Hacked Ford screens put anti-RTO slogan above CEO’s face Conference-room screens at Ford's Dearborn HQ were briefly hijacked on Thursday to display a protest image in an apparent swipe at the carmaker's return-to-office policy. On Thursday morning, screens at Ford offices displayed a picture of CEO Jim Farley with a slashed circle over his face and the words "F**k RTO" emblazoned …
“ Next month, Ford will open its new 2.1-million-square-foot headquarters in Dearborn and it's clear management wants to see bums on seats in the meantime. This hasn't gone down well with some on social media.”
An example of US corporate hubris. No wonder Toyota, Honda, Subaru, Nissan, Kia, Hyundai are pissing all over Ford in their home market with US domestically made Japanese/Korean vehicles.
Those office staff who don't want to go to the office... Well, they're proving they don't need staff in the office. It won't be long before they are outsourced to India. Then they can complain some more. I look forward to reading their placards: "The bosses told us to RTO, we said NO".
When you work for a company, you follow the company rules. If you don't like the rules, you can leave. Nobody is forcing you to stay there.
>> Hacking the monitors requires knowledge of the network infrastructure - something far beyond what your average pen pusher could pull off.
Have you ever actually been in an office with lots of staff? Lots of staff usually means numerous people know how to connect to conference monitors. Such information may well be published somewhere for staff to use.
Most of the time I've spent in an office in the last 25 years has been spent looking busy while I surreptitiously watch the clock until the earliest minute I can slip out and get home where I can finally get some work done.
That's the truth regardless of how loud the executive voices are.
The only office job I've had involved me either stretching out the 3 hrs of actual work into 8 hrs, or doing the 3hrs of work in 3 hrs and spending the rest of the time playing minesweeper/solitaire
and dont get me started on the meetings.................. pre-meeting meeeting and post meeting meeting followed by e.mail to all present summerising said meetings.
And making bullshit bingo cards for the meetings......
The boss doesn't have your interests at heart.
Employees are just reciprocating.
Surprised you're surprised at that.
And then the politicians complain about productivity.
These days, loyalty doesn't count for anything. Bosses, and HR, have ensured that.
" If somebody pays you they have an expectation that you will do what they ask."
No. Not even near. You don't have *any clue* that basically everyone is asked to do *a lot more* than they get paid for, so you? Obvious management attitude issue here.
People who pay you, will get what they pay for. No more, no less. *Not everything*.
If there's slack time, it's falls to the management, not the people doing the actual work.
This post has been deleted by its author
If I have a contract, I'm obligated to do exactly what's written in the contract, no more and no less. Anything beyond that is voluntary, though I may well choose to do more, since killing time can be as hard as working. A contract that's not in writing isn't worth the paper it's written on.
Yes and no, if there is a particular work practice that has been in place for a period of time (typically 2 years) then it can be considered regular practice and doesn't need to be specifically list in your contract. Not much surprise but WFH due to covid is not considered under this regular practice.
I had a contract with a defined place of work. They binned off the lease and everything WFH.
I asked for a Contract Variarion making me remote - as most others were - as no office and was told by HR …” ‘No … in case we ever have an office again in the future”.
"Lots of people doing a few hours work, but being paid for far more."
In cases, yes, but that's down to poor management. There should be a way to estimate the time it will take to complete many tasks and assign jobs to fill up most of a work day. Anything with a creative component can be difficult to estimate, but there can be goals with people showing their work to date at set marks. It down to mangers to make assessments of each employee's work output to see if they are good enough, putting enough effort/time in or just skiving off. It can also be poor management or the manager's time being siphoned off in meetings and tasks that take them away from supporting the stuff under them.
When you’re paid roughly the same as everyone else, to do roughly the same workload as everyone else, but complete that workload in a fraction of the time of everyone else, what do you think is going to happen? There’s a few overachievers in every workplace, and those people will not get paid any extra for doing more work than everyone else, so why should they?
Wise managers naturally accept that overachievers will naturally remain idle for far longer than everyone else, and the trade-off for letting them “do nothing” when they’ve (seemingly effortlessly) completed their fair share of the work is the guaranteed extra capacity available for those rare occasions when shit seriously hits the fan. After all, they’re the only people who will have the time to spare in that scenario, at no additional business expense. Without them, employers would otherwise be doling out overtime or hiring additional people at a much greater cost to the business. As long as overachievers are kept looking busy when they’re working around others (to avoid inspiring idleness among the less capable) there should be no problems whatsoever.
"If you don't like the rules, you can leave. Nobody is forcing you to stay there."
Exactly this. If more people were prepared to stand up for themselves at work, then work wouldn't be the shitbox it is now. That involves risking your current employment. But that means not stretching yourself so far that your life becomes critically dependent on a continuous income. It seems people would rather buy shiny things.
IR35 prevents worker owned business from making profit. Same rules don't apply to business that is not worker owned
If you work for large consultancy, they can make profit from service you deliver.
If you work for your own business, you can't make profit from exactly the same service.
It's a full market capture.
The downvotes are the point - most people don’t want to believe they were manipulated into giving up something valuable. IR35 was falsely framed as stopping tax dodging, but it real aim was to stop independence and competition. It created a system where a large consultancy can profit from your work, but you can’t profit from your own. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable to hear: it exposes how easily people were convinced to defend a policy that stripped them of choice, bargaining power, and the right to run their own business. Some defend it because they benefit from the system; others because admitting the loss would mean realising how thoroughly they were played. Funny how people downvote, but never have a counter-argument.
IR35 was always a tax dodge.
If you're actually consulting then you don't fall under IR35 rules, and so get to squirrel away some of the profits into the company to deal with holiday/sick pay etc.
If however you're just an off payroll employee then you should be taxed as an employee.
Incorrect. In UK tax, “consulting” simply means selling a service. IR35 does not test whether you are “actually consulting” - it only bites if the worker owns or controls the company that invoices.
