Over 50% of CEOs Say They're Considering Cutting Jobs Over the Next 6 Months - and Remote Workers May Be The First Go To (marketwatch.com) 254
Alarm sirens from the C-Suite about a looming recession are gaining volume in America and elsewhere, but calls back to the office for full-time work are a lot softer. Most CEOs across the globe shared the view that a recession is on the horizon and coming sooner than later, according to a Tuesday report from KPMG on business-leader outlooks. From a report: Nine in ten CEOs in the U.S. (91%) believe a recession will arrive in the coming 12 months, while 86% of CEOs globally feel the same way, according to the findings from the international audit, tax and advisory firm. That echoes the foreboding predictions coming from big name Wall Street investors like Stanley Druckenmiller. In America, half of the CEOs (51%) say they're considering workforce reductions during the next six months -- and in the global survey overall, eight in ten CEOs say the same. One caveat for people who like working from home: Remote workers may find it in their best interest to show their faces in the office as their job security becomes more uncertain.
It is "likely" and/or "extremely likely" that remote workers will be laid off first, according to a majority (60%) of 3,000 managers polled by beautiful.ai, a presentation software provider. Another 20% were undecided, and the remaining 20% said it wasn't likely. When asked how they foresaw their company's working arrangements in three years for jobs traditionally in an office, nearly half of U.S. CEOs (45%) said it would be a hybrid mix of in-person and remote work. One-third (34%) said the jobs would still be in-office, and 20% said it was fully remote. CEOs across the globe sounded more keen on in-person work. Two-thirds (65%) said in-office work was the ideal, while 28% said hybrid would be the way and 7% said it would be fully remote. The global findings pulled from U.S. business leaders, but also from CEOs in Australia, Canada, China, India, Japan and certain European Union countries and the United Kingdom.
It is "likely" and/or "extremely likely" that remote workers will be laid off first, according to a majority (60%) of 3,000 managers polled by beautiful.ai, a presentation software provider. Another 20% were undecided, and the remaining 20% said it wasn't likely. When asked how they foresaw their company's working arrangements in three years for jobs traditionally in an office, nearly half of U.S. CEOs (45%) said it would be a hybrid mix of in-person and remote work. One-third (34%) said the jobs would still be in-office, and 20% said it was fully remote. CEOs across the globe sounded more keen on in-person work. Two-thirds (65%) said in-office work was the ideal, while 28% said hybrid would be the way and 7% said it would be fully remote. The global findings pulled from U.S. business leaders, but also from CEOs in Australia, Canada, China, India, Japan and certain European Union countries and the United Kingdom.
The cynic in me makes me wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Who paid for the creation of this "news" piece? Is it an office space provider like WeWork trying to get people back into the office, or a job search site like Indeed trying to "stir the pot" and get people in a tenuous work-from-home position to look for a permanent work-from-home position?
Or, maybe it's simpler than that, and it's just beautiful.ai (A site I've never freaking heard of before) trying to promote itself.
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> Nine in ten CEOs in the U.S. (91%) believe a recession will arrive in the coming 12 months
These kinds of prophecies have ways of fulfilling themselves
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Quite... but you have to remember that the Fed is actually trying to create a recession and they have all the tools to make it happen. It is almost like the CEOs have "inside information."
That said... the difference between a mild recession and a major recession is largely in how much people assume there will be a major recession. Most employers I know are either hiring or freezing hiring-- nobody is really laying off anybody. The next phase is to lay off "dead weight." When it goes past that phase you e
That's your metric? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you hire and fire based on flawed considerations, don't wonder when your company suffers. But hey, if your metric is the sycophant level rather than output, more power to you. Just tell me if I'm working for you so I can bail before I have to explain why I stayed with you while you were sinking.
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The demographic for this "study" was self-selecting for lazy, impulsive and ineffectual: the site makes automated presentation software, for fuck sake.
All this tells you is that lazy executives for likely-shit businesses will make shit decisions.
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lazy executives
Why the tautology?
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Touche.
So CEO's are planning to reduce output (Score:2)
Global warming (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it any wonder that global warming is inevitable when CEOs are dead-set against one of the most easily achievable CO2 reduction steps available: working remotely.
Why, in the 21st century, does any company require technology professionals to physically drive into the office, with all of the emissions that entails? If you are truly hiring professionals, you only need to give them a task, and if they need a physical presence in the office for something, they'll take it upon themselves to drive in if necessary.
