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The Gasmask posted:I recently got a new job that's working from home, and I have complete freedom to work whenever I feel like and take breaks any time. It's doing something I love, and I get to work on some really amazing projects. I've been telecommuting for almost 15 years now. I'm a contractor and I only go into offices to meet the people that will be employing me for the current gig. After that I go home, do my job and get paid. It is possible to live the dream as long as you hit your deadlines.
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Sep 23, 2016 15:30
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Lowen SoDium posted:Many companies still use VPN for remote access and a lot of them don't have proper access list to limit connectivity to jump servers, web apps, or what ever. Jesus christ why??? I can't imagine any scenario where you'd want to do that, it completely destroys any semblance of security because all it takes is one idiot leaving their laptop somewhere with an active VPN key on it to give unauthorized persons access to your inner goddamn secrets.
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Sep 23, 2016 15:48
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Kwyndig posted:Jesus christ why??? I can't imagine any scenario where you'd want to do that, it completely destroys any semblance of security because all it takes is one idiot leaving their laptop somewhere with an active VPN key on it to give unauthorized persons access to your inner goddamn secrets. I completely agree. But a lot enterprises are slow to react and update. Also, a lot of network engineers and security people suck at their jobs.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:01
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At my job they took away my desktop and gave me a surface, despite it not being anywhere near as capable at doing what I need to do. If I take it home I have to VPN to the network to do anything besides check my email.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:25
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working from home right out of the gate as a career seems disastrous, i think you need ten years in crushing corporate cube farms before you become disciplined enough to appreciate the freedom working from home affords.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:40
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The Gasmask posted:Thanks for the heads up. I've heard this warning from a few people, so I've been keeping it in the back of my mind. Luckily, we have lulls so it'll be busy for a bit, dead for a bit, and so on. I don't WFH myself, but one thing I've heard is that having a spare room and using that as an office is the best option.
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Sep 23, 2016 21:25
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Kwyndig posted:Jesus christ why??? I can't imagine any scenario where you'd want to do that, it completely destroys any semblance of security because all it takes is one idiot leaving their laptop somewhere with an active VPN key on it to give unauthorized persons access to your inner goddamn secrets. The Gasmask posted:Thanks for the heads up. I've heard this warning from a few people, so I've been keeping it in the back of my mind. Luckily, we have lulls so it'll be busy for a bit, dead for a bit, and so on. Seriously though, you just need to decide where you draw the line and stick with it. I'm sure I'd be miserable if I did everything the moment it arrived in my inbox, even at night, but I only do that if it only requires a short response from me to get West coast working instead of waiting a day for my response next morning, for example. Everything else can wait, and if it can't they'd give me a call but they never do.
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Sep 23, 2016 21:29
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My current client won't let me take my laptop in and use that as a workstation, so I have to use a company provided mac. It's also fine for me to connect any old phone or tablet to the second wifi network that isn't connected to the 'secrets'. But it's fine for me to WFH, on my laptop, using the VPN that connects me to everything. Not that I even need to use the VPN as everything we use is a cloud based service. Corporate rules: more or less obsolete, but still strictly enforced.
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Sep 23, 2016 23:58
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Imagined posted:I had to take a lie detector once for a 911 dispatcher job. I went through one of these for a 911 job. I answered everything truthfully and at the end when the dude was reviewing the results he started pressing me about whether or not I'd actually received a 4 year college degree. I had to laugh because that was about the dumbest question on the test to challenge me over, considering all the time and money I spent getting that goddamn degree. He let it go and I got the job but it left me with a very low opinion of the value of polygraph tests.
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Sep 24, 2016 00:33
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Dick Trauma posted:He let it go and I got the job but it left me with a very low opinion of the value of polygraph tests. I worked in a convenience store in the mid 80s and had to take a polygraph after the inventory came up way short one month. The manager was stealing gas, money, and merchandise from the store and the district manager was a drunk who had to have the manager help him process payroll. All of the other clerks and I knew this and told the polygraph guy. Both managers passed the polygraph. So, yeah, gently caress that poo poo.
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Sep 24, 2016 00:59
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Mister Kingdom posted:I worked in a convenience store in the mid 80s and had to take a polygraph after the inventory came up way short one month. The manager was stealing gas, money, and merchandise from the store and the district manager was a drunk who had to have the manager help him process payroll. All of the other clerks and I knew this and told the polygraph guy. Both managers passed the polygraph. The way polygraphs "work" is by deviations that correlate with reactions that themselves correlate with lying in most people. It is known that there are people out there who just don't feel much of anything when they lie and could tell you they were Batman or something without so much as a blip on the thing. And yet people still use them for things.