If Deloitte invoices for the same seat and output, IR35 is irrelevant because the worker does not own Deloitte. If your own Ltd invoices for that identical work, IR35 is triggered and a status test is imposed, with compliance risk pushed onto the client.
Concrete contrast:
Big consultancy invoices £1,500 per day for its £60k worker. No IR35. Client carries no off-payroll risk. Consultancy makes profit.
Worker-owned Ltd invoices for the same deliverables. IR35 applies. Client must assess and often refuses or deems the engagement “inside” to avoid risk. Your company cannot make profit.
So this isn’t “tax dodge vs real consulting” - it’s classist and ownership-based gatekeeping deciding who is allowed to profit from selling labour and who the client can safely buy from.
Also remember the 5% rule that was specifically designed to stop whole teams from leaving big consultancies and cutting out the middleman.
If a big consultancy lands a multi-year bum-on-seat contract - it’s “savvy business with repeat clients.”
If a worker-owned consultancy lands the same - it’s a “tax dodge.”
This is why advertising is SO important to Capitalism. Without the indoctrination that we all have to keep buying shiny things, we could all relax a bit, work a bit, and enjoy life.
Stop watching and reading adverts, cut right down on the "news", and life becomes much nicer.
"Well, they're proving they don't need staff in the office."
It's quite odd really - big organisations often have multiple locations in their home country, and communicate almost entirely between them with shared networks, email and messaging, group video calls, even where teams are split across those sites. Apparently that is all possible without affecting productivity, UNLESS an employee is at home. Or, there's another explanation, that too many senior managers are arseholes who can't manage by results; as an entirely acceptable substitute, bums-on-office-seats becomes an important KPI.
I work for a UK government department, and they measure and record office attendance. They don't measure to any adequate standard what benefit the department delivers to the population we serve, there's no proper suite of departmental KPIs, but be assured, if the minister wants to know then his senior civil servants will be able to tell him with absolute accuracy how their oiks are doing against the BOS target. I'm hopeful of getting a suitable pictogram in our next annual report with a "% of target" figure in huge font next to it.
"It won't be long before they are outsourced to India."
Just because a job doesn't need a continuous physical presence in an in-country office, that doesn't mean that it can be effectively offshored. Lots of companies have discovered the hard way that just because offshore labour is cheap, the ability of offshore staff to understand all the home-country culture, terminology, regulation, expectations and to communicate etc is highly varied, and when offshoring on the cheap (as is normally the case) then those factors are a low priority. But maybe that's exactly what Ford should do. Close all their offices in the US (apart from the board, because it's simply not possible to offshore such important roles) and employ cheap offshore workers to do all white collar jobs, whilst they bring home those important and well paid manufacturing jobs that the fat orange one prizes.
>> UNLESS an employee is at home
Except... I have seen this personally... an employee "working at home" who could not be contacted for several hours. He had disappeared out "for a while". Yeah. But he expected to be paid for his disappearance.
>> They don't measure to any adequate standard what benefit the department delivers to the population we serve
They don''t need to. We all know it's crap.
It seems there are a lot of entitled people around. They expect to be paid, but don't want to go to the office. Too bad. You have a choice: walk away.
I'd guess your employee who "disappeared" for a while while based at home might be as adept at not working whilst in the office.
"It seems there are a lot of entitled people around. They expect to be paid, but don't want to go to the office."
Let's dispose of the first bit; I'm long retired . I retired before working from home became a regular possibility. Some of that work was in laboratories so working at home would have been a non-starter. I have no direct interest in this.
But I spent a good deal of my working life commuting. I know the time wasted. The time I spent commuting from High Wycombe into London was equivalent to two full working days a week - for which I was NOT paid. I was not alone. I was in trains crowded - overcrowded - with others in the same uncomfortable predicament. Looking out the the windows I could see roads crowded with cars also taking commuters into work. It was a gross and unnecessary waste of huge portions of human lives and of physical resources. A society which has got itself into that situation needs to stop and think very hard about how to get out of it; it has a responsibility to itself and to the rest of humanity and the planet to do that.
I grew up in an industrial Pennine village when the mills were still working. Most people worked in the mills and there was a mill within walking distance of most people's homes, the exceptions being those living in the remoter farms who were probably not working in the mills in any case. It was a more humane way of life than commuting. Now we have the double whammy of the mills having almost entirely closed, so less work within walking distance and they have been treated as brownfield sites for housing so more people than previously now having to commute. It would have been quite feasible to have converted those mills to alternative forms of working. Put offices in them or whatever.
If companies want staff in offices disperse the offices into smaller units where people live. I return frequently to my daughter's experience - working for a company which is entirely based on remote working. It is feasible. We know from the experience of Covid that it is feasible for a good many jobs - not all but a good many. I repeat again, I have no personal sense of entitlement in this, just a sense from experience and observation that we have organised society very badly to have it depend on unnecessary commuting into huge conurbations to do work that could be dispersed. The entitled ones are those who demand that it be done this way.
According to these articles which were published earlier this year:
https://reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/is-working-from-home-better-than-being-at-the-office
https://theconversation.com/more-than-two-thirds-of-organisations-have-a-formal-work-from-home-policy-heres-how-the-benefits-stack-up-251598
A "tailored approach" is required that allows an employee to work from home or in the office as works "best" for the employee...
"... there was no notable difference in productivity between employees working from home versus in the office."
"32% of Australian employees would prefer to exclusively work from home, 41% prefer a hybrid option, while 27% prefer to work exclusively from the office."
There are no doubt other reports showing the opposite as well. Statistical reports in economics and social sciences can produce whatever outcome is desired. The big issue for me is that with large-scale commuting we have put ourselves into a situation which is unsustainable and morally and irresponsibly wrong.
