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AT&T Calls Telecommuters Back To the Cubicle
bednarz writes "AT&T is requiring thousands of employees who work from their homes to return to traditional office environments, sources say. 'It is a serious effort to reel in the telework people,' says the Telework Coalition's Chuck Wilsker, who has heard that as many as 10,000 or 12,000 full-time teleworkers may be affected. One AT&T employee says rumors have been circulating since AT&T's merger with SBC that the new upper management is not supportive of teleworking: 'We'd heard rumors to that effect, and all of a sudden we got marching orders to go back to an office.'"
My guess is that ATT is betting that a large percentage of the teleworkers will either resign, or come back with such bad attitudes that they will be fired "for cause" shortly after their return.
The reality is that, in the current business environment, it is better for your career to be mildly competent but in plain sight that extremely competent but hidden at home.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
First they call you to the office, next thing you know they're going to want you to communicate! If this goes on for too long we may actually have to work.
They should all quit! AT&T is the worst company out there. I don't know where the regulatory agencies get off letting them merge and become larger when they where born by being broken up because they had become too large and powerful and didn't give a crap about the consumer because there was no competition. Now we have this! Plus didn't AT&T cut a bunch of their workers pension plans? If I worked for AT&T this would be the last straw. Of course I can't see myself every working for such a company.
Hey! It`s a phone company. They don't care. They don't have to.
"Of course it's work-related. I'm farming Primals for my supervisor."
Maybe the company just doesn't want their internal telecommuting communications to be subject to the federal wiretapping they are performing, keeping it all in-house on their LAN.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You know, if Boeing were to reel in their telecommuters, that is one thing. But this is the freakin' phone and network company saying that a phone and network just don't cut it as the primary ways to communicate professionally. What sort of message is this going to signal to big corporate customers who want to spend tons of cash on promoting and providing telecommuting solutions for their own staffs? Oh, yeah, nothing.
[
Never trust the Suits.
Most of them probably don't even know what telecommuting is.
Most of them probably don't have a computer in their office. That's for the 'help' to deal with.
MOst probably can't spell 'email'.
From the article there's so many negatives to this, that I really fail to understand the reasoning whoever thought this up was using at the time.
I would start issuing invoices for fill-ups.
Barring that, how about writing up an article and trying to get it into the New York Times (and other large papers) asking the question: Why is AT&T supporting pollution by requiring 10,000 employees to begin commuting to an office once again? Does AT&T _not_ support a green initiative and want to cut down on its carbon footprint in this world? Does AT&T _not_ support cutting down on vehicle emissions by using the very effective telecommute for work? What does AT&T have against saving the planet?
With the wide variety of people focused on green initiatives, carbon footprinting, greenhouse gases, and trying to save the planet surely some bad press thrown AT&T's way making it look bad on the global stage for, basically, FORCING 10,000+ people to begin commuting to work again after years of working from home... Well, even monopolistic giants can be pimp-slapped in the press. Sometimes.
AT&T - Your world. Delivered. To the NSA.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
it's a sign of bad management when they can't trust those they manage
of course, the senior people are always the ones who spend the least time 'in the office' in my experience
Isn't it odd this story comes up right after an article on the obesity epidemic.
I have an idea to be at the office and telecommute at the same time: Invent the holodeck.
The office space would actually be a giant holodeck with holographic cubicles and other holographic office equipment. At each employee's home, a much smaller holodeck would be installed. These holodecks would be designed similarly to the ones in Star Trek, but with one small difference: These holodecks would use a superset of the X11 protocol.
Employees at their home holodeck would feel exactly as though they were at the office. Those who physically commute to the office would feel the same way. The residual self images of all the employees logged in to all the holodecks at any given moment would be mapped onto the big office holodeck as well as onto all the smaller holodecks at all the employees' homes.
Besides saving on gasoline, hours wasted commuting, and traffic jams caused on the nation's highways and streets, this approach would have a few additional benefits as well. For one thing, besides purchasing the holodeck, the employer would not have to buy any other equipment or supplies. All desks, chairs, computer workstations, pens, pencils, post-it notepads, lights, water coolers, vending machines, carpets, and those annoying inspirational posters that say things like Teamwork or Persistence, would all be holographically implemented. This would save big on costs for everyone.
