jesus fuck i cannot wait for these old bags to fucking croak and take their outdated logic with them.
Hate to break it to you, but the old bags will be replaced by new younger douchebags.
Yup. I think the ChatGPT punkass is fairly young blood: https://fortune.com/2023/05/05/openai-ceo-sam-altman-remote-work-mistake-return-to-office/
That miserable cunt probably has a lot of years left.
It’s almost like business school teaches a few things random commenters on a website might not fully grasp.
I think you meant to post this to LinkedIn. That’s where all the corporate fellatio happens.
It’s almost like business school is for those who couldn’t quite cut it as a doctor or lawyer or scientist or engineer…
As though it predominantly attracts a certain type of person who exhibits psychopathic tendencies in their obsessive pursuit of power.
It’s almost like there’s an entire management philosophy our economy pushes that’s categorically suboptimal for and often at odds with making a solid, sustainable, and engineering-first organization.
The only thing “classical” business experts are good at is trying to find the quickest route to monetization. This pretty much never yields a product that actual helps people in a meaningful and consistent fashion in the long term.
Make a thing, and make it well, and it will sell itself. Boeing did this until they acquihired McDonnell Douglass leadership and transitioned their entire business model towards being “investor-first”… and that gave us delights like the 737 MCAS debacle (exacerbated, of course, by deregulation and poor auditing). They used to be one of the true paragons of American engineering. Now they’re just another profit über alles corporation.
Engineering-centric organizations need to focus a whole hell of a lot more on engineering ethics. These days, it’s mostly an afterthought.
The pandemic made it clear to us that our literal lives don’t matter. Record profits have pretty much never made their way into worker’s pockets. Wages have been stagnant against forty years of inflation and record housing costs, while shareholders and C-suites struggle to decide between a private jet or a second yacht. And climate change is coming for all of us. Given all that, why the fuck should we care about some job that has literally never cared about us? Why wouldn’t we get to pursue some work-life balance, and spend what little time and money that are being left to us on something that makes us happy?
Plus the increased work life balance has been proven by studies to be more productive because people working shorter hours and/or from home are more productive then the regular 40 in the office.
“But I can’t recognize it by looking at it so everyone must be lazy” some rich jackass.
Also, a lazy worker at home will be lazy in an office too.
If someone likes to procrastinate, you can’t really change that via environment alone.
Unfortunately, leadership positions tend to be mostly interactions with others by forming working relationships and establishing trust so they see skilled workers who are avoiding work by chatting about non-work stuff to be productive team building even when done to excess. So they consider that not being lazy even if it is when done to excess for that particular position.
Can’t talk about sports teams and ‘team build’ in the same way when working at home in their eyes.
“I’m perfectly happy in my large, quiet office, sitting in my $2000 executive chair in front of my mahogany desk and using my private executive bathroom. I don’t know what these people on the fourth floor are complaining about. We give them cubicles and a ping-pong table (do not use during work hours), don’t we?”
Cubicles break things up. To maximize synergy we need an open floor plan so everyone can hear and see everyone else.
Now they’re all about open floor plans for collaboration (read: for squeezing more people in the same space).
Having done cleaning in offices such as these for at least one of the top companies in the world, I fail to see why even this sort of office is all that compelling. Look, a miniature golf statue…
They’re not compelling to you and I. They’re a way to show fellow executives how powerful you are. A huge office with expensive furniture means you’re important.
Sounds like something a lazy, entitled, unproductive CEO would say.
He just pissed that business travel is still down. Sorry, it’s never going back to the way it was.
He is mad because the pandemic allowed people to review their priorities and turn towards their personal lives rather than focusing on career lives. People today are less willing to work overtime, less willing to go above and beyond because they don’t care about that. It means less money for the fat cats which is why they are bitching so much.
Yeah promotions don’t exist anymore, raises only come when you threaten to quit, and the only reward for loyalty is vacation time to use on getting sick. I’m not gonna show unrequited loyalty.
I’m extremely pissed that my company went to “unlimited personal leave” as long as you can get your work done. I’m already salaried, so technically, I could have always done that. Now I’ve lost the 4 weeks of vacation (earned by decades of seniority) that once enjoyed without guilt or worry.
Over the course of the pandemic I lost my dad and had a baby. I also changed jobs and took a promotion. That really gave me quite a bit of perspective and my priorities absolutely shifted.
I was(am?) a very ambitious, motivated, “go-getter” who has moved up the ranks fairly quickly and am in a very senior leadership position for my age. I genuinely like what I do, so that definitely helps. But I saw an unqualified person take over my old job and is, at best, ‘coasting’ and more realistically slowly killing an amazing platform I had helped develop–and driving away incredibly talented engineers and analysts.
Leadership changed and just moved on to the next shiny object and seems content to let that platform flounder because…it’s not their baby. Why on earth would you continue to move that invaluable platform forward when you can make a name for yourself on something else?
I don’t want this to sound like sour grapes, because its not that. It’s more that I realized, why did I kill myself for that job? The bigwigs seem to be totally fine cutting it loose. Why did I stress myself out to drive that platform forward so hard? Why should I kill myself, sacrifice limited time with my family to drive products forward when, as soon as leadership changes or as soon as I move on, it will get scrapped or forgotten about? It obviously wasn’t nearly as important as they claimed it to be.
So, I am not killing myself for work. I am taking my entire paternity leave and not taking a single call or text from work. I am not going to work overtime. I am not going to work on my day off. I am not going to travel unnecessarily. I am going to prioritize things that benefit me personally. And I am not going back into the office on someone else’s terms. (I honestly dont mind going in once or twice a week. I do less work in the office than I do at home tbh–as far as “work” goes its usually a free day. But I am fully remote officially and I’d probably hop to another company if they started to force me back in ‘officially’ because, like I said, I am prioritizing me and mine and commuting 45-60minutes each way, paying for parking, to sit on the same Zoom calls I can do at home, doesn’t really benefit me in any way.
He’s also slightly mad because he now has to compete in a labor market where people can choose between:
A shitty waiting job that has you flying out of town daily, pay is about as much as a gas station clerk, has you dealing with some of the craziest ideologies on the planet because no one respects your authority. High Stress, low reward situation.
Then you have work from home: Right off the bat, you get 2 extra hours back from your daily commute. If you have kids, you are now saving hundreds of dollars monthly on child care. Car care costs go down. Gas costs go down. Less stressful situation, and more mentally stable.
The problem isn’t just that he is having to compete with work from home jobs, but he is now having to compete against the benefits of work from home. And there is only one way to do that: $$$.
Agree with everything except;
If you have kids, you are now saving hundreds of dollars monthly on child care.
Myself and most WFHers know still put our kids in care, you simply can’t work and look after young kids simultaneously unless you only work at night or during naps.
I do apologize, I seemed to have put every parent into the same logical group of thought, and that is wrong on my part.
Though I will reiterate the argument that once you start piling the cost savings from a work from home job, companies would have to pay more at a minimum to match those cost savings.
