Young People Are Going to Save Us All from Office Life
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
My 2 cents is: - trust me to manage my time as needed. If i dont have any urgent priorities, i will drop down a gear. If i have priority tasks, they will get done on time and to spec, guaranteed. - give me flexibility, it is worth more than money. Letting me work a day or two remotely, start or finish late can save me hours of commute time, flight costs, etc. It shows me you value me as a person, and not just me sitting in a desk. - understand that i consider my work holistically: for example, letting me bail early on fridays gives me a level of joy that helps me advocate for you as an employer and makes me forgive a lot of your shortcomings.
All in all, us young people are not doing anything revolutionary but sometimes se arr more willing to cut through the bs and take what we need in order to be able to mentally and emotionally give what is demanded.
the 99% of jobs need the time to manage you, not the contrary.
they are not task based, they are presence or hourly based.
If you go to the bank, they need to be there.
If you go to the hospital, they have to be there.
If you go to a bar, they'll be there.
From x to y.
It's not about time management, it's about presence management.
> It shows me you value me as a person, and not just me sitting in a desk
Most of the time sitting at the desk is THE job.
The guys that clean my office before I arrive would love to be sitting at the desk.
> Letting me work a day or two remotely, start or finish late can save me hours of commute time, flight costs, etc
That sounds good, but apart from edge cases, living close to where you work is almost always a smarter move than commuting.
And most of the things you're talking about are easily gained with time.
To trust people you have to know people.
At my current job I had to punch in and out 4 times a day, 9-13, 14-18.
After 9 months, more or less it, became 2 times a day, when you arrive in the morning and when you come back from lunch.
Now I get in at 11 and go out at 17, with at least an hour of lunch break.
Nobody says anything anymore.
Nowadays, it's the noisy and distracting open office environments where you're scrunched next to people who you probably aren't even working with.
In the future, it's leaning towards remote work. Which sounds great on paper. But there's another whole level of tyranny with that. Only getting 15 minutes per day face to face with coworkers over video chat, the rest done asynchronously over Slack is very impersonal. Though maybe I'd trade that for being able to live in an actual house with a pool instead of squished into a tiny apartment.
after working home for 3 years, I missed being out of my house, even though I am not the most social person you'll find at my office.
I think the balance is some remote, when you fill it, and the rest in a real office, with real people.
secondly, go live close to the job, the closest possible.
it takes me 15 minutes now from door to door and it made my life much better.
The biggest benefit of remote work is being able to live wherever the hell you want and do work that you enjoy.
It drags out simple interactions over time, very unfocused. In a company where everyone ignores everyone else leads to pits of ticket queues that never get resolved. Each team that does this multiplies the effect.
What I find confusing is how you imply that "going to the bank" is an OK reason to leave work, but taking a sick pet to the vet is weird? What country do you work in?
I ask my boss and he says ok I hope your dog is feeling better. 8-5 Megacorp job.
I've heard that in the advanced nation of Germany lots of useful businesses aren't open when ordinary workers have time to go visit them, such as banks and electronics stores and grocery stores. If you work an extra hour for some reason you can't pick up food except at a stall in the train station?
It's a well preserved secret, nobody knows how they did it.
It is clearly magic or sth like that
Spoiler: they do like everybody else's does, they ask for some free time for family.
You have the right to it, even in shitty US
Unless it's structural. Take your kids to school every morning and come in late? That has to be talked through properly. And if you go home early every week because your fashion items are going to be delivered, that's not okay.
Other people take vacation hours for this kind of stuff. (we get 25 days a year). Others will work an hour unpaid overtime here and there, and compensate by going home or getting in early at other times.
In general it's just not an issue really, you just notify upfront and not be there, and make sure not to do it more than twice or so a month.
It really helps that working from home 1 day a week is becoming more of a thing though. You're more flexible that way.
Sometimes, it's cute. "I'd like a day off" out of no-where. Sometimes, it's ridiculous. "I'd like a day off to go day drinking with my buddies" Sometimes, it makes me re-think what and why we do things. This is how we move forward. Case in point, "I'd like a day off. I need a mental health day because someone tried to break into my house last night and I'm freaked out"
Mental health days a total luxury, but if you think about it, there are days we need off because we are going to unproductive regardless. It can be abused, but it can also be useful. Context and Manager discretion matters.
Young People aren't going to save us from the office, but they are going to challenge our assumptions and it's our duty to listen and change the office as needed.
Why is this ridiculous?
Edit: so sensitive! I guess I’m the only person here that gets PTO :)
Lately I've been dealing with a lot of "can I work remote while I go visit my girlfriend for a week" or "I need an entire sick day to go to the chiropractor"... it gets old because my more senior devs do not make life so painful.
what's not reasonable about working remotely? I mean as long as the work is done an they are available in their normal hours?
Same thing about doctor visit - it is their sick day, they can decide what they want to use it on.
security.
You are going around with company secret data.
You are moving them outside of the company network, which is heavily controlled.