Something tells me that the delays in commuting, lost productivity from sick days (most telecommuters work while sick), parking/transportation woes, decreased morale and higher turnover, ATT will slowly report that things probably aren't so bad when a % of workers telecommute.
In fact, I fully expect to see telecommuting plans as a normal part of government recommendations for business during times of terrorism, epidemic or natural disaster. PUtting it bluntly, SBC simply doesn't know where the world is going.
It's not as if AT&T were a telecomm company ... oh, wait ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
Translation: out of the three companies which are merging, let's pick the policy that takes the most away from the employees.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
As the CEO of a successful chain of churches, I can tell you that our televangelists are much more lucrative than our traditional ones.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
We can blame global warming on AT&T becasue they are making 10-12k people drive to work...where is the justice in the world.
Joking aside, imagine the cost that AT&T will have to incur in offering a facility, electricity, infrastrucute, and other brick and morter expenses to house 10k+ employees.
The finest shade.
And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.
It has occurred to me recently (and probably to many others before this), that if your job can successfully be performed via telecommute, it can probably successfully be performed in India. Granted, this is not the entire set of telecommuting jobs, but a large portion of them. To that end I have always avoided job opportunities that included a telecommuting option, and instead focused on job opportunities closer to home in the first place.
--why?
I think that's the general idea.
People are generally more productive when working from home. Less breaks, more on task, etc etc. Granted they have less face time at the office but this generally works out in favor of both the company and individual. Yes, I do telework about 85% of the time and I know a few people at AT&T that do and will probably continue to do so; as a consultant or otherwise. For all you naysayers...if it doesn't work for you then don't do it but don't harp on the people that it helps over the course of their tenure at said company.
I'm here to kick a$$ and chew bubble gum...and I'm all out of bubble gum!
While the prospect of "shadow layoffs" has some validity, I suspect that what you are seeing is just another case of management cluelessness and an inability to let go of old business models.
Upper management in most organizations either misses the boat, spending time desperately trying to recover (witness MS and the internet, or the Bells and DSL), or just kills the golden goose out of greed and ignorance.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Or maybe the teleworkers should all buy robots to fill in for them?
I was at HP when they did this. They didn't make much of a secret that it was being done to try and drive people away from the company to reduce headcount. I suppose it worked to some extent, as many of the people that were "recalled" were working at remote locations where it was impossible for them to commute to an office location. Those people were effectively laid-off, and without getting the nice HP severance package normally received for the major lay-offs HP was doing at the time.
All I can say is I'm glad that I am out of there. HP is still doing anything they can to make it a miserable place to work so people will leave. Last I heard they just eliminating almost all year-end vacation roll-over (Merry Christmas, employees).
I suspect AT&T will start doing some of this kind of thing now. It is much cheaper for them if employees quit out of frustration then if they have to give them a lay-off package. I suspect they'll see a few more of these "changes" that don't seem to make sense until you look at it as a headcount reduction method.
I agree that these people should get another job. They should also still complain. Because what AT&T is doing is stupid, harms people's lives, and will not increase productivity or communication at all.
I remember reading an article about HP doing this very same thing last year. They had a fairly large number of telecommuters, and called them back because they didn't feel they could adequately communicate with them. I don't remember the exact quote, but the press release mentioned that they needed "all hands on deck" for whatever they had planned.
:-) )
I totally see both sides of this issue. On the anti-telework side, you have two camps. The first is the "old-school" executive types who don't believe anyone can be producing anything unless they're physically in the office. That'll never change until they're retired...that's the way they went to work in 1968, and that's the way we do it now. Period. The other group is convinced that, for whatever reason, a telework force just isn't getting anything done. That's entirely possible. It takes _a lot_ of discipline to get stuff done when you're in a comfortable environment.
