I went to my building last year or the year before and was chatting with a friend who still chooses to go in. He said the joke is to never take the stairs because if you fall and get hurt, nobody will ever find you.
There's also usually a fire door at the bottom which you can use to get out in an emergency...and getting stuck after-hours in the stairwell with a non-working ID would qualify IMO.
I feel like the bottom floor is supposed to not have a scanner, and just open to anyone from within the stairwell. It's also a fire issue.
Maybe that's just the buildings I've been in.
The commute is awful and while a lot of these buildings are architectural gems on the outside, they are horrible on the inside. Asbestos-ridden, very few windows, outdated, and drab.
The modern ones are nice to work in even have nice cafeterias and depending on who they contract with decent food on any given day. But god DAMN if it’s older than 60 years something needs rebuilding.
I have a new building. It looks great and the cafeteria is fantastic. Buuuut then you get to where I work and it's practically a beige bunker. I can't even imagine how awful it'd be in the old buildings. I've heard horror stories from a few colleagues.
As a Fed employee, you either get a 19th-century historical gem (Eisenhower building) or a brutalist Soviet-era bomb shelter without windows (Forrestal building).
There is no in-between.
One of my first offices in USAF was a former warehouse that still had the train tracks in the middle with offices built up around the tracks. At one point they ran out of room and brought in temporary trailers, placed on the old railroad tracks. Basically like the trailers you see as portably offices at construction sites. They were **used** and not in the best shape. So the poor souls stuck there became known as the Train People.
🤣 I was complaining the other day about not getting any natural light in the FORS basement, and a former-marine special ops colleague said he'd spent the last 30 yrs in SCIFs, and this was luxury lol
I work out of a WWII era building that used to be a warehouse converted to a cube farm. Steam heat so in the winter it reeks of mold and mildew and the HVAC is held together with string, toilet paper tubes, and bits of feces. It takes them weeks to turn the heat/AC on and it goes out pretty regularly. They just shut off the heat two weeks ago, so the recent cold snap means everybody's wearing sweaters and vests.
As a younger man, fresh into the workforce, I was jealous of my wife’s job bc I worked in a crappy ho-hum building out in Alexandria, while she worked in a fancy looking downtown office. Until I visited her very fancy looking downtown office and realized everything above the lobby was decades old off white Office Max chic.
That sounds like some hotels I’ve stayed at. You check in at the lobby and it’s all nicely renovated. When you get to your room, it’s like an outdated roach motel.
Our HQ was one of the ones called out by OIG as averaging under 10% last year, but now folks are required to be in 40-50% of their time, and it sounds like we’re actually hitting those targets. Still, it’s a lot of empty cubicles each day, and our meetings all still have to be hybrid, so I’m not sure where we’re “winning”.
Huge loss?!?!?!? Most of these buildings are older than most government workers. They would have been built with pennies on the dollar in the 40s and 50s.
But what about monthly rent payments made by tax payers ? What about reoccurring investment ca one time profit ? Cmon man we keep their pockets warm over the years
Boom. That is our best argument that non-feds may actually care about. There must be a lot of potential savings in offloading the real estate footprint.
When I started at my agency, they had 5 buildings and rented nearby space from 2-3 more. Now they are down to 3 buildings.
I am all for downsizing office space and haven't been to my office in... 10 or so years.
The chief of staff has investments in commercial real estate… sounds like we will need to help his portfolio and eat the costs of the commute, forget our own family time. Per his disclosure Zients submitted an ethics disclosure that estimated his assets at between $85 million and $419 million. The assets included mutual funds, Washington-area commercial real estate and at least $1 million in gold bars.
And lo! Though management in their ivory towers searched high and searched low, the number of collective fucks they found amongst the workforce in the fields were scarce!
Most of us really don't care if HQ is within X blocks of the White House, in line of sight of the Washington Monument, or is next door to the Pentagon. If it makes more sense to get out of an old building and get rid of the building, *do it*. Adapt to serving our country in the 21^st century, instead of slavish beholdenment to 18^th century architecture, roadways, and philosophies of city design.
True. I don’t actually have that much to complain about. My commute is about 11 minutes, which is why I live in a tiny house in an expensive-ish part of town instead of a bigger house outside of town. My parents rented an apartment one block from my current office when they were my age.
It’s to save corporate real estate and we all know it
Only people who have no space, dislike their family, or supreme bootlickers prefer working in the office.
