4 ms·
Lets be honest here, a very significant portion of business practices are caused because upper management do not trust the team they hired. Be it that they don
by dijit 3y ago
Lets be honest here, a very significant portion of business practices are caused because upper management do not trust the team they hired.
Be it that they don't trust them to have the right idea, or trust them to do the work. Nearly all business practises we hate are caused by a measure of overt control over your daily time and a strict measuring of your time and tasks.
Unfortunately: there's about 10-20% of people who genuinely shouldn't be working because they are untrustworthy, and things like remote work just enabled them to take multiple jobs or slack-off massively.
So these practices mostly exist to deal with those people and the rest of us just suffer.
- throwitaway222 3y agoActually it's a complicated effect. One person doing it often causes many people to do it. And its one of those things that doesn't replicate in an "in office" atmosphere.
- yakaccount4 3y agoI think there's a large pool of good talent that can't fully be trusted to do the right thing (not slack off), but can be employed successfully with sufficient guardrails (return to office). Loosely related anecdote why I feel so: For a while right after Apple started its mandatory RTO and ramped up Caffe Macs, the soda "grab n go" sections had an honor system - you paid your $1.25 for a coke and went on your way. Apparently there was a _lot_ of petty theft of drinks, so they have a person with an iPad check you off now, and I assume theft has basically plummeted since there's far less employees brazen enough to just barge off with one without checking off their name. So maybe the RTO is effective in someway? Or maybe the real lesson is that the soda should have been free to begin with.
- galdosdi 3y agoYou have to.... pay... for soda... at Apple? What the hell?
- azinman2 3y agoYou have to pay for food and drink. It’s not like Google etc.
- IntelMiner 3y agoCall it the Apple tax
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoSame at Nvidia. But it's subsidized. The argument I heard is it reduces food waste.
- samplatt 3y agoSorry; not understanding your outrage here. You expect your work to provide you with free soda? Or you expect a FAANG company in particular to do so?
- wetpaws 3y ago[dead]
- galdosdi 3y agoYes, free basic cheap commodity drinks and snacks are bare minimum for a FAANG-class employer, and every other FAANG-class employer I'm familiar with goes well above and beyond that. Even my first job out of college as a boilerroom MSP sysadmin earning $40k in manhattan gave us free soda (the only benefit lol) I mean, even if you work as a mechanic at a body shop, there is often free coffee in an old pot in the break room, it's not that crazy. But outside of that context, no of course I don't expect/care if my employer provides me with free soda. I don't even drink it. It just seems weirdly cheapskate for a supposed FAANG-class employer.
- pompino 3y agoI'd rather receive benefits in cash than paying some vendor tens of thousands of dollars to stock useless items.
- supportengineer 3y agoCokes are 2.25 now
- yakaccount4 3y agoI'm a coke zero guy
- thefz 3y ago> I think there's a large pool of good talent that can't fully be trusted to do the right thing (not slack off) Ever worked in an office? At any corporation size no one works 8 hours a day and if you want to slack, there are plenty opportunities in the office as well. Hell, you can spend the whole day there without doing ANYTHING. So that is a non-point for me, slackers gonna slack.
- ryandrake 3y agoI knew a guy whose daily routine was something like: 9:25 - Arrival (cafeteria stopped serving breakfast at 9:30. 9:30-10:15 - Breakfast 10:15-11:30 - A lot of walking around the office, having business-sounding conversations with others but really getting nothing done. 11:30-1:00 - Out for lunch. 1:00-3:00 - Sneak out to car in the parking lot for a nap. 3:00-3:30 - Daily standup. Vaguely talk about how he’s “merging code” or “updating library dependencies” this week. 3:30-4:00 - At desk working. 4:00-5:30 - Doing his walk-around-talk-arounds through the office hallways again. 5:30-6:00 - At his desk again! 6:00 - Cafeteria starts serving dinner. Grabs a bunch of food, throws it in his backpack, and heads to the parking lot. This went on for years. The other teammates joked that he must have blackmail dirt on the boss because it was obvious to everyone that he wasn’t doing anything and nobody seemed to care. He was there when I joined the company and was there when I left, years later. He may very well be still there today, merging code.
- dijit 3y agoThere are less serious versions of the same thing that people might unintentionally do. 09:25 - arrive. 09:30 - 10:00; breakfast 10:00 - 10:30; standup 10:30 - 11:00; Coffee after standup 11:00 - 11:30; checking emails before lunch 11:30 - 13:00; lunch 13:00 - 13:30; food coma, better just check some emails 13:30 - 14:00; coffee and a chat 14:00 - 15:00; maybe some actual work 15:00 - 15:45; someone needs help, they come over and have a chat 15:45 - 16:30; maybe some more work 16:30 - 17:00 wrap up, go home, urgently write some emails and expect a response before you arrive 09:25 tomorrow. I've seen this, a lot of this.
