Lyft Demands Employees Return to Office in September (spokesman.com) 131
"Since the pandemic began, Lyft employees have been able to work remotely," notes the New York Times, "logging into videoconferences from their homes and dispersing across the country like many other tech workers. Last year, the company made that policy official, telling staff that work would be 'fully flexible' and subleasing floors of its offices in San Francisco and elsewhere."
No longer. On Friday, David Risher, the company's new chief executive, told employees in an all-hands meeting that they would be required to come back into the office at least three days a week, starting this fall. [Although the Times adds later that "People will be allowed to work remotely for one month each year, and those living far from offices would not be required to come in."]
It was one of the first major changes he has made at the struggling ride-hailing company since starting this month, and it came just a day after he laid off 26 percent of Lyft's work force. "Things just move faster when you're face to face," Mr. Risher said in an interview. Remote work in the tech industry, he said, had come at a cost, leading to isolation and eroding culture. "There's a real feeling of satisfaction that comes from working together at a whiteboard on a problem."
The decision, combined with the layoffs and other changes, signals the beginning of a new chapter at Lyft. It could also be an indication that some tech companies — particularly firms that are struggling — may be changing their minds on flexibility about where employees work. Nudges toward working in the office could soon turn into demands, as they have at companies like Disney and Apple...
Lyft also planned to tell employees that it would reduce their stock grants this year, according to a person familiar with the decision.
Risher "said the cost savings from the layoffs would go toward lower prices for riders and higher earnings for drivers," the Times adds, noting that last month Lyft's two founders said they'd step down after disappointing financial results. (Lyft's stock price closed Friday at $10.25 — down from a peak of $78.)
Bob Sutton, a Stanford professor and organizational psychologist, suggests another possible motivation to the Times: executives worried about financial stress "feel compelled to increase their own illusion of control."
It was one of the first major changes he has made at the struggling ride-hailing company since starting this month, and it came just a day after he laid off 26 percent of Lyft's work force. "Things just move faster when you're face to face," Mr. Risher said in an interview. Remote work in the tech industry, he said, had come at a cost, leading to isolation and eroding culture. "There's a real feeling of satisfaction that comes from working together at a whiteboard on a problem."
The decision, combined with the layoffs and other changes, signals the beginning of a new chapter at Lyft. It could also be an indication that some tech companies — particularly firms that are struggling — may be changing their minds on flexibility about where employees work. Nudges toward working in the office could soon turn into demands, as they have at companies like Disney and Apple...
Lyft also planned to tell employees that it would reduce their stock grants this year, according to a person familiar with the decision.
Risher "said the cost savings from the layoffs would go toward lower prices for riders and higher earnings for drivers," the Times adds, noting that last month Lyft's two founders said they'd step down after disappointing financial results. (Lyft's stock price closed Friday at $10.25 — down from a peak of $78.)
Bob Sutton, a Stanford professor and organizational psychologist, suggests another possible motivation to the Times: executives worried about financial stress "feel compelled to increase their own illusion of control."
A good decision (Score:2, Insightful)
It would further accellerate Lyft's fall.
Competent employees will look for work somewhere else, while incompetent ones, who know their prospects of finding something else are slim, will come to the office and dick around like usual.
Yes, I know I'm oversimplifying. Time will tell, though.
Re:A good decision (Score:4, Insightful)
They know people will quit over this, and that's the goal.
Re:A good decision (Score:5, Insightful)
Could be, but it's a stupid method. The better ones will quit first, and the chaff will remain.
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Therefore the Human Remains Mangling department have already collected the data they need for a redundancy round (yeah, I know : this is in America ; if you've been hired, you can be fired at will, without notice). And if there are particularly good staff they want to retain, then individual deals can be cut.
Re:A good decision (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the worst way to get rid of people, because you lose exactly the people you want to retain: The good ones.
Who is more likely to find something new, someone who is actively pursuing his goals, who hones his skills and has marketable skills or a slacker who can't be bothered to move his own ass to further his own goals, let alone that of the company he works for?
Re: A good decision (Score:2)
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How would forcing people to work there make up for that loss?
It only justifies the expense, and it does so for subjective reasons.
