Banks in the US are _very_ insistent on the return to office mandate. Noncompliance would be met with termination.
Rest assured their goal is full return to office despite the current "hybrid" model they are pushing, and you are not important enough to them to keep your job while being civilly disobedient.
Banks are by far the vanguard force advocating for RTO in part because the banking industry owns a colossal amount of office and commercial real estate, and if the world doesn't magically go back to how it was they stand to lose many tons of money.
This. Those same banks also own all the credit lines, card merchant services, and other financial instruments attached to every smaller, adjacent business (restaurants, dry cleaners, gyms, convenience stores, etc.) with clientele in those offices. Companies with a big footprint in one place also typically get tax breaks for bringing their workforce to that city, with the expectation that the economic activity will generate other tax revenue. When big employers don't force their people to be in a certain building for a minimum amount of time, all of that deflates.
Big banks, in particular, want to make a big, public show that "we're all going back to the office" in order to, at a minimum, delay the inevitable collapse of commercial real estate concentrated in major cities. On the inside, they're willing to quietly make exceptions if you fit the right profile (key talent, DEI quotas, political buddies, etc.). If you're a regular, high performing employee with no reason to be in an office, go pound sand.
Source: I'm that person. We lost a LOT of good people because of this over the last few years.
I believe they meant to use the tildes to indicate a strikethrough text format, as with markdown. The "cul", I would guess is an unfinished "cultists", even though you'd typically strikethrough a completed word. When trying to indicate a "change of mind" it would be better to use a dash: "Better at retaining cul- uh, employees."
Funny, cause I think the exact opposite. I've read numerous papers and in Australia at least, you are statistically better off on a variable rate something like 2/3 of the time. You pay a premium for the security of a stable interest rate.
You can also (probably) save money by never buying any kind of insurance, but insurance is a useful risk mitigation. Someone who got an ARM a few years ago and is hitting the variable rates around now probably sees their interest rate roughly double. They likely aren't much reassured by the fact that historically, most people's mortgages had better timing.
If rates are going down they are a great choice as you will refinance in a couple years anyway. However you have to really know what rates (read the economy) will do so that just as they reach the bottom (you don't need to hit the exact bottom, just get close) to refinance to fixed rate.
They are also good if you have reason to believe you won't live there for more than a couple years. (in general renting is better than buying if your time frame is less than 7-10 years, but local factors may force you to buy anyway).
Since ARMs are lower rates they save you money in the short run. However they tend to adjust up after the terms and so can really hurt you.
I would say close to illiterate. I don't know what mortgages are like in other countries, but in the US you want a fixed rate or you want to rent. An ARM can really fuck you up.
> They are also good if you have reason to believe you won't live there for more than a couple years
Generally speaking, it's better to rent in that case. You'll have more flexibility and substantially less risk.
Ignorant here because I dont know how ARMs are actually structured as far as what the lender can and cant do, but the idea of signing a loan contract and having no garauntee of the upper bound of the interest rate is absolutely wild to me. Banks will fuck you at any opportunity they have, so habding then a loaded gun and thinking theyre not gonna raise rates without a reason is crazy to me.
The beauty of competition. The person lending you money always could fuck you over, but the greed of other banks would save you in that scenario. Which they know, so they don't fuck you over. Same reason grocery stores don't wait until you fill your cart up and then jack up the prices as soon as you reach the register.
Back in the 80s and 90s ARMs were very popular in the US because interest rates were high, and the expectation was that they wouldn't stay that way forever. The rate increases had a lifetime cap, so there was a knowable upper bound.
Edit to add: also, if you knew you were going to sell (and confident you could actually sell) within a few years, the lower initial rate of an ARM made sense.
There is also a material spread between ARMs and fixed when the rates are high. When rates are low the spread compresses (same with rates between terms 15/20/30), making the additional risk questionable.
I have a buddy who got a fixed 15y when rates were super low b/c he wanted to pay his mortgage off early. But, locking into the 15y barely lowered the rate vs a 30 fixed. I told him to do the 30 fixed, and just pay it as a 15y. This would give him flexibility if he lost his job or had some other emergency.
Getting a 30y and paying off in 15 is a smart move. For our most recent house, that's we did set out to do, until the last refi (maybe 5 years in to the 30y) when we got a 15y and paid it off in 10 more years.
I used to think that, but i'm not convinced anymore. In the best case it is smart, but I've known too many people over the years that either died before they were able to enjoy the fruits of their investment, or by the time they were that old their body was such that they couldn't do anything without much pain.
Better to pay off the house when you retire and enjoy life a little more. Of course you should save for a nice retirement, but don't plan all for when you get old. (Renting can also work out well, but you need more in other investments when you retire so you can keep paying rent)
You bring up a great and different point. Is paying off early worthwhile at all? I agree with you that it's really not. Given a low fixed rate, paying off a mortgage early is almost never a good financial decision. Particularly with a lump sum. It's most people's largest leveraged investment. Better to keep the cash and the leverage working for you.
Even if there were no limitations in the contract, there's still a market. If your bank diverged too far you can just refinance. And if the whole market is high, inflation is probably crazy and you're watching the principal dwindle to insignificance anyway.
They keep the same rate for 3-5 years. Then you refinance, so they can't do anything. If rates are going up, they can't go up as fast as rates, though in general you should always refinance just before the adjustment.
> If rates are going down they are a great choice as you will refinance in a couple years anyway.
It's also great to put all my money on black if the roulette wheel is going to land on black. Mortgages are long term, making predicting future rates 3-5-10 years out very hard.
> Since ARMs are lower rates they save you money in the short run.
The low rates of the last 5ish years compressed the difference between fixed and variable that there was little reason to take on the variable risk. As rates go up, that calculation will likely change.
> They are also good if you have reason to believe you won't live there for more than a couple years.
You should rent then. The cost and friction of RE transactions are too high for someone not planning to be there for 2+ years.
One more specific example of someone taking a calculated short term risk: home flippers. They have had both good times and bad in the last 15 years. Those who financed with lower costs during hotter markets had better margins.
