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jj4211

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jj4211 ,

I’m torn, on one hand, you are right. On the other, I will say that while we disagreed, my extended family used to get along. Enough time with social media and there’s basically people that can’t stand to talk to each other at all, let alone be in the same room. Folks that grew up together, spent decades hanging out. Same thing for a friend of mine that had been a friend for over a decade. Went down a rabbit hole and frothing at the mouth rage with all sorts of extremist talking points.

While direct responsibility is certainly tricky, social networks have allowed people’s worst inclinations to fester. The neat tendency for them to group “like-minded” folks together while guarding them from “unlike-minded” has really caused deep societal problems.

jj4211 ,

During his presidency, yes. On a related note, when I would speak to someone in the UK during Boris Johnson, he would be careful to inject a bit of “Boris Johnson sucks, Brexit was dumb” to make his stance clear.

Related, they sometimes assume I not only own a gun, but I’m armed at all times like some old west cowboy, depending on how little they deal with Americans day to day.

jj4211 ,

Well, of course I didn’t have to clarify I wasn’t a supporter of President Trump while he wasn’t President…

I pretty much have to be prepared for assumptions about any dubious American move in the global stage, and America makes a lot of dubious moves.

jj4211 ,

While that does suck, there are options in the primary. So you can vote her out without voting for a Republican, if that’s anathema/unrealistic in her district.

jj4211 ,

To your first paragraph, decline often comes suddenly. Of course with a two year term, and hundreds of representatives, it’s not as critical of a risk as a 6 year senator, but still.

jj4211 ,

The issue is that it’s not that people express do not want the option, it’s just that if it is cheaper, they might go without.

In other products I’ve been involved with, the dilemma crops up. 90% of our customers pay for a premium feature, or else the feature has become so cheap it hardly saves us anything, we decide “guess everybody gets the feature”.

The argument that I might be willing to accept is when a feature carries a very large development expense, and you want to defray the cost among those that demanded it, both as a different model for funding the development and for keeping track of waning interest to discontinue that effort. Related are things like patent royalties and licensing fees.

However, we are taking about some resistive heating elements in a chair, hardly an engineering marvel and not really subject to a limited set of demanding supplier nor an area to run afoul of active patents. Once safety regulations got to the point where manufacturers had to run wiring to the seats anyway for the airbag modules, the hearing elements become negligible cost. A lot of budget models even shrugged and just tossed the feature in at that point. In that context, is crazy that a premium brand would think to pull such an obnoxious move.

jj4211 ,

It is the point when the subscription is paid for lifetime, but the warranty is not.

A subscription fee might make sense if it came with warranty coverage. If the fee is for using some heating elements you already have, but no promises they will actually keep working, then you are paying for something that doesn’t track any associated expense incurred on the supplier.

jj4211 ,

Of course a BMW driver would be driving while commenting on the Internet.

jj4211 ,

Hilarious if you look at the X5 it has a M package… which is just some cosmetics at this point.

jj4211 ,

I agree. Some subset of ADAS are using things like LIDAR mapping data that do incur ongoing cost. For example, Ford relies on road having recent LIDAR data to let you take your hands off. So they have a subscription, and if you don’t pay… Well it’s almost the same except your hands have to stay on. It is vaguely less competent, but still pretty much follows the lines/traffic on its own.

Of course their pricing is way more than I think will work out, but I can at least understand why a subscription fee is associated.

The argument I could maybe see is that their seemingly fine ADAS system is at higher risk of being hit with a mandatory recall down the road. Those generally ignore all warranty limitations (e.g suddenly having to replace airbags in 15 year old cars…), but might spare them the expense for those who lack the features, or at least the revenue from the users helps fund the possibility of converting a related recall.

jj4211 ,

I’ll plug in my phone, ignore your entire. Infotainment and actively campaign for it to fail and blow up in your face.

Jokes on GM customers, they announced they would no longer support apple carplay or Android Auto, and customers would instead need to buy functionally through GM.

jj4211 ,

And then shock and surprise that people are actually talking to each other instead of just either mindlessly agreeing or purging a different opinion. Don’t folks know this is the internet, which is no place for actual discourse?

jj4211 ,

It depends.

