#productivity

The merger of the orgs is s disaster
Tools were not ready for the extra users
SEs are not well trained
Figures are terrible
Not enough SE coverage

60-90 minutes devoted to commuting.
Coworkers constantly stopping by to chat about non work related things.
Leaders encouraging team lunches that last an hour.
Scrambling to find private space for sensitive calls.

I’m hitting my time but getting a lot less accomplished. But I’m at my desk. That’s what matters, right?

Does anyone know how the keystroke and activity monitoring reporting is going to work with PTO? If it’s taking an average does it not consider when you are on PTO (so not working that day/several days)?

To produce to the full capacity I’m capable of with all the noise going on here. Why doesn’t management recognize that the environment they have created is toxic? I hate getting up in the morning to come here and that was never the case.

After each round of cuts I stopped doing something, whether it's the overtime or the extra polishing that used to matter to me. At first I fought to keep standards up, then I realized it was nothing but self punishment. Now I guard my time and try not to let the job eat me, and I make sure to do just a bit less after every round.

J&J have had employees working from home since COVID in 2020 and they are still working from home up to now. These employees are working side jobs and working on their home renovation projects while getting paid from J & J. It's time for J & J to do some housing cleaning. These are non-essential, none value added employees. They can be let go and this will save the company millions of dollars.

There are enough locations that IF Hertz allowed scheduling based on performance 100% rather than longevity having any merit to a schedule, then you would have your money driven top performers taking the most transactions lately resulting in a revenue surplus.
What grocery store has their oldest cashier who is not efficient just because they’ve been with the company for a long time?
Or do we continue paying these over paid hourly employees to resolve little to no revenue which the company is scraping to attain to pay the positions that are duplicated, tripled, top heavy…

75K still overstaffed or just nice? employees still overloaded or simply inefficient and unproductive?

It’s been two years since AT&T blindly followed Amazon into the RTO disaster. And for what? Nothing’s improved… morale, productivity, retention, all worse than before. The only thing that’s gone up is burnout.

Since then, almost no one else has moved to 5x RTO. The vast majority of major companies are still hybrid because they see the damage this kind of policy does to reputation, to employee engagement, and to the bottom line.

And to the guy claiming “5-day RTO is becoming the industry standard” - no, it’s not. It’s been two years, and nobody’s joining this sinking ship. No other major company in the industry does more than 3 days. You’d have to be completely delusional to believe otherwise. Or maybe you just think we’re a tech company. LOL.

Ah the results of RTO are upon us!

Look at all that productivity!

That’s a 20 Billion dollar loss. Way to go Stankey and BOD!

Not close. It's a smart idea. AI can automate repetitive, manual tasks like data entry, scheduling with speed and consistency. This reduces a company's labor costs. Senior workers can increase their own productivity and focus on higher-value activities. AI can also train the "would be" junior employees into becoming more senior employees.

Actual d-mbest things: how about replacing remote work arrangements with RTO5? And RTT? And RTH? And then complaining that launches are too slow? And violating the rights of disabled employees? Shame!

It’s here just to push out as many people as possible on the cheap. If I’m wrong, convince me otherwise. Give me one example of RTO actually improving collaboration, efficiency, morale, productivity, anything, really. All I’ve gained is more time wasted commuting and higher expenses. I balance out the idiocy of RTO by making sure I’m not available after hours. None of it makes sense unless you see it for what it is - a way to make people quit.

Genuine question - Does anyone even find themselves productive in the office? Not here to rant - actually just genuinely curious. My in office days are filled with trying to tune out an outrageous amount of noise and side chatter about sports, etc. (people playing mini golf in the aisles, solving puzzles). How is that collaborative when it comes to a work environment? I have to struggle to tune out the insane amount of noise and random people coming up to my desk to talk in order to actually get my job done properly. I get ten times the amount of work done at home. So frustrating.

Whatever veep or c-suite mo--n enabled this team should start looking for a new job.

I’ve been in claims for nearly 3 years, got a pretty good schedule where I work task work the entire day, I do my 5 task an hour, takes me like 15 minutes, I click my mouse multiples times so no idle shows up, and then I just play video games for the the better part of the day, and I know a lot of people are gonna come bi--hing and moaning about my post but idgaf lmao, I have a small community of people in SF that do the same, I was really into the work for the better part of 2 years and realized being remote there’s no opportunities to move up and now I don’t think I want to if there was an opportunity, I’m just gonna milk the system until I decide what I want to do next. Gonna learn how to use this FMLA and STD before I do up and quit. Cheers!

