The resistance to allowing WFH really shows how bullshit the push for EVs “to help the environment” is.
I’m not anti-EV and do believe they are better than ICE. But even better than an EV-driven mile is a mile that isn’t driven at all.
I’m not sure how you equate that first paragraph at all. Can you expound? The second one just nullifies the first lol.
My point is that if they were serious about protecting the environment, they would promote WFH (for those who can…not everyone can obviously) in addition to EVs. Instead, there seems to be a big push for return to office.
Got it. Thanks. It definitely read like you were saying EVs were some secret not as good as you thought it was issue…
When they’re pretty damn fantastic at lowering pollution over time.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110016823009055
It’s not bullshit at all. It is a lot better for cars that are being used to not shoot out smoke from combusting refined oil. There will always be cars in use, so it will always be better for them to not shoot out smoke.
It’s not possible for all workers to live inside dense cities and use public transport and work in offices or at home. MANY other jobs are out there and still need doing every day. Everyone who physically maintains all of our critical infrastructure, manufacturing, and food supply industries is pretty much going to commute to work one way or another. Millions of those people don’t live in cities with public transport and/or don’t work where public transport can take them to. EVs are an improvement for all of those necessary use cases, because the vehicles they need could not be shooting out smoke.
I’m not sure what percentage of workers could do their job from home if they were allowed to. It’s probably a small minority, though a quick glance of numbers from COVID would suggest 15-20%. I’ll use 15% for sake of argument but would welcome a more “confident” number if someone has it.
Reducing the number of miles is and important way to reduce impact. Additionally, even those who cannot work from home benefit from reduces congestion and reduces vehicle idling. Although idling has less impact on EVs (though they still have to run HVAC), ICE vehicles are still the majority of vehicles being sold today in most nations and will be in circulation for decades.
Not everyone can WFH, but it needs to be part of the strategy of reducing emissions from transportation. Not pushing WFH (for those who can) is leaving a lot on the table. This is not a replacement for EVs, rather in addition to.
I’m all for WFH and EVs personally. Haven’t bought an EV yet but I would like to have a non-spyware-laden one for a reasonable price.
This is the truth. People like to tout EVs as the end all, be all, “silver bullet” for the petrochemical industry. Bullshit. Your EV is riddled with oil-based products and asphalt contains a shitload of petrochemicals. EVs are better than gas burning cars in the same way getting stabbed with a knife is better than being shot. If you really want to help the environment by buying a car, buy a used car instead of a new one. Still, nothing really compares to just having a society where the average individual doesn’t need a vehicle. I think if we had a more robust service economy structured around couriers who took care of shopping and delivery, and then had a genuinely decent public transportation system or taxi options, we’d do a lot to reduce emissions. But the car is itself a sign of affluence and personal freedom in America. Always has been; probably always will be. Ownership of one, especially an expensive one, confers a certain status, and that’s a cultural problem, not an environmental or material one.
None of my coworkers drive to the office and we actually like seeing each other… Hybrid remote work is great for us
I think 90% of the problem is people being forced to drive everywhere
Traffic would be so much better with a staggered work force. We might actually enjoy the commute.
Or if they actually cared, they could build trains.
Because of traffic, the workforce started staggering by themselves here if possible. The result was that bad traffic was spread out over the entire day instead of just two peaks in the morning and evening. Good traffic is only at night and working at night defeats the purpose of having business hours.
Basically just further proof that car traffic doesn’t scale well. It’s just an incredibly space inefficient way to get around.
Another factor is the spaces that offices take up or the power used whilst unoccupied, these space could be used for housing or maybe even industry.
Its great that no one drives to your work but this is more uncommon than common.
In conclusion: work from home is better.
Well, having the office was nice because I like my colleagues. I’m lucky in that regard though, and as nice as it was to socialise at work, working from home is nicer. Not to mention much much cheaper by every metric. In conclusion fuck ever going back to the office, thank you for coming to my TEDx Talk.
I personally like it too, but not daily. I average 1-2 days in office now and it’s healthy for me. See my coworkers, they know my name, we catch up, have our meetings, then I go home for a few days again. I’ve just learned everyone is different, and the company definitely shouldn’t be telling people how to work, people are grownups and can decide themselves. (And if they can’t, then fire them instead of punishing everyone).
However for this meme, another great way to get people off the roads would be… trains
I like trains.
Some people don’t have the space at home to set up a working area and really want to just go to an office that their employer pays for, and that’s fine.
This is why coworking spaces exist.
