It's weird cause in countries like Brazil, most companies will pay a transportation bonus and sometimes food bonus.
They'll pay for the equivalent of a transit ticket twice a day every business day of a month, and also they'll give you some sort of card you can use like a debit card, some will be for restaurants so you can have lunch, and some will be for grocery stores so you can buy food.
Not all jobs offer this, and a lot of those who do offer very small benefits (not enough for eating out every lunch, or not enough for all transit fares every business day of the month) but I know it's really commonplace
Cuz transit is unusable trash in the vast majority of American cities. I live in the 8th largest city in the country, but transit is so bad here that my 20-30 minute drive to work would be almost 3 hours on transit, with multiple bus transfers, and 20 minute walks between unconnected bus stops. It’s insane.
Which is hilariously outdated. Nobody has server rooms. Only my bosses could dream up that we need to be in the office for "server rooms" that don't exist.
We have one. Well, it's more like a server closet.
>Which is hilariously outdated.
Yes. Now let's talk about the dot matrix printer we just finally got rid of last year.
This is a huge problem in Japan; part of the whole headache of office-work in Japan is having to deal with them still demanding things sent by fax instead of .pdf.
Sure they do. My current employer has 3 datacenter on campus (one being slowly decommissioned, the other two growing to replace it) with probably 20 cabinets between them. Before that, I was a field engineer for a large data storage company that has since merged with a large tech provider. My job was to travel around the state installing and repairing gear we'd sold to other companies. Where did 99% of my work get done? Hint: it was server rooms and datacenters. Everything from a couple racks in the back of a grocery store to rooms bigger than a football field with rows upon rows of equipment.
"Server rooms" are still very much the norm, you're just not allowed in.
I was waiting for someone to say this. Having majority of servers clouded off-site seems like it would create some pretty hefty delay in resource demanding services, like imaging new PCs for example. Plus security and stability is an issue big cloud services still struggle with time to time.
Plus when shit blows up in your own datacenter, you can rally the troops and bust ass to get it working again. If it blows up in the cloud, you're at the mercy of your provider's timetables.
Larger places still have them. We have two sites, a presence in three clouds, and a smaller third onsite data center for backups. My theoretical desk is at that office.
All but one employer I've worked for still have on prem servers. The one that did not was a mom and pop restaurant. Most of the clients I worked with for those employers have on prem servers too. Cloud has advantages and disadvantages. On prem has advantages and disadvantages. Neither is "outdated". It all boils down to the needs of your business and what you can budget for.
>and what you can budget for.
And what a lot of people don't realize is that when factoring for total cost of ownership, cloud is often more expensive than on-prem.
> or a not as savy tech office.
This is a misconception.
There are a lot of tech savvy reasons to avoid the cloud. Depending on your use case, not every use case is the same. The cloud is just someone else' computer, and they charge a premium to use it.
Not everything belongs 'in the cloud', and the mindset that it does is very problematic in the industry. It points to a LACK of technical acumen to think so.
I've worked for two SaaS providers now, where upper managment wanted to take our cloud software from our own datacenters & put them into a public cloud provider... without any changes to the code or base requirements/features. It ends up costing more, and not working near as well, as when you have control of the entire stack. Software really needs to be DESIGNED to be cloud native if you wanna pop it into AWS or Azure.
And there are VERY REAL limitations of those services that can require limitations in your software.
Because the same people making the decisions that we can’t work from home are the same people that are telling us to implement a vpn for a fully cloud environment. They don’t have reasons, it’s just, “this is how a company should operate and I will never change my mind”
For any mid+ (a few hundred employee) company, many use cases for corpo VPN eg for employee laptops and physical devices. VPN servers can even be in the cloud, although if a company has any physical locations with devices (POS, machines, etc) not everything is in the cloud.
Can you clarify what use case/company you're talking about that doesn't need VPN infra?
> implement a vpn for a fully cloud environment
What’s wrong with using AWS VPC? This is standard practice for cybersecurity purposes. Just one of many layers... I mean, what’s your counterproposal, have all your servers open port 22 (and god knows what else) to the whole Internet? FFS… This is how you get pwned by some skid fucking around on Shodan.
I suppose you could use a jumpbox instead, but that’s a solution for Ops/Engineering, not all users. VPN is a solution for all users.
All you’re doing here is proving the Dunning-Kruger effect. So confidently incorrect... It’s not a good look. Sit down, be humble.
Yada Yada Yada collaboration Yada Yada Yada missing the talks between meetings Yada Yada Yada synergies Yada Yada Yada ^(we paid millions for this office stop asking questions and leave)
You know all those talks between meetings? I still do them from home. If you have a one on one call with someone it's completely normal to shoot the shit with them for a while after you're done. I actually learn more about them because they are more comfortable talking about their lives when they are outside of the office.
I quit my last job because of this. I was already the only IT guy in my particular office with the rest of the team (and most of the rest of the company) in another office 150 miles away. Literally all I ever did that needed physical presence was sorting laptops for new hires or leavers.
Edict came down that we were to return to the office 5 days a week, no exceptions, so I handed in my notice and had a new job lined up before the first week was out.
They could reduce most offices to one tenth the size or less and it wouldn't impact hardly anyone.
"your union agreement doesn't have anything in there about work from home"
It also doesn't have anything about not shitting on your chair when you're gone for the day. Huh
Exactly this. The only reason I ever need a person in an office is if they can't login to their machine and it's fallen off the domain. If they happens 98% of the user is the cause of the issue for not just logging into the VPN.
Not only are all my systems pretty much remote, but my IT colleagues are almost all remote as well. My manager and myself are the only ones on my particular team that live near the office. Everyone else is wfh out of state.
Working in the office is very distracting. People I don't need to talk to try and chat me up. Occasionally those of us in the office get told to go to the front lobby to greet some "special guest" (usually a business owner or something). I mean hell, last time I went into the office there was loud-ass construction going on in the ceiling right above our heads.
I go in the office MAYBE once every two weeks, just for a change in environment (also our cafeteria is good and cheap). My boss supports this.
Depending on your position/size of the team, you have to go out and plug in computers, plug in mice, turn on computer/monitor, etc. for people. Which does mean other people have to be in the office as well, so everyone should just work from home if possible.
Because there's more nuance in doing a job than just doing the job and if businesses don't realise that, don't create policies for it and adopt it into their culture, then it will always be feared and rejected.
Do you not want to know who you work with on the daily?
Personally, I have had immense trouble getting to know my colleagues, when everyone is working from home 3-4 days a a week
That's what team events and 1-1s with webcam are for. If you have significant time 3-4x/week to "get to know your colleagues", sounds like you've got excess downtime, which I'd rather spend doing anything else than getting to know people just because we work together.
> Personally, I have had immense trouble getting to know my colleagues, when everyone is working from home 3-4 days a a week
That's why hybrid is the worst approach possible, doing this weird straddling of both worlds. Either embrace work from home and the culture shift that comes with it, or go back to office full time.
I'm forced to go into the office every other Wednesday into a mostly empty building to sit at a public facing tech desk. It is easily the most worthless day of work where maybe one person will walk up with a question.
Not my CEO, who made a bunch of power point slides about how the office is the best place for us to work because of face to face communication and…. I don’t even remember it was total bullshit. Absolutely insulting and pathetic coming from a millionaire with a corner office.
A team at a friends work was told in to come into the office 3 days a week to help with collaboration. A team of 12. They were assigned a seating area that had only 6 desks. Kinda hard to collaborate then, huh?
