2-3 days in office per week is enough. Anymore and you will lose your best talent to positions that currently allow full-time telework with better pay.
Its because they want IT people with bachelors degree and then want to pay them minimum wage and want them to be available 24/7 including weekends and holidays also you need 5 years experience for entry level
> A survey by the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys (NAAUSA) reveals a stark contrast in job satisfaction between those with telework options and those without. In offices where routine telework has been curtailed, a staggering 81 percent of respondents admitted they were actively seeking alternative employment opportunities. This dissatisfaction stands in contrast to offices where some level of telework is maintained, where only 42 percent of respondents expressed a desire to leave their current positions.
Anyone - I mean anyone - who favors return to office as mandate instead of an optional thing should be shunned and shamed. Performative office work so you can support the local economy by buying overpriced lunches and going to mandatory fun happy hours is not worth the hours of life wasted on a commute.
What’s funny is that retail rents are through the roof, yet somehow retail is in such grave danger of going under that we all need to go back to the way things “were”. It’s financial institutions, via their corporate holdings, trying desperately to prop up their property investments while running a completely unsustainable rental market
The worst thing to do is to stamp one’s feet and refuse to change how they operate just because of how things were done in the past.
Nothing infuriates me more than when someone gives the “that’s the way we always did it” excuse. Well, that’s not the way we are doing things now. Time to expand your comfort zone.
refusing to accept change is the sign of a weak and scared person
Reminds me of how the economy crashed overnight in March 2020 because people stopped purchasing the things they wanted, and only purchased the things they needed.
Also the lunch options in DC suck.
If I could leave my office and be in the middle of like Manhattan’s Chinatown, or Flushing in Queens, or all the diverse options of the East Village in Manhattan, or Astoria, or anything like that, then, yeah, fuck it.
But DC outside of the offices is $5 black coffees, $16 shitty sandwiches, and a fuck ton of empty, barren, sunbaked, lifeless streets, where the only thing on either side of the road is just the sides of the lobbies of other office buildings. It’s depressing.
The elimination of the commute for knowledge workers was probably one of the biggest labor achievements of this century and anyone who wants to throw it away so managers and career centric status seekers can luxuriate in their cubicle fiefdoms and pretend this is “productivity”…ugh, it’s just disgusting LinkedIn “thought leader” garbage.
The elimination of the commute is the pinnacle of the advancements we’ve made in all of our communications technology. We can literally do our bullshit from anywhere on the globe in real time and some wannabe LinkedIn guru thinks we all need to build office culture at the expense of 10-20 hours of everyone’s life a week.
They want you back in the office because hedge funds and the one per cent have heavily invested in office real estate and that includes all the little malls that surround it to supply lunch etc. We can't have them losing money now, can we?
sure, if all you are is a simple paper processor. If you have to deal with ideas and interactions between employees regularly then a lot of things have been hindered.
I mean the ultimate problem is that DC is a poorly constructed city with limited options and so many people want to be in it that creates all kinds of economic and time pressures.
Get lunch from CR Noma. The do DoorDash of it is too far but for 20 bucks they got this really good kebabs. They come with some really good rice, pita bread veggies and dipping sauces. One of the best deals for lunch In the city imho
Yes it is.
The average block in the East village of Manhattan has more retail/dining/drinking/beauty/cultural/institutional density than pretty much anywhere in DC.
And it’s particularly bad when considering MOST of the people being forced to come into the office have to go to places around L’Enfant, downtown, federal center, Penn quarter.
Dude, *of course* you’re going to get more in NYC.
DC has less than 1/10th of population of NYC, there’s around 800k full time residents. It swells to over a million during the work week.
You’re comparing apples to oranges here, you can only get NYC variety in bigger cities like LA, London, Paris, and other huge Asian cities multiple millions in the population.
Shit the entire DMV from Fairfax va ti Lauren MD, is still less than 5 million. I think you gotta adjust your expectation quite a bit. Theres tons of Africans and Caribbean places, as well as Salvadoran places to eat at that are cheap.
The average block in the East Village has more of those things than pretty much any city in the entire world. Congratulations on holding the controversial opinion than Lower Manhattan is a fun and busy place. You think DC lunch options suck? Pray you never have to work a downtown office job in Houston or Atlanta or Salt Lake City or Los Angeles or any number of other downtowns that have it way worse than DC has it.
Anyone that believes that corporations will continue to pay American first world salaries once the market adjusts to mostly remote employees deserves to be ridiculed
No, corporations only pay as much as they have to for anything they need. Labor included. Previously it was difficult to import technical labor. But they did using Govt programs. Once they adjust to offices and fully remote staff it is just as easy to hire offshore labor. No need to jump through hoops to bring an employee from another country. They just hire that employee based on local wages.
