When Covid hit I was getting ready to retire from professoring. I had already "created" 2 online courses bck in 2012 or so, It took me 3 semesters to get them "right", but after that they worked really well and it was smooth sailing. Well except for haing to constantly remnd 10% or so of each class that they were not in HS any longer, and therfore did, indeed, have to follow my rules and my syllabus.
They were Intro Am Govt, and State and Local Govt, simple courses, and most students really did learn from them.
My wife was a project manager for a survey research firm. She was in cubicle hell. She is very intelligent, very organized, and a very hard worker. But she had a "fishwife" across the way who evidently didn't have an inside voice, especially when she was on the phone. Which she was, pretty constantly.
Anyway, I taught stats (grad and undergrad) in the classroom, other undergrad online, and grad calsses in the classroom. I retired on Dec 31, 2020.
My wife was "sent home" to work probably in summer 2020. It was Michigan aftr all, with Gov wHitler running the place.
It was great. Not only was the fishwife not there, but she could do her housework, too. Her output nearly doubled, and she no longer had the hated drive to and from work. Win-win.
After the "pandemic" fizled out, she was allowed to continue to work from home. So we moved to NW IN to be closer to her family. For her, working from home has benefitted her and her employer a great deal. Her boss has always been a bit of a micromanager, but not as bad as most, nd he still bugs her a bit. I likes, for instance, to keep hold of data and not give to those who need it until he absolutely has to. I've helped her with some strategies about that.
Will AI take over her job? Possibly, but not real soon, I think. She wants to work ten more years, but we'll see. Her main job is roughly the logistics of setting up and running surveys, adjusting/adapting flow chart type stuff on the fly as screwups occur. Probably eventually an algorithm will do that, but it won't be good at it, I think, as long as there are still humans in the equation. Almost every one of the problems she has to fix is due to typical human stupid behaviors.
Anyway, to me working from home seems to be like when I was an outside salesman. I was basically my own boss, in charge of my time, as long as I sold enough. My bosses' sort of cared what I was doing, but as long as the sales got made and no laws were broken thet let me alone.
As an aside, no one should ever sell except on commission. Get paid for your own work. If you're on some kind of salary deal, even salary plus commission, either you're carrying some moron's dead butt or someone is carrying your dead butt. Not everyone can handle straight commission jobs. but if you can, they're dynamite.
When I was a kid, my dad got me a summer job working in a Western Auto store - those days' version of today's Advance Auto or whatever. They have a full auto repair service with a three bay garage attached to the building. This was located in one of Muncie's two spanking new shopping centers, which we didn't know they to call strip malls, though that's what they were.
Anyhoo, I made some piddling "salary" - probably minimum wage, something in the buck and a quarter or half range, but...we got commish on the sales of certain items - primarily batteries and, especially, tires, which we could install in our garage and scrape a bit more profit from.
A set of Goodyear radials would make me about ten bucks in commission at 15%. That right there equalled about 25% of my "salaried" take home pay. I started selling tires. Boy, did I ever. Enough so that it took up most of my time, and the manager began to get disgruntled about it. I wasn't cleaning or facing enough shelves. I wasn't paying any attention to customers looking for a quart of oil, or a jug of washer fluid. I was selling tires! I was selling them at a rate of three or four sets a day. I was the single biggest sales producer in the store - by far. Call me the rainmaker of the Western Auto tire department.
So naturally I was complimented, praised, and encouraged to do even more of what I was doing, right?
Not exactly.
I was getting myself fired. The ostensible reason was I was "neglecting my other duties."
The real reason was I was taking home about triple the store manager's salary.
I learned some sort of lesson out of that, but damned if I can figure out what it was. If you can, do comment and let me know what it was.
I spent almost 20 years in sales before getting into the Higher Education scam. One thing I learned was that few employers understand the incentives they offer. They are generally desired (by management) to spur productivity at a low cost. When anyone figures out how make that a higher cost (to the business, but a profit to the employee) management goes nuts.
That's one reason MBO (Management By Objective) was generally a failure, and generally detested by employees.
Possibly. My first "real" job was working as a customer service rep for the RCA Victor Record Club in Indianapolis, IN in 1966. The office was a large, open-plan space sans cubicles. The supe's desk was off to one side, but was the only thing that distinguished her from any of the others. The room was divided in half by an aisle - the transcriptionist/typists sat on one side of the aisle, and we reps - there were a dozen of us - occupied the other side.