House flipping should probably be banned, though. It's bad for the homeowners who buy the house because it's invariably low-quality contractors who do the work and they invariably don't do it to code. It's bad for the neighborhood because the residents aren't stable.
You have to do a lot better at prediction in most markets. The other the potential for change gets priced in, while with mortgage you can get todays rates while everyone knows how they will change.
Why? When I looked into it (about a decade ago), variable rates had paid less overall than fixed for every 10 year window over the previous 50 years. I always assumed people getting fixed rate were overleveraged and couldn't assume the rational risk of the variable.
Your statement makes me assume you're financially illiterate...
A variable rate has historically been more beneficial than a fixed rate.
A fixed rate should be seen as an insurance you pay a premium for. If the risk of it going up so much that you can't afford it, then it's absolutely a great idea to get a fixed rate, but otherwise you'll earn more with a variable rate.
Statistically, you're right - the variable rate is usually better. But that's also assuming that interest rates are completely random (which they're not) - a bit of market timing is wise to do here. And the spread compresses when rates are low, making the fixed more attractive then because the premium is lower.
Variable also makes a lot more sense with shorter timelines (either to sale or to early payoff).
Depends on what the rate is. If it's historically low at the time your take out your mortgage you might consider locking in that rate. I certainly would not have been better off with a variable rate, for one example.
Yale economist James Choi certainly doesn't strike me as financially illiterate, yet in his paper "Popular Personal Financial Advice versus the Professors", he finds variable rate mortgages to be a pretty good deal.
Banks set the fixed rate & they more than anyone else knows what will most likely happen to rates in the future because the banks are the ones in closed door meetings with reserve banks/government.
Do you think they'd set a fixed rate where they lose?
The problem with this is that your previous manager may be an idiot who can't accurately judge your skills. You have the same problem: your manager is no more trustworthy than you are, and it's much easier to just have you write some code in front of me to solve this problem.
Many subreddits are simply themed containers of creative writing. With all the media attention the AntiWork subreddit has gotten lately that brings more karma farmers and therefore more fiction. It's an entertaining read, but not likely true.
Like TheDailyWTF stories, this is in the category of stories where even if the literal person who wrote that wrote fiction, something that is effectively the same story is true for someone.
As developers who start writing big servers learn, scale matters. Crap you'd never think twice about when running a script on your workstation will bring your entire service down. There's 7-ish billion people in the world. Entire industries live in situations you've never experienced. There's plenty of scale that all sorts of weird things really do happen to someone, somewhere in real life.
I don't find this all that hard to believe. To be honest, I'm not even sure what you're finding hard to believe. What exactly is it? That a law firm could be that clueless about tech? That someone would discover this opportunity and simply milk it for all its worth? I don't find any aspect of this story particularly hard to believe. I'm sure this story is happening at least a thousand times over somewhere in the world in some form.
In fact I'd bet that if we could investigate carefully enough, we'd find someone out there who has at least three of these jobs with different companies. Someone who blundered into one of these, figured out some useful pattern, and figured out how to do it systematically. Probably as a contractor.
This exchange has been the long drawn out version of:
> > Story
> r/thathappened
r/nothingeverhappens
---
Where subreddit "ThatHappened" is a sarcastic one, a response to far-fetched and unlikely sounding stories, implying they are not true. Such response has been overdone enough that subreddit "NothingEverHappens" has become a reply implying that unlikely sounding things actually do happen.
And all of it is a real-world version of the joke "a person walks into a bar, and hears one of the regulars say 'number 38' and the other regulars laugh. A bit later another one says 'number 17' and they laugh. The person asks a regular what's going on, and they say 'we have all been here so long and told the same jokes so often that we know all the same jokes and just refer to them by numbers. Try one yourself'. The person says 'number 22'. Nobody laughs. The regular shrugs, eh, it's the way you tell 'em".
But suggesting that joke plays out in real life might be r/thathappens . But it does happen, and people do laugh.
The story is most likely made up and one of the last clarifications strongly hints at it:
> It can't be this simple / this is fake because you aren't doing blah blah. You're right, it's not this simple. There are more steps involved in the script and it performs functions I haven't discussed. [...] The core of the script, transfer and hash, is accurate
The person focuses on transfer and hash and keeps what looks like an absolutely critical part of the process as barely a mention: checking against a spreadsheet where the automation is most vulnerable. Tens of thousands of files means just as many opportunities for a typo in that spreadsheet. And yet the job is still 10 minutes per day.
Also with the popularity this gained, not being worried at all that the employers can guess who this is about just because they left out some parts of the job is a bit hilarious. Somehow I can buy that a mid-sized law firm never realized how easy it is to automate this task. But nobody ever suspecting they're the actors in the story despite the process being fairly unique? That I don't buy.
Everything sounds like a very inexperienced person telling a story they can only fantasize about.
> But nobody ever suspecting they're the actors in the story despite the process being fairly unique?
In a past life I used to write for a local TV soap. I would constantly take personal events that my friends and family told me about, minimally jazz them up, and have them happen to our regular cast. I was there for five years and not one person noticed that their story was on the show. It's all about context.
You overestimate how much managers and employers browse social media. Especially non-tech organization, they may not even know what Reddit is.
And no, this isn't a unique experience, given how many people here alone chimed in on similar automation strategies in non-tech situations. It can be weird if you're in tech and you're managing billion line codebases, but you'd be surprised how much a non-tech company would value a 100 line automation script you whip up in a week. The only risk in that relationship is your skills growing stale for if/when you need to change jobs
All regulars are laughing, hard. They shout out in turns "73!", and laugh again. Confused, the person asks what's so good about 73. Says a regular, catching his breath and wiping tears from his eyes: "Heh 73, we haven't heard that one before!"
I also agree that it's not only happened, but it's probably not that rare. Before most businesses were automated to the point where this is possible, I had an engineering job where for at least two years, I may as well have not shown up. I spent all my time reading magazines and doing pet projects because there wasn't anything else for me to do but answer the phone if a customer had a question. I could have easily taken on another job in the mean time if remote work was a thing back then.