It could fizzle out a bit, harsh reality is that there are limitations, and those limitations are not trivial to push beyond. For example here they said the results were obviously bad, and the Spanish readers would switch to read English instead.

It could free up opportunities for sorts of work we couldn’t previously have done and keep folks utilized.

We may run out of ambitions and end up with a glut of time and resources and give everyone better quality of living with less time lost to labor.

We may end up with a dystopia of people arbitrarily in the winning side enjoy a paradise and the rest suffer or rise up in desperation.

jj4211 ,

It’s why I speculated different scenarios, we have to prepare for things to go various directions.

There’s a chance that possibilities I can’t imagine pop up. I suspect my imagination would have been too limited to see modern jobs if I lived in pre industrial times.

It’s possible we ultimately run out of new stuff to do. Hopefully we can find a path to increase leisure rather than pointlessly keep people doing tedious work that we could automate because we couldn’t think of a better system. There’s tough issues around how to do it at all, and tougher, how to do it fairly.

If we get to such a future, I’d want to see reduction in hours worked per person, or some decoupling of livelihood from working. Way easier said than done though…

jj4211 ,

Indeed, “use it or lose it” versus “keep it and we presume you might use it… one day”

jj4211 ,

Well, that’s not really “trickle down” as championed by Reagan, that’s more “use it or lose it”. He wanted to reduce those crazy high tax rates to give the rich the choice of whether to keep the money for later or to spend it now, with “trickle down” being the phrase to tell people that it’s fine, it’ll make it’s way out to everyone else… eventually?

jj4211 ,

Of course, unfortunately, replace the word “capitalism” with pretty much every at scale economic “system”, and you get similar results: some group granted authority and power over the rest and “everythings fine” even when they are not.

jj4211 ,

Challenge is getting companies to actually move into the spaces earmarked for them.

My area has gone all in on mandating that all new housing must: Be dense, but short (Max of 4 stories) Constructed with dedicated office and retail space

Ok cool, walkable… Except the companies aren’t moving into the retail or office space. Since they only get a useless amount of street side parking, they can’t really serve people outside walking distance reasonably. Meanwhile they can find a bigger spot a few miles down the road with parking to serve a bigger area. Serving a walkable community might be worth it if the apartments were high rise providing the requisite density to support such business. Once upon a time, business did subsist on that volume of customers, but nowadays businesses demand more efficiency…

jj4211 ,

While they could do things to mitigate the angle of incidence, ultimately that same photovoltaic material will fare better angled consistently toward where the sun might be. If you’ve run out of room everywhere else, sure, time to look at trailers. But so long as we have spare other places, those are better places.

The trailer might be going through shaded areas, there’s only so much optics can do to correct for angle of incidence, and the added weight means we are using energy to move them around when they’d be better off stationary anyway.

Even residential solar is a dubious proposition, since you have to work around roof lines that are rarely optimal for solar. In that case it can make some sense for owning your own generation, particularly with battery, to go “off grid”, but I have a hard time imagining similar for the trailer.

jj4211 ,

You should be watching the generation capacity rather than efficiency.

My roof happens to be incredibly well aligned for solar, and most months I generate more energy than I use. About 1.2 MwH per month. The fact that the panels are “only” maybe 19% efficient doesn’t really factor into my reality. The factors that matter are system output, cost, and my usage.

Efficiency helps on the power output per unit time, but better to focus on the end goal rather than the contributing factors. Depending on your location and house design, you might be good to go already, or even a hypothetical 30% efficient system would fail to get you everything you need.

jj4211 ,

The issue is that while it may be a trivial gain, that same photovoltaic material would generate more energy in a fixed installation. Also, as an installation on a truck, the weight of the system contributes to the energy needed to move the truck, somewhat negating the benefit.

So sure, have your electric truck. The trickle charging of any onboard solar system wouldn’t even be noticeable though, and it’s better to have the panels on grid helping drive the charging infrastructure. I saw someone guesstimate a theoretical peak of 25kw. My car charges at home at half of that, and even for my comparatively tiny car, that takes a long time to restore range, compared to it driving down the road. The truck might be able to get an extra 5 miles of range per hour of peak sunlight with 25kw system under realistic conditions, and that same material might be able to extract 40-50% more energy over time in a fixed installation.

jj4211 ,

I read an article the other day where an airline was breaking about using AI to predict how many passengers will buy a meal in flight based on how many people had historically bought a meal in flight.

