Working From Home

working at home = dud for me. 6 mos. of freelancing for aol and i was ready to comit hara kiri with a letter opener.

Always got stuff done though - often at 9pm on the Sunday night when server traffic was quiet and my conscience was playing up.

working from home: classic
working from home when your flatmate has been made redundant and is mooching around the flat with his annoying boyfriend all day: DUD DUD DUD oh god just go awayyyyyyyyy

I twisted my knee playing football last night (that's why I'd stopped playing!), and couldn't walk properly today as a result, so I emailed in sick to work, and told them I had various things I'd do online and that I'd be available via email and my work mobile. As result I've actually been marked down as "home working" today rather than on sick leave.

This is the first time I've done this (although I do, if off sick or on leave, generally check work emails reasonably regularly - especially when I was off after my hernia operation for instance), and it's been surprisingly productive; I've organised as many if not more things as I would have done had I been in the office, sent a gazillion emails chasing various things, edited a load of copy, drafted some new web pages, AND had a nap and stroked the cats. And all while wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt that are full of holes and not fit to be seen in public.

i'm working from home today and it is fucking amazing.

-shouting abuse at co-workers who can't hear you in response to their emails
-singing along to records
-cooking your own lunch
-not bothering to pretend to work if there's a lull or you're done by 1600
-no commute obviously

I have been working from home for almost four years. I can only see advantages. If you're office based and you have Skype, Webex and so forth I really don't see any reason *not* to. The people who still insist on buying or renting huge energy consuming, Earth destroying office space (space which could be used so much more constructively, be it for housing, parkland or given back to nature) are truly behind the curve.

What I'm interested in -- and I'm interested to know if there has been research in these areas:

(a) Has anyone done serious calculations of how much energy we could save (inter)nationally if everyone who *could* work from home did so and secondly,

(b) from a sociological point of view, the focus has been on the negative ("you can't get to know/work properly with people who don't see and physically interract with, ergo groups of home working people are doomed to failure") but shouldn't we also consider the flipside, that home working allows for people to be judged on their true merits, rather than the ad hominem nasty stuff that comes to the fore when people have to share a space?

Heh, my wife just started doing this full-time and has liked it so far.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a couple people at my office must have asked about the possibility because the partners sent out this really passive-aggressive email at the start of the year about how it will never be a possibility here because, basically, "it is impossible to believe that anyone could work productively out of their home". It was just laughably obnoxious and reductive about any possible benefits. (Of course, several months later one of the partners' favorites moved to Texas with her husband and was suddenly approved to work "remotely")

I don't ever want to do it

with my immunocompromised status and the virus terror, I may have to

BUT

the plantation I contract for, at a pitiful wage, uses a "VPN" that requires use of your

PHONE

which I do not have and do not want

fuck apps, fuck texts

is that app PingID?

no

Full time wfh since Oct 2012. Best thing ever. Makes work not suck. Def still look forward to the weekends but I no longer dread Monday. Limits my "advancement" options but I don't care; if I could maintain current position now thru retirement I'd be thrilled.

makes personal traveling mid-week possible. it's harder now that I changed roles, but when I was working in implementations, all they cared about is that I worked, not where I worked from, so sometimes I'd head out of town mid week and bring my laptop.

did manage to go to Vegas midweek last year because i had no classes that week

I’m starting to wonder whether spending £4500 a year on train tickets so I can commute to London, sit in an office and have web conferences with my colleagues and customers around the world is the most productive use of my time and money. The big problem with working from home ime is that it is much harder to put a cap on the day. I’m more likely to agree to 7pm meetings or answer emails at 10pm than I am if I have physically left my place of work.

Full time WFH since May 2015. It is definitely harder to put a cap on the day, though I don't really have meetings or emails to answer (I'm a web dev)

Its the job content itself as much as the WFH but I've changed around my perspective to not see work in terms of hours or blocks of time like this, but blocks of stuff that I need to have built by the end of the week or month. This means the delineation between own time and work time is more entwined. Mentally I'm kind of always at work but also never at work, I don't know if its better or not but I don't miss my 90 minute each way commute!

I feel a lot of the risk could have been mitigated if more organisations were better at actually allowing people to work staggered or different hours - fewer people on public transport at peak times, less crowding on train/tube platforms (can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a crush of a few hundred people waiting to get on a tube train) and management doesn’t have to pretend it cares about having a coherent wfh policy. My parents have never worked more than ten minutes from where they live and I envy them.

I feel a lot of the risk could have been mitigated if more organisations were better at actually allowing people to work staggered or different hours - fewer people on public transport at peak times, less crowding on train/tube platforms (can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a crush of a few hundred people waiting to get on a tube train) and management doesn’t have to pretend it cares about having a coherent wfh policy. My parents have never worked more than ten minutes from where they live and I envy them.