On the pro-telework side, you have people like me. I live far from my job. To get to one of my possible work locations, I have a choice. I can take a 1.5 hour, 35 mile car trip in horrible traffic or a 1.25 hour 50 mile train ride (which is actually fine except for the time it takes.) That's three hours of totally wasted time a day. When things aren't totally, nuts, I telecommute 1 or 2 days a week. It keeps me sane and productive. Granted, there are some really lazy people out there who just wouldn't be able to handle it. However, for those who have proven they can handle it, it seems to me like it'd be a great privilege to offer. The caveat would then be that if your performance slips, you're back in the office.
IMO, telework is ruined by the percentage of people who use it as an excuse to play World of Warcraft in their PJs instead of doing work. (And I'm waiting for a VM to finish building itself now, so I'm actually working.
If people could get their act together, telework would really cut down on the cars on the road, reduce fuel usage, and probably take the "pissed-off" edge out of people who have to deal with a long drive to/from work. Going into the physical office for part of the week would also let parents spend more time with their kids at home (balancing it with their work, of course.)
Be funny if everyone showed up on the same day, and the parking lots couldn't even hold them all.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Perhaps the "phone company" is just a comapany like any other company, and has found out that the telecommuter's job can be outsourced. I can just imagine some worker in India is piss mad cause some American telecommuter stole his job.
If we spread more misery, people will need more misery-reducing products. AT&T is obviously about to start selling legal, over-the-counter, medical marijuana.
technical writing / development
What are 20k people doing that doesn't need to be done on AT&T property? Certainly they're not maintaining or deploying physical infrastructure.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I just completed my intravenous mobile organic multi trillion cell processor running at 7.9 gazzillion gigahertz(it's based off the new iPhone) and it has calculated that if you add up the letters AT&T and then divide by the Latin letters in COMCAST you get the numeric value 666. Just saying.
Several years ago Verizon shut down some office buildings (notably in Florida) and basically forced people to work from home. The company provided the DSL and second phone line and paid to ship the contents of their desks to the houses. Flash forward a few years and those same people were told that they must move back into the office. I know at least one person that chose to pay for their DSL and continue to work from home because it was more convenient.
Basically, upper management no longer supports working from home, regardless of the fact that they can be expected to work nights and weekends, especially to work with India.
What is ultimately a challenge is how to measure worker productivity. The business needs to prove that workers are more productive in one setting over the other, but in the real world, you can't just count lines of code.
I saw a demo at a Sun conference earlier this year that proposed something similar (Java, not X11 based though...)
http://research.sun.com/projects/mc/mpk20.html
Cheers,
JG
-- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
You gotta get real with some of these #'s of productivity. Kids, Dog, food beer TV are all distractions that make you get absolutly nothing done. I choose to work in an office because you don't have all those distractions. Sure.. I might loose some time from coworkers but not nearly as much as I would if I had family around. I haven't heard anything about them stopping people working from home after hours. Explain to me how you can tell if someone is messing around at home if thier sales are down or they are busting there butts trying to break even? From a management view, you can't. If everyone is doing great, then there isn't a problem. But apparently AT&T isn't doing so well. You can't sit there and continue to loose money without making a change. Complain all you want, but you should feel fortunate for all the years you got to have all that freedom.
ATH
NO CARRIER
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I don't have anything against you personally, but that question makes me want to slap you.
Here is a Canadian Government white paper on the subject.
Quote from the paper "Companies that promote family-friendly workplaces have an edge when it comes to recruitment and retention of skilled employees."
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
I've been a telecommuter for 8 years. I have calculated that
average 200 work days a year
3 hours a day commute from home into London
= 8 * 200 * 3 = 4800 hours = 200 days of time not spent traveling to work
Then then there is the financial cost.
An annual season ticket is over 4K GBP.
So, I guestimate that that I can take a hit of around 10K year in salary for working at home
Or the other way round, I'll look for a job that pays 10k a year more if I have to travel to work.
If companies like AT&T want to do this they are IMHO totally crackers.
HP did this to Compaq/DEC people here in the UK after the takeover. Many voted with their feet at not having a desk when they got to the office even before 08:00 in the morning.
This might have been a short term profit for HP but all these people will think long and hard before dealing with HP again.
The downside of this is that the best people (ie the people they can afford to lose the least) will leave first as they can fnd other gainful employment the easiest.
But (sigh) the bean counters rule Ok. And what they say goes regardless of whether or not it is best in the long term for the company.
