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https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/08/ars-readers-take-on-the-present-and-future-of-work/
Over the past few weeks, we've been talking about how best to manage the current state of work and what companies will need to do in the near and not-too-distant future to adjust to post-pandemic reality. As expected, our readers had some opinions on these topics, too—ranging from insightful to inciteful.
So, in the interest of better surfacing the wisdom of our particular crowd, I've curated some of the thoughts of the Ars community on the topics of working better from home and what our shared experiences have taught us about the future of collaboration technology and the future nature of the corporate office. As always, we hope you'll share additional wisdom in the comments here, as they may guide some future coverage on issues related to the realities of future work.
[...]
Aside from responding with protests of post-traumatic stress after I mentioned Lotus Notes in our article on the future of collaboration, our readers had some on-point thoughts on the current strengths and weaknesses of collaboration technology—particularly in the face of current circumstances. And one of the problems is collaborating across companies effectively.
[...]
Other readers noted that work-from-home wasn't an option for them, but only because of management's whims. RCook wrote that his employer had brought everyone back into the office, "partly because we're located in Iowa where the Pandemic didn't happen according to our Governor and partly because the company President has some stupid control issues."
[....]
However, the company president is working from home. And while RCook "made sure the IT infrastructure was ready and capable of handling the [work-from-home] VPN load" during the company's initial lockdown, "I was actually asked at one point how management could effectively spy on employees to gauge productivity."
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:53PM (5 children)
One of your many great insightful posts where I'm happy, laughing, angry, agreeing- pretty much every possible reaction.
I'm just old enough to remember a time when the phrase "Human Resources" didn't exist. They were called "personnel departments" and they were generally kind, helpful, accommodating people. When I first heard the term "human resources" I rolled my eyes, and felt a sense of fear, which of course ended up being valid. I thought "uh-oh, someone's getting a big head, full of themselves, needing to take control".
I would love to know what they do all day. Someone should be monitoring them. I don't see any work results. Not full-time worth anyway.
I've often thought I should start a talent agency. I'm pretty good at identifying talent, and potential. But then I'd have to deal with HR people even more... sigh.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 26 2020, @04:27PM (4 children)
I have come to understand that employment is highly political. HR is full of trolls who hate and fear engineers. They get a kick out of rejecting the best, while keeping their a** covered by advancing a few stock subjective reasons. They'll claim a candidate is "not a team player" or lacks social skills or something else in that vein. And is too independent and not obedient enough. And a "flight risk", likely to leave before even finishing their first year. And is too financially sophisticated, and won't get themselves into a bind and be unable to quit. They lack the skills to check out a candidate's technical chops, and have to resort to the sorts of subjective evaluations I mentioned above. However, they also love, love, love claiming that you're a fraud because you didn't know the answer to one question about technology, about something trivial and obscure like where in the menus of a spreadsheet program to find some functionality, never mind that the producers of commercial office software are always rearranging the menus. They're frauds, and deep down they know it. They want to be reassured that everyone else is phony, too, and willfully blind themselves to the unfairness of a question of that sort.
Something else that happens a lot is nepotism and cronyism. HR is abused to concoct plausible reasons why a raft of much better candidates were all rejected in favor of an imbecilic, spoiled brat of some VIP. Or they simply drag their feet, in hopes the candidates can't wait that long. I was once on the inside track of one of those. The company put an ad in the paper (this was back in the 1990s), and interviewed several applicants, but it was all for show, merely to satisfy EEOC requirements, because they had already decided to hire me. It didn't feel good. I think I could have won a fair competition, and certainly my skills made it very easy for HR to make the requested case to hire me. I especially felt bad that my new employer was not interviewing these job seekers in good faith, just wasting the time of everyone concerned. However, I went along with it all. Most I did was ask whether they might hire another person as well as me, since they were doing all this interviewing, and was told that they might. Maybe they weren't lying to me, maybe they really didn't know themselves. Maybe I shouldn't have taken the job, but when it comes down to it, it's very, very hard to turn down a job offer when there is no other offer on the table, and you're feeling the social pressure of being despised as a mooch and a loser for not having a job, and in any case there's enough ambiguity about the ethics of it all that you can't be absolutely sure your new employer is that unprincipled.
Incredibly, I have read that for the position of police officer, some cities actually have a policy against hiring candidates who are "too smart"! Claim that brains are an impediment to doing good police work. And maybe they really believe that, but I suspect they have a hidden agenda, like maybe, I don't know, perpetuating racism in law enforcement? Now, finally, those chickens have come home to roost, and thanks to too many thuggish police, we actually have groups proposing that local police forces be entirely eliminated! Meanwhile, this notion that a job applicant can be too smart, aka "overqualified", still has much currency. even for positions that require a high degree of skill and training.
HR is high school all over again, with the normies using their superior numbers to make stick their slanders and vilifications of smart people as nerds, uncool, unstable, and, actually, stupid, as in stupid in certain areas, basically idiot savants, or unsophisticated and naive in the ways of lying and corruption, though of course they hide that with all sorts of euphemisms. Yeah, you have to bypass that kind of HR.
