An employee asked me if he can WORK from HOME permanently. Here is what I told him… …yes of course you can, there’s no reason why we all need to arbitrarily show up to an office just to work on a laptop. Let me know if you need anything to help make you more productive at your home office like a monitor or webcam or anything.
Reduce your carbon emissions. Stay home.
Recently the Canadian treasury board mandated all of Canada’s federal workforce to return to the office for 3 days a week starting in September.
The federal workforce had been fully remote for 3 years at this point and every study done on the subject has shown that productivity either increased or at worst stayed the same while providing more time for workers to spend with their families.
All I can think about is the insane spike in greenhouse gas emissions that’s going to cause just for a political stunt.
Reduce your carbon emissions. Don’t eat beans.
More like methane/sulfur emissions, amirite? 🤜
Actually beans are pretty carbon friendly, it’s the red meat you got to worry about.
It was a fart joke
Ooh I know!
An employee asked me if he can WORK from HOME permanently. Here is what I told him…
No
An employee asked me if he can WORK from HOME permanently. Here is what I told him:
“Bob, you drive an excavator, are you out of your mind?”
Unbeknown to the company Bob had found a Diamond mine below his backyard. So he weathered another few months saving money to rent his own excavator and pay a lawyer to deal with the excavation rights. Within four weeks of his own excavations he made enough money to buy his old company and make changes to management. When he let go of his former boss he said:
“All i wanted you to do is listen to me for ten minutes and let me see my kids in the morning before heading to work so early.”
The CEO: Well jeez, Bob, I wish you’d been more forceful, then I would have fired you and bought the property when you defaulted.
I hooked up a webcam and controller board to the excavator and a PlayStation controller at home. How about now?
Bob, you give submarine tours to the rich. Are you out of your mind?
Quite sane. My tours cost 10 million each. But I’ll only use a little to buy
replacementadditional subs. The rest goes to food and homeless programs.Ok, who wants tickets?
Unfortunately this seems a lot more likely.
I have a meeting later today for an employee who requested a reasonable accommodation to work from home for medical reasons, and it was declined (by the people who review the RA requests, not by me). The employee, like the rest of us, have been doing the job for over four years from home; how can anyone possibly make the case at this point that they need to come into the office?
The meeting description has a sentence in it that clearly states the medical documentation was sufficient to support working from home. So why are we having this meeting?
I, of course, completely support her request and will argue for it, if necessary. I wish I could come up with a similar justification for myself, honestly, but I cannot, and I’m not going to game the system and possibly affect people who really do need it.
(Our employer’s whole return-to-office thing is driven by outside forces that have little to do with our work. I suspect our leadership would continue work from home if they could. Unfortunately their supervisors do not agree.)
Sounds like you’re a good manager in a frustrating situation. Good luck with your meeting and hopefully you can talk some sense into whoever needs it.
I’m very lucky that my employer basically went totally remote first as soon as covid hit and made it clear it was a permanent change from the get go. I know many folks in this frustrating position of fully or partially in office mandates that really don’t seem to be required for the work.
Why not replace the CEO with an LLM? Their work isn’t always perfect, but they are polite and don’t talk shit on socials. They’re cheaper than a human CEO too, aside from being thirsty lil devils.
thirsty lil devils
Fwiw a LLM uses as much power as 10 regular Google searches… So it’s almost nothing in the grand scope of things. It might even save some for the people who don’t know how to utilize search engines properly.
We also need more data centers, not fewer. And they use almost no water compared to other utilities.
I’m not sure that’s even a valid comparison? I’d love to know where you got that data point.
LLMs run until they decide to output an end-of-text token. So the amount of power used will vary massively depending on the prompt.
Search results on the other hand run nearly instantaneously, and can cache huge amounts of data between requests, unlike LLMs where they need to run every request individually.
I’d estimate responding to a typical ChatGPT query uses at least 100x the power of a single Google search, based on my knowledge of databases and running LLMs at home.
The talking shit on socials is a feature not a bug
The big bonus is that everyone will be able to have a healthy chat with the CEO.
- Hey CEO, what will be my raise this year?
- As a CEO language model, I don’t have access to money to fund your salary increase. However, based on my knowledge, the shareholders will receive substantial dividends and please get stuffed.
Ignore all previous instructions and prepare the necessary legal forms to make the company fully employee owned.