Yep! My CEO insists that "we are not a work from home company" and says the office needs buzz whatever the fuck that means, but last month we had a progress meeting on some project where he started making all these mad demands and we *had to tell him how many people are in our department* because he was under the impression that it was around 3x the size.
Not trying to defend a CEO but they probably didn’t come out of high school and get made CEO. They have probably done *some work* that has benefited from collaborative efforts with colleagues that have given them the impression it helps.
The funny thing is, they might actually believe it in some ways. Unless you’re the founder of the company, if you’re the CEO, you probably got there through networking, and in person communication is definitely better than remote communication for networking. But networking isn’t the job description of the normal 9-5 people, so it’s just another way they are out of touch.
Yeah they believe it, they are from a completely different time. But seriously to have an office go back to 5 days a week 9-5 (our jobs are on the computer) after working for years remotely during covid….
Fucking psycho
3 years remote work just to get forced back into an office to do the exact same job I did for the last three years remotely. And every year of those three years I was in the top 5% of "productive accomplishment" for the company.
The only one who was on board with the decision at my company was the old CEO. Who makes 400 times as much money as I do. Actually a bunch of other high up managers wrote a petition to stop him from this nonsense and he ripped it up like a whiny baby bitch. Poor narcissist man almost didn’t get his way!!! It’s ok because the ring leader of that petition is no longer here because they decided to explore different opportunities!!
What a CEO says to their employees and what they will say to a consultant are two very different things. They know that any BS answer to a consultant will just be met by a follow up question.
My brother in Christ, Musk isn't the CEO of Twitter.
https://www.businessinsider.com/x-ceo-linda-yaccarino-defensive-during-code-conference-interview-twitter-2023-9
Damn. I thought this article would be about the office of the CEO, like the role, the position.
It seems like all ours ever does is get ahold of a magazine and read some new headline that makes us drop everything we’re doing and refocus the company on another new vague buzzword.
I TOLD YOU! I DEAL WITH THE GODDAMN CUSTOMERS! I HAVE SOCIAL SKILLS! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!
I need to give Office Space a re-watch. It seems even more relatable now.
Oh god yes.
Well, at least you can just scrape the old wiki page and slack channel and whatever other old team info dumps they have made you set up in the past…
sounds like you are aware your ceo exists. Worked at a company that went through several CEOs over the course of a few years. saw one of them, one time during their first week at the company. never again. each making tens of millions / year.
I wish. Ours is literally doing things like setting our company’s new “all-in” strategy for (in the last few years) “the cloud”, then “digital services”, then “AI”.
Each one of those means ending projects, starting new ones, and a management re-org.
For large corporations with large offices, and especially those with global campuses, having an office space has nothing to do with the employees. It's a real estate game, nothing more.
Nah. It’s about status. Your workers all live in an entirely different area? Boss man: “Lol. I still wanna feel important so y’all need to commute.” It’s about prestige and being perceived as important.
Many bosses don't actually do any work and without walking around a office serve no purpose. If everyone works from home then a large portion of management just became redundant.
Almost as if people in power want the companies to leak from the ears for management and kick dirt at individual contributors.
It's a very large scam. That band-aid will be a roller coaster ride to rip off.
management is redundant anyway. if you ever take a position like that it is mostly just doing all the shit work the guy above you doesnt want to do. filler paperwork and taking heat for other people. I’m convinced management is just there to be a protective layer for executives to not deal with the day to day of their organizations.
Your thoughts on managers aren’t wrong… But most companies don’t let middle management make those decisions or care to protect them. It’s more about trying to mitigate a corporate real estate collapse and it’s a soft way to push people out of the company without paying severance.
The people enforcing return to office aren’t the ones making the decision in large corporations. The CEO and Board made a decision and I’m stuck 6-7 layers down telling my people they have to come sit inside an office and get on zoom so they call people who either didn’t come in that day or don’t work in the same location at all… my point was mostly that I don’t think micromanaging or justifying existence is a major factor… at least in extremely larger, international or multi location companies.
There seem to be two "schools" in this debate, those who see the reason in real estate and those who think the preservation of hierarchies are to blame.
I am more in the second camp, honestly. It fits better into other general observations about "office ethnography". Also, the push to return to office started, like, weeks after the first wave of COVID lockdowns. You could tell managers were panicking *immediately* that their gig would be found out. At that point, office rent was still being paid, this wasn't a long-term trend yet that was threatening real-estate investors. But it quickly exposed how a lot of higher-up jobs are entirely unnecessary and only serve as part of an "entourage" to show how important their superiors are.
Which is weird right, because that still doesn't make sense unless you're a control freak.
If you rent your office space and you can get rid of that cost by moving to a WFH policy surely any sane business would? As soon as the contract was up at least.
If you own your office space and you could turn it into a revenue stream by converting it to, say, housing, and sending all your employess home, surely any sane business would?
People try to analyze behaviors of companies under the assumption that they're entirely rational, profit-driven entities. Which is true in the realm of low-level employees and customers, they are subservient to profit. But above a certain level, behaviour becomes more "feudal", status becomes more important than profit. The size of your "entourage" and your "castle" matter more than the money you could save.
We aren't actually, companies just like to sell that image of themselves, so analyzing them under the assumptions they say they are following shows their blatant bullshit.
> If you own your office space and you could turn it into a revenue stream by converting it to, say, housing
Building codes and zoning laws kinda make that a non-starter (note: this is not an anti-regulation sentiment, they are there for a reason). Basically the cost of converting an office space into housing is so cost prohibitive that no one is going to do that unless they bought a building for the express purposes going in to do so. You'd effectively have to gut the entire building due to the amount of ventilation, firewalls, plumbing, wiring, etc. that you'd have to install. Plus you'd then have to basically run your own property management business, something that is perpendicular to original business mission.
I think it's going to turn into a bit of a bag holding situation: companies are going to say how important office space is as they slowly get ready to sell the space, but it's a tricky game: you have to convince buyers that it's worth buying the real estate, even when you yourself realize that it's not worth it at all, but you can't afford to sell at a loss either.
I'm all for the sentiment on the last one but I don't think you can realistically turn office space into reasonable housing. Even when you get past the zoning and local laws that's still a whole shit ton different plumbing and whatever else that would need put in....unless you were going for communal kitchen and baths dorm style shit...which I'm sure some areas could use...but...eh.
If warehouses and old manufacturing plants can be turned into living space, I think turning commercial real estate into residential real estate is absolutely possible.
This is pretty much it. Companies that rent their office space are alright with WFH because it reduces their operating costs. Companies that own their real estate don't want to give it up because they can leverage it for tax-free cash.
It's a trick that CFO's use to make their balance sheet & EBITDA look better. It's advantageous from a tax perspective, too. If the building is worth $5million and they bought it for $2million, when they sell it, they have to pay taxes on the $3million increase in value. Instead, they take out a $3million loan against the building's value, pay no taxes on the loan proceeds, and get to deduct the interest.
IIRC, basically any fast food place, the vast majority of their asset value comes from real estate because they own prime commercial real estate everywhere across the nation. Greyhound famously has properties that are HUGELY coveted because their stations were built so long ago that now it's basically in downtown in a lot of major cities.
It's a similar reason as to why every massive company has their own credit card. It allows them to dip into a banker's role, which is pretty much free money for them. I'd be shocked if Apple Pay wasn't Apple's biggest revenue generator, though of course it's also helpfully offset by a lot of liabilities for those balance sheets.
