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CoronitaParticipant[quote=scaredyclassic]Strangely, many of the telemedicine jobs my wife’s been offered require the doctors to come to the medical office to do the telemedicine. For no real reason… They can’t quite let go of making people show up.
I think in general management likes to see bodies it can exercise control of.
I exaggerate my love of human interaction. Humans can be draining and infuriating, and having to deal with them via screen or phone can make it easier. More distant, less affecting. This may better many workers mental health.
On the downside, there have been coworkers, some, over the years whose presence I’ve deeply enjoyed. On the other hand, some people are maddening.[/quote]
Well, there are some jobs (for instance) lab work that requires in person obviously. But there’s also some management style that have trust issues with employees.
I found that it was interesting that one biotech company a friend works out made all their hourly coworkers go back to office and make them work in close contacct cubicles while they gave all the engineers/scientists single room offices and also the option to work remotely. Obviously, all the engineers scientists are all working from home so all the single room offices are left unoccupied while all the clerical workers (the ones that haven’t quit yet) are bunched together in cubicles in close contact. To me, that sends a strong message to the clerical workers. “We don’t give a shit about you, even if you get sick from a covid reinfection…” And they wonder why people quit and it’s hard to find replacements.
CoronitaParticipant[quote=deadzone]
You tech guys have reading comprehension issues. I said the prima-donnas are the ones who threaten to quit if “forced” to work from the office a couple times a week. Think their skills are so unique, rare and irreplaceable that they can get any job they want. I see a lot of this attitude lately and it reminds me of the late 90s when engineers were hopping between multiple startups every few months chasing higher salary and stock options. Until the shit hit the fan.
Sure most employees would prefer to work at home in their pijamas all day, save gas, avoid rush hour traffic, jerk off during lunch break, etc. But the fact is corporate management is not in favor of that because they know it is not the most productive situation. That’s why they are calling their employees back to the office now that Covid is over. You guys can whine about it all you want, but it isn’t going to change the fact that fully remote work is going to be the exception, not the norm, going forward.[/quote]
Dz, there are lot of non-tech people on this thread responding to you about your assertions and generalizations being incorrect. But yet, you decided to collectively lump all these people all as tech workers. Besides generalizing wrong, it also does yet again suggest you have a ax to grind with tech workers, no different than previous BearishGurl having an ax to grind with college degreed people who bought homes in far flung North County with lizards and walls. Just saying…
And again, you are arguing with yourself. No one ever said remote work is going to be the norm for everyone and every company. Almost everyone said that some (NOT ALL) companies are going to adopt remote a remote option of varying degree, and that’s no longer going to be a trivial amount. The work environment has changed enough for enough companies to make a material difference to give some people options. Remote work is not without drawbacks, and individuals have to weigh the pros and cons like anything else. But even the adoption of a hybrid work environment makes a big difference because unlike before, that gives people that further away to obtain a job. Before, driving 2+hrs one way every day to a job might not be possible for some. But now with a hybrid model, that’s more obtainable for people that only have to do it for part of the week or part of the month. Real families with real commitments to kids for instance, with more job mobility further way, that opens the door to greater career and earning prospects. For instance, if an company in OC is offering 25% above comps at the inconvenience of making someone work 5-6 days out of the month, that might be worth it for a family at various stages and earnings in their life. If I was in my late 20ies or early 30ies, I wouldn’t mind doing it. I wouldn’t do it for now because I’d rather spend the extra time with my family and I don’t need the extra 25% pay bump if it means more hours of commute per month. But for others, it might be worth it. That also applies to all sorts of jobs. For instance lower paying clerical work. If someone currently makes $20/hrs and has to spend 1 hr each way each day commuting, but another company now offers those clerical jobs remotely for roughly the same pay, it makes sense for that person to switch jobs since an hourly making $20/hr, commute costs is a significant impact on their household income so why wouldn’t they take the remote job with the same pay. And companies that have a hard time finding in-person clerical workers, well they’ll have to pay more, say $25/hr, which is probably fair considering those people coming in have to commute. That’s solves a lot of problems with companies being in a expensive area like Sorrento Valley where people paid $20-25/hour probably can’t otherwise afford to live comfortably near it and the company can’t easily find people who are willing to drive longer distances for those jobs.
