what this escaped the corporate intranet

Bureaucracy is the worst. Learn about some of it.

CBC: Employees ‘upset’ about return to office and prefer flexible work

As more and more employers order their workers back to the office, employees say they like the flexibility to work from home — and some returning to corporate workplaces aren’t so happy about being forced to return.

I get particularly het up about this exact topic.

WFH’s effect on productivity is so marginal that papers struggle to prove any kind of correlation, either for or against, and its effect on employee happiness is noticeable and significantly positive, so the justification for return to office is:

• not enough people are paying attention to the executive suite
• let’s keep commercial real estate profitable
• corporate culture

Can we just hire a potemkin office of young underemployed actors to treat the CEO like a big boy so that everyone else can get work done?

that’s what executive assistants are for

What is this glorious corporate culture we’re trying so hard to preserve? I think people are overestimating the cultural cachet of low-pile grey carpet, fake plastic plants, and saying “low hanging fruit” to a room full of sweaty people in collared shirts and Dockers slacks.

what will become of the men’s loafer industry

I know, I know, the company’s extroverts need 6-8 meetings a day because if nobody speaks to them in a 30 minute span their ego will collapse like a dying star

but I work with those same people in a WFH environment and they just frantically spam the slack huddle button, they’re doing FINE

and as an introvert I don’t know why their social dysfunction should be MY problem.

I’m angry that employee happiness isn’t even apparently a factor in company decisions.

If your average company discovered that they could increase profits by half of a half of a percentage by playing a high-pitched squealing noise on loudspeakers at all time I’m sure they’d immediately adopt the squealing loudspeaker in a heartbeat.

Look, everybody who’s not competent enough with computers to thrive in a WFH situation is going to retire or die in the next 5 years, we’re going to have to work together to bury cubicles and open-office work plans where they belong: in the past.

it’s kind of the opposite of “impostor syndrome”, as I think of myself as a thoroughly boring person with a skill-set that’s essentially as common as “accountant” - like, it turns out that you can’t throw a rock without hitting a chubby nerd who’s good at computers and python and servers and stuff

it’s not just because we’re absurdly common, it’s also because we’re super bad at dodging rocks

“oh, you’re a python/javascript server developer who can also do a bit of Rust? oh you have a lot of opinions about databases? Okay, tell me about the video game you’re OBVIOUSLY developing in your spare time.”

The doctor told me I was allergic to survivorship bias which is why I’m not allowed near any more short punchy airport business books.

“what’s this 9 year gap on your resume?”

“…. uh, work study”

someone at Business Insider has been banging the RTO drum for the past 4 full years, trying to convince people that RTO is good using any conceivable angle

an increasingly unhinged series of takes, no matter how ridiculous,

and I would like to wish them a very fuck right the hell off

either Business Insider’s corporate owners also own a lot of commercial real estate or some terrible middle-manager is very lonely without people to harangue

sometimes I stay up at night worrying that I’ll join a company that doesn’t have “Teamwork” and “Innovation” in its core values, and instead has “Collaboration” and “Inventiveness”

i’m not sure if I’d be able to survive the change

heh

Slack: HEY! I HAVE A NOTIFICATION FOR YOU!

Me: but it’s after work on a friday what is it

Slack: IT’S THIS THING A CO-WORKER SAID YESTERDAY

Me: slack what is wrong with you

Slack: I’VE FORGOTTEN HOW NOTIFICATIONS WORK

Me: i’m surprised you answered but ok

ed: for context, around this time Slack was struggling to stop notifying you that you had an available message, even if you did not, in fact, have an available message.

an expensive standing desk is a wonderful way to find out that you don’t like standing while you work

in order to increase company cohesion overall I’ve been inviting 10 random people to a meeting every eight days, but I’m not sure how it’s going because I haven’t been attending

i wonder how the whole western economy collapsing is going to affect my Q2 KPEs

TailCloudForce AI: Industry Solutions for a Globally Connected Workforce ™️

pictured: your project manager trying to organize a big spreadsheet

I’m VRChat user #379 , which might surprise folks, the API predates me by some time

User #0 is fusl, but that’s because she changed her sign-up date retroactively to Midnight, January 1, Year 1, which is possible because we did build our servers out of a bunch of logs and some stone plinths

there needs to be an alternative to vacation called “quiet i’m cooking” where you take an at work vacation from meetings and other human interactions and actually get some shit done

“where’s greg?”