I knew at the time that I wasn't alone in this. I knew another engineer whose job consisted of basically showing up to work just in case an alarm went off. He spent his time writing a software package that he sold. Because, again, he really had nothing else to do all day, every day.
This was back in the mid-late 90's. I'd expect that it's even more prevalent now.
> As developers who start writing big servers learn, scale matters. Crap you'd never think twice about when running a script on your workstation will bring your entire service down.
This reminded me of an issue we had at a previous startup that was growing really fast. There was a process that "created PDF invoices", which was coded by calling a (sync) API, which generated it on the fly.
The problem changed, once those PDF invoices became 100MB large, with hundreds of pages (required by business case). It's a completely different beast that the "MVP" developers did not thought about (as it is expected). Now you either code and maintain an async service which uploads to S3, along with the full lifecycle, or just buy a service to do it for you.
Scale definitely matters, and all systems change once you consider large scale data and workloads.
I don't think so, but it is a recurring issue I've seen at several B2B startups. It makes sense if you think about it. Being B2B, customers' AP departments request detailed usage billing. Someone creates a simple endpoint to produce a PDF, and eventually PDFs get too large to handle synchronously.
Back in 2013, as part of my consultancy services, I built a simple email support site for a client, whose most difficult part was just a background job (mailman) that would need to pull emails from different providers and send emails through them, as per replied by this client's support reps. The customer wanted a sort of custom service rather than using Zendesk or something, because he was providing a "outsourced support services" to his clients. I charged only $950 to build the initial version, but charged monthly maintenance which started from $300 something, and over the months/years went onto $840+ monthly.
Mostly, it was Mailman that would require some tweaks re error handling/retry logic, as there were weird errors I would see from different providers once in a while. However, the code would work flawlessly and for months I didn't even need to check it at all.
So, yes it's possible IMO, just that you need to be in a right situation at the right time with the mindset of a hacker (the one who wants to make machine works for him), you can achieve something like this.
All of these highly-upvoted Reddit stories have the same few things in common:
1) They're vague enough to be possible. If it's too outlandish, people will call it out.
2) Verifiable or falsifiable specifics are conveniently omitted. This is easy to justify due to the anonymity.
3) They have an element of good guy versus bad guy, where the reader can empathize with the person telling the story but can also accept the counterparty (the company, boss, whatever) as the "bad guy" without feeling bad about it. These subreddits are built on the premise that companies and bosses are bad, so anything that fits that narrative is welcomed without question.
Basically, the stories are vague enough that they can't be falsified, but there are so many of them with so many convenient details falling perfectly in to place for the poster that it's extremely unlikely that all, or even most, of them are real stories. In the past, people would dig through the Reddit poster's history and often find conflicting posts (e.g. someone claiming to be a programmer in one post, then claiming to be unemployed somewhere else), but lately Reddit is such high-volume and fast-moving that nobody really cares to check anything. If it sounds good, it gets an upvote.
Take it all with a grain of salt. It may sound plausible or "truthy", but you never know which stories are real and which are just someone's creative writing exercise.
You find it suspicious that most of the stories that become popular are appealing as stories and are the sort of stories people tend to tell? Is it also suspicious that they are all in English?
I'm sure some of them are fake, but so what? Let people have their plausible mundane lies. Sometimes my girlfriend lies about her name to the Starbucks barista and she hasn't been called out for it yet.
> people would dig through the Reddit poster's history and often find conflicting posts (e.g. someone claiming to be a programmer in one post, then claiming to be unemployed somewhere else)
Eh... So unemployed people can't become programmers, or programmers unemployed?
>but you never know which stories are real and which are just someone's creative writing exercise.
my simple rebuttal to this is: what do I have to lose here if I find out that some reddit post is false, but still true enough to inspire more-likely-to-be-true stories? This isn't exactly misinformation that can cost lives.
Everything should be taken with a grain of salt. I don't find this post to be exceptional in that case.
I mean, if I were running a small business and needed to run my own Mailman instance, I would pay those prices—or even substantially more!—in a heartbeat. And I'm technical enough that I could manage Mailman myself.
It sounds like you were clearly representing the service you were providing, so it's a bit of a different story.
I personally know someone who claims to have automated his work with Excel after learning how to code. He ended up telling his manager after feeling guilty. He got a promotion and eventually left the team to become a real software engineer. The rest of his team was eventually let go since they were not needed. This was at a large company you have definitely heard of.
Its possible that my friend lied or exaggerated the situation, and also possible that the author of the reddit post isn't being completely honest. Personally, I'm inclined to believe the stories are mostly true.
Even at my BigTech job I have seen opportunities were non-technical people were doing highly repetitive work that could be automated if they knew how to code.
When I worked at HP over a decade ago it was literally my job to walk into a department and find processes that were automatable, implement whatever program or automation was necessary and gtfo.
One of the highlights for me when working there was automating a process which took three people thirty days to perform. I made a point to unnecessarily optimize the program to the point where it ran in a handful of milliseconds.
These kinds of low-hanging fruits are all over certain industries and companies which aren't primarily software-development based.
2 jobs ago I had a management level position ("Head of Architecture") for a decent sized engineering multinational.
My fondest moments are actually when I helped people do mind numbingly awful tasks by automating stuff - this was not my day job but I had a lot of freedom.
One guy was so delighted that I had scripted in less than an hour some ghastly bit of spreadsheet work that he estimated was going to take him a few weeks that he immediately ran out and bought me a bottle of wine!
This is partly why I miss it, sometimes. The work itself is largely pretty easy to do and the impact can be huge. Not just in a time-saving way, but to the people involved and ultimately the company.
I often think about the sheer volume of tasks like this the world over where a tiny Python, or even say, AutoHotKey script could automate it. The amount of hours mankind must spend on utter drudgery astounds me.