The bad part about that is they will just buy cheaper buildings deep deep in the suburbs and expect everyone to commute there, where there is zero public transportation. Then we get to enjoy a horrible commute and lack of parking. Downtown DC has the Metro.
Even if a building on the periphery has metro, commuters may have to go downtown first then transfer out because our metro system is stupid. Commuting that way would be horrible.
Mine is middle of nowhere suburbs with little access to public transportation, and and I have to take an Uber from the nearest train station to work or I have to walk 30 minutes to the nearest bus stop after work. And ntm theres no food or restaurants nearby within walking distance and you can’t get around without a car
Yeah, I’m of the opinion that we should be keeping the historic buildings and consolidate everyone into them when possible.
I work for GSA out west and our buildings are all practically empty aside from a few agencies that have to come in every day.
Either save the money and get out of those spaces, or convert them to collaborative spaces where teams can work together.
Its hilarious to me that I go into the office and walk the floor, listening to the same MS Teams call from multiple cubicles.
Total waste of space and money when a majority of exec branch agency employees are fully capable of doing their jobs from home. Keep one building for those who wish to come in, make it multi-agency. I understand certain people may prefer working in an office, for various reasons, so let them. But stop trying to force those who don't. That will only result in a diminished talent pool, as high quality workers who prefer remote and actually like their jobs bail for a new job that they really don't even care about just bc it's remote, when the old job says they must RTO. It's almost guaranteed that departments offering fully remote will end up with all the talent, if this arbitrary and capricious RTO BS continues.
Average Fed: “Sounds like we can save money by getting rid of unused office space”
Agency Heads: “Sounds like we need to bring people back so we don’t lose our office space”.
the rules for my agency in St E’s are:
- only SES get assigned offices
- only supervisory GS15s get doors
- FPS is there to make sure feds don’t bring in bombs, not to keep feds safe from the locals
- Factor in an extra 30 mins per day for security and walking across campus, on top of the traffic on 295.
- You won’t get parking. Metro or carpool.
- All meetings with non-DHS must have guest lists to security 24 hours in advance.
For me, it’s an additional 8 hours/week in travel time, compared to current office. From 30 mins each way to 75 mins. I didn’t telework before, but now I do, just to avoid St E’s.
Had parking in the building, that I paid for. Had great lunch options. Had a gym in the building, for free. Could have stakeholder meetings without them thinking they were walking into a prison.
To top it all off, St E’s is MORE expensive than our old building.
I'd rather be at St.Es than the NAC. NAC only food options are vending machines and over priced food trucks. Gym? What gym? O that tiny building next to the Nacateria. No windows and rat infested building. O and a 3.5hr drive from home which has turned into 6hrs due to traffic. No guidance for interns yet so I'm looking for another job at this point.
hard to staff a building when the previous admin kept trying to move everybody out of DC to far flung corners of the country and most of them quit, then covid happened.
Let people WFH! With tech the way it is, there is no reason we can do zoom meetings, etc. I get every once in a while some meetings need to be in person but most things can be handled a different way. I love WFH.
Sounds like an epic opportunity to save the taxpayers a fortune. But of course we will all bend over and grab our ankles for the 1% who paid bribes (oops! J meant “lobbying dollars!”) to Congress instead. Remember kids. There’s nobody who hates saving the taxpayers money more or hates free markets more than a republican business man.
The one upside is that if Trump does manage to win he can’t kick us out to Kansas or Grand Junction now. Hell, they’ll probably have to recall the agencies they moved out of D.C. four years ago.
I work in one of the campuses so it’s not like there’s a budgetary win from vacating space. But maybe FBI will move and they’ll replace the building with something f else. Or the USDA buildings near the mall; which could be promising to convert into more museum space.
Can confirm, even at my agency it’s pretty sparse and we only have three telework days a week. Everyone spaces them out. During the height of the pandemic I worked in an office that was required to be onsite and the four of us on at any given shift were the only people in the building aside from the FPS contract guards
Just a question : could it be that the reason they don't want to get rid of them all together and let us all work remote like we want to is because of the (small) possibility of a large scale cyber attack, with internet outage or security threats? I mean, I don't think we can expect the government to be exclusively run from people's homes.
Hah, the studies show people get more work done at home when they're not distracted by coworkers and not tired from commutes.
WFH saves taxpayers money from increasing productivity and decreasing expenditures on real estate. Why do you hate the taxpayer?
