Working From Home

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Falstaff

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
8,311
3,165
Our managers hate work from home. Even before this, we were 6 months away from moving into a brand new building and trying to pivot to 75% staff on site max/hot desking and these guys insisted our entire team needed to be on site 100% of the time. The last 2 months has proved that’s absolute horseshit. I imagine our project manager types will only come in one or two days a week but they’ll make a push to have everyone back as soon as it’s socially acceptable.
And yeah we have a couple people who miss the social aspect of work but they do the same thing at home as they did at work... fucking chatting on skype all day which you can do at home. One of them thinks being perceived as a stay at home mom is damaging to her career so whatever.
 

LiquidDeath

Magnus Deadlift the Fucktiger
4,831
11,118
Almost our entire engineering team is based in India. Our product is very good and improves monthly.

My company has a large presence in India that is divided into two groups. About 95% of them are in the first group, which is a large mass of general IT workers who are absolutely terrible to work with and can literally only do the one thing you teach them to do or give them a script to follow. They are only employable because of 1) cost and 2) they will do mundane, repetitive tasks without complaining until they quit and then are replaced with an identical copy. The other 5% are intelligent, hard-working, and capable of critical thought like the rest of the workforce across the globe.

The company actually has large offices in 2 other low-cost centers, Monterrey and Manila. I would work for 100 years with people from those places before I would voluntarily choose to work with the people in India.
 
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Alex

Still a Music Elitist
14,466
7,382
OK our product support team is in India too and they're largely pretty damn bad.
 
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ZyyzYzzy

RIP USA
<Banned>
25,295
48,789
OK our product support team is in India too and they're largely pretty damn bad.
"Hello my friend, this is Joseph, here to help you."

Just connect me to an American or European, Punjab.

I hate that I still need to schlep myself to the office periodically to answer things on the high side, plus too boot our agency director still expects toy to be in a suit and tie even of there are like 10 people inside the entire building
 
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calhoonjugganaut

Trakanon Raider
1,447
1,411
I really would like to see some true research come out of this and get an indication of productivity levels WFH vs In Office. My old job ran a "study" on this with the IT staff. They found that people got lax the longer they worked from home.

I can do the same amount of work at home than I could at the office IF my wife and I have a babysitter or have them in daycare. My workflow is probably the highest at my company so I'm likely still higher than most everyone even with the kids at home. An almost 2 yr old and a 4 yr old present problems for me sometimes when I'm expected to answer any calls that I get.

On a different subject, I started working at my company after a hurricane and they hired 750-800 independent adjusters and they all came to our state and worked at 5 or 6 different locations. We are down to 25 or so now. The people left know how to do their jobs well and they are also from out of state. I'd imagine they will allow most of us to continue to work from home until another storm hits.

However, when you bring in 750+ people and have to train them how to navigate software and claims protocols set forth by the company, it simply can't be done remotely (especially considering the pay). We got 10,000 claims in one day and that kind of volume simply cannot be managed and reviewed like most claims are. Many of the people hired weren't even touching, reviewing, or settling claims but doing admin, phones, returning voicemails and just explaining the process. You literally have to have a team lead for every 5-10 people in my industry starting off.
 

Mist

Eeyore Enthusiast
<Gold Donor>
30,275
22,011
5-10% of them are passable and the rest cannot do the most basic function.

When we brought on an Indian provider to handle our very most basic event filtering/event response, it was like cloning our absolute worst in-house employees 30 times over.

When I was working all those hours of overtime, probably 70-80% of it was unfucking what they fucked up and doing RCAs on how simple problems went undetected because they ignored 100s of alerts over days or weeks.
 
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Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
37,961
14,508
Someone previously said it and I think it bears repeating. I've found Indians can follow instructions to a T, but that's it.

Even our Chinese engineers are kind of shitty but they're capable and smart.
 

Brahma

Obi-Bro Kenobi-X
11,816
41,171
Someone previously said it and I think it bears repeating. I've found Indians can follow instructions to a T, but that's it.

Even our Chinese engineers are kind of shitty but they're capable and smart.

This. Indians I have found over the years just WON'T think outside the box in general. They will pretty much do exactly as told.
 

Lenaldo

Golden Knight of the Realm
324
108
My company has a large presence in India that is divided into two groups. About 95% of them are in the first group, which is a large mass of general IT workers who are absolutely terrible to work with and can literally only do the one thing you teach them to do or give them a script to follow. They are only employable because of 1) cost and 2) they will do mundane, repetitive tasks without complaining until they quit and then are replaced with an identical copy. The other 5% are intelligent, hard-working, and capable of critical thought like the rest of the workforce across the globe.

The company actually has large offices in 2 other low-cost centers, Monterrey and Manila. I would work for 100 years with people from those places before I would voluntarily choose to work with the people in India.

My old company had a huge team in Inda that reported up through me. This is pretty much 100% what I experienced. What was really odd is we would bring some of those 5-10% to the US and they would really shine. However, as soon as they returned to India they would regress. Their work is not very good and there is nothing more demoralizing than being told you are responsible for their work but not allowed to do any of it because of cost. We lost a LOT of good engineers due to that mentality.

Indian engineers are definitely good at mundane, repetitive work. The problem is automation tools are becoming so good that its more economical to invest in them than a person - even at india rates.
 
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alavaz

Trakanon Raider
2,001
713
Government would have to change some policies and rewrite our contract before I could work from home.

For my specific role, I can definitely be more productive if I have the option to go onsite, only because of the disconnected nature of our networks.

