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MrShankles ,

I work night shifts. My manager one time called me around 2pm to ask me something menial and waking me up (as I was still sleeping for my next shift at 7pm).

So naturally, I called him at 2AM when I was at work… because I had an “urgent” question about a work policy lol. He got the picture, and that shit never happened again

andrewta ,

As funny as this is, I’m quite certain if somebody actually tried this in the real world they’d get fired. At will employment means they don’t even have to tell you why you got fired. They’ll just wait a couple of weeks or a month and tell you goodbye.

possiblylinux127 ,

That’s not true at all in many countries. You can’t just fire someone for no reason. It doesn’t have to be a good reason but you need a reason. Also if someone is fired because of something that is protected under law like pregnancy they can come back and sue.

andrewta ,

True. Sorry should have specified in the US they can just say we are letting you go and you’re done. Which as far as I’m concerned is basically a catch all statement of “we aren’t going to tell you why, we are just firing you”.

possiblylinux127 ,

You can’t do that in the US. They can make up a excuse but they can’t fire someone for no reason

MutilationWave ,

I worked for a company that trained me that “right to work” meant I could fire someone and tell them it was because I didn’t like the color of their shoes. I suppose that’s an excuse or reason but at that point is there really any difference?

Pandantic ,
@Pandantic@midwest.social avatar

Right to work means they can’t be required to join a union. They / you are thinking of “at will employment”. You may get this confused because some states pass them together.

Alexstarfire ,

The employee can still sue. There’s a reason why others say to keep documentation of everything in situations like this. While they don’t have to tell you why you’re fired, if you sue, they still have to provide adaquate reasoning. Can’t really say "I just don’t like the guy anymore’ and have that be sufficient.

There’s no way for us to know who’s really in the right here since we don’t know what the specifics of his employment agreement are. We can just agree that the employer is wrong, and stupid. Why piss off employees that actually do the work?

masquenox ,

Nicely done.

br0da ,
@br0da@lemmy.world avatar

This is such an odd restriction for IT staff. Normally HR gives you a form to sign agreeing to working remotely sometimes and having company data on your phone because you know, servers are meant to stay on all the time? It must be nice living in a world where nothing bad happens after hours.

GamingChairModel ,

On the other extreme, 24/7 operations have redundancy.

A friend of mine explained that being an Emergency Medicine physician is a great job for work life balance, despite the fact that he often has to work ridiculous shifts, because he never has to take any work home with him. An Emergency Room is a 24/7 operation, so whenever he’s at home, some other doctor is responsible for whatever happens. So he gets to relax and never think about work when he’s not at work and not on call.

lauha ,

In a sane world, they give you a company phone when you are on reserve duty and they agree to pay compensation for being on reserve. Why would you agree to work for free?

xilona ,

Well done mate! 👏👏👏

damnthefilibuster ,

My SO was told to travel to office every day of the week, only to sit in zoom meetings because all of their team is elsewhere.

Reaaaal good use of everyone’s time and our non-renewable resources.

EldritchFeminity ,

Don’t forget that it’s also effectively a pay cut due to the added expenses and time lost in commuting. They should ask if the company is going to at least pay for the maintenance of the car if they aren’t going to pay for the time spent commuting.

snooggums ,
@snooggums@midwest.social avatar

Also the time spent getting ready for office appearances and prepping lunches (or the cost of buying lunches away from home).

Ragnarok314159 ,

We are required to show up one day a week, but my employer usually buy breakfast and/or lunch. It’s a decent meal, not a shitty half slice of pizza.

None of us dress up. Not the bosses, the lawyer, no one. We sit in the conference room looking like it’s finals weeks. No one cares, and we get more done.

neomachino ,

I do something similar, I’m on a dev team of 2 and a while back we started going in once a month for a “planning day” where we spend a couple hours in person planning out our month and spend the rest of the day talking to the teams who actually use our software to get feedback and ideas. At first the owner would take me and the other dev out for lunch but we’ve turned it into a whole office thing. So usually the whole offices shuts down for about 2 hours for a nice free lunch when we come in. One day a bunch of us went out for mini golf after lunch on the bosses dime. Another month a couple of us played old Xbox games and smoked cigs in the basement while we “brainstormed”.

brbposting ,

“Here’s the invoice for the rental!”

ramble81 ,

You know the answer, so why even ask? Just makes you look foolish. Brush off the resume and start looking. They won’t learn.

