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posted by
Fnord666
on Sunday April 11 2021, @03:43AM
from the home-is-where-the-heart^W-office-is? dept.
from the home-is-where-the-heart^W-office-is? dept.
34% of WFH (work from home) workers say they'd rather quit than return to full-time office work:
A new survey of WFH (work-from-home) employees suggests that many are not yet ready to return to the office. In fact, they may never be ready.
The survey found that 34% of WFH respondents say they would rather quit than return to a full-time office job.
The survey was published by staffing firm Robert Half. It involved more than 1,000 adult employees of US companies, all of whom are currently working from home due to the pandemic.
As mentioned above, more than 1 in 3 said they would look for a new job if they had to again work in the office full time.
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34% of WFH (Work From Home) Workers Say They'd Rather Quit Than Return to Full-Time Office Work
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Sunday April 11 2021, @04:53AM (8 children)
> Employers laid off the deadwood
this is not just false, the opposite is true. they laid off people who temporarily were not needed due to reduced business volume. they kept, and even grew the dead wood. because the dead wood is in charge. I'm an engineer who was hit by that, and had to look for new work. so i have a huge sample size of who got canned at many companies where I know people, as well as the job situation, as I had to get a new one.
the companies laid off people doing the actual work, due to reduced work. at the same time, they hired middle management - yeah, those many levels of "supervisor" "manager" "director" "sr director" who all report up the chain, to more effectively manage the two people who're left actually working. this literally happened at my office - a bunch of tech staff canned, new regional vp hired, at a salary of all theirs put together.
who else stayed? the hr retards. and their job is to create work for themselves. they post a position that will maybe exist in a year, update it every two weeks to make it show up new, collect qualified resumes, do literally hundreds of first-level interviews, rinse, repeat. about half the jobs I looked at last march when I was canned - they're still there. And, by the way, Robert Half's jobs - a shitty bottom-feeder staffing firm, are all still there. Now, you may think RH - sounds like a decent firm! Jersey Temporaries doesn't sound so decent - sounds like temp people for a lawn mowing service. Yeah, that's RH too.
When companies go back to in-office, they're all going to go back to in-office. We tried the remote thing - big push for that like 15 years ago. Then companies reversed direction. The purpose of in-office has nothing to do with work. It's so that people who can bring no other value to the work outside of being physically present, the people in middle management, can feel in control and feel important. A real office has not been needed work for many jobs for a long time. you're wrong in assuming the point of being in the office was to facilitate work. covid didn't change any of that.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Unixnut on Sunday April 11 2021, @10:51AM (4 children)
> this is not just false, the opposite is true. they laid off people who temporarily were not needed due to reduced business volume. they kept, and even grew the dead wood. because the dead wood is in charge. I'm an engineer who was hit by that, and had to look for new work. so i have a huge sample size of who got canned at many companies where I know people, as well as the job situation, as I had to get a new one.
I don't know. To counter with my own anecdote. During the covid period my company has been hiring like crazy. One thing I did notice when I was hiring for an engineer, is that the quality of applicants were very poor, and most said were let go when covid hit.
Talking to my boss, who talked to the bosses of companies in the area, said that that there are two currents going on:
1. Covid allowed a lot of companies to let go of poorly performing employees, without having to justify the decision to HR/employment tribunals/etc... especially as the government was willing to provide some "covid relief" money to those affected. So there was a bit of a "clear out" of such employees using covid as an excuse.
2. Those employees that were good were needed during this difficult period. They themselves were not willing to move to other jobs. Having a steady job where you have proved yourself (i.e. didn't get let go in the "clear out") was golden during the period of uncertainty. So a talented person was not willing to risk moving to a new company, go through 6 months probation, etc... and risk being let go and having no job during a pandemic.
So good people didn't want to risk moving jobs, while not so good people were let go. The result was quite a large pool of applicants for jobs, many of which were not considered good enough. We really struggled to find decent people.