Seriously. Why is the CxO mindset still stuck in the 1970's?
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Re:Global warming (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes...yes I do.
I for one, have been working remotely for about 13 years. I have honestly been asking my CPA if I can write off boxer shorts and t-shirts as "work attire".
If I had to go into an office tomorrow, it would cost me an arm and a leg to buy appropriate work attire.
And yes, when working remotely and significant other is out of town for awhile, it is easy to forget to brush your teeth one day, or skip a shower...hell, who's gonna smell you, you know?
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Well I have a ton of friends, but I don't see them every day.
I actually LIKE having some alone time, I don't have to be around people all the time.
I'm quite sociable....and I have an active and fulfilling social life.
I just don't have it with people I work with...that is a completely different category of folks that I keep at arms distance on a personal basis.
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Sad? I'm an antisocial bastard. My catchphrase is "most people are just alive because they ain't worth a second of jail time".
You think I want human contact? The very last thing I need is to face any of these ... creatures.
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Do you really think that people who have WFH "jobs" are hermitting it up, not bathing, not going out?
Umm... yeah? At least one person does, I can vouch for that.
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Only if you enjoy human company.
I don't.
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Re:Global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
In cities with functional public transit systems, the trains tend to be over crowded during the two peak periods of the day (and usually only in one direction, with empty trains coming back), and mostly empty at all other times.
It is not SPRAWL that is car dependent, it is commuting that is car dependent. If you take away the commuting, then you take away the need to have a car at all in many cases.
By far the biggest problem is city design where workplaces are all grouped together with few/no residential properties nearby, and then the residential properties grouped together somewhere else.
Have as many people as possible work from home, need for commuting massively reduced.
For those who do need to work in a particular place, ensure that they can live within easy walking or cycling distance of their workplace.
If you take away the reason why people travel to/from a static workplace every day, the only people left travelling are those who do inherently mobile jobs (police, delivery drivers etc) and people making one-off trips (eg attending an appointment). These users would have a much better experience due to massively reduced congestion. Ask anyone who was still doing a mobile job during COVID lockdowns.
I utterly detested driving to work...
I utterly detested taking the train to work...
Due to lack of available property or unaffordable prices, i could not live less than an hour away (by car or train) from where i worked. The distance was too great to walk or cycle at all.
I would quite happily walk 10 minutes to work.
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The love of train depends entirely on the state of said train. I'm with you. Now. Living in a city where trains come every 5-10minutes during peak and I'm able to get a seat.
On the flip side I absolutely detested it when I lived in a city where the trains came ever 20min during peak and we were crammed like a pack of sardines such that it wasn't uncommon that 2-3 stops closer to the city people could no longer get on the train.
You still need good city planning to make trains work effectively, and the concep
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How exactly is it a good thing to stuff humans into tiny apartments like into some sort of laying battery?
Re:Global warming (Score:5, Interesting)
We won't get clean, efficient electric public transit (lovely trains!) funded if people continue to hermit it up at home.
We won't get those things anyway. Just being a realist here.
If we were talking about long-range travel as an alternative to air travel, trains would make sense. For short distances, they suck. They might be better than the alternative if you're in an ultra-dense area where you can't get around in a car, but in terms of efficiency, they're terrible. You spend ten minutes (or more) walking to a mass transit stop, ten minutes waiting for the train, twenty minutes on the train that stops every half mile, and ten more minutes walking to your destination, and you've traveled at an average of three miles per hour or something. And that's if there are no transfers, and if both ends are close to a station, and....
Even medium-range trains like Caltrain just *barely* make sense, and even then, only because San Francisco is so horrible to drive in, thanks to badly configured traffic lights that allow pedestrians to completely stop the flow of traffic for almost the entire light cycle more often than not, coupled with bizarre traffic patterns that exemplify the "you can't get there from here" joke.
For short distances, we're much better off moving to electric vehicles, reducing density to sane levels, and fixing any global warming problems by using cleaner energy sources.
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Walking is free exercise. Walking to/from train stations is a feature, not a bug. Real cities like NYC and many European cities tend to act as natural gyms, where people are forced to exercise (and not pork up) as part of their daily lives.