BCsven ,

Paying for commute time for regular workers is not going to happen, for many many decades you getting to work is your own issue…thus why we find a place near highway access or near transit. asking a company to pay travel means they will just hire somebody that lives close by

LetKCater2U ,

Which will no longer be feasible as more and more people are priced out of city living.

BCsven ,

It has already happened in Vancouver area, people commute in from Chilliwack to afford a home

MystikIncarnate ,

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.

BlueMagma ,

They probably wanted to get rid of you. So instead of firing you, they imposed stupid rules to makes you leave on your own.

MystikIncarnate ,

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.

what_was_not_said ,

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.

MystikIncarnate ,

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.

corsicanguppy ,

Or a “constructive dismissal”.

BearOfaTime ,

I’ve worked for numerous enterprises since the 90’s.

None of them have been this idiotic. All of them implemented secure channels. Remember SecurID cards for dial up connections?

MystikIncarnate ,

Sorry no. I was not a part of the workforce when working remotely involved dial up connections.

I was in highschool when DSL and cable internet became the norm. From then on out, it was all VPN.

EmperorHenry ,
@EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

BAM! God I need to start doing shit like this.

ChillPenguin ,

As some in IT. If my company ever does this. I’m doing the same thing. Genius play.

RBWells , (edited )

We went back to the office, I don’t care because my commute is immaterial BUT now I leave my laptop there, I disassembled the workstation at home and packed it away, I will not work at home now. Teams is on my phone because I don’t put the work email on my phone and needed a way to tell my team if I will be unexpectedly delayed. I don’t open it ever though, and now we have a group text might take it off too.

ETA: I did also delete MS Teams, we have each other’s phone numbers now.

aphonefriend ,

If it’s outlook you can access it from “webmail.your companydomain.com/edu/org” from any browser. That way you don’t need teams on your phone either.

bitchkat ,

You can just login at office.com on your mobile browser.

toddestan ,

They have the ability to turn off the web access now. My company recently did just that - if I try to access office.com on a personal device, my log in is blocked. Works fine on a company controlled device.

I’m not sure how they tell the difference since it’s through the browser. But my guess would be something to do with the lack of all their security software they load onto company controlled computers that have hooks into everything.

PunnyName , (edited )

Work from library.

FlashMobOfOne ,
@FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world avatar

It’s astonishing.

The capitalists know full well we’re more productive working remotely, but their need for control has proven to be stronger than their insatiable greed anyway.

AngryCommieKender ,

Just more proof that cruelty is the point. They’ve known since the 70s that they’d be richer than they are if they would pay thriving wages and eliminate poverty. They want the suffering more than the money.

FlashMobOfOne ,
@FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world avatar

Fair point

brax ,

It’s still greed. They want to justify the mobey they’ve wasted in useless office spaces.

IzzyScissor ,

They would be richer, but by “allowing” working class people to have a thriving life means the power gap between us and them wouldn’t be as big. People could organize and overthrow them, so they have to keep us fighting amongst ourselves for scraps.

The cruelty is the point.

roofuskit ,

Board rooms have a lot of people who are heavily invested in commercial real estate.

FlashMobOfOne ,
@FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world avatar

Also a fair point.

possiblylinux127 ,

Me who likes working in a office:

Gradually_Adjusting ,
@Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world avatar

People who are having a great time at work are the reason I like WFH

possiblylinux127 ,

I personally don’t have an issue with WFH as long as you are getting work done. If you can manage yourself go for it. It is nice to see people face to face once in a while but that doesn’t mean 3 days a week.

Gradually_Adjusting ,
@Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world avatar

I may be an outlier, but it feels great to be car free in a walkable city.

possiblylinux127 ,

I don’t mind walking but sometimes the distances are a but far. I do know a lot of people who ride bikes. Bikes has the benefit of being small and having a place to put a bag. It also probably has to do with air quality as in some places the air is bad.

Gradually_Adjusting ,
@Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world avatar

I couldn’t have done it if I stayed in the states. No judgment on anyone who lives in a structurally car dependent area and doesn’t have a good alternative

Kecessa ,

Then go to the office, don’t be angry if others don’t go

rikudou ,

It’s sad that this is considered malicious at all. Seriously, either working from home is a risk for your company or it isn’t, there’s nothing in between.

sunzu ,

Well u see your employer reserves the right to always be right!

That's the benefit of being "leadership"

BossDj ,

What I need right now supercedes anything I’ve ever said or anything on paper

7fb2adfb45bafcc01c80 ,

Here they’re pushing the “must be within 60 miles from the office” trope; I bet they’d say to drive in if it’s after hours.

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