If our OP is already a middle manager at 23, I’ll take that back 
I’m assuming Daddy owns the company.
He sounds like a tech CEO trying to sell employees on the benefit of open plan offices. “And you have people to pass your hackysack to!”
Stranger
I had that same thought too.
This is absolutely not true. I’m 50, and I’ve talked to plenty of coworkers, management, and friends who are in the 40-65 age range who do not want to go back to an office 5 days a week
100% of my job can be done remotely, and has been for over a year. Our numbers were up this year with all of us at home.
In my case, the worry among my co-workers about having to go back to a physical workplace is the thought of being crammed in a poorly ventilated crowded lecture hall with 250 18-20 year olds filling every seat and spilling onto the stairs, many of whom think they are invincible. And as a capper, we’re not even allowed to ask if anyone has been vaccinated.
But that’s pretty much what we’re being told to do.
I’m 60. I’m not going back to the office. I think they know that. And, well, it’s going to take a few years to replace my code with new stuff. It needs to be replaced, and I push, push, push for that to be done.
Yeah, sometimes this happens. I want to see my code replaced. The new folks are working on it with new apps. We should be able to do it in a few years, but my code needs to be retired. Coworkers are afraid I might retire. Well, it’s gonna happen. Someday.
AND, the reason I posted this was to show this video. Love the song, and love how they put together the video.
Heh - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger. Lip synced. Done great in a, well, ideal office environment.
Flagpole Sitta
It’s really well done IMHO. I think I originally found it here on the Dope.
At my job, it’s mostly the younger folks that are struggling with WFH - most of them are living in rented apartments with roommates, and finding enough workspace for everyone is a real problem, particularly when there’s conflicting Zoom calls.
So in other words your (by your description) lazy and poorly motivated co-workers shall set the post-covid, everyone must be in the office standard.
Strangely, my co-workers have been busting their asses while WFH and, not by choice, home-schooling, while performing miracles for our company’s programs.
I used to work at a company that was practically across the street from where I lived. I usually drove to work, but sometimes I walked, because getting to the office from my apartment involved walking up a hill. crossing one crosswalk, walking up another hill, and crossing a street with no traffic to get to my office. A 7 minute walk or 3 minute drive. (The only reason I even bothered driving was because sometimes I had to head somewhere other than home right after work.)
My boss refused to allow me to go home to have lunch. I wondered why the fuck he cared if I ate lunch at a Wendy’s or my house, but to him it was inappropriate to be at home on a work day. It didn’t matter if it was my lunch hour and I was free to spend it however I wanted, if he knew I went to my house there was hell to pay. There was nothing practical about it, it was about control.
He wasn’t even an asshole, he was just quirky. If anyone ever watched the TV show Monk you’d know what I mean. He didn’t have crippling OCD like the show, but he had some very, very strange quirks. For example, if we ate lunch together we absolutely had to leave no later than 11:30 AM. And you could see him visually shaking as it got close to the time to leave, almost like someone struggling to hold it when they desperately needed to use the bathroom. Just an odd guy. Usually very nice but odd, and for some reason draconic about letting someone go home for lunch.
He probably would have totally lost his shit at the thought of people teleworking from home…
I love that song. Thanks for the share.
Maybe he has separation anxiety? Just a guess.
Unfortunately not. When I went back consulting the partners I left it with ran it into the ground within 6 months.
Boo fucking hoo yourself. That sucks that some people have to “work near minimum wage multiple jobs with no health insurance and they actually physically have to constantly work no matter their discomfort level”, but if they want they want the “cushy” remote office job making $150k a year they can go to college and become a software developer, accountant, lawyer or whatever.
I’ve been working in a remote “hybrid” style for 15 years. At first, no one really ever planned it or formally gave permission. We just figured that with everyone in the office constantly travelling to and from clients and working on different projects and the technology enabling us to actually connect to the office remotely, it didn’t seem necessary to physically be in the office all the time. I remember one of the first conversations I had about it (on the phone) with one of our Managing Directors:
MD: I’m trying to get ahold of Amy regarding the Peterson account. Is she there?
