11h ago

Office Productivity

77 comments

evryone look irritated getting randomly photographed

I don't overthink people's expressions on trains, nor do I think we should be taking pics of people who look upset because they look upset.

Everyone here already looks like they want to go home, hah.

Humans have more worth and potential in life than being subjected to a soul crushing machine that drains the light from their eyes for their entire lives. We aren't free.

They don't care about this part at all. This is your time. It's your fault for not being rich.

White shirt guy maybe, probably either at making you extremely mediocre coffee (looks too straight to be a good barista) or doing something like the ux design for the app interface to a microchip that doesnt let your dog love you without microtransactions. The owners are lobbying for it to be mandatory, and all dogs without it will be liquidated by 2030. The app is spyware written by a large language model, and only sometimes works. Iphone only.
Tan jacket lady maaaaaaaybe.
Black+white checkered shirt guy is a cop, he's already at work. He'll be very productive later, already planning on attending the protest.

Trains are a much more desirable way to get to work than driving is.
- I’m counting down the months until my work relocates to our new head office. I can say goodbye to the 35-75 minute commute (each way), and have a reliable ~60min train ride.
  Sure it might take longer, overall - but I’ll be able to relax by reading a book, taking a nap or playing a game. I’d much rather that than deal with the anxiety of bumper-to-bumper traffic in a sea of SUVs filled with inattentive drivers.
  I literally drive past at least one accident every day on my way to work. The Monash Highway in Victoria, IYKYK.
  
  taking a nap
  Well, I see you don't live in America lol.
  
  It's really is the least talked about benifit to public transport, yet is so significant. Sure you can't do too much but you can watch a show/movie, play a game, read, write, draw or even do your taxes and shop from your phone and laptop.
  Certainly can't do that driving around. And it let's you relax and change from work mode to home mode. Even if you have to do a little drive to and from the station.
  Plus like you mentioned, less chance of delays and being involved in accidents. Win win win win.

I can guarantee every company demanding in office work has owners that either own (or are friends with the owners of) tons of commercial property or have stake in retail that over extended into commercial districts.

Eh, we don't have buses or trains at all.
But fighting traffic pumps up your adrenaline and you're ready to crush it when you walk in the office door! /s

That guy in white with air pods looks like he's going to be at 110% at prompt engineering and LinkedIn engagement.
- Surely he'd be more productive if he got the LLM to do the prompt engineering for him?
  
  He's writing a LinkedIn post on this exact matter as we speak, on how he LLMed away his own position for the greater good a.k.a. The company.
- Yep! Who else would set their bag on the floor of a metro, lol.

The whole "return to office" thing is a cocktail of like.. "Feelings Driven Leadership" and "The Cruelty is the Point". Oh, and "I'm incompetent so everyone else must be incompetent in the same way, too."
Many managers make decisions based purely on feelings. You can show them data but they don't care. They feel like being in-office is better. And maybe, maybe, it is, on some metrics. Are those metrics better for workers? Probably not.
And the cruelty? Well, as others have said, some people get off on having power over others.
The last point, there are some people who just can't manage themselves so they seem to think no one else can, either. Like someone the other day was saying he can't work from home because he'll just play xbox. To which I respond, from the depths of my soul, fuck off. Grow up and stop making everyone else around you suffer because you're an incompetent, unmedicated, shit. You can go into the office if you have to. Don't make everyone else suffer a pay cut too because you're trash tier at self control.
- You're forgetting the whole...." I invested entirely too much in corporate real estate".
  When there's instability in the market a lot of fortune 500 corporations will start investing in corporate real estate as a "safe bet" to hedge more risky investments.
  Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a "safe" investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.
  
  Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a “safe” investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.
  This is just the sunk cost fallacy though. You can inflate the paper value of assets by playing games like this, but the bill always comes due in the end. Yes, companies that do this can juice their books a bit in the short term, but they're harming themselves in the long term. They retain a bit higher book value for their real estate, but they make whatever goods or services they provide noncompetitive in the marketplace. They have competitors who aren't bogged down by past bad real estate decisions. Those competitors can outcompete them on price and can attract better talent. Meanwhile, they're stuck in their ways, fruitlessly trying to inflate their real estate holdings, all while their revenue is plummeting because they can't attract good people and have to charge higher for their services than their competitors.
  It's just the sunk cost fallacy. You could inflate the book value of real estate by doing all sorts of foolish things. You could create a subsidiary and have that company rent out some of your floor space for absurdly high rates. But you're ultimately just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Those commercial real estate properties have already lost their value. The value was lost the minute it was proven that work from home was a superior work model.
  These companies are going to go bankrupt at a mass scale when the next recession rolls around.
  Fuck, these companies might actually be violating the law. Deliberately choosing unproductive business practices just to cook your real estate books is something Enron would do.
  