Beyond that, locally there appears to be a pretty good growth in new higher paying jobs in biotech and life sciences too.
I’m sorry if you feel like you’re getting left behind and feel a need to wish people who have a decent career prospects to lose their jobs in order for you to get ahead. Reality is that life most of the time isn’t a zero sum game, and most likely one is one’s worst enemy more than anyone else.
CoronitaParticipantCovid did interesting thing to people. My kid was saying before COVID, there use to be a bunch of bratty kids at school, the “popular” ones that use to be very selective in who they would be caught dead talking with.
When school reopened and kids were allowed to go back, suddenly everyone is a lot nicer to each other. I guess a lot of the more social kids got a lesson of what it’s like to be left alone for a long time.
A lot of engineers are introverts so some actually do better working from home. Some communicate over slack way better than in person. Just like me, I suck at negotiating with a car dealer in person. I do everything over email or SMS.
But personally, I would prefer a hybrid model where I could go back to an office occasionally per week. I miss the company gym and foosball fridays.
But I don’t mind working from home because I can selectively tune out on the plethora of useless meetings we use to have. And actually, it’s better in some cases. There are some people that insist of holding meetings to talk about when to hold the next meetings because they lack any real skills beyond being a glorified secretary….but somehow they ended up in a “project management” role.
Just a quick check, 50 people in a meeting at roughly $100/hr per person for 1 hoursl costs the company $5000 for each of these useless meetings we use to have. Now, no one shows up for these anymore.
Also, at $6-7/gallon, not needing to go to work in person everyday is also good for the wallet and for the environment.
It also gives more flexibility to where people can live locally. For example, people can more readily live in Riverside county or Imperial County, even if their work location is in San Diego North county because in the worst case scenario, they don’t need to make a long commute to work everyday even in a hybrid mode.
They can buy better house at a better price than something near Sorrento Valley.It also helps the company find people who is willing to do the lower paying hourly clerical jobs and helps those people keep more of their money by reducing commuting expense, which is a big part of their overall income. Someone further away can do these jobs remotely and not get eaten alive by long distance commute expenses everyday
CoronitaParticipant[quote=spdrun]^^^ Kidding, or are you an outlier out of all tech workers?[/quote]
Scaredy is a lawyer, dude.
CoronitaParticipant[quote=JPJones][quote=spdrun]
The key is not to force your preference on others.
The problem is that employers will start pushing from-home work on people who DON’T want it (like myself – I’ve learned to LOATHE working from home full-time) if the industry allows for it. Why? It saves them on office costs, and if people have all the tools needed to work from home, there are suddenly no boundaries between home and work. Welcome to 24/7 on-call Hell.[/quote]
Yeah, that’s tricky. Since my wife switched to remote 2 years ago, we’ve had to get a lot more strict about setting boundaries with work. She used to check Slack occasionally while idling on the couch outside of working hours. Little things like that were cut out pretty early on, else she ended up doing a lot of little work sessions during family time. If you aren’t good at setting those boundaries, remote work might not be right for you.[/quote]
There’s a tradeoff between flexibility and taking calls outside of your timezone. We’ve had a few years to refine things but it’s pretty simple.
We have a planned short morning “standup” meeting at 9am PST in the morning and a meeting in the afternoon at 2pm PST. If you’re not in the PST timezone, you either have to be available at those times OR you must have someone covering for you.
You are not to respond to slack or team messages past your 6pm in your timezone, unless you are happen to be the engineer on call for a production launch week. At which there’s a rotation schedule across US timezone and asia, so at most you’ll be on call for +2hrs from 6pm until the other team takes over.
Managers and above are exempt and expected to attend corporate meetings as early 7am PST when needed because there are times you’ll need to get on a call with the east coast team… The flipside is there are days that things get quiet by the time it’s 3pm PST (because everyone on the east coast it’s already 6pm). So some days, I’m off by 3:30pm PST, just in time to volunteer for my kid’s robotics team.
No one is allowed to ring personal mobile numbers. Everyone is expected to message in slack or teams, and if you’re on call, you need to have slack/teams on your phone and logged in.
If you don’t respond during hours, don’t check in your code or submit a PR or show up for a code review, design meeting. You will get tarred and feathered over slack and teams by your teammates and get shit on by them.
