Americans are working less

[htismaqe]

Originally Posted by DaFace

I'm somewhere in the middle. I definitely value eliminating the commute (which was 45-60 minutes one-way for me back in the day), and when I REALLY need to focus, I can crank through things far faster from home than I could with the distractions of an office.

On the other hand, there are a lot of times when I feel pretty isolated. I'll end up banging my head against a wall on a problem because I don't want to bug people where, in an office, I might just ask the people around me if they have any ideas.

I think in my perfect world, I'd work somewhere that has a 2-day-a-week hybrid policy. Everyone goes in a couple of days for collaborative stuff, and everyone stays home the other days to crank shit out.

See, we use Slack and I find instant messaging far more convenient than somebody coming to my cube and wanting to talk in the middle of work. As you can imagine, I'm the only member of my team in Iowa so I've always been "long distance" from my coworkers. We do all of our collaboration online and it works great.

[HemiEd]

Very interesting discussion about the + and - of working from home. Just one more thing that has changed dramatically since I retired. Apparently for the good for many of you.

To be honest, I would have been way to tempted to sneak out and work on one of my cars or another home project probably. Also, my commute was about 10 minutes by bicycle since we bought a home near work. Previous jobs the longest was 20 minutes by car.

My last 18 years I had multiple department heads reporting to me as the work day progressed and some of it required my physical presence on the production floor, sales dept., shipping or purchasing. I have no idea how I could have duplicated that remotely.

However, both of my daughters have been successful working from home on a significant scale, mostly starting about the time of the pandemic. They have had no problems with distractions and I have witnessed it personally while visiting them.

[BWillie]

I am a believer that all jobs should be hourly unless you like own the company or something. You may have a salary but you get paid by the hour once you go over 40. Employers can easily **** you over otherwise. Also people feel like they have to work OT in some instances to get ahead or just meet the status quo and they end up killing their self working 60 hrs a week before they know it only making money on the 40.

I am generally not very pro worker even and I have this view. Most unions I am against. I am against any minimum wage but employers can act oblivious and pour you more work than you can handle, then expect it on straight salary jobs and there isn't anything the worker can do about it.

[|Zach|]

I think there is value to being in office. An ideal setup for me would be in the office 1 or 2 days a week.

Don't have that luxury though. Have a lot of freedom for when I come and go and I can still do a lot from home but there are too much this is happening in real time you need to be there shit.

[KCUnited]

I'm fully remote but went into the office recently because my boss was in town for a leadership meeting and I wanted to say hi. There's a couple people within the analytics space who go in, but I don't which days. Anyway, while there I overheard someone on the phone walking through the same data connection issue I was having. The result of that happenstance was a collaborative solution that may never have happened or at least taken me longer to solve

So I get it when its applicable and if I knew this persons schedule I may go in but I don't and that's what makes this hybrid thing really dumb

It should go back to pre-Covid when it was a conversation between leader and employee on what works best for everyone instead of a broad brush stroke approach of X number of days for everyone

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by |Zach|

I think there is value to being in office. An ideal setup for me would be in the office 1 or 2 days a week.

Don't have that luxury though. Have a lot of freedom for when I come and go and I can still do a lot from home but there are too much this is happening in real time you need to be there shit.

When I was working for the military, I would spend 35-45 minutes getting to work through heavy traffic. Another 10-15 minutes to get through the base security gate. Another 5 minutes to get back to my workplace. Park and walk into the building, usually 10-15 minute walk. Get into the building, I have another 5-10 minutes of security to get back to our area. Thats 2-3 hours out of my day. Then I'm working 12 hours a day.

When I left the military I swore to only work remotely from now on. Never worked on site again.

[ghak99]

State paid employees. Covid caused them to go remote. Post Covid they went to 1 office day a week.

... multiple workers are now home schooling their kids.

[HemiEd]

Originally Posted by ghak99

State paid employees. Covid caused them to go remote. Post Covid they went to 1 office day a week.

... multiple workers are now home schooling their kids.

Sounds like a real efficient way to spend taxpayer money.

[ghak99]

Originally Posted by HemiEd

Sounds like a real efficient way to spend taxpayer money.

Concerns about it were sent up the chain to representatives, but it doesn't appear any change has been implemented yet.

[duncan_idaho]

Originally Posted by ghak99

State paid employees. Covid caused them to go remote. Post Covid they went to 1 office day a week.

... multiple workers are now home schooling their kids.

I occasionally see people asking about that on the remotework subreddit. “How do I homeschool/should I homeschool while working remotely?”

I mean, the answer to those questions is you can not:should not, but that’s the answer to the question of homeschooling, period, so … they usually don’t take that suggestion well.

[ThaVirus]

Originally Posted by mr. tegu

This made me think about just the environment, not even the fact it’s at home or in the office. Everyone at home has a nice space, probably a window, maybe some music, their pets, etc. But in the office it’s usually so grey and sterile, maybe a cubicle, no window and just generally less pleasing to our senses.

