My previous workplace was like this. It didn’t get to this point, I left before it got to the point of being told you’re not allowed to wfh under any circumstances, but I was very confused why I needed to go to the office, to do my IT job, helping people with their computers remotely. I go to the office, to work remotely. Which doesn’t make any sense at all.
What is special about the office that allows me to work better/faster/more effectively/whatever? Nobody could give me an answer. I can easily run the tools at home and work fine from there, but I’m not allowed.
My specialty is in network operations, if they want my work to 100% go through their equipment and firewalls and stuff, I can make that happen. With little effort, I can setup a system on a VLAN, and VPN that VLAN to work, blocking it from all other traffic apart from the VPN. It would be the only system on that VLAN (apart from the firewall/VPN device), ensuring no possibility of cross contamination between my equipment and theirs. They even had an openVPN host already configured, which they would only need to generate a connection file for, in order for me to get it working. I can then proxy 100% of my traffic through an office system and it would be identical to being present in the office, apart from me being physically there.
At home I have a dedicated room for my computer activities, where I can close the door and lock it if required, so I can remain undisturbed.
I made sure they understood all of this but they still wanted me in the office at least 4 days a week. I’m still not sure why.
I left that job, and my new job doesn’t even have a physical office, so I’m permanently working from home.
Oh probably. From everything I saw it was impossible for me to meet their demands.
Partway through my employment I moved to a new home, after a few months my SO got a job. She doesn’t have a license but needed to travel about 15 minutes to work (30m round trip). I was basically the only person who could, or would, help her get to work. I worked 9-5, her shift was 2:30 to 10:30.
For a while, my brother would drive her to work and I would drive her home, even that was stressful, because I’d wake up at 6:30 to shower and get ready to leave by 8AM so I can be at work for 9, then I had to stay up to bring her home, which she wasn’t out at 10:30 promptly every day, so I’d frequently get home after 11:30. Going to bed at, or after midnight, to wake up by 6:30 AM, five days a week isn’t fun, even at four days in the office per week, it was not great.
Thought-out this time I was asking for more wfh, since then I can at least sleep from midnight to 8 AM or so. They wouldn’t budge.
My brother ended up having a medical issue that caused him to be unable to drive her to work, so I told my employer I had to work from home, since I have to take care of getting her both to, and from work, and that, at most, the situation would last around 10-12 months (she was working on her driver’s license, and that’s the minimum waiting/learning time for new drivers, before they can drive without a chaperone); I also informed them that I could attend the office once per week, since she had one weekday off per week as part of her shift rotation. They “compromised” by basically telling me to follow their schedule or be laid off. Their schedule was: in office every day from 9-1. Travel home between 1 and 2pm, and do what’s needed to get my SO to work. Once I’m done that, I can work from home when I return from dropping her off (usually 2:30 or 3 PM to 5 PM or so… Whatever our quitting time was), with one day (her day off) fully in office, and one day fully from home. So 3 of 5 days was this insane in-office then drive home and finish at home thing, one day was fully remote, and one day was fully in office.
Needless to say, I burned out fast. Got a note from my doctor saying I was disabled (he didn’t specify why, but if push came to shove it would be something mental health related, he never needed to AFAIK), and I wasn’t able to work right now, and currently the recovery time needed was unknown. So I went on disability.
I also want to mention that through all the half day nonsense, they expected me to log 6.5 hours in their time tracking software, which is something I struggle with at the best of times. When I’m stressed, the first thing that suffers is my ability to correctly log and account for my time in any system. So I had 4 hours in the morning to work from the office on my “split days” (as I called them), plus, maybe 2.5 hours at most during my work from home time. Totalling 6.5 hours. I couldn’t so much as take a shit or I would fall behind on my time tracking. Normally over an 8 hour shift, the 1.5 hours of missing time in the day would be for breaks/lunch. It’s hard to take lunch when I’m barely able to make it home in an hour, and barely able to get to/from her work in 30 minutes. I usually work through lunch because I tend to have time where I have no idea what I was doing, so I can’t really account for it in the time tracker. With the 1.5 hour block of driving in the middle of my day, plus all the distractions and unaccounted time I know I’ll accrue from co-workers pulling me away from my work to ask asinine questions about things that don’t have a presence in the time tracking system (all ticket based, and they would ask me about prospective projects that wouldn’t have a ticket for months), I knew that what they were asking as an impossible task.
