Jun 19, 2023·edited Jun 19, 2023Liked by George Patterson Sibble
Thought to add my 2¢. In my case I was at first open to hybrid work but at like 1–2 days a week but my old company wanted 3–4 days. I was a manager of a team so I did understand and appreciate the reason to get the team together. But the fact was as a team we were already drowning in meetings and did not have enough time allocated to do the actual programming/design work. One of my team members has a really long tiring commute, and has a family, so I hated to ask him to come more than once a week: can't blame him for the ridiculous real estate prices here.
Other team members are in a different locale so we end up still video/audio-conferencing anyway when we are in the office. A "globalized workforce" is what they call it. In capitalism everything's fair game I suppose so isn't it nice for once that workers (whose work can be done remotely) too can partake a bit in the benefits of "globalization", i.e. choosing a better place to live than all crowded apartments in the downtown core of a city.
I'm not bitter in so far as I have, fortunately, am exploiting the ability to work for myself now. Recently, I discovered that my marginal productivity in terms of hours worked doesn't even reach a peak at 10 hours/day, so the back-to-office mandate ended up as one of the major factors leading me to leave my old company, a bank. (As a people manager I don't think I could really dodge their top-down mandate.) Having no commute saves me 1–2 hours of time per day which can be invested in more productive work or just de-stressing myself sometimes. It's huge!
Everybody has probably noticed by now, the people who like back-to-office (and to be fair their reasons are totally logical) are top-level management and young junior employees. The former need to be in to make office politics work in their favor, and they have no mortgages to pay; the latter don't have family obligations and can quite put up with, even enjoy, a typical downtown city life.
Thought to add my 2¢. In my case I was at first open to hybrid work but at like 1–2 days a week but my old company wanted 3–4 days. I was a manager of a team so I did understand and appreciate the reason to get the team together. But the fact was as a team we were already drowning in meetings and did not have enough time allocated to do the actual programming/design work. One of my team members has a really long tiring commute, and has a family, so I hated to ask him to come more than once a week: can't blame him for the ridiculous real estate prices here.
Other team members are in a different locale so we end up still video/audio-conferencing anyway when we are in the office. A "globalized workforce" is what they call it. In capitalism everything's fair game I suppose so isn't it nice for once that workers (whose work can be done remotely) too can partake a bit in the benefits of "globalization", i.e. choosing a better place to live than all crowded apartments in the downtown core of a city.
I'm not bitter in so far as I have, fortunately, am exploiting the ability to work for myself now. Recently, I discovered that my marginal productivity in terms of hours worked doesn't even reach a peak at 10 hours/day, so the back-to-office mandate ended up as one of the major factors leading me to leave my old company, a bank. (As a people manager I don't think I could really dodge their top-down mandate.) Having no commute saves me 1–2 hours of time per day which can be invested in more productive work or just de-stressing myself sometimes. It's huge!
Everybody has probably noticed by now, the people who like back-to-office (and to be fair their reasons are totally logical) are top-level management and young junior employees. The former need to be in to make office politics work in their favor, and they have no mortgages to pay; the latter don't have family obligations and can quite put up with, even enjoy, a typical downtown city life.