Funny thing about the word “cubicle” it actually comes from Rome/latin where the word “cubiculum” which basically meant small sleeping quarters. Old English changed it to cubicle but it still meant small sleeping chamber. Eventually though it became the horror we know it as today.

Yep, this is a thing too. Used to have a daily battle with a dude who sat near me on whether or not we could open the blinds.

I wanted them open. Otherwise we’re sitting in this dank, dark office going crazy to top 40 pop hits all day every day. He wanted them closed because the sun made a glare on his screen. ****ing pussy..

Ya know another thing that’s better at home? Sitting on your own shitter! Can’t put a price on that.

[htismaqe]

I've been working 100% from home since 2009. Yeah, there are days when I jack around and do yard work or play video games. But I work in a results/deadline based industry so they don't really care how much I work, just how much I get done.

[htismaqe]

I personally wouldn't recommend trying to homeschool and telework at the same time, not without help. My girls were homeschooled and as I said, I've been 100% home since 2009. They mostly schooled themselves, my wife didn't "teach" by any means, but she was always available to answer questions and stuff like that.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by htismaqe

I personally wouldn't recommend trying to homeschool and telework at the same time, not without help. My girls were homeschooled and as I said, I've been 100% home since 2009. They mostly schooled themselves, my wife didn't "teach" by any means, but she was always available to answer questions and stuff like that.

How do you feel about the quality and breadth of their education? Was there a home-school curriculum that you obtained and followed?

One question I've always had about home schooling is that it seems like it can narrow of the funnel of sources getting to a kid, both in terms of topics and philosophy. If the parent is interested in science and hates literature, the kid is probably going to get more science. (And that's not a challenge of you and your wife, but rather a general comment that I think would be true of a lot of people.)

I realize that a lot of parents have traditionally home-schooled because they want to narrow the sources in terms of philosophy (e.g., religion, social views). One can debate the merits of that, so I won't go into it. But in the Covid era, I would suspect that we got a lot more home-schooling for other reasons.

[htismaqe]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

How do you feel about the quality and breadth of their education? Was there a home-school curriculum that you obtained and followed?

One question I've always had about home schooling is that it seems like it can narrow of the funnel of sources getting to a kid, both in terms of topics and philosophy. If the parent is interested in science and hates literature, the kid is probably going to get more science. (And that's not a challenge of you and your wife, but rather a general comment that I think would be true of a lot of people.)

I realize that a lot of parents have traditionally home-schooled because they want to narrow the sources in terms of philosophy (e.g., religion, social views). One can debate the merits of that, so I won't go into it. But in the Covid era, I would suspect that we got a lot more home-schooling for other reasons.

I apologize in advance for the wall of text but there's a lot to unpack.

We didn't home school for religious or similar reasons. We home schooled because our local school district is shit. My kids aren't into sports. They're into art, music, and stuff like that. They were both good academically too.

I won't go into exhaustive detail but some of the things we had to deal with:

1. Curriculum issues. We've talked about this in the DC subforum and elsewhere but my wife and I became increasingly aware that things like Common Core were teaching kids inefficiently and in some cases, just plain wrong. There was a growing emphasis on "showing your work" - giving kids credit for the attempt, even if the answer was wrong, as long as they used the correct methodology. There was also the constant testing. Funding depends on standardized test scores so they spent more time practicing testing than actually teaching.
2. ridiculous lack of logistics when it came to bussing rural kids. Near the end, my kids were on the bus for one hour and five minutes, twice a day. It's actually against the law in Iowa to be on a bus that long.
3. defunding art, music, and other things we wanted. My oldest was just finishing elementary school when they got rid of her TAG program. Every year the number of para's (basically babysitters for disruptive kids, because they can't be segregated anymore) goes up and the programs for high achieving kids get cut.
4. Other fiscal decisions like spending $3M on a new building that doesn't house students even though it's only 20 years old. Or spending $750K to "fix" the 150-year old school near the country club only to close it completely 3 years later because it's beyond repair.
5. Bullying - my kids weren't subjected to it much but we never really gave it much chance. It was almost like mobs were running the school and the admin acted like they were powerless. When a local kid got stabbed across the street from the school, that was kind of the last straw.

We brought a lot of these grievances to the school board as a community because there were dozens of us homeschooling at the time. The school district treated us with contempt and scorn. They never once tried to address the issues or cooperate with us. From the start, we were adversaries. They talked to us like we were heretics from the 10th century, like anyone that dared to question was a witch.

Anyway, we used an online curriculum, some of the classes were the same as what they would get in school but some were above and beyond. The only subject my kids bitched about was history/social studies but I love history so they took it.

I'm not sure what else to say, I could talk about this for hours and hours, there's so much to it. The bottom line is my kids are social, well-adjusted, and even mildly successful (my oldest is the director of our art center and she's only 24). Instead of sitting in a classroom all day, they went on field trips to places school would never take them. They did crazy projects for weeks on end, activities school couldn't accommodate due to rigid schedules and testing quotas. And most of all, they had the freedom to not only truly learn but to excel and not be held back.