To make a stupid, but apt analogy, it's like me building a nice dog kennel and then force my dog to stay in, even if it doesn't like it. I will have an unhappy dog who will try to escape all the time, but I feel good because "my investment is now worth something".
"Illusion of control". Yep, fits well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Incidentally, this is basically what everybody with a clue says: This is in no way about productivity, and in many situation _decreases_ productivity. It is merely about "managers" that want more control. In most cases this control will indeed be entirely illusional. This is not slave-labor. As an added factor making this stupid, employees that do not want to return to the office will look for alternatives, and the best ones will find them first. Hence this decreases average employee quality up to the point where only those with no alternative are left. At the same time, prospective employee quality will drop for the same reason. Hopefully companies with leadership this bad will eventually be unable to find anybody qualified that is willing to work for them.
In sum, this is leadership incompetence. Nothing else.
Bad Management that has to see asses in chairs (Score:4, Interesting)
We fight the same battle. Most of our group is remote has been since the pandemic. We've been FAR more productive than other groups that are back full time. Some of us HAVE to go in 1 day a week. They tried to hire more people with the stipulation of being in the office full time. NO ONE APPLIED. They don't realize it but they are about to loose more folks. I don't get we have tools to track that work is being done. We meet every crazy deadline forced on us, it's still not good enough if they can't see your ass in a chair. Baffling.
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Extreme denial of reality is what this is. "Leaders" with below-average skills to see reality and with huge egos. My take is that medium-term, companies that do not adapt will simply go under because they cannot compete anymore. Your "NO ONE APPLIED" is really the writing on the wall. You have to actively look away to not see it.
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Partly, but I also see it as another thing - a layoff, but without calling it a layoff.
Force a return to work, and everyone who doesn't want to can quit. Voila, you just laid off 50% of your workforce, but you didn't have to pay severance or deal with other pesky things during a layoff.
Layoffs are trendy, and I'm sure while Lyft already did a big layoff, they need to lay off more people, so they'
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This is about as stupid as it gets, because you're losing exactly the 50% of your workforce that you should try to retain: The productive ones who can very easily find another job. What you retain is the 50% that cannot because they have no marketable skills and are already dead weight for you.
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Indeed. One of the more reliable ways to slowly kill a company.
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Layoffs have that effect as well. You might be able to lay off the crap people that way, but the good people see the writing on the wall and also head for the hills.
In effect, the people you keep after the layoffs are
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They don't see the writing on the wall, they see that they're expected to do twice the work for no more money and tell their managers to stick it.
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Well, possibly. But that is even less smart, because this way you keep the dross.
For our company, it's basically hybrid. You don't have to come in, but the office has special tools and hardware, and if you need to use them, you gotta come in. But the scheduling is completely up to you - if you need to access the hardware tomorrow, you come in tomorrow. If you don't, you work from home.
Nothing wrong with that. Something like this obviously makes sense.
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"Leaders" with below-average skills to see reality and with huge egos.
"Leaders" who are incompetent get to retain the incompetent portion of their workforce.
The system works.
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Well, "A" players hire "A" players, but "B" players hire "C" players. The same is true for employee retention.
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That's what I like about my current boss. He hires people who know more about the shit they're supposed to do than he does. He doesn't have to know more, he has a different job. His job is to make sure I have my resources in the correct amount at the right time.
We know how to do our jobs. We don't need someone to tell us this. We need someone who gets the resources we need and keeps the assholes from bothering us. And that's what he's great at.
Not gonna trade him for anything!
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With all the big tech layoffs recently, I don't think that you'll have to wait too much longer to get people who are desperate enough to go back to working in a cubicle or an open office. At this point, the COVID stimmies have all been spent and the extended unemployment benefits are all gone. It's time to get a sucky new job or go broke while waiting for a good one to appear!
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The stimulus and unemployment dried up a long time ago. Only those who are desperate to not see how crappy it is to work for them are still clinging to that excuse.
Re: "Illusion of control". Yep, fits well. (Score:2)
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Indeed. And to save face wrt that ludicrously overpriced commercial real estate that they never should have bound themselves to in the first place. Bet they have difficulty subleasing now.
