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Remote work has been studied extensively for decades and the findings overwhelmingly show that remote workers, when provided the right tools and support, are significantly more productive. Demanding people commute to an office was never about productivity.
I can guarantee every company demanding in office work has owners that either own (or are friends with the owners of) tons of commercial property or have stake in retail that over extended into commercial districts.
Trains are a much more desirable way to get to work than driving is.
If they’re really, really good.
Here in Munich, our public transport is much better than any American city, but I still hate taking the train in summer. AC either does not exist or is far too weak. Taking the car takes 40, maybe 50 minutes, the train 1h25min. I still take the train, mind you, but it’s so much more exhausting than the car…
I have to mention my daily commute is between two cities outside Munich.
I’m counting down the months until my work relocates to our new head office. I can say goodbye to the 35-75 minute commute (each way), and have a reliable ~60min train ride.
Sure it might take longer, overall - but I’ll be able to relax by reading a book, taking a nap or playing a game. I’d much rather that than deal with the anxiety of bumper-to-bumper traffic in a sea of SUVs filled with inattentive drivers.
I literally drive past at least one accident every day on my way to work. The Monash Highway in Victoria, IYKYK.
taking a nap
Well, I see you don’t live in America lol.
That highway is in Melbourne, Australia. I fell asleep on a train in Australia once as a kid and for some reason had my shoes off. When I put them back on I crushed a cockroach that had snuck inside. As long as you check your shoes before putting them on, you should be just fine taking a nap on an Australian train.
Bro, EW lmao.
Tbf, you could probably sleep fairly safely on a lot of trains in the US. That said, it’s entirely too frequent, when I ride my area’s transit, that I see some wild shit that I’d really prefer not be asleep around.
TBH I have also fallen asleep on the NYC subway and the worst thing that happened was I missed my stop and accidentally went super far in the wrong direction
It really is the least talked about benefit to public transport, yet is so significant. Sure you can’t do too much but you can watch a show/movie, play a game, read, write, draw or even do your taxes and shop from your phone and laptop.
Certainly can’t do that driving around. And it let’s you relax and change from work mode to home mode. Even if you have to do a little drive to and from the station.
Plus like you mentioned, less chance of delays and being involved in accidents. Win win win win.
Never thought I’d find myself in agreement with The Dark Lord, yet here I am…
I always try to argue this when people say they’d rather drive to commute.
When you drive both you and your employer lose time. When you take a train you keep your time in a way.
I enjoy the drive a lot. However, I also don’t live in a big city, so the drive is nice.
Environmentally, absolutely…personally? I absolutely fucking hate using public transport. I’d take 90min of sitting still in traffic alone in my car over bumping and griding with random strangers for 90min on a train any day.
I do not. I can read or watch movies while riding a train. No chance in a car.
Listening to podcasts, ebooks or music are good when driving, I also tend to get very anxious when traveling and I’m not driving, it’s unfortunate lol
The stink (perfume or BO) and unwanted proximity to strangers makes it a very unpleasant experience, no book or movie can make up for that IMO.
gets to office and signs into zoom meeting
my wife kept getting pressured to go into a specific office location every week. 2-3 hour commute each way to sit at a desk on video calls with little IRL interaction
I was pushing to hold desk meetings back before we were in COVID.
Why am i stopping everything I’m doing to go sit in a room for 30 minutes and listen to everyone else talk about crap not related to me in which I’ve got maybe 5 minutes worth of things to say by the end.
In most cases we were already broadcasting the meeting to someone not in the room across the country.