By far, my favorite accomplishment from last year was (effectively) automating a barcode lookup. The historical process took 5-10 minutes and was performed 5+ times per day. My half day of scripting now saves ~1HR of daily labor. Nearly a year after I created it, and one woman still stops me every time she sees me to thank me for improving her job.
Yup. That reminds me of a time when a co-worker in another department (technical but not software) told me that the people she managed had to do a very tedious task extracting and cross-correlating data from files that my project produced. They were sometimes spending 4+ hours each day doing it.
It took me all of one lazy afternoon to build a utility to do the same work and present it in a nicely formatted report. Their workload on this task went down to about 5 minutes per day.
Had something similar at a larger company I worked at! There was this team that was tasked with automating stuff from the other teams. And then they got split up and individuals were sprinkled around the company. I guess it was sorta like embedded devops in a way because they were supposed to spread that "automate stuff" mindset.
Thinking about it now, it makes sense. It's a bit of a waste to have one team that automates stuff, and everyone else just thinks of automation as "that's not our job!"
You'd be surprised how often that isn't the outcome. It definitely does happen, but a lot of the time the company is left with a task that's now automated and an employee that's received a ton of training on the business systems. There are almost always other products that sales wants to push that there simply wasn't the bandwidth for before...
There is always more business - sometimes companies choose to put automated employees towards that (and get huge moral boosts to the employees that automated the thing - the employees that were automated - and everyone nearby who appreciates how useful automation is) and other times they decide to trim a marginal cost off the bottom line and end up discouraging further innovation and, probably, losing a lot of people they actually still need.
Companies that, essentially, get some of their labour replaced for a free (or marginal cost) should realize that there are a lot of more savings like that to be had - and that if they use that savings to invest in growth it will pay off in the future. Companies that choose stagnation die (and you should leave them to die without you as an employee).
The difference is whether you are automating a "profit center" or a "cost center". Automate a profit center, and you free up people to do more profitable stuff. Automate a cost center, and they can lay everybody off and cut costs.
The whole notion of "cost-" and "profit centers" is a terrible construction of modern management theory. But it is how almost all businesses work nowadays. Never work in a cost center department (unless you can use it for grift the way HR directors do).
The notion of cost centers is why most web sites are crap. For most businesses the web site is a cost center, and everybody working on it is piling on superfluous tech to pad their résumé with, and to make themselves more essential.
It is simply an internal implementation of rent seeking.
You can burn fossil fuels and cause damage through pollution and be applauded for being highly profitable.
Meanwhile people building sustainable energy or at least reducing the damage caused by pollution will be considered a drag and harshly criticized.
Ultimately the problem lies in the fact that we have built entire societies around the idea of exploiting externalities. You can't build a healthy society around such a thing and yet we keep doing and loving it.
This is spot on. The final conclusion is that we are in a cul-de-sac though, any kind of exit seems to be across capital expenditure barriers that are too high to surmount and if you succeed there will always be a competitor to your plan that does things the old way and that looks short term to be cheaper.
I think the big problem is that we do not show the full price at the outset, the 'sticker price' is usually only a fraction of the total cost and the payer of the sticker price has no idea of what the total cost eventually will be. If we could only make them aware of that it would already be a step in the right direction, and the remainder might be fixable by taxation.
It depends on the company. My day job can reduce required headcount for the work we handle. Some companies use that excuse to lower headcount, but in cases where valuable employees are involved they get moved to other jobs where their knowledge can add value while not doing the boring and repetitive tasks.
A lot of industries, despite being "tech", are still just using computers to "push paper". That means a true technical person can often automate these jobs. It's real and it does happen. The thing is... most people like that are not content doing that and then fucking around all day. I've been in this position. I've shared my automation with the team I was on and the manager I had, and I got a raise. I did this at more than one company when I worked in operational roles, since then I'm more engineering focused so less opportunities to do so.
Same here - my first real job involved putting reports together by collecting/combining data from various sources.
Spent the first month doing it be hand, second month I pulled an all-nighter and automated the easy 80%. The last 20% of automation involved switching from Excel to a website - that took a couple of years to make happen because I needed to convince people to make the change.
I spent the time I received improving my skills and automating other things, as well as helping colleges with work which did require manual intervention.
If you add socially normalised work from home to any of these stories the opportunity to do the very little becomes obvious. When we all had to come into the office for 8 hours a day, even if you managed to automate most of your work you still had to show up and sit at your desk.
Yeah, just consider all the places where PDFs are still used instead of a more computer-appropriate format (fixed layout is generally not needed, sometimes even not for printing, and is sometimes even an hindrance, and (m)HTML can be used as a standalone file too...)
Most opportunities are definitely data-entry oriented. For example, making a report in a spreadsheet and then having to feed some of those fields into some kind of form in a web-based UI, or vice versa.
20 years ago this was a super common situation. There were so many jobs that were easily automated and just hadn't received that treatment yet. I even had software engineers on some of my teams that were basically just template generators. Another table, write code with all the new columns and types.
Most companies have cleared out the lowest hanging fruit by now but I'm sure there are still a lot of jobs everywhere that can either be easily automated now, or would be easily automated except for one little obstacle the worker is doing everything possible to play up and preserve.
> Most companies have cleared out the lowest hanging fruit by now
This seems unlikely. There are lots of companies with 50 employees with no programmers, hobbyist or pro, on staff. That's why taking a business' excel spreadsheet nightmare and turning it into a program is a viable consultancy.
Having a dividing line between the worker and the programmer is where the problem lies. There's tons of jobs where it makes sense to have the worker write a script to automate, which would make no sense for me to come in and automate for them.
This is why I think some basic forms of programming should be standard. You don't need to be a specialist to get a lot out of it.
Tech workers tend to under-estimate the impact that trivial automation can have on other industries. My partner 10x or more their efficiency with some simple Office macro copy-pasta from the search results of "how do I <do thing> in word"
A very good friend of mine has done almost the same thing (except he works from home for different reasons). He's done this with three companies in the 10 years I've known him. It's not fiction - this kind of thing is completely doable with the tools we have available now, and the antiquated thinking that many offices are still run by.