A "tailored approach" is required that allows an employee to work from home or in the office as works "best" for the employee...
Yes and no.
Before I retired I, and many of my colleagues, followed a hybrid model, which was a good balance between close contact with local colleagues and easy work with colleagues in 8hr+ different timezones. By and large it worked for us, and our manager was happy with it.
On the other hand I've worked with people who were 100% WFH and thought they were doing a great job. They were the classic "on the spectrum" solitary workers who hated human contact. They loved being able to concentrate just on their project, with no interruptions or distractions like meetings. They were completely unaware of the frustration of their team members who could never get status updates, never knew where their project was going or whether it was on track. Ultimately the manager had to call them in, and force them to talk to their colleagues, for the good of the team & the project.
It depends totally on the work, the project, the people and the job, and it isn't always the employee who will be able to decide what's "best". A mandatory 100% RTO may not be the solution, but neither is leaving it entirely to the employee, and a competent manager will know that.
"Occasionally I have been frustrated by not being able to walk to and collar someone I needed immediately, but on balance my work from home the last 4 years has been so much better for my life and for the work I am able to produce."
Not being able to be collared can do wonders for getting work done too. When I was working in an engineering office, I liked to be able to be left alone when stuck in something until I hit a natural stopping point or wanted to come up for air. Getting interrupted would break my flow and it would take a bunch of time to get back into the work I was doing.
I use ringtones on my phone to let me know who is calling or what group of somebodies is calling so I can make the decision whether I need to answer or not. A ringtone is long and distracting, but a short chime would be good for company applications. A simple clear ding could be rank and file with Big Ben a message from the boss. That would tell me if a DM while I'm working on something at home is urgent or could wait a few. Maybe I'd let somebody access an "urgent" tone if I had the ability to take that away since there's always somebody who thinks their needs are always urgent. It's a way to let people alert me to them needing a mo when I have a mo to give. A person approaching me in an office is not really ignorable and once they've loomed over me, the flow is gone anyway.
TL:DR, means can be devised to interact with others in a remote situation.
" Ultimately the manager had to call them in, and force them to talk to their colleagues" - seriously?!?
Just be thankful your "team" wasn't in another city / country / continent - sounds like your management would consider coping with that scenario to be rocket science. Yet miraculously, thousands and thousands of managers across the planet achieve it.
As for "on the spectrum" - do you really believe putting employees in stressful situations will really get the best out of them?
> seriously?!?
Yes, seriously. Conversations along the lines of "John, you're working on module X and the people working on A, B, Y and Z are stuck because they don't know where you are with the interface, or what you need from them. There's a team meeting on Thursday, you WILL be there with the information. You're delaying the project."
> sounds like your management would consider coping with that scenario to be rocket science.
Strangely enough, not. It was a large company with worldwide teams, and my last 3 managers had no problems dealing with teams distributed between India, Europe and the USA.
> do you really believe putting employees in stressful situations will really get the best out of them?
Some level of pressure can often make people rise to the challenge. If they can't cope with the work that everyone else is the team can handle, they're in the wrong job and need help to find one more suited to their abilities.
> and need help to find one more suited to their abilities
And by the way you are writing, management - and you - really did a stand-up job providing that help /s
> Some level of pressure can often make people rise to the challenge
Sounds rather like your approach is to provide that pressure - and if this isn't one of those "often" times, oops, never mind, try again with someone else. Instead of anything like tailoring the situation to the OBVIOUS differences in the people, you know, like applying actual people management skills to get the best out of individuals. Yes, those skills do exist, even if we rarely hear about.from people who have them.
> They were classic "can't walk" wheelchair workers who hated stairs.
That's a particularly ignorant and offensive comment. Have you ever worked with disabled people?
People with physical disabilities are generally only too well aware of the limitations they place on them. A wheelchair user is not going to offer to work in an office with only stairs, nor is a blnd person likely to take a job where they have to drive to work, but neither has anything to do with likes or dislikes.
People who are neurodivergent, such as those with some form of autism, sometimes are not aware of their limitations, as a consequence of their disability. Someone who struggles with social contact, and is happiest when working in isolation, may think that they are doing a great job and be totally unware that their lack of communication is an issue for coworkers.
For that reason they are not always the best people to decide if WFH is the best option for them, in the context of their job. It may be that some time in the office is a good solution, it may be that a different job is better. Either way, their manager is likely to be better placed to make that call, with their help.
>Clearly you had poor management problem and disabled workers were the scapegoats.
Scapegoats for what? We had a successful product and a great project team, precisely because we worked together to resolve issues, and didn't let everyone do their own thing heedless of the effect on the rest of the team. That's the whole point here.
Your comment didn’t reveal insight; it revealed prejudice dressed as competence. You reduced autism and introversion to managerial problems and mistook control for communication.
When you couldn’t get updates, the failure wasn’t neurological - it was managerial. A team that collapses without constant hand-holding isn’t evidence of dysfunction in others; it’s evidence of poor systems and fragile leadership.
Framing autistic people as incapable of judging what works for them is pure arrogance. The claim that a manager “knows better” than the person living the disability isn’t professionalism - it’s bias given a title.
> Framing autistic people as incapable of judging what works for them is pure arrogance.
And if you took the trouble to read and understand what I'd written you would have seen that I didn't do that.
I said that some mental characteristics, in some people, can mean that they aren't necessarily the best judges of what is best for some jobs. You're the one making it an absolutist statement, which it is not. Assuming that you know best for everyone is your arrogance, and your ignorance. As I have said repeatedly, there is no one solution that works for everyone, and you may eventually learn that.
You completely failed to take account of the other option - having a five minute phone call with their manager once a day.
Deals with all the communication requirements without compromising their ability to work well.
And they'll likely be working much better without the noise and "expected behaviour" of an office - particularly since the concept of having an office is now reserved for upper management.