I don’t know in other countries but it is working quite well in France, you can get a subscription to the closest working space and have a desk, meeting rooms … To work remotely.
I like that it gives a separation between home and work but without long commute.
This, and I do a lot of gaming on my pc, have a nice setup etc, usually not great trying to work there (don’t have space for another desk and can’t really justify having two sets of monitors, keyboard etc
Why do you need all that? I have my work laptop sitting at the back of my desk. Most monitors have two inputs. I’ve got an older 1080 with HMDI+DVI and a newer 1440p with DP/2xHDMI.
So I have the laptop in HDMI on both screens (it needed a USBC to HDMI cable for one of the outputs), and a simple USB3 switch for the mouse+keyboard.
So when I’m working I fire up the laptop, switch the USB over to that and swap the screens to the HDMI inputs. When I’m done working I can fire up the desktop, swap inputs and USB and in seconds I’m switched over.
I’ve been doing it this way for years and years now.
That’s normally what I do, the problem is the context for me, I sometimes prefer just sitting across the room with a laptop so I’m in a slightly different environment
It can help draw a line I’d agree, but I’ve gotten used to it now I think. I used to have it worse. I operated out of the bedroom for the first few years I was remote and that wasn’t good at all. The new house had a bedroom that was really too small to be a bedroom. So it became an office room.
Some companies are doing it to create a hostile workplace to increase attrition. If an employee quits, they don’t have to pay unemployment or severance. Other companies have huge investments in corporate real estate. They have been sitting on short-term loans that are coming due. The property owners are keeping their real-estate values artificially high, but to one wants to rent/lease them, so they aren’t as valuable as in practice as they look on paper. Some companies get tax breaks from cities to put their offices there and will not continue to reap those rewards if their workers are not coming into the city. Don’t let them gaslight you about culture or face time because that has all been debunked. A lot of remote workers are coming in to the office and sitting on Zoom/Teams calls in their cubicles.
What the fuck kind of weyland corporation do you guys work for.
Literally every corporation.
the most unbelievable part is cubicles, no real corporations will provide that much privacy and instead force you to work open plan on a row of desks next to a random other person from another team who was also forced in for no reason
The dumbest most mismanaged bullshit in history.
A history that includes the fucking Bolsheviks!
You think the Bolsheviks were bad, just look at the guy they replaced. He made the Bolsheviks look good!
Korensky? He wasnt great, but I don’t think he was as bad as those dipshits. At least he didn’t murder all the communists.
I actually meant the tsar, and I can understand feeling bad for Kerensky (poor man must have been so confused, when all he had to do was get on a train out of Dodge as of mid-late September 1917 and anyone with an ounce of sense could have told him this), but don’t hold him up as a leading light of proper management and doing shit the smart way, okay?
Yeah I’m just bitter about the Bolsheviks betraying the revolution so they could be on top before it was even finished, abd doing it so completely.
Yes, monarchs were often worse, and Nick was particularly spectacular in that regard. But the USSR is sort of a recognizable legibly-modern example; they had tell communications and (shitty, because they had a chance to be decades ahead of everyone else and noped out) computers and airplanes and stuff. And while they’re not the worst, they’re well past the “there is no fucking excuse to suck this much” line. So that’s my “worse than x” line, and I think the american empire fails on every metric.
To be clear, while I do have criticisms of centralized communism (the centralized part), I think if it were substantially at fault for how much the USSR sucked, Cuba wouldn’t have lasted five seconds, much less outlived it and still squeaked by even with the spectacular bullshit challenges it face(d/s)
Yup, it was a shitshow. If you’re a socialist, it’s good to study, but maybe in the same spirit as bourgeois revolutionaries might have studied the wreckage of the French Revolution. Or, you know, in the same spirit as Marx and Engels reflecting on the failures of 1848.
Working from home reduces emission much faster than electric cars.
Working from home is also considerably safer. The most dangerous part of most people’s work day is their drive to and from work. If that time had to be covered by workplace injury insurance, management would be begging for as many people as possible to stay home just to keep insurance costs down.
agree
True
People going on about how much electric cars suck are usually shocked when I agree with them… And moreso when I point out that they suck because they’re still cars, and that’s not a conversation the anti-EV crowd is ready to have.
Also, goes into the old “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” mantra which it seems nobody understands is ordered that way intentionally as that’s the order they should be implemented. Reducing usage is by far the most effective tactic for positive environmental impact or environmental harm reduction.
They just get to “recycle” and see that they can change pretty much nothing more than putting trash in a different bin and figure that’s all they need to do. Even though it’s a really poor overall impact.
