Has your organization enabled employees to easily work remotely?
Displaying poll results.11615 total votes.
Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother. - Kahlil Gibran
Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother. - Kahlil Gibran
Anesthesiologist here (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: Anesthesiologist here (Score:2)
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Re: Anesthesiologist here (Score:2)
Actually the virus started from a guy called Juan Ping
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therefore you can't even get 1ms speeds across your country (* not valid in monaco, aruba or other countries smaller than 300km) no matter what tech you use.
Re: Anesthesiologist here (Score:2)
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I am waiting Surrogates to become the next new thing.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]
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Thank you for your hard work.
Politically, yes the organization "enabled" it (Score:2)
But all the actual work necessary so our university department can work and teach from home has mostly been done by the handful of us IT group members over the past few weeks.
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I wasn’t involved in this, but I believe our department mailed out lab kits to all the students in those sorts of courses. It’ll be interesting to see how that works - normally the students work in groups on most projects like that, which can’t happen. Plus the instructors can only help over Zoom rather than standing right there with the student and the kit.
But it was probably the only workable way to do it without cancelling the classes.
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I wasn’t involved in this, but I believe our department mailed out lab kits to all the students in those sorts of courses. It’ll be interesting to see how that works - normally the students work in groups on most projects like that, which can’t happen. Plus the instructors can only help over Zoom rather than standing right there with the student and the kit.
But it was probably the only workable way to do it without cancelling the classes.
I had a flash to one of the universities her in Houston that does Nanotech... A Nanotech lab kit would be fun :)
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Power corrupts, Absolute Power is kind of neat...
For me it's fine. For a lot of people it's not. (Score:3)
Most manager's mindsets where I'm at is in the 60's and 70's. I suspect most were caught completely off guard. Luckily my manager isn't one of them.
Re:For me it's fine. For a lot of people it's not. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, mine have been struggling. They can't figure out how to manage without putting eyes on people. At first I had to log all my work, then that became too much for them to review so they asked for less detail. Then there wasn't enough detail. Then we needed a morning email with a list of planned tasks for the day....
The real issue isn't that we're not working, its that we're plowing through stuff too quickly. All of those "meetings that could have been an email" are emails, and that's cranked productivity up a ton. I have no idea what we're going to do this summer. A whole lot of that planned work is getting done now.
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Of course, this has broug
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They can't figure out how to manage without putting eyes on people.
My MIL just started work from home today after her company scrambled last week to get something in place. They turned to a quick Citrix solution where everyone is connecting into their own work desktops. Also quickly spun up MS Teams for chat communication. Works fine from a technology perspective. Sadly, the managers above them haven't connected the concept of how to communicate with the staff outside of the internal systems. Manager-1 this morning sends a Teams message (again, only visible if you're conne
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Eh, mine still start off meetings by saying, "Can everyone hear me? If you can't hear me......"
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We have daily status meetings where I work. That said, a lot of the stuff that I do in IT relies on other teams (development, marketing, etc) to validate that the equipment and software that I set up is correct, so I find myself repeating myself constantly in status meetings. While it's not my fault, I'd imagine that it's not making me look all that productive in the eyes of management.
I kind of miss the ability to physically walk to someone cubicle and tell them to stop goofing off.
It is mixed (Score:2)
I can do many things remote but, ultimately, my job involves physical hardware. We have one person who is allowed to come in to move parts around he doesn't have the expertise to rearrange lab equipment and at least one equipment change requires two people. Only one person is allowed in the building at a time so that can't be done.
We are deferring some tasks with customer approval but the longer this stretches out, the more tasks are going to be stymied by the lack of physical presence. Even for the jobs
Kinda (Score:2)
The infrastructure is available, but we're treated like we can't be trusted and have to report in with our work efforts least we lose the 'privilege'. Just once, I'd like to be treated as an adult.
Re: Kinda (Score:1)
Yes, that should read lest, not least.
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Not that this is a startling revelation, but - this is the perennial problem of poor management.
When technical people are incompetent, it almost always becomes apparent to other technical people very quickly. Our jobs require having specific discrete skills and accomplishing specific results. But management seems to mostly involve a rather soft skillset, and on top of that management lends itself to deception quite easily. After all, for someone higher up - the whole point of hiring a manager is so you don'
Re:Kinda (Score:5)
The dirty secret of the world is that most people are bad at their jobs. There are a handful of professions where incompetence is obvious, but even within those, in the vast majority of cases you can get away with it for a very long time - because the people who are nominally tasked with detecting incompetence are, themselves, incompetent.
Add to that, impostor syndrome leads even those who are NOT incompetent to think that they are, and therefore to be afraid of calling out incompetence in others lest the finger be pointed at themselves in turn. So what happens is we all just carry on as we are, pretending not to notice incompetence in others, pretending that the absurdly overextended budgets and timelines on our projects are normal.
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So, it's incompetent nincompoops, all the way down?
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Of course, how could I forget? Hot air rises.
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There's an amount of behavioral research that suggests that if the top is not incompetent to begin with, they automatically become so if you over-pay them. Performance drops dramatically above and below certain levels of reward, so there seems to be a goldilocks-zone for appropriate reward for any behaviour if it's competence and performance you're after.
Re:uhhh... yeah, the Peter Principle (Score:2)
The dirty secret of the world is that most people are bad at their jobs. ....
This is a well-known concept, called the Peter Principle: "People rise (advance) to their level of incompetence..."