I see all these posts/comments about meetings that are obnoxiously inefficient, and I’m so sorry for everyone who has to deal with them; it’s almost completely foreign to me
I work medical, and our meetings are usually reps teaching us about some new or revamped devices… but they gather us on-shift to listen to a 5 min schpiel and have us sign a paper. If I’m busy, too bad and you can try and catch me next time. If I get called mid-teaching… my name is signed, and nobody cares. If I somehow miss it entirely… oh well, guess it’s on me now to learn any changes. We have one formal review per year that takes all of 10 minutes. Maybe 2 or 3 formal meetings per year… and if I can’t make it, doesn’t matter
I already hate the few meetings we have, as is; and I’m only “required” to go to one per year… and it’s maybe 10 minutes. Or I can dodge it, and just say “my bad” (though not a good look for you). I simply can’t imagine being constantly pulled away for bullshit… and I guess I’m grateful for that
Granted, my job has it’s own special flavor of hell and I should’ve been an electrical engineer. But all the lack of meetings involved makes me feel a little bit better; as penance for the other rampant bullshit I have to deal with
These meetings y’all speak of — I just can’t imagine how antsy and aggravated I would be to have to attend such idiotic fluff that “could’ve been an email”. Fuck, I can even ignore my emails with almost no recourse. Kudos to y’all for getting through it, cause I’d really rather not. Let me work, leave me alone, and then I go the fuck home; that’s all I want
Great 25 minutes of very relaxing work…
I’d rather put in my 8 hours get on my shit done and go the hell home.
Wfh is now 8 hours of moderately relaxing work and I don’t even have to have another 2 hours of driving in traffic.
Why not make a step further, and ask why do you even have 30 minutes meeting if it’s not useful?
My entire career could have been an email.
That’s a more complicated problem.
Quarterly employee feedback says people feel in general that they don’t understand what’s going on in the company and what projects / deadlines are coming up and how it all relates to other departments. Everybody’s pretty much in tune with what happens in their own department.
Project management spins up and creates confluence documents that contain all of this information. Analytics spins up weekly reports that go out to everyone.
Next quarterly, top issue is once again people don’t understand what’s going on at the company. We missed that, we didn’t hear about that, we didn’t understand those grass, we didn’t know the chart was updated. Bottom line is nobody’s reading the data there’s departments are churning it out for nothing.
And that my friend is how you get a daily 30 minute all-hands sync and a weekly all hands company meeting.
Sounds like a skill issue. Someone can’t write an update that isn’t the longest paragraph of text scientifically created to be the most boring and incomprehensible sequence of words put together as a biological weapon.
And by someone I mean everyone in the corporate world.My update isn’t exciting but it is important. I need people to know this stuff or I’ll be fielding questions on it for the next 6 months as everyone individually discovers the changes.
I’m not going to spend time rewriting my update to sound thrilling and engaging in order to attract the eyes of the lowest common denominators attention span.
So we have a meeting, everyone listens, and if they say afterwards that they weren’t told or weren’t paying attention, there’s a recording of the zoom call so they can try again.
It’s work, if it were fun and enjoyable 100% of the time we wouldn’t be paid to be there.
No, you write you shit once so it’s understandable, and if you can’t you learn how to do it since it’s your job. And then if someone has questions you refer them to your writing, and eventually they learn to read what you write, since it’s their job.
Your email explaining you shit has the same power of zoom recording, more even, because it’s concise.
It’s work, you’re paid to be there, no need to make it harder for everyone just because you can.Noone reads the email.
I think it’s an occupational hazard. If you don’t have people interested in numbers you don’t have finance people and analytics people. The people who are interested in numbers are unfortunately also generally the kind of people that don’t understand that other people aren’t interested in numbers. There are correlating data with excitement because it’s what they feel.
Or analytics guy was having a rough week and said he was burning out from dealing with The analytics report. On the 6th it does this and on the 8th it did this and the 9th we had this sale. 99% of the people in the meeting only care that it’s up and to the right, flat, or down into the right
The graph technically needs two to three points on it and you need to explain why it’s aimed in whatever direction it’s aimed.
Looks like a lot of people who are waking up off the clock! I roll out of bed, clock in, and then have to spend 30 minutes actually waking up for the day.
Is that the Northern line?
The video did not provide the exact metro line.
I think all the lines (except Overground etc) share rolling stock, and just change the number of train cars, so it’s impossible to tell
edit: this has been a slow process since 2010, so they are slowly converting to “S-Stock” from previous stock. I’ve not lived in London for a decade now, so I can’t comment first hand, but I recall the District/Circle lines used to be different to the Northern/Central lines. I dont know if that’s changed.
I enjoy being in the office with my co-workers. We have lots of fun together.
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Awful AI slop
Detectors aren’t 100%, blah blah, but this isn’t even pinging on any I used. Text doesn’t look AI. The image has a weird quality to it, but to me it looks more like a filter/bad camera/bad lighting than AI.
