People can slave away in their garrets just as much as under the eye of a Scrooge. A mixture of remote and in-person is probably a good way to go in a hypothetical non-pandemic future.
Ruckus
There are obviously jobs that can not be done at home.
As I’ve stated here before, there is no way I can set up a machine shop in my apt. You couldn’t even get one of the machines through the door.
JaneE
Based on the type of work I did, I wouldn’t want to give up the office and in-person interaction completely, but it could easily be scheduled on an as needed basis. 20 years ago we were working remotely at least part of the time (mainly after hours). Zoom or whatever could handle almost all the interactions we needed to have, because we weren’t allowed to strangle people anyway. I would be very surprised if the people working in my old department weren’t more productive remotely than when they came to the office. I can remember lots of days when the productive part started at 5PM.
Technocrat
I left my previous company when the pandemic was just ramping up. A guy 3 cubicles away tested positive, and management didn’t notify anyone. I only found out because the person who was sick thought he ought to tell his cube-neighbor, and that person told everyone else. With all the uncertainty at the time, I didn’t feel I could trust management’s safety posture. Had to bail.
Because I didn’t want to work for someone who might arbitrarily decide to yank us all back into the office, I looked for a company that had been remote before COVID. Much like tinare at #68, my new coworkers are spread around the world, although my core team is all US-based.
What I’m finding is that there’s not really less socialization – in some ways there’s more. But it’s paced differently. In the office the pattern was work for a couple hours, someone stops by your cube to shoot the shit for a while, go back to work for an hour or so, someone else stops by, etc. If you really need a break, you visit someone in their cube.
At my new place, there’s no real demarcation between work and chat. Teams is a pretty steady stream of commentary, questions, emojis (I had to up my game in this area), and the occasional picture. It weaves into working such that I’m overall a lot more productive (software dev) but still feel connected.
Weirdly, I do miss the commute. I absolutely do not miss shoveling out my Pittsburgh driveway to begin said commute. Work/life balance really can be a problem. We have a couple of gung-ho types who seem to work 7 days a week, and it’s hard not to get drawn into their madness when Teams is an iPhone swipe away.
Steeplejack
@schrodingers_cat:
Thank you.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@James E Powell: Guess they heard about the nakid mopping.
sdhays
@Another Scott: I used to work for a large international organization, and we had horrible performance with Skype for Business here in the US, just for audio (they were far, far too backward to have introduced things like video conferencing in 2020 when I left the company). Things were fine in the UK, but there were also problems in other non-UK offices (it was a UK company, and for most of my time there, they really couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge the many offices outside the UK they had). After screwing around for over a year, they finally figured out that some settings on a piece of equipment in a certain connection point in Canada were not correct – dramatically incorrect. And then things got better.
Hopefully your networking folks are more competent/motivated so that you can actually believe them. But I wouldn’t.
raven
@Sure Lurkalot: She’s doing well. We took her to our Friday outside dinner gig and she enjoyed the attention and the treats. She’s very sensitive to sudden noises and movement but that’s understandable. I’m pretty sure we won’t keep her because the conventional wisdom is that she’ll end up a 60-65 lb pup and that’s too much for us.
Soprano2
@sab: You mean you can’t learn everything you need to know from a few You Tube videos? /s/s/s No one wants to pay for training anymore. We got a fancy new phone system and no training on it except a few videos. They think you can learn everything by Googling it.
I would hate working at home. I have no space for it and my husband is retired, so he’d be there all the time. I love going to the office and seeing people!
MagdaInBlack
@raven: While she is with you, she will learn what it is to be loved, and that’s a good thing.
Kayla Rudbek
@CaseyL: the Belisarius saga, by David Drake and Eric Flint six book epic (link to TVTropes)
raven
@MagdaInBlack: Yea, I knew it would be tempting and asked about what we would need to do if we wanted to keep her. We need to keep our heads and remember what a struggle it was to properly care for Bohdi down the stretch.