Managers and above have learned here to use the “Scheduled messages” after hours, if they want to put something in a slack channel that is not meant to be actioned upon until the next business day. Before, I wasn’t doing this, people were thinking I was expecting a response off-hours and finally people complained to me about it. I didn’t expect people to respond off-hours.. I just didn’t want forget and posted it in the slack channel meant for tomorrow.
My philosophy is don’t be a dick to people on your team. And one day if you end up working for one of them, (hopefully) you won’t work for a dick.
CoronitaParticipant[quote=spdrun]
This startup is building a remote configurable hearing diagnostic and hear aid system. The concept is to allow some elderly in the rural/remote community with limited mobility and unable to reach hear specialistics to have access to top hearing specialists that live elsewhere (IE urban areas)…
Two things:
(1) What’s to stop the companies from pushing laws that allow the specialists to be outsourced abroad or automated away? This sounds like a jobkiller long-term.
(2) People who need hearing aids should also have a checkup for other organic causes of hearing loss … a hearing aid could be hiding the real problem that’s damaging hearing long-term.[/quote]
If you want, you can talk to the company. They couldnt afford me so I didn’t follow up with the details of how it works…
I try not to be a Debbie Downer when someone trying to do something new in tech. There’s enough of that on piggington.
OOAL!!!
CoronitaParticipant[quote=scaredyclassic]
Telemedicine will be commonplace, I don’t think that trend will reverse. My wife’s doing it. It’s very very VERY efficient. Having bodies late and milling about an office slows things down. Obviously some issues will require physical presence, but a shocking number do not.[/quote]
Actually, this is just starting and scratching the surface.
I’ve had a few startups that reached out to me asking me if I was interested in running their mobile app group. There’s a few interesting concepts, all with the idea of no longer requiring in person contact. I’m not sure I agree with all the ideas will work but…it’s interesting to see some people thinking about this. Most of them are in the medical space..
1) Remote, self service hearing diagnostic and hear aid kit.
This startup is building a remote configurable hearing diagnostic and hear aid system. The concept is to allow some elderly in the rural/remote community with limited mobility and unable to reach hear specialistics to have access to top hearing specialists that live elsewhere (IE urban areas)… Their prototype involves shipping a medical hearing diagnostic kit to the person, and than providing a remote management console to a hearing specialist elsewhere to run the hearing tests one normally would need to see in person to do. They also are working on a hearing aid that can also be configured and tuned remotely. Part of the “kit” besides the medical device is a smartphone shipped with the package specifically customized and built just to run the the tests and configure the hearing aid. Interesting concept.
2) Second company is creating remote diagnostic tools to help parents diagnose if their developing kid has a higher chance of autism. Some of this is to capture day-to-day behavior of the kid and also some integratio to daycare etc. Supposedly the POC is being tested with part of the USAF. I didn’t quiet understand how things work, and how much of it was real and to be done, but whatver.
3) Third company was a startup that does remote diabetic management. (No ,it wasn’t Insulet, Dexcom, or Solara).
#1 and #3 had their Series A VC funding. #2 was funded by angel investors not yet at the Series A yet.
There’s a lot of energy and money being spent on remote medical diagnostic. It’s not just about being confined to home due to a pandemic they are trying to solve. A lot of these ideas came up because the pandemic caused people to think “what can we do with technology if you cannot physically be in close contact with someone else”…..And then the application of that is being applied to people who do not have easy access to good medical care (IE rural people etc)…
I think these ideas are a lot more exciting than companies like Peloton that make a connected exercise bike. I wouldn’t consider that really “tech”….lol.
That said, some of the medical diagnostic-ish stuff is also being applied to things like sports medicine/training. For example, glucose monitoring companies are starting to branch out to sports medicine/fitness training where some of the future products are to help athletics monitor their glucose levels, etc as part of a training regimen. I believe some of these devices probably don’t need as rigorous clearance from the FDA/etc…
CoronitaParticipant[quote=sdrealtor][quote=Coronita][quote=XBoxBoy]It’s funny. We keep talking about tech workers, but the other day I called a company’s customer service and while I’m on the line with the service rep. I could hear her also telling her kid that she needed to be quiet while mom’s on the phone. I guess she could have brought her kid into work, but I suspect she was working from home. And if you think about it, she’s saving money because she doesn’t need to pay child care, and the company is able to get a low wage worker that they otherwise might not have been able to. I don’t think this work from home thing is just about high paid tech workers.[/quote]
It’s also school district employees, who called just a few days ago, and she said she’s not in the office and she’s working from home so it’s best to reach her via email….[/quote]
And it’s health care workers also. One family member meets with a therapist over zoom. Another family member just took a work from home job counseling patients with hearing issues.
