Other time zones and that makes communication difficult, so no quick IM with "by the end of the day" as that means something different over there. Different culture and way of doing things, so have to spend a lot more effort in communication being very clear. Even then they're far away where it's a lot easier to hide stuff until the hole is very deep. Travel expenses going up very quickly for a little training for a new guy. It can be so fun to work with teams in a different continent.

Is it valid? If they could outsource they already would have. They already have with heavy industry.

Perhaps true with office work (so many tales of people saying they got shit code from overseas developers) and such, but I think the savings were very real for manufacturing, at least for a period of time. Happy to be corrected if that's wrong.

The bosses don't care when 3 of them cost the same as 1 of u

The recent AI LLM goldrush has shown that things don't need to be good to be used.

If it makes the line go up, no matter how short term it is, it gets done.

That's why you don't fire the whole department, just implement a hiring freeze while your US staff train the Indian and Filipino staff.

Fuck your ex boss. What a horrible person!

I go in to eat said baked goods ❤️

Where do you work? I'll start coming in too.

Get a different job.

For years I thought I just hated working. After I was injured at work and had some off time, I picked up a book called "Discover What You Are Best At" by Linda Gail. It helped me assess my strengths and pointed me to a job I actually enjoyed doing.

Have you tried taking your laptop to a library or coffee shop or something?

I have the opposite problem. When I work at the office so much time is spent 'harmonizing' with the other workers, I get a lot less done on those days than if I had worked from home and was able to focus on my tasks.

But some people can also listen to heavy metal while working, whereas I prefer silence. 😁

I get the issues with doom scrolling, but the desktop issue is pretty easily fixed. I have my home office set up with a couple KVM switches so that I can't be on my work laptop and home desktop at the same time, because both systems use all the same peripherals. That at least makes it harder to justify switching over and being (more) unproductive during my shift.

Also, I have found it helps to have music or a podcast going in the background to help keep your focus on what you're supposed to be doing.

If you have ADHD WFH could be a lot more challenging. Without external structure or factors aid track of time it makes it super tough to work isolated like that.

I work in corporate IT so my job is basically to sit there twiddling my thumbs and wait until something breaks. Then I remote onto the server to fix the issue. Which means I was basically working remotely anyway the server might have been in the same building as me but I was never physically going down there I was still remoting on so working from home isn't much different for me.

I'm much more productive now because I don't have people coming and asking me questions, for which answer is in the corporate knowledge base. Now they actually have to check it.

Uh, welcome to society, I guess. That's not a “problem with society”, that's just society. It's what being human is about, developing meaningful relationships with other humans. The actual problem is that we have put in place barriers and obstacles to make us even more isolated and less integrated, thus stripping ourselves off of the social strategies and mechanisms that reduce risks on that principal-agent problem. It is way harder for your car mechanic to rip you off when they are also your neighbor and life long friend. If they defraud you, you can ruin their reputation in the community and thus make them unable to acquire any more jobs in that community. The might also feel an emotional moral compulsion to not hurt you, and vice-versa, for you to fulfill a just payment.

They're referring to the other 3/4 of managers & hr who responded that they didn't want employees to leave because of return to office policies.

They, apparently, genuinely believed that rto would have some tangible benefits, or were just trying to make their employees lives harder for a laugh, and didn't expect it to affect headcount at all.