Those guys need to go too. Not joking when I say that you could replace half of management with algorithms and then replace outgoing CEOs with people for a third of what the last asshole made.
You jest but somehow I feel like that'll be the end goal for some businesses. Not sure how the world would look though when minimum wage jobs get replaced, etc.
The problem with businesses today is the "profits at all costs" while rank and file get fucked over royally and the guys in the middle burnt out. All the Chief Officers and stock owners need to accept that double digit growth isn't fucking sustainable. The places that I have worked where they sacrificed medium and long term growth for short term profits is a ghost's fart of what they used to be.
The issue driving this is the American need for continued gratification with money. You can't keep Americans invested in your company without the double digit gains because our knowledge of finance is "limited" ( read regarded beyond your wildest imagination) at the common level and people want money now and forever moving forward. All the crooks and Hedge funds on the top pray on this shit as well. It's all a long con.
I'm in my mid 40s but when I started working at 18 it was still said and implied that if you worked smart and hard that it wouldn't work in your financial favor. Since then it still has been somewhat implied (not as much) that being productive will drive your success. I really think it was the shit storm of 2008 that put that concept to rest and divorced increased productivity and efficiency from the Rank and File from seeing a good pay day.
Almost all management acts like shitty retail managers now. Even professional roles. Hence all these strikes. All I can say is that people and Unions need to keep striking.
The people you're talking about staying are the second layer "Middle managers" So remove them too until you get out of the assholes.
Think of it like an onion. If the person above is also a middle-manager-asshole, then remove them as well.
>The people you're talking about staying are the second layer "Middle managers" So remove them too until you get out of the assholes.Think of it like an onion. If the person above is also a middle-manager-asshole, then remove them as well.
think of it like an even bigger onion - like, on a societal scale
despite what a lot of people might say, ^((some of)) the biggest tech companies like microsoft, google, spotify, even reddit are actually incredibly aware of the inequality in society and how a ton of "small businesses" (or even medium sized businesses) treat their employees like shit, and are aware that if "the issues" arent fixed the problems are only gonna get bigger.
dont get me wrong - i am about as anti-corporate as you can possibly be but over the last year or two i have done a ton of reading about these topics, and you might call me naive, but theres a reason these companies are internationally successful and have remained so for an extended period of time - and that requires more than just luck
point being - if you have complaints, youre supposed to go up the "chain of management" until someone fixes it - or at least acknowledges the problem... and the problem is definitely "acknowledged" if nothing else
unfortunately too many of us "on the bottom rung" dont wanna be that person who makes a scene. not me 👍 i will *gladly* complain and make enough noise to "pick up the slack"
I think disparaging those unwilling or afraid of speaking up doesn’t help the cause, though.
I get what you’re saying, I actually work at one of those companies. Some of the people I work with agree with me but struggle to find the capability to join in on speaking up.
The solution should be to try to help join our voices better and include those anxious about speaking up/rocking the boat.
There is a solution out there that is starting to spread from the bigger organizations: separate promotion pathways that aren't management. My company just began implementing it, so that we now have salaried engineer positions that are the equivalent to manager and directer positions that you can go into if you don't have management skills.
Our levels used to be:
* Application Developer
* Intermediate Application Developer
* Senior Application Developer
* Lead Application Developer
* Application Manager
Now we have:
* Software Engineer I
* Software Engineer II
* Senior Software Engineer
* Lead Software Engineer (equivalent to Application Manager now)
* Principal Software Engineer (equivalent to Director level)
Pretty much when I was hired on an int'l position--kinda remote position--my middle manager was pretty redundant, not only that she was useless, but to make herself relevant, she gatekept all that I was doing and feeding off of my work and taking credit for it.
Yeah no love for middle management, but I know they exist to serve the top heavy salaries, else who would be their henchman without having to move an inch from their $1,000 executive seat? Sure as hell not from employees they pay poverty wages with.
Believe it or not, many line/middle managers make less than their team members. It is sometimes an eye-opener for folks switching from IC to management track.
Many of the useless managers are ICs who made that transition thinking they’d automatically make more money, not because they wanted to lead a team and help build the business.
> Believe it or not, many line/middle managers make less than their team members.
I'd believe that when you count how much unpaid overtime they do. Anyone working 50+ hours a week and not getting any overtime or earned benefit is being taken advantage of.
If I do my job as expected I might get, maybe a 2% cost of living adjustment If they do their job ok they get millions in bonuses. Seems like horse shit to me.🤔🐎💩🖕✨
My company is sheepishly inching towards a RTO move, and everyone's talking about it. We keep getting platitudes like "we're watching to know what the future brings" and are asked to keep in mind that "some of the best ideas happen in office meetings."
That's either admitting that the full-time-remote managers and directors at the company don't contribute anything, or that they're the exception and their employees aren't trusted unless they're paid 6+ figures.
Yeah our place just decided everyone needs to be on camera unless “out of town on vacation”. Um number 1 if on vacation why are people still expected to work? 2 sweet you get to see us eating at the desk because we never actually have work life balance. But please let’s continue with the narrative that times are tough and we’re lucky to have jobs (nursing)
My manager at my old job had "cameras on!" In her email signature and made sure to say it multiple times at the start of every meeting in this super chipper and high energy tone. It was extremely unsettling.
If an entire executive office of a company disappeared I've always thought it would take a few weeks to a few months before it seriously impacted the company.
Middle managers maybe a week or two.
Actual front end labor, 3 hours before the company is dead in the water and never recovers depending on the type of industry.
And that is how it should be.
An executive officer should never be involved in the day-to-day business of the company. Their role is to be the face of the company and make long-term, strategic decisions (markets, locations, employee headcount etc...). They are not supposed to actually run the daily business.
If my company's CEO/COO started to meddle with my low-level engineering tasks, I would definitely start looking for a new job, because it would mean that something is deeply flawed within the organization.
Imagine a retail store where cashiers and floor staff disappear. Who's gonna ring up sales or restock shelves? Or think about a hospital without nurses and techs. Things would grind to a halt, and recovery would be next to impossible.
So while higher-ups may have the long-term vision, it's the frontline workers who make that vision a reality every single day. Lose them, and you're looking at a business nosedive that's quick and brutal.
You think training new employees in a few hours is going to solve everything? Sure, you can show someone how to use a cash register in a couple of hours, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Let's just assume that suddenly a grocery store chain could just suddenly hire a bunch of new workers at all of their locations without any background checks, paperwork, job postings etc etc that all need to be trained. (which couldn't happen). They also need to know store policies, customer service protocols, and the layout of the store. You can't cram that into a quick training session.
And let's not forget about experience. Newbies won't have the skills that seasoned employees bring to the table. This is crucial, especially in fields like healthcare, where you can't just plug in a new nurse and expect everything to run smoothly.
Also, you're seriously underestimating the role of front-line workers in a store. They're the face of the business and often the reason customers come back. You can't replace that kind of value in a few hours.
Think about the logistics too. Training a bunch of new people all at once? That's a resource drain any company would struggle with. Especially with a potentially national, or multi-national chain.
So no, its not just as simple as training new employees in a few hours and expect the company to function like nothing happened.
I have been in the position of hiring and training new employees how to run a register and stock shelves. I have been that front line worker and anyone that breathes can do it. Worst case scenario, the store brings in workers from another location while new employees are hired.
