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JPJonesParticipant[quote=CDMA ENG]I didnt read all 13 pages of this thread but I read the first five and the last two…
One thing that I didnt hear mention of was that many companies saw an increase in productivity…
Why? Because most of us only have X hours in a day to devoted to work. If I have to get up and get ready that is time given to the company. I have to commute… again time given to the company… For me the maximum at work day I could give was 9 hours. I was commuting to Irvine from north county. So all said and done… about 11.5 hours a day went to the company.
If I now can remote… I can give 10 hours to the company and I get 1.5 hours back… Win Win.
That is an exchange that people want in tech.
There is a good portion of us that had to go into the work. Your bench engineers that have 100K in equipment to work with had to go in. There was no remoting for that but many could do design work from home or even remote into our equipment.
Remoting is here to stay because productivity went up. If companies see a decline then people will be called back.
CDMA ENG[/quote]
It was mentioned here a couple pages ago. I was thinking about asking him for a source, but at this point I can’t be bothered.
[quote=deadzone][quote=barnaby33]Deadzone you really do have an axe to grind. Wow, primadonnas? I don’t know about the rest of the tech industry but I am straight of back, white of tooth and above all modest.
I offered you a rebuttal and then you said it was irrelevant. You sir are veering off into incoherence. I may be wrong but I’ve been around in tech a long time. Salaries aren’t actually that high now. During the 90’s contract software engineers (more senior than me at the time but certainly less so than me now) could regularly find 100+/hr contracts. Those are few and far between these days. Plus the cost of living has what tripled? Salaries have really stagnated and compressed. Sure a college grad now gets 80k to start but trying to find jobs above 140k is still difficult. I think you think that everyone works at FAANG or that’s the impression I get.
Josh[/quote]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]
JPJonesParticipant[quote=Coronita]oh oh… Apparently all is not well at Google…
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/google-employees-upset-remote-work
[quote]
Employees raised their complaints at a company all-hands last Thursday, submitting questions through a system called Dory. Two popular questions involved remote work, according to Insider.
“Google made record profits through the pandemic (and WFH), traffic has already increased (at least in Bay Area) with gas prices at record high, and people have different preferences for WFH vs work from office,” one question said. “Why is the RTO policy not ‘Work from office when you want or when it makes sense to?'” Another submitter said some teams “blanket ban” remote work, with Google rejecting applications “even if managers are supportive.”
Workers told Insider that Google’s remote work policies felt arbitrary. One employee said a colleague was barred from remote work even though their manager was allowed to work from home. Bay Area employees who wish to work remotely from other states might face pay cuts: Google will lower pay if employees relocate to cities like Durham, North Carolina, and Houston, Texas.
This isn’t the first time Google’s remote work plans have upset its employees. In July, CNET reported that employees were angered by “hypocritical” remote work policies, allowing senior executive Urs Hölzle to work indefinitely from New Zealand while lower-level employees had to go through an application process.
[/quote]Time for Google folks to quit and go elsewhere and free up some jobs.[/quote]
Man, I KNEW there was a reason he didn’t take my bet! Bugger!
JPJonesParticipant[quote=Coronita][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.[/quote]
That’s all about par for the course at my wife’s company, too. I especially like the bit about scheduled messages. Letting after-hours messages from bossmang sit overnight causes anxiety.
JPJonesParticipant*stupid double post
JPJonesParticipant[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.
JPJonesParticipantAccountants, engineers, helpdesk/service desk, bankers, basically every desk job I know of. They’re all working from home if it’s practical and they want to. If their employers didn’t allow it, they found jobs with employers that did.
On the other side of that coin, there are people that don’t want to work remotely, and that’s great, too. There are plenty of jobs for both types. So, while I don’t see remote work going away, I don’t see in-office jobs going away, either. Having both available is healthy and ultimately keeps more people happily employed. The key is not to force your preference on others.
JPJonesParticipant[quote=deadzone][quote=Coronita]
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.[/quote]
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]
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)
JPJonesParticipant[quote=Coronita][quote=XBoxBoy][quote=flu]I didn’t even know sabbatical existed at my company.[/quote]
So when’s your sabbatical gonna be?[/quote]Holy Shit.
