Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why::The share of workers being called back to the office has flatlined, suggesting remote work is an entrenched feature of the U.S. labor market.
Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why::The share of workers being called back to the office has flatlined, suggesting remote work is an entrenched feature of the U.S. labor market.
Not sure people are finding meeting-free gigs. I read about someone holding down 4 jobs who once had to attend 3 meetings at once (that story might have been in Wired mag, not sure). Like a DJ he had multiple audio streams going with headphones and made a skill of focusing where his name would most likely come up. I’m sure there’s also a long list of excuses like “had to run to stop the burning food” or whatever. Presumabely a long list of excuses to wholly nix a meeting in the first place as well.
Some people are secretly outsourcing some of their work as well, which works for workload but not for meetings.
And this kind of shows how useless many meetings are. Luckily, my meetings are very limited in my current job, but even in those I often tune out when a different group of people are discussing something that’s within my group, but not part of my job. We’ve just gotten used to sometimes having to “wake up” someone if the topic changes to something they would have input on. It usually 5 seconds to repeat the starting point of the new topic so it’s not really that bad.
Of course, ideally you’d have meetings structured so things broke out so no one is sitting there completely uninvolved in any part - but often that’s unrealistic.
Then again, there are people who are paid now to just have a zoom box up with their name showing for hours at a time. I can see how you could easily do something else in that time.
I just work during meetings until somebody invokes my name. I did this back in the office, too - I’d bring my laptop to the meeting room, still SSHed into my dev box, and just get back to what I was doing. Sometimes I’d implement the thing that was mentioned at the beginning of the meeting, and would tell everyone the review was waiting for them at the end.