I disagree. As a blind person, I've had to deal with plenty of problems caused by a disability, and I am the most knowledgeable person, at least in everywhere I've worked, about what my blindness does and does not prevent me from doing. However, there is still a set of things that it does prevent. I will not take a job which involves writing image manipulation software because most of that will require looking at the thing my code did and deciding whether it was correct. Unless there are a lot of testers who can do that with every dev build, that is a job where I am incapable of something core to the job.
From the picture they described, the problem was not people being incapable of working with a team but people who didn't want to. Whether they didn't want to because they had neurodivergences making them uncomfortable with it or if they just disliked it, it was still a choice, not an impossibility. You have changed it to an impossibility which is, in fact, insulting in itself. Here's a simple rule of thumb. If you describe something as a "they cannot" when they can, it's harmful.
But what if they actually can't? I'm not sure what disability makes you incapable of providing a summary of what you've done recently but doesn't make you incapable of doing the work itself, but let's say one exists. That could be as severe a problem to achieving the goal as my inability to test that my image manipulation code didn't accidentally mangle the content. Some things can work with no regular inter-person coordination, but it's far from all of it. If you are, in fact, claiming that there's such a disability, it would make those with it either entirely unsuitable or significantly impaired in their ability to do the job. I have known people with various types of neurodivergence and that is not what they had. If what you are saying was true, it would make the people you are trying to defend significantly less capable of doing their jobs than the description of people avoiding what they dislike. In attempting to defend them, you are not only insulting them much more strongly but making a much stronger case for simply removing them as incapable.
Being blind doesn’t make you an expert on every form of disability. You understand blindness; that doesn’t give you authority over neurodivergence.
You’re also misframing “can’t” as “won’t.” For many autistic people, forced synchronous interaction isn’t about dislike - it’s about cognitive bandwidth, sensory regulation, and the structure of the interaction itself. The ability to do complex work doesn’t automatically mean one can context-switch into constant social communication without loss.
Communication barriers in neurodivergence aren’t a moral failing or a lack of effort. They’re part of the condition - just as blindness affects vision, not motivation. Reducing that to a “choice” is precisely the thinking that keeps workplaces inaccessible.
No, but it does give me an understanding of how far a disability goes in justifying changes to a job. Let's take a specific example that is rooted in blindness. I have worked on teams which have used, as part of planning, diagrams drawn on whiteboards. That meant two things. No matter whether those are physical or virtual boards, I can't draw on them, so instead, I described my designs and we asked questions. I also can't see the diagrams that my colleagues drew, so they had to do some more talking as they did it.
The core part is that the information from the diagrams still got conveyed in both directions. It would not have worked if I said that I can't draw these diagrams, so you will learn what my design was when the code gets checked in a month from now. That would not have been acceptable. If, for some reason, that was the only alternative I was willing or able to do, then I would be unable or unwilling to do an important part of the job.
There are many jobs where coordinating with a team is a required part. The frequency and degree of coordination varies with the specifics of the job, but occasional, scheduled updates are quite common and aren't pointless. I framed "can't" as "won't" as you say because it is the more positive outcome. If coordination is required, and someone truly can't do it, then they can't do the job in the same way that I can't safely drive a car, therefore I can't do the job of a taxi driver and should not be hired to do so. Most of the neurodivergent people I know can, in fact, do it. You should be aware that "can't" is one of the legally acceptable reasons to discriminate against people with disabilities. If you are honestly making the case that person X is unable to do team meetings, that translates in the realm of employment law to person X can be dismissed or summarily rejected during hiring if team meetings are part of the job. If they actually can, especially if small changes to the plan would make massive improvements, they would be better served without jumping to the absolute statement that puts them at risk with an excessive and dangerous defense of their experience.
"They were completely unaware of the frustration of their team members who could never get status updates, never knew where their project was going or whether it was on track."
The implication there is that there was no common place where the product was checked in and visible to all. That is a management failure in setting up remote working in the first place.
Look at how FOSS projects work. Many of the participants there are your 'classic "on the spectrum"' people. They share a common version control system and often have a maintainer to whom work is passed to check in.
> The implication there is that there was no common place where the product was checked in and visible to all.
Of course there was, what has that got to do with anything? When you're working on a 30-million-line product that's been around for 15 years, with dozens of interacting modules, you can't expect everyone to read all the source code and know every interface. The "common place" was the regular meetings where we discussed issues and solutions with the subset of people who were involved, often at very inconvenient times according to worldwide locations. People who didn't participate were not helping the team.
> Look at how FOSS projects work. Many of the participants there are your 'classic "on the spectrum"' people. They share a common version control system and often have a maintainer to whom work is passed to check in.
And for tiny projects where one person can do that, it might work, but let me offer the Linux kernel as a counter-example. How well does Linus Torvalds react to people who beaver away in isolation and then just putback code without talking to the others?
" Ultimately the manager had to call them in, and force them to talk to their colleagues, for the good of the team & the project."
And that conversation couldn't possibly have happened over zoom/teams/slack/google chat/telephone/email because?
if the office was a 10min drive or walk or bus then i suspect many wouldn't mind being in the office.
i was lucky enough to find a job 5 mins walk from home.
i was able to have lunch at home and let the dog out etc.
evening changes i would go into the office and use my several screens at my desk instead of the single screen at home etc etc plus be able to focus in an empty office.
i'd changed my job by lockdown & when my monitor broke i invested in a 40" replacement.
proved invaluable for the evening & overnight changes i wound up doing especially as my laptop only had a 13" screen. The office then was only 10 miles away and pre pandemic was ~ 1 hour each way in rush hour, post pandemic when everyone was wfh it was 20 minutes each way during what was rush hour.
really made you wonder why everyone bothered coming in.
when we got outsourced we had to ask permission to go to what was once our office plus find a sponsor so naturally that didn't happen often. There was a clause in the outsourced contract that we could be asked to go to one of their offices within, i think, 30 miles of what was our main office. Obviously it was a strategy to force people out.
