“You must go in to the office, so that you can get on calls with your team or other teams, which are in the other global offices.” (rolling eyes)
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Where I work they are so fucking stupid they are making everyone go back to the office to 'foster collaboration' but all the seating is random - you sit somewhere new every day, first come first served. What useful tasks am I going to collaborate on with random people from all different parts of the company sitting around me each day? It shows that the executives are just fucking liars and aren't willing to tell the truth, which is that they need people spending money in the cities to help with their portfolios. Or they are just doing what everyone else is doing. Or they're just on a power trip. Or all of the above.
Do the top executives also sit randomly with other colleagues?
Ahahahaha, the executives don't have to come in to the office.
And even if they do they have dedicated offices with doors.
My current company stated that if you have a local office and want to go there fine, but otherwise do your job where it makes sense. Of course my boss is on one coast, the rest of my team is spread out in multiple states on the other coast, and I’m kind of in the middle of the country.
Mine told everybody "if you have a local office and want to go there fine, otherwise you're laid off. Also we're closing a bunch of offices so if you don't live near one anymore you have to move at your own expense. Otherwise you're laid off. Also no job guarantee even if you do move, we might lay you off the next day. Hey why is morale in the toilet?"
That really is one of the most ridiculous parts. Even if your team is local, a huuuge amount of interaction is spread across tbe globe.
A few months ago my director started discussions on return to office mandates. No one else really paid any attention.
I went in today and nobody is here, including my director. I don't think anyone thinks the commute is worth the value they're pitching.
I should have slept in an extra two hours.
What happens if you just never go in? I'm so glad my office is in Denver and I am in New England.
Worst are the meetings of international work groups. Stressful travel, being away from the family for days, sitting in a shitty meeting room talking about the same shit you talk about online and then sitting with a bunch of people getting senseless drunk, cringing constantly. I hate those meetings.
Used to be so awesome during corona. Took 4-6 hours, comfortably sitting in my home office, now it takes 3 days costing maybe 50,000€, instead of 0€, without more results.
I never went back to the office after the pandemic.
I actually got really sick and had to spend a small amount of time in hospital, afterwards I might have slightly played up the emotional trauma to management so they couldn't try that BS. Eventually they did anyway I along with a lot of my colleagues quit and got another job straight away.
Apparently they have now flip-flopped again and are back to permanent work from home for everyone who wants it. I wonder if losing a third of their work force in a month had something to do with that.
You can tell how important working from the office is by the fact that they can't tell whether or not people are working from the office.
Maybe people need to start talking about unionizing while in the office.
This is the right point to make... Instead of managing people by the work they do or the objectives they achieve, they are managing literally where their butts sit
Did they think that'd give them good optics or do they just not care?
So I've worked in business for 17ish years now, and the only consistent thing I can say about business leadership is they are there to have their egos stroked.
They do not care about money or other people until they look bad, and even then they don't do anything until someone threatens to take away the group of people forced to listen to them.
Working from home hurts their ego. This method (RTO) doesn't improve value and increases turnaround, which increases expenses if you are happy with the amount of people working for your company, as replacing people costs money.
So either Dell still needs to get rid of people, or a bunch of old fucks need someone to suck up to them in person.
Are their egos fragile because they know the people who do the real work are... not them?
Hard to say, you could be right. That's where I'm less sure. I've had jobs where a (not direct manager) boss thinks I do less than I do, and more than I do.
The ones who believed I did less believed they did more than me regardless of what my manager reported or actual work done. The ones who believed more consistently didn't hand me work and I eventually would leave.
One job I had different people who disagreed about the actual amount of work I did based on if I was at my desk vs the amount of awards I had vs my lunch breaks vs my extra work projects. I'd have feedback sessions with my manager about burnout but also if I was taking too long for lunch and going home too early.
What I'm saying is I think people are terrible at assessing subordinates work.
This came straight from Michael Dell, per multiple conversations with directors and managers at Dell. He's probably trying to squeeze out all the old employees to replace them with cheaper people. There's no clear reasoning at all, which means it's underhanded bullshit or he's a moron.
They only care that it looks good to the out of touch, sociopathic management type
It's a way to cut headcount without doing layoffs. It's usually followed one or two quarters later by an actual layoff.
I really like my job but if they started monitoring my data like that I'd absolutely quit. There's already a monitoring mechanism, it's called your boss needing you to complete tasks on time. If you're doing that, the only thing data monitoring does it falsely call out people who are doing their work.
