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Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why (www.cnbc.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 23 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Among the primary benefits: no commute, flexible work schedules and less time getting ready for work, according to WFH Research.

They forgot: being able to secretly simultaneously work 3 full-time overlapping jobs to triple your income.

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  • [–] 37 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Where can I find these trivially easy jobs with no meetings?

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    I had a coworker who did exactly this back in the '90s. He was an expert in a really obscure programming/database platform/language from the 1970s (called "Cyborg") that only had a few people left that knew anything about it. It took literally hours to compile even the tiniest code changes so his job mostly involved sitting around doing nothing waiting for the compiler to finish. He managed to eventually get a WFH situation (with dialup lol) that paid him $300 an hour, then went out and got two other similar WFH jobs that paid the same since his actual work load was just a few minutes per day for each. $900 an hour in the 1990s.

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