Working From Home

i am so burnt out my chest is in knots every morning before daily class. gotta get to January. they have me training people on New Year's Day ffs

jesus, I know sometimes it's easy to forget you're muted, big whoop, but I have heard the same individual for four consecutive days eating, muttering to themselves, breathing heavily, belching, etc

I've stopped asking them to mute and just started manually silencing them. i don't even have to look to know who it is

you're *not muted

we are supposed to assess learners who are not up to speed so we can stay late for an hour a day and give them a one on one learning plan.

yeah, this is a class of 45 people, I'm not doing that 4 days into class. everybody passes

do we think the ideas in this thread are likely to come to pass or is this guy full of shit?

I've spoken to 1,500+ people about remote work in the last 9 months

A few predictions of what is likely to emerge before 2030

[ a thread ] 💻🏠🌍

— Chris Herd (@chris_herd) December 4, 2020

Varying degrees of bullshit depending on the prediction. I have optimistic takes that align with some of his. I don’t think no-code stuff has any particular correlation w remote work. Most people suck at written communication but I’d be delighted if we all just started communicating in memos. I think lots of places will wind up offices with hotel desks, private offices for a few who have no wish to work from home, conference rooms with higher-end video conference setups, and a few middle managers who are way too squirrelly about what people are up to all day. I think many places will continue to expect most people to be available during usual business hours. I think a lot of people miss some things about the office and a few people would never want to keep working from home.

it's been interesting to watch this shake out in my 23-person company. I'm one of the few who basically never comes in, there's a niche for me and I filled it. Not everyone has that option, but some do.

Im optimistic that wfh coming in to the civil service here (and hub offices as another, linked, covid measure) will be good for work/life and especially geographic balancing measures, tbh

Longer term, who knows.

if I'm allowed to keep wfhing after all this - which there really is no good reason for me not to be able to, as an example my colleague who I share a work load with was on the sick for 3 months during this and I was able to do the work of 2 people from home, why can't I do my work of one person from home indefinitely? - my issue will be convincing my wife to move somewhere else in the province that's not as expensive as Vancouver (everywhere is pretty expensive but we're the pinnacle). probably won't be successful

I certainly have no interest in leaving my general chunk of the city but if a bunch of squares want to move to the suburbs and do their techco jobs from there and never drive into town again by all means they should.

ROASTED

silby i think you’ll find those are also known as “world class people”

I’m world class at laying down

During work

🤖personal RPA: robotic process automation will transform work for individuals

No-code tools that enable workers to built bots that automate menial parts of their roles will be huge

— Chris Herd (@chris_herd) December 4, 2020

I don't think that's how this ends: "I've got a bot to do my job, I'll just lie back and enjoy that regular paycheck".

I'm being trained in RPA now. Goal is to have bot do the tedious, mindless data entry/mouse clicks part of my job, not the whole thing. Or so they say…
No but seriously it'll free up more time to do the analytical aspects of my job.

lol I was gonna say, dumping Squarespace form data into Google Sheets is really helping me out

just thinking out loud, perhaps a period of time where you have given the Training department zero breaks between classes, and we still can't meet face to face with learners, is not the time to decommission the customer service console, add an entirely new tool AND case management system in a period of months.

people are asking me questions about the new tool which I tailored and I have to keep replying I'M TEACHING FORTY MOTHERFUCKING PEOPLE RIGHT NOW, I'LL GET BACK TO YOU ON BREAK

Getting a nice bit of reading done today and plans for a walk look likely

I work for the US federal govt and our office, which is home for several statistical agencies, just told us they are rearranging the entire building and won't reopen until the end of 2022. It looks like we'll be moving to some sort of hoteling once it reopens. Already working on a full time home office.

that helps. I finally have a desk and a headset, but my old place was so tiny I did work out of my bed and....yeah, easy to be unmotivated there.

adding to my aggravation today - I open our training modules at the beginning of each day so I can share them as an application in MS Teams. However - the third party software that the modules are built on time you out for inactivity like any software. The modules used to also be built on this same software, but last year we changed the modules to a new software, while retaining the original third-party software for the place they're stored.

So now, the system CAN'T TELL when you're actively using one of the modules. You can be clicking around for 40 minutes in the module and suddenly a big warning message pops up saying "You have Been Inactive, click Continue to prevent closure of the module". And you get 15 fucking seconds to click continue or it closes out the module AND the place the modules are stored! you have to reload BOTH.

AND, the warning message doesn't *pop up* when it happens, so if you are temporarily outside the module doing a demonstration, you won't see the message, and you'll come back and everything is closed out. and chances are, the same thing happened to your class.

so you wind up having to reload everything and telling the huge class to reload everything. multiple times a day.

when I bring it up I'm told "this is how it works everywhere" (narrator: no, it isn't).

Decided against the walk, looks peaky out there

lol

Right or wrong, that guy's predictions only address a tiny slice of "work." I know this is the wfh thread but the class divide here is so frightening, and only poised to get even more dystopian unless we Do Something(tm) to stop it.

that guy's predictions only address a tiny slice of "work."

seriously!! in a weird way things are more resembling my images of the turn of the previous century in cities, where there were fancy people that had fancy homes and there was the class of people that delivered things to them. It's kinda like the only thing missing is people tossing their liquid waste products out the windows, though I doubt the new new world order will eliminate indoor plumbing

I certainly have no interest in leaving my general chunk of the city but if a bunch of squares want to move to the suburbs and do their techco jobs from there and never drive into town again by all means they should.