Another factor is indeed the future of work. I am seriously wondering if employment as we know it is coming to an end. The Robot Apocalypse. I suspect that pressure is influencing HR to treat job candidates even worse than they have in the past. One effect of pressure of that sort is to push people into becoming a whole lot more political with their decision making.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:04PM
You heard right https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836 [go.com]
This is what you get when you give people of average intelligence a gun. As long as you say "I feared for my life" you can kill an unarmed person lying face down with impunity. They need a test for bravery, or just select for above average intelligence, because intelligent people won't see someone lying face down on the ground as a threat who needs to be shot dead.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 27 2020, @01:47AM (1 child)
This all scares the shit out of me. For so, so many reasons, not least of which is being "scary-smart woman with scary-long hair," I know my chances of surviving the HR gauntlet are somewhere around "snowball in the Malebolge." As time marches on I am seriously considering something like finding an organic farming co-op or something to join.
Part of the problem is I haaaaate lies and lying with a burning passion, and this is *all* lies, the worst kind of lies there are, the kind of lies that lead to people becoming homeless or worse. I've had enough of it all and just want out. I could probably lie and manipulate my way through some interviews well enough (I've done it before, and makeup helps--only time it ever gets used!), but it does some kind of long-lasting psychic damage that doesn't heal off.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday August 28 2020, @02:03AM
There are still employers who value competence and honesty. It's not all Dilbertesque. Talking to acquaintances in the engineering field over the years, I hear it's about 50-50. The engineers who have had the same job at the same company for 20 years, they're the ones in a sane and straightforward workplace, and never were gaslighted and ground up in office politics. It's the engineers in the gig economy who get most of the sh*t.
I now think that my university education had some large holes. We were not educated in how to detect and deal with insincerity. Not warned that we needed to keep our bullsh*t detectors active. We were perhaps too arrogant in thinking that such problems are trivial. The flip side of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that very smart people often underestimate their skills and performance. The con artists in the workplace see that self-doubt in a New York minute, and exploit it to the max. Do all they can to sow more confusion and doubt. Many are nearly as incompetent at that as they are at engineering, but a few are all too slick and successful with the gaslighting. And indeed, the entire nation has been blindsided by all the bull from the bullsh*t artists who finagled their way into power.
It'd be nice if we could entirely avoid the bull. But that's not realistic. So, how do you deal with it?
1) Get it in writing. The scumbags in management don't bat an eye at asking others to do illegal, dangerous, wasteful, or stupid stuff they wouldn't do themselves. And if it leads to trouble, they absolutely will deny that they ever asked such things of others. But if you have a paper trail, they can't weasel out and leave you to hang. However, it doesn't usually go that way. What happens is that when you insist that they put their requests in writing, they will change their minds, deciding that what they were about to ask of you isn't such a good idea after all. In any case, you don't want to be in the position of having to demonstrate that you were ordered to do something bad.
2) Keep your cool. Don't have a temper tantrum. Yes, yes, the lying dirtbag just tried to manipulate others into firing you, tried to frame you for something, or sabotaged your equipment or data. Losing it totally hands your enemies a gift. Sometimes, sh*t is done on purpose because they want to see how you will handle it. It's okay to be angry, but don't, don't, don't lose control. Yeah, you want to smash the a**hole in the face, but you won't, you know better than that. About the farthest to go is playing a harmless prank on them, if there is any hope they are not incorrigible. If they are, don't waste any more time on them than you absolutely have to.
3) Don't be afraid to refuse. Its not uncommon to be asked for the moon. Or to be left wondering what the heck did they just ask of you, really. What is hard, is untangling all the business speak and pinning them down. If you don't have clarity on what you're supposed to do, you're cruising for a bruising. Before long, they're going to view you as incompetent, never realizing that they expected too much. Some bosses are never satisfied. No matter how hard you work and how much you accomplish, they want more. You could have worked even harder. If by some miracle you delivered on a request for the moon, don't expect them to appreciate it. Instead, they might well whine that they wanted Mars, not the moon.
4) Keep some f*ck you money. So you can tell your boss "f*ck you", and walk. There are situations that are so bad that walking really is the only viable thing to do. Don't believe those self-help books that claim you can work with anybody. No, you can't. There are people who really are impossible. Like I once had a manager/coworker who deliberately sabotaged equipment. He'd wipe hard drives I was using. But it wasn't behind my back, no it was done in my face, with him giving me spurious reasons why it was supposedly necessary. That one is obvious, but it can be hard to tell, and you don't want to rush out when there is still some doubt. On the other hand, don't be scared into believing them when they hint around about your career being ruined if you walk out. As to the other card they love to play, that the economy is in the crapper, unemployment is through the roof, and all that, maybe it is, and maybe not. If you are stressed to the max, and it's affecting your health, leave.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday August 27 2020, @03:08AM
Same here. I have had a job where this happened as well. I worked at the company previously and I knew the department manager quite well. She knew I was not just competent, but skilled and I knew her management style and was happy to work for her. In order to get around the crap with the HR department, she took a copy of my resume and created a job position that mirrored my skills and years of experience, including every obscure reference. Then she just waited and passed on every candidate that came in from HR until I eventually was called in.
This was in a very large fortune 100 company as well... and what she did was also done by many others in that company. While I do not know personally of other companies doing this, with all the rules and regulation around hiring, I am sure that many others do the same. It really makes a person wonder how many job ads are actually real.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P