MagdaInBlack
I’m listening to Tucker worship Victor Orban and thinking of Adam’s post of the other day, and it’s making me a bit ill.
I watch Hal Sparks watch, so Tucker doesn’t get my clicks, Hal does.
Poe Larity
Speaking of bears, the honey bear of gentrification meets his end
“Guillotine All YIMBYs Since Honeybears Always Mean Eviction.”
sdhays
My company’s lease is up this month, and they’ve decided not to renew it. There was a plan to move us to a smaller space, but management decided that remote work has been going just fine and is a lot cheaper. We had the whole team in for one last hurrah this past week, and I got to meet most of the team for the first time in person (I started last year while the pandemic had already started, but I knew a couple people from working with them before). I really like working in the office. I like the separation from home distractions. I like the random interactions, both on a personal level and also getting a better feel for where everyone is coming from. I’m an introvert, but I like the social interaction at work, even if I’m not the type to head to the bar after work.
I really hope that we’re able to have at least a hybrid setup going forward a flexible office space, and hopefully we’ll be able to organize periodic events where the entire team gets together.
MagdaInBlack
@raven: I was thinking that she was gonna be bigger than the one I’m still crushed you took a pass on.
CaseyL
@Kayla Rudbek: Thanks! Not a big Eric Flint fan, but I might check it out.
Another Scott
@sdhays: At one virtual meeting early on they got a question about video camera issues and said something like:
“We’ve got plenty of bandwidth. We’re only using XX% of the maximum; in fact, we’re using less bandwidth than we were before the pandemic!”
I wanted to follow-up with “Um, almost nobody was using video cameras pre-pandemic, isn’t that a sign that there’s a problem??” but of course the meeting moved on to something else before I could even think about it…
Thanks. I may try one more time to be the squeaky wheel…
Cheers,
Scott.
raven
@MagdaInBlack: We’ve got to be realistic. I’ll be 72 and I’m having mobility issues. We need a doggie we can both handle to be fair to all parties.
MagdaInBlack
@raven: I get it. I know I couldn’t handle a dog. This is why I live vicariously off those of others, like you
randy khan
I may be in the minority, but I like being in the office. There’s a lot about what I do that’s easier if I can have casual interactions with my coworkers.
And, frankly, all the petty bureaucracy stuff doesn’t seem to go away – if anything it seems to be worse as the people in charge think they need to check in on us more because they don’t see us in person.
J R in WV
@Another Scott:
I see your problem from here. MS tools. Wrong, never use a MS tool if there’s any other choice. Even a tool from a tiny company in Macao would be a better bet than a MS tool.
No amount of bandwidth will help a tool that isn’t capable of working at all.
sdhays
@Another Scott: Like any bug in a dynamic system, it requires persistence. It’s really irritating hearing things like “welp, it’s not the bandwidth, so what do you expect us to do?”. “Ok, it’s not the bandwidth. Then WHAT IS IT?”
From what I heard, once someone was actually assigned to really chase the problem at my old company, they figured it out in a matter of days, after subjecting all the employees in North America to almost unusable service for months. If your company is anything like my old company, someone checked a few easy things and didn’t see anything wrong and decided that it was someone else’s problem. That was their typical MO.
raven
Up 5 at the half, let’s see this brain trust figure Gobert out!
The Pale Scot
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes
Another Scott
ObOpenThread – Re: the Denver cops threatening to quit.
(click to see a couple of images)
A table shows 194 “Line of Duty” deaths of their officers. 92 of those deaths are from COVID-19.
Umm…
“Being a cop is incredibly dangerous, so they need qualified immunity!! Just look at how many died ‘On Duty’!!1”
(via Popehat)
Cheers,
Scott.
Yutsano
I have to be back in my office*. The nature of my work requires me to have in person interactions with taxpayers. While there is work that I can do remotely, and I’m quite good at it, it is not the main requirements of my job. Plus more often than not I like interacting with people and my co-worker. My office only has the two of us and we work together really well. It would be hard for me to be remote only as that changes the whole characteristics of my work. So count me in as needing to return to an office environment.