  Capitalism, such efficiency!
  
  Pull all your own, sell office space. Profit?
- fuck your unmedicated ass, you can go to theboffice if you want
  The office or a park with cell reception, a cafe, a fucking wework, a...
- Yeah, you just have to know yourself. Personally I feel like I need to go into the office once per week otherwise work starts becoming an abstract thing. But I've known some co-workers I wouldn't see for months at a time that were really on the ball. Ask an obscure question about something really technical on slack and get an answer within seconds kind of thing. I knew another guy that said he had to come into the office every day because his family was too distracting.
  Everyone needs to know what works for them and be a responsible professional about it.
  And yeah managers that want 100% RTO are just admitting they can't handle working from home. Ok that's your thing, but it's not a thing for everyone else.
  Anyway I got out the the RTO thing because I told them of the times some computers were having issues and I had to work the whole weekend (from home) to fix them. If I'm going to be 100% RTO then I'm 0% WFH and the next time something like that happens I won't be able to start working on it until 9am on Monday morning. So I'm still in the office one day per week, weather permitting, which is my preference.

Its partly tradition, power displays, and disbelief. People who've been managers for decades somehow believe that being in the office is the only true way to do work because that's how it's always been done. Then you have some managers who will always get off on the fact that they can hold people's ability to feed themselves hostage to make them do what they want. Lastly, some managers just don't believe you can be productive at home. After all, all the not work things are there.
- I know this site is heavily weighted towards IT professionals and other pure-office-work type professions, but sometimes in office work really is better than work from home. Online meetings are largely useless, even when it's a proper meeting, not just a should-have-been-an-email meeting.
  In my current job, remote work isn't an option, and I can't tell you how much time I've wasted trying to get engineers and software devs to understand things that would have taken two seconds to understand if they would go physically look at the thing. But of course, they can't do that because they are working remotely. Instead we get to waste half a day playing picture/video tag
  
  Online meetings are largely useless
  Oh! Oh! This is where people say "skill issue", isn't it?
  If you can't run a productive meeting over zoom you probably can't do one in person, either.
  
  I think this is all really subjective and depends on how your team does work. Getting people to work with you or understand things is a communication problem, and in my own experience, being in the office didn't eliminate those issues.
  I agree there are times to be in the office, but it damn sure doesn't need to be every day all the time. IMO people need to adapt, be smart and figure out what works for their teams and themselves, not hold themselves to tradition for its own sake.
  Managers should be empowered to make these decisions to do the research and figure out the best strategy for their situation, and I think many would like that responsibility.
  
  I think most people acknowledge that some things do gain efficiency in physical proximity. Most dont. We aren't talking about you.
  Though sending a solidworks file shoukd be easier than it presently ie.
  
  This will depend on your work. All my work is on the computer. Showing someone something is as easy as sharing my screen (and this might even be better, as I can draw on it).
  And I don't agree online meetings are useless. All of my team work from home most of the time, and we work out how to make that work.
  Having half the group in the office and half joining remotely I think is the worst of both worlds.
- Those things, and needing to prop up the commercial realestate market.

Damn it. That’s me on my current commute. I’m on a bus though. I hate the bus. Soo much rather be on the train.

You guys don't understand that this is is the goal. Happy rested people thinl a lot, demand things, want a better life. Unhappy and exausted people only want to go home and go to sleep, they loose their souls and think that this is better enough. Those are easy to control
- Plus, look at the great job of keeping commercial real estate prices high they're all doing
- It's not a conspiracy, it'a a distributed systematic failure that can only be solved by cultural change.
  
  I think its a conspiracy fact

Significantly more productive than anyone forced to commute by car.
- Curious why you say that. I used to do the slog to lower Manhattan every day, 90 minutes by train, and another 10 or 20 minute walk, depending where I was going. I'd get back in the train later in the day knowing I should open the laptop up and work, but just couldn't do it.
  Now, in fairness, if I was driving 90-120m, I'd kill myself. But at least I'd do so listening to the Wheel of Time audiobook.
  And extra fairness, my job went remote after COVID (for the majority of it). Public meetings have returned to in person sadly, but my day work is 90% remote. And on those rare occasions I get dragged out of my home wearing a suit, I do so belligerently. I'm done showing up 20-30m early, I get there when I get there. And I gotta leave early now too. I have really just started to not give a fuck, which is not great as an independent contractor.
  