If unions and OSHA really had teeth, they’d point out the significant health risks of having workers commute to work versus work from home. In terms of lives saved, work from home is much safer and we should fine companies accordingly when they force workers to commute when instead they could simply work from home. They should also be fined for environmental impact as well :)
2802 - 7006 lives saved every year if wfh was allowed partially or all the way.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/remote-work-literally-saves-lives-peter-watridge
those first 3 months or so of covid were bliss. every office drone was off the road. it was so fucking easy to get everywhere, and it was quick too
It was mostly quicker on my pushbike too. I wasnt having to keep swerving and braking for idiots. Though I did get chased 3 times, by special kinds of idiots (one in a dinosaur suit ffs).
But the company culture.
The culture:
What a depressing sight to behold
At least it’s empty
Better than an open office setting.
Which is better still than open office “Hot Desking”
Yep I know all about it. Shit sucks.
I’d be fine with going into the office if public transportation could get me there, but it’s a 15 minute drive vs 1.5 hours on the bus. And when I go into the office I just put in headphones with a YouTube documentary and don’t talk to anyone. What’s the point?
Ok, I need to tell someone else. The other day I ran into an acquaintance, John. He was telling me about his new manager job. Currently, everyone is working remote. An email was sent out to John’s team inviting them to lunch so that the team could meet John in person.
Apparently, only 1 person showed up. John got butthurt. John told his boss that he thinks his team doesn’t “engage enough” at work and that he thinks remote work is to blame. John told me he likes to test people randomly by sending them a Slack message and seeing how long it takes to respond. Apparently, he thinks 5 minutes for a response means people aren’t at the computer working. John has convinced his boss to force people back in the office…
Look forward to the follow-up where he has to explain why they are losing the good team members
Problem is, such managers didn’t cared about it in the first place, thing they care is power tripping, you know their personalities
LOL! I ran into him yesterday and he was telling me he had to work over the weekend because people have left and they are now understaffed! 😂 git rektt!
Not well played by team imo, sad story but that’s not how you keep your privileges
Maybe? It was an “optional” lunch meeting. I tend to skip meetings that aren’t required because I want to keep working.
But, sure. I understand managers/leaders want to feel important, so fine, I show up to the meetings. I sit at the desk, open the laptop, and tune them out while I actually get work done. Like, the thing we’re supposed to be doing. I have the 15 pieces of flair, ok.
Because they didn’t feel like going to lunch? Was it mandatory? If so, were they going to get paid for it? And for the gas to come in just to have lunch?
Fuck John. All my homies hate John.
Unnecessary RTO should be outlawed
The worst part of it is most big companies are forcing RTO to either justify the leases they don’t want to pay to break, or to satisfy tax incentives agreements they made with municipalities.
In both cases, they’re deciding it’s better if you pay - in time, gas, car maintenance, mental health, productivity, and stress - for their business decisions that went bad instead of paying money out of their own bloated pockets.
Meanwhile, my lead, who insists I drive 40km which takes 70 minutes one way:
“I can’t do teams meetings for design discussions, I don’t like drawing with my mouse”
Me: “OK, get a Wacom tablet or wtv and draw with that?”
Him: “No, just come to the office” for our 5 min talks we have occasionally and the once every two weeks 1 hr discussion
If only they could somehow have a webcam point at their desk to show you what they’re drawing
😂
There’s like a $10 app called super display that will turn any android device into a touch monitor, pair that with one of those precision styluses with the plastic disc on the end, you got a ~$20 dollar drawing tablet!
Hint: it isn’t about the Drawing.
Yeah exactly, so strip the layers from this bullshit onion and don’t let him have any excuses.
Nice! I would have imagined there was some app to allow freehand drawing on phones, so thanks for the info!
I read this has: " I have an irrational need to be in the same room as you, here is a plausible excuse to justify it"
Then you replied with: “here is a reasonable solution to the excuse you gave me so that we can all work better”
And then it went down hill.
Honestly I think we’re going to hit a wall where we realize we need about half as many “office drones” as we have in a couple years.
So many people with office jobs drive in, sit at a desk, and do maybe 2 hours of actual work in the entire day. Or they work from home and do the same. And then they collect their 95k/year salary.
I really dunno if people are prepared for businesses to start going “wait, what are all of these people doing?” And axing their workforce and replacing most of them with AI or existing other employees
The thing you’re not accounting for is that work that primarily involves thought, which is what “office drones” are doing, aren’t productive in the same way that physical or service jobs are.
