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Gotta Work For a Living
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The company I work for went pretty much full remote back at the beginning of the pandemic. Now and then when the situation allows/demands it some teams return to the office for a day or two, and on such occasions we all see each other. In some cases it has been years we haven’t seen each other in real life, but only worked together over Zoom meetings and Jira tickets.
I must say this. People look better these days. They look healthier; some lost weight, others got more time for themselves, or to spend with their families. They all had stories of gardening, renovating their homes (to some that meant ‘new decks’ and others ‘I learned how to make shelves and built them for my living room’), or hiking trails walking their dogs - and of new dogs they got to actually hang out with during that time.
All of this because they no longer had to spend two hours every day commuting back and forth. Because for lunch they got to sit on their couch and eat home-made food instead of grabbing a candy bar from the work fridge or going for a Big Mac across the street simply because they had no time for anything else. And because if they had ten minutes to kill between meetings they could spend them with people they love rather than work-friends who wanted to talk about their projects anyway.
Working from home isn’t always great but it’s so much better than the alternative.
Of course YMMV.
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@Arkandel said in Gotta Work For a Living:
The company I work for went pretty much full remote back at the beginning of the pandemic. Now and then when the situation allows/demands it some teams return to the office for a day or two, and on such occasions we all see each other after. In some cases it has been years we haven’t seen each other in real life, but only worked together over Zoom meetings and Jira tickets.
I must say this. People look better these days. They look healthier; some lost weight, others got more time for themselves, or to spend with their families. They all had stories of gardening, renovating their homes (to some that meant ‘new decks’ and others ‘I learned how to make shelves and built them for my living room’), or hiking trails walking their dogs - and of new dogs they got to actually hang out with during that time.
All of this because they no longer had to spend two hours every day commuting back and forth. Because for lunch they got to sit on their couch and eat home-made food instead of grabbing a candy bar from the work fridge or going for a Big Mac across the street simply because they had no time for anything else. And because if they had ten minutes to kill between meetings they could spend them with people they love rather than work-friends who wanted to talk about their projects anyway.
Working from home isn’t always great but it’s so much better than the alternative.
Of course YMMV.
Amazon and Meta both reached out to me in the past month. I told them to hit me up when they have committed to permanent remote work policies.
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This is a general bump of solidarity to everyone else who works in the education sector (on the technical side of things, but guess who kept the lights on for the last couple of years).
I started writing a lengthy rant on how everything sucks right now and I’ve been doing 50+ hour weeks due to cascading mismanagement and the screaming entitlement of a few people who should just take a nice walk outside and how management just scheduled a HUGE project over the top of a vacation I had reserved months prior in advance (plus they’re a little restricted on vacations).
But I lost this post. Whoops.
I’ll console myself with the fact that this city school district is nowhere near the higher-ed trash fire I was at previously.
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I’m really enjoying the subbing gig. My calendar is almost fully booked for the next two months except for the couple of weeks I have blocked out for transporting kids back to college/hubby’s biz trip. I was going to immediately start looking for a part time district job (I’ll be taking the parapro assessment soon) but now I’m torn.
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@shit-piss-love As unenthused as I am about the idea of ever going back to the private sector as it is, I got enough of a taste of Amazon culture from my former job where we imported one of their execs as a CEO.
Nothanks ever.
I woke up feeling so good, I think I’d better call in sick/ I need a personal trainer to help me hold my drink
I plan to be spontaneous next time we meet/I’m putting off procrastinating until next week
I’ll get onto it when I give a shit -
@SpaceKhomeini said in Gotta Work For a Living:
@shit-piss-love As unenthused as I am about the idea of ever going back to the private sector I got enough of a taste of Amazon culture from my former job where we imported one of their execs as a CEO.
Nothanks ever.
Oh yeah I would never work for Amazon or Meta. But I do want to contribute pressure to making permanent remote work the norm.
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Yeah as of this fall Tech Department is the last group that gets permanent WFH privs. But that may be revised next year. Hmmph. Enjoy your covid, fucknuts.
As it stands, the writing is already on the wall with a very cheery email from HR stating that it will now be “enforced policy” to have your camera on at all times during meetings.
