It also has to with the tyranny of distance. People end up trapped in shitty jobs that aren't right for them. They end up in roles where they aren't doing the things they want to do or where their talents truly lie. Economically, this causes them to be much less productive than they could be in a position that's a better fit for them.

And the main reason people end up trapped in jobs is the tyranny of distance. Maybe there's only two employers in your town that can really use your specific skills. For someone who owns a home, moving costs tens of thousands of dollars. And often you can't find out a position won't be a good fit until you actually work there for awhile.

Work from home overcomes much of this tyranny of distance. It allows employers and employees to find much better matches for each other, unconstrained by physical distance. And for this reason, shitty employers hate it. Shitty employers thrive on transaction/switching costs and employee lock-in.

I mean, a dysfunctional family is still a family. 🤣

Team building is fine, even beneficial, when done right. Which is almost never.

The tea & coffee fund

retire

lol

we are not going to retire

I just straight-up refuse to use the AI tools at work.

Boss's boss bitches at my boss about it regularly, but I do the work of three people for the salary of 3/4 of a person, so chasing me off would only cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars in recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training my replacements and gain them nothing.

Know your worth and be willing to walk away.

The only thing they care about more than money is power and control.

Giving everyone an office is too costly.

I've got an idea, since cubicle went so well, lets shorten the walls to half walls.

Since half wall cubicles went so well, lets take the walls down complete.

Since the fully open design worked so well, lets squish all the desks together as closely as possible.

Since bench desking worked so well, lets take away personal desks all together and go to a hot desking system.

Since hot desking went so well, lets replace the desks with side tables, and benches with empty cat littler buckets.

Excerpt from "Leadership's Guide to Call Centers"

It's not that simple, there's also esprit de corps and discipline and networking.

Yes, for work productivity right now right here it makes sense that working remotely is good.

That has always been known and normal for people who can work remotely. Writers, or anyone who can synchronize their work through runners with envelopes or, later, fax and telephone.

But also people who can work remotely would always have situations where they'd prefer not to.

My sympathies with remote work are because I'm spoiled and because of retrofuturistic promises of (almost) everyone working like that, my concerns are because you'd want sometimes to see people you're working with, and if many people work in one place and some work remotely, then even if the latter work well, they are ruining discipline.

We did. Projects move ahead faster, problems got solved quicker, problems went down.

Frankly, it was never remote working per se, it was embracing the elements that make it work: asynchronous work. Documenting EVERYTHING, completely open infrastructure (everyone can see what everyone is doing/working on), requiring dedicated YOU do this tasks, assignments etc.

But from then on, we didn't need an office anymore. We don't even need regularly scheduled hours for everyone, what ever works for them is fine. I think that gives people opportunity to do things when they like, and without the commute there is a lot more actually doing the work when they are there.

At my company they came up with a great plan. Count our pr merges lol.

It's been going on a few weeks and they are just realizing that we have a ton of prs but still haven't shipped a ton of features lol.

They have played their hand and shown they have no idea what they are doing.