I mean, I'm friends with all the people I work with and am happy to be there. I know I'm odd, but that is an option.
A Formal Thread about Activision/Blizzard
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
That's not odd.
I'm not a fan of forms of office design (e.g. tiny cubicles), because I think they are often designed for efficiency and staff monitoring in ways that can be distinctly uncomfortable, alienating and sometimes controlling for workers. However, I do think there are substantial plusses to going to a workplace and interacting with colleagues face to face - maybe 2-3 days a week? Workplaces should have a sense of community, and I don't think Zoom/Teams calls cut it.
As someone who's never done office work, let 'em stay home. The fact that my job doesn't allow it is no reason to force other people into an office. I'm not that petty
While office community *might* have it's benefits, we're in the age of mass layoffs to support the stock price. Office morale is shit
Don't worry, soon ChatGPT and the like will have the opportunity to put everyone out of a job.
In fact, I wonder whether my job will increasingly become as a sort of "editor" or "fact checker" for AI-derived material.
My office (the physical room, not the entire building) is 10 desks in cubicle-like layout, but there are no cubicle walls. Our workflow is highly conversational, in that if we need someone else we can basically just look up at them and ask the question. Or like, if a salesperson is transferring a customer to me for support, I've heard half of the conversation by the time I've answered the phone. I cannot imagine how much time would slip away if we had to actively make contact with each other and communicate everything down the line for every question.
3 days a week is what blizzard wants. They arent even asking for the full week.
It is also better for mental health to interact with people directly sometimes and not always via the internet. Not to mention how much more efficient working with people in person is as the example Tstorm provides above.
To be fair, the added efficiency is easier for me to appreciate commuting 10-15 minutes through basically rural PA than someone commuting like an hour in a city, and the people I work for are pretty flexible in hours (showing up a bit late, leaving a bit early, scheduling time off). It all only works because it's loose and social and the only hard standard is "does your work get done?". If someone took my job and tried to treat it with the rigidity of an assembly line, it would be, as they say, soul-crushing.
The extent of the point I want to make here is not that offices are good universally, but that they are potentially and contextually both efficient and uplifting, and we are not, by any means, "evolving past them as a society".
You still couldn't pay me enough ot work an office job. I've been to that purgatory and I'm not going back and I sympathize with anyone who feels the same.
Okay well an office job aint for you, that's ok. But that doesn't mean a company shouldn't expect employees to come to the office, again especially when the work is secretive by nature or when group communication is a core aspect of the job. There are a lot of jobs people can do that don't involve an office, and that's great for them.
I used to drive 100 miles every day 50 miles each way to get to my office. It was part of my living situation, and I simply saved money until I could afford to move to a place that is only 1 mile from the office. I understand how much traffic can suck, but honestly there are so many good things you can do while driving to work.
Listen to a good audio book, podcast, or music.
Rant about how Jerry microwaved fucking fish again.
Clear your head and unwind from work-mode into home-mode.
Like a commute isn't always a bad thing. Everything can look like oppressive shit if you have that mindset, but things that aren't 100% wonderful don't mean they are crushing things to people's everyday lives. It's an insane notion to expect that life should have zero hardships or resistances to anything you want.
I think that's increasingly likely in academic and associated circles; if nothing else it becomes a club to crush wages: 'We want you to do the job because you're better than the AI, but we want to pay you what the AI would cost us because that's the next best thing that you're competing with.' Just digital offshoring used to keep skilled labour hungry.
The company doesn't work better remotely. That's why. If the person works better remotely then there needs to be a look into why. A business or workplace cannot cater to an individual worker and ideally must try to be as neutral an environment as possible for all people working there to get whatever work done. Sure some people work better in isolation, but isolation isn't reality because commication between departments, co-workers, project leaders, is all incredible hampered by working remotely, compared to working in a single location.
Sure individually you might be able to get your personal work done better, but when it comes to relating that work to others the remote worker falls short. And for the record, I don't think it's an unreasonable compromise to ask for the worker to be in-office a couple of days a week. Which is what Blizzard wants.
Speak for yourself and the corporate jack offs at Activision Blizzard. I know not every corporation can have a work from home, but considering her dealing with, they can get their job done fine at home or through zoom. If you're that happy go for it, why don't you just do it yourself or join up with AB. You know they're crap and this argument really doesn't add or help the people under much.
We've established though that Blizzard cannot be trusted. Why should they be trusted on this matter?
??? Yes they did. Lots of people had a problem with it before covid.