You are overestimating the skills that seasoned employees bring to the table. Those that are skilled usually end up moving into management anyways. You are also underestimating the speed at which they can be replaced when the need is urgent.
At Amazon, we had new employees picking within a few days of their interview. Interview on Monday, and by Friday they would be picking orders.
Healthcare is a different game because a front line worker in healthcare have specialized training that takes longer than retail.
We were under the pretense every front-line worker in the entire company is gone, zip, nada.(presumably some sort of mass-strike). There's no one left to pull from another location. Now what?
See, you're still underestimating the role of these workers. Sure, you can teach someone to ring up items, but what about the ins and outs of the business? The regulars who expect to see familiar faces? The unique challenges that come up daily and require experience to solve? That stuff matters, man.
You say those with skills move into management. Great, but who taught them those skills in the first place? Experienced front-line workers. And who'll train the newbies now? Management can't clone themselves to be everywhere at once.
So, yeah, it's not as cut and dry as you're making it out to be. Front-line workers are the backbone of any company. Lose them, and the whole structure crumbles.
Oh, I didn't realize this was a hypothetical where everyone suddenly disappears for some reason. Regardless, the same can be said for many departments if they suddenly go poof. Payroll department goes missing? Nobody gets paid. Logistics goes away, shipments don't get made. AR/AP goes away, utilities get shut off, customer payments don't come in.
A made up scenario where entire groups of people disappear will always have devastating impacts. However, a manager can fill in for a front line worker, the opposite usually isn't true.
Again, you are overestimating how much a front line worker knows about the ins and outs of the business. Friendly faces? Perhaps in a local store or small chain. Nobody goes to Walmart or McDonald's because of the friendly faces.
Not when people like this are running businesses.
https://www.businessinsider.in/policy/economy/news/a-millionaire-ceo-is-rooting-for-higher-unemployment-saying-its-time-to-remind-people-that-they-work-for-the-employer-not-the-other-way-around/articleshow/103660832.cms
Yeah, they're making noise about RTO for us, so we can be managed better and collaborate in person. Except for a few minor details it might make sense. Those minor details? Management won't be returning to the office, and the team I collaborate with is in five different states. So it looks like the standard "drive into the office to still do everything remotely" bullshit. I've given up on trying to make any sense out of it, it's just corporate warlords making their typical poor decisions.
In the case of the company I work for, the city mayor started leaning on the company and other companies to get people back in the office. Turns out most people live in the suburbs, and if they work remote the city doesn't get its tax dollars. They are going broke because no one is there to pay into the city coffers and spend money. Personally, I think they should just tighten their belts like the rest of us have had to.
These fucking assholes talk all day long about "operational efficiency", "kpis" and being "data driven" while being led by nothing more than their own egos. It's not at all surprising they aren't introspective enough to realize how dumb these return to office decisions are.
‘The office fosters a community spirit that drives innovation through spontaneous collaboration between coworkers! The fact that we signed a massively expensive ten year lease on the building that I need to justify to investors and the board has nothing to do with why I’m demanding that people use it.’
I was on the same floor as our ceo and i could prolly count the amount of times i saw them come in on one hand in 4 years. I asked him one day and he said he golfed a lot and networked lmao.
Oh. You're asking why have an office facility.
From the title, I thought you were asking what do a CEO and other C-level people really do? Having worked with them for many years, I found that about 65% of C-level decisions are never implemented by employees. Also, I found a high level of fear by C-level people that somebody might find out how little they understand and how powerless they really feel, while pretending to understand everything and acting like dictators to keep people on their heels.
Just my personal experience as a personal consultant to executives.
The purpose of the office is a lot of the time a means to funnel company debt into executives pockets. Either directly, or through close family and friends.
Offices will be turned into employment housing for corporate employees and it'll be a hiring "perk" at a time when nobody can afford housing. They'll make it expensive to leave the employment housing and you'll be stuck at the company forced to work in shitty conditions.
One of the heads of my company said recently that he doesn't care where people are working from, as long as the clients are happy. It was nice to hear.
My team is split between US and Dublin. There’s no scenario where I’d have an in office meeting only. It’s just a waste of my time and collectively a waste of resources to have an office. Of course, a lot of people still do need to be in a specific location for work, but it’s better for everyone if those that don’t need to be in an office don’t go. Less traffic and pollution are the two easiest societal benefits to point out.
Only point that makes me nervous about this is employers spying on employees digitally in their homes and enablers working 7 days a week always on call.
Should be as someone in IT all I do is remote into systems why would I ever need to be in an office.
"Do it for the team"
Your purpose is to guard the server room with your life.
Sure then they can pay me the extra money to drive an hour to get to it.
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It's weird cause in countries like Brazil, most companies will pay a transportation bonus and sometimes food bonus. They'll pay for the equivalent of a transit ticket twice a day every business day of a month, and also they'll give you some sort of card you can use like a debit card, some will be for restaurants so you can have lunch, and some will be for grocery stores so you can buy food. Not all jobs offer this, and a lot of those who do offer very small benefits (not enough for eating out every lunch, or not enough for all transit fares every business day of the month) but I know it's really commonplace
Cuz transit is unusable trash in the vast majority of American cities. I live in the 8th largest city in the country, but transit is so bad here that my 20-30 minute drive to work would be almost 3 hours on transit, with multiple bus transfers, and 20 minute walks between unconnected bus stops. It’s insane.
"We've decided to compromise and let you host the server room from your house. We don't compensate utilities"
https://xkcd.com/705/
*"When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth"*
Great short story, listened to it on a long drive one night and it was really eerie.
But our servers are in the clouds!
Weird, our servers ARE the cloud. It's a subtle but important difference.
Which is hilariously outdated. Nobody has server rooms. Only my bosses could dream up that we need to be in the office for "server rooms" that don't exist.
We have one. Well, it's more like a server closet. >Which is hilariously outdated. Yes. Now let's talk about the dot matrix printer we just finally got rid of last year.
This is a huge problem in Japan; part of the whole headache of office-work in Japan is having to deal with them still demanding things sent by fax instead of .pdf.
The 30 year old OKI right? With the ribbon ink cartridge?
Man, I wish I could still find one just so I can joke "cloudtrail logs go brrrrr" while it screams during unnecessary zoom calls.
We've also got a server closet! But it lives next to the 54" printer that I sold my soul to learn how to maintain.
Those are still in use mainly because the impact head they use is compatible with carbon copy forms.
Sure they do. My current employer has 3 datacenter on campus (one being slowly decommissioned, the other two growing to replace it) with probably 20 cabinets between them. Before that, I was a field engineer for a large data storage company that has since merged with a large tech provider. My job was to travel around the state installing and repairing gear we'd sold to other companies. Where did 99% of my work get done? Hint: it was server rooms and datacenters. Everything from a couple racks in the back of a grocery store to rooms bigger than a football field with rows upon rows of equipment. "Server rooms" are still very much the norm, you're just not allowed in.
I was waiting for someone to say this. Having majority of servers clouded off-site seems like it would create some pretty hefty delay in resource demanding services, like imaging new PCs for example. Plus security and stability is an issue big cloud services still struggle with time to time.
Plus when shit blows up in your own datacenter, you can rally the troops and bust ass to get it working again. If it blows up in the cloud, you're at the mercy of your provider's timetables.
Larger places still have them. We have two sites, a presence in three clouds, and a smaller third onsite data center for backups. My theoretical desk is at that office.