Answering for a friend... (Score:2)
Their business is totally natural for doing everything at home, it's basically a phone-based business, but they are too inflexible to restructure it that way... Details at 11, as they say, but only if I'm sure the friend won't find out? Thin-skinned, too.
Re: Answering for a friend... (Score:1)
Millennial/post-millennial?
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Sounds like you are asking for someone's age? Who and why would it matter?
This needs to be the new norm for most desk jobs. (Score:3)
I couldn't help but think about how much better all around this arrangement is for stinger managers that have wfh as a policy but only allow it sparingly.
All the fewer cars (I know the lockdown but still how much commute traffic just wouldn't exist?) and less car pollution (but I guess more electric draw) can't hurt, less wasted time in commutes, more freedom to work around personal tasks. I feel better rested, more comfortable, and more productive....i'm pitching doing this on a more regular basis hard when this all blows over....
There is to much to gain and not enough reasons I think for lots of people if you can manage yourself and actually stay productive....even if you have to answer the phone or need a secure connection....their isn't a good reason for lots of people after this to "need" to work in an office.
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Yea I know those kinds of places. You're right but its a feeble argument to make when half the world did it for a month...but I think it goes deeper than just trying to keep people working their full 8.
The types of people that make those sort of policy rules I think are just lost without having physical presence to read their employees.
Bartender Here (Score:2)
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You are a person whom can be served cocktails! (Also any family members, of course.)
Probably doesn't pay very well, cash-wise. There can be non-monetary benefits, though.
Yes, but our industry had shut down. (Score:3)
It's a small company so I'm developer, sysadmin, etc. Our systems have been built to allow remote access from the get go. All we added were headsets and SIP clients rather than users using their mobiles.
It's made no difference however as our industry shut down (not quite overnight, but as good as) so there's nothing for users to do.
I've still got work to do which is keeping me sane, but it's got to be horrific for everyone else.
Unemployed! (Score:2)
I'm guaranteed state funding through approximately the fall - last company I worked for had most of their clients in the hospitality industry. I hear the guys still working there are finally able to remote in, after about 3 years of begging for it.
Hopefully the market fixes Great Depression II before the State of Texas goes bankrupt, either that or Trump cuts us another check of that sweet, sweet socialism.
Does it count.. (Score:2)
If you have to create and maintain your remote options yourself?
K-12 Infrastructure IT (Score:3)
Adapting this process to the current situation has required some changes:
- For the students that don't have a computer at home, we've purchased Chromebooks for them to use.
- All non-critical personnel are required to work from home.
- Critical infrastructure teams can only have one member in the central office at a time, rotating weekly; the rest work from home.
- All IT Management are required to be in the office, in order to act quickly should situations arise or a decision need to me made.
- I'm not sure how the desktop teams are handling their support issues, but I would imagine they are using the same remote tools they always have.
- We also re-tasked our bus fleet into meal delivery vehicles for students in the School Lunch Program; driven by our bus drivers, with meals provided by those school cafeterias.
I think that with all these policies and processes in place, our students will be able to finish out the school year, and our staff will be isolated per the state's social distancing guidelines.
Been doing it for past 14 years (Score:2)
Ho, hum. Nothing new for me. Been working from home for the past 14 years.
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My large-corporation employer has, over those years, alternated multiple times between periods of encouraging, discouraging, prohibiting and even mandating tele-work. Meanwhile, I've just continued to work from home all along -- sometimes with their support, sometimes with their disapproval.
My one saving grace being that my immediate management (the people who understand my job function, as opposed to the top-level corporate execs
Yes (Score:1)
But I've worked from home for four years anyway... I have, however, been arguing to get proper ACLs set up for my customers for the last three weeks... Seems the average network guy doesn't get SIP...
I'm all set but it could be better (Score:1)
Something about webpages taking 30 seconds to load strikes me as unacceptable. We're a smallish startup who isn't designed to support all traffic from all employees over VPN at the same time.
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I'm at a large company. Our infrastructure was designed to handle a certain percentage of workers over the VPN. It was not designed to handle ALL the workers over the VPN. The IT team was scrambling to put in place a few more VPN appliances the first week we were working from home. Things were a bit difficult that first week, but all is good now.
Yes - for years (Score:1)
Refused to Work for Companies With No WFH Policy (Score:1)
About 10 years ago, I turned down an offer from a company that did not have a WFH policy and had not set up any means to do so. The company I did start working for, and I still work for today, has allowed WFH and had VPN set up well over a decade ago. I was full time WFH last year before this whole mess started.
Not Really (Score:2)
Running smooth as butter (Score:2)
I work for a company of over 7000 people, primarily in the publishing industry, but branching out into data in a big way.
We're part of a larger group.
For the most part, only part of the groups business is in more serious trouble - exhibitions.
There's been a culture of remote working for a number of years - some teams are more easy going than others, but generally, 1 or 2 days a week WFH has been normal, with some people with specific circumstances doing more. There's no hard and fast rule - it is up to the
Ships (Score:3)
Hard to fit a 600' ship in my living room, so no way I can work from home, for better or worse.
Voted first option. (Score:2)
99% of the time (Score:2)
Missing option: I already worked from home (Score:1)
A lot of us now work from home as part of our jobs. This works out great for a lot of tech companies because they can hire whomever fits the job role instead of being stuck with the local talent pool.