>> The time I spent commuting from High Wycombe into London was equivalent to two full working days a week - for which I was NOT paid.
And presumably you knew this when you took the job.
While you are travelling, were you working for the boss? If not, why should you be paid for it? Salaries within London are generally higher than outside because this takes into account commuting. By your logic, if you needed a plumber in High Wycombe and he came from central London you would not pay him travelling time. Just free use of his time as he moans his way towards you.
If you don't like the way that things are you can start your own company. Then find local staff who can walk to work with a smile on their faces.
(a) Note that nowhere did I say that I expected to be paid to travel. What I said was that the travel necessitated by commuting was equivalent to two full days work and that it was unpaid.
(b) We have structured our society in such a way that most corporate jobs are in conurbations so large that they typically need catchment areas of at least a thousand square miles to house the workers. This is an unbelievably stupid situation and, at least in the UK, it didn't happen by accident. It was planned. Post-war planning looked in horror at the C19th housing huddled around c19th factories which were often polluting and decided that mass transport and the motor car could enable living spaces and work spaces to be separated without asking how it would scale.
(c) I would have not have needed to engage a plumber I wouldn't have engaged one from central London. Plumbers work locally. Is that the best you can do?
(d) Eventually I did form my own company.
"We have structured our society in such a way that most corporate jobs are in conurbations so large that they typically need catchment areas of at least a thousand square miles to house the workers. "
At one time, it was necessary to have everybody in one office due to difficult/slow communications. Often, there were business districts dedicated to a product such as jewelry, garments, food, etc. Many jewelers would be able to specialize in doing one thing such as ring settings and sell those to a gem house to add a stone and they would market the complete ring to retailers. Interactions would be facilitated by walking a few minutes to another office in the same building or a block up the street. There are still those districts that live on mainly due to the building and office setups continuing to be relevant to those businesses. Their business isn't done face to face and hasn't been for some time now. Common carriers visit office everyday with packages to just about everywhere and overnight services can be cheaper than spending an hour or two to hand deliver something. Websites and digital photos have replaced salespeople bringing a sample case to a customer.
But the same rules apply, if you didn't like the fact you spent so long commuting each way and so much 'unpaid' time you wasted each week travelling you could of moved job to a different job that was closer to home. High Wycombe is not exactly a high unemployment area.
Everyone that commutes to work is doing so because it is the job they chose to do. You aren't at work whilst commuting so why would your empoloyer pay you. Not only that but if they did pay you then you would need business insurance in any vehicle you drove in and their insurance would need to cover you for injury whilst out of office but on your way in.
The motorways are full of people commuting every day because it is their choice to do that job on that salary. As other have said if you dont like it change job.
I left a fairly secure job to become self employed and earned a lot more money up in London, it was my choice and I had to pay lots of money for insurances etc. that i never had to do as an employee.
When a company that owed me for 9 months work was trying evrything possible not to pay it was my choice to take them to court for the money which would of been stressful on myself and family. Instead I made a decision to up and move from the south east back to the small village in the north I had grown up in. After a few months I started working for a company that was a 90% pay cut compared to what I could possibly earn in London in a different career path altogether. It was under half the salary I had at my emploer before going self employed.
but as an individual I was happy and less stressed as were my family. I bought my house in the north for cash, spent £40K on an extension mainly for our dogs. So yes I was lucky I had no mortgage for many years before.
Do I regret spending 20 years of my life working in the SE and London - No. Do I regret moving back north and miss all the money opportunities - No.
I changed employer again after a few years and ended up commuting 1 1/2 hours each way, more on days ofsitting with other 'friends of the M6'
I left that position and took another pay cut again to be only having to travel 5 miles each way. Even that became a drag and I gave it all up to become my wifes carer and I will do bits of work if and when i choose to do so.
Yes I have the luxury of having no mortgage, of choosing to drive my 15 year old car rather than buy myself a new 'shiny' of feeling very comfortable with my lifestyle that is very basic and simple.
Not everyone by age 35 has paid their mortgage off and can spend the next 30 years living without any debt or loans for anything. But it is ultimately down to individuals what they want to chase in life, worldly goods and perceived image of success.
It isnt up to companies to provide you with a well paid job that you can work from home. Having worked at a research establishment that started to allow certain 'administrative' staff to work at home 3 days a week well before the pandemic I can safely say that they were not more productive whilst out of the office. Indeed responsibilities they had to organise documentation to access laboratories had no way of being carried out when they were working from home. Not that they ever did much even when in the office the first thing they did every day was login to facebook NOT the companies database system.
That was a senior managers decision and so they also could never be found 3 days a week unless you chose to call their local golf course.
People at all work levels can be shirkers it's up to those even higher up the food chain to pull them up for it.
My philosophy is that if I am an employee of a company they are buying an agreed number of hours per week off me for my work, which I will carry out to the best of my ability. But don't ask me to work overtime or weekends paid or unpaid at stupidly short notice - example at less than a minutes notice at the end of a day. My time is my time. If I wasn't happy with how things were playing out I voted with my feet and left to do work I was happier to be doing instead.
> If I wasn't happy with how things were playing out I voted with my feet and left to do work I was happier to be doing instead.
Good for you.
Glad to hear that you were in such a privileged position that you managed to do that.
Your single anecdote has been noted.
Doctor Syntax:
There's still a tendency of companies to choose business locations that are in big cities or certain regions (Silicon Valley) for outdated reasons. This makes it a requirement that employees commute. The companies also all adopt the same business day so all of those employees are commuting at the same time as well. Not only is the commuting a drain, the demand on transportation winds up having to be built to handle those peaks which leaves it mostly unused at other times.
