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I asked around, got these as reasons from various people (management or otherwise) for forcing workers to come to office 1. Effective tool to force people to q
by akudha 2y ago
I asked around, got these as reasons from various people (management or otherwise) for forcing workers to come to office
1. Effective tool to force people to quit, instead of laying them off
2. Smart, fast workers have figured out ways to do extra work (freelance, part time job etc) which enrages employers. We can debate the ethics of this all day, but remember that prices of everything is going up every year, but raises/promotions are hard to come by
3. Pettiness, micromanagement - just relishing the fact that people suffer from long commutes, have to find baby sitters etc. A manager at my job was collecting names of people who don't come to office minimum 3 days a week. This was his biggest "achievement" last month, he contributes nothing to actual work. Showing people who is "the boss"
4. Keeping commercial real estate prices from crashing
- closeparen 2y agoThere probably is a world where you get paid per line of code or story point, but you might not like it. When an employer pays a salary they are buying out your entire professional capacity. In a creative field like ours, part of that price encodes a bet that you might be one of those rare workers whose contribution exceeds their cost many times over. If everyone is able to titrate their contribution to the exact level of management’s expectations, like by context-switching to childcare or another job when their assigned workload is done, then the budget for the role is going to be exactly what that bare minimum is worth. What could break us out of this jam is either radically more individualized compensation structures, or other costly signals of commitment and engagement that are as meaningful to the firm as transporting your physical body to be somewhere for 8 hours a day. I think there’s an interesting world of co-presence technology beyond the Zoom call that could be relevant here, but explorations in this area are also a stone’s throw from rather dystopian employee surveillance regimes, so it’s hard to say.
- 2mlWQbCK 2y agoIndividualized compensation and treating everyone like expendable faceless factory workers instead of teams of professional hired to work together on solving problems seems to me to be the real problem today, not a solution. We're supposed to work on really difficult problems, but we're not given the freedom and resources to think and collaborate in meaningful ways to solve problems. Instead it's a constant push for individuals to sit alone and display how productive they each are, alone, at completing jira tickets. Managers care more about being able to measure individual performance than about actual results. If they cared about results they would allow teams to work as teams. Agile had a lot of good ideas, but I never saw any of it lead to anything good in reality.
- closeparen 2y agoIf your responsibility is to the team's mission, and the end of this mission is not at hand, then there's really no limiting principle other than the number of butts-in-seats hours your work culture considers reasonable.
- callc 2y ago> When an employer pays a salary they are buying out your entire professional capacity. Nah. I’ve got free time with a full time job. I’ll do what I damn well please with it. “Salary = ownership over worker” is the most authoritarian working class vs ownership class things I’ve heard Let’s make laws that help the vast majority of people: workers.
- Tade0 2y agoNumber 3 is what scares me the most, as throughout the years I overheard enough conversations that HR/management had, which weren't meant for my ears, that I find it an entirely believable reason why they might be doing it.