I will not work for a company that thinks it needs to babysit it's employees. The idea that you have to constantly micromanage someone is ridiculous, if they're that shit at their job, you let them go and get someone else for the role.
This sounds like a recipe for malicious compliance if I ever heard it.
Many people chose a 'remote' role that requires no office visits but hamstrings your career growth. I know a bunch now enforcing 5PM as the end of their day. But there will always be happy worker bees.
Many people chose a 'remote' role that requires no office visits but hamstrings your career growth.
Not really. Everyone knows that in the business world the only way to reliably get a promotion is to switch companies anyway. So I can be on permanent work from home and then when I want a better job I can just switch to another company, that may or may not require me to go into the office sometimes. I can have my cake, and eat it.
It is not the 1930s anymore, I don't have to work for the same company my entire life. Everyone but the business people seem to know this.
If only they had been so rigorous in protecting customer data.
Or making quality consumer products.
Idea: script that connects and disconnects from a VPN over and over at set intervals to send "fuck you" in Morse.
Working from home proved that most of the people are capable of "self-managing" and don't need a corporate drone telling them what to do. I have a feeling that the push to get back to the office is fueled by insecurities of middle management that became redundant.
When I worked in the office I worked in a cubicle all on my own behind a support column and a potted plant that I put there specifically for the purpose of being unviewable by the idiot manager who wandered around and got in everyone's way.
Also now people don't randomly come and ask me questions about why the printer isn't working, or start sentences with "can you just", and "it will only take a moment".
I don't know if I'm more productive at home than when I was in the office, but I'm definitely not less productive. I would probably be more productive but there really isn't that much to do. My job is to basically sit around and be there, I'm ready to jump into action when everything breaks.
The same Dell that just leaked my information yesterday because of their incompetence, that Dell?
Just to be clear, this is the same Dell who fucked up and leaked a bunch of personal info.
.. the number-one cause of which is usually missed patching, which is caused by people just.not.caring.
I can see this going very well for them.
Just another huge ass company that values short term profits over its employees and customers. Probably won’t be buying any more of their products.
There's not a single person I work with who lives in my metro area. Going to an office is the dumbest thing I can think of.
The only marginally logical excuse i've heard for RTO is to justify rented office space.
Remote work is not right for ALL companies. Just ones that are completely or predominantly software-based.
Breakfast cereal manufacturing - hey. Someone's gotta be there to close up all the boxes.
I forget - does Dell make breakfast cereal?
remote work is pretty prevalent in finance/banking - at my job only the customer facing folks (branch offices, investment/mortgage, etc) need to actually be in the office - that's only 30% of the workforce. another 15% is hybrid now, the rest are 100% remote.
Love it when the logical excuse is the Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Though I think there's some truth - companies still pay employees for their WFH rigs / utilities (or they should be, anyway), so it's not exactly free for them to have WFH (just a lot cheaper, if there's a choice).
The logical excuse I buy into is that commercial real estate is valued on it's income and if business aren't renewing leases because they don't need office space, then commercial real estate values tank. That and thinly veiled layoffs.
Which companies pay for WFH expenses? I worked for the biggest software company in the world in 2022 and there was no WFH allowance. We were 100% WFH at that point.
A large portion of most rich peoples investment portfolios is commercial real estate.
So if remote work takes off then offices devalue and their invest profiles diminish. That's why all the big business have colluded to force RTO, even if it would ostensibly cost their business more to do so. The execs personal savings are more important.
Color coding humans.... Following in IBM's footsteps yet again. 1939 was a hell of a year for the database.
Color coding people? So they are doing a caste system?
It's just pieces of flair. Brian, for example, has thirty seven pieces of flair, okay.
based on the dell products i’ve used, i’m not working there. i get the motive, but they need some good ass cybersecurity to have information like that be kept safe
Budget for monsy spent on pizza parties, etc to encourage workers back to office: $0
Budget for money spent on tracking and whipping employees based on managerial whims: Infinite
Folks, has corporate culture become a cancer on society?
Folks, has corporate culture become a cancer on society?
Become?
Dell will track employees' badge swipes and VPN connections to confirm that workers are in the office for a significant amount of time.
So if you need a tracking system or you wouldn't know if they were in the office or not, why do you need them office?