I could go for some Japanese fast food. Maybe some onigiri in a 7-11 too.
Your pots, pans, knives and other utensils have undoubtedly amortized down to a cost of zero, but are a potentially significant cost for people starting out.
Did you assign a value to your time? You may enjoy cooking, but it still takes some portion of your day. And if you are working 16 hour days and want to sleep and shower, then that time becomes even more valuable.
I’m not prepared to do that, but I also don’t complain about migrants taking my job, so I’m not sure why you think that’s some kind of “gotcha”
It’s a good question without firm answers.
Our group had 3 people start late in March last year literally days after we had transitioning to work from home, all of whom somehow ended up on my team. Aside from showing up the first day to sign paperwork for HR, none came back into the office nor personally met any of their teammates for several months if at all.
None were entry-level, but even then it has been a mixed bag. The most experienced of the bunch was somebody I worked with before at a different company and he transitioned pretty easily and was operating at a high level very quickly and didn’t really need to meet people in-person. One hasn’t met anybody on the team in person and has clearly not picked up the work culture and is in danger of being put on a performance improvement plan already. Individual variations aplenty.
More than I would have thought, though. Personally, like most workers, I see the benefits of some in-person interaction at the office but don’t think this needs to be 5 days a week. I would love a transition to 2-3 days WFH days.
I hate micro-managing but some people actually prefer it (getting 7-8 calls a day from the same person gets really annoying) and it’s easier to do that sort of thing at the office.
I don’t agree with this portion of your analysis. If this were true, declining populations in a geographical area would be considered a good thing economically (MORE JOBS!) and burgeoning populations would be considered a bad thing. States and municipalities would run ad campaigns trying to get people to move away.
Yet the opposite is almost universally true. Population decline is almost universally associated with economic decline, and burgeoning populations go hand in hand with economic growth. More people equals more demand. When they aren’t working, people go to restaurants and shops and entertainment venues and spend money, creating a demand for more jobs at these places and opportunities for new businesses.
I think a lot of anti-immigration rhetoric …the “They come into my town and take jobs” and the “We’re full, we don’t have enough jobs to go around” is willfully ignorant of the demand side of the equation. You can’t treat population growth and economic growth as separate things with no relation to each other, they go hand in hand.
Lol. The whole you can’t export Burger King jobs therefore any mandated wage floor isn’t counterproductive argument.
What you can do is price the least capable completely out of the official work market. Where I live there are more and more kiosks for self checkout and to place orders. You think the folks who were manning the registers are now going to be ‘learning to code?’ It’s doubtful.
Furthermore, this idea that printing money helps people not starve is fallacious. The production of goods and services is what’s important and right now we are distorting the incentives that lead to the creation of said goods and services. Let me know when you can eat a dollar bill.
Notice I didn’t say that. But more than one poster is calling it starvation, when that’s NOT happening in the U.S., and most of the world.
“Starvation wages” is an appeal to emotion, and nothing more.
Hmmm. Considering how aggressive shitty customers already get with the actual human beings working fast-food jobs, and how they’re likely to handle frustration as a result of malfunctions or misunderstandings with automated kiosks, I’m not so sure that the number of technicians required to service and repair those automated kiosks is going to be so “much smaller” as you expect.
“If you can get your food from a Food Bank, what’s the problem? Don’t exaggerate, guys!”
Modnote: as this is basically a off-subject quibble and the phrase dates back to 1825. Lets drop this minor quibble. Most people understand what the phrase means.
I hear you Wesley_Clark. I’m saving 800 miles and 30 hours a month on the road.
Working at home has been wonderful, and the best year I’ve had in the 29 years at this job. I’m going to retire in about 5 years, so I will not be jumping ship. If health insurance wasn’t an issue I just might if I have to return to ‘their’ office. I have an office at home that is better for me.
There are a dozen other reasons that this works out better for my employer and myself, but I fear that they will want to go back to the old model. The reason will probably be some old cliché like ‘we need the face time’. Well guess what, I’m half deaf and I hate so called ‘face time’ I much prefer the written word.
My bosses boss has said that we have proven that working from home works great, and he is working with the powers that be to allow people that want to work from home do so. So far… Crickets… nothing. No info. That has me concerned.
Make no mistake. My sympathies go out to the tragedies that COVID has caused. And I’m not just talking illness and death. People lost housing, jobs and many are stuck. My closest co-worker has a 6 year old at home. No good workspace for her or her husband and the kid is bouncing off the walls. She wants school for the child and her old office back. I understand that completely. She is walking distance to… um… work. The old office place.
My feeling is that we can’t just through some blanket policy over unique work situations (the easy way out for HR and management). This is a new paradigm, and we should try to embrace it and not shun it.
Replying to Great_Antibob’s post, not sure why Discourse dropped the “replying to” sign at the top - I realize that I am continuing a hijack that is only tangentially related to the original topic of this thread. That being said …
Two months ago, my team had to deal with onboarding a new member who lived on the East Coast (with the rest of us on the West Coast). We quickly learned that while existing employees who knew the system found it simple to transition to work-from-home back in March 2020, onboarding someone new, who by virtue of geography is forced to work remotely, is a complete pain in the ass.
During that whole ordeal, it really got driven into my head how much simpler it is to explain the idiosyncrasies in how our company does development and best practices for coding when all of this is done in-person, where I can point things out manually on a computer screen or whiteboard, and hold their hands through the whole process, than it is to explain all this over video calls or Slack messages.
Even now after two months, I still feel this new member is in over his head, and the unfortunate part is that I’m not 100% sure whether it is because his level of competency is just not up to par with the rest of our team, or that he was dealt a shitty hand and maybe if I were in his shoes I would’ve struggled too. If he lived close to where I live, I could’ve met him at a café from time to time and show him the ropes, but because management had the genius idea to bring in a new employee from the opposite side of the country, that’s not an option.
IMO the ideal arrangement (for my company’s situation, at least) is: in each two-week block, allow work-from-home for 9 of the 10 business days, but one business day is a mandatory work-from-office day where everyone comes in and hammers out solutions to complex tasks, and resolve any previous lingering issues.
I can see that. We have slack meeting with the ‘sub’ department (4 of us) twice a month. And then an entire department meeting (16 of us) ~ once a month. In the past year, one coworker has wanted to just have a quick phone call about something. We all communicate very well with IM and email. But all organizations, and parts of them, are different.
I believe that for us that can work from home, and if it works great, the powers that be are trying to figure out what they are going to do with a building that is half empty.
Employers who typically hire people at minimum wage are going to have a problem firing someone making $20/hr? That’s funny.
You would be surprised how many don’t return a call, or how many no-show the interview, or how many who make the interview can’t work the hours (or want $30/hr+ with full benefits). Applicants to viable candidates are easily 40 to 1.
~Max
Fire somebody you JUST got through training, so you can hire somebody you’ll have to start over from the beginning with, and hope to heck the new guy/gal can manage to get through training without a single no-call/no-show (or showing up higher than a kite)?
Hiring the cheaper person still has costs.
It’s not convenient, but they ARE hiring workers whom they intend to pay the lowest legally allowable wage in the economy. You don’t buy convenience or reliability with that.
Sure, but firing somebody you’ve already got trained and already established as reliable, in favor of the cheapest new kid on the block, is not a decision made lightly. Some employers will do it anyway, some won’t; it’s not as obvious a decision as you make it out to be.
This seems like a problem with an obvious solution: Let the managers who like to micro-manage, and the people who like being micro-managed, all move back to the office, and leave the rest of us alone!