We shouldn't be waiting 10 minutes for trains. The Kyiv Metro DURING A FUCKING WAR, is running trains every 5-7 minutes in off-peak hours. We could do better in the US, but we choose not to.
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Subways in Vienna run (aside of after 10pm, then it's a wee bit longer) every 3-5 minutes. So do most trams.
While I was still living there, I didn't even have a car. What for? For a buck a day, you get the whole town's public transport system and it's reliable, clean and fast.
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Walking is free exercise. Walking to/from train stations is a feature, not a bug. Real cities like NYC and many European cities tend to act as natural gyms, where people are forced to exercise (and not pork up) as part of their daily lives.
The problem is not that you spend twenty minutes walking, but rather that:
People who advocate for public transit often fail to understand that time has intrinsic value beyond the obvious mon
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You spend ten minutes (or more) walking to a mass transit stop, ten minutes waiting for the train, twenty minutes on the train that stops every half mile, and ten more minutes walking to your destination, and you've traveled at an average of three miles per hour or something.
It sounds very much like you have an example of a bad rail setup. Here's an alternative to me:
I spend 10minutes walking to a mass transit stop, a maximum of 7 minutes waiting for a train (during peak hour, if I'm stupid enough to show up that early for something which I know will arrive at the same exact time every day), 10minutes on a train, and I'm in the city centre. Total ride time 20minutes.
My alternatives are: 40min by car during peak hour, 25min in the middle of the night, 30 min by bicycle (this I a
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You seem to be talking about the Bay Area. You are right that transit in the Bay Area is mostly mediocre. That's a consequence of land use. Except for SF, the Bay Area has low average population density (mostly single family houses due to zoning restrictions) which means that every step of a journey is geographically long. In Europe or Asia, housing is much denser, and distances are shorter and transit trips are quicker and more pleasant despite having a similar average speed.
Reducing density and relying on
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I don't know what world you are living in, but pre-pandemic commuting wasn't exactly building tons of rail or making people place their offices all together and all the residential together.
No, people drove their cars, on average, 41 miles a day just for work. I personally have avoided burning over 1,500 gallons of fuel owing to working remotely since the pandemic began.
Having everyone go back will not cause public transit to improve appreciably. Even given fantasy level funding and eminent domain, our ar
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Except that ability to work from home enables SPRAWL, which is car (stinkbox!) dependent. We won't get clean, efficient electric public transit (lovely trains!) funded if people continue to hermit it up at home. Save our cities! Save our trains!
Cities are AWFUL for one reason alone: they're incredibly fucking loud, at all hours of the day and night. Some of that is the fault of internal combustion engines, but a whole lot of it is not. Every time I visit a city I thank my lucky stars when I can finally escape. (From cities in both the US and Europe.) Incessant emergency vehicle sirens all fucking night is the worst of it. Police, fire, ambulance, all the damn time. In a dense city, someone is having an emergency every hour, and those sirens
Re: Global warming (Score:2)
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I dunno about you, but I have this amazing invention called FRIENDS...you know, people you really want to spend time with in meatspace.
I've never socialized with co-workers outside of the work site. They are not my friends, and getting too close and sharing too much information with them can often lead to trouble that will threaten your job, which is the primary reason you are there.
No, I have lots of friends that I look forward
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1. Not everyone makes friends easily.
2. The workplace (where you already have common interests) is actually a GREAT place to make friends.
3. Your cowardice aside, the fact is that a LARGE number of relationships and marriages DO end up starting at work. I haven't found stats for friendships, but I suspect the number is quite high as well.
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Talk for yourself, will you? The past 2 years were the best of my life. I didn't have to spend more time with humans than I absolutely, positively had to. And that was very, very relaxing.
I'm an autist. I have to pretend to be human when forced to be in the same area as humans. This is stressful to me. I do not want to spend more time with them than I absolutely have to.
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With the exception of food and wine, we should not in any way aspire to be more like the French. They are great at food and wine and artsy shit, but absolutely horrendous at logistics or anything of a practical nature. Their energy policy would cripple America.
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Good! (Score:2)
Hopefully only minor layoffs will be necessary to tame inflation. But I don't see a way out of this without some job losses.
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If there are more jobs than people able to fill them, how is fewer jobs a loss in any way? If anything, we might see a few CEOs eventually get kicked out when their boards realize that they can't do fuck all but pretend to work.