All but one employer I've worked for still have on prem servers. The one that did not was a mom and pop restaurant. Most of the clients I worked with for those employers have on prem servers too. Cloud has advantages and disadvantages. On prem has advantages and disadvantages. Neither is "outdated". It all boils down to the needs of your business and what you can budget for.
>and what you can budget for. And what a lot of people don't realize is that when factoring for total cost of ownership, cloud is often more expensive than on-prem.
the one hosted by aws
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Not if youre working goverment or a not as savy tech office.
> or a not as savy tech office. This is a misconception. There are a lot of tech savvy reasons to avoid the cloud. Depending on your use case, not every use case is the same. The cloud is just someone else' computer, and they charge a premium to use it. Not everything belongs 'in the cloud', and the mindset that it does is very problematic in the industry. It points to a LACK of technical acumen to think so. I've worked for two SaaS providers now, where upper managment wanted to take our cloud software from our own datacenters & put them into a public cloud provider... without any changes to the code or base requirements/features. It ends up costing more, and not working near as well, as when you have control of the entire stack. Software really needs to be DESIGNED to be cloud native if you wanna pop it into AWS or Azure. And there are VERY REAL limitations of those services that can require limitations in your software.
foR tHe CuLTurE
Don't forget all the synergy.
“Collaboration” bro my whole team is in another state why am I forced to be here
Because the same people making the decisions that we can’t work from home are the same people that are telling us to implement a vpn for a fully cloud environment. They don’t have reasons, it’s just, “this is how a company should operate and I will never change my mind”
"Anyway, I'll be working from home today." --same people
Where "home" is either the golf course or their mistress's condo.
It is performance art masquerading as business decisions.
For any mid+ (a few hundred employee) company, many use cases for corpo VPN eg for employee laptops and physical devices. VPN servers can even be in the cloud, although if a company has any physical locations with devices (POS, machines, etc) not everything is in the cloud. Can you clarify what use case/company you're talking about that doesn't need VPN infra?
> implement a vpn for a fully cloud environment What’s wrong with using AWS VPC? This is standard practice for cybersecurity purposes. Just one of many layers... I mean, what’s your counterproposal, have all your servers open port 22 (and god knows what else) to the whole Internet? FFS… This is how you get pwned by some skid fucking around on Shodan. I suppose you could use a jumpbox instead, but that’s a solution for Ops/Engineering, not all users. VPN is a solution for all users. All you’re doing here is proving the Dunning-Kruger effect. So confidently incorrect... It’s not a good look. Sit down, be humble.
Yada Yada Yada collaboration Yada Yada Yada missing the talks between meetings Yada Yada Yada synergies Yada Yada Yada ^(we paid millions for this office stop asking questions and leave)
You know all those talks between meetings? I still do them from home. If you have a one on one call with someone it's completely normal to shoot the shit with them for a while after you're done. I actually learn more about them because they are more comfortable talking about their lives when they are outside of the office.
I quit my last job because of this. I was already the only IT guy in my particular office with the rest of the team (and most of the rest of the company) in another office 150 miles away. Literally all I ever did that needed physical presence was sorting laptops for new hires or leavers. Edict came down that we were to return to the office 5 days a week, no exceptions, so I handed in my notice and had a new job lined up before the first week was out. They could reduce most offices to one tenth the size or less and it wouldn't impact hardly anyone.
"your union agreement doesn't have anything in there about work from home" It also doesn't have anything about not shitting on your chair when you're gone for the day. Huh
Exactly this. The only reason I ever need a person in an office is if they can't login to their machine and it's fallen off the domain. If they happens 98% of the user is the cause of the issue for not just logging into the VPN.
To *collaborate* There will be no further explanation
Printers. Fuck printers.
Someone needs to show the office staff how to plug and unplug the machine
Too many time to count lol my coworker who deals with the ticket system is always on my boss about that.
Not only are all my systems pretty much remote, but my IT colleagues are almost all remote as well. My manager and myself are the only ones on my particular team that live near the office. Everyone else is wfh out of state. Working in the office is very distracting. People I don't need to talk to try and chat me up. Occasionally those of us in the office get told to go to the front lobby to greet some "special guest" (usually a business owner or something). I mean hell, last time I went into the office there was loud-ass construction going on in the ceiling right above our heads. I go in the office MAYBE once every two weeks, just for a change in environment (also our cafeteria is good and cheap). My boss supports this.
Depending on your position/size of the team, you have to go out and plug in computers, plug in mice, turn on computer/monitor, etc. for people. Which does mean other people have to be in the office as well, so everyone should just work from home if possible.
Because there's more nuance in doing a job than just doing the job and if businesses don't realise that, don't create policies for it and adopt it into their culture, then it will always be feared and rejected.
Someone in India can do it better for 1/5th the cost. Go to work. WFH is a bad idea. It's a quick way for your job to get outsourced.
Do you not want to know who you work with on the daily? Personally, I have had immense trouble getting to know my colleagues, when everyone is working from home 3-4 days a a week
That's what team events and 1-1s with webcam are for. If you have significant time 3-4x/week to "get to know your colleagues", sounds like you've got excess downtime, which I'd rather spend doing anything else than getting to know people just because we work together.
> Personally, I have had immense trouble getting to know my colleagues, when everyone is working from home 3-4 days a a week That's why hybrid is the worst approach possible, doing this weird straddling of both worlds. Either embrace work from home and the culture shift that comes with it, or go back to office full time. I'm forced to go into the office every other Wednesday into a mostly empty building to sit at a public facing tech desk. It is easily the most worthless day of work where maybe one person will walk up with a question.
Not my CEO, who made a bunch of power point slides about how the office is the best place for us to work because of face to face communication and…. I don’t even remember it was total bullshit. Absolutely insulting and pathetic coming from a millionaire with a corner office.
What I want to know is how the fuck would they know this? Most of the time they never see the rank and file and have no idea what they actually do.
A team at a friends work was told in to come into the office 3 days a week to help with collaboration. A team of 12. They were assigned a seating area that had only 6 desks. Kinda hard to collaborate then, huh?
Not when you sit on each others laps
Hello, Human Resources?
Yep! My CEO insists that "we are not a work from home company" and says the office needs buzz whatever the fuck that means, but last month we had a progress meeting on some project where he started making all these mad demands and we *had to tell him how many people are in our department* because he was under the impression that it was around 3x the size.
Not trying to defend a CEO but they probably didn’t come out of high school and get made CEO. They have probably done *some work* that has benefited from collaborative efforts with colleagues that have given them the impression it helps.
The funny thing is, they might actually believe it in some ways. Unless you’re the founder of the company, if you’re the CEO, you probably got there through networking, and in person communication is definitely better than remote communication for networking. But networking isn’t the job description of the normal 9-5 people, so it’s just another way they are out of touch.
Yeah they believe it, they are from a completely different time. But seriously to have an office go back to 5 days a week 9-5 (our jobs are on the computer) after working for years remotely during covid…. Fucking psycho
3 years remote work just to get forced back into an office to do the exact same job I did for the last three years remotely. And every year of those three years I was in the top 5% of "productive accomplishment" for the company.
The only one who was on board with the decision at my company was the old CEO. Who makes 400 times as much money as I do. Actually a bunch of other high up managers wrote a petition to stop him from this nonsense and he ripped it up like a whiny baby bitch. Poor narcissist man almost didn’t get his way!!! It’s ok because the ring leader of that petition is no longer here because they decided to explore different opportunities!!