"There's a real feeling of satisfaction that comes from working together at a whiteboard on a problem."
There's a feeling of satisfaction from chopping kindling. Whiteboards, not so much. Sophistry.
I'd used Lyft when possible because Uber had been so slimy. Now they're equally unappealing.
Re: "Illusion of control". Yep, fits well. (Score:4, Insightful)
In my experience, the vast majority of "white board" type meetings were between my teams as tech people trying to convince management of things that needed attention - equipment upgrades, system/network expansion, etc. (e.g. growth and avoiding tech debt), and it rarely worked (because they wanted a spreadsheet instead). Maybe occasionally showing a new employee a general overview of things (but in those cases, we should have had documentation to show that, not a half-assed sketch on a white board).
The real work between team members would be discussions, followed by someone drawing something up (e.g. Visio or the like for diagrams of networks and such, or actual DB schemas and at least pseudo code for development), sending it out, and follow-up comments (mostly by email/chat).
Executives somehow seem to think "collaboration" is like students sleeping a with a textbook under their pillow to "learn". Cram a bunch of people in a too-small room with little or no divisions and MAGIC HAPPENS.
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Executives somehow seem to think "collaboration" is like students sleeping a with a textbook under their pillow to "learn". Cram a bunch of people in a too-small room with little or no divisions and MAGIC HAPPENS.
Pretty much this. Collaboration is two or three people sitting in a quiet room working together on the same project. It does NOT happen in a noisy place where you can't even hear your own thoughts, let along the person trying to tell you something.
Any manager who thinks open plan floors are a great idea can work in one. I won't.
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Any manager who thinks open plan floors are a great idea can work in one.
It is a great idea! (For his costs line-item and his bonus. Employee efficiency? Productivity? He can offload that to HR and make it their problem.)
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For budgetary needs, certainly. Management has limited resources and their job is to distribute those resources in accordance to needs of each worker depending on their productivity and relevance to each project. You need to convince them that your needs are in fact X and that your relevance to the project is high enough that X needs to be met. Your co-workers will have the exact same interest, except that their interest is to compete for the same resources to be given to them instead.
A lot of this sort of
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Hmm, what's more likely? Incompetent workers getting stuff done on time, or incompetent managers who can't tell you what "productive' means except "in a chair for 12 hours / day"?
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The person you answered to is probably scared to death of this change because suddenly it will become obvious he cannot deliver. "Office troll" is a good characterization. Probably has coasted along on the productivity of others forever. And now that undeserved meal-ticket is about to go away. Of course he would be arguing for a return to the office.
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Indeed. Does fit very well. People trying to make things worse for a lot of others so that they have a bit of an easier life.
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Why are you so utterly focused on "incompetence", when the question is about "suitability"? Most people aren't suited for full time work from home, which is why they returned to work at office either part time or full time. I list a good amount of reason in my follow up posts, and you can find a few people from the majority who tell you about specific problems they faced. Those problems are real, and have nothing to do with "competence" or lack of it.
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Talk about being in denial and stuck in the past. Your claims have no merit. Your AdHominem is just invalid. I guess history will leave you behind. Good luck!
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Do you realize that most of remote work trend is now in fact "in the past" and present is about people having mostly returned to the offices? The fight is in fact over the minority remnants of the "full time work from home" crowd being dragged kicking and screaming into the present to do partial office and partial work from home, which majority settled on about a year ago.
Re: "Illusion of control". Yep, fits well. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are no severe problems with remote work where the only solution is a commute to a wasteful, antique office space. The thing about remote work is that the results of productivity, as well as the lack thereof, are immediately apparent. This illusion some folks keep bleating about remote work somehow equates to jerking off all day simply does not exist. The fact is, if you are working remotely and you are not pulling your weight then only the most incompetent, oblivious manager is not going to notice. I would argue that the opposite is true when you have to go into an office, because it is very easy to give the appearance of being busy while actually producing nothing of significant value to the company. Need to look important? Schedule a useless meeting so you can point at charts! Need to look busy? Walk around the office with a clipboard and a serious expression on your face!
