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Yet they still want us in the office...
I work remote twice a week, which is nice, but I seriously wonder why I even have to go to the office the other three days.
Most of who I communicate with to do my job is not even in my location, so I'm regularly using Microsoft teams and WebEx. Also all the programs are accessible on my work laptop from home.
They are starting the force people back to work at my company. Apparently a location had a fight break out and police called because of an argument over a spot. There isn't enough room at these places so they were trying to make people go to an office an hour away instead.
If I were to go into the office I wouldn't have anyone else on my team with me. And if someone were to ask me to do work, I could have easily done it if they sent a message instead of walking by. I also don't eat lunch, so I would just work with headphones in. So I wouldn't contribute to the collaboration that is claimed to take place.
The only reason they want people back in the office is for that control. They don't want people having a good work/life balance. They want you to waste money on gas, time away from your family, and to eat out more often. It would be great if some states would prevent companies from forcing back to office.
I quit a job that was trying to force RTO to a new office that was half an hour away from the old one, had paid parking instead of free and then only had enough office space to house 2/3 of employees at any given moment. They literally told us that for all-hands meetings people were expected to come in and sit on the floor. Then I quit a different job that was trying to force RTO when they owned the nearest parking garage to the office. You might think "Well at least you won't have to pay to park" but nope, they expected to juice every employee for $12-$18/day in parking.
This right here! My commute is rather long. I spend about 2 hrs total of my day commuting to and from work. I could save so much time and money on gas if I was full time remote.
In the new cramped environment with low visual privacy and especially no audio privacy, we all just end up with earpods in. We need the noise isolation to f'n THINK!
So the boss oozes his way over and 'hums' and 'haws' trying to get our attention before waving and doing that "hey pull out your earbuds so I can talk" gesture that resembles yokels trying to pick up someone in an elevator or on the bus and not.getting.it .
Because he doesn't.
So that is the life of people I left at the old job, and it's repeated a thousand times over.
Learn to also say on the phone "this environment has no audio privacy. Can you book meeting and a conference room? Thanks", if you get too many desk calls.
Their wanting you in the office is about control - it's nothing to do with productivity or any of the other excuses.
A lot of the investments by big companies were made in 2018-2019 with low near 0% interest. now a lot of those loans are coming due which will impact their total assets. they want workers in the office to keep Corp real estate in demand so their investments don't tank. most likely will result in massive layoffs or bail outs as they will try to protect the shareholders for eternal growth.
Programming and fields like it can be done remotely. Manufacturing cannot be done remotely (like you said). I work in a semiconductor fab and my job is most definitely not compatible with remote work. I would like to transition to a job where I can be remote though, at some point.
I work in engineering, for 3 years we haven't gone into office. There are in person things when needed, but the majority of design and engineering time is a solitary task.
Yeah for jobs like that it seems odd for the engineers to not want to see the prototypes.
Seems like people like that are in the wrong profession for sure.
You don't; and you know this already.
I quit my union job when the new hotshot manager started mandating RTO into a newly compressed, hot, bright, loud environment; being able to actually see asses in chairs was his jam, despite the work impact. What a tool.
Found a job with another unionized IT shop, paid for it with a 3% pay cut but got an extra week of vacation (net loss: 3 days pay/yr) and a really great crew and 100% remote written into the contract. Thanks, ya tool.