One quote that really stuck with me is from the YouTuber "Practical Engineering"

He was talking about how we often call road construction workers lazy for standing around, while one person is doing the work.

At one point he says something to the effect of "Next time you're working, pay attention to the actual amount of time you spend actively doing things, you might be surprised to realize it's not that much. It's just natural to need time to break and think to do your job properly - the only difference between them and you is your work activity isn't publicly visible"

Similarly I take the stance it's none of my business what people do at work as long as it doesn't interfere with me. Results are what matter, and even then that's between them and their boss.

I've lost count of the times I've watched apparent slackers achieve great accomplishments (and not because they got someone else to do their work). Conversely those who complain about the amount of work they are putting in often turn out to be unproductive (sometimes covering up their laziness with that narrative, or just doing their job really inefficiently).

Another thing I noticed in school is when you're in an exam, take a look around - you will notice nearly everyone is just sitting staring and doing nothing. You haven't entered the twilight zone, they're just thinking, you don't notice when you do it because you're too busy...thinking!!

And the long lunches and the birthday parties and the "oh someone brought in x, we better run and get some before it's gone" too many reasons NOT to work when in an office.

I find it interesting that "attend meetings" is said in the same breath as "walk around" and "take lunch or bathroom breaks".

Meetings are way worse for productivity than breaks and water cooler bullshitting, at least in my experience. There's more of them, they take longer, and they tend to leave me with a vague sense that nothing's really getting done and everybody's sort of okay with that. AND they're treated as an obligation in a way that taking breaks is not.

At least when I get back to my desk after walking around, I feel a bit more refreshed and ready to get back to work. In fact, it's usually meeting burnout that prompts the walk-around in the first place.

are CEOs really working ~~all day~~ at all? No. here's what they're doing instead.

fuck all.

Middle management especially basically only exist in the numbers they do because of in office work culture, which is very often just distractions from actual work.

80% of their 'job' is either useless or counterproductive to what the organization is actually, or at least supposedly, designed and intended to do, and they know that a mass adoption of a paradigm that makes this obvious would lead to them not having jobs.

So we get masses of propaganda to disabuse us of the notion that their mostly useless 'work' needs to exist in the way that it can.

This is made all the more ironic (and horrifying) when you know that most of these people also profess to care about the poor, the climate, but that's less important than feeling like queen bees in their corpo hives, so fuck anything that might actually significantly reduce co2 emmissions and significantly increase the quality of life for a huge amount of workers.

I’m in a hybrid position with the office pretty close to where I live and I’ll just say it: slacking off is much more comfortable in the office than at home.

If it’s a really slow day I don’t have the same thoughts that I need to keep my work phone with me, or make sure I’m “available” in teams every hour or so (running Linux with Teams in a browser means I’m away or offline most of the time when actively using my PC). Being in the office gets you the “looks busy” effect almost for free, and it reinforces the fact that not being instantly available is not a bad sign for productivity.

My office environment is fortunately pretty decent though, so going in isn’t a nightmare compared to home other than the whole thing where I have to get moving and make myself presentable for venturing into public.

Those who do best in office positions are the ones that are particularly skilled at making it seem like they are busy and productive. Ie staying late, or getting in early

I mean, it's not really a "in office" v "remote working" debate - people will slack off and make themselves look busy regardless of where they are. That's caused by a case-specific mix of motivation, discipline, or other factors. That's a line management issue rather than a work location issue - WfH just gets scapegoated for that.

Ultimately it will be the money starting to talk - if the accountants start complaining about expensive office space not being used to its maximum, then they'll start instructing folk back to the office. It's a shit reason but unless your contract specifically says remote, it'll be the balance sheet making the decision for you (edit: unless it really doesn't work for you and you go nuclear with the "resign" button of course)

How many breaks did Jessica Guynn have during the day she wrote that text?

Found a link to the article here: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/09/18/remote-work-from-home-survey/75266226007/

Which references this survey with no access to the data or methodology used: https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/surveymonkey-research-workplace-culture-and-trends/

So it's an opinion piece with no real justification or factual foundation you'd expect from a journalist.

I kinda do miss the office chatting and gossip/drama (hearing it, not being a part of it lol)

Not enough to go back to the office though lmao

It kinda reminds me of Snow Crash, where one character works in an office where everything is monitored, so she slowly reads a stupid note about toilet paper with backtracking and making superfluous lists to game the tracking algorithms. Working is not about productivity, but gaming the KPI.

I was so annoyed the other day because on my walk to the bathroom I caw 4 people watching Netflix with a teams meeting on closed caption.

And then I saw 2 people in one cube playing a multiplayer phone game next to their manager wearing headphones in a teams meeting.

So that's the reason we got called RTO...

Thank Atlassian for continuing to do unbiased research on the subject.

No Shit! I wonder which corporate real estate consortium financed that article.

There are four kinds of office jobs. They ones where you don't have enough work but they pay you for 8 hours, the kinds where you have too much work and they only pay you for 8 hours, overpaid executives, and the grunts who are only in the office when they apply and work their asses off for zero appreciation in the manual labor jobs.

5 days a week in the office is inevitable. Everyone will start following Amazon's lead. I'm 100% remote so I'm sure at some point, some overpaid exec will have the great idea to get rid of positions like mine.