It’s been proven over and over remote work retains top talent and makes people better at their work. And the “productivity loss” is covered by the fact that people maybe get less done in eight hours, but work longer to make up for the productivity they lost to taking more breaks.
But American capitalism has to remind the workers that their misery is part of the point.
Plus there's a multitude of studies showing that people work far less than 8 hours a day, even if they are physically present at the job. I doubt productivity actually drops at all.
I worked in a government office that supported a very seasonal industry.
My coworker had an 8:30 start and would be done her work by 9.
Other times we wouldn't have time in the day to finish, but the slow season was hell.
My kids are less distracting than the folks who walk into my office to chat while I’m in a working session. “Are you in a meeting? Yes? Oh well, You should have seen…”
Especially with the expansion of the open office… Ugh. I’ve avoided it for most of my career and I hope to never go back to an official office unless it has a door on it.
Same. Guy that sits behind me in the office has an average speaking volume of 78 decibels. Yes, I pulled out a sound meter one day because he is so goddamn loud. And I’m stuck in an open floor plan with him.
The productivity loss takes place at the office. You go from being able to solve problems all day to having Susie Homemaker and Joe Blob wanting to talk to you about the sportsball event when you’re in the middle of super complicated logic. You go from being able to use the restroom 30 seconds from your desk to walking 10 minutes to get to the closest one at the office. You go from making a quick sandwich and then getting back to work, to driving miles away to find something decent to eat. Every engineer I know is more productive at home.
More likely, they’ve reached critical mass and are now using this as a downsizing move. They know a % will quit. Will reduce the number they have to float until eventual layoffs.
Aren't they risking losing their most talented workers doing that? I assume they can more easily find jobs providing the flexibility they're looking for.
I work in tech, at one of the big tech companies (the Rainforest one).
The dirty little secret of tech is that you don’t need the best engineers. You just need people that are “good enough”, and that bar varies wildly across all of tech. I’ve worked with senior engineers from Google that absolutely crumbled outside of building Python web apps, and recent grads in LCOL areas that are better in all areas.
Alongside this, many tier 1 services in big tech are propped up by mid-level engineers. Depending on the company and org, you’d be shocked at how little coding some software engineers actually do, because they’re attending WBR’s, building review decks, running all scrum ceremonies, even responsible for multimillion dollar team budgets. Again, many of these people aren’t particularly talented compared to your standard engineer.
You’re absolutely right, but I doubt any big tech company cares. They want to reduce human cost as much as possible, and if that means letting everyone that knows how shit works go, and hiring new grads to keep your systems alive, so be it.
This only works for so long, then the company hires an MSP which does have top notch engineers and they run it like that for a decade before bringing it back in house. The cycle has always been like this. They did it in 08-11 when a ton of companies laid off their devs and shipped the jobs to code farms in India…then half a decade later when the code was like a house of cards, rehired top talent back in house to fix it all. The cycle will continue, it’s just the way CEOs who aren’t there long term for the company think. Short term profits, aka kick the can down the road to the next guy.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a fucking stupid approach, as do ~90% of IC’s at these companies.
Someone at Amazon put it nicely when they’ve said that there’s a rise in “belief-driven” leadership in tech right now. Instead of following the data and asking people what they want, we’re seeing tech leaders position themselves as visionaries, and making market-changing decisions on gut feeling. It’s absolutely a series a short-term decisions, and all they care about is what they think, and how it’ll save their skin for the next 3-6 months.
Oh man thank you for that phrase. “belief driven leadership” is exactly what’s happening there right now. Spot on. I’m so close to finding somewhere else to work but my immediate leadership thinks the RTO is bullshit as well. However I know they can’t hold off forever.
I’ve worked most of my career with msps and yes there are a lot of the lower level guys which are more for triage than fixing anything and they’re average, but the higher levels all have top notch engineers usually. Don’t get me wrong, there will always be those who squeezed by and made it higher but most who are higher up the food chain have a lot of experience from tons of different environments.
That’s very shortsighted though. One great engineer is worth 10 mediocre engineers, especially when you factor in the time required to manage them. But I’ve never built a trillion dollar company before, so I’m probably not qualified to say that my ideas are better.
Somebody should tell them about that software you can use for video teleconferences in case that opens up options for remote work. Can’t remember what it’s called though.
To be fair, I’m certain they have a way to, like, exclude internal conversations from that. They’d be foolish not to have a system to disable collection on some accounts/calls
Absolutely, but that’s the myth they’re pushing. Really what is going on here is, if remote work became the norm, suddenly all these companies would have huge empty offices that nobody wants to buy because everyone would be trying to offload their unnecessary office space. In the short term, a small productivity hit is nothing compared to multi-million dollar real estate instantly having its value slashed in half.