*granted right now I’m on medical leave. Internal injuries suck.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Major Major Major Major: Speaking as an hourly who has to come into work, keeping the power game players out of the building as much as possible really improves the productivity of the work day.
RamRos
@schrodingers_cat: Yes!
Shalimar
@schrodingers_cat: Very interested
VeniceRiley
@Watergirl Great work! Yay!
@raven Dad used to love it when a local therapy group brought dogs or cats to the Veterans Skilled Nursing facility. The staff took pictures… and they put them up in his hospital room to see. He loved pets and he and his harridan 3rd wife would rescue abandoned by movers. It was her one redeeming quality.
TallTom
@Another Scott: MS-Teams is a memory hog. When we went remote, we had a lot of trouble with Teams sessions crashing until we doubled the memory on our laptops. All of the problems with Teams went away. No more issues.
piratedan
@CaseyL: IIRC Flint is one of the real lefties writing alternative history fiction when he was in the Baen shop, but I’ve kind of lost touch with the publishing house over the last decade. One bonus in their corner, they were the first ones to give Bujold a shot and she is simply awesome (imho/ymmv)
raven
@VeniceRiley: Those dogs require incredible training.
raven
Bring it home USA!
Lyrebird
@Eolirin:
Thanks for the useful comments!
@raven:
More credit to you. I am so sick of distance learning. Best wishes to the pup btw!
I think Zoom and teleconferencing tech have done a great job teaching us all how much better it is, at least for some conversations, to have people in the same room. I would also guess that the author of the article is not the main person parenting small children right now. My mommy friends are pretty much all desperate to get back to FT at the office.
Lyrebird
@The Thin Black Duke:
Depends on one’s build. For some bodies it’s more comfortable to wear one than not. Not just my opinion… I think some other folks said the same when Cole was asking about loafing around clothing.
VeniceRiley
@raven: Then I am grateful to their handlers! He loved pets and he loved those days. He had a Vietnam era roommate named Kenny with a long matted up beard and three missing limbs and not much brains left either, but he was always cheerful with an enthusiastic HIIII! And I’d get him cokes and Diet Pepsi for dad and stock up the supplies in the closet.
Dad and the witch would have maybe 6 or 7 rescues at a time back when.
Cathie from Canada
“What the hell is wrong with you? I have people skills! I talk to the goddamned customers so the engineers don’t have to!”
Another Scott
@TallTom: In our case, it seems to be confined to video cameras. The video will suddenly lock up and the connection will drop and the person using video will have to reconnect and try again. Everything else is fine.
MS says that video should require no more than 4 Mbit/s; no more than screen sharing. Since just about every home network connection is at least 10 Mbit/s upload, it’s hard to believe that it’s on the home user’s end. Presumably the people spending months preparing for and rolling out the software looked at that page of recommendations. ;-)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Cathie from Canada: That’s such a funny movie.
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
Late to another great thread.
I want to read the comments more closely later.
A few quick thoughts.
Interesting that there is a sentiment that remote work might easily be accommodated, but remote education should be avoided. I think both can work.
I think some surveys indicated that remote workers had fewer disruptions than other workers. Not only did pay and employment continue, but remote workers tended to regularly receive wages. “Essential workers” suffered more layoffs and wage disruptions and felt the sting of income inequality more harshly. The result may have been a widening gap between lower income workers and other income groups. This may not be easily remedied by a $15 per hour minimum wage.
I have worked remotely for more than two years. The company has tried to adapt management style to deal with an almost totally remote work force. I have also discovered that there are people who prefer remote work and have adapted to that work style. They have favored headsets and other equipment that they use and optimize their home work spaces for remote work.
Tax laws were changed in 2017 to disallow most home office deductions. Ironic as hell. We may also need to rethink some rules for people who live in one state or country and work remotely elsewhere.
raven
@VeniceRiley: AW, that’s sweet.