As much as I hate this I want to say, this is going to hurt everyone else more than it hurts me.
I woke up feeling so good, I think I’d better call in sick/ I need a personal trainer to help me hold my drink
I plan to be spontaneous next time we meet/I’m putting off procrastinating until next week
I’ll get onto it when I give a shit -
@SpaceKhomeini We have a guideline by HR to be on camera during meetings.
It’s… very loosely upheld, at best. We do when it makes sense (i.e. during scrums, semi-social occasions, etc). If there’s actual work to be done my team is well aware they should leave it off and focus on the screenshares.
There is no point to enforcing cameras. It’s all based on old-school “are you doing your job” kind of micromanagement. If I have to rely on looking at people to see if they’re busy then what good are all the other KPIs we generate for?
In any job that can be done over Zoom, if you can’t tell whether your FTEs are producing work unless you have visual contact with them then you’re probably doing something wrong.
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Bingo. This is only for “WFH users.” The irony is, the way our office is set up, were I at my desk in my cube I wouldn’t be able to see anyone anyway. Plus I’d be dealing with massive meeting mic echo.
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I feel really awful missing the first day of school. But I’m also sitting and having to take a break after folding just one basket of laundry.
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The only time my work insists we use cameras is when there’s someone with a disability who needs to be able to see what you’re saying. This has led to a culture in my team of cameras on for greetings and general natter, then cameras off unless you’re speaking (or have something you want to say) for the rest of the meeting.
It’s a good halfway house between the ones who have a need to not be on camera and the ones who have a need to see the people who’re talking, with the added bonus of not taking up as much bandwidth as fifteen cameras all on does, and a great side benefit of people being able to see that you want to specifically add something to the current topic.
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@Arkandel said in Gotta Work For a Living:
We have a guideline by HR to be on camera during meetings.
At university, we have a similar condition. During tutorial (actual teaching) classes, our cameras must be on, but not so during lectures.
The reason for this is an important one, even if it’s a little irritating. The university staff need to know we’ve actually attended, as that’s an essential part of our accreditation - no attendance, no certification, certification which is important for those who want to practice after our degrees.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Pavel I don’t like mandates in general. They are inflexible. I can understand HR wanting to encourage culture-building (at least) by allowing coworkers to ‘see’ each other, take cues from facial expressions and all those everyday subtleties of human interaction. There’s absolutely a time and a place for it.
But for example I once had an accident that gave me a black eye for a week. I wouldn’t want that to be a focus of every call I got on. Other people might be dealing with… anything - a bad hair day, a headache forcing them to keep the light off, it might be hot and they want to be in a tank-top.
There’s no need to have one-size-fits-all policies unless that is actually the case. If it’s 100% needed, 100% of the time, have it. Else leave it as a general guideline and go from there - especially since if you effectively force people to ignore one of your mandates then they will find it easier to ignore other ones, too.
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@Arkandel If they tried to mandate camera use at all times, I’d go for a Reasonable Adjustment to say ‘no’.
I can handle it when the deaf guy needs to be able to see me; that’s fine and fair enough. His need to see who’s talking absolutely outweighs my need to not be visible. I can handle it when I’m talking in general, because that’s what talking in a meeting means now, and that includes the ‘hi how are you’ pre-ambles. Teams will let me fake my background, and I got a nice photo that’s suitably work-themed a few months ago.
In general, though, I find being on camera exhausting, especially when it’s unnecessary. I’m not doing it for hours on end when I’m not the focus, and if you think I’m taking the minutes with a camera on me I have two words and the second one is ‘off’. I have a disability, and I have stated so to work. One of the recognised symptoms is being camera-shy. I will absolutely weaponise employment legislation if I have to.
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Another poorly represented argument here is… there is only so much screen real-estate on a monitor.
Much of IT actual work at least is conducted over screen-sharing sessions. I want to look as much of an IDE, code PR or log someone is sharing with me as I can; I don’t need to see their face at the same time. Hell, it’s distracting from what we’re actually trying to do.