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If there are more jobs than people able to fill them, how is fewer jobs a loss in any way? If anything, we might see a few CEOs eventually get kicked out when their boards realize that they can't do fuck all but pretend to work.
Most of the people with jobs are people who either need or want to work. There aren't more jobs than people ABLE to fill them, but there are some jobs that few people WANT to have, and there are people who don't want to have a job and have figured out how to make do without one. If there were actually more jobs than people able to fill them, unemployment would be zero.
At any rate, the Fed is working assiduously to ease the tight labor market (otherwise known as incentivizing layoffs) with its inflation-figh
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I like my job. Part of why I like it is that I have a fairly lenient contract. I have a rather well funded training budget, I can work from home if I so please, I go on vacation when I want to.
Change that and I'll find something else to work at, or I'll just do without work and focus on my personal projects instead.
At some point, you notice you have enough money to last you a lifetime so you don't really care whether you have a job or not anymore.
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I'm pretty much in the same boat as you. You do realize though, I hope, that most people work because they feel, usually rightly, that they have to in order to survive.
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Sure. But it feels good to tell these entitled fuckheads that they have the honor to suck my cock and if they don't like it, well, I can take my ass with 20 years of security, law and financial auditing to someone else who wants to pay the not even 100k I ask.
Part of my compensation is pretty much being able to tell CEOs that they're fucking useless and getting away with it. Yes, I'm petty like that.
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Well, if there are significant layoffs, suddenly there will be way more job seekers than open positions. A lot of people have seemingly cushy situations because their companies have been hoarding employees, afraid of letting go of people and finding out the hard way those people did stuff they didn't realize. I know personally a couple of managers desperately trying to make their people suddenly 'look busy' because they absolutely know the axe is coming and want data to try to minimize how big the swing i
Smarter Approach (Score:2)
I dare you... (Score:3)
I dare any CEO to lay off remote employees over office employees.
Let's see what happens to your productivity and product-market fit in 2023.
Legitimacy of power (Score:2)
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Pay me 20 times more and I'll come to the office. Promised.
CEO pay (Score:2)
How many of those same CEOs will give themselves a pay cut at the same time?
Since CEOs make the most the business has the most to gain from cutting CEO pay. If you are cutting pay and cutting positions without taking a cut yourself then you are only being selfish at the expense of everyone else. If the business is having a downturn then is should effect everyone and not just your lowest paid people.
No big loss (Score:2)
Our "working from home folks" call in and have us do their jobs for them because "it's their working from home day".
For the last time (Score:2)
Layoffs have nothing to do with remote work (Score:4, Insightful)
What I find strange is the sheer number of people here on
Why is it the people who shout the loudest about freedom are the first in line to be told what to do and how to think?
re: workers vs CEOs (Score:2)
What you define as "strange" is just honesty and logical thinking on the part of a number of "rank and file" workers who can see that CEOs don't just declare people "should come back in to the office" because they like the sense of power and control over them.
I've done a lot of "hybrid" work from home + going into offices over the last decade or so. IMO, that's probably the ideal compromise. But these demands to keep working completely from home aren't going to fly at many companies, and I don't blame their
If you're smart enough to post here (Score:2)
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Why is it the people who shout the loudest about freedom are the first in line to be told what to do and how to think?
Compensation. They know they are defectives that are a problem, but they like to pretend they are not. So they scream loudly.
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from some very specific industries, the quality and quantity of works suffers in remote environments.
Ah that explains it. A lot of CEOs are remote workers.
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, cut them some slack, they have to be magical miracle workers considering that they can do about 100 times your work while playing golf. At least that's what their paycheck tells me.
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Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Informative)
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CEOs are paid actors, and acting is a lucrative profession if you find the right gig.
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Fun part: that's one job that will have you terminated if you try remote work.
I know of at least one company I do some business with that literally fired their CEO because he got stuck in France during lockdowns and couldn't get back to do his actual job.
Remote working is just not an option in that position.
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would venture out and say that those who aren't productive in remote environments probably aren't productive in the office either, and those who are productive in the office would also be productive in remote environments, and perhaps even more so. I say that because productivity doesn't come from being in the office. My own personal experience has been that so much more time goes wasted on company's dime in the office because of goofing off and idle chitchat.