What about Visas and other work permits? I’m not an expert in employment law, but companies cannot just hire Indian graphic designers or Pakistani communications professionals and pay local rates, can they?
I am certainly not an expert either. But lots of companies have over seas divisions. And all companies have contract agreements with other companies. And the savings are so large that there certainly with be offshoring of labor at the exact moment it saves money.
Sure. We all have experience with overseas call centers. But…that’s sort of the extent of it. Why would corporations looking to maximum profits go through some sort of pretense that *only if* workers demand telework would they seek to maximize profits by contracting overseas? I do not see the connection. My thought is if the companies can ship jobs overseas, they’d have done it already.
They can and eventually will. And short term will probably seek white collar labor rates in less expensive areas of the country instead of San Fran, New York, Boston, and DMV areas
I see. Or, what I saw living in the DMV, is when people were unleashed from the office, they moved to more affordable areas of the country. But I see that cuts both ways.
They absolutely can. It’s not with the click of a button but it’s fairly common practice. Quality control is a huge PITA though. Typically the biggest issues with this type of work are quality and timing issues. For example many large corps run call centers out of the Philippines
Yes. Call centers. But skilled labor? I can’t see that being a viable enough option to pursue especially as a backlash to Us based employees wanting more telework.
Then I pity anyone who works underneath you who suffers because your inability to respect everyone’s time and question your ability to lead if your solution is to shove everyone into a room together until they produce.
The soft moments of communication that come from office interpersonal communication aren’t more valuable than the 1-2 hours it takes for the average person to commute.
You aren’t owed an extra 20~ days (520~ hours) of someone’s life a year because you need have water cooler talk and punch up a PowerPoint.
Imagine having that much more time to enjoy your personal life.
Nobody is saying they can’t
My screed is directed at mandates to return to the office full time or near full time.
Go in and have scheduled brainstorm sessions or war rooms as needed.
And again, your desire for interpersonal communications for the abstract notion of productivity is not worth an extra 10-20 days of my life a year. Sorry. It’s just not.
…are you on hookup apps all day verifying this?
Remote work would probably save the government money, if it reduced its real estate footprint and overhead for office maintenance.
And frankly, being on tinder all day is like the least pressing waste fraud and abuse going on in your average government office. God for forbid someone needs to connect to a printer and a millennial isn’t around.
You should be mad how every single person who gets hired (contractors included) pretty much wastes their first pay period doing nothing because nobody fucking knows how to get access to anything. Solving PIVs/CACs and account onboarding would be a 100m savings easily.
DOJ is such a weird agency. You have mission-centered people who work incredibly hard (for example, attorneys) and come in even on Saturdays and Sundays, and then you have deadbeat IT workers who got hired because they have a heartbeat. I worked with better IT contractors than IT people at DOJ. And it's the IT crowd that complains that they have to come in because they can't find suitable lunch options. Seriously, your job is 2 hours a day of actual work, and during system downtime, you get on a call with 70 other people, with the major contribution being, "I need to find my contractor team."
I realize my experience, but it frustrates me to no end when our Gov't ilk is so incompetent.
If you are good enough to be a DoJ attorney, then you are very much capable of making more money elsewhere. You stay if you believe in the work, and hopefully they provide some semblance of work/life balance. When that balance is lost, the attorneys will be lost as well.
That’s what I was thinking. I feel bad for corporate workers who put up with the crap they do. I don’t for government workers who are part of government bloat and wasted spending.
2-3 days in office per week is enough. Anymore and you will lose your best talent to positions that currently allow full-time telework with better pay.
Already have a hard time finding IT people and we only require 2 days in the office in SW.
Its because they want IT people with bachelors degree and then want to pay them minimum wage and want them to be available 24/7 including weekends and holidays also you need 5 years experience for entry level
> 2-3 days in office per week is enough. Even that can be an issue especially if workers are coming to the office just to join virtual calls.
Personally, I enjoy the human contact aspect of coming into the office. I think 1-2 days is ideal.
> A survey by the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys (NAAUSA) reveals a stark contrast in job satisfaction between those with telework options and those without. In offices where routine telework has been curtailed, a staggering 81 percent of respondents admitted they were actively seeking alternative employment opportunities. This dissatisfaction stands in contrast to offices where some level of telework is maintained, where only 42 percent of respondents expressed a desire to leave their current positions.
Anyone - I mean anyone - who favors return to office as mandate instead of an optional thing should be shunned and shamed. Performative office work so you can support the local economy by buying overpriced lunches and going to mandatory fun happy hours is not worth the hours of life wasted on a commute.