WFH today. Probably one of many. Technically I am a 'remote worker' anyway, having been made one about a year ago, but I still come into the office as it's about 10 mins cycle away. Frankly I've nowhere to work at home - I have a small desk in my room that's uncomfortable to sit at, and my sofa and kitchen table are no better.

been asked to supply emergency contact info at work in case of

lol

"adverse weather closing the office"

politics is the art of what cannot be said etc

The big problem with working from home ime is that it is much harder to put a cap on the day. I’m more likely to agree to 7pm meetings or answer emails at 10pm than I am if I have physically left my place of work.

We have a pretty flexible working culture with a lot of working from home and honestly it's great, but it only works if you're prepared to treat people like grown-ups. TBH I'd retain the same boundaries as you do in the office. I don't especially mind working a bit later if I'm not going to be commuting home, but if you do have a 7pm meeting what's to stop you taking a longer lunch break or similar. As long as you get the work done when you're supposed to, who cares?

International meetings make things harder, but one way psychologically to put a cap on the day is just to make a clean break by immediately doing something that absolutely says to yourself I Am Not At Work Any More. Cooking, opening a beer, playing a video game, whatever. If you just start tapering off it becomes very easy to get dragged back into it.

I'm a freelancer, about 80% of my work is on-site at various places, just had my first conversation this morning about an office shutdown, guessing that most everywhere else will follow, shit is going to get tight.

no wonder u ppl are on ilx all fucking day

Been WFH since 2017. Love it. Possibly starting a 9-5 office job on Monday, though, and not sure how I feel about that (besides “thanks for the money”)...

The lifeblood of ILX the entire internet is bored office workers, moreso without the office.

its a turning point in history

in a bad way

let's run all the megapolls we've been fantasising about

i hope office buildings empty out like suburban malls and are repurposed into affordable housing.

Does anyone do this with kids in the house? Seems kind of impossible without turning child into tv zombie

Looks like this will be me from next week, or even maybe tomorrow. My plan is to move to the conservatory and stock up on educational software / film downloads for them.

I cannot work with kids disturbing me, this is going to be hard.

turn child into book and board game zombie imo

my carrom board is finally gonna get some use, v excited to get good

i hope office buildings empty out like suburban malls and are repurposed into affordable housing.

― Yerac, Thursday, 12 March 2020 12:56 (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

I wish I could find that faux-pamphlet from a few years back about an office building gradually turning into an overgrown post-apocalyptic ecosystem

I've worked from home for almost 19 years. I expect it to all come crashing down around my ears any day now.

i don't maintain much of a social circle outside of work (mostly just my wife, my parents, and my cat) so I do think I benefit from the social aspects of coming into an office every day and interacting with people. i'm lucky in my position that I typically don't HAVE to do much interacting in any given day if I don't feel like it, but if I do then there are always people around who want to shoot the shit.

Does anyone do this with kids in the house? Seems kind of impossible without turning child into tv zombie

i do but there's always another carer around. she (child not carer) occasionally comes up to spin around on my chair but generally respects the sanctity of the office space.

that sanctity in full:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKxqy9SJ-0I

Spare a thought for us poor sods who can't work from home, we're dead.

My first day of working at home. Not without its downsides, but I did watch an episode of Kojak during my lunch hour, and so without coronavirus I would possibly never known about this meeting of the titans

https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/190/1346970079_6.jpg

When I calmed down I saw the pattern of who they kept.

So...originally, in 2018, my team were the only permanent trainers. There were 6 of us, and one manager. We'd pull additional people from other lines of business.

It got too hard, so in 2020 we partnered with a third party company in India to provide trainers. At first, we barely used them. By 2022, they were probably were doing half of our trainings. By last year, we were basically relying on them for almost all training classes that we couldn't do. You see where this is going.

Last year, they were so confident with the output of that group, they felt four of us could just stop training permanently and just supervise and do special projects. The rest remained trainers.

The only ones that were spared today were those of us who weren't trainers. The trainers are seen as unnecessary now and they want to rely 100% on our offshore partner.

Head of dept got axed because they always do that so they can replace then with someone they can control.

I could find a safer department. But idk. Maybe it's time

But they definitely seem to be suggesting we'd continue doing special projects. Vague in detail

today felt weird. at one point I got locked into my work but it felt odd - the whole 'layoff survivor guilt' thing.

my friend and I are doing this thing of pointing out obnoxiously any time the layoff impacted our work. cos fuck making it easy on the higher-ups

"oh sorry, didn't get that email, see, you fired them before they could send it to me"...