That’s… Literally just an average of how many people order a meal…

jj4211 ,

My management assigned me a title implying high level AI person. Evidently they had a mandate for X% AI experts, so a bunch of us had our titles arbitrarily changed and the mandate was satisfied.

No one can tell we aren’t, so I guess it worked out?

jj4211 ,

Ultimately that application is just averaging over a smaller subset.

While admittedly I don’t know that scenario myself, it looks like several scenarios I’ve seen where we imagined some magic insight from AI over more limited statistics, but not one of those scenarios ever predicted better.

That’s not to say AI approaches are useless, but this sort of data when the dataset is pretty well organized and the required predictions are straightforward, then a pretty simple statistical analysis is plenty, and declaring “AI” for such a simple scenario just undermines AI credibility where it can do formerly infeasible things.

jj4211 ,

Also possible she is lying to try to pretend she made a mistake.

iFixit tears down a McDonald’s ice cream machine, demands DMCA exemption for it (arstechnica.com)

McDonald’s soft-serve ice cream machines are regularly broken, and it’s not just your perception. When repair vendor and advocate iFixit was filming a video about the topic, it checked tracking map McBroken and found that 34 percent of the machines in the state of New York were reported inoperable. As I write this, the...

jj4211 ,

In fact, Kytch made an aftermarket add-on to the machines to let the restaurants know what is wrong, without having to call Taylor for service.

McDonald’s corporate came out and said they weren’t allowed to do it, that it was dangerous to do it instead of calling Taylor, that it risked leaking McDonald’s proprietary business information.

In fact, Taylor makes ice cream machines for a number of fast food chains, but McDonald’s explicitly got the crappiest one (not as in “cheap”, but explicitly crappy, as McDonald’s corporate mandated their use).

Now why in the world does Taylor make good machines for other chains, and why in the world were operators not free to buy the better models or even fix the models they are allowed to buy? Taylor’s business results talk up the revenue for their paid repair service, and with the operators having easy access to know how to fix it/avoid the problem themselves, their repair volumes would go down. Evidently they have a particularly interesting business relationship and thus McDonald’s corporate was happy to through franchisees under the bus in service of that relationship.

Nowadays, it seems franchisees are allowed to get machines that actually self-report the problems. Presumably all the bad press around the whole ordeal moved it to the point of really needing to be fixed (also two vendors are allowed now instead of just Taylor)

jj4211 ,

Good stance, though part of the problem is that we hopped off nuclear, but not quite.

So we recognized risks of the nuclear plants and we started doing fixes, but most critically, we largely stopped making reactors. So instead of migrating to newer, fundamentally safer designs, we keep duct taping the existing ones.

We already have much better technology understanding, but because new nuclear is scary, and somehow old nuclear got grandfathered in, we are generally living with 70s limitations. Fukushima failed in a way a more modern design would probably have done in a ‘failsafe’ way. Same for waste, we have knowledge on how to have reactions that end with much less problematic material (though still not great, at least with a more manageable half life).

So we should make sure we address the concerns, but have to balance that against letting perfect be the enemy of the good. So far we’ve been so reluctant about safety of new reactors, we ironically are stuck with roughly 70s level safety.

jj4211 ,

It can be multiple things.

Real estate costs that they are stuck with. For example, my employer committed to a 20 year lease shortly before the pandemic. They don’t have a good exit clause so either those office towers are going to be empty or used, but either way, my employer is paying for them, might as well get use out of them.

Managers that have such a poor understanding of the work that they can’t comfortably tell if the work output from their employees is good or slacking. At least being able to see them in person they feel more comfortable that the employee looks more likely to be engaged. It’s still possible a slacker is conning them, but at least they aren’t as obviously doing so. They may not be masochistic as much as they hired people that know more than they do, and are therefore at a severe disadvantage when evaluating an employee.

As others have pointed out, one mans annoying distraction is another employee’s great help. A new hire that needed mentorship. A colleague stuck on a little thing without going out of their way to ask for help in a remote context.

Realistically, having some work from home for morale/better work life balance, and focused individual work and some in person time is probably the most productive scenario.

jj4211 ,

b) Their WFH staff are more productive than their office staff.