I think we can do without the creation of nonexistent problems where the only solution is a return to the old ways of wasteful commutes to energy hogging office spaces. There is nothing you can do in an office that cannot be done just as well remotely. The only people insisting otherwise are the annoying extroverts who treat the workplace as a place where they can socialize and gossip, or the people who have skin in the commercial real estate game and are seeing their precious profits take a nosedive. Either way, nothing of value is lost if either group does not get what they want.
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I'm finding this genuinely interesting how different opinions on slashdot are on this topic from pretty much every discussion I had on this topic in real life. They're the exact opposite in fact.
Reply by excelsior_gr below is very close to what I hear from a lot of people. But it's very much not an opinion of majority of people on slashdot. And I suspect this has to do with nerds being generally very poor at face to face communication, which means that face to face interactions feel either useless or active
Re: "Illusion of control". Yep, fits well. (Score:2)
I think the tendency for pro-office advocates to just assume that people who prefer working remotely are somehow socially deficient is a problem.
It is not a question of social awkwardness or an inability to communicate effectively that drives most of us to want to work from home. The question is really how relevant the alleged benefits of working in an office are as it relates to actually solving problems and being productive. I have yet to see any point raised that is so unique in nature that the only way
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This entire post appears to be a fight against windmills of "people are social creatures". No amount of handwaving, or pointing out that autistic people have genuine trouble being social will change the fact that humans as species are social creatures. We evolved this way, and you're not some kind of a new species that dumped the "social" aspect from homo sapiens.
Like I noted elsewhere, and like at least one poster has already stated, the issue on slashdot seems to be the significant overrepresentation of p
Re: "Illusion of control". Yep, fits well. (Score:2)
The problem with your argument is that you have still failed to point out anything that is done in an office that cannot also be done just as well in a remote setting. Instead you conflate socializing with working and appear to suggest that people who do not want to work in an office must be on the spectrum or at the very least are incapable of socializing with their fellow humans.
I never said humans are not social creatures. I just do not recognize the workplace as being an appropriate venue to socialize.
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>The problem with your argument is that you have still failed to point out anything that is done in an office that cannot also be done just as well in a remote setting
Communication. Literally what I started with. This is the elephant in the room, projectile vomiting and having explosive diarrhea at the same time, and you're going "this smells so nice in this empty room" as you're getting covered in layer after layer of liquid feces and half digested food.
No. It doesn't.
And no, "communication" is not syno
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Meetings that require a white board are already in a state of reduced efficiency in my experience.
I mean, have you seen the handwriting of the average manager?
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Yes. But since it's a white board meeting, I can ask. I can also infer a lot from non-verbal language used.
Former is much more difficult in online mode with "raise your hand" style features just to be allowed to speak in large meetings and latter is simply unavailable.
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I cannot.
I'm an autist. Non-verbal communication is lost to me. I actually benefit from this conversation we have right now more than a conversation we have face to face, because I'd be at a disadvantage towards you.
Now explain to me why the fuck I'd want to engage in a face-to-face communication with you.
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Funny, that was exactly my point in other posts on this topic. That the reason why slashdot is so hostile to concept of local work is because there are so many people on autistic spectrum here.
But world doesn't revolve around handicapped people. We can make some adjustments to help those that are less capable than normal people when we live in extreme modern opulence of modern Western nations, but when you start going with Handicapper General level of adjustments, everyone loses. Because while autistic, you
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No, but I genuinely enjoyed watching people stumble about in the darkness for the past 3 years in online meetings. "Walking a mile in my boots" comes to mind, and frankly, I want you to.
Learn to walk. I'm not coming back. What you'll also find out about "us autists" is that a lot of us actually have very valuable skill sets. And that means that yes, we get to say that the lights stay off and you get to stumble about in the darkness because we like it better that way.
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Then society will do what it always did. Route around the individual going "I'm out", just like internet routes around a single node going offline. No one is replaceable, and if your terms are "put your eyes out, because I'm blind and I want you to suffer like me", people will simply turn around and walk away. En masse.
Which is why I'm really not recommending you try. Humans are evolved to survive. And they can be very, very cruel in doing so.
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Fine with me.
The thing is, I frankly can't be assed to care anymore. Humanity, as far as I'm concerned, can do whatever it wants, preferably eliminate itself. It seems to be really good at that, and it doesn't even seem to need my aid in it. So why should I worry?