Not all businesses thinks it's ok to put data on Amazon S3.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you, but they have their reason, the most important of them is "things have worked until now because we do the things as we do them, what if we change and things don't work anymore"?
Fear of change is a real thing in big established businesses.
Every company I've worked for, people are using laptops and bringing them home at night, so I am very skeptical that this is the reason.
"Sick. Not coming in today." This one should be obvious - is there some overriding concern that Boss wants to risk contaminating the entire office? I hope not...
This whole "asking for permission" thing bugs me. Sure, there might need to be a conversation if something in my personal life comes up and me taking tomorrow off to deal with it would impact an important meeting or a deadline. But anything in advance, and especially well in advance, is me courteously informing Boss that I won't be available to the company on that day/week/whatever.
1. confused and frustrated without a (rather strict) set of baseline rules to guide them,
2. push to the boundaries of my flexibility to see how much they can get away with (not unlike my pre-teen kids)
3. Totally oblivious/naive about what is acceptable in the broader corporate-esque working world - Example: Will the company buy me a laptop [to attend a one day bootcamp]?
I guess it makes me a crusty old fart, but I have no interest in advancing this style of work management and will be long gone before I'm forced to accept this new world
What kinds of work are you hiring for? Are these young/newly minted CS grads looking for SW jobs?
If they're new grads, they're gonna push boundaries - academia is so different from the workforce. The naivety I'm sure is just inexperience. Acting like a mentor instead of a Corporate Suit can rectify their expectations.
P.S. On equipment purchases: my last three companies provided laptops as daily workstations (is this uncommon?) - they went home every night (yay business continuity policy), came to the office every morning. And traveled to conferences and bootcamps as needed. If your company is providing desktops, I think it comes down to whether this one-day bootcamp business is a personal enrichment exercise (at the employee's expense) or whether the company is compelling attendance. Obviously in the first case, the employee should be using their own hardware - in this case, maybe it's a bit entitled to expect a hardware purchase for the event.
> asking for things whether they deserve it or not.
> Sometimes, it's cute. "I'd like a day off" out of no-where.
This is a troubling attitude, and I hope it's not what you meant. Does their compensation agreement include PTO? Then they "deserve" their day off. There is no other requirement. There is no explanation or justification needed. As an employer, you may request that I reschedule my PTO if there is an urgent business need, which I may or may not do if possible. But I've never understood the attitude that someone needs to come up with a reason to use the compensation they've rightfully earned. Would you hold their paycheck over their head and demand a reason why they should be allowed to spend it?
Hospitals are closed on Christmas? Hotels don’t clean or rent rooms on Jan 1? Planes don’t fly on Thanksgiving?
My point is there doesn't exist a 24/7 business I know of that would be able to survive if they simply let employees "demand" days off. You can't rely on a bunch of coworkers to sort out who is working when. You request days off, a boss checks the schedule to see what can be moved around and whatnot, and then approves it.
I have yet to see a 24/7 business that works any other way.
Fwiw I'm probably working more then I usually would at 9 to 5 workplace, but realisation that the company is treating me like a grown up adult makes me happy. I can't imagine being back to my previous corporate work environment, even the thought of it fills me with dread.
In Europe you'll find a lot of them, you don't have to ask, you have the right to it.
For example: I have 28 holidays, 8 hours of payed leaves a month (you can't use more than 4 hours at a time), sick leave up to 6 continuos month, after that they start cutting your salary but you can't loose your job and they have to keep it for you up to 36 months. You go back one day and the counter resets.
And that's for everybody having a full time contract, is not something special for high paid management (on the contrary, usually managers have way higher salaries, but less guarantees)
Why wouldn't a young person (or any person, for that matter) deserve something, like a day off? My time off is my time off, if I want to use it to go on a wholesome family vacation, or a 3 day bender, it doesn't really matter.
Farming won out because it favors centralization of power: it is more productive per area, so the chieftain can better keep an eye on a larger group, and it increases switching costs, so farmers will put up with more abuse.
Each second of my work time is tracked via Toggl, which creates a good few second order effects.
For example gone is "pooping on company time" - even when I'm in the office.
Also it's currently 23:12 in my timezone and I still have more than an hour of work to do. This is something that happens more often than I would like to admit.
That being said having to actually go places to work and arrive there at a specified hour at that would be hell for me.
And the way it's always been. And the way it will always be as long as humans are self-interested and in competition with each other for resources. Welcome to life (it's the same for all other species, btw)!
And there are many types of slavery that are not chattel slavery.
My point being that Cicero was free from a life of (physical) labor only because of the presence of these laborers/slaves. Property ownership enabled and paid for these intellectual or artistic pursuits.
Here it goes, nevertheless.
People are social beings. We like to find "our" groups, and feel pride in being members of them. Examples of such groups: political parties, nationalities, religion, fans of a particular kind of music/artist/clothing style/tv show, hobby groups, etc).
Because of that, we feel bad when our groups are conflated; we feel it erases a part of our identity. Waged workers in this example feel pride in being not slaves, however nominal the distinction is.