"sorry I don't have this report updated, see, the report I need to run it, only so-and-so know how to do, and you fired him..."

watching the fallout has been amusing at least. we were intentionally set up spread out over the country for contingency reasons, but they laid off every manager who lived outside Orlando, so now we're likely to have both managers lose power and have no manager coverage for the rest of the week. and I'll already be gone because I'd originally taken PTO this week before the hurricane nonsense.

I about had a heart attack yesterday as HR said they wanted to talk to me, but it turned out it was because there was an innocent of a trainer using racially insensitive language that happened the night before the layoffs, and they couldn't find anybody else to reach out to because we'd laid off both of the people that reported the incident. so they came to me.

*incident....trainer was most definitely not innocent and is in a lot of trouble

Oh, man.

Hoping things work out for you, Neando.

"sorry I don't have this report updated, see, the report I need to run it, only so-and-so know how to do, and you fired him..."

I would gleefully be doing the same in your situ tbh. Fuck them indeed.

Just saw the last week's worth of posts, glad you're at least still employed Neando! Careful with that hurricane.

thanks! was supposed to have a fun mini-vacay where I went to two metal shows in Tampa. welp....lol. but in two days I'll be relieved everybody I know is safe hopefully.

Just a fuckin' constant drone and rev of leaf blowers, all day every day.

omg I was working outside on a local community college campus one afternoon last week (waiting for my son to finish a class) and this dude with a leafblower was making the rounds of the whole quad over and over, while there were a bunch of people sitting at picnic tables etc obviously doing work. And there were hardly any leaves! Grrr.

What makes it particularly annoying around here is that we share an alley with a senior center, who pays a guy to clean up the trash that gathers in the alley. Fine, except a) from all appearances his solution is to use a leaf blower to gather the trash and, b) he apparently has no other duties and spends hours pacing back and forth behind their building with the leaf blower. So it's not even just in the fall when there are leaves!

That is among the least great things about working from home: so many mowers and leaf blowers and edgers, and they’re so damn loud.

it's not quite leaf blower season here yet, but I am onboard with the hate

It wasn't until I started working from home that I realized how much noisy maintenance stuff goes on in my neighborhood on a daily basis. As soon as one house gets finished being repaired (or sidewalk or curb or patch of roadway or utility or whatever) it's on to the next. It just never ends! Plus the constant barrage of backing-up trucks and those Amazon vans and that coughing noise they make when they idle.

My local Starbucks is often quieter than the neighborhood around my condo.

can't someone make quiet leaf blowers? they use them all year round here. is it fun? why are they blowing all them time?? what are they even blowing

Thanks to climate change, we won't have to worry about leaves much longer.

I've never used one, but my understanding with my limited discussion regarding leaf blowers with their owners is that, yes, it's a lot of fun and they will use them for whatever tasks they can be used for regardless of whether it is the best tool for the job or not.

landscapers use them because they'd never be able to turn a profit if they didn't. they use gas-powered ones because they're much more powerful (thus faster) and don't require the additional work of hauling around a ton of backup batteries.

the ones the landscapers use at my dad's house are so powerful they blew the tilework off his front porch

Our city actually banned gas-powered leaf blowers but, judging from their constant presence, actual enforcement of the ban seems to be non-existent.

here in the suburbs it's pretty bad, this HOA has them come on Tuesday, the adjoining one Wednesday, the ones who do the areas on the main thoroughfares come Thursday and then all the lunatics with their own bust them out on the weekend so it's literally constant and unending

The last time I saw MBV I realized we were all just standing around listening to leaf blowers.

leafblown a wish

my nearest neighbor and I agreed that the guy who lives across the street uses his leaf blower as a meditative practice, or something to do outside when he needs a break from his family inside the house

by far his funniest use was when he was at home during a snow storm and he'd go out every couple hours to blow all the snow off of his relatively short driveway

I can KIND of understand the satisfaction that you get from imposing order on your environs, but for me the laundry and dishes are sufficient.

I swear I saw a guy blowing a car. Was that necessary? surely a broom or somethign could remove leaves or whatever got on the car. at least if the leaf lowers made a chord that would help

I swear I saw a guy blowing a car.

Whoa, family forum!

lol

I live in a semi-light industrial area, there's a factory at the end of my road that makes some kind of giant transformers. Theres frequenly massive trucks backing up right in front of our place into the driveway of the factory (its on the T junction). The idling drives me bonkers.

But TBH it is usually pretty quiet considering I'm in an inner urban area.