>> Invent the holodeck.
Why not skip right over that, and generate free power at the same time? Invent the Matrix instead!
I think this, as much as anything else, speaks volumes about who took over when SBC merged with AT&T. The SBC management and anti-consumer policies have been infecting AT&T ever since the merger. (Hell, I'm even viewing this from the outside, and I can see this.) Those SBC execs are not very nice people, IMHO. It is a shame that they have to go and ruin a good company. :(
And how are thy going to try to spin the environmental cost this will have?
For a long time I have thought that if political wanted to appeal to multiple sides of the political spectrum, they would give a good tax break to businesses for getting over a certain percentage of telecommuters. They would also give the employees a tax break so that they would push for telecommuting as part of their compensation. This make them business friendly, environmentalist friendly, and family friendly all in one fell swoop. If even 20% of the population could be removed from the roads, we would see less wear on the roads, as well as less need for widening roads, as well as less traffic congestion. The biggest question from a political point of view would be concerning how much gas taxes would be lost compared to savings on roadways, and how hard the oil companies would fight it.
You honestly believe that 12,000 AT&T employees collect a wage without doing work?
While I don't know if YOU might steal from your employer in this fashion, it's foolish to assume that everyone else does.
I shudder to consider what other beliefs you hold true.
I am speaking from experience on this, so please hear me out (I also have to post this anonymously):
The honest truth is that only the foolish ones work 40+ hour weeks. If you're smart, you've positioned yourself so that you only do about 15 hours of work but everybody thinks you work 60+ hours (emails sent during nights and weekends help with this illusion). Telecommuting helps you hide this fact although you still need to be in the office on occassion for socializing and general schmoozing. Out of sight is out of mind and we don't want that come bonus and promotion time. And quite honestly, I don't see it as a badge of honor to work my ass off for my company. I want to enjoy life, not slave for someone else's bonus. The sad irony of this little scenario is that the higher up you advance, the less you generally work. I say this as an engineer who recently moved into marketing and who is right this very moment "working from home." I'm actually about to go for a nice bike ride but I'll first send a few emails asking for schedules from the software group. The software guys will give me a date and I'll forward this to the customer. They will go back to work while I will arrange a nice trip to California where we'll go out and party, talk a little business, and generally make all of our strategic decisions in a bar somewhere in San Francisco.
If you are an engineer with any sort of social skills, get the hell out of engineering and go into sales/marketing. Your technical talents will make you a god, you will decide what projects to do, and you will have a life other than coding and WoW. And if the above didn't convince you, I will just say two words: Marketing Chicks!
It's your life. Don't waste it.
AT&T clearly has no clue. My wife works from home for a very large company. In fact they let her move out of state where they don't even have an office. They are letting more and more workers telecommute because her company understands the big picture of retaining employees. In fact they pay for our net connection as well as her business phone, fax, printer, and other expenses. Her boss yelled at her for NOT expensing stuff soon enough because its SOO much cheaper for the company to allow telecommuting than bringing them into the office. This company CLEARLY gets it.
And that'd be different from reading /. @ work how?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
First, if they try to sell their telecommunications systems to a company, and the CEO / buyer asks the AT&T rep "even your own company doesn't believe in or use your own products, why should we?", they're going to have a hard time answering that question. I certainly would never buy from a seller who doesn't believe in their own product.
Second, since they won't be using their own systems in-house, they'll become more divorced from them. They'll lose a competitive edge. When you don't use your own products you lose touch. Over time this will degrade their own products.
Third, not everyone is shiftless and lazy. Simply because you think everyone is like that doesn't make it so. Also, there are lots of jobs where objective benchmarks will tell you if someone is doing thier job. People who want to kill time / be lazy will do that regardless if they are at the office or not. You think standing around the water cooler or going on another smoke break is worse than walking your dog?
Anyway, if you can't tell if someone is providing enough benefit to justify their salary / pay if they aren't in the office then the job they're doing probably isn't necessary anyway. If you can tell or have an objective marker for their productivity then it shouldn't matter if they telecommute or not.
