Same. 5 full years WFH and honestly work was enjoyable AND I got so much more actual work done.

But we gotta RTO now because uhhhh… Reasons!

I get nothing done anymore and I’m just frustrated all day and all my time is utterly wasted. No time to get work done, no time to get home chores done, constantly exhausted from the pace of running back and forth to meetings and driving all over the place wasting time and gasoline.

So glad I burned a gallon of gasoline into the air and wasted an hour to move my ass from a comfy chair at home on a teams call to a less comfy chair in a different building with a worse desk to join a teams call. Productivity!!!

My big company just did a full RTO mandate after 5 years full WFH since COVID started. It quickly swung from a good enjoyable job with plenty of work able to be done during all the bullshit meetings to an open office cubicle farm nightmare with harsh bright lights, tons of noise and distractions, and having to physically move from home to office and from desk to meeting room on different floors all the time eating up every last second of available time to do my ACTUAL job. And we are doing a bastardized version of Scrum and it’s miserable.

I got reprimanded one day because in our daily standup I simply said that I had not made any progress on my tasks since yesterday because I was in meetings all day. Apparently that wasn’t being a team player.

Yeah. I don’t know which was better. Having millions of closeted racist hateful people pretending to be nice or outwardly venom spewing racists.

At least now we can tell who the bad guys are because they broadcast it everywhere they go, and we can cut them out of our lives and try to stay away from their toxicity.

It absolutely is a cult of personality. The part that breaks my brain is that his personality is abysmal. Just gross, horrible, mean, rude, hateful, lying, cheating, hurtful. Not even objectively attractive or well spoken. Just babbling hateful drivel. I do not understand how it ever got this big except that he represents all the worst parts of humanity and he gave all the worst people the permission to be the worst version of themselves and that is more appealing than being smart or kind.

And when he does die the cult WILL implode. It already has fractured, but it will shatter into factions and infighting and it will be a big mess and lots of collateral damage. But maybe it will all be finally over. A decade of hearing his bullshit will finally end and maybe his cultists will start to snap out of the trance and be reasonable again.

No, not steal the source code. Steal Excel! We sneak in one night and grab it and bring the corporate world to a halt.

No, I mean STEAL it.

Downloading isn’t stealing. Reproducing isn’t stealing. Forking a repo isn’t stealing.

I mean. STEAL IT!

Rise up and take back the means of production!

We should steal The Declaration of Independence Microsoft Excel!

But yeah, execs have no idea what all daily work looks like, but because they siphon 99% of the profits that we creat away from us and no matter how wasteful or unproductive everyone is, enough gets done that they STILL make millions off of us. So they don’t care. We all suffer and get paid JUST enough to not riot, but they make millions and millions just by virtue of being the executive or owner.

I wonder how well a company would actually do if it was fully owned by all workers evenly.

Imagine Microsoft if every employee had the same % share in profits. Wonder what that would look like? I bet middle managers would stop wasting money left and right. I bet pointless projects would stop. Anything you do to make the company more efficient or profitable is celebrated and you actually get a share in that profit.

I also wonder if it would simply fail due to people wanting to coast and not pull their share.

I don’t know about you guys, but my company just mandated RTO a few months ago.

As expected, we now spend waste 8 hours: Commuting, Walking to and from meeting rooms, etc.

And the meetings, and the “collaboration”, which are basically non stop all day long now, are just us talking round and round about all the things we need to do and how to do them for the 8th time, without actually doing them. But we sure LOOK really productive and busy. And I guess that’s what management wants? Who knows.

With remote work I would do my job for 8+ hours per workday in pure focus mode. Knocking out solution after solution. You want XYZ to happen? Already done, here’s a link to it. Have a meeting? Click join Teams call 1 minute early, listen and talk, while continuing to working on XYZ. You think we should try ABC for the XYZ project? Ok, I’ll have it ready by tomorrow.

In office work is now spent walking from meeting to meeting, and you gotta leave 15 minutes before and it takes 15 minutes to get back and settled and you did not work on anything during. And they ask “so, how is project XYZ going?” “Good, good. Should be done in a few more weeks.” And you maybe work on XYZ for 30 minutes uninterrupted that entire day, decide to skip any testing or QC, skip those extra features, skip checking with other teams if it will impact them, you have to skip all that to get it done on time. And it takes 3 weeks to do a 5 minute task. And it’s inferior. And you talk about XYZ every meeting of every day, time after time, updates and statuses and comments on the ticket. And you finally announce you got XYZ completed and it’s “yay good job” and management asks how the RTO is going and everyone is terrified to say “this is stupid and a gigantic waste of everyone’s time and your money to put us in a giant expensive building just to not work on work, but to talk about working on work and we are getting only 10% done vs remote work”. So we say “oh, fine” and management puts a little golden star on their report they made for themselves and they feel all warm and fuzzy that work is going great.

And thus, project XYZ was finally completed. A task that would have taken 1 person a few hours to do remotely, has now taken 8 people, 3 weeks of in office meetings and status updates and endless interruptions and discussions over every aspect of the project over and over again to finally complete. But we all LOOKED super busy doing it. And that’s the important thing.

I’m personally, loving the RTO. I thought I would hate it, but I get to talk with friends all day and sit in meetings and daydream and the day flies by and I barely turned my brain on.

I’m happy to just do my job at home uninterrupted at my desk, but they sure don’t seem to want that, so fine. Hope that works out.