Looking off into space thinking is part of the work. People average about four hours of productive work in an eight hour day.The thing you can’t do is get rid of half the people and then expect the other half to magically be eight hours productive per day. Businesses keep trying and weirdly it just tanks their output.
AI is not the panacea that so many people think it is. Do you feel happy when you need help with something you bought and you get an AI trying to offer you helpful articles or tips? I don’t. Do you want the same level of service from the entity that controls where your paycheck gets deposited or fixed your HSA contributions?
If you definition of work is butts in chairs typing, office workers don’t do too much work. But that’s a very naive definition of what most office workers are actually doing.
Incredibly well said. I’m saving this.
Me thinks thou dost protest too much
The thing you’re not accounting for is that work that primarily involves thought, which is what “office drones” are doing
Found the office drone.
Our office drones are not “thinking” for half the day like you, and input and manipulate data. You could also include half these “managers” too who sit in an office sending emails all day, and never hit the shop floor.
Given that office drone would cover any job that isn’t service, manufacturing or laborer, it’s not exactly surprising that you’d find one. I’m a software developer.
It’s almost always best to assume that other people’s jobs actually take some form of skill, because they always do. People get paid for a reason. Otherwise you fall into the trap of calling huge swaths of work “unskilled labor” and thinking they don’t deserve much pay, just because they’re just moving stuff around on the shop floor.
What do you think those emails the managers are sending are, if not work?
A software developer!? On Lemmy!? Say it ain’t so
The old; how do you know someone is a software developer? Yup, they tell ya!
I think I really touched a nerve with that guy though, and it seems like they want to be an office drone instead of working from home (this is the bit where the “senior software devs + team manager” argue they need to collaborate, in person) with a nice life balance.
You don’t understand though, because it’s not physical (software of any kind) and even if it is (any hardware) because you aren’t constantly doing something it’s not work!!
As an admin who got push back from the sales team, everyone has… Unique perspectives on what is and isn’t work.
I know exactly what those emails are because I have to deal with them asking me if a wagon that I’m looking at has arrived yet.
So I email them back telling them that it’s arrived (they knew that already because goods-in already updated the checking in sheet) and they get to validate their job somehow by asking me, shit.
It’s quite amazing how they keep their jobs.
So you can dismiss someone’s job because you, a person whose job it is to look at wagons, got an email you didn’t see the point of?
If they have the sheet, why do they need you to work there and look at the wagon at all?
Now, I know your job definitely has more to it than looking at wagons and confirming their existence.
My point is that the person who sent the email does too. It’s rare for a job to actually have no point and no work associated with it.Well, maybe your workplace wouldn’t put up with these people but I can confirm that besides them not being able to use SAP to check the quantity of a BOM, to like I said - they have access to the other functions / data but prefer to delegate them to others.
So it ends up going down a hierarchy until someone else does what these managers could do themselves in the first instance.
And they spend all their time forwarding these queries to people lower down the hierarchy and that’s all they do, eh?
You should probably get a new job if your company has that much dead weight and no direction.
If it is so easy to be an office drone, why weren’t you able to get a job like that?
Is it maybe because it involves skills you aren’t aware of?
I once worked in an office doing what I described above.
I absolutely hated it stuck in a cubicle, and now work outside with lots of other people grafting, instead of listening to gossiping over the cubicles all day long. Think I lasted 2 months.
Here’s my theory: bad bosses want you to be there in person because they think you’re lazy.
My old job: there was a constant cloud of mistrust I got when I worked there, just a feeling of unease. I can’t really describe it. Like everyone was just a little bit unhappy with their job. It wasn’t related to the work we were doing, it was the working conditions. Everyone seemed unhappy with some policy. I consistently heard bickering about management and idiotic decisions, plus the usual customer complaints about clients making bad decisions or doing ridiculous things, but that’s normal and nobody seemed miffed about it, just discussing it.
They had a “hybrid” work setup, each person was “allowed” to work remotely one day of the week, each week. The selection of which day was up to each worker and their team/manager to schedule. The expectation was that someone would be in office at all times on every team. Most teams were 3-4 people, so it generally meant that only one person was working remotely at a time.