Hob
@Poe Larity: I can’t stand Fnnch, but Gay Shame (at least, the current little club of aggro posers using that name around here) can go fuck themselves. Putting posters around my old neighborhood claiming they were going to beat people up for looking like yuppies (no such attacks happened of course, this was their idea of cleverly scaring people away while presumably enjoying creeping everyone out in general), and having the hilarious grandiosity to use the tagline “A Virus in the System”, because as we all know, the best way to be subversive and provocative is to just say that you are.
raven
Like, France cuts it to 3 with 10 secs to go.
JCJ
@raven: I am stressing!
raven
@JCJ: I was till KD stepped up.
raven
And KD ices it! USA, USA!!!!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Another Scott:
Could be, if their spouse and kids are also doing remote work/school.
karen marie
@schrodingers_cat: Yes.
Brachiator
I get the impression that google and Microsoft “improved” their remote meeting products more for the enterprise market than for the education market, but even here I am not certain how substantial or meaningful these enhancements were.
Laptop reviews often complain about the quality of laptop cameras, and yet there seems to be no attempt to address this issue.
ETA. Anyone using the new T-Mobile Home Internet product?
Interstadial
@Another Scott: We just upgraded our internet and we now get around 7 Gb/s download. I just did a test and got 2.5 for an upload. Before the upgrade we used to get no more than 3 as a download. Yeah, we have a crummy neighborhood for internet.
My last few years of work I teleworked one day per week without Zoom, just conference calls. The telework days were great for productivity and were a lot less wear and tear on me, but I could not work on documents remotely thanks to internet latency and the occasional crashes it would cause. I had to work on a separate copy and then send it to work at the end of the day.
Calling into meetings was an exercise in frustration. Because I was too nice and didn’t interrupt others, I sometimes didn’t get a comment in. I hope that with Zoom and better internet these kinds of problems are resolved.
I also missed the in-person collaboration of being in the office but I sure didn’t miss the distractions and interruptions. In the end, I felt that half my days in the office and half at home would have been a good compromise.
JCJ
@raven: An amazing 2 1/2 weeks for Jrue Holiday and Khris Middleton.
Another Scott
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Yeah, but that’s not what’s happening based on our experiences – e.g. people alone in their apartments…
Doing some more searching around, it seems to be a common problem and there may be some different things to try and possible diagnostic tools.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
karen marie
@Another Scott: I transcribe remote depos, most of them on Zoom, a handful on MS Teams. Could just be the individuals had better equipment or connections but all the Teams depos were technically much better than most of the Zooms.
karen marie
@scav: Wonderful!
While over there I came across this:
Until about six months ago, I’d had my 11-year-old spaniel on a limited ingredient diet. I’d had my previous spaniels on a LID as well. My boy had heart disease but I have no idea if it was DCM. My current dog is on a prescription diet to improve her gut health because of weird gastric issues unrelated to the LID, and her heart – as far as any vet has said – is fine.
VeniceRiley
In regards to remote work: I can tell you first hand it is an intense burden on the IT Department. It’s frying us like Covid fries icu staff in hospitals. Webex is what we use as it is very secure for healthcare that is crucial.
We were going to bring people back to office but that is definitely delta delayed. I’m proud of how well we did getting patient video visits and remote work for so many up and running. But I’m happy to go to the office every day. I have my spot 99% alone, and glad of it, as I get nervous even going down to the clinic to pick up inter office mail. And I gave every janitorial a very nice bottle at the beginning of all this and thanked them for keeping us safe. Now they call me by my name.
Brachiator
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
My sister’s husband has had a home office for years. They had to improvise a second setup for my sister when she started doing remote work.
Their son continues to do remote work at his apartment. Sometimes he spends a long weekend with his parents and brings his laptop and works remotely from there on Monday.
Yutsano
Yeah that was dumb. I’m not even sure why the Republicans bothered to make this much trickery to get the rich and corporations their sweet sweet tax cuts. They certainly didn’t care about the hole they blew in the budget even after the massive revenue loss became apparent.
LesGS
@schrodingers_cat: Yes!