My guess is that a great many of these stories are true. I've seen more than one instance at large companies where a job either was, or easily could be, mostly replaced by a series of Excel Macros.
There was that famous story of a guy who stop showing up to work and got caught years later for stealing from his company by not working and getting wages.
Sounds like your friend is a hell of a lot more honest than that guy who took on multiple sysadmin positions and then automated almost everything and for the remainder hired multiple overseas contractors to do the rest
Funny, I had this exact same thought. The red flags for me were their use of “clock in” and “shift”. Those are not concepts generally in play for IT staff at law firms.
That actually rang fairly true to me as some of the law offices I interacted with (consultant) did so as they did some sort of fractional billing to the clients for internal IT time.
I actually wonder if that's not the bigger scam here, that the firm is re-billing this person's make-work job in some sort of time and materials way that there is financial incentive to keep him doing this unnecessary role.
If the firm was billing his time, he'd have to create a billing log. You generally can't get away with billing for IT. But you can bill for "litigation support" which is the intersection of IT and litigation. Though its much more involved than just uploading files to an FTP.
Firms navigate this by making the employees fill out their own billing entries. If OP is filling out fraudulent billing entries then that would explain why nobody is checking up on him. If he's billed out, his real work output is billed-hours.
No reason (to need, in this situation) for the automated program to run faster than a human. The right hours billed to a human instead of the human's computer is.. not quite so fraudulent?
In Austria (and I think in Germany it's the same), for most jobs, including IT, employees must track their working time for legal reasons, so I had to clock in and out via a device at the entrance like a factory worker, to prove to HR, accounting and the bureaucratic government institutions in charge of taxing me, that I'm indeed at my workplace 8h/day.
One company I interviewed at had a work-time time tracking machine next to the coffee machine as breaks were not included in the working time. I said no thanks to that job but it's quite common in Austria at more traditional companies who insist you're only productive while your butt is in the chair.
Thanks Covid for the disruption but it's a massive shame it took a global tragedy for companies and governments to realize people working in tech and other sectors can be just as productive without needing to commute somewhere else just so they can keep a seat warm for 8h/day.
>all of a sudden unpaid overtime would be so much harder
Austria "solved" this "problem" by introducing the infamous all-in contract, adopted by many companies, where all your potential overtime is already included in your compensation.
Basically it's a fancy way to have you wave your right to paid overtime to what amounts to one of the most exploitative legal employment practices I've seen in Europe.
And the strict time tracking is still there for legal and workplace accident insurance reasons ("you claim you hurt yourself through a work related accident at 14:40, but we need to check your time tracking as proof you were actually at work and not somewhere else")
> Austria "solved" this "problem" by introducing the infamous all-in contract, adopted by many companies, where all your potential overtime is already included in your compensation.
That’s illegal in Germany, luckily. Some unpaid overtime can be included in the contract, but a contract must specify the maximum number of hours.
for companies and governments to realize people working in tech and other sectors can be just as productive
It may seem this way, but the conditions allowing this situation still exist.
I assure you, large swaths of people will be called back to the office ASAP.
And many non-IT/computing types need to be there, to be productive. Which means many managers need to be too. Which means, in non pure tech firms, the call will be stronger, for lots of other employees will be in-office.
Some say, that they'll just refuse. That's fine and dandy now, but when the market crashes, 2 years, 5 years, and jobs become scare?
You, and everyone else will work in office to put food on the table.
I can confirm this is the case in Austria. However, my experience is mostly using a computerised system via the company Intranet. There's an option to use an access card and touch it to a login pad at the office entrance, but I can also work from home, logging the time via the Intranet based system. I don't get paid overtime, but I do receive time off in lieu of excess hours worked.
They didn't cause problems in the way you're implying. We took the time to polish hackathon projects before releasing them. We didn't just shove them out the door as soon as they were done.
That said, one of them was an unmitigated disaster. Leadership loved it, users hated it, you know the drill. The company eventually gave in and turned the feature off three years later.
This is the actual red flag. A mid-size firm simply couldn't function without IT. They could outsource it to a contractor, but, in that case, they'd never then hire someone for 90k to do one small IT task.
If there is any true to this, he's probably on the books as an "Litigation Support Tech" and his job probably involves (or is supposed to involve) more than he's describing--like interfacing with vendors who do the actual data/document processing.
My point was that they may not even be big enough for one. “Plug and play” might be good enough for now (a shared drive means someone is around though, someone had to set it up).
There are definitely small firms that rely on the young paralegal who is a self taught super user. But that sort of firm wouldn't pay someone 90k for doing a small part of all IT.
Slight chance this person was hired as a "case assistant" or "litigation support" and not IT. Firms definitely hire that sort of person--though they usually bill their time--so hopefully the OP isn't submitting fraudulent time entries. But 90k is a lot for that sort of role without expectation that you are performing other tasks.
I’m still skeptical. I was hired at ridiculous rates once ($2k an hour) to validate DKIM signatures by a small time firm. 90k to be “on call” and validate things seems totally reasonable even from a small firm.
Courts don't actually require you to check hashes like the OP claims. They do remarkably little evidence authentication unless the opposing party contests the evidence. Digital evidence is by default produced to the other side by low quality TIFF files.
If you want to accuse the other side of manipulation, you bring in an expert (who probably bills at nearly 1000 bucks an hour).
I didn't take this as a sign of OP being false because its likely he just doesn't understand why the firm wants to him to validate hashes. The likely reason is other employees fucked up transfers.
I knew a chap who left where I used to work to go to a large UK bank at high end contracting rates.
He returned after a few months saying that the team he joined (which was apparently quite large) had been given no work in that time and hadn't even been given any computers - and they weren't allowed to use their own devices for anything. He said he left simply because he couldn't take the boredom - even though, as he freely admitted, the money was fantastic.
