Attention Office Resisters: The Boss Is Counting Badge Swipes | Hacker News Reader

Attention Office Resisters: The Boss Is Counting Badge Swipes

wsj.com

20 pointsvoisin15 comments

We trust you with million dollar business decisions but please swipe here so we know you spend time in the office.

Infantilizing and stupid. I’ve come to the conclusion that most of this is about reminding people they are wage slaves, nothing else.

The same executives, even at Met, are excluding themselves from these rules and are holding court on zoom from Hawaii, Lake Tahoe or god knows where.

Not saying it's not that, but I've heard that it may be about ensuring a demand for office space. Without this artificial demand, owners would be forced to lower prices or sell. And that simply won't do.

More than just office space, it is about the tax kick-backs that Amazon (and presumably their peers) have extracted from cities where their major offices are built. The cities offered the tax cuts or rebates to the company on the expectation that wealthy tech commuters would be forthcoming. Much like how Amazon has its cake and eats it via advertising revenue from its marketplace sellers, these companies have found a secondary revenue stream from their employees.

Reminder that WSJ, Fortune, and FT, have all been churning anti Remote work opinion pieces since at least the last quarter of 2022.

The formula is always the same, some argument that makes remote work a 'bad' thing (e.g. framing it as 'office resisters' is beyond ridiculous), present some anecdata and publish it as an opinion piece.

There is a clear desire to shape public opinion against remote work from people who are likely heavily invested in commercial real estate.

They were writing such articles at the height of the 'lockdown' part of 2020. they have no shame at their obsequence to their billionaire owners.

With my manager being on one side of my country and most of my team members on another, any attempt at ‘return to the office for collaboration’ invariably means sitting at a hot desk in an over subscribed office with my headphones on all day because every conversation I have is on a video call.

Problem is, they’re still pushing for it.

With a workforce spread the way many tech industry ones are, I really don’t see any reason to go in frequently at all, and I’ll happily change jobs to continue doing my current 4 days a week from my well equipped office at home. I don’t need to book the desk in advance and I can even leave my laptop on the desk too.

And, not you specifically, but you're the guy that ruins RTO for everyone else.

I'm hybrid and every Wednesday there's a wave of people that slide in, put in their earbuds, and shout into Teams calls for eight hours. It's impossible to concentrate.

I've managed to get some of them to get self aware and use conference rooms or those silly phone booths, but it's a nonstop problem now.

Our conference rooms and phone booths are booked out weeks ahead, so it's not like there's a choice. They even turned a bunch of them into desk space because of the hiring that happened during wfh. I'd never met the people I sit next to before, and we work on totally unrelated projects. What is the point?

Much like sibling, our 6 meeting rooms are booked so far in advance I’d never have a chance. For people who have no choice to be in meetings all day, we’d also much rather not be in the middle of the floor, but ever since I joined the workforce I haven’t even had a cubicle let alone an office, so the business world demands that I sit at my desk next to people who’d much prefer to concentrate feeling bad about it all day.

I wish engineering bosses were more technical and more concerned with "engineering" management than spending time on BS things to target their own reports.

And it's been this way for a long time.

Didn't you get the memo about the TPS report coversheets?

This is just micromanagement aka a wasteful allocation of development budget.

Thinking that people at Bell labs used to produce a report only once per year and it worked just fine.

Now some of the most cocky managers even want to know how much time you spend on the throne.

Attention boss: I'm still not coming into the office. If you care that much then fire me and I'll go work somewhere less infantilizing.

Most badges are cheap and easy to clone. A team could have a single member come in per week to satisfy such reporting methods.

In Minecraft[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37637165

Reminds me of the nfc chips in university books, including those explaining how nfc chips and theft protection works. You can't harass with magic the caste which cast the spell.

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