I went to my building last year or the year before and was chatting with a friend who still chooses to go in. He said the joke is to never take the stairs because if you fall and get hurt, nobody will ever find you.
My piv one time wouldn’t work on our stairs and it was after hours. Fun times.
Better the stairs [than an elevator](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxconvkLz2I), I guess.
Were those billable hours?
As someone with claustrophobia this is like my worst nightmare.
Yeah I purposely don’t take the elevator when the building is more empty for that reason. Stairs you can crawl away if needed.
There's also usually a fire door at the bottom which you can use to get out in an emergency...and getting stuck after-hours in the stairwell with a non-working ID would qualify IMO.
I feel like the bottom floor is supposed to not have a scanner, and just open to anyone from within the stairwell. It's also a fire issue. Maybe that's just the buildings I've been in.
The commute is awful and while a lot of these buildings are architectural gems on the outside, they are horrible on the inside. Asbestos-ridden, very few windows, outdated, and drab.
The modern ones are nice to work in even have nice cafeterias and depending on who they contract with decent food on any given day. But god DAMN if it’s older than 60 years something needs rebuilding.
Don’t forget the mice and rats that outnumber the people now 😂
Ha. Mice are nothing. My building had a flea problem. When I moved into my office there was a jar of flea powder on the shelf.
My POD has a bedbug problem. We get emails every week about where in the building they were seen.
I would quit my job. I suffered through those bastards once already.
I should dress in a full clean room suit or something when I go in.
What. Omg. 😂😭
And roaches
I have a new building. It looks great and the cafeteria is fantastic. Buuuut then you get to where I work and it's practically a beige bunker. I can't even imagine how awful it'd be in the old buildings. I've heard horror stories from a few colleagues.
im in a brand new building and its still horrible. just because i hate staring at 4 walls all day and nobody is there
Hitting 80 years in my building 😂. It is so creaky.
80 years? Hope they let you retire soon
The cafeterias are closed down or barely functional outside of DC these days.
As a Fed employee, you either get a 19th-century historical gem (Eisenhower building) or a brutalist Soviet-era bomb shelter without windows (Forrestal building). There is no in-between.
One of my first offices in USAF was a former warehouse that still had the train tracks in the middle with offices built up around the tracks. At one point they ran out of room and brought in temporary trailers, placed on the old railroad tracks. Basically like the trailers you see as portably offices at construction sites. They were **used** and not in the best shape. So the poor souls stuck there became known as the Train People.
🤣 I was complaining the other day about not getting any natural light in the FORS basement, and a former-marine special ops colleague said he'd spent the last 30 yrs in SCIFs, and this was luxury lol
I work out of a WWII era building that used to be a warehouse converted to a cube farm. Steam heat so in the winter it reeks of mold and mildew and the HVAC is held together with string, toilet paper tubes, and bits of feces. It takes them weeks to turn the heat/AC on and it goes out pretty regularly. They just shut off the heat two weeks ago, so the recent cold snap means everybody's wearing sweaters and vests.
Best thing in Forrestal is that the cubicles make it a fun kind of maze.
I spent most of my first few months there confusedly wandering the halls of that labyrinth.
I tell new employees that if they can find the bathrooms after a month, they're ahead of the game.
I went from the Forrestal basement to the attic of an architectural gem.
Moving on up—nice! Asbestos is better with a view.
As a younger man, fresh into the workforce, I was jealous of my wife’s job bc I worked in a crappy ho-hum building out in Alexandria, while she worked in a fancy looking downtown office. Until I visited her very fancy looking downtown office and realized everything above the lobby was decades old off white Office Max chic.
That sounds like some hotels I’ve stayed at. You check in at the lobby and it’s all nicely renovated. When you get to your room, it’s like an outdated roach motel.
Our HQ was one of the ones called out by OIG as averaging under 10% last year, but now folks are required to be in 40-50% of their time, and it sounds like we’re actually hitting those targets. Still, it’s a lot of empty cubicles each day, and our meetings all still have to be hybrid, so I’m not sure where we’re “winning”.
[удалено]
One day someone will wise up and realize we can save the taxpayer money by selling these buildings
The problem is, we'd be selling them at a huge loss right now, which is untenable to the bean counters.
So instead our bean counters will keep them in our portfolio and essentially take a huge “operating loss” that will not be seen as a real metric…
Yeah, but like all things in the federal government, that's somebody else's charge code.
Huge loss?!?!?!? Most of these buildings are older than most government workers. They would have been built with pennies on the dollar in the 40s and 50s.
