[HN Gopher] The absurdity of the return-to-office movement
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The absurdity of the return-to-office movement
Author : DebtDeflation
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-01-22 22:18 UTC (42 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >The internet and cell phones obviate so much of what was once
| done at the office, which is, after all, largely an artifact of
| the 20th century thanks to the rise of mass transportation, the
| ability to build tall office buildings and the previous
| immovability of the "work" telephone, which was stuck to a desk.
| All this, thankfully, is going the way of the dodo.
|
| This seems to me to have been forgotten as technology evolved
| over the last 2-3 decades. There was a time when you HAD to be in
| the office, because that was where your desk phone was, your
| desktop PC (including local software) was, the physical access
| point for your corporate network/applications was, etc. With
| laptops, smartphones, the internet, VPNs, SaaS applications, that
| hasn't been the case for a long time, Covid was just the CATALYST
| that forced people and companies to actually utilize the
| capabilities they already had.
| ghaff wrote:
| I sometimes like to ask provocatively "What would have happened
| had COVID happened 25 years ago?" (Don't sweat the exact
| timeline. I'm about right.) Yes, vaccines/medical issues but
| that's somewhat orthogonal.
|
| I think the answer was that most office workers would have
| struggled to work. Yes, we could have mapped home phones to
| office numbers, bought people cell phones and paid for their
| plans, subsidized a second phone line, etc. But it would have
| been hard and difficult; most people would have been nowhere
| near prepared. I suspect at the end of the day, we'd mostly
| have made do for a month or three, said screw it, and reopened
| offices even if we knew more people would probably get sick.
| Oh, and forget things like grocery delivery or streaming TV
| (Netflix DVD barely existed) for the most part.
| Spivak wrote:
| And invest in them for the whole office instead of them being
| limited to specific departments. Like it used to be that only
| sales got Zoom licenses because they were on calls with remote
| customers, only devs got access to Slack everyone else was on
| Teams/Outlook. The pandemic made everyone build out the
| infrastructure for work anywhere. It's got to be in the top 5
| advancements in the information age that obviates so much waste
| moving people back and forth to office buildings and execs
| desperately want to go back for some strange reason.
| wcunning wrote:
| It's been a "fun" time in Detroit lately. The Big 3 have been
| forcing people back into the office some, with increasingly
| shrill demands. Last year, GM required us to come back 3 days a
| week, you pick the days. Managers looked at that, listened to
| employees and it was quickly 2 days, then they weren't enforcing
| it at the HR level at all, so it was no days. Until suddenly in
| December, after a bit of a struggling year, we got an email (at
| the same time as our managers and senior managers, make of that
| what you will) that they had actually been tracking badge swipes
| in aggregate and that we would all be returning to the office 3
| days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday starting the second
| week in January. Then it got delayed two weeks because there
| literally weren't enough seats for everyone, much less seats in
| the building you were assigned to, much less parking, much less
| parking for the building you were assigned to. And wouldn't you
| know it, about 6 years ago, GM had moved to "hoteling" or "hot
| desking" with an intentional 90% capacity for the number of
| people assigned to the building, but the COVID hiring binge hit
| us too, so now there were main buildings with as low as 60%
| capacity for the number of people assigned. Then, we got an
| updated email, some teams were going to come back a few weeks
| later, so that IT and facilities would have enough time to fix
| problems as they arose and get desks setup, etc. Then we had an
| ugly winter storm. Then it got delayed another two weeks. Now
| it's the second week in February. Order, followed by counter
| order, equals disorder. Isn't RTO fun guys?
| Liquix wrote:
| > Now it's the second week in February.
|
| They're even trying to force time travelers back into the
| office? Grim
| kibwen wrote:
| To be fair, forcing employees to while away their lives by
| wasting their own unreimbursed time sitting in a car commuting
| every day represents a non-negligible portion of every
| automaker's bottom line.
| Zacharias030 wrote:
| This article simply doesn't reflect my personal experience. I'm
| rather at the beginning of my career, but feel like personal
| growth, enjoyment and satisfaction with the work is much higher
| when I go to the office and when my colleagues do the same (we
| have full freedom to never do though).
| pdimitar wrote:
| Here's what the ever-so-helpful CNN is giving me when I visit it:
| Browser Blocked We apologize, but your web browser
| is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from
| implementing required components that protect your privacy and
| allow you to view and change your privacy settings. This
| functionality is required for privacy legislation in your region.
| We recommend you use a different browser or disable the "EasyList
| Cookie" filter from your "Content Filtering" settings (found
| under "Settings" -> "Shields" in the Brave Browser).
|
| How sleazy can their language get?
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(page generated 2024-01-22 23:00 UTC)