Having offices dispersed is not a big deal these days with the level of communications available. Putting marketing and accounting in different cities isn't likely to disrupt "synergies" from those groups not being able to mingle at the water cooler.
I too grew up in the Pennines although the mills were in decline at the time. But there were a lot of other, skilled jobs in the vicinity and 'Rush Hour' lasted about 20 minutes as people walked, cycled (hard work uphill), bussed, motor-cycled or very occasionally, drove.
Years later and sadly no-longer Pennine, work involved being in the office: Proximity to the factory was important, and I enjoyed the inevitable social interaction that working in a busy business involved. We had some very clever people who were approachable to discuss various technical issues which were outside my particular area of expertise. Ideas developed. On the other hand, there was never any real fuss if someone asked to work from home, in order to concentrate on a particular nutty issue.
Later still, when remote working became more widespread for whatever reason, some of that close-personal interplay was missed but never entirely lost. Our bosses were interested in what we were doing and encouraged 'thinking'.
These days, I'm not sure if those intermediate managers know what their staff are doing and so feel they have lost an empire. I see that type as a potential cost-saving. A good manager knows what is going on and provides the buffer to the 'strategists' at the top. A bad manager is a salary wasted.
Hmm those who slack off when wfh are just as likely to do it when in the office.
I was wfh on Wednesday but needed to get a flu jab, not a problem as I put a calendar entry in so that people knew I wasn’t available - my manager knew about this in advance. On Monday and Tuesday I was wfh before being in the office Thursday for an external supplier meeting and then in on Friday for a design workshop.
However depending on what I need to do I can be in the office far more than that during a week. The important thing is that I have jabs that need to be delivered and those get done, sometimes working at home I can be on calls starting at 5pm and running for a few hours as the company has offices worldwide, so if I need to deal with people in California they start work when I finish, mind you I ran a knowledge transfer session and had one of the USA people on the call which was 10 AM uk time - which was unexpected and I said I would run it again for him later in the day so he could go back to sleep but…..
Just because you are against wfh doesn’t mean the same applies to everyone. Would you expect a field repair engineer to go and sit in an office and wait for a call?
I was a field service engineer working for a small but very efficient firm. My working day officially started at 8:30 and the office was just under an hour away. If there was an urgent job already waiting I'd go straight there. Sometimes it was to release another engineer who'd picked it up on a night call-out. Other times, if doing software development I'd stay at home. I probably ended up going into the office about twice a week - mostly to pick up supplies. Every 2 months there was a general meeting including a free breakfast at a local hostelry to keep everyone up-to-date.
As I said to the boss, I'll stop work when it's no longer fun - I worked 5 years beyond official retirement age. I still drop in to the office if I'm in the area. It's nice to stay in touch with people who became friends.
"It seems there are a lot of entitled people around. "
Of course. You know, people who know what they are doing and are good at it. The people company actually needs to run, instead of incompetent people herders.
Management sock puppet like you of course wouldn't know anything about that and it shows in every comment.
How much they pay you for trolling, by the way?
"bums-on-office-seats becomes an important KPI"
And, of course, measuring inputs rather than outputs is not really a KPI at all. It is SOP in government. Ministers will loudly declare how much they're spending on this or that matter of concern but seldom have anything to say about results.
"Ministers will loudly declare how much they're spending on this or that matter of concern but seldom have anything to say about results."
The usual refrain I see is how many jobs such and such measure has created. Even if it's just a mess of construction jobs for 6 months to build a data center that will hire some minimum wage security staff once completed. If it's obvious there won't be any jobs, they'll crow about economic activity while ignoring that the giant conglomerate will not be spending any money in the local economy and directing the revenue to the Caymans for tax reasons.
when offshoring on the cheap (as is normally the case)
This is very often the biggest issue. India (and similar countries) have some very talented engineers but they tend to command a decent salary and quality of life, so they are unlikely to work for the lowest-bidding outsource agency.
if the minister wants to know
Minister wants to know or investment funds behind coffee chains and other high street traps or landlords leasing commercial estate to government?
Conversely, economy is dying let's force civil servants to spend money!
"Have you ever actually been in an office with lots of staff?"
Yes, indeed. There was the desk reorganisation where a group with a very noisy dot-matrix printer was relocated right behind me.
And the time that some one very important in the business came on a visit say the portionless call centre and pronounced it good so all the desks in IT had their partitions and the shelves they supported removed over the weekend. My row of reference manuals which had been within arm's reach ended up permanently on a windowsill some distance away.
The people who come up with this garbage don't actually do any work in the sort of offices they want to see the people in. If they're in the building they have a private office and probably a good deal of time is spent meeting people away from the company's office. Not that there's anything wrong with either of those situations but it does mean that they don't have the experience of trying to work in the circumstances that they think are so productive.
I doubt that the occasional quick word - and, yes, I understand that from experience - is sufficient to to compensate for the losses of a badly organised open plan office. And that's before the entirely unnecessary not very quick words from a PM who has nothing better to do than wander up to break one's concentration, entirely, of course, lacking the awareness of that concentration or of the damage done.
@VoiceOfTruth "I agree there are some very badly "designed" offices. While noisy, the ability to have a quick word with somebody in person is invaluable."
You know it is just really lucky that IT as a profession does not attract neurodivergent people.
Just imagine how hard it would be for someone with an Autistic Spectrum Personality (ASP) to work in a large open plan office with all of the noisy social activity going on.
Yeah, it's really lucky that there are no ASPs in the IT industry. It saves companies a lot of money that would otherwise be wasted on people friendly offices.
/s
Badly designed offices, can you imagine working in those little partitioned cubicle spaces like a battery hen as seen in 1980s American TV comedies and films?
I don’t know if they we real or not, or something fictional for entertainment but totally repulsive idea anyway and not something I would tolerate.