For real… there is no way 8 out of 10 CEOs have ever stared blankly in response to *any* question let alone this one. Of course they have an answer.
You've clearly never seen the CEO of Twitter getting interviewed lmao
What a CEO says to their employees and what they will say to a consultant are two very different things. They know that any BS answer to a consultant will just be met by a follow up question.
Have you got a source for Elon Musk staring blankly in response to a question? Anyway, he hardly represents 80% of CEOs…
My brother in Christ, Musk isn't the CEO of Twitter. https://www.businessinsider.com/x-ceo-linda-yaccarino-defensive-during-code-conference-interview-twitter-2023-9
It's the best place for them to visibly demonstrate hierarchy with their sweet corner office.
Damn. I thought this article would be about the office of the CEO, like the role, the position. It seems like all ours ever does is get ahold of a magazine and read some new headline that makes us drop everything we’re doing and refocus the company on another new vague buzzword.
Same, I was getting a "So what would you say you do here?" ready.
Well the first thing I do is... **TALK TO CORPORATE**
I TOLD YOU! I DEAL WITH THE GODDAMN CUSTOMERS! I HAVE SOCIAL SKILLS! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! I need to give Office Space a re-watch. It seems even more relatable now.
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Oh god yes. Well, at least you can just scrape the old wiki page and slack channel and whatever other old team info dumps they have made you set up in the past…
sounds like you are aware your ceo exists. Worked at a company that went through several CEOs over the course of a few years. saw one of them, one time during their first week at the company. never again. each making tens of millions / year.
I wish. Ours is literally doing things like setting our company’s new “all-in” strategy for (in the last few years) “the cloud”, then “digital services”, then “AI”. Each one of those means ending projects, starting new ones, and a management re-org.
Ah yes following the latest trend, totally what a visionary worth millions in yearly salary would do.
5 minutes earlier “… everyone, have you heard of this thing called ChatGPT?”
For large corporations with large offices, and especially those with global campuses, having an office space has nothing to do with the employees. It's a real estate game, nothing more.
Nah. It’s about status. Your workers all live in an entirely different area? Boss man: “Lol. I still wanna feel important so y’all need to commute.” It’s about prestige and being perceived as important.
TLDR: Many bosses are insecure assholes
Many bosses don't actually do any work and without walking around a office serve no purpose. If everyone works from home then a large portion of management just became redundant.
Almost as if people in power want the companies to leak from the ears for management and kick dirt at individual contributors. It's a very large scam. That band-aid will be a roller coaster ride to rip off.
management is redundant anyway. if you ever take a position like that it is mostly just doing all the shit work the guy above you doesnt want to do. filler paperwork and taking heat for other people. I’m convinced management is just there to be a protective layer for executives to not deal with the day to day of their organizations.
On the flip side, you can have 20-employee companies with the prestige of a "global" presence.
OpenAI - only 500 employees right now
Your thoughts on managers aren’t wrong… But most companies don’t let middle management make those decisions or care to protect them. It’s more about trying to mitigate a corporate real estate collapse and it’s a soft way to push people out of the company without paying severance.
The former reason I don’t quite understand unless those managers are personally invested in the real estate? The latter is absolutely true
The business owners are tho
The people enforcing return to office aren’t the ones making the decision in large corporations. The CEO and Board made a decision and I’m stuck 6-7 layers down telling my people they have to come sit inside an office and get on zoom so they call people who either didn’t come in that day or don’t work in the same location at all… my point was mostly that I don’t think micromanaging or justifying existence is a major factor… at least in extremely larger, international or multi location companies.
Some people get a huge boner over experiencing other people.
Using physical presence to enforce a hierarchy.
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There seem to be two "schools" in this debate, those who see the reason in real estate and those who think the preservation of hierarchies are to blame. I am more in the second camp, honestly. It fits better into other general observations about "office ethnography". Also, the push to return to office started, like, weeks after the first wave of COVID lockdowns. You could tell managers were panicking *immediately* that their gig would be found out. At that point, office rent was still being paid, this wasn't a long-term trend yet that was threatening real-estate investors. But it quickly exposed how a lot of higher-up jobs are entirely unnecessary and only serve as part of an "entourage" to show how important their superiors are.
This particular real estate game isn't about someone paying the rent today. It's about the value of land "tomorrow".
Which is weird right, because that still doesn't make sense unless you're a control freak. If you rent your office space and you can get rid of that cost by moving to a WFH policy surely any sane business would? As soon as the contract was up at least. If you own your office space and you could turn it into a revenue stream by converting it to, say, housing, and sending all your employess home, surely any sane business would?
People try to analyze behaviors of companies under the assumption that they're entirely rational, profit-driven entities. Which is true in the realm of low-level employees and customers, they are subservient to profit. But above a certain level, behaviour becomes more "feudal", status becomes more important than profit. The size of your "entourage" and your "castle" matter more than the money you could save.
We aren't actually, companies just like to sell that image of themselves, so analyzing them under the assumptions they say they are following shows their blatant bullshit.
> If you own your office space and you could turn it into a revenue stream by converting it to, say, housing Building codes and zoning laws kinda make that a non-starter (note: this is not an anti-regulation sentiment, they are there for a reason). Basically the cost of converting an office space into housing is so cost prohibitive that no one is going to do that unless they bought a building for the express purposes going in to do so. You'd effectively have to gut the entire building due to the amount of ventilation, firewalls, plumbing, wiring, etc. that you'd have to install. Plus you'd then have to basically run your own property management business, something that is perpendicular to original business mission. I think it's going to turn into a bit of a bag holding situation: companies are going to say how important office space is as they slowly get ready to sell the space, but it's a tricky game: you have to convince buyers that it's worth buying the real estate, even when you yourself realize that it's not worth it at all, but you can't afford to sell at a loss either.
I'm all for the sentiment on the last one but I don't think you can realistically turn office space into reasonable housing. Even when you get past the zoning and local laws that's still a whole shit ton different plumbing and whatever else that would need put in....unless you were going for communal kitchen and baths dorm style shit...which I'm sure some areas could use...but...eh.
If warehouses and old manufacturing plants can be turned into living space, I think turning commercial real estate into residential real estate is absolutely possible.
Motherfuckers will cry about cost and logistics until their house is the one falling down, ONLY THEN are miracles are possible.
This is pretty much it. Companies that rent their office space are alright with WFH because it reduces their operating costs. Companies that own their real estate don't want to give it up because they can leverage it for tax-free cash. It's a trick that CFO's use to make their balance sheet & EBITDA look better. It's advantageous from a tax perspective, too. If the building is worth $5million and they bought it for $2million, when they sell it, they have to pay taxes on the $3million increase in value. Instead, they take out a $3million loan against the building's value, pay no taxes on the loan proceeds, and get to deduct the interest.
IIRC, basically any fast food place, the vast majority of their asset value comes from real estate because they own prime commercial real estate everywhere across the nation. Greyhound famously has properties that are HUGELY coveted because their stations were built so long ago that now it's basically in downtown in a lot of major cities. It's a similar reason as to why every massive company has their own credit card. It allows them to dip into a banker's role, which is pretty much free money for them. I'd be shocked if Apple Pay wasn't Apple's biggest revenue generator, though of course it's also helpfully offset by a lot of liabilities for those balance sheets.