“oh, he’s on cooking vacation, he’s here but you’re not allowed to talk to him”

i don’t like software developers making it out to be like they’re soft, prima donna miracle workers who can’t accomplish anything unless they have days of uninterrupted quiet and peace to focus on their masterpiece

unless it’s me, I want that

i’ve invented a new term for empty corporatespeak that I’d like to share:

“brandiloquence”

thank you, you may now go about your day as usual

The reason you have a PM is to stop the Hot Drink Station Discussion from consuming your entire company

layoff notifications are always written in the exonerative tense: “X% of our employees will be leaving the company, we’re sorry for the ones affected”

as if they were hit by a fleet of buses one at a time

at some point in the past 20 years people stopped saying “meet” and started saying “sync” or “sync up”

MEETINGS ARE OVER, NOW THERE IS ONLY SYNCHRONIZATION

Following up

with the mental model

of validating solutions

aligned autonomy

while tailoring

our frameworks’ approach

to specific flows

out of these perspectives

we’ve gathered a lot

of great feedback

for planning and executing

roll-out team objectives

baking that in

to a new process

to address pain points

we’ve identified

including barriers

to ideation,

focus,

and synergies,

while preserving

our best chance to succeed

with a new team-level

product strategy documentation phase

to clearly align

the team’s strategy

to the overall company strategy

creating a big improvement

over last half

a cross discipline

planning leads team

will create a more inclusive experience

across the board

we’re really stretched

so we can go deep

utilizing impact analysis

planning cycles

detailed planning leads

across four distinct phases

utilizing context

to jump in

to high level completion

of the company strategy phase

the output of which

was the phase priorities

which we’ll walk into

with the OKR setting phase

for lightweight half-planning

strategy buffered feedback week phase

then, again,

we’ll have the monthly

company objectives

to deliver a “golden goose”

“star retention” using

the team strategy doc

which I’ll share out

after this presentation,

investment in targets

and goals

that will have value

for the business,

delineating an exciting change

my suggestion that, for pride, we simply roll out the NYC world but leave a bunch of interactible bricks lying around

has been rejected out of hand

I can’t stand working in coffee shops.

It’s loud, people are having conversations all around you. Not enough screen space. Laptop keyboard.

You can’t leave your “office” unattended to use the bathroom unless you want it to wander away. I have better coffee beans at home.

I think that people have over-romanticized working in coffee shops, it actually sucks.

co-worker: “I cleverly used a text adventure to trick people into letting me rewrite the notifications system.”

me:

the government says pants aren’t a business expense and yet if you show up to work WITHOUT pants suddenly YOU are the pariah

Business Insider and the NYT are the most fond of these “remote work bad” hit pieces, but they forgot to tell their illustrator about that so they just drew the standard “sad person in a cubicle”.

Former Amazon VP Ben Smith on admitting he was wrong to push for workers to return to the office several days a week: “As someone once asked me, ‘Have you ever noticed the only people in favor of RTO are people with large admin staffs and grown children?’ I had not, because that was me. Touche.”

Working from “home” - A mea culpa.

I’d like to correct a previous post, I am told by numerous technical colleagues that this is not, in fact, Kubernetes

Oh, you’d rather work from home?

What if I were to tell you that we’ve installed cry-pods at work so that you can cry without disturbing your co-workers?

😔 “We’re listening, self-reflecting, and making changes to our approach, and we understand that you feel threatened by our last interaction. We’d like to apologize to how we came off in our earlier interaction.”

😠 “You SHIT in my CHEERIOS.”

😔 “We hear you and we would like to apologize for any confusion and angst the new state of your cereal has caused you.”

😠 “Don’t POOP where FOOD is!”

😔 “We would like to assure you that we will be making changes to our policy vis-a-vis how we manage breakfast cereals going forward.”

😠 “WHAT CHANGES!?!?”

My wife’s company is trying to convince people to return to the office because one of their executives thinks its embarrassing when clients come by and the offices are empty, anyways, theatre students always need some pocket money and if someone wants to join my exciting new “potemkin village as a service” startup.

seatfillr is gonna be huge

Avenue 5 nailed this, with a deck filled with attractive, well-dressed actors pretending to work on a bunch of high-tech-looking panels for the sake of the company’s image while the actual engineers worked on a bunch of regular computers in a dingy, crowded, messy office.

as a dumpy ADHD man who wears a robe for most of the day and who has built a tremendous amount of real actual software I feel like if I had to operate in a traditional corporate environment, having a productive looking actor representing me would actually be a real career boon

He could go in, look attractive, and attend all of the meetings and report back to me and I could do all of the actual work and cyrano de bergerac for him in key moments, I think we’d be a productive team.

pretty sure we’d be VP of Engineering before long

“why are you always wearing that bluetooth headset?”

Curtis’s Actor, Handsomely: “I’m very busy with all of my job.”