It’s incredibly short sighted decision making only if you assume the leadership actually cares about the company. When you have a golden parachute guaranteeing you escape the companies implosion unharmed, there’s no reason to think about the long term, you can just keep stacking short term profit shit up and glide away safely when it finally collapses.
I feel sorry for the guy. To be crushed by multiple 40kg blocks of anything isn’t funny.
On a lighter side: one of the reasons that people prepare those traditional cheeses is out of love. Death is death but at least he died doing something that he likely enjoyed - cheeses, that bring joy to families out there, having their meals. May he rest in peace.
I would argue it's more a problem of lax corporate safety. That's a ton of weight and those shelves should have been overbuilt as hell. They should have also been regularly checked for sagging and wear.
Get someone killed because you irresponsibly drunk before driving and you get sent to jail. Get someone killed because you wanted to cut costs to make more money, have a slap of the wrist and perhaps pay reparations to the family and off to home you go.
An Italian man has been crushed to death under thousands of wheels of a Parmesan-style cheese, authorities said.
Giacomo Chiapparini, 74, was buried when a shelf broke in his warehouse in the Lombardy region on Sunday, firefighter Antonion Dusi told AFP.
The collapse created a domino effect bringing down thousands of wheels, which weigh about 40kg (84lbs) each.
Some of the wheels reportedly fell about 10m (33ft) and a local resident told Italian media the collapse sounded “like thunder”.
Speaking to Italian media, a neighbour described Mr Chiapparini as “very supportive… and generous”.
The warehouse, located in Romano di Lombardia, about 50km (31 miles) east of Milan, contained a total of 25,000 wheels of Grana Padano, a hard cheese which resembles Parmesan and is popular in Italy.
Entirely political. Police do the same thing all over but because it was a black man on cellphone video the entire black community rioted and burned everything down for a month. Should they have been convicted? Probably. Was it deliberate? Most likely not. Dude was hopped up on fentanyl.
Oh sorry my bad. What I meant to say is he was high on drugs and had an extensive criminal history. He started the encounter by fighting the police. Don’t fight the police.
Why not? If somebody fights against you as a cop you’ll be less likely to let up and allow them room to escape. Most people would be fine in that situation. It was kind of a freak accident.
I said nothing about being deserved or not, but sometimes actions have consequences which nobody wants but happen anyway due to circumstances nobody predicted. Sure are a whole lot of people now saying how they can’t breathe but still not a whole lot of them dying.
A hidden world of sex abuse and exploitation by men working as “spiritual healers” has been uncovered by BBC Arabic.
It is mostly women who visit healers - believing that they can solve problems and cure illness by expelling evil spirits known as “jinn”.
Testimonies gathered by the BBC from 85 women, over a period of more than a year, named 65 so-called healers in Morocco and Sudan - two countries where such practices are particularly popular - with accusations ranging from harassment to rape.
Dalal (not her real name) sought treatment for depression from a spiritual healer in a town near Casablanca a few years ago, when she was in her mid-20s.
In Sudan, a woman named Sawsan told us that when her husband left the family home to live with a second wife - as is his right under Sharia (Islamic law) - she found herself destitute, and approached a healer for help.
In Sudan, Dr Alaa Abu Zeid, head of the family and society department at the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, was initially reluctant to believe that so many women had reported experiences of abuse to us.
I just recently read an article about Overdrive and KKR, the company that bought both Overdrive and now this publisher. It was a really disheartening read for what’s happening in the books market.
The deal with investor KKR marks the likely end of a years-long saga for owner Paramount Global, which had been looking for a buyer for the book company since 2020.
Titles released since include Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People; Joseph Heller’s military satire Catch-22 and best-selling mysteries by Stephen King.
KKR, which counts digital books platform Overdrive among its earlier investments, said it saw an opportunity to expand the company’s distribution “across mediums and markets”.
Author Stephen King was among the big names to testify against the sale on behalf of the US government, which has taken a harder line on competition under US President Joe Biden.
But on Monday, the boss of Paramount Global, Bob Bakish, said in a statement that the money raised by Simon & Schuster’s sale would give the entertainment firm greater “financial flexibility”.
It reported an overall loss after ad sales at its TV networks fell by 10% and the firm couldn’t follow up with a film that was as big as Top Gun: Maverick last year.
It makes some sense when multiple crimes were committed but it was one event. Robbing a liquor store becomes several different crimes with their own max sentences. Sure there were multiple laws broken but they only did one thing. The issue is how grey that line becomes and how much authority a judge has over a crime’s punishment and when you factor in things like if the robber shot the clerk.
Because prison is supposed to be about rehabilitation and not punishment. If you ban concurrent sentences, you might as well just shoot anyone with 50+ years of consecutive time in the head, it’s a whole lot more humane.
I personally disagree, but most people seem to agree. But I also have never been in a situation where I’d seriously have to choose, so obviously my opinion ins somewhat academic.
bbc.co.uk
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