Since the corporate world was forced to compromise, it’s now intent on making hybrid workers as absolutely miserable as possible.
I think it’s fair to say that us progressive engineers, doing our continued great work in the Grand Game of Software Engineering, are a lot better off than we used to be¹ a few short years ago.
I say that because the part of our lives that used to make us so very miserable, disillusioned, and just basically tired all of the time — commuting — has been eliminated, or at least reduced, in a great number of the more forward looking and trusting companies.
No more trudging with wet shoes through the rain, expensive, overpriced, and lukewarm coffee in one hand and rain smeared iPhone in the other.
No more sitting in endless traffic jams listening to self-aggrandising nobodies prattle on for hours in meaningless podcasts whilst the frustration builds to slam your foot down on the accelerator, ram the car in front, and scream out in infinite anger.
And, definitely no more squashing ourselves into packed railway carriages like a school of suicidal sardines — gasping to breathe in a fug² of body odour, condensation, and bad breath.
And, breathe. Literally. If you can.
Of course, to add insult to injury that was all on our own time, and our own dime (as the saying goes), but I’ve addressed that elsewhere already.
The Collective Illusion Of Commuting
Realisations really do strike home when the familiar actions cease.
If we leave aside those companies that inherently distrust their employees, or those that value keeping middle-managers occupied, making sure all the bums are in the correct seats all day, over actual productive worker cogs such as developers, then things have indeed very much improved.
Well, they did for a while anyway.
Of course not everyone can work from home all of the time, we do know that, and sometimes even close physical proximity must indeed be endured — when absolutely necessary.
To facilitate this, when full remote working and ad hoc attendance was just flat out refused by the most regressive companies the curse that came to be known as “hybrid working” was born.
On the one hand management made a gesture, in the cases where it could actually justify some time in the office as mandatory it held out an olive branch of trust in the name of letting workers work from home, some of the time.
This could be a useful compromise, we thought, for those that had to be in an office at least some of the time —whether they were neophyte progressives, those working on secret, expensive, or just outright dangerous hardware, or those that were just waiting to jump ship anyway as they wanted full remote and weren’t prepared to compromise.
But, as expected, this olive branch of trust was really a sharp and thorny branch of poison ivy in disguise as management sought to make hybrid workers the pariah of the organisation through singling them out for every kind of sleight and victimisation it possibly could, without actually making it an actual crime.
Sure, you can work from home, but…
- Only on these specific days, which we dictate, but never justify with anything reasonable — just the whim of your line manager.
- Only if you requested those days 90 days in advance, after consultation with both customers and management, ran it past your HR representative, and put it in the calendar to see if anyone objected.
- Only when your direct project manager agrees that other people on the team don’t need you to be “in office” — thereby leaving the decision to the manager in question to arbitrarily decide at their whim.
- Not during the summer, as the office is a “more pleasant place to work with its paid for air conditioning”.
- Not during the winter, as the office is a “more pleasant place to work with its heating”.
- Not when any other member of your team is on holiday as it’s “all hands on deck” to cover for them and management didn’t want to “burden” other workers with your “special arrangements”.
- Not when creativity is needed — you can do the legwork at home but must come into the office to collaborate and be creative!
You know how it goes, you’ve heard it, I’ve heard it, we’ve all heard it.
You would also think that the punishment and alienation would end there, but you would, of course, be totally unsurprised that management would not only decide to make hybrid working awkward to facilitate but also make hybrid workers thoroughly miserable when they’re forced to actually come into the office too.
Hybrid workers, due to their “hybrid” nature have now started to have their in-office desks reassigned to more loyal workers, one that didn’t request remote working, ones that don’t “cause trouble”, and now have to suffer the indignation of “hot desking” — a practice that should have been outlawed during medieval times.
No, don’t say it, don’t say that they deserve it. There are already fewer people in the office due to remote working, and a surplus of desks. It’s just creating unnecessary competition, and therefore insidious amounts of stress, between the workers cogs.
Now not only do hybrid workers have to commute, on their own time and expense, but also have the added stress of not knowing if they’d get a desk at all — or if they get a desk whether it has a chair, a chair with a squeaky wheel, with all of its wheels, or just no working power points that’s somehow in a WiFi shadow.
The solution? Naturally, to come into the office full time and have a pre-assigned desk, just like in the old days, just like one big happy family, when your chair has all of its wheels, is level on the ground, and doesn’t squeak, and somehow the whole area gets full bars on the WiFi too.
I can’t think it’s accidental really, as I’ve seen it happen, it’s like someone decided to punish those in the organisation that decided to somehow take advantage of the organisation when all they ever really wanted was a respite from the torture of commuting, to save that money spent on transport and over expensive lunches, and to fundamentally get work done more efficiently and actually have a life too.