This probably varies place to place, person to person. However, over the course of, say, 10 years, productivity would likely drop in a 100% WFH scenario. People retire and the new hires never really find their groove without the in person experience.

Just let those leases expire when they do

Some of these leases are absurdly long, like decades long. Some own the buildings rather than lease, so they’d need to sell, but who would be buying?

I do see significant reduction in office space and more aggressive ‘hot desking’ to size a lower occupancy rate due to increased WFH. Before pandemic, our office planned to 80% occupancy, based on measuring generally 60% occupancy (between sick days, vacations, meetings, and travel, a lot of people aren’t at their desks). I would not be surprised for them to size for, say, 50% occupancy if opportunities to exit lease for some of the buildings comes up.

jj4211 ,

One analysis suggested that a hybrid work but without specific corporate mandate seemed to see the best result.

If the business arbitrarily said “come in all the time” or “come in three days a week”, they tended to not get good results.

If the business said “ok, no more office, all remote”, they seemed to also not get good results.

The businesses that said “office is open and ready for you to use as you and your teams see fit”, they seemed to have the best result. The optimistic will ascribe that to people thriving on the flexibility and respect of their employer. My somewhat more cynical view is that peer pressure works to get people into the office, and the employee is less pissed because it’s “their choice” to come in. Just like when a company grants employees “unlimited vacation” and rejoice, as unlimited vacation tends to mean the employees take less vacation.

jj4211 ,

The weird thing is that Apple without Jobs was a failure, but also Jobs without Apple was also a failure.

jj4211 ,

While he has had some success, he’s also demonstrably been a glory hog benefiting from crazy good luck.

He had an Internet company during the first dot com boom. He got a bunch of cash from Compaq for effectively nothing, because businesses had to snap up anything vaguely Internet. Right place at right time, basically won a lottery.

So then he founded an Internet bank. But want allowed to lead it, no matter, either way it was overshadowed by PayPal, which was a runaway success. Somehow he managed a merger with him being put in charge of the joint company. Then he almost tanked it and was put aside to salvage the company. However, he managed to be popularly thought of as “the PayPal guy”

He founded SpaceX. Off the top of my head, that one seems fair enough.

Then you have Tesla, which existed prior to him Knowing about it, yet he still insisted on being called a founder. It’s possible that without him, Tesla wouldn’t have gone far, but either way, he’s been a glory hog about it to the point of again getting himself framed as “the” Tesla guy.

jj4211 ,

Not to stand up for jobs, but from what I’ve seen of woz, I can totally believe he wouldn’t see more money as worth the bother. From what I’ve seen: If you’re making 36k a year, your are obsessed with opportunities to get more, no matter who you are. Your life is financially difficult and any chance to overcome that is worth it.

If you are making 200k a year, you start seeing different sorts of folk.

Some will not stop until that number is as big as it can be. Their lives will be consumed by that as a “high score”

Some care less about money and more about titles and conspicuous status symbols, like a coveted office.

Some are happy to just do their work the way they like without having to worry about the money anymore, or to work on hobbies and afford to walk away from working.

I know folks that are 200k as “bird in the hand” money and chasing bigger numbers is worth considering, but they are more concerned about risk to their perceived status or working conditions than pay.

Take one of those last sort of folk, get them to tens of millions of wealth and they are likely happy to just stop thinking about the money, even if it means they are sonetimes the chump as a result.

jj4211 ,

How does trying to prattle on about not liking grouping 17 year olds together with 9 year olds a pro-gun argument? That would only even vaguely make sense if your stance was “yeah, but 17 year olds deserve to get shot and killed”

jj4211 ,

Scraped the internet for data? Public domain.

Of course, just because material is on the internet does not mean that material is public domain.

So AI is likely the worst of both worlds: It can infringe copyright and the publisher be held liable for the infringement, but offers no protection in and of itself down the line.

jj4211 ,

If we had a UBI then IMO we could likely do away with the copyright laws for the most part.