LeftCoastYankee
The last year plus has made it imminently clear that most people have no idea how things work, or even how “working correctly” would even look.
Corporations (particularly publicly traded ones) are functionally/legally compelled to make more money for their shareholders in the next 3 months x forever and ever. The idea that people who are deemed “competent leaders” at achieving this goal are in turn “making shit work”, is ridiculous.
Building a warm house is much harder than warming your hands by burning it down.
Kent
I spent 3 years working remotely as a consultant in the early 2000s. I was living in Texas and doing 1099 work for my old agency in Alaska.
The old home office rules were hugely abused and rife for abuse. I was able to calculate the square footage of my home office and deduct all kinds of ridiculous stuff like a percentage of yard maintenance and landscaping expenses. If the home office was 15% of the house then I could deduct 15% of things like yard service. It was a black hole of tax evasion.
Legit businesses should pay for home office expenses so you don’t need to deduct them. Or if you are doing 1099 work then your billings should cover expenses.
Brachiator
@Kent:
This is not relevant to my point. Under current law, employees cannot deduct any home office expenses. The old rules still apply to self-employed persons.
frosty
I’m gonna add my two cents about working from home. I hate it. I don’t have a good space for it and there are way too many distractions. I retired just before COVID hit so I didn’t have to deal with it, fortunately. In the Before Times, though, when I had tight deadlines and had to work over the weekend, I would drive the 20 miles to the office on a Saturday to work in my cubicle. That’s how much I disliked working at home!
frosty
@raven:
You’re making the right decision. Fifteen years ago when I was in my 50s, our 80-pound German Shepherd gave me tennis elbow from walking her. I couldn’t do that now.
I’m glad to see you’re fostering. We gave it some thought a couple of years ago but decided it wouldn’t work out with the amount of traveling we want to do.
Hang in there.
Yutsano
Uh…
Did we get left alone?
prostratedragon
@schrodingers_cat: I would also be interested.
Barry
@schrodingers_cat: I would appreciate this, also.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@schrodingers_cat: Looking forward to it!
I’m also interested in how Buddhist influences passed through China, influencing Chinese thought traditions like Taoism. So fascinating!
Miss Bianca
@The Thin Black Duke: As a (big-chested) gal, I’m astonished that you seem to know so many women who are apparently *more* comfortable going bra-less than not.
J R in WV
@schrodingers_cat:
I took one class in the history of religion of southern Asia, with 6 or 7 not huge books to read for that course. Professor was a PhD in religion and theology at a liberal arts college that had big science majors as well. Fascinating to me.
That field is so huge, though, that a 3 hour survey course could only barely touch on many of the topics…
Also, that was in 1968-69, so a very long time ago. Still have some of the texts. If you would, could provide links to on line resources that you regard as quality work that would be wonderful. I’m sure there is lots of good information out there, but also, just like here in the English speaking west, lots of mostly fiction to build up a specific group or individual.
Anonymous At Work
This article does a great job of showing out more than a few upper-levels at my workplace and is why I left a previous employer in a city I loved.
My current work either is taking me more into their realms or their quests for relevance/CYA is taking them into my realm. And it’s becoming clearer to more people just how much they love to hold large meetings, then small meetings, then smaller meetings, to reconvene into larger meetings, all without deciding or doing anything themselves (they hire consultants to do that), while just drawing out timelines for projects.
It’d be funnier if I wasn’t looking at another 6 months without visiting family and needing a true vacation.
lowtechcyclist
@artem1s:
I know it’s a dead thread (I’ve never understood the logic of an interesting conversation in blog comments coming to an end simply because there are new posts, but be that as it may), but at least over time, there’s a simple solution to this. A lot of people without kids like living downtown. And as more people telework full-time, employers will need less space, and will be eager to pay rent on less space. There’s going to be a metric ton of what’s now downtown office space getting converted to residential, and people will take advantage of that. There’s your new tax base.
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist: +1
J R should be along shortly to close the comments.
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.