― is right unfortunately (silby), Friday, December 11, 2020 3:56 PM (five days ago)

I am hoping for this as well

snow storms just don't hit the same when you're already working from home :-(

lol

anybody got this on their bingo card?

"hey I was away, can you repeat what you just went over?"

"you...mean the last five minutes?"

some people literally type "brb" every 2 minutes

meanwhile I get to hold my peepee until break

Just quit a job that I started in June. Never went to the office. Never met any of my colleagues.

Refreshing, and weird.

Congrats

I hate sometimes when the business pressure from leadership clashes with my humanitarian side. Disclosure, I was a very toxic person to work with in 2006 - I'm amazed more people didn't quit (if only I'd had Effexor then). Had to spend years undoing the corporate programming ("work is your top priority") and remember my compassionate side.

i'm glad because there was one learner who was late each day and I asked her if there were any tech issues we should be aware of, and she tells me her husband is on dialysis and requires daily assistance, and that she was discharged from the hospital for heart failure the day before training.

yeah, i'm not marking this person late anymore. I couldn't have known, of course, but man, people are putting themselves through hell right now just to obtain gainful employment since the gov't has abandoned them.

i took a clandestine nap this morning from 11-11:45. no emails. led a meeting at 1 that went well and i got compliments. good day lol.

Heh i napped through half of a few days earlier this year. Work naps ftw

i keep working with people who can't seem to work out that they need to occasionally toggle between the meeting room and MS Teams chat. just about every co-instructor I work with gets tunnel vision and only looks the material they're presenting, so if I discreetly try to message them on the side, they don't see it, and they don't see it when I write it in the meeting chat, even if I tag them to make it 'ding'. so then I'm forced to do the thing I don't want to do and interrupt them out loud in front of the class to tell them what I wanted to tell them (or ask them to read their messages, if it's not something I can share in front of the class).

they always use the excuse that they don't have dual monitors but I DON'T EITHER! and I can jump back and forth without a problem!

like right now, for instance, when the co-instructor blew through a section and completely skipped a necessary item, and isn't responding to msgs, so I basically am gonna have to go "hey excuse me you skipped this" in the least awkward way possible.

Take a nap, a stroll into town on errands or in the park most days

Great lark this tbh

slept poorly last night and got maybe 5 hours sleep tops, had a kip on my lunch hour today, feeling ten times better than I would have without it. miserable pissy and cold rain outside which I'm very glad to not have any reason to venture out into. bliss.

hey that sounds like my day in wfh world! high five.

then I wrote an article about interfacing Automatic Generator starts with lithium batteries, which is a huge PITA for many reasons

i keep working with people who can't seem to work out that they need to occasionally toggle between the meeting room and MS Teams chat. just about every co-instructor I work with gets tunnel vision and only looks the material they're presenting, so if I discreetly try to message them on the side, they don't see it, and they don't see it when I write it in the meeting chat, even if I tag them to make it 'ding'. so then I'm forced to do the thing I don't want to do and interrupt them out loud in front of the class to tell them what I wanted to tell them (or ask them to read their messages, if it's not something I can share in front of the class).

For the most part I think Teams works pretty well, except for this. I really wish that if someone started chatting with you while you're on a meeting that this would somehow be on the same screen as the one having your meeting on (I guess make it optional, because it could be annoying I guess). I do have dual monitors and a message will generally pop up on the other screen so it is easy to miss if I'm focused on the meeting.

yeah. it was a major adjustment for me to get used to as well. for the non "new" look of MS TEams, it's embedded within the MS Teams meeting so you can easily jump back and forth, but for some reason the 'new' look felt that was too convenient and separated the two.

problem is I need the 'new' look because it's the one that gives me Large GAllery mode.

scheduling training classes in December = everybody has mentally checked out, especially the managers. a quarter of our hires' managers aren't even here, and have already begun PTO, so the hires come to us instead (cos they don't see on the out of office message who their managers' backup is or feel comfortable msging them). likewise, 2 of them didn't even show up today for the manager checkpoint, having backups lead them in their place - which defeats the entire purpose of a manager checkpoint.

on the plus side...this class ends tomorrow.

Is the two screens thing worth it? I teach language, so conversation is really important, and I want to be looking straight at my students while I talk. It seems like it would be hard to have a second screen without looking to the side all the time.

I feel like it depends on what you're used to. I'm a guy who used one screen for 16 years, and they gave me a two screen setup in a training class, and it broke me - completely threw me off, and I refused to do it again. it felt like adding extra steps and the process of dragging things from one screen to another aggravated me. had I been on two monitors from day 1, would probably have gotten used to it.

I guess it depends on what you do exactly. I've been working with two screens for a long time now and briefly going back to a single screen at the beginning of the pandemic really affected my productivity. Even for meetings, it's pretty useful for when you need to look up something while still keeping the meeting on screen.

The trick is to make one screen your main screen and the second one a secondary that you use when you need to have more than one window open.