Look at all the additional comments that have been added. This is almost definitely ai
The fact that we even have to have this conversation… Ugh
Just wait until the difference is so slight that none of us can tell the difference.
Yeah this is a real image. It’s all post-processed smoothing from subtle movements captured on what was probably a 3 photo HDR bust by a camera phone. Meanwhile, some of the issues are literally artifacts from compression and the rolling shutter.
Hah yeah the woman’s eyeglasses frame goes under her nose
Hey what part do you think looks like AI slop?
I can’t see anything suspect but I’m looking pretty hard for it. If I’m wrong then that’s scary.
Is the photo somehow glitched that I don’t see?
He thinks smartphone camera upscaling is AI slop
WHICH IT IS, but it’s not what he thinks it is
No, look at all the additional comments that have pointed out all the errors. This is almost definitely an ai generated image. I think you’re right that there might ALSO be ai upscaling, but the base image is likely an ai generated image too
Signs all over the image, most obvious place to look would be the woman’s face directly under the “is”. Glasses and eyebrows and nose all swirling together
i also didnt see it at first.
look at the person in the brown coat on the right. their glasses and eyes melted together. the text above them is garbled nonsense. and the person sitting to their left is wearing shoes that dont fit into the background and slightly overlap with the other ones’ shoes. the person on the left holding their glasses seems to still be wearing glasses, and their ear is an unusual shape.
thats about all i noticed tho. pretty scary indeed.
EDIT: i believe i stand corrected and the glitches i pointed out are just camera glitches or possibly some kind of unusual photo editing.
There’s a bunch more when you look closely. Blue jacket guy’s eyeglasses arm blends directly into his hand. And his thumb is wacky looking. White sweater guy’s hand is a pointy triangle straight out of tomb raider one. Guy on the right just past the pole, his hands/pants/phone are all a mishmash of impossible. Brown coat lady’s ear is straight out of star trek. And her glasses frame rim goes under her nose. Etc.
look at the person in the brown coat on the right. their glasses and eyes melted together.
No, that is because frames frequently have a lighter color/clear on the inside of the frame so they aren’t as distracting. Tufts of hair near ears can also make things look wonky when you can’t see fhe individual hairs. Blurry hands tends to be moving. This is a low quality image and the ‘blending’ effects are just normal potato image quality.
AI would not be able to get buy holding glasses while face in hands right,l (the black line above his ear is hair), would have screwed up the shoe logos, and a bunch of other small details.
I think you’re wrong.
The glasses are absolutely smudged, but that is from the image processing on the phone. Low light most smartphones try to reduce noise by smoothing the picture, often excessively.
The text above the woman is not garbled nonsense, it says “<indecipherable> is biGGer”. The upper case G’s makes it look strange, but it is cohesive text.
The shoes look to be another smoothing artifact.
Yeah. This is potato camera image.
The shoes have New Balance and Nike logos. AI would mess that up. The guy standing with his bag between his legs. AI wouldn’t add that detail. Plus the guy behind him has blurry hand, I’m guessing because it was moving. AI image wouldn’t have that.
is that important to the discussion?
It’s even better than a real photo in this case, because you don’t have to worry that any depicted person is real and doesn’t want their face plastered over the internet.
I can’t wait until the novelty of GenAI wears off so we can resume concentrating on the message instead of the carrier medium. Either that, or until it becomes undetectable, which will probably be in 1-2 years at the current speed.
What “discussion” lol
“Does this look like (specific policy) is good?” [AI generated frowny faces]
Just wow man. The only thing trash like this accomplishes is making the movement look like it has nothing, hence the need to try and pass off slop. Enjoy your moralizing corporation worship though I’m sure next year’s perfect AI will do really great things for the world
The RTO discussion the text is about, if you didn’t read the text.
What “moralizing corpo worship” do you see in my comment?
- this isn’t AI
- Even if AI, it would be better than posting the faces of unwilling participants
- and even more even if AI, i can generate images on my own graphics card, no need for corpos, TYVM, and even if i hadn’t a suitable card, there are things like AI Horde where normal people allow others to generate pictures, free of charge (yes, not even paid with any ads or tracking)
You have issues, mate, but i’m pretty sure i cannot help you, better talk to a therapist or smth idc
lol cheers mate, have fun with your AI generated podcasts or whatever
I don’t agree with your view on AI but I definitely support your first point. Taking pictures of strangers and posting them on the internet has become way too normalised.