I know a lot of the /. crowd loves to work from home, but as someone who has to deal with clueless telecommuters all the time, I think the whole system sucks. Whether it's their home ISP having problems or they too stupid to figure out that they need to actually be on the VPN to access work resources, it's nothing but a huge headache. So for your average geek working from home may be a sweet deal, but for everyone else there should be a computer literacy test given before you are allowed to telecommute.
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
It seems from the discussions that 'telecommuting' consists of connecting to some computer at work from home - just like at work but without any real existence. However, this is very obsolete methodology; think of WebEx or Xerox Rooms, or similar technology. With these, and with better versions of the same, telecommuters should be even MORE present than if already there. Having to walk around to find someone is very inefficient, and each worker is much 'hidden' behind a door or cubicle wall. This is not very 21-st century!
I worked for a big semiconductor company that has reversed their telecommuting policies.
Companies need to understand that they need to hire the right people in order to make this policy work. It's easy for a few bad apples to ruin it for the hard working ones.
So I guess AT&T realized that since they haven't maintained their networks, there hardware can't handle the customer demand for bandwidth. So they had to find a way to reduce the load.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Hewlett Packard also did this last year, as well as just a few months after Mark Hurd took office. Both times, the rumors were closely paired with internal rumors of layoffs. Both times, HP denied that the two were related.
I wonder why the powers that be don't make some way for those comments to be automatically deleted?
If you're telecommuting from Orlando to Seattle, you knew that were you to be asked into the office it would be a problem, but decided to do the job anyway.
That's not for a judge to arbitrate, it's for a grown person to expect and plan for.
Okay then ... then AT&T should also cut the "teleworkers" in India, Russia, and all the Fuckistans, and offer those jobs to U.S. workers in U.S. offices.
Compare the salaries between engineering and sales/marketing. Where I work, the sales/marketing droids don't make nearly what a mid-level coder makes.
Going from engineering to sales/marketing would be a big cut in salary unless you moved over as a manager.
I'll admit that the marketing chicks are cute and perky.
Just remember, this isn't your parents' Ma Bell, this is the former Southwest Bell, long considered the most cut-throat of the RBOC children, having eaten half its siblings and now wearing its parent's skin like some hideous story out of Greek myth.
I somehow doubt this is what Judge Greene had in mind at the time...
Sorry if I am being redundant - I usually RTFA and read all the Slashdot shit that follows (don't get me wrong - I love this place) but I recently started a new job after seven years of telecommuting. This new job means I am at work on basic time of 9-5 and I have no choice but to be at least seen to be productive within those hours. Telecommuting, whilst initially attractive eventually fucks you up, unless you are one of the 0.1% of the world population that are androids (Google take note) - and hugely naturally self motivated (not me). Something domestic always turns up, and with the arrival of our baby six months back... Well ... Never being able to shut the office door can be very destructive on your personal life, I learn't that to my detriment. If I need to crunch I can now do it on my own terms and the demarcation between life/work is now there. Most employers will let you work from home when you absolutely _need_ to. I got so bored of being at home that I had to escape the house at 6 pm no matter what (after 4 days stretch of not seeing a customer or anyone other than wife/child). And that involved alcohol, starting at 3pm because I could (think Crackberry) and ending up in a vicious circle sort of way. My new employment let me work at home if I have to - the rest of the time the 'office door' is shut. I am truly much happier. Having said that I moved close enough that the office is only at worst a 30 min drive... Lots to be said for living near the office... Swings and roundabouts for all but the whole everyone telecommute idea is only a panacea.
"I wonder why the powers that be don't make some way for those comments to be automatically deleted?"
Kevin Smith on Prince
One small stumble for AT&T, one giant leap backwards for sustainability. 10,000 or so people will now be commuting to work where previously they used modern technology to avoid burning fossil fuels. Many will have chosen homes further away from work than average in the knowledge that they don't have this commute, so they will mostly likely be burning a greater than average amount of fuel. Some may even have to buy a second car for the family, where previously one was enough. Road infrastructure surrounding AT&T's offices will be strained by this extra load, affecting other commuters.
I can only imagine this is the product of a bunch of old white men. What's next? One day a week where you're not allowed to send email?