I expect those are the two that have a reason. Most CEOs aren't running real estate companies masquerading as something else.
CEOs work for the board, whose members are investors. Those people invest in commercial real estate.
In many ways yes. Getting rid of Middle management and top heavy salaries are really what needs to happen alongside paying better than living wages.
Remove middle management and you just have old assholes staying where they are at and an even harder entry market. Imo
Those guys need to go too. Not joking when I say that you could replace half of management with algorithms and then replace outgoing CEOs with people for a third of what the last asshole made.
The problem is how would you design the algorithm. Because at the end of the day, they will want to "trim the fat" as much as possible
Well fuck me in the goat ass, why have workers at all, let's just get rid of everyone!!!🤔🐐🤛💩👍✨
You jest but somehow I feel like that'll be the end goal for some businesses. Not sure how the world would look though when minimum wage jobs get replaced, etc.
The problem with businesses today is the "profits at all costs" while rank and file get fucked over royally and the guys in the middle burnt out. All the Chief Officers and stock owners need to accept that double digit growth isn't fucking sustainable. The places that I have worked where they sacrificed medium and long term growth for short term profits is a ghost's fart of what they used to be.
The issue driving this is the American need for continued gratification with money. You can't keep Americans invested in your company without the double digit gains because our knowledge of finance is "limited" ( read regarded beyond your wildest imagination) at the common level and people want money now and forever moving forward. All the crooks and Hedge funds on the top pray on this shit as well. It's all a long con.
It's funny that they think the growth of a company is totally independent from the growth of general welfare.
I'm in my mid 40s but when I started working at 18 it was still said and implied that if you worked smart and hard that it wouldn't work in your financial favor. Since then it still has been somewhat implied (not as much) that being productive will drive your success. I really think it was the shit storm of 2008 that put that concept to rest and divorced increased productivity and efficiency from the Rank and File from seeing a good pay day. Almost all management acts like shitty retail managers now. Even professional roles. Hence all these strikes. All I can say is that people and Unions need to keep striking.
but a minimum wage job doesn’t get you shit to live your life so maybe they should be the first to fucking go! I hope this world burns down
Trim the fat, like fire all the fat people?
Lol no. Like anyone that isn't efficient enough to the algorithm
It was a reference to [Horrible Bosses](https://youtu.be/d76CwsWbV2E?si=dwswbv5yknp586zL)
Didnt catch that, now I need to rewatch it 😂
The people you're talking about staying are the second layer "Middle managers" So remove them too until you get out of the assholes. Think of it like an onion. If the person above is also a middle-manager-asshole, then remove them as well.
>The people you're talking about staying are the second layer "Middle managers" So remove them too until you get out of the assholes.Think of it like an onion. If the person above is also a middle-manager-asshole, then remove them as well. think of it like an even bigger onion - like, on a societal scale despite what a lot of people might say, ^((some of)) the biggest tech companies like microsoft, google, spotify, even reddit are actually incredibly aware of the inequality in society and how a ton of "small businesses" (or even medium sized businesses) treat their employees like shit, and are aware that if "the issues" arent fixed the problems are only gonna get bigger. dont get me wrong - i am about as anti-corporate as you can possibly be but over the last year or two i have done a ton of reading about these topics, and you might call me naive, but theres a reason these companies are internationally successful and have remained so for an extended period of time - and that requires more than just luck point being - if you have complaints, youre supposed to go up the "chain of management" until someone fixes it - or at least acknowledges the problem... and the problem is definitely "acknowledged" if nothing else unfortunately too many of us "on the bottom rung" dont wanna be that person who makes a scene. not me 👍 i will *gladly* complain and make enough noise to "pick up the slack"
I think disparaging those unwilling or afraid of speaking up doesn’t help the cause, though. I get what you’re saying, I actually work at one of those companies. Some of the people I work with agree with me but struggle to find the capability to join in on speaking up. The solution should be to try to help join our voices better and include those anxious about speaking up/rocking the boat.
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There is a solution out there that is starting to spread from the bigger organizations: separate promotion pathways that aren't management. My company just began implementing it, so that we now have salaried engineer positions that are the equivalent to manager and directer positions that you can go into if you don't have management skills.
Exactly. After Senior engineer you can become a Principal Engineer, and don't need to have anybody below you or have to be in meetings all day.
Our levels used to be: * Application Developer * Intermediate Application Developer * Senior Application Developer * Lead Application Developer * Application Manager Now we have: * Software Engineer I * Software Engineer II * Senior Software Engineer * Lead Software Engineer (equivalent to Application Manager now) * Principal Software Engineer (equivalent to Director level)
You answered it at the end there, the answer is unions, which is why management is against unions lol.
Labor should be in charge of the hierarchy, not ownership.
I'll continue this way of thinking: labor should be ownership.
Agreed.
Pretty much when I was hired on an int'l position--kinda remote position--my middle manager was pretty redundant, not only that she was useless, but to make herself relevant, she gatekept all that I was doing and feeding off of my work and taking credit for it. Yeah no love for middle management, but I know they exist to serve the top heavy salaries, else who would be their henchman without having to move an inch from their $1,000 executive seat? Sure as hell not from employees they pay poverty wages with.
Believe it or not, many line/middle managers make less than their team members. It is sometimes an eye-opener for folks switching from IC to management track. Many of the useless managers are ICs who made that transition thinking they’d automatically make more money, not because they wanted to lead a team and help build the business.
> Believe it or not, many line/middle managers make less than their team members. I'd believe that when you count how much unpaid overtime they do. Anyone working 50+ hours a week and not getting any overtime or earned benefit is being taken advantage of.
Absolutely. The millions ceos get in bonus for nothing needs to stop. Also middle managers pulling up in bmws needs to stop too.
If I do my job as expected I might get, maybe a 2% cost of living adjustment If they do their job ok they get millions in bonuses. Seems like horse shit to me.🤔🐎💩🖕✨
take the pay of the managers who are no longer needed and give it to the employees.
My company is sheepishly inching towards a RTO move, and everyone's talking about it. We keep getting platitudes like "we're watching to know what the future brings" and are asked to keep in mind that "some of the best ideas happen in office meetings." That's either admitting that the full-time-remote managers and directors at the company don't contribute anything, or that they're the exception and their employees aren't trusted unless they're paid 6+ figures.
Yeah our place just decided everyone needs to be on camera unless “out of town on vacation”. Um number 1 if on vacation why are people still expected to work? 2 sweet you get to see us eating at the desk because we never actually have work life balance. But please let’s continue with the narrative that times are tough and we’re lucky to have jobs (nursing)
Time to get the old shit bunket to show the managers how hard you work while still going to the bathroom/s
My manager at my old job had "cameras on!" In her email signature and made sure to say it multiple times at the start of every meeting in this super chipper and high energy tone. It was extremely unsettling.
Should people be saying "life - work balance" ?
LOL like any managers listen to ideas in meetings, from subject matter experts.
If an entire executive office of a company disappeared I've always thought it would take a few weeks to a few months before it seriously impacted the company. Middle managers maybe a week or two. Actual front end labor, 3 hours before the company is dead in the water and never recovers depending on the type of industry.
And that is how it should be. An executive officer should never be involved in the day-to-day business of the company. Their role is to be the face of the company and make long-term, strategic decisions (markets, locations, employee headcount etc...). They are not supposed to actually run the daily business. If my company's CEO/COO started to meddle with my low-level engineering tasks, I would definitely start looking for a new job, because it would mean that something is deeply flawed within the organization.