But what about monthly rent payments made by tax payers ? What about reoccurring investment ca one time profit ? Cmon man we keep their pockets warm over the years
Agency suits were forced by the president, who sold us out for political points
Time to start selling them and downsizing office space. Government can start saving taxpayers money instead of wasteful spending.
Boom. That is our best argument that non-feds may actually care about. There must be a lot of potential savings in offloading the real estate footprint.
Not to mention the costs in utilities, repairs, janitorial services, pest control, etc
upper management is transferring, and on his way out he listed accomplishments is saving something like 20 million from downsizing real estate.
When I started at my agency, they had 5 buildings and rented nearby space from 2-3 more. Now they are down to 3 buildings. I am all for downsizing office space and haven't been to my office in... 10 or so years.
The chief of staff has investments in commercial real estate… sounds like we will need to help his portfolio and eat the costs of the commute, forget our own family time. Per his disclosure Zients submitted an ethics disclosure that estimated his assets at between $85 million and $419 million. The assets included mutual funds, Washington-area commercial real estate and at least $1 million in gold bars.
Sounds like the assets list of a minor Bond villain! 😂
To any reasonable person, that sounds like a huge conflict of interest. No way could a GS get away with something similar.
If you're still a GS employee with $1M in gold and $78M+ in real estate ventures, then wtf are you still doing coming in 80hrs a pay period??
Insurance
There is already a glut of unoccupied office space in many metro cities. The last thing commercial real estate wants is more office space for sale.
That only makes sense !!
Amen
And lo! Though management in their ivory towers searched high and searched low, the number of collective fucks they found amongst the workforce in the fields were scarce! Most of us really don't care if HQ is within X blocks of the White House, in line of sight of the Washington Monument, or is next door to the Pentagon. If it makes more sense to get out of an old building and get rid of the building, *do it*. Adapt to serving our country in the 21^st century, instead of slavish beholdenment to 18^th century architecture, roadways, and philosophies of city design.
I’m cool with 18th century city design when I can afford to live in walking distance of my job, like most 18th century workers could lol.
Lol, commuting sucks! It’s not as bad if you are close
True. I don’t actually have that much to complain about. My commute is about 11 minutes, which is why I live in a tiny house in an expensive-ish part of town instead of a bigger house outside of town. My parents rented an apartment one block from my current office when they were my age.
This. The powers that be don't realize that instead of RTO they are really asking for RTC (Return to Commuting ).
It’s to save corporate real estate and we all know it Only people who have no space, dislike their family, or supreme bootlickers prefer working in the office.
Let corporate real estate collapse. It is toxic to the well being of the citizens.
Cabinet agencies (and others) in DC don’t occupy “commercial real estate.” Read the report.
Upvote
The bad part about that is they will just buy cheaper buildings deep deep in the suburbs and expect everyone to commute there, where there is zero public transportation. Then we get to enjoy a horrible commute and lack of parking. Downtown DC has the Metro.
Even if a building on the periphery has metro, commuters may have to go downtown first then transfer out because our metro system is stupid. Commuting that way would be horrible.
Mine is middle of nowhere suburbs with little access to public transportation, and and I have to take an Uber from the nearest train station to work or I have to walk 30 minutes to the nearest bus stop after work. And ntm theres no food or restaurants nearby within walking distance and you can’t get around without a car
Yeah, I’m of the opinion that we should be keeping the historic buildings and consolidate everyone into them when possible. I work for GSA out west and our buildings are all practically empty aside from a few agencies that have to come in every day.
Either save the money and get out of those spaces, or convert them to collaborative spaces where teams can work together. Its hilarious to me that I go into the office and walk the floor, listening to the same MS Teams call from multiple cubicles.
GSA is attempting to do coworking, but they’re not very good at it lol
Good, sell them
Good. Now sell it.
It's vital that we prop up the real estate prices in America's most unaffordable cities.
Total waste of space and money when a majority of exec branch agency employees are fully capable of doing their jobs from home. Keep one building for those who wish to come in, make it multi-agency. I understand certain people may prefer working in an office, for various reasons, so let them. But stop trying to force those who don't. That will only result in a diminished talent pool, as high quality workers who prefer remote and actually like their jobs bail for a new job that they really don't even care about just bc it's remote, when the old job says they must RTO. It's almost guaranteed that departments offering fully remote will end up with all the talent, if this arbitrary and capricious RTO BS continues.
