Why many people who make over $100k will likely continue to work from home
marketwatch.com
marketwatch.com
It is great for socializing, taking a long time to get food and a drink, running into people randomly that you wouldn't talk to electronically to socialize more. Then you add in background conversations and constant distraction.
IMO you don't even have to bring in the cost of the office and it already doesn't make sense anymore.
And I guess semi-jokingly trashtalking other teams that caused outages and were ludicrously incompetent but kept protected by office politics.
Well... I can mute Zoom meetings, but I can't mute the colleagues I'm with in my shared office space. Also, while in a virtual room, people are more likely to just "change the room" to not distract you and others from their work, compared to being in the same office, where they would need to take everything with them.
> I prefer to get out of my house.
So do I - but not every day. When I need to "get things done", I prefer staying at home.
I keep all the distracting notices pretty much turned off and only allow it for a select few situations. Then I plan regular “communication breaks” where I check for new email, check for slack messages, etc. It helps tame the noise.
Me I feel like society is spending a lot of public and worker bee resources for the mere convenience of the boss class. With workers making 50-80 mile a day commutes on the public roads.
If you are doing something invented 30 years ago or longer, and implementing by rote, then that can be done distributed with no problem. Follow a standard waterfall-able process is easily done remotely as not.
they could still type to program, but the typing necessary to participate in a meeting was probably beyond them without physical therapy or serious exercise regimen or something.
i'd say they needed speech to text, but one of them probably couldn't have _read_ a text meeting fast enough to keep up, either. maybe if he was provided with a 40" monitor and kept it at 1080p?
i dunno man.
Remote kinda sucks for junior people. They need mentoring, don't know who to ask for what, and likely have multiple roommates all stomping over one another.
I also continue to point out, not everybody is software only. Anyone who operates in the land of firmware finds that not having an office and a lab really stinks. Anybody who is a manager probably spends more time on webcam than they ever did in meetings.
And, let me argue further, if your job is software only and can be done completely remotely, you can probably be replaced with someone cheaper. Think very carefully about your actual talent level and value to your job.
Locally? Maybe if they live somewhere cheaper, but talent still requires competitive compensation, otherwise they have other choices, it goes both ways
Despite the power of banks in today’s society, it’s not a foregone conclusion that banks will maintain their power with the rise of central bank digital currencies. Dimon experienced one anecdotal business loss by not visiting in person. Point taken. But if he maintains this immature attitude he’ll miss out on a lot more.
I think executives are afraid to give the real reasons why they want everyone back in the office.
It's not something that you can really say.
Especially if they don't force everyone to come to the office and hire remote workers.
Win-win
The bullshit rationale, the fact it interfered with doing my actual job and the creepy vibes I got were one reason why I quit.
Im almost certain theyll try to drag people back in.
Many of them were also involved in signing multiyear leases and investing millions to billions of dollars in office real estate before the pandemic.
Good managers in my experience have three important jobs: Scoping projects and getting the team together, motivating employees and handling their compant interfacing problems (talking to HR for them, managing account access issues, ect.), and most importantly talking with clients/stakeholders in a sympathetic ans professional way that many developers just won't do at the same quality. All of that might only take 3 hours of video calls per day, but for the good ones, it's a full day's work. For some, certain functions they're doing aren't needed, but most of the managers I've had have done valuable work that I wouldn't do as well and wouldn't want to have to do which would distract me from my work.
Could professional football teams likely also have the players figure out training schedules, plane flights, diets, plays, recruiting? Probably, and some might be pretty good at it. So why don't they? Probably the reason those teams have coaches is the same as why managers in the tech space aren't all going to be proven useless working remotely, because they actually aren't.
Maybe yours is a very different experience, but this hasn’t been mine both in engineering or sales teams. Quite often that’s a separate role, like project or engagement manager.
And I’ve seen this in both large corps and mid-size startups.
The pandemic revealed much of the management layer as useless. No one wants to cop to that, so now you see them twisting themselves in knots to justify the return. Frankly it'd be more respectable if it were honest. Sadly, honestly is not to be expected from American "Corporate Elites".
There were also managers from other departments that would not do anything over e-mail or chat. They'd traverse across campus to ask questions or "have a quick chat". It always annoyed me as it would be things I could find out, but couldn't really speak to off the top of my head. Things that would be perfect to handle over e-mail initially, and then talk in person if more context is needed. Sometimes I was not even the intended target of conversation, it's just whoever they were looking for was not at their desk.
I still think it’s a useful dividing line, especially for this kind of article. The physical/virtual job world fits pretty well around $100k.
It seems like only about 1/3 of Americans make over $100k [0].
I don’t think $100k means you’re rich like when I first heard the term in the 80s, but it still means that you’re way better off than most Americans.
[0] https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/average-american...
There are places in the US where someone with a $60,000 a year salary has a higher standard of living then someone making $100,000 a year.
From my experience, the physical-virtual divide isn't quite at 100k, but it's more job title dependent. Many places are already swapping lower paid support/helpdesk/call centre staff to WFH; however there is much more rather gross surveillance and preventing from fooling around, timed login sessions, etc compared to engineers that can go run off to do laundry in the middle of the day.
For individual workers, $100k is more like top 15-20%. For full-time workers, 75th percentile make $81k ($1,557 per week) and 90th percentile make $125k ($2,405 per week)[1].