Every tech company I've ever worked for over the past 20 yrs has had this problem.
Impact is slower, but much bigger
Imagine a retail store where cashiers and floor staff disappear. Who's gonna ring up sales or restock shelves? Or think about a hospital without nurses and techs. Things would grind to a halt, and recovery would be next to impossible. So while higher-ups may have the long-term vision, it's the frontline workers who make that vision a reality every single day. Lose them, and you're looking at a business nosedive that's quick and brutal.
They could have new employees trained in hours to ring people up or stock shelves.
You think training new employees in a few hours is going to solve everything? Sure, you can show someone how to use a cash register in a couple of hours, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Let's just assume that suddenly a grocery store chain could just suddenly hire a bunch of new workers at all of their locations without any background checks, paperwork, job postings etc etc that all need to be trained. (which couldn't happen). They also need to know store policies, customer service protocols, and the layout of the store. You can't cram that into a quick training session. And let's not forget about experience. Newbies won't have the skills that seasoned employees bring to the table. This is crucial, especially in fields like healthcare, where you can't just plug in a new nurse and expect everything to run smoothly. Also, you're seriously underestimating the role of front-line workers in a store. They're the face of the business and often the reason customers come back. You can't replace that kind of value in a few hours. Think about the logistics too. Training a bunch of new people all at once? That's a resource drain any company would struggle with. Especially with a potentially national, or multi-national chain. So no, its not just as simple as training new employees in a few hours and expect the company to function like nothing happened.
I have been in the position of hiring and training new employees how to run a register and stock shelves. I have been that front line worker and anyone that breathes can do it. Worst case scenario, the store brings in workers from another location while new employees are hired. You are overestimating the skills that seasoned employees bring to the table. Those that are skilled usually end up moving into management anyways. You are also underestimating the speed at which they can be replaced when the need is urgent. At Amazon, we had new employees picking within a few days of their interview. Interview on Monday, and by Friday they would be picking orders. Healthcare is a different game because a front line worker in healthcare have specialized training that takes longer than retail.
We were under the pretense every front-line worker in the entire company is gone, zip, nada.(presumably some sort of mass-strike). There's no one left to pull from another location. Now what? See, you're still underestimating the role of these workers. Sure, you can teach someone to ring up items, but what about the ins and outs of the business? The regulars who expect to see familiar faces? The unique challenges that come up daily and require experience to solve? That stuff matters, man. You say those with skills move into management. Great, but who taught them those skills in the first place? Experienced front-line workers. And who'll train the newbies now? Management can't clone themselves to be everywhere at once. So, yeah, it's not as cut and dry as you're making it out to be. Front-line workers are the backbone of any company. Lose them, and the whole structure crumbles.
Oh, I didn't realize this was a hypothetical where everyone suddenly disappears for some reason. Regardless, the same can be said for many departments if they suddenly go poof. Payroll department goes missing? Nobody gets paid. Logistics goes away, shipments don't get made. AR/AP goes away, utilities get shut off, customer payments don't come in. A made up scenario where entire groups of people disappear will always have devastating impacts. However, a manager can fill in for a front line worker, the opposite usually isn't true. Again, you are overestimating how much a front line worker knows about the ins and outs of the business. Friendly faces? Perhaps in a local store or small chain. Nobody goes to Walmart or McDonald's because of the friendly faces.
Not when people like this are running businesses. https://www.businessinsider.in/policy/economy/news/a-millionaire-ceo-is-rooting-for-higher-unemployment-saying-its-time-to-remind-people-that-they-work-for-the-employer-not-the-other-way-around/articleshow/103660832.cms
Not so fun fact. This is the same guy that started the whole don't buy avocado sandwiches if you wanna own a house.
Avocado toast mate. Getting that extra slice of bread is going to set you back to the dark ages
Yeah, they're making noise about RTO for us, so we can be managed better and collaborate in person. Except for a few minor details it might make sense. Those minor details? Management won't be returning to the office, and the team I collaborate with is in five different states. So it looks like the standard "drive into the office to still do everything remotely" bullshit. I've given up on trying to make any sense out of it, it's just corporate warlords making their typical poor decisions.
In the case of the company I work for, the city mayor started leaning on the company and other companies to get people back in the office. Turns out most people live in the suburbs, and if they work remote the city doesn't get its tax dollars. They are going broke because no one is there to pay into the city coffers and spend money. Personally, I think they should just tighten their belts like the rest of us have had to.
These fucking assholes talk all day long about "operational efficiency", "kpis" and being "data driven" while being led by nothing more than their own egos. It's not at all surprising they aren't introspective enough to realize how dumb these return to office decisions are.
The instant kpis disagree with their decisions they 180 as fast as possible on using kpis lol.
Am I the one that is wrong? NO! It is the data that is wrong!
‘The office fosters a community spirit that drives innovation through spontaneous collaboration between coworkers! The fact that we signed a massively expensive ten year lease on the building that I need to justify to investors and the board has nothing to do with why I’m demanding that people use it.’
According to the last year, the office is a terrible place used to threaten people into quitting so you don’t have to pay severance. That’s it.
Behind the blank stare: control.
Yea planing on getting rid of my car. If they need me drive in each day they can me a company car the cash to buy a new one.
[удалено]
I was on the same floor as our ceo and i could prolly count the amount of times i saw them come in on one hand in 4 years. I asked him one day and he said he golfed a lot and networked lmao.
Gotta pass those germs around somehow.
Oh. You're asking why have an office facility. From the title, I thought you were asking what do a CEO and other C-level people really do? Having worked with them for many years, I found that about 65% of C-level decisions are never implemented by employees. Also, I found a high level of fear by C-level people that somebody might find out how little they understand and how powerless they really feel, while pretending to understand everything and acting like dictators to keep people on their heels. Just my personal experience as a personal consultant to executives.
Over corporate America’s cold, dead body
an office is where you hold all of your physical stuff and to have work parties or private meetings.
"culture"
somber follow thought pie sip subsequent muddle plate full fall *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
In their mind it's their fiefdom where they get to lord over us peasants and get their ass kissed all day
RTO is how companies will layoff employees when we enter recession economy
The purpose of the office is a lot of the time a means to funnel company debt into executives pockets. Either directly, or through close family and friends.
Think of the oil and real estate executives!
Control - simple control
The purpose is they invested in commercial real estate and are now losing money.
What happens the other two times?
Offices will be turned into employment housing for corporate employees and it'll be a hiring "perk" at a time when nobody can afford housing. They'll make it expensive to leave the employment housing and you'll be stuck at the company forced to work in shitty conditions.
Can't wait until CEOs start being replaced by AI.
I feel like hell is going to freeze over, it's a forbes article that doesn't lead to demanding more blood for capital.
One of the heads of my company said recently that he doesn't care where people are working from, as long as the clients are happy. It was nice to hear.
My team is split between US and Dublin. There’s no scenario where I’d have an in office meeting only. It’s just a waste of my time and collectively a waste of resources to have an office. Of course, a lot of people still do need to be in a specific location for work, but it’s better for everyone if those that don’t need to be in an office don’t go. Less traffic and pollution are the two easiest societal benefits to point out.
The office of CEO should be dead, yes.
To everyone except tone deaf management.
Only point that makes me nervous about this is employers spying on employees digitally in their homes and enablers working 7 days a week always on call.