That all reads well for a sophisticated and well-funded enterprise, but this is an HBCU (already chronically underfunded) in a rural area (further underfunded and with limited local IT talent) with just 800 total students (not large) and an average tuition of $19.2K before financial aid (about half the national average).

This is getting to a point where there needs to be some sort of federal, coordinated effort to harden infrastructure across the board; otherwise small players will continue to get destroyed because they don't have a $2 million IT budget.

In this case, it's an extremely marginalized community resource that was already under duress that has been lost, and cannot be easily replaced.

Might want to read Senator Rick Scott's policy platform.

Among many other likely-to-be-unpopular measures (major income tax hikes on the working poor, for example), it also proposes doing away with both Social Security and Medicare.

Now, it "phases it out" to make sure that the current conservative voters in the senior citizen demographic keep their payments, so I guess that does underpin some of your point. But there are certainly leaders in the Republican Party who are indeed planning on ending Social Security. Mitt Romney has also spoken favorably about such a plan.

Too bad that Elon Musk is so ANTI-poor that he didn't propose affordable internet access via Starlink himself, rather than waiting for the government to do it for him.

Unions have also been tied to the class system; the very top of the economic pyramid has quite cleverly convinced the average salaried office worker that they're "upper class" and not "working class" like the unionized factory folks.

Unions, therefore, are for yucky blue collar people and not for us professional white collar folks! We are part of the elite just like the big boss!

People hold to that as an article of faith quite a bit, right up until they learn that the tradesman is making 2x what they are.

Unions built the American middle class, and their decline has been right in line with the growth of income inequality, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few people, and increased predation across the labor economy.

Oh gosh you had to go and post a bunch of facts. That's mean.

I mean, this is the USA in 2022. The only thing that matters is the narrative that my team gives me! Anything that's counter to that is rigged and fraudulent and should probably be illegal. ;)

I worked for a well-known "unicorn" about 10 years ago. It went to hell very quickly; my options were worthless but the founders managed to come out pretty wealthy.

The lesson I took from that is that there's nothing quite like actual revenue and profit to demonstrate "transformational potential."

I struggle to think of a large tech company that operated on endless infusions of shareholder cash for years and years and years on end that eventually became a big profitable player, apart from Amazon. And well, most money-burning startups aren't Amazon.

I'm betting the business model doesn't work quite as well as you might think.

In NYC, a big Uber market, the MTA is still operating with only about 60% of normal ridership.

I'd imagine the falloff is even worse for Uber; at the same time, gas prices are high and NYC now also has a congestion charge further increasing prices for New Yorkers.

Can't imagine it's any better in any other part of the country either.

They've also lost money every year they've operated as a public company except for 2018.

... including the "disruptors" at Uber, I reckon.

With few people needing to spend lots of time "out and about" anymore, a lot of businesses have become obsolete. Who needs "ridesharing" when you're not riding all over town anymore?

The average office is filled with more distractions than the average home -- especially if it's open-plan.

And if you think that your team members are con artists, that's once more on the manager. It's reasonably easy to see if someone is performing or not performing, and acting accordingly (including developing a performance plan if need be).

If you have a persistent suspicion that your team members are conning you, that's a sign of a very low trust work environment... which is a cultural issue that no location policy can fix.

In my experience, the proper question here to ask is "how am I failing as a manager?"

If someone was a top performer and has seen a falling off in results, and I as a manager don't know why, I'm not doing my job to know and understand my team and their needs.

Further, if I have concerns "in the back of my mind" that I'm being taken advantage of, it's either a result of my insecurities (which I need to address offline), or a complete lack of trust in the relationship -- which again, is on me, since I haven't taken the steps necessary to build a trusting rapport with my team members.

I think the Bloomberg link is a classic Scare Story, and I doubt that almost 2 in 5 remote workers are working two full-time jobs.

That said, if they were -- and their employment agreement doesn't forbid it -- what's the problem?

The claim that they're getting sub-par results is an a-priori assertion without any proof. Further, companies themselves have migrated towards at-will employment, in which it can be terminated at any time for any reason, as well as migrating to defined contribution pensions and increasing employee contributions to health care, transforming the work relationship into a series of transactions in an effort to maximize profitability. It would be foolish to assume that the other side of the equation wouldn't eventually mirror the practice.

I also hear a lot about "work time," which is another interesting concept in 2022. When does it start? When does it end? Do workers get to drop off calls immediately once "work time" is over? If they have to work longer hours than those with "work time," do they receive extra compensation? It seems to me that the expectations around "work time" suddenly disappear when additional time is required... which means that it's not really a reasonable basis for making determinations from.

Some employers seem to "want it all," and the world has changed.

Employers who treat their people well will retain them and attract new people. Those who don't trust their employees or micromanage them will have difficulty attracting top talent. And people at successful companies will, as always, be evaluated by output, rather than presenteeism.