Case in point, when I worked in the office, we had this girl who would come and sit by me and just talk my ears off about everything her. Even if I tried to continue to work while she talked, the distraction was obviously negative. It was to the point that others in the office would call me at my desk phone and I'd use the excuse that I'd have to get that for her to leave, sometimes even pretending that the other person had a problem I needed to solve and get up and leave my desk. I know this is an extreme example of office chitchat, but it happens.
You know what doesn't happen when I work at home? That. The worst at home is that I get up to get a soda from the fridge, or check slashdot, but the difference is that I do that when I am ready and between tasks.
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Yup. It would be far more profitable to keep the productive remote workers, shitcan the useless chair warmers, and drastically reduce the office square footage when the lease comes up for renewal.
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
This supposes you know who the 'productive workers' actually are. In my experience both in and out of management the truth is you generally know who the super-stars are and you know who the truly dead weight and/or trouble makers are.
Outside the shop floor where in some cases you may have some simple metrics like "(completed assemblies) - (rework required assemblies)"
Now compare to two network engineers Sara and Jim. Both diligently come in each day do their jobs. They are both busy but neither is 'slammed' which one is more 'productive'? Does the answer to the question maybe change week to week, or even hour to hour?
The answer is you don't know and if the manager above you says "thou shalt reduce headcount" and you look around and decide you can't get cut your developers ( all slammed, project already late), you can't cut your support staff (if you do, trouble tickets will just start bubbling to the developers), so you will have to do with one fewer network engineers - you will have to make a choice about Sara or Jim. Reality is there is no 'fair' way to make that call probably. Sara works in the office, Jim works from home. You have more face time with Sara, ultimately that is slightly more convenient for you usually, if even if you never really thought about it before - so you keep Sara.
Working from home requires a lot of discipline (Score:3)
I would venture out and say that those who aren't productive in remote environments probably aren't productive in the office either
Probably true.
and those who are productive in the office would also be productive in remote environments
Oh, no. It requires a lot of discipline to be fully productive at home. You can easily find that rest breaks, meal breaks, bathroom breaks, I need to take a walk and think breaks, etc now take longer than they used to. Some much longer than they offset the commute time, or greatly exceeded it. Been there done that.
Now add the notion that you have flexibility in hours, so you cook lunch, sit down to eat it in front of the TV watching something you DVR'd, then go cleanup the mess in the kitch
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Yes, I take more breaks during the day when I work at home, e.g. to walk on the beach at low tide, but I start working earlier and stop working later because I don't have to drive over an hour to get to or from work. Net result is I spend more actual time working. The only caveat is that working from home is pretty much impossible if you have toddlers in the house (mine used to come bang on my office door when I was trying to work).
Another missing caveat is that you are not really an effective team member. You are much less accessible. That's a negative for many jobs.
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and those who are productive in the office would also be productive in remote environments
Oh, no. It requires a lot of discipline to be fully productive at home. You can easily find that rest breaks, meal breaks, bathroom breaks, I need to take a walk and think breaks, etc now take longer than they used to. Some much longer than they offset the commute time, or greatly exceeded it. Been there done that.
Now add the notion that you have flexibility in hours, so you cook lunch, sit down to eat it in front of the TV watching something you DVR'd, then go cleanup the mess in the kitchen. And you find yourself working until 8 or 10pm due to this and other mistakes.
Or you grab the Kindle on the way to the bathroom.
Or you go on slashdot and someone 1.5 hours disappears
Home is a dangerous place to work from without a lot of discipline.
Home is a dangerous place to work without a lot of discipline - my work is always right here, so it can be hard to stop.
My workday is very different from home. Besides the massive time gain from eliminating the commute, I can use my time far more effectively. Most of my jobs over the years have been as a developer on very large projects with long build times. If I'm working in an office, a huge chunk of my day is spent waiting while the CPU is chugging away at 100% usage making a build. If I'm lucky, the co
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You also confuse flexibility with efficiency. Having the flexibility to run errands have downsides, what if a colleague has a question? Flexibility can impede teamwork as people become harder to locate.
Also you are making my point, your workday is a lot longer due to the inefficiency flexibility introduces.
I get what you are saying. I've been working remotely since before covid. But it is con
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Home is a dangerous place to work from without a lot of discipline.
I'm gonna go ahead and, uh, disagree with you there, champ. Working from home may have its own set of trappings, but skating at work is nothing new, and your proximity to the office only really determines whose internet ramp you're doing the skating upon.