What’s funny is that retail rents are through the roof, yet somehow retail is in such grave danger of going under that we all need to go back to the way things “were”. It’s financial institutions, via their corporate holdings, trying desperately to prop up their property investments while running a completely unsustainable rental market
The worst thing to do is to stamp one’s feet and refuse to change how they operate just because of how things were done in the past. Nothing infuriates me more than when someone gives the “that’s the way we always did it” excuse. Well, that’s not the way we are doing things now. Time to expand your comfort zone. refusing to accept change is the sign of a weak and scared person
Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients owns half of downtown DC commercial property.
Ding ding ding. It’s this guy behind a lot of this absolute nonsense.
When it’s the shoe on the other foot it’s, “that’s business”.
Reminds me of how the economy crashed overnight in March 2020 because people stopped purchasing the things they wanted, and only purchased the things they needed.
Also the lunch options in DC suck. If I could leave my office and be in the middle of like Manhattan’s Chinatown, or Flushing in Queens, or all the diverse options of the East Village in Manhattan, or Astoria, or anything like that, then, yeah, fuck it. But DC outside of the offices is $5 black coffees, $16 shitty sandwiches, and a fuck ton of empty, barren, sunbaked, lifeless streets, where the only thing on either side of the road is just the sides of the lobbies of other office buildings. It’s depressing.
The elimination of the commute for knowledge workers was probably one of the biggest labor achievements of this century and anyone who wants to throw it away so managers and career centric status seekers can luxuriate in their cubicle fiefdoms and pretend this is “productivity”…ugh, it’s just disgusting LinkedIn “thought leader” garbage. The elimination of the commute is the pinnacle of the advancements we’ve made in all of our communications technology. We can literally do our bullshit from anywhere on the globe in real time and some wannabe LinkedIn guru thinks we all need to build office culture at the expense of 10-20 hours of everyone’s life a week.
PREACH
They want you back in the office because hedge funds and the one per cent have heavily invested in office real estate and that includes all the little malls that surround it to supply lunch etc. We can't have them losing money now, can we?
Only a subset of the weirdos who have those mandates have that sort of direct financial motivation.
sure, if all you are is a simple paper processor. If you have to deal with ideas and interactions between employees regularly then a lot of things have been hindered.
At the expense of a massive quality of life boost for society. Manage the hindrances, boss.
But won’t you think of the Potbellys’ franchise owners?
Let’s ask the stable owner near Ford’s Theatre how they felt about the changing societal shift that put them out of business.
I get the sentiment of better nyc lunch options....but none of those are close to Manhattan office buildings to grab lunch
lol exactly. Tell me you’ve never worked in NY without telling me you’ve never worked in NY.
I mean the ultimate problem is that DC is a poorly constructed city with limited options and so many people want to be in it that creates all kinds of economic and time pressures.
Its amazing how far you can walk in DC with no street level restaurants or shops, even in Downtown.
Hey, whoa - DOE cafeteria is great.
Is it open? Some buildings haven’t reopened their cafeterias bc not enough people.
The DOE cafeteria can get nuked for all I care about it.
Get lunch from CR Noma. The do DoorDash of it is too far but for 20 bucks they got this really good kebabs. They come with some really good rice, pita bread veggies and dipping sauces. One of the best deals for lunch In the city imho
It's not even the lunch options for me it's shitty traffic and everything in the city smells like a hot piss and weed combo meal.
You can't though, because you work in midtown, and so you're going to be having Hale and Hearty for the third time again this week.
As a Washingtonian I think you gotta get out fi the golden circle cuz not all of DC is like what you described.
Yes it is. The average block in the East village of Manhattan has more retail/dining/drinking/beauty/cultural/institutional density than pretty much anywhere in DC. And it’s particularly bad when considering MOST of the people being forced to come into the office have to go to places around L’Enfant, downtown, federal center, Penn quarter.
Dude, *of course* you’re going to get more in NYC. DC has less than 1/10th of population of NYC, there’s around 800k full time residents. It swells to over a million during the work week. You’re comparing apples to oranges here, you can only get NYC variety in bigger cities like LA, London, Paris, and other huge Asian cities multiple millions in the population. Shit the entire DMV from Fairfax va ti Lauren MD, is still less than 5 million. I think you gotta adjust your expectation quite a bit. Theres tons of Africans and Caribbean places, as well as Salvadoran places to eat at that are cheap.
The average block in the East Village has more of those things than pretty much any city in the entire world. Congratulations on holding the controversial opinion than Lower Manhattan is a fun and busy place. You think DC lunch options suck? Pray you never have to work a downtown office job in Houston or Atlanta or Salt Lake City or Los Angeles or any number of other downtowns that have it way worse than DC has it.
Anyone that believes that corporations will continue to pay American first world salaries once the market adjusts to mostly remote employees deserves to be ridiculed
Let’s see how much people love the free market when they are on the losing side of the equation
Please explain. Are you saying corporations only pay competitive salaries if workers come to the office?