Much of the mortgage industry is wfh now also. It’s a tech wave but has created many other ripples[/quote]
My kid’s tutor service is now over zoom.
CoronitaParticipant[quote=JPJones]
Jesus, dude. Who hurt you? You say you have no axe to grind, then proceed to grind an axe.
Anyhow, good tech workers are literally irreplaceable right now. The type of shortage we’re seeing isn’t going to correct itself in a year or two, and for that matter, we aren’t even talking tech workers at this point. WFH is a normal part of benefits packages for every white collar job across every industry now. The cat is out of the bag, and smarter business people than us have figured out how much full-time remote work has increased productivity. (SPOILERS: it’s a lot)[/quote]
[img_assist|nid=27543 | width=700]
CoronitaParticipant[quote=XBoxBoy]It’s funny. We keep talking about tech workers, but the other day I called a company’s customer service and while I’m on the line with the service rep. I could hear her also telling her kid that she needed to be quiet while mom’s on the phone. I guess she could have brought her kid into work, but I suspect she was working from home. And if you think about it, she’s saving money because she doesn’t need to pay child care, and the company is able to get a low wage worker that they otherwise might not have been able to. I don’t think this work from home thing is just about high paid tech workers.[/quote]
It’s also school district employees, who called just a few days ago, and she said she’s not in the office and she’s working from home so it’s best to reach her via email….
CoronitaParticipantGot to go..
OOAL!!!!
Ciao
CoronitaParticipant[quote=deadzone]
No axe to grind at tech workers in general, only towards the entitled, prima donna subset of tech workers (or any industry for that matter). The ones who feel so highly of themselves they really believe they are irreplaceable. Most of these, I suspect, entered the workforce post 2009/2010 recession and only know good times as their careers benefitted from the gale force tailwinds of fed money printing. I’ve seen this before, those same attitudes were common place in the late 90s in the tech industry.[/quote]Um, ok if you say so.
Yeah, that’s what people use to say about Qualcomm.
….Back in 94 before the 2:1 stock split.
Then they certainly were finished
… Before the 2:1 stock split in 1999…
Then obviously they were finished with the patent issues…
….Before the 4:1 stock split in Dec 1999….
They were certainly done with all the IP lawsuits….
….Before the 2:1 stock split in 2004
….And clearly they were finished when they were 38/share a few years ago…
That was before Broadcom hostile takeover failed, Intel pulled out of 5G, Apple gave up on 5G and settled….Tech sure is finished….lol
I’m sure there will be another real estate opportunity of a lifetime . one day.
CoronitaParticipant[quote=deadzone][quote=barnaby33]deadzone wrote:
And let’s face it, if hiring 100% remote is fully normalized, why would I hire a San Diego engineer at 200K when I can get the same productivity out of an Indian engineer for 50K or less?
LoL, no, just no.
Seconded. Having been in IT for 25 years now, that’s a myth. If the Indian/Chinese/Russian was that good, he’d most likely be in the US already.
Josh[/quote]Perhaps. But it is irrelevant, the majority of white collar workers will go back to the office, at least part time, once Covid is over.
And the entitled, prima donna tech workers who are threatening to quit if forced back to the office can do so. But they better be careful because the job market is not going to be so favorable if this tech bubble crash continues on its current trajectory.[/quote]Man,
deadzone tell us how you really feel about tech workers, lol. You definitely have an ax to grind with tech workers. Could it possibly be you once were during the dot.com days and somehow never made it back into tech?
Sour grapes, much?
lol
Tech jobs aren’t necessary opportunites of a lifetime. You might think it that way by seeing others successful at it, but it’s not for everyone and not being in tech doesn’t mean one can’t be successful.
Personally, I’m happy to see finally tech workers making serious $$$$. For years, I thought it was pretty funny that investment bankers make 10x+ more than tech workers was a little strange, lol.
CoronitaParticipant.
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