The thing is, there is more slacking at home. Now the honest folks sort of keep track of this and work later into the evening to compensate. The inefficiency often gets dressed up as flexibility or something else. Sure I can go run an errand and just work later, shift my hours around. But I've not as good a team member since I am more difficult to find.
If you don't like your job, you're going to ditch work more than average. The inverse is true if you enjoy your job. How much you enjoy your job is a result of your personality, engagement, team mesh, and pay. In my experience, people only get bent up about work from home employees because they can't overlord and hover their workforce.
I've been working from home for years, long before covid. You are also doing a bit of a straw man here. Note that I said that painting efficiency requires a
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think the core problem is the definition of productivity. Productivity is not only a personal metric, it is also a collective metric. And if the senior employee get more productive but your junior employees don't know what to do and their productivity tanks, then your productivity went up while the unit's productivity went down. My guess, from what I am seeing locally, is that that's the problem.
Now, there may be strategies and organizations that remain remote and solve these problems. But we know what we
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Aside from some very specific industries,
Examples?
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know a lot of folks would claim programming would fit this model as well, but that hasn't been my experience. It seems to work if all you're looking for is offshored quality code, but anything better than that often requires a degree of cooperation with your coworkers, with in-person being more efficient than remote.
Weird. I can't think of any environment with more than a few employees where there was much cooperation, with the possible exception of planning meetings, and even those can easily be done over video chat. Most of the time, people work on their own part of the project, and if things break, they reach out over chat, not in person, because asynchronous communication is less disruptive and results in better overall efficiency on average.
When folks shifted to work from home, people with kids lost their minds because of all the extra interruptions. People living alone got way, way more done because of fewer interruptions. The reluctance to schedule unnecessary meetings resulted in more asynchronous communication, which overall improved efficiency in spite of the impact from some people having to take care of their kids during work hours.
Productivity overall dropped measurably after we returned to the office. We waste more time in meetings, we get less done, and we waste time driving, some of which we previously spent working, so we spend less time working overall, too.
So with the possible exception of startup environments, unless people just don't know how to set up shared chat rooms and do video group chats, I have a hard time imagining how in-office programming work could possibly be more efficient than remote work. That's just not what the numbers show.
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to work if all you're looking for is offshored quality code, but anything better than that often requires a degree of cooperation with your coworkers, with in-person being more efficient than remote.
Please tell me the difference between two people sitting in a cubicle staring at a display, two people in a huddle room staring at a bigger display, and two people in their own home offices, staring at a shared screen via Zoom / Slack / Teams / Google Meet on their own displays.
You can still both see what's being shown. You can interactively communicate. You can even make annotations from your own screen that the other person will see in order to hilight / raise awareness of things. And when you are both remote, you both have the comfort of your own desk setups.
You say that cooperation is necessary, and it is. However, cooperation can happen in different ways, and if your particular org has decent tools and actually uses them, "being remote" is far less of a hindrance than it has to be.
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Utter bullshit. Programmers don't need "collaboration". I've been at this for a long time and never, EVER have I had meetings where I "collaborated". You're thinking analysts, maybe.
In fact, after 2 years, we had an "onsite week" (our company confirmed we're permanently remote, all of us, since they repurposed the space). It was exactly as I remembered. People looking at their screens with their headset on. Absolute silence. No "collaboration" going on, except in their screens.
"Collaboration" is bullshit. I've seen enough whiteboards with old, irrelevant drawings months and months ago to know that there is very little use for them.
"Collaboration" was the excuse for open plan offices, and shared long desks. For cramming people into a noisy office, with too cold air conditioner, and people talking next to you. Good fucking luck trying to focus in an environment like that. Been there, done that.
Also, "agents popping their heads above their cube"? What kind of drugs are you on? I work for a call center. I make the software that tracks them. There is no "popping your head up", every keystroke, every click, everything is logged, measured. Your neighbor does not have one single second to waste on you.
Here's the deal: you like working in an office. I don't. Go to your office and be happy. Enjoy the water cooler talk, and be a rockstar programmer since you'd be able to deliver 10x as me since you're collaborating.
But don't come here and tell everyone that YOUR way of working is THE way of working. One size does not fit all.
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Programmers don't need "collaboration".