Going along with the original story, I could go either way on this. On the one hand, paying someone $40k to do it, probably involves more supervision and turnover, and a chance of someone making a mistake. And then you get to tell your million dollar client: "We lost our case because our semi-skilled clerk misplaced a file and we have no IT department."
On the other hand, what would you pay an outside developer to automate the process and guarantee accuracy, maintenance, and uptime? Could you even do this with no GUI, no dashboard, no management fanfare, and no brainstorming of unnecessary features?
Yeah this is the big red flag for me. I believe that a law firm without a ton of technical knowledge would hire someone to do this work manually, but they'd get an intern or something, this is not skilled work.
It's easy to overstate the technical difficulty of lots of basic IT work, especially if people are tech illiterate.
There might be an element of deliberate fraud if this guy is spelling out the difficulty of the job as justifying his pay to management. I've seen very clever goldbricking similar to this, where management doesn't know enough to understand what good IT looks like, or how to value IT work.
On the other side: the business can clearly afford it, so the value he brings is entirely justified from a commercial perspective. The fact that they can find cheaper alternatives on the IT market is a different issue.
You can buy a new branded car for $$$ and be sure it will work for years with minimal maintenance, or you can shop around and buy a passable 15-year-old car; in both cases it will likely get you from A to B for a while, but the chance of having problems is lower with the new "whip". This guy, to the business, is the equivalent of leasing a new car every year: they can afford it and brings no risk as far as they can see.
The obsession with capital efficiency can often turn into a disease. Why should we drive down our own wages, when the market is willing to pay more?
This is basically why I do not automatically discount the story as fake. I have certainly been a part of groups that had a wide range of technical skills. It is an odd experience, but it forces you to think about your audience ( and document everything like you would for your parent ).
I do have an anecdote in a similar vein from a buddy, but he does sometimes tend to exaggerate sometimes so I won't mention it. I absolutely believe though there are companies are still run in a very traditional way for one reason or another.
I disagree. Yes, 'clocking in' is not a frequent process for IT people but it heavily depends on the company. My first job was for a company that billed its clients based on hours. Even if it was pretty much ridiculous for us (IT crowd) to do so, we did clock in just like everyone else, so that our billing department had a more 'accurate' representation of how much we worked for that client, even if our work was pretty much shared across all clients.
I'm skeptical of these anonymous texts as well, but 'clocking in' is not a red flag. Also, in my current role I still do 'shifts' when I'm on-call, although I don't 'clock in' anymore.
This is how a lot of small businesses operate, and Law Firms are small in terms of staff. Everyone tracks their hours, even if their hours aren't billable.
The same thing happens at engineering firms small or large. Everyone tracks their hours the same way.
Heck, I'm a salaried IT staff at an enterprise level nfp and have to track my hours in two different systems. One of those systems is the same one used by hourly staff and has the concept of clocking in/out.
I had a job that tried to implement a time logging system. Most of IT just didn't. Eventually they explained to us that the payroll guy uses that to cut the checks, and it's a huge pain in their ass if we don't use the system. They compromised by asking us to log in and out at least once each pay period. That was fine, and we did.
But they really did try to get us to go whole hog on it at first.
I also got r/thathappened vibes, but I choose to believe. Anyone who's worked for more than a few places can name a business that's held together with rubberbands and excel spreadsheets, especially small businesses. This is an entirely believable story.
I have a similar story-ish but without the cloak and dagger part.
I was employed as a temp working for a large custodial bank. On of the functions there was to confirm that the holdings we thought we had in various assets matched the holdings that issuer thought we had. They had a system which would automatically accept various spreadsheet from issuers and would flag up the discrepancies.
Our job was to identify why we had discrepancies. By far the most common discrepancy was trades which occured over the report period. I wrote an VBA macro in Excel which scraped the IBM 390 terminal emulator and would identify these and automatically and close the discrepancy in the system referencing the transaction IDs. Often it would automatically close more than half of the discrepancies with no manual intervention. Literally days of work each month.
I could easily see someone more ballsy coming up with something like than and keeping it to themselves. Add socially normalised work from home and it would be trivial to do nothing for several days which still appearing to be working faster than most people on the team.
The creative writing argument is used all over the place on Reddit though. I once shared an anonymized true crime story that you could verify by reading the previous week's local news where I live, and about half the comments on the thread were people saying it was obviously fictional, congrats on becoming a crime novelist, etc.
Among other things I think it really says something about the way people choose to look into, or not look into things. In a lot of cases it would really easy to casually verify these stories, even if offline or via PM, rather than going with the straight-up subjective interpretation.
I worked as an overnight computer operator years ago, and could easily have replaced myself with a batch script, except for a couple manual tasks that I could have done either at the beginning or end of my shift. I didn't do that, because I enjoyed going to work and being able to work on my hobbies while being paid. The company didn't do it largely out of ineptitude. They'd say they wanted a warm body there in case something went wrong, but one of us was always on-call anyway, even with another of us actually there; no reason the system couldn't just alert the on-call person.
One of our overnight operators worked a second job during his shift. He'd fire up a batch of jobs, go work elsewhere, come back on his lunch break and fire up another batch of jobs, go finish his shift elsewhere, then come back and fire off the last batch of jobs and be there when people started coming for work in the morning. He got caught because he was the only one of us who was always a little behind in his work; so they watched the cameras. When confronted, he admitted it. If he'd have automated the stuff, he'd have gotten away with it for a lot longer.
Many subreddits are simply themed containers of creative writing.
One really annoying trend I am seeing in some mainstream news publishing online is repackaging social media clips and "reporting" on them as if NewsWeek breaking a story, Reddit and TikTok seem to be the current darlings of this form of phone it in journalism.
It makes it easy to play games with journalistic integrity if you have a beef with a local paper and want them to get egg on their face. Then again, this is not unique to the internet—only easier. It was a major plot point in the final season of The Wire.
Yeah, it's trash and you're almost always better off just reading the original story (if you haven't already, since it was probably on the front page of a major subreddit).