Employers repeatedly argued that WFH for long periods wasn't possible or sustainable. Then the pandemic happened and... that turned out to be completely untrue.
It isn't just AB asking people to get back to the office by the way. A lot of places are demanding that, and most of them are not being as generous as AB by only asking for 2-3 days a week. A lot of people are being forced to either return to the office or quit.
Remote working from home was never going to last, and business are expecting to return to normal business operations with normal schedules and workflow. People are have gotten used to being at home and it isn't going to continue. And believe me, people think working from home is so awesome, but it really isn't. It's not good to never leave your house. It's not good for you to never get dressed, or interact with only your social circle if you even have one.
Not to mention that over time a lack of investment begins to develop. Working for people you never see, and you never get to know because you only ever see windows in a Zoom call. People need to physically interact with others and work runs better when their is a team investment involved. This is pretty basic shit that people ignore because they think it'd be cool to never have to put on real pants.
Remote working from home was never going to last, and business are expecting to return to normal business operations with normal schedules and workflow. People are have gotten used to being at home and it isn't going to continue. And believe me, people think working from home is so awesome, but it really isn't. It's not good to never leave your house. It's not good for you to never get dressed, or interact with only your social circle if you even have one.
Not to mention that over time a lack of investment begins to develop. Working for people you never see, and you never get to know because you only ever see windows in a Zoom call. People need to physically interact with others and work runs better when their is a team investment involved. This is pretty basic shit that people ignore because they think it'd be cool to never have to put on real pants.
Lol, how much of any given work week in most office jobs is taken up by a round-the-table brainstorming session?
It's usually between 0 and 1 hours a week.
Then on the other hand: how much time is taken in commuting? Mine is ~1hr each way. So five days in an office would be 10 hours a week commuting to get to a place to do what I have all the tools to do at home.
And that's before we even get into the emissions caused by the pointless car journeys
You know who the main lobbyists are for returning to the office here in the UK? Owners of retail outlets. Not because of their own staff, oh no; their own staff are already back in-person since reopening. No, they're lobbying for everyone /else/ to get back to the office because they make money from the daily commute. People forced to take hours-long journeys every day buy stuff they don't need, which they wouldn't buy if they were able to stay home.
This whole dispute is about retail profit at the cost of an enormous weekly timesink, lost sleep, higher emissions, and great inconvenience.
Who would take a job they didn't want or weren't able to physically goto? People might have wanted to work from home, but they didn't and they didn't mass quit because they weren't able to.
WFH is not sustainable. It's been shown to be a hinderance. Just because company's have been forced to have people WFH or not even opperate at all, doesn't mean it's a sustainable productivity level. Nor has it been shown to be on par with working for long periods. Look at gaming in 2021, where most companies had people working from home, a lot of games got delayed and pushed back because it was hard to set people up, and get the chain of work rolling in order to get the product out. People adjusted to it and things have started to move again, but doesn't really mean it's sustainable. And clearly businesses like Morgan Stanley, Tesla, Golman Sacs, and many more feel the same way.
The office is set up with all the tools needed for all employees to get shit done, a home is not. Even something as simple as getting a piece of art approved is so much harder to do remotely. You have to send the art file off to the right people, wait for them to see it, they then have to write up feedback and suggested changes, wait for you to see that, all just to get an art file done. Not to mention the misunderstandings that can occur over the phone or through an e-mail. And if you needed clarification it would only further add delay to getting it done.
Meanwhile in an office you buzz Bill ask him to come look, he comes over looks at it with you and can physically point and direct his ideas to you and then move on. Plus the added bonus of you actually interacted with a person. And anything you don't understand in reguards to the feedback, can instantly be clarified and exampled.
I actually had to fire someone who refused to come back to the office 2 days a week. They wanted to only have to come to work once a month, and it led to a lot of miscommunication, and delays in getting product made. So when we decided that the artist needed to come into the office more often they refused and we let them go. Got another local artist with a better skillset immediately and even pay them more because they have more skills and can do more with the tools.
So basically those retailers are saying that work from home is removing their customer base, which means they can't stay open, which means they loose everything they've built and all their employees loose their jobs.
Fuck those people I guess. How dare they be so greedy as to want to be able to stay in business and keep people employeed. Bunch of monsters.
Microsoft plans "last-ditch" effort to save $69bn Activision Blizzard deal with EU next week
Microsoft is set to defend its beleagured $69bn Activision Blizzard deal at a meeting with the EU next week.
www.eurogamer.net