Need? No. Can benefit greatly from? Yes.
I've been at this for a long time and never, EVER have I had meetings where I "collaborated".
That's... sad.
More comfortable to fire remotely (Score:3)
Is anyone surprised?
No, its what companies do when they suspect a recession, let alone are in a confirmed recession.
it takes a certain kind of person to excel in a remote environment.
True, but there is also the human factor of the manager having to lay off a person in front of them live vs a video conference. So being a little better than the on-site employee is not necessarily good enough. Plus on-site you have a better chance of befriending the manager, or having the more friendly relationship. Another consideration making getting rid of the remote more comfortable.
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^^^
This. Remote work and not interacting in person fosters a lack of empathy. Much easier to fire someone whom you've never talked to in person and haven't formed a social bond with (whether you realize it or not). Humans have evolved to interact in person, not through a fucking screen. COVID quarantine was an anomaly and should remain an anomaly.
We are being manipulated (Score:2, Troll)
We keep having recession after recession. You would think that 1929 or 2008 would be a wake up call to fix the broken economic system so recessions don't happen or are very rare.
With that said, you can't tell me that recessions are just accidents. There is clear manipulation going on here, to keep the population scared and nervous, and this is being done so they will accept whatever fascist, controlling bullcrap is in store for them. When food can no longer be put on the table and homelessness is lo
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We always have to be careful with that thought. More often than not when people start worrying a great deal about that kind of thing, they end end up creating or becoming a part of the very conspiracy they are afraid of.
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Is anyone surprised?
No, its what companies do when they suspect a recession, let alone are in a confirmed recession.
Or end up contributing to one. People can't buy goods and services w/o money, they can't (legally) get money w/o jobs - and unemployment insurance is a pittance.
Layoffs (firings) do provide the opportunity for companies to get rid of higher-paid employees, force (and scare) the remaining ones to work harder (to keep their jobs), and then hire new employees at lower pay -- and get executives bonuses for saving the company money. Often, quality and productivity suffer in the interim as the new people come
Re:More comfortable to fire remotely (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:More comfortable to fire remotely (Score:5, Insightful)
I find that you can't really do team building remotely, it's hard to build genuine friendships with people you only see on video screens. So people probably should meet in person, but once a week would be enough to build relationships.
First, people do it all the time in video games. A roommate of mine back in college went to the wedding of a guy he had only known through their Counter-Strike team. I have friends I made through EVE Online that I still speak with regularly.
Second, why do you assume that the people you work with want to be your friend? I work to get paid. Sure I may make a couple friends in the office but they still mostly only know my work persona. My real friends are people I can be myself around.
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Aside from some very specific industries, the quality and quantity of works suffers in remote environments.
Link to study please. Otherwise I highly suspect you haven't actually done an efficiency study across various industries and various job roles and therefore are just parroting a talking point from whomever was pushing a specific agenda at the time.
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Obviously. Some people cannot actually think for themselves. They still like to pretend they do.
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not in every industry.
i work in customer support. having to drive 90 minutes a day, get interrupted by coworkers, or having to disregard their noise while working with customers is detriment to my productivity.
i can work much better from job and stay happier, and my employer knows.
the first people to go during a recession should not be remote workers: it should be whoever is the least productive. if that's the same in their companies then great. i am not worrying just yet
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The problem isn't work from home, but the general inability for some managers to manage work from home employees.
Unfortunately businesses really suck at change. So they are hunting for a way to get back to the old normal, vs actually rearranging themselves for the new normals.
Managers are treating work from home employees like outsourced employees and contractors. Vs full time employee who happen to be home.
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I'm with you, it's much easier for me to concentrate in a work environment. I don't have kids to drop off and pick up, the food in the fridge is off-limits, and people I might need to talk to are much easier to find.
At home I have kids to deal with, distractions and for some reason a to-do list from the wife, who seems to think that sitting in front of a computer is the same as sitting in front of the TV.
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Megacorporations are an extension of government - they're enfranchised and protected by government regulations. Think of them as a semi-independent arm of government which influences all other branches, ultimately controlling them: a controlling populace codified and enforced by the government.
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The key fallacy of most CEOs is that people are fungible. I.e. that anyone can do any job.
Hey, morons, just because any bum can do YOUR job doesn't mean that it's the same for people who actually have to do some work!