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Would "not being eaten alive over two hours in a horrific agony" be a good enough reason?
See, the reason why you don't have to worry about things like bears and their favourite way of eating mid sized mammals such as ourselves is because we have a large population of people who culled them and removed them from your vicinity. Without those people, you will quickly learn that there is nothing more important to care for than survival of the society. Just ask Russian peasants from Siberia and Far East during W
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Sounds like the key is to not have assholes like Stalin in power.
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This is a strange argument. Are population level gun confiscation movements, such as for example Australian anti-gun lobby Stalinist, especially considering that Australian rural population is facing comparable or more hostile wild life than Siberians?
Is your kind of genocidal "humanity can... preferably eliminate itself" also Stalinist?
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Firearms are not a part of modern civilization now? Racist much?
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The difference is that I don't want to aid humanity in its destruction. It is very capable of doing that itself, I don't think I need to waste time on that. Stalin actually worked towards that goal.
Well, I guess, everyone has a hobby... but I don't really care for humans that much to be honest.
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This suggests you know little to nothing about Stalin and his goal beyond anglosphere memes. His GOAL was the exact opposite of the one you state. His METHODS lead some to believe that he may miss his goals, because they carried extreme cost both in terms of human life and quality of human life.
Frankly, consider reading up on Stalin. He was a very interesting person. A Georgian son of a priest, with very strict upbringing, who utilized religiosity of population very effectively to push toward the ultimate M
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Stalin wanted control and used terror to that end. Not exactly new, but quite effective.
I don't want to control anyone.
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So you're a Makhno fan?
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Since I had to google for what this is supposed to mean, I guess it's safe to say that I'm not.
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That's the sad part. Most people don't know who people that actually applied ideologies in real life are, when they're not massive winners in some realm like Stalin.
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Ideologies are a bit like religion. To the stupid real, to the intelligent rubbish and to the rulers useful.
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That is because humans have a hard wired religious impulse. So it makes sense for successful ideologies to tap into it in some way to maximize effect.
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Guess I'm not too human, I have never had any use for religions or ideologies.
Aside of for making humans do what I want them to do, of course. For that, either of them work pretty well.
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You confuse "thing" with "impulse toward having the thing". Those are not the same thing.
Humans have a natural religious impulse. It's almost certainly an evolutionary development to allow individuals to be better at delayed gratification (and even outsourced gratification, where benefits are reaped by others in your ingroup rather than you while you sacrifice for it). Ideologies, be they religions or something else usually merely tap into that. It doesn't need to be a specific religion either. Someone beli
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And that makes it useful for motivating humans to do what you want them to do.
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No, that makes it useful for motivating humans to become something more than a tree dwelling monkey, only interested in the next fruit and a jack-off session to detriment of everything else.
There's a reason why the moment we dropped mainstream religions and became agnostic and atheistic in many societies, we immediately saw a massive rise in male coomers. Without an ideal greater than yourself to pursue, all that's left is mindless hedonism.
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We managed to get down from the tree now. That chapter is closed. But the useful tool is still there. Kinda like a vestigial organ that serves no purpose to the body anymore but sure has use for a surgeon to make him rich. Similar here, there isn't really a useful purpose for the person anymore, but for whoever wants to use that person.
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This is a common problem with people who live in extreme opulence. You start believing that progress from zero point of subsistence is so permanent, that you can just think of us as Homo Novus, the new humans. Who just don't need the primary tools that allowed them to get here, because we have permanently progressed past needing them.
All while living in a society where a few weeks without electricity would retard everything back at least a century, and a few months without it probably close to millenia. And
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Humans may need them. At some point. Not now. Now, these vestigial properties are just tools for someone else to use.
Sure, at some point, they may become useful again. Probably right after they have been used to create that situation.
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Humans have barely adopted to controlling fire and failed to adopt to farming to this day. Easily observable in things like our horrific teeth problems in societies that have diets that are not mostly meat with some small additions of plant based foods like berries.