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Sep 24, 2016 03:15
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Polygraphs are basically just an intimidation tactic.
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Sep 24, 2016 03:50
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Jerry Cotton posted:What the hell else are you going to do 8-9?
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Sep 24, 2016 04:19
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I've been telecommuting for almost 15 years now. I'm a contractor and I only go into offices to meet the people that will be employing me for the current gig. After that I go home, do my job and get paid. It is possible to live the dream as long as you hit your deadlines. I would love to telecommute, for the sole reason of not dealing with the office politics that is going on right now. But I know that I don't have the self control to not be distracted and slack off. I'm actually in talks with my boss to move me out of the office and over to the workshop/warehouse where I would be closer to the things I need to do my job, and further away from customer facing areas and the before mentioned office politics. I like quiet when I work. I have one of those chess clocks on order to help illustrate how much of my day is taken by being taken away from my work and to do tasks for other departments. It's also the most obvious passive aggressive display I can find to illustrate how much of the day is spent doing other peoples work. /vent
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Sep 24, 2016 05:35
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My stupid job actually requires active involvement only maybe 10% of the time I'm there. The rest is purely sitting around watching the computer do its thing. I could 100% do this from home while sitting on my rear end playing GTA all day and I'd probably have an increase in productivity. As it is I'm probably gonna start bringing my tablet and watching Netflix on eduroam wifi.
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Sep 25, 2016 17:29
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Spy_Guy posted:
i am now actively seeking one of these out to buy. i am in love.
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Sep 25, 2016 17:44
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Humphreys posted:I have one of those chess clocks on order to help illustrate how much of my day is taken by being taken away from my work and to do tasks for other departments. It's also the most obvious passive aggressive display I can find to illustrate how much of the day is spent doing other peoples work.
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Sep 25, 2016 18:41
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Arsenic Lupin posted:You're in good company; Fred Brooks (THE MYTHICAL MAN-MONTH) used to do that. I think he was actually tracking billable hours, but my dad said that it still made you feel like wasting as little of his time as possible. I also work in an open office type environment. If other people in the room at their desks are chatting away about non-work related poo poo or visibly slacking off. I refuse to answer incoming calls. There is one person that has given us multiple cryptoware from loving around on the net on the company dime. I may have sounded bitter about my job in my last post, but I really do enjoy it, when I am doing MY job.
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Sep 26, 2016 11:19
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On the flipside, expecting 8 continuous hours of focused productive work every day is completely unrealistic unless you work at an assembly line or something. That doesn't mean that it's OK to sit and chat in an office where a third person is trying to focus, but "omg people do something else than hard work at work" is a fact of life in every office with fixed working hours (outside burnout-inducing startups).
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Sep 26, 2016 13:04
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Computer viking posted:On the flipside, expecting 8 continuous hours of focused productive work every day is completely unrealistic unless you work at an assembly line or something. That doesn't mean that it's OK to sit and chat in an office where a third person is trying to focus, but "omg people do something else than hard work at work" is a fact of life in every office with fixed working hours (outside burnout-inducing startups). 
Collateral Damage has a new favorite as of 15:21 on Sep 26, 2016 |
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Sep 26, 2016 13:14
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Computer viking posted:On the flipside, expecting 8 continuous hours of focused productive work every day is completely unrealistic unless you work at an assembly line or something. That doesn't mean that it's OK to sit and chat in an office where a third person is trying to focus, but "omg people do something else than hard work at work" is a fact of life in every office with fixed working hours (outside burnout-inducing startups). In certain environments I feel that the traditional office actually deters me from working. I often did things faster at home, just to get them out of the way, than I did sitting at my desk in my former company (legal department) where I didn't feel any interest in getting anything done beyond making it until the end of the day.
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Sep 26, 2016 14:57
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Work @ work was an interesting divide when I did surveying - us field crew guys would be actually physically working on average around 6 out of the 8 hour days, while one of the LS and a few of the office employees would get a couple hours of work done a day. Often the licensed guy wouldn't actually start working on maps until close to noon (after being there for almost 5 hours), and would leave at least 30 minutes early every day. His mornings were spent on the phone (where he loved to extend a 3 minute conversation to an hour of bullshitting), browsing yahoo news, and complaining about how he hadn't been able to start working yet. I never considered this was anywhere near normal in an office, but I burned out hard on the fieldwork after ~7 years, longer than most of the people I trained, and he's still sitting in the office after 30+ years.