Most UBI proposals would not really help with that. Most UBI, when combined with other social programs, means a general “safety net” for people to barely subsist, rather than thrive if they are trying to build a living out of it. It’s mostly envisioned as an emergency living, maybe bridge someone to get education, or to complement minimum wage type of work to bring it up to a respectable standard of living.

jj4211 ,

Not necessarily. I recall one of the big issues was an animation studio using AI generated backdrops, but still drawing the critical elements in the scenes. So you need something convincingly “foresty” in the background but don’t care about the details, you start there, and then maybe carve out some path for the characters to be in and do the actual specific work there.

If the studio found out that people could freely rip off their backgrounds, I doubt they would care. There’s a lot of “don’t care” creative work that has to be done to fill out the context around actual core creative works. Also lots of room for, say, one 3D model to be created and using some AI-enhanced version of “palette-swapping” to create diversity in mobs without actually doing work. The derivation may not receive additional copyright protection, but the base model that was altered would be covered, so attempts to rip-off the AI mutated model would still hit the base model’s protections. Even in constructing creative works that matter, you get to a basic design and then have AI take it away (coloring, rigging, animation might be AI enhanced beyond automation tools can provide already).

jj4211 ,

Ultimately, it’s because the human creators need to eat and take longer to do what they do. If they are uniquely able to create something valued, then we want to afford them some protections so that they can keep doing that value.

For AI works, the effort is trivial (and frankly, the output is very much uninspired, but there are places for that). So there’s no connection between human labor hours and the content, and therefore no reason we should prioritize protecting it.

On the stance of whether copyright helps achieve that, if you simply remove copyright without an alternate system, then the creators get nothing at all once a single copy of their work is made available for free. It was bad enough when works had to be printed/manufactured, in the digital context duplicates are perfect and essentially free. Straightforward enough case on perfect duplication, but then it gets rough on “derivative works”. You include something created by another person but contribute your own thing and make it new, well, you clearly derived some value from the inspiring works but clearly also created your own value, and that’s so subjective. Finally you have the terms of copyright, which seem crazy long, and could stand to be shortened.

Numerous Tesla owners say they've been trapped inside their EVs after they lost power. (www.businessinsider.in)

Numerous Tesla owners say they’ve been trapped inside their EVs after they lost power.::Numerous Tesla owners say they have been trapped inside their EVs after they lost power.Teslas come with manual door releases, but they can be hard to find

jj4211 ,

Tesla is not alone (there was a story about someone trapped in a Corvette because they didn’t know about the separate emergency release handle).

However, there are examples of doing it better. For example, evidently in the Mach E the emergency release is… pulling the normal door release harder. So there’s some detent for ‘normal electric opening of door’ and then if you are more frantic, pulling harder to really open the door.

jj4211 ,

As much as we want to simply call these people “stupid” or “clueless” (which many people in this thread have already one) but it is much deeper than that.

Further, doing so will galvanize their support for their guy.

People like to imagine that making it obviously shameful to follow a guy would discourage people, but if you are open to considering the guy, you just get pissed, dig in, and let your persecution complex run wild. Famously, Hilary Clinton did a misstep in calling Trump followers “deplorables”. Which might have been an apt word to describe his die-hard adherents, but a much broader population took that as an insult, that the perception of “it’s us or them” had been validated. Even if they didn’t believe in Trump “per se”, the culture is absolutely support your guy, no matter what, or else the bigger evil other guy will ruin your country.

No one wants to believe they are being conned, that they are being manipulated. That the person they believe in is so bad. In the rare case where someone admits they were for Trump, but now recognize that he is a bad person, they are still likely to face ridicule for having ever been in a situation to fall for Trump’s shtick.

jj4211 ,

Unfortunately, that rhetoric will only reinforce their stance that they are a persecuted class.

We may think of it as a self-inflicted situation, but they feel the direct personal insult rather than seeing it as an avoidable situation by just preferring some other republican that isn’t as obviously corrupt and sleezey.

jj4211 ,

It’s not about them being dumb, it’s them not caring about the particulars of their platform. Can it play some mobile games? Can it keep them connected to their friends through text and social media? Once it meets those criteria, that’s enough.

Then comes the next challenge: social status. Particularly during the teen years, social status is a keen focus and every little thing is part of the equation. iMessage versus SMS and RCS means that an Android user can’t tell their peer is an iPhone, but iPhones highlight Android users very obviously. So if either platform might align with social groups, Apple is the one that makes it easy to identify “outsiders” and ostracize them.