  Now, in fairness, if I was driving 90-120m, I’d kill myself. But at least I’d do so listening to the Wheel of Time audiobook.
  I've never had trouble listening to audiobooks on the train (assuming I knew the route well enough).
  And on those rare occasions I get dragged out of my home wearing a suit, I do so belligerently. I’m done showing up 20-30m early, I get there when I get there. And I gotta leave early now too.
  Which is fine.
  But I've found a lot of merit in the personal collaborations with coworkers that only really happen in an office setting. I'm in office hybrid - three days a week - and I mentor new hires, grab lunch with senior managers, get tipped off on problems from people I pass in the hallway, and occasionally just shoot the shit with people I'd never otherwise know existed if I wasn't in the building.
  I value my Work from Home, but also get a lot of mileage from a communal office.

I enjoy being in the office with my co-workers. We have lots of fun together.

Is that the Northern line?
- I think all the lines (except Overground etc) share rolling stock, and just change the number of train cars, so it's impossible to tell
  edit: this has been a slow process since 2010, so they are slowly converting to "S-Stock" from previous stock. I've not lived in London for a decade now, so I can't comment first hand, but I recall the District/Circle lines used to be different to the Northern/Central lines. I dont know if that's changed.
- The video did not provide the exact metro line.

Looks like a lot of people who are waking up off the clock! I roll out of bed, clock in, and then have to spend 30 minutes actually waking up for the day.

Statistically, most of them will be blue collar workers.

Awful AI slop
- Hey what part do you think looks like AI slop?
  I can't see anything suspect but I'm looking pretty hard for it. If I'm wrong then that's scary.
  Is the photo somehow glitched that I don't see?
  
  He thinks smartphone camera upscaling is AI slop
  WHICH IT IS, but it's not what he thinks it is
  
  i also didnt see it at first.
  look at the person in the brown coat on the right. their glasses and eyes melted together. the text above them is garbled nonsense. and the person sitting to their left is wearing shoes that dont fit into the background and slightly overlap with the other ones' shoes. the person on the left holding their glasses seems to still be wearing glasses, and their ear is an unusual shape.
  thats about all i noticed tho. pretty scary indeed.
  
  Signs all over the image, most obvious place to look would be the woman’s face directly under the “is”. Glasses and eyebrows and nose all swirling together
- So much debate about the pixels, when you could just reverse image search and find it's from a video.
  Now talk about the pixels in the tiktok original instead I guess.
  
  Literally an AI generated video generated by an AI scammer account who is actively using it to shill his AI scams. Thanks for clearing that up lol
- It’s a screencap from a TikTok video.
  
  Someone in the thread posted the source. It’s from an AI scammer’s account. He generated it to promote his AI scams
- Detectors aren’t 100%, blah blah, but this isn’t even pinging on any I used. Text doesn’t look AI. The image has a weird quality to it, but to me it looks more like a filter/bad camera/bad lighting than AI.
  
  Yeah this is a real image. It's all post-processed smoothing from subtle movements captured on what was probably a 3 photo HDR bust by a camera phone. Meanwhile, some of the issues are literally artifacts from compression and the rolling shutter.
  
  Look at all the additional comments that have been added. This is almost definitely ai
- is that important to the discussion?
  It's even better than a real photo in this case, because you don't have to worry that any depicted person is real and doesn't want their face plastered over the internet.
  I can't wait until the novelty of GenAI wears off so we can resume concentrating on the message instead of the carrier medium. Either that, or until it becomes undetectable, which will probably be in 1-2 years at the current speed.
  
  I don't agree with your view on AI but I definitely support your first point. Taking pictures of strangers and posting them on the internet has become way too normalised.
  
  What “discussion” lol
  “Does this look like (specific policy) is good?” [AI generated frowny faces]
  Just wow man. The only thing trash like this accomplishes is making the movement look like it has nothing, hence the need to try and pass off slop. Enjoy your moralizing corporation worship though I’m sure next year’s perfect AI will do really great things for the world
- Hah yeah the woman's eyeglasses frame goes under her nose

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