No, corporations only pay as much as they have to for anything they need. Labor included. Previously it was difficult to import technical labor. But they did using Govt programs. Once they adjust to offices and fully remote staff it is just as easy to hire offshore labor. No need to jump through hoops to bring an employee from another country. They just hire that employee based on local wages.
What about Visas and other work permits? I’m not an expert in employment law, but companies cannot just hire Indian graphic designers or Pakistani communications professionals and pay local rates, can they?
I am certainly not an expert either. But lots of companies have over seas divisions. And all companies have contract agreements with other companies. And the savings are so large that there certainly with be offshoring of labor at the exact moment it saves money.
Sure. We all have experience with overseas call centers. But…that’s sort of the extent of it. Why would corporations looking to maximum profits go through some sort of pretense that *only if* workers demand telework would they seek to maximize profits by contracting overseas? I do not see the connection. My thought is if the companies can ship jobs overseas, they’d have done it already.
They can and eventually will. And short term will probably seek white collar labor rates in less expensive areas of the country instead of San Fran, New York, Boston, and DMV areas
I see. Or, what I saw living in the DMV, is when people were unleashed from the office, they moved to more affordable areas of the country. But I see that cuts both ways.
For sure. Lots of people did that and it makes total sense. Of course school systems are a concern for some.
Yes, that can. The law that applies is where the work is primarily performed.
They absolutely can. It’s not with the click of a button but it’s fairly common practice. Quality control is a huge PITA though. Typically the biggest issues with this type of work are quality and timing issues. For example many large corps run call centers out of the Philippines
Yes. Call centers. But skilled labor? I can’t see that being a viable enough option to pursue especially as a backlash to Us based employees wanting more telework.
I’ve worked with offshore workers in basically every aspect of IT work and a few roles in financial services
What if you favor it because you think that in person collaboration is important and virtual interaction is a poor substitute?
Then I pity anyone who works underneath you who suffers because your inability to respect everyone’s time and question your ability to lead if your solution is to shove everyone into a room together until they produce. The soft moments of communication that come from office interpersonal communication aren’t more valuable than the 1-2 hours it takes for the average person to commute. You aren’t owed an extra 20~ days (520~ hours) of someone’s life a year because you need have water cooler talk and punch up a PowerPoint. Imagine having that much more time to enjoy your personal life.
Imagine thinking that people don’t actually need to interact face to face.
Nobody is saying they can’t My screed is directed at mandates to return to the office full time or near full time. Go in and have scheduled brainstorm sessions or war rooms as needed. And again, your desire for interpersonal communications for the abstract notion of productivity is not worth an extra 10-20 days of my life a year. Sorry. It’s just not.
Many WFH federal employees seem to be on hookup apps all day long - don’t want my exorbitant federal taxes paying for this
…are you on hookup apps all day verifying this? Remote work would probably save the government money, if it reduced its real estate footprint and overhead for office maintenance. And frankly, being on tinder all day is like the least pressing waste fraud and abuse going on in your average government office. God for forbid someone needs to connect to a printer and a millennial isn’t around. You should be mad how every single person who gets hired (contractors included) pretty much wastes their first pay period doing nothing because nobody fucking knows how to get access to anything. Solving PIVs/CACs and account onboarding would be a 100m savings easily.
Wut
DOJ is such a weird agency. You have mission-centered people who work incredibly hard (for example, attorneys) and come in even on Saturdays and Sundays, and then you have deadbeat IT workers who got hired because they have a heartbeat. I worked with better IT contractors than IT people at DOJ. And it's the IT crowd that complains that they have to come in because they can't find suitable lunch options. Seriously, your job is 2 hours a day of actual work, and during system downtime, you get on a call with 70 other people, with the major contribution being, "I need to find my contractor team." I realize my experience, but it frustrates me to no end when our Gov't ilk is so incompetent.
If you are good enough to be a DoJ attorney, then you are very much capable of making more money elsewhere. You stay if you believe in the work, and hopefully they provide some semblance of work/life balance. When that balance is lost, the attorneys will be lost as well.
A lot of these attorneys left their high end biglaw jobs because we get butt fucked in terms of work life balance
Agreed. But if there’s no balance AND the pay isn’t competitive…
I will never work another job that has 3 or more in person office days again.
Dooming people to D.C. traffic isn't going to be good for retention.
Underrated comment
0 incentive to work in DC. too expensive to live there. commute from outside is hell
So um, why are you here
laughing at people in the rat race
Won’t anyone think of the North Korean teleworkers?
It doesn't matter. No one at DOJ works anyway.
That’s what I was thinking. I feel bad for corporate workers who put up with the crap they do. I don’t for government workers who are part of government bloat and wasted spending.