And if you take away religious impulse, there is no human society because human society is formed around applied tribal instincts, of which religious impulse is probably the single most important one. You cannot have a human society without delay
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One should think that by now we should have arrived at a point where we don't really need that anymore. And maybe we would have, if religion (or let's rather say ideologies in general) weren't so terribly useful for those that want to control humans.
Let's face it, there's no easier way to control them than with ideologies. They are useful. So why change what is such a powerful tool?
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If one is delusional and believes that evolution isn't real and humans are socially constructed, sure.
If one is normal and understands that evolution is real and applies to humans, no.
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The thing is, we replaced evolution with civilization, for the most part at least. Which in turn means that we select for vastly different traits now.
It's kinda bizarre when you think about it.
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You appear to not understand the time scale of evolution. The reason why we barely adopted to fire and have not even began to adopt to farming is because there hasn't been sufficient amount of generational cycles. Farming is a starting point for modern civilization.
So the opposite to your statement has happened. We failed to adapt to even precursors of modern civilization, while continuing to speed up the progress. Biologically, we are very poorly suited for "civilization". And it shows in things like birth
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We are by definition adopting civilization at the speed we develop it at. Civilization is also subject to the same laws that evolution is. Stuff gets tried and that which gets us ahead will be kept, the rest discarded. Same deal, but at a vastly different time frame.
For example, we've tried that slavery concept. And while it sure has its advantages in a shorter time frame, at least for the slaver, in the end it leads to stagnation and the eventual demise of a civilization relying on it. Same goes with that
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This is the typical "on the spectrum" opinion. And I mean that technically, as one of the key parts of being on the autistic spectrum is difficulty in interpreting non-verbal ques.
Most of the communication for normal people is non-verbal. This is completely lost in online-only "whiteboard meetings". So it may suit the small minority of people who do not have the ability to correctly interpret non-verbal communications. In fact, it may make it easier because everyone else is forced to somehow try to cripple
Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
It was one of the first major changes he has made at the struggling taxi company
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that doesn't change the fact that they are taxi companies operating illegally.
News flash: When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law. Ric Romero has more on this late-breaking story at 11.
Re:Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
Without being American and really seeing these companies in action I'm going to guess your 1 and 2 are strongly related.
Lyft and Uber evade a bunch of regulations by not technically being taxi companies, and because they don't have to spend time and money being compliant with the regulations they can provide a cheaper service.
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I certainly do. No "the credit card machine doesn't work", the entire thing is GPS-based so you'd better have a good reason for deviating from the route (and they usually do), and you can actually hire a larger/nicer vehicle when you need or want one. Cheap rides funded by VC's was just a fringe benefit.
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But... (Score:3)
But I don't have a car. Then take Uber.
David Risher is 57 not 87 (Score:3)
""There's a real feeling of satisfaction that comes from working together at a whiteboard on a problem." - David Risher, guy at a tech company who is mentally stuck ~Y2K.
Yes, there is a somewhat valuable social component to a physical meeting. No, the difference between that and periodic teleconferences with maybe a monthly or semi-annual physical social team meeting is NOT worth forcing everyone back into their cubicles.
Re:David Risher is 57 not 87 (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm 58 and have been a developer since 1988 and other than occasional face to face meetings, as far as I can tell everyone is SIGNIFICANTLY more productive teleworking. It's not an age thing, it's a dumbass thing.
Re:David Risher is 57 not 87 (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not far behind you. My productivity varies between home and office - give me a nice juicy task to focus on for which I have the skillset, I'll do better at home... but give me random tasks that require a lot of collaboration because they involve knowledge in other people's heads and the cube farm is occasionally better.
That of course is because most people hate documentation and don't document properly, leaving 'pester them' as the fastest way to get information. And for that, email, IM and teleconferencing just gives them opportunities to delay responding and slow you down.
Basically... I sometimes need the cube farm to partially compensate for other people not doing their jobs properly.
Re:David Risher is 57 not 87 (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking as someone who traveled over 40 weeks a year on business, I can say that face-to-face meetings can be great if you're trying to push consensus or get something finalized. The rest of the time, it's a waste of time because nobody knows how to run a meeting. I work with a company now where I have project managers daisy-chaining one Zoom meeting after another without any real agendas and no expectation of outcomes. Therefore Zoom and their counterparts have become the defacto meeting suck vortices that have plagued badly run companies for decades.