We answered letters from customers. We did not have scripts. We composed and created our responses on the fly. A stack of mail would be in my inbox every morning. If I worked my way through that, the supe brought more.
There were very few phone calls, almost all handled by the supe, although I eventually was given that task as well. She - and I, also eventually - handled "high priority" mail, essentially anything that was sent to the RCA c-suite and forwarded, mostly unread, to our department for response.
I recall that environment as being essentially quite pleasant, even with the constant clacking of a dozen IBM Selectrics providing background noise. When I was promoted to programmer trainee and then programmer at the data center (same complex) I shared a standard office and a secretary with another programmer who trained me. (RCA Spectra 70/40, Unix, RCA Biz Language, Cobol, a small army of blue haired little old lady keypunchers, midnight debugging sessions with unwieldy cardboard trays of punch cards, bribing the computer operators with pizza to move your jobs up, etc., etc. )
It was a different, non-cubicle world. I remember my first thought as cubes began to appear in the corporate environment was how uncomfortably constricting they were. The final real (non-freelance writing) job of my career was with the City of San Francisco. Cubes as far as the eye could see - soul-destroying, bleak, gray cells fit only for monks or prisoners.
I've never liked them. Authoritarians, for some reason, seem to love them.
Typewriters clicking doesn't sound so bad. People talking is what locks my brain.
I've been blessed to never have worked in a cubicle farm. Shared windowless offices are the worst I have had to endure. That was enough to make me work weird hours when allowed.
Pair programming happens. Can be very productive when the pair share the same office with no one else. Annoying when trying to work next to a pair who are working on a different project.
It amazes me how penny wise/pound foolish many workplaces are. A good employee may walk. A good chair doesn't. Neither do good sound dampening materials. (I hear that employers in Silicon Valley understand this better than the military contractors I have worked for.)
Herman Miller, famous purveyor of Mid-Century Modern icons, (and the Aeron chair, one of which my arse is planted on this very moment), understood this better than most anybody.
When Covid hit I was getting ready to retire from professoring. I had already "created" 2 online courses bck in 2012 or so, It took me 3 semesters to get them "right", but after that they worked really well and it was smooth sailing. Well except for haing to constantly remnd 10% or so of each class that they were not in HS any longer, and therfore did, indeed, have to follow my rules and my syllabus.
They were Intro Am Govt, and State and Local Govt, simple courses, and most students really did learn from them.
My wife was a project manager for a survey research firm. She was in cubicle hell. She is very intelligent, very organized, and a very hard worker. But she had a "fishwife" across the way who evidently didn't have an inside voice, especially when she was on the phone. Which she was, pretty constantly.
Anyway, I taught stats (grad and undergrad) in the classroom, other undergrad online, and grad calsses in the classroom. I retired on Dec 31, 2020.
My wife was "sent home" to work probably in summer 2020. It was Michigan aftr all, with Gov wHitler running the place.
It was great. Not only was the fishwife not there, but she could do her housework, too. Her output nearly doubled, and she no longer had the hated drive to and from work. Win-win.
After the "pandemic" fizled out, she was allowed to continue to work from home. So we moved to NW IN to be closer to her family. For her, working from home has benefitted her and her employer a great deal. Her boss has always been a bit of a micromanager, but not as bad as most, nd he still bugs her a bit. I likes, for instance, to keep hold of data and not give to those who need it until he absolutely has to. I've helped her with some strategies about that.
Will AI take over her job? Possibly, but not real soon, I think. She wants to work ten more years, but we'll see. Her main job is roughly the logistics of setting up and running surveys, adjusting/adapting flow chart type stuff on the fly as screwups occur. Probably eventually an algorithm will do that, but it won't be good at it, I think, as long as there are still humans in the equation. Almost every one of the problems she has to fix is due to typical human stupid behaviors.
Anyway, to me working from home seems to be like when I was an outside salesman. I was basically my own boss, in charge of my time, as long as I sold enough. My bosses' sort of cared what I was doing, but as long as the sales got made and no laws were broken thet let me alone.
As an aside, no one should ever sell except on commission. Get paid for your own work. If you're on some kind of salary deal, even salary plus commission, either you're carrying some moron's dead butt or someone is carrying your dead butt. Not everyone can handle straight commission jobs. but if you can, they're dynamite.