This effect is even more pronounced because in a stratified society (which the Roman Empire was), as a waged worker, you could be confused for a slave, but not for a member of nobility. (We feel the most animosity when being taken to be a member of a group that resembles ours the most. Tell a Ukrainian that culturally, very little differentiates them from a Russian - and be prepared to be lectured on just how wrong you are.)
So, waged workers, then and now, would have reasons to vehemently identify themselves as "not slaves", and thus they would be biased in assessing the differences, seeing all of them as significant.
Ranks of nobility would have no such bias.
Exactly! The sort of slavery being referenced here is "wage slavery," and it derives straight from Cicero's line of thinking. The idea here is that the vast majority of humans in a developed economy need to work. In particular, people without the resources to start a business themselves have to work for someone else. Although there is theoretically a choice of employers (there may not in fact be due to locality of the labor market), one nonetheless has to work for someone else, selling their time. If one wants to survive, one is not free to leave one's job.
This lack of freedom is the essential notion of wage slavery. That some wage slaves are better off than others is irrelevant: house slaves in the American South were often treated better and had better working conditions than field hands, but they were still slaves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaveryhttps://en.wikiped...
Why do we work? To take care of our basic needs so we can have as much time as possible to live life, with the maximum ability (usually in the form of money) to do what makes us happy. Humanity has fallen into a trap where we think that we NEED a job. We need to take care of our basic needs, and nothing more unless we want to.
We're getting to the point where, if we applied tech as such, it can start to handle most of our basic needs for us. Instead of having the mindset that robots are "stealing our jobs," why not look at it as a robot has opened up a lot more time for us to live our lives? We're unable to look at things this way because humanity has not yet reevaluated the way it integrates money and technology into society. A few people or companies are allowed to control the tech humanity has invented, and we're forced to pay them for its use. Tech is supposed to make our lives easier and instead we are allowing it to make our lives harder and more stressful.
Money and labor within society need a complete overhaul ASAP. I think young people are simply waking up to the fact that their lives are finite and they can't wait 400 years for such changes to occur. It's now or it doesn't matter.
It doesn't look like saving us from anything. It seems horrible.
This can be perfectly acceptable, I was happy to do it for a previous employer. I was also compensated for it.
1) you get asked to take out of hours client meetings.
2) those become regular.
3) you end up on a project which is high priority.
4) those have daily standups to make the schedule.
5) that becomes regular.
Congratulations, you've now got both out-of-hours and in-hours meetings, frequently at 10AM and 10PM. Even if the offset is a "Tuesday/Thursday WFH", that will eventually become consumed by a scheduled something in the face of some time pressure.
For example, we have regular "no meeting weeks", and the team just scheduled one. However, everyone on Project Y, had daily standups. We were even told "no meeting week doesn't apply to you".
Another piece of well-earned experience is what happens with a company phone out of hours. When I did that, I got pinged by well meaning ops people when they started looking at their bug queue. The only problem? I was in GMT-7, and they were in GMT+3. If it's important, they can page me, instead of messaging me.
Again, I can be happy to do this. If I believe in the company mission, and/or I'm compensated for it. I need to negotiate with my partner, but that's what being in a relationship is all about.
Basically the premise (as I interpret it) is that younger generations have such a drastically different relationship with their employers and work-life balance expectations that it may not be possible for employers to make the kind of demands and "take-backs" your describing because they would just not be considered acceptable anymore. It's basically a positive (and I think more accurate) interpretation of "Millennials don't want to work hard" that says "Millenials aren't willing to sacrifice their health or happiness to make their employers more profits", and looking at what employers may have to change in the future to account for this.
We have automated monitoring of services, and except for the core routers and environmental monitors, all SMS notifications are disabled from midnight to 6am. 'tis lovely.
Change can seem impossible the face of entrenched opposition, but change is inevitable. It's never crazy to hope for, and work towards, a positive change.
Now, I'm a salaried employee, and I feel annoyed if someone expects me to work past 6PM or on weekends. I feel like I need that time to rest and get my mind off of work-related stuff. I probably need that time in part because I'm expected to get to work in the morning, and deliver a largely uninterrupted work day. As a grad student, I worked from home, and if I was working on a difficult problem, I could just take a break and go lie down on my couch for 15 minutes if I needed to. This isn't an option now, and not being able to take breaks when tired or unmotivated feels pretty unnatural.
Personally, it feels like having unstructured work hours leads to an implicit competition between everyone to do the most work humanly possible, and any leisure hours begin to feel almost sinful.
This is about flexibility and a change from strict 9 to 5 office hours. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. If you're not available from 11AM to 2PM, you still have to complete your work - maybe you don't need a full 8 hours to do it, but it needs done.
Naturally if client calls aren't your thing, steer away from that kind of work. Maybe instead you don't mind writing code at 8PM or doing research at 8PM.
They are just going to make things miserable for the next generation, like everybody else do did.