You know the kind of meetings I'm talking about like when a 15 min stand-up winds up to be a 45-minute diatribe.
Having people in the office is an old problem and represents old thinking. Companies are desperately trying to sublease or sell off office space everywhere, which is really a good thing because it means more free time for the employees not commuting, better for congestion at rush hour and a better quality of life for everybody.
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> it's a waste of time because nobody knows how to run a meeting
I have been in one well-run meeting in my entire life. The guy was a VP, and when the time came he got passed over for the big job and I told him the board had made a significant error.
If you can run a meeting so that it goes smoothly, no egos get involved, and disruptive people are managed effectively... you have a gift that should not be squandered.
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I was in a department under a VP who was really unhappy when I said a meeting without an agenda was just people wasting time hanging out. That company had SO MANY meetings just because the calendar said it was meeting time. I was spending 8+ hours a week in scheduled recurring meetings (not including project or customer meetings), and they were about 95% a complete waste of my time.
I don't work there anymore, and am much happier and more productive for it.
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Yes, there is a somewhat valuable social component to a physical meeting.
If there's beer and a BBQ involved, you might have a point. Otherwise, I fail to see it.
I'm glad to at least see (Score:2)
Finally some stabilization in the market caps for these services. Lyft at over $70/share was ridiculous. I still think Uber at a market cap of over $62B is just flat-out nonsense.
Promissory Estoppel (Score:2)
The employment lawyers will have a field day with this one.
As a form of protest (Score:2)
The individuals coming back to the office should take an Uber.
They're just trying to do layoffs (Score:3, Interesting)
What annoys me is after so many years of this crap we haven't noticed the cycle. Or if we have I don't think there's anything more taboo to talk about.
Companies do Mass layoffs and then Force the survivors to work an extra 20 to 30 hours a week to make up for it. Human beings just can't do that very long so eventually they're forced to hire back up in order to avoid a combination of mass resignations and a hard left shift in politics in favor of unions. Then after we've had just enough rest they do another round of mass layoffs and we're back to struggling again. Lather, rinse repeat.
I don't understand why we are still doing the same shit we did 40 years ago. Hell for some of it you can find protest songs from the '40s about it. Why can't we learn?
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They have learned. That's the problem. They've learned, that by doing this, they can reduce how long an employee stays at a company. In three generations, we've evolved from someone working at a company the majority of their life, to working at a place 5-10 years, to working 18 to 36 months and leaving. This have the effects of reducing wages, reducing benefits, reducing union membership (why would you care about unionizing a company you're going to be at less than 3 years?), and lastly casing the menta
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> the real reason is old people cost $10,000 per year for medical insurance while young people cost $4,000 per year.
>
> Which is why we need national health care
If twenty years' experience isn't worth $6K/yr you've done everything wrong.
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The problem is, to most PHBs, they don't look at the quality of the employee at all. They just look at needed skill set at the lowest cost to the company so they can take the biggest bonus home for themselves instead. Good managers know better, but we know how rare those tend to be.
parking lot (Score:2)
What most of the skilled people will reply (Score:2)
Dear David,
I found something new.
More of money,
less of YOU.
Good luck finding decent engineers (Score:2)
Pretty sure you won't be able to out pay the competition that offers WFH.
Seems to be new playbook... (Score:2)
First they lay off a bunch of people. Those people typically will receive some sort of severance package. Let's say for example that they layoff 10,000 people. The real goal is 15,000 but they announce it as 10,000. And then almost immediately after the initial layoff they come out with some draconian forced return to office program. Most of the employees will comply because if they don't they fear being part of the next layoff.
But others will say, wait a minute, you guys told us that working remote was fin
H1B Quotas (Score:2)
We can't find any Americans to work - we need more H1B workers!
Just keep changing the work requirements until this is true.
That way the good engineers will quit and start the company that will replace yours.
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Yet Linux crushed all of the competition with dev teems that have never met in person.
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That last at least is entirely a management issue. If you're accepting work into the codebase which hasn't passed the testing criteria that management (i.e. you) set, then the manager isn't doing his job properly. No bonuses this month !