When I started at budget insurance back in 1997 the sales floor (where I didn’t work) was a maze of cubicles where nobody could see more than a 2 or 3 desks around, the desks were about 6 foot tall so you couldn’t even see people by standing up.
They also had desks sized based on role, one person got promoted and was entitled to another 4 inches of desk, they had to move 100 desks to give them the room.
Fortunately by the time I left 20 years later the desks were open plan better spaces and standard between grades so no more silly furniture moves (what has happened in the last 8 years I only know from old aqaintances who I happen to live near.
My current employer everyone except for head of department level gets the same desks, the head of department usually have an office.
|They are / were real. Not so much in Europe but in the US in 80's and 90's for sure. Used to walk around in the afternoon and people would be having a snooze. There were people working on the same team in adjacent cubes that didn't know what the other guy was doing. Thing is Europe has been open plan for as long as I can remember going back into the early 80's and not been an issue.
"and not been an issue."
It certainly is an issue - you can hear every conversation going on on the room.
And home workers on Zoom / Teams often can't hear what the onsite employee is saying because of the lack of self awareness from their noisy colleagues.
"Thing is Europe has been open plan for as long as I can remember going back into the early 80's and not been an issue."
That's BS. Try early 00s or so. Until very late 80s everyone had their own office, me included. Possible shared with one or 2 people, but still your own space.
Replacing those with cubicles was a stupid idea and removing cubicles was even more stupid idea. It is and has been a problem since day one to anyone who actually tries to work in such a space.
It's not a problem to management as it's a money saver and I don't have to guess which group AC belongs to.
has been a problem since day one to anyone who actually tries to work in such a space.
Was never a problem for me. I enjoyed seeing and being able to talk to anyone. Just got on with it, people talked on phones and were appropriately quiet about it. It just seemed to work.
But best of all, you could have conversations with your colleagues whilst you worked and if you needed to focus then we all learned to read the situation and act accordingly. It is fortunate that we have technology now for working from home so we can still do this. I am-co-working on a project right now and the audio between 5 of us is permanently open.
Being isolated in an office like those 80s American comedies is like working from home with just a landline and terminal, but having to commute do it. When did that shit stop? In the 90s? Good riddance.
>> all the desks in IT had their partitions and the shelves they supported removed over the weekend.
We *literally* had the CEO (who does not have an office onsite) walk in and tell us that removing the partitions made it "look better" when - once or twice a year, max - new clients wanted a look at the workforce "so they can see how many people we have to put on their project" (we had mostly had repeat contracts from clients who knew that we existed).
> While noisy, the ability to have a quick word with somebody in person is invaluable.
Having full-height partitions cuts down the noise and has *never* prevented anyone having a quick word: walk over, pop your head round the partition, say hello and have a word. You can even lean on the partition, taking a non-threatening posture.
UNLESS your definition of "a quick word" is restricted purely to standing up and calling across the room, making sure you disturb everybody else in the room. Oh, wait "while noisy" - yes, that IS precisely what you mean.
A noisy environment - the best environment to encourage any paper/screen/knowledge-based work.
And why is in person better than a quick call, after a message to check you aren't interrupting anything important.
The time wasted to "quick" interruptions can be many times longer than the interruption as you get back into the problem that you were deep into trying to solve.
"Lots of staff usually means numerous people know how to connect to conference monitors. Such information may well be published somewhere for staff to use."
So the hack is a consequence of the collaboration, communication and cross-pollination etc. of working in the Office.
Ford management should be pleased with this evidence that it's all going so well.
If supply and demand of job vacancies and job seekers were distributed in such a way that job seekers in all professions could choose from as many jobs in their area as employers can normally choose from applicants, when-you-work-for-the-man-you-work-for-the-man style employers would have eliminated themselves long ago. Unfortunately, this is not quite the case. Nevertheless, those who act like this will lose many more good employees to others than, well, others, and that is of course a good thing. Too bad they tend to neither notice nor learn. Which is also one of the reasons why we need more, not less, workers rights and unions and work councils.
If the man is paying for an ego trip.
But birthday parades are only part of a job.
If you join a company then you should be working towards the aims and for the interests of the company.
Managing likewise.
Primates are a bit more complicated than that but bear it in mind.
(If you work in the health service, you work for your patients, comm7nity, and for all mankind. And some people should remember that, also, or be reminded of it.)
t won't be long before they are outsourced to India.
Perhaps if and when the time comes, Ford will consider outsourcing their IT function to TCS - after all, TCS have real first hand experience in providing exemplary IT services to Jaguar Land Rover. What could go wrong?
This would depend entirely on the contract of employment.
If you signed the contract which has you work in an office, but you've been allowed to work from home: The employer has the right to demand you honour the terms of your contract and get your arse into that office.
If you signed a contract for hybrid work: It should say how many days you need to be in the office for. Here it's been 2 days. Now, if you never bothered showing your face: Your employer has that legal right to demand you get your arse into the office for those two days. If you're already in for those two days: Your employer would be breaking the terms of your contract to insist on more days in the office.
If you signed the contact that has you remote work (Work from home) the your employer can't insist you go into the office to work: That is breaking the terms of your contract.
Now, saying all that: Depending on where you work, this could be meaningless: If you're on an 'at will' contract: You either accept the changes or you're looking for a new job. If you've employment protection, however... that's when the terms of the contract come into play.
Yes, we're going though something like this at the moment, so am familiarising myself with what it all means. Although, specifically, they're shutting offices and moving people from office based to home based so we're not looking at RTO, we're looking at being requried to WFH. Awkward if you don't have an office set up at home...
If you can outsource/offshore to India you don’t need RTO bums on seats in Dearborn illustrating the pointing out being presenteeism.
As with the last 5 decades just fucking US workers off for cheap.
Maybe a 500,000K new HQ was all that was needed…. If that.