I’m having a great day.
My boss just resigned.
I’m in charge now.VP for years decided to join a startup and work remotely.[/quote]
Hey, maybe they’ll let you work remotely, too! Oh, and grats on the last-man-standing promotion, of course. There can be only one!
JPJonesParticipant[quote=Coronita]Lol….
So one of my senior mobile engineers, the one that I previously said was working out of his RV/trailer traveling the US, decided to resign from my company. He’s going on a 6 month hike from the mexican border to the canadian border.
I was like, man that’s cool. I wish I did that when I was younger. So I tell my boss’s boss that his last day will be next week. To my surprise, my boss’s boss told me to ask him if he was interested in going on a 6 month sabbatical. I didn’t even know sabbatical existed at my company. I was told, “not officially”…. lol….[/quote]
Sounds like your boss knows how difficult/impossible it will be to replace a senior engineer. And here we are kicking around the idea that remote work is on the way out. Maybe we should kick harder so it goes away?
JPJonesParticipant[quote=deadzone]All the big companies are going back to the office to some degree or another. Just because you don’t agree with it, or your little po-dunk companies are fully remote, doesn’t change that fact.[/quote]
So is that a no or…?
JPJonesParticipant[quote=deadzone][quote=JPJones][quote=deadzone]Looks like they mean it this time. Either way, return to work is going to happen, sooner or later. It is as inevitable as the sun rising.[/quote]
Sure, but when? It’s gets kicked around here a lot that predicting the market means getting your timing right. So what timing are you committing to? Or are you just saying ‘someday!’?[/quote]
April seems to be the current goalpost. I don’t expect them to move this time, Covid is over.[/quote]
They’ve already given themselves and out by saying “most workers”. I bet Google backpedals from their current ‘in office 3 days/week’ position by the April 4th deadline. Winner gets bragging rights.
JPJonesParticipant[quote=an][quote=JPJones]Hey slight tangent, do any of you watch commercial real estate? Relevant to this topic, I’ve had a decent number of friends and former colleagues mention their companies either sold or let their office leases expire to go permanently remote.[/quote]My old company went fully remote mid 2020 and never looked back. Sub-leased their office and have grown dramatically over the last year and a half. With their work force everywhere in the world now AND several people I know who still work there have moved to other city/state, I don’t see them changing course and firing anyone.[/quote]
Same with my wife’s old company. The counterpoint to deadzone’s claim that ‘they’ll just hire from India now’ is that she’s now working for an Australian company, so that door swings both ways. My personal feeling from the tech industry in general is most businesses are now wise to the loss in quality and productivity that comes from hiring from cheaper countries, and they’re hiring practices have changed accordingly.
JPJonesParticipant[quote=deadzone]Looks like they mean it this time. Either way, return to work is going to happen, sooner or later. It is as inevitable as the sun rising.[/quote]
Sure, but when? It’s gets kicked around here a lot that predicting the market means getting your timing right. So what timing are you committing to? Or are you just saying ‘someday!’?
JPJonesParticipantHey slight tangent, do any of you watch commercial real estate? Relevant to this topic, I’ve had a decent number of friends and former colleagues mention their companies either sold or let their office leases expire to go permanently remote.
I think even the big kids won’t have a huge amount of success going back to how it was pre-covid. Employers are seeing entire teams threatening to resign when push comes to shove, and everyone in my wide circle of IT contacts that wanted to work from home permanently has either had their employer agree to it in writing, or have found another job that is 100% remote and paid more. Working remote is considered part of the overall compensation package now as well, and as long as employees have an edge, we won’t see a much of a swing back to in-office work being mandatory.
I worked in IT for 20 years up until 2017 and have never seen the job market this hot, not even during the .dot bubble. My wife decided to shop last fall and had 5 offers with better compensation in writing within the first 2 weeks, all 100% remote, and she never even got around to updating her portfolio. This has been par for the course with everyone I know working in any capacity of IT for the past year, roughly. Even if the market crashes and we head into a recession, I’m not convinced the worker shortage would even be simply offset or less.
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