And the meetings, and the "collaboration", which are basically non stop all day long now, are just us talking round and round about all the things we need to do and how to do them for the 8th time, without actually doing them. But we sure LOOK really productive and busy. And I guess that's what management wants? Who knows.

With remote work I would do my job for 8+ hours per workday in pure focus mode. Knocking out solution after solution. You want XYZ to happen? Already done, here's a link to it. Have a meeting? Click join Teams call 1 minute early, listen and talk, while continuing to working on XYZ. You think we should try ABC for the XYZ project? Ok, I'll have it ready by tomorrow.

In office work is now spent walking from meeting to meeting, and you gotta leave 15 minutes before and it takes 15 minutes to get back and settled and you did not work on anything during. And they ask "so, how is project XYZ going?" "Good, good. Should be done in a few more weeks." And you maybe work on XYZ for 30 minutes uninterrupted that entire day, decide to skip any testing or QC, skip those extra features, skip checking with other teams if it will impact them, you have to skip all that to get it done on time. And it takes 3 weeks to do a 5 minute task. And it's inferior. And you talk about XYZ every meeting of every day, time after time, updates and statuses and comments on the ticket. And you finally announce you got XYZ completed and it's "yay good job" and management asks how the RTO is going and everyone is terrified to say "this is stupid and a gigantic waste of everyone's time and your money to put us in a giant expensive building just to not work on work, but to talk about working on work and we are getting only 10% done vs remote work". So we say "oh, fine" and management puts a little golden star on their report they made for themselves and they feel all warm and fuzzy that work is going great.

And thus, project XYZ was finally completed. A task that would have taken 1 person a few hours to do remotely, has now taken 8 people, 3 weeks of in office meetings and status updates and endless interruptions and discussions over every aspect of the project over and over again to finally complete. But we all LOOKED super busy doing it. And that's the important thing.

I'm personally, loving the RTO. I thought I would hate it, but I get to talk with friends all day and sit in meetings and daydream and the day flies by and I barely turned my brain on.

I'm happy to just do my job at home uninterrupted at my desk, but they sure don't seem to want that, so fine. Hope that works out.

[–] skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Office Space. But also, Been in all those. It's weird to remember that your employer doesn't actually want you to be productive and fix the problems to be profitable. They want to appear to be doing that. You'll go further in your career by playing those games rather than working. I, unfortunately, like doing the work to keep the company going instead of the games, which is not as profitable for myself, but it keeps the company from dying even though they don't realize it, and keeps them rich. Win? I'd rather be planting corn at this point.

[–] punkhazard@feddit.org 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Man the "rather be planting corn at this point" is such a pandemic thought as well. I fantasize about working in a bookstore, buddies of mine think about owning a restaurant, driving public transport vehicles (2 people), repairing bikes, etc. One of my colleagues just actually did it, he quit his job and started to be a baker. Corporate scrum is killing us and all we want to do is work.

[–] Dogiedog64@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

The absolutely critical difference between the work you, your buddies, and basically everyone else wants to do, versus corporate """work""", is that you want to do it because it'd make you happier and your community healthier, as opposed to making a line go up for some shareholders who honestly wouldn't care if you died tomorrow so long as it made the line go up a little further. Neoliberal Capitalism is Hell, man.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

driving public transport vehicles

I retired (aka was laid off) from my job as a programmer, spent a few years converting a used school bus into a motorhome, and now I drive a real school bus. It's insane how much happier I am, even though I make about a sixth of what I used to make and even though middle-schoolers really do suck as human beings. Money is certainly not everything.

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