"And to disprove that working from home made you more productive, we demand you return to the office and work twice the hours!"
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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It's uncanny, it's almost as if removing office politics, drama, "team building", and endless useless meetings from the equation improves productivity.
Who knew?
"we're all a family here" fuck off
I mean, a dysfunctional family is still a family. 🤣
It also has to with the tyranny of distance. People end up trapped in shitty jobs that aren't right for them. They end up in roles where they aren't doing the things they want to do or where their talents truly lie. Economically, this causes them to be much less productive than they could be in a position that's a better fit for them.
And the main reason people end up trapped in jobs is the tyranny of distance. Maybe there's only two employers in your town that can really use your specific skills. For someone who owns a home, moving costs tens of thousands of dollars. And often you can't find out a position won't be a good fit until you actually work there for awhile.
Work from home overcomes much of this tyranny of distance. It allows employers and employees to find much better matches for each other, unconstrained by physical distance. And for this reason, shitty employers hate it. Shitty employers thrive on transaction/switching costs and employee lock-in.
Team building is fine, even beneficial, when done right. Which is almost never.
The first year I worked from home, I got the highest possible rating on my annual review. I’ll be damned if having a nice quiet and comfortable place to concentrate doesn’t boost productivity.
First they forced us back to the office despite a mountain of evidence showing hybrid work is more productive.
Now they're forcing us to use AI even if it's pure garbage.
I'm so sick of these micromanaging, power-tripping buffoons. I can't wait to retire.
I just straight-up refuse to use the AI tools at work.
Boss's boss bitches at my boss about it regularly, but I do the work of three people for the salary of 3/4 of a person, so chasing me off would only cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars in recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training my replacements and gain them nothing.
Know your worth and be willing to walk away.
I do the work of three people for the salary of 3/4 of a person
Know your worth and be willing to walk away.
Congrats! You're too thick to understand what hyperbole is. And four highly regarded fellas upvoted you?
LMAO it's nice to know that the younger generation isn't smart enough to be able to take our jobs.
That was oddly specific
My comment has 7 upvotes actually 💪😤
You're bad at hyperbole dude
"Other dipshits around here agree with me" is not the flex you think it is.
You decided to rage at my completely innocuous comment an entire day after I posted it, I'm not the one trying to flex here. Why are you so mad
If that's "rage" and "mad" to you then just lol. Go see your therapist, sweetie.
retire
lol
we are not going to retire
For real. At best, we're all going to become impromptu homesteaders/farmers. At worst, we starve before we can
The only thing they care about more than money is power and control.
Holy shit this is big!
Are you telling me that giving better work conditions to your workers (and therefore making them happier) INCREASES PRODUCTIVITY?!?!
I
AM
SHOCKED.
Giving everyone an office is too costly.
I've got an idea, since cubicle went so well, lets shorten the walls to half walls.
Since half wall cubicles went so well, lets take the walls down complete.
Since the fully open design worked so well, lets squish all the desks together as closely as possible.
Since bench desking worked so well, lets take away personal desks all together and go to a hot desking system.
Since hot desking went so well, lets replace the desks with side tables, and benches with empty cat littler buckets.
Excerpt from "Leadership's Guide to Call Centers"
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I recall reading an article the first few months into lockdown that nationally, productivity was up a surprising 17% average.
I guess commercial landlords, micromanaging bosses, and the ultra rich realized it started to loosen their grip on the rest of us and we might like our lives a little. Every article after that was the complete opposite, and basically misinformation hit everywhere hard to pound out of our minds it was ever mentioned!
The mayor of my city is actively campaigning for going back to 5 day full workweeks for all office workers, under the bullshit guise of 'support small business'. She's a corporate shrill and has pivoted to because she wants to run for higher office and needs their campaign donations.
No, the company that owns all the business downtown, are giant mega real estate corps. That's who you are trying to benefit. My own company is downsizing our lease to 33% of our pre-pandemic square footage, because it makes no sense and our productivity is through the roof compared to being stuck in a open-office plan with people distracting each other for 50% of the work day.
I work less, and I get way more done because my time is much more focused, and more gets documented. Unlike in-office where more than half my daily workload was invisible because it was face to face/verbal interactions that never got recognized because they were not digitally recorded.
I hope they found a good way to measure productivity, because I never came across a convincing one.
At my company they came up with a great plan. Count our pr merges lol.
It's been going on a few weeks and they are just realizing that we have a ton of prs but still haven't shipped a ton of features lol.
They have played their hand and shown they have no idea what they are doing.
Haha. Better or worse than, 'jira tickets' or 'story points'?
They're doing a f-ing reporting database migration just now, just measure tables created that match the old DB. And standard user queries that output the same.
"Oh hang on, does the new database have to have the same data as the old one?" "We've reviewed all of our non existing requirements gathering notes and the "business " never wrote that as a requirement. we can squeeze it in later on the roadmap, when some dev resources have been freed up. Can you tell us more about these 'queries'; is that a power bi thing? - i think another team does that?"
Sack 3 or more layers of "management/director/head of/architect/strategy", that have a lot more impact on productivity than letting people wank from home.
We did. Projects move ahead faster, problems got solved quicker, problems went down.
Frankly, it was never remote working per se, it was embracing the elements that make it work: asynchronous work. Documenting EVERYTHING, completely open infrastructure (everyone can see what everyone is doing/working on), requiring dedicated YOU do this tasks, assignments etc.
But from then on, we didn't need an office anymore. We don't even need regularly scheduled hours for everyone, what ever works for them is fine. I think that gives people opportunity to do things when they like, and without the commute there is a lot more actually doing the work when they are there.
Individual worker / team / prod line. Sure you can measure those. That's great for those at thst level.. But I don't know how you add them up across the whole of "America" without some very dubious economic statistics bullshit.
Empirically , economy wide measures are generally useless i reckon. And often manipulated. It's very hard to add up output of different production lines (or different goods or services) in a single meaningful measure and account for all the variables like quality, product mix, availability and if you're using price-weights all stuff that distorts market power. Econo-statisticians will calculate it, because they get paid to, but the honest/aware ones should fess up it's got serious weaknesses however you calculate it.
Some small companies really are like families. But with large companies "family" usually means when they're in trouble you should pitch in and help by working extra for free, but when you're in trouble you're on your own.
Maybe managers woke up and focused on productivity rather than 'are you in office on time? '
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