So much debate about the pixels, when you could just reverse image search and find it’s from a video.
Now talk about the pixels in the tiktok original instead I guess.
Literally an AI generated video generated by an AI scammer account who is actively using it to shill his AI scams. Thanks for clearing that up lol
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It’s a screencap from a TikTok video.
Someone in the thread posted the source. It’s from an AI scammer’s account. He generated it to promote his AI scams
Work remotely if you care about speed. Work in-person if you care about velocity.
Is this you being silly or is this an actual thing?
It’s not about productivity.
It’s about control.
Guess who gets to work in private offices instead of the “productivity enhancing” open offices!
When my last company went to an open office plan, everybody (even the CEO) had to be out in the open because the whole company moved into one big room (with a little cordoned-off area for meetings). Granted, this was because we were on the edge of folding and we moved into the one big room to save on rent. But it did produce a nice “we’re all in this together” vibe because it sucked ass for everyone.
This point i don’t get…in all my jobs, team leads, department managers and basically all management level employees are sitting in the same open office as everyone else. I have never been somewhere where this is not the case. Is this a predominantly American thing?
They’re talking about the c-suites who make the decision to call everyone back to office, I presume
Yup, director level and above get their own office
CSuite get their own entrance and tunnel, don’t want to enter with the rest of the plebs and walk in the same hallway
I don’t overthink people’s expressions on trains, nor do I think we should be taking pics of people who look upset because they look upset.
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It’s easier to just say “just because something is legal doesn’t make it okay”.
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Its partly tradition, power displays, and disbelief. People who’ve been managers for decades somehow believe that being in the office is the only true way to do work because that’s how it’s always been done. Then you have some managers who will always get off on the fact that they can hold people’s ability to feed themselves hostage to make them do what they want. Lastly, some managers just don’t believe you can be productive at home. After all, all the not work things are there.
Those things, and needing to prop up the commercial realestate market.
I know this site is heavily weighted towards IT professionals and other pure-office-work type professions, but sometimes in office work really is better than work from home. Online meetings are largely useless, even when it’s a proper meeting, not just a should-have-been-an-email meeting.
In my current job, remote work isn’t an option, and I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted trying to get engineers and software devs to understand things that would have taken two seconds to understand if they would go physically look at the thing. But of course, they can’t do that because they are working remotely. Instead we get to waste half a day playing picture/video tag
I think this is all really subjective and depends on how your team does work. Getting people to work with you or understand things is a communication problem, and in my own experience, being in the office didn’t eliminate those issues.
I agree there are times to be in the office, but it damn sure doesn’t need to be every day all the time. IMO people need to adapt, be smart and figure out what works for their teams and themselves, not hold themselves to tradition for its own sake.
Managers should be empowered to make these decisions to do the research and figure out the best strategy for their situation, and I think many would like that responsibility.
Wasting a lot of time on “explaining things” is an excellent indicator of overstaffing.
Which is completely orthogonal to the question of remote work or not.Explaining things often is a sign of over staffing? That’s a new idea for me. Why?
I think most people acknowledge that some things do gain efficiency in physical proximity. Most dont. We aren’t talking about you.
Though sending a solidworks file shoukd be easier than it presently ie.
Online meetings are largely useless
Oh! Oh! This is where people say “skill issue”, isn’t it?
If you can’t run a productive meeting over zoom you probably can’t do one in person, either.
This will depend on your work. All my work is on the computer. Showing someone something is as easy as sharing my screen (and this might even be better, as I can draw on it).
And I don’t agree online meetings are useless. All of my team work from home most of the time, and we work out how to make that work.
Having half the group in the office and half joining remotely I think is the worst of both worlds.
Remotely joining an in person meeting is horrible. Joining a remote meeting from your desk is fine.
Yeah except for the people around you trying to work as you jibber jabber 😆
Skill issue :-)
Damn it. That’s me on my current commute. I’m on a bus though. I hate the bus. Soo much rather be on the train.