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Sep 26, 2016 16:35
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The Gasmask posted:Work @ work was an interesting divide when I did surveying - us field crew guys would be actually physically working on average around 6 out of the 8 hour days, while one of the LS and a few of the office employees would get a couple hours of work done a day. Often the licensed guy wouldn't actually start working on maps until close to noon (after being there for almost 5 hours), and would leave at least 30 minutes early every day. I feel that offices end up creating an incentive for dicking around the higher you go in the hierarchy. If you're doing technical or physical work, your performance is based on the specific thing you did that day. On the other hand, and I say this based on my experience on legal departments, on a more white collar position you tend to have considerably more leeway to just dick around, as long as you stay the mandatory minimum time. Working from home does have the difficulty of requiring the type of self discipline many (including me) tend to lack, so I'm not sure how much of a real alternative it is.
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Sep 26, 2016 16:42
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I've never really understood people who do anything more than the bare minimum of work required to not get in trouble. But that's probably because I work in industries where raises don't exist and the only people who get promoted are friends with the boss.
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Sep 26, 2016 16:44
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A glimpse of office life in the days before ubiquitous Internet:
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Sep 26, 2016 16:51
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CubanMissile posted:I've never really understood people who do anything more than the bare minimum of work required to not get in trouble. But that's probably because I work in industries where raises don't exist and the only people who get promoted are friends with the boss. sounds like your job is to become the boss' friend.
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Sep 26, 2016 16:55
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CubanMissile posted:I've never really understood people who do anything more than the bare minimum of work required to not get in trouble. But that's probably because I work in industries where raises don't exist and the only people who get promoted are friends with the boss. Do you also work in local government? My first year my performance review was kicked back to my supervisor for having too many "exceeds expectations" on it. They made him edit it to take half of them off. After that I solemnly swore I would never do one iota more than the minimum required again. Lesson learned. And we haven't had raises or promotions in ten years. The only way to make more is to move to a higher classification of job. Imagined has a new favorite as of 17:00 on Sep 26, 2016 |
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Sep 26, 2016 16:57
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well why not posted:sounds like your job is to become the boss' friend. I tried! But bars and restaurants are constantly replacing general managers and the new ones always bring in their own people.
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Sep 26, 2016 17:00
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CubanMissile posted:I tried! But bars and restaurants are constantly replacing general managers and the new ones always bring in their own people. Sounds like your job is to become the boss then.
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Sep 26, 2016 17:27
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Non Serviam posted:I feel that offices end up creating an incentive for dicking around the higher you go in the hierarchy. If you're doing technical or physical work, your performance is based on the specific thing you did that day. On the other hand, and I say this based on my experience on legal departments, on a more white collar position you tend to have considerably more leeway to just dick around, as long as you stay the mandatory minimum time. This is absolutely true in my experience. When I started work here, I was just scanning and filing. It was boring work that generated noise and motion, so everyone knew if you were slacking off because there would be a long period of silence. People could also check exactly how far you had progressed in your work in quantifiable terms (how many files were in the finished stack compared to the unfinished stack). Now that I'm in a customer service, my job is much more "abstract". There are specific tasks that need to get done, like scheduling people for certain things and making sure that exams go off without a hitch, but they have more flexible dates that exist in the future unless someone fucks up. A portion of my job is simply making sure someone else does their quantifiable menial task, like printing cards and letters to mail. And of course, this all comes with the benefit of my own office set apart from the others. There come times where I simply don't have anything actively requiring my attention, either because I've completed all my work for the day and would just have to start making work for myself (like figuring out new, more efficient ways to do things) or it's a task that can wait another few days and I can't be arsed to jump on it. It kinda highlights how ridiculous the wage system is: higher positions technically have more responsibility (calling customers and understanding diplomacy and all of the different certification standards and regulations is harder than just scanning class files over and over), but they put in less effort overall and get more money for an easier job.
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Sep 26, 2016 20:44
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it's fairly typical as you move up the career ladder to be paid more for what you know than what you do
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Sep 26, 2016 20:49
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The Gasmask posted:Work @ work was an interesting divide when I did surveying - us field crew guys would be actually physically working on average around 6 out of the 8 hour days, while one of the LS and a few of the office employees would get a couple hours of work done a day. Often the licensed guy wouldn't actually start working on maps until close to noon (after being there for almost 5 hours), and would leave at least 30 minutes early every day. I do both and it's one hell of a lot easier to focus on things in the field. I never ever hurry in the field, just work through taking my allotment of breaks these days because it's been beaten into me so many times that hurrying just results in fuckups. It helps that with a small company you get more interesting and varied jobs, I couldn't stand just pegging one subdivision after another. I have a lot of trouble working productively in the office, especially with unmonitored internet and a total laissez-faire management. Sometimes I wish that I was hand drafting because it's more interesting than entering data into a computer, but even with my slackarse work ethic, I'm still at a productivity level undreamed of in the nineties. My bosses seem to spend far more time on the phone or writing letters about resource consent issues than they ever do on plans or survey calcs. They each get about three to five calls a day from clients requesting progress updates, each of which puts them further behind on the other jobs, and so the cycle continues...