For certain tasks like writing code / scripts or preparing documentation, I am way more productive at home. Work that requires hardware or heavily collaborative tasks are better in site.

Doesn't really matter to me either way, but I think the government is hopefully going to change it's opinions on WFH in the long term.
 

Nija

<Silver Donator>
1,901
3,705
I can do the same amount of work at home than I could at the office IF my wife and I have a babysitter or have them in daycare. My workflow is probably the highest at my company so I'm likely still higher than most everyone even with the kids at home. An almost 2 yr old and a 4 yr old present problems for me sometimes when I'm expected to answer any calls that I get.

People are going to call me an idiot dreamer... so be it. It's better if we, as a society, did something like work from home when the kids are young. I would say 0 through 5 years old. It's okay to have decreased productivity during that time as you're setting up the next generation for future success. It's more or less what I've done with my kids, in combination with my wife not working. I've worked incredibly hard (and sometimes long) hours during kid downtime to make up for it daytime wanderings.
 

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
24,422
31,638
Worked at home since near right after high school off and on. Dad worked at home as well. He quit his regular job to work at home the day I was born. In the structural end of my job lots of companies in the US will do the CAD work of various sizes. When it gets small they use one man working at home. On plate not so much. The industry has squeezed those out till the only place I know that does it still uses a company in Thailand and they have an American that started the company that lives there and keeps them on track. Almost impossible to find Americans at home or a company in the US to do it. Pay them lump sum in Thailand and they still send in time sheets, no idea why. If they actually work the hours they put down nobody in the US would work that or they are very ineffecient.

But working at home has been a thing for a very long time. Before computers if you had an extra room big enough to put a drawing board in you could do it.
 

moonarchia

The Scientific Shitlord
20,915
37,915
People are going to call me an idiot dreamer... so be it. It's better if we, as a society, did something like work from home when the kids are young. I would say 0 through 5 years old. It's okay to have decreased productivity during that time as you're setting up the next generation for future success. It's more or less what I've done with my kids, in combination with my wife not working. I've worked incredibly hard (and sometimes long) hours during kid downtime to make up for it daytime wanderings.
It's called stay at home mom or dad. Parents decide who the better breadwinner is, and the other keeps the kids in line and handles the housework.
 

Punko

Macho Ma'am
<Gold Donor>
7,912
12,564
People are going to call me an idiot dreamer... so be it. It's better if we, as a society, did something like work from home when the kids are young. I would say 0 through 5 years old. It's okay to have decreased productivity during that time as you're setting up the next generation for future success. It's more or less what I've done with my kids, in combination with my wife not working. I've worked incredibly hard (and sometimes long) hours during kid downtime to make up for it daytime wanderings.

Its not huge, but in Belgium you get 16 weeks of payed leave, per child, for each parent.

This is on top of the maternity leave, which can be max. 15 weeks for the mother.

A woman could get pregnant, work until 1 week before giving birth, take the remainder of the 14 weeks maternity leave, followed by the 16 weeks payed leave, and after those 30 weeks some of them are pregnant for >20 weeks again, so they can pretty much chain these forms off leave, with some regular holiday sprinkled in, since those days are retained in full (minimum of 21 payed days / year).

For someone working half-time, the 16 weeks are turned into 8 months, so those can go on permanent pregnancy leave for years. Obviously these forms of leave are a "right", so the employer can't refuse them.

You are also protected legally from being fired, as soon as you report the pregnancy to your employer.

tl;dr we give tons of payed leave so certain groups of people just have their wife breed 10 children so they can skip work for a literal decade and go into permanent unemployment after. This hasn't improved our society.

Of course before they go into maternity leave, you have them "work" for 4 months (120 days minimum) at a friends kebab restaurant, for a fictional wage of 5000 monthly, so that their replacement income which is 75% of their reference income, is actually above the modal income of people that work full-time.

I'd write a book about this kind of abuse and sell it in Africa, but someone must have beat me to that.
 
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TomServo

<Bronze Donator>
6,305
8,095
Amazing work from home story for me. Out for walk before work get attacked and bit by German Shepard.

IMG_20200518_100307.jpg
 

Alex

Still a Music Elitist
14,466
7,382
I think that has very little to do with working from home and more to do with a neighbor with an asshole dog.
 
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OneofOne

Silver Baronet of the Realm
6,549
7,899
This. Indians I have found over the years just WON'T think outside the box in general. They will pretty much do exactly as told.

I wish we even had that. The ones we use have problems following simple checklists. Yet when critical thinking is required to know that in THIS instance it would be best not to follow the checklist, they cling to it for dear life with stupidly frustrating results. And they seem to have no sense of embarrasment or shame.

I could rant about this shit all day. Somewhere along the way mine and my American coworkers jobs turned into babysitter jobs. We babysit (mostly) Indians, with a few other foreign teams.

My productivity (along with most of the rest of the Americans) took a nosedive, and not one person in management has said shit about it. On the contrary, our yearly raises have substantially increased, as have our benefits. And even though management covertly acknowledges this mass loss in work now that we spend so much time cleaning up Indian messes, if you dare say outloud what we're all thinking - these Indians suck - management will come down hard on your "racist" words. Ive seen it happen. So we have to tiptoe around this issue as we deal with consistently bad (but cheap!) work, and implement new onboarding and training procedures and nothing ever changes.

I really do think its Silicon Valley liberal mind disease at work.

I really want to find a new job, but Im over-paid and while highly highly frustrating, my job is stupid easy. Plus, I work from home, only going to the office every month or so, and this is quite a boon for spending more time with my son.
 
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