- sys_64738 3y agoI remember when Oracle took over Sun and they brought in the free soda drinks where you can grab a can and they're constantly replenished. I brought in a backpack and filled it then took it home. After a week of doing that I had all these soda cans to drink but I realized I didn't like soda anymore. Larry is the best.
- dvfjsdhgfv 3y agoI'm sorry but the example you gave for your argument makes no sense at all. Most people here have tasks and daily meetings where these tasks are discussed or at least briefly mentioned (in other words, your "iPad guy" is already there). If someone is slacking, it is immediately visible. Can you abuse the system by providing fake explanations for why one task takes so long? Of course, but you can do the same whether you work remotely or not, and this can also be easily verified in both cases.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoWell all the people at the top were machiavellian bastards on their rise. But they need underlings to not be machiavellian to get the best operating business and stock performance. So they need to be visibly watched. Of course ascending the hierarchy means visibly larger and larger numbers of underlings. Zoom phantoms don't count in that swinging duck contest.
- sudhirj 3y agoI would pay a lot of money to see this swinging duck contest. Especially if the ducks were not sedated.
- pompino 3y agoI'm curious - Where are you getting your numbers from?
- dheera 3y ago> Unfortunately: there's about 10-20% of people who genuinely shouldn't be working because they are untrustworthy, and things like remote work just enabled them to take multiple jobs or slack-off massively. There are better ways to deal with those people. I'm not convinced that is the reason for RTO. The real reason, IMO, is there is all this office real estate that needs a justification to exist.
- kimixa 3y agoI think a lot of people aren't actually aware of how much they already rely on trust - I dread to think how much an actually adversarial employee could have cost as many of the places I have worked...
- Aeolun 3y agoIt did always strike me as somewhat unreasonable that my job trusts me with the ability to spin up an arbitrary number of $100/hour AWS instances, but not with purchasing a $60 mouse.
- _rutinerad 3y agoThe bean counters only understand (and measure) one of those well enough to try to control it.
- fragmede 3y agoCIA: The Art of Simple Sabotage https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage/ https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nine_k 3y agoTrust is a key enabler. I avoid low-trust environments, because nothing can get done there, everyone is suspicious and puts CYA first. Ironically, a high-transparency, high-trust environment is exactly what makes teams of remote workers efficient. But it greatly helps in the office, too.
- erik_seaberg 3y agoIt’s kind of terrifying to have and give out admin powers with no oversight (except maybe forensics if we’re lucky). I’m interested in what alternatives could look like. Maybe provisioning requests take multiple signatures, like turning missile keys?
- mklepaczewski 3y ago>Unfortunately: there's about 10-20% of people who genuinely shouldn't be working because they are untrustworthy, and things like remote work just enabled them to take multiple jobs or slack-off massively. Many of these people suffer from chronic procrastination. They don't want to slack off, but they do it anyway. They want to work, but they're not capable of working in a remote environment. These might be the people who have ADD/ADHD, people who suffer from depression, extroverts, etc. For some of them, the fix is surprisingly easy: put them in an environment where there are people around them. It can be a coffee shop, library, or whole-day video call. Source: I'm a co-founder of a body-doubling platform for remote workers.
- swah 3y agoCan you compare Workmode.net with Flown.com?
- mklepaczewski 3y agoOn other platforms, you work with the platforms' other users. If you don't show up to a scheduled session or disconnect mid-session, nobody is going to care. You might get a bad review or an automated email, but that's it. If you're a chronic procrastinator, you might have just started another zero-day. On WorkMode you work with our employee (Productivity Partner), and their only job is to ensure that you stay productive throughout the day. You always work with the same Productivity Partner. They'll call you 15-30 minutes before your session starts to remind you about it and to make sure you prepare for work. They will notice if you don't show up, and they'll call you to find out what happened. They'll call you if you disappear mid-day or your lunch break takes more than you planned. They'll keep track of your to-do list and help you break down tasks into manageable pieces. They pay much more attention to what you do and how you do it (perfectionism/productive procrastination/detrimental context switching). They know when you might procrastinate and what may trigger it. You can do 30, 60, or 4-hour sessions - it's up to you. The focus is on you. Now, should you try WorkMode? If you already use Focusmate, Flown, or Focus101 and it works for you - keep doing that; you're doing great! If, however, it's hit-and-miss, you have zero days or need extra accountability, definitely try WorkMode :-)
- 3y ago