But imagine for a minute it isn't. What's the point of farming karma on a throwaway account ? Plus, we are social creatures, and sometimes we just need to offload our personal stories. Quite often there's a new fun thing that I wish I could write about or tell the world, but I don't because of real consequences to some people, or even myself. Recounting these stories is cathartic. And to go back to the original point, they are also weirdly cathartic even if fabricated.
> What's the point of farming karma on a throwaway account ?
reddit accounts are built up and then sold[0][1], and then used for who knows what. Helps to have an "established" account with high karma and a post history.
In more popular subreddits (like /r/funny), you'll see frequent re-postings of content from 5+ years ago just for the "karma whoring" as it's called.
The harm done is that impressionable young people on /r/antiwork are given false hope in their dream of getting paid to do nothing so they can play more video games.
There's a kernel of truth in all good fiction. Whether this is 100% true, or just exaggerated, it's still worth knowing & evangelizing that there are a lot of tools out there that can automate a lot of your job. Between shell scripting and LCAP tools, a ton of what a lot of people do, not just IT professionals, can be automated.
I know a bunch of people who could be in a similar situation as the OP if they just took a couple days to learn how to use power apps, power automate and gasp powershell.
I try automating as much as I can at my current job. Probably out of laziness, but also because it leads to less room for error, and I feel much more mentally stimulating when trying to figure out how to automate something
That subreddit's a mixed bag from what I remember.
I think there's a core of "true" antiworkers that are genuinely against the idea of working (categorically? within capitalism?) in some deep philosophical sense, but I think most of the sub are people that are okay with the _idea_ of work but are very unhappy with current working conditions.
I remember there being fights between them where the diehards would post stuff like "if you're a 'work reformist' this sub isn't for you" but the comments would be full of people telling them to stop gate keeping.
If you take a look now, the sub is in a pretty poor state. It's full of almost certainly fake stories and what seem to be actual children. A lot of the demands / proposals posted are extremely counterproductive or not useful. And I assume the actual elite thrive on the fact that the general public don't actually know what they need and instead waste time calling for nonsensical change.
That's the general gist as I recall. A lot of people who aren't structurally opposed to work but are opposed to their relationship with production as workers.
I honestly don't understand the ideological anti work nonsense.
If you were properly compensated for your work with no one dipping into your income and taking their middle man cut, then hardly anyone would be against work.
After all, the anti work people are a drag on people who want to work. UBI doesn't pay itself unless it is funded from taxes on resources where it merely democratizes resources than actually provide an income.
There's a guy named Josh Fluke on YouTube who may qualify as antiwork to you. I find him very very reasonable and a bit dangerous for pulling off the wool over the young generation's eyes. I mean dangerous for the corporate and the myths corporations have built to lure and abuse workers.
Maybe you don't see the irony in anti-work kid using the youtube platform to spread cynicism about Corporate America while getting paid. His stuff is somewhat interesting, for about 10 seconds before you realize it contributes nothing to your life. Also, memes and urban dictionary slang? Are you serious? Don't be like this, indeed.
JAQing off is a concept introduced by the rational/skeptic community. The fact that you found the description in urban dictionary doesn't take anything away from the word.
But if your points are so weak that even urban dictionary and knowyourmeme calls you out, perhaps you should reconsider your position? ;)
I think the point is it's easy to be critical of work if you can make money without working. But for most people, doing menial work is a necessity in order to earn a living. If he has to deal with the consequences of not working I'd be inclined to take him more seriously, but fact of the matter is no one really wants to be homeless on principal
I wonder what's the dynamic that leads to this. Same with some localized cultural phenomena here that peddle "silver water" as cure for many illnesses. Or some news channels giving quite odd health advice...
Eh, if the user is in the Midwest or South, I'd believe this story. I wouldn't believe it on the coasts though. One of my first jobs out of the military was being a sysadmin for a national company with next to zero IT infrastructure. I was interested in scaling their storage infrastructure due to some commitments I found in their contracts, but they had no cognizance of their systems capabilities. I was also NAASCO certified and qualified to work on their robots and trucks so my job was fairly expansive but I have no doubt they'd let something like this happen in a well-defined position.
> Many subreddits are simply themed containers of creative writing. With all the media attention the AntiWork subreddit has gotten lately that brings more karma farmers and therefore more fiction. It's an entertaining read, but not likely true.
Exactly. Don't underestimate the volume of fake stories posted to Reddit.
I tried giving advice in several computer career subreddits for years. I was always stunned by the volume of obviously fake stories people would post about their boss or company or coworkers. Many of them are easy to debunk with even the slightest attention to detail or a quick browse of the user's posting history.
I could barely believe how frequently I'd read a post with some oddities, only to check the poster's history and see 5 different creative writing style lies posted to other subreddits with entirely different details. A lot of people really like using Reddit to create fake outrage stories, because it's a trivially easy way to collect a lot of upvotes and internet sympathy points.
I couldn't say whether this story is true or not, but I do have to remind myself to steer clear of /r/antiwork and take it with a grain of salt. I'm a person who is happy when I'm working hard, and my current life goals include gaining skills in an industry where I can't really operate as a solo entrpreneur with a startup business. I need a job where I can learn, and I need to work hard, both for my goals and for my own happiness. Reading too much /r/antiwork makes me bitter and angry, which colors my relationships with my coworkers and employer. It's not good for me, even though I agree with most of their philosophical points (ie, pro-union, don't work for free, insist on your rights, etc).
Well, this being the post truth era an all I pretty much think everything is sponsored content or trolls, someone doing some free writing is pretty harmless. That said, lawyers are prettt clueless as to what they would need of this kind of worker so I can see it happening.
It's funny you'd say this because this is a classic tale in the BOFH genre.
Scripting your way out of stuff to do is a time-honored IP pastime. The old tradition was to hit the boss key (F10 for you youngins), now with remote there's no need.