After I felt up to the task of returning to that insanity, instead of keeping my seat warm for me, they laid me off before I was set to return to work. I only felt up to it because it would have only been a matter of a few months before my SO was able to take her driver’s test to be able to drive solo, and after 6 months of being off I wasn’t suicidal from the stress anymore, but the bills were starting to pile up.
I was able to determine that they hired a new person in the same role I had, who was on probation at the time when I wanted to return.
I’ll let you conclude what you want from that. I’ll legally bound not to speak poorly of the company, or what happened after my layoff. Everything I’ve said here is simply the facts of the matter.
In any case, after some thought, I’m glad I don’t work with people who would force me into that kind of position for a paycheque. I have a new job now and I’m slowly paying off any accumulated bills from my time disabled and/or laid off. The new company, as I believe I’ve mentioned, is entirely wfh, and I’m certain if I ended up in a similar spot, they would be vastly more empathetic to my plight. I’m even earning a small amount more per year, not enough to write home about, but it’s still a bigger number than I was given at the last place. I’m happy where I am, and I’m largely not stressed, apart from the normal stresses of my job. I no longer need to pay for gas to get to the office, nor parking, since the previous job was located in a nearby city in the downtown area, with no free parking for employees, so I had to get paid public parking out of my own pocket. I estimate the change will save me around $6000/yr or more. On top of my small bump in pay, I should have a bit less than $10k/yr more money to myself. Right now all of that is sunk into repayments, but long term, its basically free money.
If you work in the US, NDAs tied to severance are generally illegal.
Even so, I gave my last employer the benefit of silence for the amount of time my severance would have covered in regular salary. That time is now past.
Not in the USA, I’m not sure that we have a similar law. Any agreement that may or may not have resulted from the above story, which I cannot confirm nor deny, would have been examined by a legal professional whom is familiar with local laws and if such an error were to have been included in such a document, they would have surely pointed it out.
I’m not saying that’s what happened, but if it did, I certainly would have had any such agreement looked at by a professional who is familiar with the laws to the point of knowing if such a thing were not enforceable.
I wish I could say more specifically what happened, including my opinions, or name and shame the company involved but I am compelled to not disclose any such information. I also cannot elaborate on why or how I am limited on what I can disclose.
I feel like I’m walking a tightrope. The chances that someone is going to even care enough to trace my username to my identity, then do something about it, is pretty slim, even if I were to disclose everything, and name and shame as I would love to do… But I’m more honorable than most I suppose.
It may be real, but I’m finding a Russian nesting doll’s worth of references to other sites when I try to find more info. The closest I can get is a blurb on this website, which claims to get its info from an AFP article it doesn’t link to.
lol nuclear is really uneconommical, way too expensive and therefore really inefficient. You need 10-20 years to build a plant for energy 3 times more expensive than wind. For plants that still require mining. That produce waste we cannot store and still cannot reuse (except for one small test plant). For plants that no insurance company want to insure and energy companies dont like to build without huge government subsidies.
I know lemmy and reddit have a hard on for nuclear energy because people who dont know anything about it think its cool. But this post is ridiculous even for lemmy standards.
One of my favorite examples is when a company from India (I think?) trained their model to regulate subway gates. The system was supposed to analyze footage and open more gates when there were more people, and vice versa. It worked well until one holiday when there were no people, but all gates were open. They eventually discovered that the system was looking at the clock visible on the video, rather than the number of people.
I do that shit when I have a web interview. Put up a guitar just visible in the camera, a small bookshelf, a floor lamp, make sure my tennis bag is visible despite not playing in ages…
Whether they realize it or not, people do take this stuff in. Not sure why some algorithm based on these very same interviews wouldn’t do the same.
I did the same, but they were not impressed by my Obedience extreme sex bench 5000 with restraint straps. I even told them the sturdy bench is made of durable, heavy-duty steel, capable of supporting up to 400 pounds of weight.
Well, you see. Those in charge want that apple there. Because when push comes to shove that apple will also kill activists, protestors and political opponents without asking questions or refusing orders. He will keep fellow apples in check and keep them from speaking up as well. They like that apple.
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