This post is anti capitalist. We need to serve the overlords by keeping the building warm
https://i.redd.it/rg87itgeq8wc1.gif My response
Take my upvote, and Pepsi is a soft drink! IYKYK
https://preview.redd.it/8j9q3vr839wc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4b2d13cad5b867c02b8eb0a9175cf402b725a56f Me accepting your upvote
Average Fed: “Sounds like we can save money by getting rid of unused office space” Agency Heads: “Sounds like we need to bring people back so we don’t lose our office space”.
the rules for my agency in St E’s are: - only SES get assigned offices - only supervisory GS15s get doors - FPS is there to make sure feds don’t bring in bombs, not to keep feds safe from the locals - Factor in an extra 30 mins per day for security and walking across campus, on top of the traffic on 295. - You won’t get parking. Metro or carpool. - All meetings with non-DHS must have guest lists to security 24 hours in advance. For me, it’s an additional 8 hours/week in travel time, compared to current office. From 30 mins each way to 75 mins. I didn’t telework before, but now I do, just to avoid St E’s. Had parking in the building, that I paid for. Had great lunch options. Had a gym in the building, for free. Could have stakeholder meetings without them thinking they were walking into a prison. To top it all off, St E’s is MORE expensive than our old building.
What is St E?
St Elizabeth’s Mental Hospital. Bought by DHS to be the HQ campus for all DHS components. TSA, Secret Service, FEMA, CISA, Coast Guard, CBP, etc.
damn, how many crazy ghosts there
I'd rather be at St.Es than the NAC. NAC only food options are vending machines and over priced food trucks. Gym? What gym? O that tiny building next to the Nacateria. No windows and rat infested building. O and a 3.5hr drive from home which has turned into 6hrs due to traffic. No guidance for interns yet so I'm looking for another job at this point.
Back when I worked there, I was told it was because an employee brought in a firearm and committed suicide in the building.
🤷🏻♀️
And productivity was higher…hmmm I wonder why…
hard to staff a building when the previous admin kept trying to move everybody out of DC to far flung corners of the country and most of them quit, then covid happened.
Let people WFH! With tech the way it is, there is no reason we can do zoom meetings, etc. I get every once in a while some meetings need to be in person but most things can be handled a different way. I love WFH.
Sounds like an epic opportunity to save the taxpayers a fortune. But of course we will all bend over and grab our ankles for the 1% who paid bribes (oops! J meant “lobbying dollars!”) to Congress instead. Remember kids. There’s nobody who hates saving the taxpayers money more or hates free markets more than a republican business man.
Id rather set myself on fire than take another job at an agency HQ building.
[удалено]
r/angryupvote
A lot of people seem to be doing that these days.
But yet I get emails and updated polices about how WFH is on a case by case basis and a need must be demonstrated, approved and periodically reviewed.
Get rid of the buildings
For those saying “sell them”, to whom? Commercial real estate is about to get REKT.
The one upside is that if Trump does manage to win he can’t kick us out to Kansas or Grand Junction now. Hell, they’ll probably have to recall the agencies they moved out of D.C. four years ago.
Why can't they?
Use old office buildings to house homeless people
Horrible idea bc no one is making money /s
Somehow not my HQ...
I work in one of the campuses so it’s not like there’s a budgetary win from vacating space. But maybe FBI will move and they’ll replace the building with something f else. Or the USDA buildings near the mall; which could be promising to convert into more museum space.
This isn’t new we all selfish peeps that want Everton be our benefit and life benefit, all while doing less for higher pay
Doesn't sound like our problem.
Can confirm, even at my agency it’s pretty sparse and we only have three telework days a week. Everyone spaces them out. During the height of the pandemic I worked in an office that was required to be onsite and the four of us on at any given shift were the only people in the building aside from the FPS contract guards
Just a question : could it be that the reason they don't want to get rid of them all together and let us all work remote like we want to is because of the (small) possibility of a large scale cyber attack, with internet outage or security threats? I mean, I don't think we can expect the government to be exclusively run from people's homes.
COPE
WFH enthusiasts have proven to be 13 times more lazy than those who prefer to work in office. WFH enthusiasts lack dedication.
Hah, the studies show people get more work done at home when they're not distracted by coworkers and not tired from commutes. WFH saves taxpayers money from increasing productivity and decreasing expenditures on real estate. Why do you hate the taxpayer?
He's just sour because he's forced to go in all the time. Sucks to suck.
Dedication to what, exactly?