Me: I don’t know. I’m not in the office.
MD: Where are you?!
Me: I’m working from home.
MD: WHAT? Why are you working from home?
Me: You’re in London. What do you care where I’m working?
MD: BECAUSE I NEED TO TALK TO AMY ABOUT THE PETERSON ACCOUNT!
Me: Sooo…you’re upset with me working from home because some other employee working who is supposed to be in the office is unresponsive?
MD: Yeah, I guess that makes sense.
Anyhow, given that everyone I work with is scattered across creation, I like the idea of working from wherever I like whenever I like. And sometimes that includes going to the office or a client just to show my face. I do believe that face to face contact is necessary for relationship building.
What I hate are the Tim Cook style mandates of "everyone MUST be in the office or even giving out arbitrary “work from home” days (but with special approval). That’s just corporate control bullshit.
Using blue-collar workers to justify forcing people to work in the office is, basically, daft. The workers who actually need to be there in person to do their job don’t lose anything from other people being able to work from home - in fact, as someone else above said (maybe Grr?), they benefit from it due to less street traffic.
A race to the bottom only benefits those who are already at the top.
Some people who can technically work from home in practice find it difficult due to lack of space to do that work. They would benefit from going in to work. No problem, allow working in the office if feasible - it’s basically an extension of hotdesking.
But if the job can actually be done from home, and the employee wants to do it, then it’s not whining or being entitled to want to not have a long commute and the many other advantages that come from working from home.
My contract technically has me working at an office that’s too far away for me to commute to. However, I was hired to work from home, so, despite my working from home always being only unofficial, I doubt they’re going to try to make me come in. (I’d have disability grounds to work from home anyway, but others would be able to argue on very reasonable grounds that they wouldn’t have signed up to a 2.5 hour commute both ways).
It requires communication and negotiation.
Also, R3D, people exaggerate stuff online. I mean, you must know that. They don’t always mean “OMG ABUSE!!!” they just mean fuck this shit, I’m annoyed.
(Your title should say employee abuse, BTW).
I’m quite sure it was no typo. Who gives a fuck about underlings when managers are denied the chance to power-trip.
I would probably not take what people on Reddit say very seriously. There’s a sizeable group there who believe they should be able to work 20 hours a week with no reduction in pay or benefits, for example.
I prefer working in the office, but perhaps I’ve been the beneficiary of very good workplaces with nice people. I like being able to “take off” my work hat when I get home and that becomes more challenging (for me) when I work from home. I don’t feel coming in for work is inherently abusive per se but I can see how various individuals might have their own reasons for why working from home is the preferred alternative.
So, what I’m gathering from this thread is that there are a lot of different folks who require different strokes, what works best is going to vary from person to person and company to company.
And that blanket generalizations about working entirely from home or returning to an office or generalizations about the age or sense of entitlement of anybody with an opinion either way are stupid as fuck.
That about the gist of it?
Pretty much. Also, senior management are tools.
This is definitely what I’ve been seeing at our ad agency. Most of our younger employees live in the city, in small apartments or condos, often with roommates/partners/spouses, and they’ve been slowly going stir crazy for the past 15 months. The older employees are more likely to be living in the suburbs, in bigger houses (and not have small children at home), and have been more easily able to carve out workspaces in their homes.
In addition, teamwork is a key part of how an ad agency works, and especially for younger employees, it’s been harder for them to reach out for assistance or interaction now that the only way we can interact is on Microsoft Teams. The agency is looking to get people back in the building, at least part of the time, at some point later this summer, and it’s the younger people who are the most eager to be able to do so.
Also, we have an “open office”, where everything is shared workspaces, no one has a permanently-assigned desk, and the only space you have to keep personal stuff is a small locker. Management’s position (at least, pre-COVID) was that it promotes flexibility and teamwork, and lets people pick different places to work, in order to facilitate collaboration and creativity. Everyone, of course, knows that this is BS, and it’s just cheaper. But, what we’ve been hearing is that part of the reason why they haven’t allowed us back into the offices yet is that they are rethinking that office set-up, for health and safety reasons, if nothing else.