When I was a kid, my dad got me a summer job working in a Western Auto store - those days' version of today's Advance Auto or whatever. They have a full auto repair service with a three bay garage attached to the building. This was located in one of Muncie's two spanking new shopping centers, which we didn't know they to call strip malls, though that's what they were.
Anyhoo, I made some piddling "salary" - probably minimum wage, something in the buck and a quarter or half range, but...we got commish on the sales of certain items - primarily batteries and, especially, tires, which we could install in our garage and scrape a bit more profit from.
A set of Goodyear radials would make me about ten bucks in commission at 15%. That right there equalled about 25% of my "salaried" take home pay. I started selling tires. Boy, did I ever. Enough so that it took up most of my time, and the manager began to get disgruntled about it. I wasn't cleaning or facing enough shelves. I wasn't paying any attention to customers looking for a quart of oil, or a jug of washer fluid. I was selling tires! I was selling them at a rate of three or four sets a day. I was the single biggest sales producer in the store - by far. Call me the rainmaker of the Western Auto tire department.
So naturally I was complimented, praised, and encouraged to do even more of what I was doing, right?
Not exactly.
I was getting myself fired. The ostensible reason was I was "neglecting my other duties."
The real reason was I was taking home about triple the store manager's salary.
I learned some sort of lesson out of that, but damned if I can figure out what it was. If you can, do comment and let me know what it was.
Never show up the boss? :-)
People respond to incentives?
I spent almost 20 years in sales before getting into the Higher Education scam. One thing I learned was that few employers understand the incentives they offer. They are generally desired (by management) to spur productivity at a low cost. When anyone figures out how make that a higher cost (to the business, but a profit to the employee) management goes nuts.
That's one reason MBO (Management By Objective) was generally a failure, and generally detested by employees.
And 15% is a helluva commission rate.
I think that before I came along, an employee did well to sell a full set of tires every month or so. If that.
Cube farms were never a good idea for jobs that require high concentration. Too much noise and other distractions. Better to provide actual offices.
Possibly. My first "real" job was working as a customer service rep for the RCA Victor Record Club in Indianapolis, IN in 1966. The office was a large, open-plan space sans cubicles. The supe's desk was off to one side, but was the only thing that distinguished her from any of the others. The room was divided in half by an aisle - the transcriptionist/typists sat on one side of the aisle, and we reps - there were a dozen of us - occupied the other side.
We answered letters from customers. We did not have scripts. We composed and created our responses on the fly. A stack of mail would be in my inbox every morning. If I worked my way through that, the supe brought more.
There were very few phone calls, almost all handled by the supe, although I eventually was given that task as well. She - and I, also eventually - handled "high priority" mail, essentially anything that was sent to the RCA c-suite and forwarded, mostly unread, to our department for response.
I recall that environment as being essentially quite pleasant, even with the constant clacking of a dozen IBM Selectrics providing background noise. When I was promoted to programmer trainee and then programmer at the data center (same complex) I shared a standard office and a secretary with another programmer who trained me. (RCA Spectra 70/40, Unix, RCA Biz Language, Cobol, a small army of blue haired little old lady keypunchers, midnight debugging sessions with unwieldy cardboard trays of punch cards, bribing the computer operators with pizza to move your jobs up, etc., etc. )
It was a different, non-cubicle world. I remember my first thought as cubes began to appear in the corporate environment was how uncomfortably constricting they were. The final real (non-freelance writing) job of my career was with the City of San Francisco. Cubes as far as the eye could see - soul-destroying, bleak, gray cells fit only for monks or prisoners.
I've never liked them. Authoritarians, for some reason, seem to love them.
Typewriters clicking doesn't sound so bad. People talking is what locks my brain.
I've been blessed to never have worked in a cubicle farm. Shared windowless offices are the worst I have had to endure. That was enough to make me work weird hours when allowed.
I'd suggest that people talking loud enough to disturb others is more a failure of social and workplace customs than physical plant arrangements.
Of course simple politeness and respect for others has rarely been cheaper or more devalued than it has become today.
Pair programming happens. Can be very productive when the pair share the same office with no one else. Annoying when trying to work next to a pair who are working on a different project.
It amazes me how penny wise/pound foolish many workplaces are. A good employee may walk. A good chair doesn't. Neither do good sound dampening materials. (I hear that employers in Silicon Valley understand this better than the military contractors I have worked for.)
Herman Miller, famous purveyor of Mid-Century Modern icons, (and the Aeron chair, one of which my arse is planted on this very moment), understood this better than most anybody.