Oh well, if you're one of AT&T competitors, you're about to see their best and brightest looking for work, if you're willing to let them telecommute.
I live in France, but I'm still earning in dollars.
Thanks to the rising oil prices and still-falling dollar nowadays, it costs me about USD 6.70/gallon for *diesel*, which is still cheaper than regular gas (that's be heading past $8/gallon).
I'm very glad to have a small car (gets about 50 mpg) and I don't have to drive anywhere most days.
Yes, I work from home.
Constructive Dismissal.
Sounds about right to me.
Kevin Smith on Prince
It's their own fault for working for AT&T and/or SBC. You work for a company of shitty morals don't be surprised when you get shat on.
If anybody gives me the "it's not their fault they work for ATT/SBC" shpiel I'll be nothing but amused
No one forces you to work anywhere.
I don't expect anything less from Ma Bell
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
My own firm went the other way and wanted to get rid of real estate so they decided to double up people in offices, then move them to cubes, then move them to call centers. My last on site job was as a security consultant with an 'office' in the call center. The cube dividers were 1 foot higher than the desk so you and everyone else got to stare at each other all day. This became intolerable so as many of us who wanted just pulled up to work from home. They give you a cash allotment for your broadband, a one time allowance to buy some home office equipment, they pay for a VoIP phone line and a modicum of consumables like paper, ink etc. It's not ideal and my spouse is pissed about it because in her mind if I'm home I'm home for chores and to be interrupted whenever whatever for whoever. Plus the time zone thing for work is a bore when I wind up on calls early or late. But on the upside it's a lot more flexible, I don't have to drive, I can take a nap, eat lunch at home or somewhere else. My company though uses it as an excuse though to not give out increases with the thinking that they've saved me two thousand bucks. If they tried to round us all up and make us go back to the office, they have to rent some office space. Whereas as we are slowly picked off and our jobs leave the US, it's pretty simple for them. Just stop paying us and send out a shipping carton for our laptops, disconnect phone. Sayonara. I have never met any of my last 5 managers face to face.
No offense intended, but I was wondering if you at one time may have worked for GE or Lockheed or Knolls Atomic at one time?
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Laziness, as they could just delete it as they have on certain discussions related to this post.
The user that incorrectly stated something about editorial policy would do well to be modded -6, Wrong.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I worked for Labs for a few years, and telecommuted. I'm really glad that I'm not still in that gig today.
Of course, my home is in Colorado, and my boss was in New Jersey, so the recall would have been a bitch!
Now that you know that you are getting the shaft and soon to be fired or laid off, you should consider furthering your career by whistleblowing. That's right, you know you are sitting on some juicy scandal or two, now is the time to cash in before you aren't an employee and it looks like "sour grapes".
Think about it. You'll be soon out of work anyway, might as well get some justice plus get paid for it (eventually)
They got broken up once for being obnoxious greedy drools, they held back modern communications for *decades*. Look around, what do you see? A zombie coming back to life? Help to put them back under a rock where they belong, whistleblow today!
I, and quite a few other people left Cingular prior to the AT&T merger due to very hostile work environments.
Nobody was ever officially singled out in our department, but people that fell out of favor were systematically driven out by a small clique of senior managers.
Anyone that might compete with them or make them look bad was driven away.
They prefer cheap L-1b labor to actual employees.
They want a serfdom they can churn at will and dispense with at the wave of a hand.
Nobody was allowed to telecommute except the most senior people.
My personal boss was in a a whole other state telecommuting from a place where there wasn't even an office.
I wonder what happened to them.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Maybe I'm deluded, but I was under the impression that the (previously) substantially higher prices on gasoline in other countries was largely due to heavy taxation to help pay for transportation infrastructure. The same kinds of infrastructure that folks in the US are figuring out is massively underfunded and crumbling dangerously. Meanwhile, in the US, high prices on gasoline instead go to... record-high petroleum company profits. Am I the only one who sees this as a problem?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
And besides, even if you were the GGP poster, no one would notice this reply, buried in a Slashdot thread. And not modded up. We hope.
Anyway, don't worry, we still don't know any more about you beyond your Slashdot alias. At least, not until we Google your handle and comb through your Slashdot posts to see what other details of your identity you've let slip
Just kidding. But be more careful next time, eh?