Also also I work in operations. Sometimes shit catches fire at inconvenient hours well into the evening or early morning. No one needs to see a bunch of sleepy-eyed squinting nerds drooling down their chins as they try to make things right again so they can go back to bed.
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I have been in thousands of hours of videoconferences and I don’t think I’ve looked at the face of someone who wasn’t talking once. I cannot fathom a reason that would be necessary aside from middle managers wanting to assure you have a butt in the seat, which is the lowest form of management. I’d go nuclear on a company trying to enforce some “cameras on at all times” shit.
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When we were first debating policies about whether or not to require cameras to be on at all times during meetings, one of the considerations that I had to bring to the attention of my immediate supervisor was the fact that not everyone has a pristine living environment to show on camera. There are plenty of people that are not living to the same means as their peers, and they might find that embarrassing, or heavens forbid they live in a messy environment, or are living out of a hotel room for the moment, or simply just get crushing anxiety from appearing on camera.
This actually seemed to catch my manager - who had been advocating for always on cameras during meetings - off guard, and they had to stop and think about it for a time and politely disagreed, and I politely pushed back. They ultimately did take my advice and run it up the chain, who ultimately agreed with me where he did not.
There are so many more nuanced reasons why people don’t want to turn their webcam on that upper management immediately thinks of.
The cynical part of me can’t help but think that this is because in part, they are all comfortably wealthy.
At the time, I was live reporting from a laundry room.
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I was scheduled to be in trial yesterday and today in another town. I drove to the town, stayed overnight in the hotel there. Woke up the next morning feeling kind of yucky and coughing a lot. Dreading it, I called and left a message with the clerks only to discover that the prosecutor tested positive for covid and was ill & asking for an emergency continuance.
I’ve tested negative on two home tests now but I also slept through a ridiculous amount of today. Ugggggggh I don’t want this stuff agaiiiiiin.
let it be a challenge to you
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@sao said in Gotta Work For a Living:
I’ve tested negative on two home tests now but I also slept through a ridiculous amount of today. Ugggggggh I don’t want this stuff agaiiiiiin.
I hope it’s just a cold and you’re feeling better soon!
Tangential PSA - latest guidance from CDC shows the necessity of testing multiple times, as you did, to avoid false-negative test results (where the test says “no covid” but you actually have covid).
On the first day symptoms appear, a home test is only about 60% effective at detecting covid. If you test again 48 days later, then between the two tests it’s over 90% effective.
Multiple tests spaced 48 hours apart gives you more confidence even if you don’t have any symptoms, though the effectiveness isn’t as high overall. (Generally, symptoms = higher viral load = easier for the test to detect; asymptomatic cases more often result in false negatives). Study source
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@Solstice said in Gotta Work For a Living:
When we were first debating policies about whether or not to require cameras to be on at all times during meetings, one of the considerations that I had to bring to the attention of my immediate supervisor was the fact that not everyone has a pristine living environment to show on camera. There are plenty of people that are not living to the same means as their peers, and they might find that embarrassing, or heavens forbid they live in a messy environment, or are living out of a hotel room for the moment, or simply just get crushing anxiety from appearing on camera.
This actually seemed to catch my manager - who had been advocating for always on cameras during meetings - off guard, and they had to stop and think about it for a time and politely disagreed, and I politely pushed back. They ultimately did take my advice and run it up the chain, who ultimately agreed with me where he did not.
There are so many more nuanced reasons why people don’t want to turn their webcam on that upper management immediately thinks of.
The cynical part of me can’t help but think that this is because in part, they are all comfortably wealthy.
At the time, I was live reporting from a laundry room.
I’m firmly of the opinion that the real reason upper management is so convinced that returning to the office is a great idea, allows better focus, is more productive, builds a better culture, etc. is simply because…
When we’re in the office, they’re top dog. Everything and everyone around them bends to them - their convenience, their needs, and their schedule. Meanwhile when they’re at home working from their kitchen table, their six year old absolutely doesn’t give a shit that daddy is using their snack-making space. It’s snack-making time, so the kid is going to use the table.
Sucks that y’all had to spend two years living like the rest of us plebs, I guess?