So knowing that, fundamentally, both platforms will give them what basic stuff they want in a handheld computer, so they just care about the ability to use the differences to identify “in” versus “out” in every possible way that presents itself. Apple does that most obviously.

jj4211 ,

Yeah, the unskippable ads are just maddening. Within the first 5 seconds I should either know what the product is, and my interest is established or not, or I’m hooked enough to watch the full ad. When I see the ad marked as unskippable, I’m automatically less receptive to the ad, it’s demanding more than it’s fair time for my consideration, so I don’t want to even think about it.

One particularly maddening one was an ad that was 30 seconds, unskippable, and the theme was “our ad is so short, you don’t even miss the ability to skip it!” If it didn’t piss me off before, that really pushed me over the edge.

jj4211 ,

That’s about your team and/or your teams leadership, not scrum.

While true, that cuts both ways, a successful team is not successful because of ‘scrum’, it’s successful because it finds a methodology that works for them, which can be in terms of scrum, but even if no one was chanting Agile buzzwords, that team would still self organize in a similar way, just without the precise buzzwords.

What’s obnoxious is that a lot of folks, with a vested interest in, say, consulting, will give credit to “Agile” for teams succeeding and then simultaneously call all failures that ostensibly use Agile but fail “not true Agile”. It can be harmless enough when self-organizing, but then it doesn’t really matter if it is “big-A Agile” or not. People hung up on the “big-A Agile” may be expecting to cash in with consultancy money, or use it as a club to assert their authority by their self-proclaimed alignment to ‘Agile’. They are advocating for Agile, therefore if you challenge anything about their direction, they will invoke the magic Agile word to silence criticism about their methods. Once an organization has “acheived Agile”, ironically they frequently close the door on any consideration of methodology reform. “We are running Agile now, whatever you may think we are doing wrong the industry agrees with us because the industry uses Agile, so stop complaining”.

So Agile may be technically workable, but the frustration is that it is vague enough to allow anyone to do almost anything and still ‘fairly’ claim Agile, but as a brand word it confers unreasonable authority for certain folks. As the most prominent brand word in the world of project management, it is further correlated with the ‘default’ asserted methodology of any crappy group looking toward consultancy/self-help to fix their bad team situation with a bandaid of methodology.

jj4211 ,

You’re bending your team/process to fit agile, and not bending agile to fit your team/process

Yeah, this one is tricky.

If a methodology is supposed to help, but you don’t change your processes in any way, then it seems odd to assert that you are “adopting” a methodology.

In fact, I would say that the typical dysfunctional Agile shop basically “bends agile” to fit their process, meaning they undertake a superficial exercise to map a problematic process to Agile terms and declare victory. Sometimes taking the time to actually make the process worse in a way they wanted to, under the smoke screen of “Agile transition”. For example, in my company customers are generally using our projects together, so we had basically a set cadence of release dates. All projects were only allowed to target designated release days (March 1st, June 1st, etc.) A project, if it made sense could skip a release window, but the projects wouldn’t just release 2 weeks differently than all the related projects. Project owners declared this “not Agile” and said everyone just release whenever, much to the complaints to customers that now have a barrage of updates that are in no way synced up, with QA that tried to use the projects as the customer would abolished, so until the customer there’s no one using the “current” editions of the projects together in one place. Agile is perfectly happy with a prescribed cadence (in fact I would say usually I hear the mantra that you try to fit your work to the schedule, rather than letting the work mess up the schedule), but development managers didn’t like the way the release schedule tied their hands so they blamed Agile for a really bad quality move.

I’m all about processes that fit your team, I just think fixation on Agile branding does more harm than good.

jj4211 ,

In our case, tossing stuff in the backlog to never get done is just part of trying to get through life.

We have an… eccentric colleague who demands the craziest stuff that no one else wants. Now in a sane world, we explain that his requests are either extremely costly for a minor thing no one cares about, or, like 90% of his requests, run explicitly counter to what our customers want even if we could trivially do it. He is not a customer nor is he in contact with customers or marketing or sales, he’s in a different technical team but has an “armchair enthusiast” interest in my teams product.