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Back in the day, I worked for Pacific Bell - the Baby Bell for California and Nevada. Not too long after I joined the company, the "Historic Merger" with SBC happened - "Historic Merger" being Texan for "We bought ya'all." At the time, PacBell was pushing second lines for residential customers so they could telecommute. Huge push, and PacBell's policy was that if you could do your job remotely, and your manager was cool with it, by all means do it. Once SBC took over the show, the policy changed. The comment around the office was "The Colonel likes ta see yo smilin' face." Basically, SBC upper management didn't trust their employees, so telecommuting was shoved aside. Never mind they were still pushing second lines like crazy with a huge advertising campaign.
Just don't think they actually want their own workers to enjoy the benefits of what they were selling...
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
"Every firm would be well served to do 100% telecommuting for a period of time, forcing them to re-evaluate how they judge the contributions of their team."
Well the envelope-stuffing firm I'm working for has been doing that for years.
"Translation: out of the three companies which are merging, let's pick the policy that takes the most away from the employees."
Eliminate toilet paper from the bathrooms.
Just sayin.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Some more info. Most of IBM Network Services telecommutes and lives far from AT&T offices. The merger to AT&T is set to take place Jan 1, 2008, the date this article sets for implimentation is Dec 31. Telecommuting support from AT&T has been a popular question to management which has been replied to with silence.
And it's not a shadow layoff; if anything it's the opposite. In a virtual-office environment, if you can't see somebody maybe it's because they're telecommuting, but in a slave-at-your-desk environment, if somebody's not there you can't see them.
AFAICT, one of the big issues is that the SBC suits don't think you're working if they don't know what you're doing, so not only does working from the office let them see that you're there "working", but it also gives them some clue what you're up to, and (pretending for a moment that they're enlightened) lets them do the HP "management by walking around" thing. It also lets you get synergy with your coworkers, in case you're working on similar problems - we do have Instant Messaging, but it's not the same as watercooler conversations or hearing phone calls from the next cubicle.
The old-AT&T sales and consulting management had the view that if you're in the office, it means that you're not out talking with your customer, which means that you're not selling things, and one of their objectives was to try to minimize and automate the paperwork part of the business so that sales people could spend less time with ordering, configuring, contracts, and billing, and more time actually selling, which either meant talking to more customers (if you had small customers) or talking to more people at your customer (if you had big customers). And they made sure that everybody who did sales or systems engineering or consulting had laptops so we could do our work when we were at the customer's offices, and could spend our hanging-around time at customer offices instead of AT&T offices. And the Real Estate Mafia occasionally instituted fads like hotelling and smaller cubicles, which made it real clear that they didn't want us in the office, and we got the hint.
Now they're giving us Blackberries but want us to spend more time in the office where they're not actually useful :-)
I often work from the middle of the sea on a ship with a laptop and a 3G HSDPA Internet connection, or from beaches, mountains, etc literally in the middle of nowhere on remote islands, so I essentially combine vacations with work and this is everyday reality for me (in fact I log more hours outdoors rather than in my home office), and managers working for big companies still debate whether telework can be done. Not only it can be done, but it is the best most optimal to work which leads to great benefits for the employee, the employer, the environment, and the economy. Managers who don't support telework are not worthy of their positions.
"It's either that or move closer to my job and pay twice as much for housing (so far driving the distance and paying for the gas is the more economic alternative) or else move into a high crime neighborhood."
Is that pre or post housing bust?
I worked remotely for Terran Interactive/Media 100 from 1999-2001, at home for myself 2001-2005, and remotely for Microsoft since 2005.
:).
Overall working from home has worked out quite nicely. Both companies are pretty distributed, and a big part of my role has been doing presentations at trade shows and at client sites, so no matter where I was based, there would be some visit to other sites, and also visits with coworkers during events.
As for visibility, both were organizations very much driven my email, so I was in the thick of it as much as everyone else. At Microsoft, people I've been working with on projects for a while are still sometimes surprised to realize I don't report out of Redmond (easier since it's only a 3 hour drive from Portland, so it's easy to drop in for a couple of days a few times a month).