I swear I saw a guy blowing a car.

don't look back you can never look back

what kills me are when the lawn gets mowed and then you blow the clippings.

spurious meeting day arranged by someone not even in our team and under described in the email. 3 degrees and sleet.

it's a week before the monthly in-person day which we never plan anything for.

https://bsky.app/profile/steadybossin.bsky.social/post/3layjwe7yrs2c

bring snacksa!

as expected, my boss is starting to come apart a little due to the anxiety of running the show now. he apparently was being Pollyanna about the whole thing, assuming the business would take December easy on us because they laid off 60% of our department. I laughed - this was a company that sabotaged a million dollar project by laying off half my team the week before it went live, causing things to collapse. they do not care and are stupid.

held a cringe meeting begging us (only half-jokingly) not to get sick and freaking out about how busy we'd be. Waiting for his transformation like the one I had in 2017, where I enjoyed watching things fall apart and making pass-agg comments to leadership about their role in it happening.

(said sabotage incident happened in 2017)

it kills me to read 'monthly in-person day' tbh

need to get out of this place before they start with the 'office every weekday' shit I fully expect to kick in next year

Colleague is moving to another place for work for the perk of working remotely anywhere for a quarter of a calendar year.

That's right. Fuck socializing with finance.

team lead just had me on a call for 10 minutes moaning about my internet connection

i've been using 3g on my phone and it's been fine for 4 years but recently i think three have turned that off forcing me onto the congested 4g, which was always half the speed. (team lead didn't know this)

but this is also fine, it's not like i'm steaming video whilst i work, i'm mostly just typing or running tests. but yesterday someone wanted to actively pair, him sharing his screen and talking, me watching along and monitoring a couple of heavy, auto-refreshing web pages, and it would keep breaking up.

dept of government idiocy wants all remote workers to come back in - sure they will all be thrilled and morale will soar

To be fair businesses that relied on lunch traffic have suffered, but nobody needs to come in 5 days a week

The idea of course is to make federal govt employees miserable and quit.

well Musk did a great job of getting rid of Twitter users so a similar idea I guess

hot desk, schmot desk.

it's not booked today but the fact that all the hdmi connections are plugged into a mac mini means i can't use it. this is the third seperate desk that i've used over the months that are now obviously occupied but still in the pool.

more like shit desk

finally getting to the first stress test for the boss after the mass layoff and he's....failing. in his defense, they've basically loaded us up with workload approximating last year's, when we had about 8 more people than we do now, but he also got away with looking better than he performed because his boss bailed him out often.

one of my colleagues approached me about him today and I basically told her that it's good that right now, we're in demand, but not to break her back over things and to take meticulous notes in case anybody tries to throw her under the bus. I've been here before, underneath the overworked guy who eventually takes it out on his underlings, and while that's not happening now, it's a matter of time before he flips out I'm sure.

one quandary my team has now is peer feedback. Most of our trainers come from a third-party company that we partner with, the rest come from our company. Regardless of who is training, we as supervisors are expected to observe them and provide written feedback and rate their performance. This is fine and we've done this for years.

Originally, the form to evaluate trainers was rudimentary, with three tiers of ratings, but most of the form consisted of written feedback. This was preferable as you could tell how well you did and the specific details of what was good and what needed improvement were the point.

A few years back, our third-party partner asked us to use a new form for their trainers, a poorly designed template with a 100 point scale, extremely arbitrary categories and weighting. Prior to this form, I wasn't harsh, but I was direct and honest with my feedback.

After the form came out, it became evident that all anybody cared about was the score, and not the feedback you wrote. And the scoring system is too flawed in that even if you take major deductions for major performance issues, it still generates a Green rating. You have to almost game the system to generate a score that matches the written feedback. Adjustments have been made over the years to correct this issue, but it remains.

But I'd notice even if I gave 'green' scores, if I gave a score of less than 90%, I often got pushback from the person I evaluated, even though that's a high score. I found out at their company, their observation scores are directly tied to performance bonuses. They compile the scores we give them into some form of spreadsheet, average them out and this determines whether they qualify for specific performance incentives. And they understandably stress out over them.

so obviously, that's a terrible system for something objective like this. Obviously feedback should play a role in someone's year-end review, but unlike call center metrics, which are (generally) reporting facts, this is a number from a poorly designed template, and there is no current calibration process in place. So your scores can vary wildly from one supervisor to another for the same performance.

so now I find myself still writing the actual written feedback honestly, but grading on a bit of a curve numerically, because frankly, we were originally tasked with doing this to ensure training was conducted properly and to help improve the performance of our trainers, not to be the arbiters of the size of someone's bonus. I'll still deduct points heavily in very egregious cases, but they rarely come up at all. I lead the charge in discussing with my boss and our former department head about how this process caused people to outright ignore the feedback and just look at the score, and how they were 'performing to the scoreboard' now rather than focusing on the class, and all of the other ethical concerns. Basically we're told they're valid concerns but being that it is this partner site's policy, we can't change it (I have pointed out we can refuse to participate in it, but...nobody took that seriously).

I have no qualms with what I'm doing, this just feels like the non-teacher version of teaching to the standardized test now.