Also, during this time working from home was for everyone, which a lot of people took a liking to (myself included). It was interesting to see that some people really did have an improvement in performance and productivity, while others didn't. Some really struggled without an office to go to (this was mostly people living alone in shoebox apartments, and people stuck in small houses with small children).
This worked well for most of 2020, but things starting going a bit sour in the start of 2021, as the government started lifting restrictions. A lot of tech companies said they were willing to offer permanent work from home, while at the same time my company insisted WFH was temporary and everyone was expected to go back to the office once the government says it is ok. This is despite a "work from home" survey showing that around 60% of the company wanted to continue working from home permanently.
The result was that in the last three months, almost half the employees in my department have resigned, and moved to companies offering permanent WFH (almost all of them went to Amazon, interestingly), which really impacted the companies functioning (those of us left have almost double the workload, and projects are missing deadlines now). Now the company has backtracked a bit and is not saying "yes" or "no" to allowing work from home, but are "considering the option".
Amazon actually contacted me as well, to offer me a permanent WFH position if I pass their interviews. I've decided to try for it, in case my company decides against allowing permanent WFH. So you can count me in the "34%".
It depends on the company as well, those who are more "pointy haired boss" type places are more likely to prefer keeping brown nosing management employees than those who do the work, likewise business where the actual workload goes down due to the government restrictions. Difference is that in my sector, the move to doing almost everything online has resulted in an explosion of work during the restrictions.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @01:18PM (2 children)
Watch out at Amazon. They have a history of stack ranking. I don't know if they still do, but reviews say that you will still have to out-perform your previous self every quarter if you want a raise each year.
Amazon's interview process is 90% core leadership principle questions, and 10% coding.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @03:15PM
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday April 13 2021, @10:15AM
I've never worked at Amazon, but from friends who have tried it was quite telling that their signing stock only vested 5% after one year. Most big companies expect that the first year is for you to find out if you're happy there and if you stay for a year you'll probably stay for a long time, so a big chunk of the stock vests at the end of the first year. Amazon expects a lot of people to leave so skews the incentives really far to the future to try to discourage this. In spite of that, they still have a lot of people leaving before the majority of their signing stock vests.
TL;DR: When your incentive structure assumes high turnover, it's probably a sign of a toxic working environment.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by fakefuck39 on Sunday April 11 2021, @06:18PM
yes, if you're laid off, you're not essential. i was a presales engineer, sales stopped for about 6 months, they laid off the presales engineers to save money. nothing wrong with that.
the employees that were good were not needed during this period. the employees who were lowest paid were, so the highest paid ones got canned, so the least number of people could get fired. the reason you got a bunch of shit resumes when a bunch of people were looking for work is your company, the position you had open, and likely the compensation. you're not selecting from the available pool - you're selecting from a pool of whoever was interested to submit a resume to you. with very few good positions open, all the good people went to those positions, and you got applications for the leftovers. but do go on and pretend it's the resource pool, not you.
you're also in a business that saw an increase during lockdown. we're talking about businesses that saw a downturn. you're literally not in the group of companies, which are most companies, that is being discussed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @10:57AM
In my case, all the company's staff was retained, 95% of us are WFH except the sys and net adm who sporadically need to get psychical. All the ergonomic chairs and extra "productivity" gadgets were sent by courier at the "home office" approx July last year and the company pays the power and internet cost.
Since July last year, the team grew by at least 20%, over all 4 timezones, all hired in a WFH arrangement.
We may get to set foot in the office, if we exercise this option, somewhere in Sept this year. For the foreseeable future, most of us will probably choose to work at most 2 days/w from the office. I think the company will start to cut from the office floor costs first before cutting from the work force once the pandemic is over.
Take some guesses about the industry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @12:23PM
At least not to your previous employer.
That’s just the way it works in every recession or economic contraction.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 11 2021, @04:42PM
It's the same old story, management decided who to lay off and guess who they deemed essential?
Occasionally middle management gets a correction, but top management never has.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end