We used to try to have that discussion to reject items to make it clear they will never ever get worked on. However whenever we did that he would demand hour after hour after hour of meeting to discuss each request that we want to reject and convince us why his requirement is the most awesome thing in the planet, and with enough meetings maybe we’d stop being so clueless and come around to recognize the brilliance.

So now we toss it in the backlog, and there’s always a point of comparison like “Customer giving us $40M asks for feature X”, and he has to rationally accept why X jumps ahead of his backlog items, even if he is displeased. One new project manager made the mistake of trying to close out the backlog items and the meeting invites flew about us daring to ignore his awesome requests.

So we have a chunk of backlog that every one knows will never happen, and in fact if our backlog ever dried up, then we’d have a big problem because then we’d actually have to have that tough conversation about why his ideas are bad. At this point some of his wacky stories have been on the backlog for over five years.

jj4211 ,

Number of things at play.

Most companies can’t take advantage even in theory of saving costs if they have an office today. If they own it, who is going to buy in this climate? (keeping in mind that if it is office space, then it pretty much has to stay office space, without exorbitant effort and money to change it to something else) My company has 10 years left on their lease, with penalties of vacating early so bad that they would be just as well letting the lease run. If there’s one thing a company hates it’s being forced to spend money/have assets that are not seeing use.

Contributing to the above, a lot of these folks have a big part of their portfolio invested in real estate, so collapse of the office space segment of real estate would be bad news for them.

A lot of management looks awfully superfluous in a remote worker scenario. Without the visual aid of dealing with people in person, it seems like maybe you could double the sizes of departments, maybe erase a layer of middle management. So management needs people in person to maintain the appearance of relevance.

Companies also like to give tours to clients and show a busy looking office space of people working toward their customers goals. You need people in person in order for those tours to look adequately impressive.

Some of their levers to get longer work out of people work better in the office. For example, my office had way less parking than they had people coming in, and an overflow lot dangling a literal mile away from the buildings. In response to complaints that there’s no reasonable parking, that there’s no shuttle, that folks have to cross a fairly busy street without a signal light, an executive said “if you cared about your work, you’d come in early enough to get a good spot”. They considered people who came in at 8AM to be lazy slackers, because the real dedicated people came in at 7AM, even though office work technically started at 9AM for most of them.

Frankly, remote work isn’t objectively more productive across the board. You can find/create metrics to “prove” either side of the argument (measuring “productivity” is really subjective, and many of the studies are self-reporting where employees decide for themselves their productivity, or even outright state how productive the workers feel. In my experience, individual productivity may see a boost with improved focus, removal of commute, fewer work social distractions. However, the relevance of the work may suffer (for example, in my group one guy spent three weeks doing something no one needed done because he didn’t have the presence of others to remind him about what really mattered) and others that depend on collaboration may falter (for example, new college hire is left adrift because it’s really hard for an early career person to get traction in a pure remote scenario). We tend to care less about folks who are little more than icons next to text most of the day, or a disembodied voice for select meetings. Ambient collaboration takes a hit, as the barrier to talk to someone is a bit higher when you have to explicitly go to the trouble of typing a message or calling. It seems more intrusive.

As to why the message tends to be softball, well a number of things.

They don’t want to get into the “data” game because the employees can find studies with data saying the exact opposite. Employees have a vested interest in believing their favored data.

Other statements are too aggressive, and they want to try to maintain some semblance of morale by being the “good guys”. At least at the company level. From what I can tell, the corporate level at my job gets to send the happy, gentle prods to come into office, but the managers are expected to go as asshole as needed to “fix” the attendance problem.

jj4211 ,

That’s the rub, management has no idea about the deliverables, they don’t understand the product or customers at all. They got spoiled by a self actualizing team that figured things out better than the hierarchical leadership, and effectively peer leadership.

When the group is broken up, then some folks stray, and while they are talented and working hard, they get caught up in their own little world when the work doesn’t organically come.

Frankly, while I bemoan how little our management does, I’m happier more directly engaging with clients, marketing, and sales. My peer groups that have clearly more direction handed down seem doomed to have suboptimal product inflicted by the game of telephone through the bureaucracy.

In short, I see challenges either way it gets sliced. Self directed teams with clear purpose and connection can thrive in any scenario, however I feel like you are lucky to find 2-3 people to make that team, and there’s some value to be added by having people along that might need some more clear steering.

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