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Sep 26, 2016 23:37
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What about actual punch clocks, are those obsolete yet? At a prior employer we had one of the old mechanical clocks until 2003-ish, when he "upgraded" to a computerized punch clock that used your fingerprint to clock you in and out so people couldn't punch for their friends. The clock fed its data into a web-based status board that the boss would watch like a hawk, because if you were not there and visibly busy working on something you were literally stealing time from the company and he expected to be compensated. We had to punch out for any breaks, including smoke breaks, and if the boss found you being insufficiently busy he would punch you out with his administrative access code and you would not be paid from then until you were allowed to clock in again. One of my projects was supposed to be a program that monitored web usage via the proxy server logs and automatically punched someone out if they visited websites on the blacklist (myspace, etc) but that never happened.
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Sep 27, 2016 07:21
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I did a little bit of work at a place back around 2009 or so that had a punch clock that just stamped your time card. My current work requires hourly workers to punch in/out of the system at dedicated computers or their own stations if they're clever enough to remember how to navigate there.
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Sep 27, 2016 07:33
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Jaguars! posted:I have a lot of trouble working productively in the office, especially with unmonitored internet and a total laissez-faire management. Sometimes I wish that I was hand drafting because it's more interesting than entering data into a computer, but even with my slackarse work ethic, I'm still at a productivity level undreamed of in the nineties.
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Sep 27, 2016 08:58
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My Lovely Horse posted:I almost entirely automated a job that was 90% sitting around watching progress bars to begin with, and productivity is through the roof. Six hours a day I browse the forums and listen to music on youtube, and we're five months ahead of schedule. Sometimes I look around the office and wonder if it's me or if they're all just loving around. I don't even know what you're supposed to do for eight hours straight. If you're really good at automating things your job could become obsoleting your coworkers.
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Sep 27, 2016 09:33
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I'm on the fence about working from home. We have some people at the office who are very often working from home, or some that meet early and leave ridiculously early on the dot, like 2pm, and it's frequently an annoyance that it's a struggle to get some face time with them talking about the projects, and after lunch it's like "let's look at it tomorrow". Meanwhile I'm there 95% of days from around 9 til 4-5 ish. Yeah sure you can phone and Skype, but people are AFK constantly when they are home, so communication is ridiculously slow. We also cooperate with some developers in Pakistan (3 times zones away from us), and the amount of time it can take to solve a simple problem is absurd. It can take days to resolve something that two people at a physical office could solve in an hour because they can communicate instantly and work on their computers "live" so to speak. I can't imagine what struggle it must be solving critical issues in a world-wide distributed company with no central office. People just get used to the fact that when you type a message in the common chat room, it can take anywhere from 2 minutes to 2 hours until you get a reply, and that's how it is? Fair enough I guess. I think it would take some company dedication to make working from home successful, like infrastructure and common chat rooms, but then on the other hand I think - gently caress no, I don't want to work from home and have a webcam and an open microphone on all day ready to chat with coworkers at a moment's notice. I'd rather be in an office then. Humphreys posted:I would love to telecommute, for the sole reason of not dealing with the office politics that is going on right now. But I know that I don't have the self control to not be distracted and slack off. I'm actually in talks with my boss to move me out of the office and over to the workshop/warehouse where I would be closer to the things I need to do my job, and further away from customer facing areas and the before mentioned office politics. I like quiet when I work. I have one of those chess clocks on order to help illustrate how much of my day is taken by being taken away from my work and to do tasks for other departments. It's also the most obvious passive aggressive display I can find to illustrate how much of the day is spent doing other peoples work. Humphreys posted:I also work in an open office type environment. If other people in the room at their desks are chatting away about non-work related poo poo or visibly slacking off. I refuse to answer incoming calls. There is one person that has given us multiple cryptoware from loving around on the net on the company dime. Remember, it's not your problem if other people at the office cause you to miss your deadlines. Some people work themselves to death thinking they have to meet all their deadlines and finish their projects. Nope, all you can do is work according to a prioritzed list.
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Sep 27, 2016 09:35
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I don't want to reopen the discussion, I just thought that getting this result when asking in german was funny.
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Sep 27, 2016 09:42
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I wonder if it comes up "Kim Jong Un" if you ask it in North Korean?
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Sep 27, 2016 09:56
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The chess clock is pretty neat when your boss asks why you're not done with A Thing you can point to the clock and say "x hours were taken up by other departments which is why I'm not done yet"
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Sep 27, 2016 11:06
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