So let me compound this, and I’ll note, there’s no exaggeration here, this is what happened. While working, we were obligated to be in a teams meeting all day long, 9 times out of 10 it was expected that we were on cam the entire day. Frequently these teams meetings were only the team in question, but the justification was that we were in there in case a manager/team leader/whatever, could pop in and talk to the team if they needed to, and/or if the manager was working remotely. It was pretty rare that happened. The other excuse was so that the team could chat about challenges and discuss any client issues they needed to collaborate on, which most teams just used text chat to do, so the meeting was unnecessary. During my time there, I made several suggestions for improvements and they all fell on deaf ears. Nothing changed. The excuses were poor, and I don’t recall them very clearly because they were largely nonsense. Needless to say, the situation sucked.
I had to drive into the office for about 1h+ each day, and at least the same coming home, so around 2.5h of my day was my commute. I pleaded for more work from home/remote, but it was denied at every turn. Add this to the fact that there was no company provided parking, and parking in that area started at about $70/mo, and went up from there. The nearest parking areas were the most costly at $130+ and they were in high demand, some had wait lists for monthly passes because they simply did not have enough parking spots for everyone that wanted them.
There were probably dozens of other frustrations I could list, I’ll limit myself to one more: my job is IT support, and we largely use remote access software for everything, so it literally does not matter where I work from. As long as I have an internet connection, I can do my job.
I didn’t last 2 years under those conditions. I barely made it to 1 year… There’s a whole story as to why I don’t work there anymore, but it’s not relevant to the point. My point is, I was untrusted, and treated as though I should just shut up and create value for the shareholders, and be happy about it. By the way, the shareholders were the managers.
Contrast with the place I’m working now: I’m provided with $1000 of home office set up funds up front. I have a home office already set up, but I found some nice-to-have things that I was able to get with that money. I was shipped a brand new laptop and dock, which the old place gave me a used, old, crappy, end of life/end of support system. They also provided me with a UPS, keyboard, mouse, and three monitors, webcam, headset, etc. Before I even worked my first shift, all shipped to me directly. This job is 100% work from home, and this workplace doesn’t even have an official office space. The only exception is when hands-on is required, or there’s a team event, and we take over a client’s board room for a day, so we can work from there, which has been less than once a month. I’ve met my team in person exactly twice in the three+ months I’ve worked at this place.
Any suggestions I have are discussed and considered. I feel heard. Some suggestions have already been implemented, others are still under consideration or have been denied with good reasons (usually a technical limitation regarding the systems we use). I don’t need to sit in on useless meetings all day that accomplish nothing, I can listen to music while I get things done without being distracted by my co-workers eating their lunch and forgetting to hit mute. I “see” my team once a day for a stand up to check in on progress and workload. I feel supported, trusted, and I’m free to work in whatever conditions I find are most condusive to getting things done.
As a matter of fact: both jobs require time tracking, the old job I struggled to account for (approx) 5 hrs of my 8 hour shift, at the new job, I frequently can account for (approx) 7 hours of my day without issue.
My boss is good, trusting, and friendly. Compared to the cloud of discontent my old boss would inspire, and the work shows through on that. I’m happier, and I enjoy work again.
I recently heard that the old job nixed hybrid and went full RTO.
QED: Good bosses trust that you’ll do your job and let you do that from wherever you can. Bad bosses want to control you into doing it “their way or the highway”.
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In that case, the management was basically the founders. They grew the business without any employees, and when it came time to bring on employees, instead of stepping back and letting the employees figure out the best way to get their job done, they’ve rigidly enforced their work methodology on their employees. When you deviate, they get unhappy.
That specific company was a bit of an outlier, the majority shareholder “brags” that he has fired more people than… I don’t remember, I couldn’t have given less of a shit when he said that. I was busy trying to keep my eyes from rolling out of my head. But that’s literally something he said to me in person, with nobody else in the room. Needless to say, that company is shit for more reasons than controlling management.
Needless to say I was already starting to look for the exit after being there for less than a year.
I can’t really talk about why I am no longer employed there, but I can confirm that I did not, at any point, provide two weeks notice as required by law when quitting. Beyond that, my lawyer advises me not to discuss it.
Needless to say, I’m thankful that I’m not working there anymore.
The reason good bosses can trust you is that they can quantify your output. Bad bosses just assume an ass in a seat is getting something done.
This is part of the reason sales positions are often the only WFH positions at a company. Their metrics are clear and easily quantifiable, so if someone’s not doing their job you can tell.
The time entries on my tickets would disagree with this logic.
Them: I need you in the office so I can keep you under my finger!
Me: Bro do you know how much in rent and power you’re gonna save keeping them at home?
the only expenses businesses ever complain about are wages. they don’t seem to care how much is wasted elsewhere if they could save a few dollars cutting some shift workers allowance