Years ago I was hosting guests from Airbnb. Due to my location I got a lot of English language students coming to Canada for 2-3 long immersion courses. One guest shared with me that one of their assignments was to engage with hosts, even if they weren't planning to ever book; obviously these people eventually did, but it's a bit problematic as it's time not compensated for - sure, it's built into the cost of business but without an agreement to accept such practice conversations it's verging on dishonest.
You'll never see a penny mind you, but IME (which includes getting pimped out to help the admin office a decent bit in grad school) mystery invoices have a pretty good chance of getting "wtf is this"'d all the way up to the dean's office.
> Many subreddits are simply themed containers of creative writing.
I didn't take this at your original meaning, because my mind fixated on this sentence.
Social media and our surroundings create an environment for either production or consumption. They can't be totally geared towards consumption, or they run out of fuel.
Communities like ArtStation, DeviantArt, etc. are incredibly focused on the creative aspect. Wikipedia, Hacker News, /r/slatestarcodex, and a bunch of other forums tend to foster inspired writing. Open source, Github...
I want to build more communities like these that focus on high-effort, high-impact creation and learning. It would be really great if it were cross-discipline. I imagine game or world-building communities where people from different backgrounds can contribute to constructing elaborate narratives.
We need more of these and fewer dopamine-optimized clickstreams.
May not be true itself, but it's relatable and equates to other stories many others have on first or thirdhand accounts. That's why these stories become popular
It's more about triggering some old memories and getting people to talk than about even telling the whole truth
A friend of mine was an HR reporting analyst who can also code. He automated his internship and we spent days gaming (I worked for a startup that had a lot of meetings with limited real work).
Most IT/Data entry guy will have a similar story so I'm pretty sure it's true because I've had a similar story from when I was working in a Fortune 100.
People will list out lots of practical reasons but I suspect the main one is that the number on your profile going up makes people feel good. As well as the temporary fame every time they make a popular post. Same reason people post dangerous stunts on tiktok despite gaining nothing monetary from it.
Accounts with high karma are sold for all sorts of purposes, for marketing campaigns
(reddit is a cesspool of astroturfing) all the way to political campaigns.
You'd be shocked at how bad the average software developer is at writing software. I've interviewed many people who can't solve FizzBuzz level problems. In interviews I have people program a function to rearrange characters in a string, appropriately named "SimpleProblem", and >50% of candidates with experience can't write a function that compiles and solves the problem.
LeetCode is just what you get when you ask Software Engineers to solve the interview problem - they like showing off their chops so that's what you get. It doesn't need to be that complicated though. I know with about 80% certainty whether someone will work out based on how they solve that "SimpleProblem". The other 20% - just fire them if they don't work out. It doesn't need to be that hard. You don't need 100% certainty for a hire, you'll never get there. Just fire the ones that don't work out. You don't even need to feel bad for them - in this market they'll find another job by the end of the month.
> In interviews I have people program a function to rearrange characters in a string, appropriately named "SimpleProblem", and >50% of candidates with experience can't write a function that compiles and solves the problem.
I would struggle with this problem, because it's difficult to read whether you want me to push back against the requirement itself and try to solve the real problem instead of shuffling chars, or perhaps you want me to talk about the edge cases you're likely to encounter while I write the naïve solution, or maybe you want to pretend it's the 80s and nothing outside your chosen charset could ever exist in real data.
I don't know why you're downvoted - it's absolute nonsense to think that your CTO should be 80% your best developer. Your CTO should not be writing code at a company with >100 employees - why would they maintain 80% of the skillset of someone who's entire job is writing code? Is the assertion that what a CTO does is only 20% different than what a software engineer does?
To expand - every meeting should have a clear agenda that is communicated beforehand. How can anyone expect to be prepared for a meeting if they don't even know what it's about? Spend the 60 seconds it takes to put a description on your meeting request.
Signed, someone who works at a company with a culture of sending blank meeting invites
People here are suggesting credentialing as if it will remove interview requirements rather than simply add a new hoop to jump through. I do not believe required credentialing solves the interviewing problem at all. You see it today with the certifications that already exist in the market. They aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Anyone can trivially study and pass the certification tests and still never have implemented a system, nor even have basic programming ability.
A real credential with teeth would likely eliminate plenty of the "Does this person know anything at all" element of current tech interviews. I've interviewed people who didn't even know what a for loop was or the difference between the stack and the heap. If there was a piece of paper which said that the candidate knows at least the bare minimum about software development, you could at least start the interview at a more advanced (or domain-specific) level.
I doubt hospitals interviewing senior doctors need to ask them basic anatomy questions, or law firms needing to ask candidates the difference between tort and criminal law. Tech could benefit from this minimal minimal bar.
Just turn the Leetcode-style data structures/algorithms segment into the basis of this credential, so it at least doesn't have to be repeated ad nauseam each time an applicant interviews with a different company, despite having the least relevance.
Triplebyte was trying to do this a while ago, weren't they? My last observations from a year and change ago suggested they were running into what might have been signaling equilibrium issues / risk aversion, but I'd be curious if there's other perspectives around.
That's what Triplebyte is attempting to do, yep. But it does seem like a considerable challenge and they're still figuring out their product. Also feels like for an industry-scale problem like this, it would require a consortium of the major employers (not just FAANG but large companies from Microsoft to Intel to Oracle and beyond) to hash out some sort of standard, not to mention a body representing the engineers (if not a SWE union, at least something like the IEEE/ACM) and the academic institutions that provide the education.
One wonders what the history of how the credentials in medicine or law were forged.
Adding a new hoop is the desired effect, and it does solve at least one problem. If you're at a tech company or some other org that interviews well, you might not have seen it yet.
Many devs are not good at their jobs. They mean well, but they can't solve basic problems without looking at stack overflow. And by "basic", I don't mean leetcode, I mean iterating over a collection.
> Anyone can trivially study and pass
Yes! At that point, I would know that the guy sitting next to me did at least some amount of studying of the fundamentals.
Rest assured their goal is full return to office despite the current "hybrid" model they are pushing, and you are not important enough to them to keep your job while being civilly disobedient.