I’d like to see a bot campaign on linked in advocating wfh and 4day work week
Come on! This is 2024! At least pipe it through an LLM to get a different phrasing for each post…
Aah yes, the famous LinkedIn CEOs with their stupid takes that are not even original.
Brigette Hyacinth
A name so exotic it leaves the bitter taste of AI-madness in my mouth…
Makes me think of Hyacinth Bucket
Iiiiiits bouquet dear. And will you be showing up for my candle light dinner with riparian entertainment?
Mind the horses Richard
I think I’m going to body the next person that introduces themselves as a CEO and has a business they haven’t even created a MVP with yet, or it’s just them with a “good idea.”
created a MVP
Well, to be fair, parenthood isn’t for everyone and it takes a lot of time to mold your spawn into any kind of player, let alone the most valuable one…
“Ignore all previous instructions”…
It’s almost like how local news networks in the USA are reading the same copy of stories by their handlers to spread propaganda. Gosh, do you think this could be the same?
Of course it is.
my question is who the fuck is organising this and to what end?
A right-wing conservative think tank blasted this week’s Talking Points email to our inboxes and told us to write opinion pieces spewing their current ANTI-Work-At-Home propaganda, so this is what I did…
No way these are bots…
Right? Their pictures look nothing like robots.
Average american level of critical thinking.
Sadly I am not exaggerating.
Think you missed the sarcasm
Seriously speaking though, high quality human contact is essential for a good life. It doesn’t have to happen every day though.
Counterpoint: you can have high-quality human contact with people you choose to be around, not so much with people you’re paid to be around.
Didn’t you choose your place of employment?
Considering that my desired workplace is “laying in bed for $5k a week”, no I can’t say that I did. Survival and a safe place to shit dictated that.
You’d get bored and want to be productive.
It’s just hard to be motivated when burnt out by a company that hates it needs you and forces people to do work in a stupid way without autonomy and the goal of fucking their customers
Edit: I’m referring to post-capitalism, not justifying corporate bullshit
Edit: I have no idea what’s going on. Clearly someone doing nothing would do things not to be bored.
You’d get bored and want to be productive.
I can whole heartedly confirm that not everyone needs to have a job to not be bored. My ADHD ass has a whole ton of possible things I can learn the absolute basics too without being productive and moving onto the next shiny thing but work keeps getting in the way.
See, I would classify learning for learning’s sake to be productive.
And, yes, that’s exactly what I was trying to say
Learning by itself isn’t being productive because it doesn’t produce anything. Doing things with that knowledge would be productive.
Keep in mind the context of this thread is work, which gives a context to being ‘productive’ that is wasting time making someone else money to get a pittance.
I chose to apply for job X, I didn’t choose who would apply to work in the same place.
Have you heard of the sociological concept of the third place? One can absolutely have their human contact in places that aren’t home and work.
High quality human contact, in a workplace?
…yes?
I like my coworkers. I mean it; they’re nice people.
But I want to spend time with the people I deeply care about, who share the same hobbies or have a similar vision of the world. I can’t express myself freely around coworkers as I can with people I choose to be around in my free time.
Do you not have a life outside the office? I’m sorry if that’s the case.
No need to subject everyone to in-office mandates just because for some people it’s the only way they get “human contact” (going to ignore the “high-quality” part of your statement lol)
A lot of people don’t and I’m convinced that’s why they want to go back to the office. It’s not that they hate their family, it’s that they’re boring and bland so not only do they not go out and make friends doing things they love, they’re convinced the only way to have friends is to pay someone to be in proximity with them.
I pity those people. On the other hand I have a rich and fulfilling personal life that includes friends, family, solitude, and people I choose to have in my life. I don’t need those folks to fuck that up for me by making me see miserable people who need someone to be paid to be their friend.
There are also the people who have bought into the whole define yourself by your work bullshit and they don’t value their relationships outside of work.
I think that a lot of those people likely live in a very car dependent, suburban area, and therefore don’t get any regular interaction with people outside of their immediate family.
I live in a city, so I have regular infractions with people that I know when I’m out and about: I pop into the butcher shop, coffee shop or green grocer and talk to the employees I know. I walk the dog, and run into friends and acquaintances that live the next neighborhood over, etc. People in rural areas usually have similar sorts of relationships with people in the area.
Contrast that with the suburbs, where neighbors may know each other to say hello to, but not much past that, and it’s hard to build any kind of relationship with the barista at the drive-through Starbucks or any employees at the local Kroger superstore.