In either organization, there were interesting jobs that I could have taken that would have required a relocation, but I never felt punished for declining them, and I've been consistently reviewed well.
And there are a lot of pluses for working from home. My main focus in video encoding, so being able to pop down to the basement to double-check on a render after the kids are in bed is a lot easier than having to go back to the office, or try to remote into HD video. I certainly did my time doing 3 am render babysitting in the mid-90's, and I'm happy to be done with that. Plus I can have a lot of video gear and 7.1 audio in my own basement, which is 12'x20' - much bigger than any office I could get on a corporate campus, and I can make a lot more noise as well.
Schedule wise, it works well with having kids. In a typical day, I'll work 9-3, do kid stuff after school through dinner and bedtime, and then 7-10. Looking at relocation options a couple of times, I never saw a good case where, adding in commute time, I could really have both breakfast and dinner with the family on an average day.
I travel more than if I was based at an office (I do 3-4 trips a month, mostly 1-2 days each), but not overwhelmingly slow. And with little kids around, sometimes a good night's sleep in a hotel bed is exactly what I need
My video compression blog
Classic. Instead of benefiting from the costs and testing of their own network designs, they'd rather accrue massive on-campus costs to keeping the staff under lock and key. Really dense AT&T.
Wouldn't this be ideal?
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
and it's my right to move my mobile service to a different carrier before the obvious new mismanagement carries this kind of stupidity out to where my phone service is degraded.
I guess those clowns have never heard of global warming. Or they think their employees exist for the purpose of boosting managers egos by laboring under their personal eyes instead of doing things that might actually improve AT&T's bottom line via telecommute. If I owned any of their stock, I'd be unloading.
This goes past stupid into offensively stupid.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Now that the cost of gasoline is soaring, AT&T figures you'll work that much harder in the office because you'll be spending more of what they pay you commuting to work.
Additionally, it brings more people back to supporting our wars in the Middle East - in the "anything that might secure our oil supply and possibly lower retail costs" camp, if nowhere else.
Besides, what is the fun of offshoring if you can't see the look on your employees' faces when you tell them?
How is that expensive? I thought you can fire people with no reason or compensation whatsoever in USA.
I don't have a sig.
This is a small thing, but why in the hell do they insist on making up a new word when one already exists exactly describing what they want to say. "Teleworking"? C'mon people, it's "telecommuting" and that has been around for a long time. Those "journalists" (and I use the term very loosely) just want to try to start their own trend of a new fad-word.
Another Huge comPany recently did this - it's simply a pump and dump scheme for short-term profits and artificial stock inflation. Tell all employees they cannot telework If enough employees quit, goto done else Tell all employees they must work out of one of 25 cities if enough employees quit, goto done else Tell all employees they must now work in one city done fire all employees for job abandonment sell stock pretty simple really, and highly effective - watched it happen. edfardos
I'm sure some telecommuters are good workers and more productive, but I believe I've seen a higher percentage than office dwellers who produce literally no value. Again, there are plenty of people in the office who merely consure resources and don't work.
Still, the majority of the highly technical telecummuters I've had to deal with never seem to help the cause. They are hard to get a hold of. The often miss meetings that are important. When they teleconference into meetings they constantly complain that they can't hear and force the attendees to repeat talking points. They seem to have more than above average problems with their ISP, VPN, computer than normal people. During conference calls you can regularly hear children running around in the background or road noise. That is distracting and also demoralizing to people actually at work who can't go grocery shoppign while they are supposed to be working. Then they send emails at 2am to make everyone think they work 24 hours a day.
I'm sure some people are great at getting work done while working from home. That requires more self control and motivation than your average worker has. I bet a high percentage of those 12000 people would produce better work product if actually supervised and see daily.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Gas taxes go to the GOVT. oil companies make about 9% profit on a gallon of gas while the parasites take 25%-45%
I used to work in a job where people did a lot of telecommutting. It's convenient for running errands that require 2-3 hours absance from work, and it's a great way to sneak in an extra day or two into a vacation... It gets in the way when you need key people for face-to-face design meetings.
No, I will not work for your startup