It's not clear from the article but the desktop wallpaper was probably set by Group Policy. Usually a Domain Admin would need to change the policy. Though it might be possible for a non-IT person to change the file referenced in the policy if a) they knew where the file was located and b) if they had the right file permission. Another possibility is the device itself shows an image when nothing is connected (I've seen projectors with this feature). Anyone who knew the device password (which might be left as the default) could then change the image on each device. My bet is Group Policy though.
"And good luck sitting anywhere close to your team ... even though 'collaboration' was allegedly the goal. Nah, this is attrition to get people to quit on their own so they don't have to pay for layoffs."
Meanwhile in BMW's Munich office, the first member of any team to arrive places beach towels on the seats in the area that the team desires...
Hacking the monitors requires knowledge of the network infrastructure - something far beyond what your average pen pusher could pull off.
Absolutely not. Conference monitors are designed to be easy to update with new content. That's the entire point of having them!
Often, it means uploading something to the right place in Sharepoint. Or even clicking the button on the Clickshare.
This was almost certainly done by someone authorised to change the content, which puts them in IT, Marketing, Sales, Demo, Events, Management... Pretty much every department except factory floor, cleaning and callcentre.
The main drivers are:
- C-Suite members who are personally heavily invested commercial real estate
- Company taxes, as leased/owned real estate are not tax deductable unless butts are in seats
The main fallout for companies is those who have talent will move on while the deadwood will be back in the office, anxious to look busy which is hard to do when you're at home.
The company I work for chose to drop a lot of real estate leases and make WFH a permanent thing. They have no problems measuring productivity either, and they don't even use a keystroke logger to do so. I have about 50 metrics, measured constantly and aggregated each month, which I must meet to keep my job. I work a four 10s schedule, and realistically can meet my numbers for the month working just 3 hours per day while screwing off the other 7. For example, it's only Oct 4, and I've already worked half the number of tickets I need to close out to meet my minimum for the month. And, I exceed the requirements each month.
If they were to do a RTO, my numbers would fall dramatically because my customer calls would take longer due to cow-orkers babbling drowning the customers out. Then there are the time suck slackers who interfere with my productivity to bullshit while holding a sheet of paper. From 10 feet away they appear to be diligently working to further the business of the company, in reality they're babbling about sports or shopping. Then there's Hadji Shrimpeater, who has takeaway fried seafood curry for dinner every night and microwaves his leftovers at 10:45AM every stinking day. None of this includes the vast majority of sluggards who seem to know nothing of the ancient mystic arts of Toothbru Shing or Arsewa Shing. No, the office is nothing more than a receptacle for disease, offensive smells and inane bullshit that I do not ever plan to partake of again.
"- C-Suite members who are personally heavily invested commercial real estate
- Company taxes, as leased/owned real estate are not tax deductable unless butts are in seats"
Time to get out of commercial office real estate and to overcome point 2, use that space for whoever wants to work in the office. There are people that would like to go to work as they don't have a good way to WFH. That makes the space deductible, yet won't incur the cost of a whole office full of people and those that are there can have as large of a desk as they like. For HVAC, it would likely make sense to partition the "office" space so it's smaller. Sub-lease the extra space to another company on a temp basis until the whole schmear can be liquidated.
So we do the morning sorta-agile standup and part of that is a very short bullet list of what you did yesterday
Usually for me it's 6 or 7 things, but on Thursdays after my Wednesday in-the-office it's one and sometimes I just have to say "I got pretty much nothing done, I was in the office"
And I'm not the only one.
However I also have to say Teams fights us tooth-and-nail when trying to do impromptu phone meetings with screen sharing. It's usually 5-10 minutes of "no, I can't see your screen"
We're supposed to back in the office after New Year's and 80% of the people are leaving. I know at least 2 projects (including mine) that no longer will be able to deliver on their contracts.
Rather amusing/"totally unexpected" story in Oz media recently. Chap had booked some time off, decided to set aside a day to go and talk to the people he kept amazedly and jealously seeing out the window having fun on the beach every day, surfing every day, etc. While HE was at work every day, working.
Standard response was: "I'm working from home."
There's a very scope-limited set of types & also number of jobs which can be done remotely, and only up to slightly-better-than-average level. (Minor exception to the last: pure IT system-admin roles can run higher on the max skill scope limit.) (Worth noting that the tiny subset remaining of ElReg's commentards are overwhelmingly in these subsets.)
But they're crippled on face-to-face teamwork benefits.
And they're crippled on learning speed. Death to juniors.
And it really shows, once your needs get above the median. Eg, emergency. Or just high aspirations.
And it really shows, as time goes on. Burning capital ALWAYS looks good; hell, GREAT. For a while. Then goes horribly wrong.
This is quite a good example. Posted by another chap here on a different topic but on precisely the same theme.
"Vibe Coding is a Dangerous Fantasy", Namanyay Goel.
“invisible complexity gap”
"you don’t know what you don’t know"
Everything looks good for a while as you burn through your buffer (luck, trust, social capital).
Then your ignorance/dismissal of the fact that your technical problem is just one tiny part of a much larger technical and social/culture network of factors, "unexpectedly" creates "unexpected" problems.
Ford just built a new corporate headquarters building and is just moving in, so if they don't get asses in the seats they look stupid.
With over 1.3 million cars recalled this year alone, they look stupid anyways but building a new office after promising wfh, and now pulling this shit, they look real stupid.
They may be an expectation for WFH by some employees but they have never promised wfh and never changed the contracts to say that for existing or new hires. In fact they have built a massive new headquarters and purchased the old train station in preparation for RTO. What did employees think the buildings were going to be used for.
"11.7% of office building loans are now in default - worse than the 2008 financial crisis peak of 10.7%. This means roughly 1 in 9 office buildings can’t pay their mortgages."
Those mortgages are bundled into junk securities. Which are held by retirement accounts, etc.
Nothing to see here...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