I worked from home 100% for over 4 years. I got a lot done, and surely even outperformed many on-site people. Even got top achiever over on-site people one year.

That being said, returning to office has forced my output to probably triple over WFH years.

My job can easily be done remotely, but being in office introduces almost daily instances where I get pulled in to solve issues outside my normal day to day "expected" duties.

I already knew I wasn't going above and beyond most years at home, I was doing just enough so my boss never even had to watch my work output.

Being on-site my boss now questions if I'm going to burn out from everything I'm always getting pulled into/voluntarily taking on.

The looming layoff threat is surely an additional motivator over "quiet quitting" years, but Elon was speaking facts about WFH just not being the same.

**I'm sure there's some who have a role where they stare at a screen all day and feel it makes zero difference to RTO, but you would really have to be working in a silo if you haven't taken on any extra work with RTO.

Five months later, Duolingo hasn’t laid off a single full-time employee, and is instead using artificial intelligence to bolster the productivity of the humans it does employ, co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival 2025 on Tuesday.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/17/duolingo-ceo-how-ai-makes-my-employees-more-productive-without-layoffs.html

Not literally, but it sure feels like it. I can’t sleep the night before, my blood pressure is through the roof all day, and the stress makes productive work impossible. I know I’m not the only one who’s less than productive on these days. Instead of dragging it out and losing productivity constantly, why not have one major round every six months and let us work normally the rest of the time?

Job Hopping Is Out, Job Hugging Is In for Fearful Workers
Employees reluctant to give up job in today’s rocky job market

Callum Borchers
Sept. 3, 2025 9:00 pm ET

They don’t seem happy, they don’t give 100%—and they don’t quit.

Cranky workers are clinging to the jobs they have instead of moving on because, well, what’s the alternative in the current economy?

The extra pay that typically comes with joining another company has practically vanished. Disengagement is so widespread across the U.S. and global workforces that cheerier pastures are hard to find.

And resigning without a plan feels more reckless now than in the good old days (2021). Back then, you could get by on pandemic savings and stimulus money, live the #vanlife for a while, then watch your inbox fill with interview requests from businesses on hiring sprees.

How times have changed in just a few short years. Today, employees are unwilling to risk change and simply go through the motions. The number of Americans quitting their jobs, and the openings available to people looking for work, continue to decline, according to federal data released on Wednesday.

The trend of staying put out of fear is known as “job hugging,” a sharp turn from the job hopping of recent years.

Like a bad penny

This is a new headache for employees, bosses and the economy writ large.

Go-getters hankering for promotions might lose out if mediocre co-workers refuse to vacate the next rung on the corporate ladder.

“When people were moving during the Great Resignation, that allowed others to get promoted, perhaps ahead of schedule and have a stretch job,” says Alan Guarino, vice chairman of consulting firm Korn Ferry. “Now people can’t move up and they potentially get demotivated because of the lack of opportunity.”

Managers, meanwhile, were only a short time ago complaining about low retention rates. Now, there might not be enough healthy turnover to reinvigorate their teams.

Leaders usually have ways of managing out unwanted employees. There’s “quiet firing,” basically sidelining someone to underscore the writing on the wall. Another favorite tactic is a performance-improvement plan.

“Truthfully, being put on a performance-improvement plan means, ‘We do not want you here,’” says labor attorney Kim Cramer. “That sounds really harsh, but in my experience, performance-improvement plans are not meant to help the employee.”

Instead of taking the hint, though, more people are riding out their employment as long as it lasts. In recent weeks, Cramer has had a surge of clients ask her to review their severance agreements after being terminated. She estimates 60% to 70% of them knew they had fallen out of favor a while ago but didn’t leave.

Exceptions to the rule

The prototypical job hugger is a drag on the team, but not all are like that. Some are average contributors or even high achievers.

Doug Yakola, a former McKinsey senior partner who is now an independent consultant, notes many workers no longer take an up-or-out approach to their careers. Instead of leaving for a bigger title and greater responsibility when they hit a ceiling, more people are willing to remain in neutral if the pay and work-life balance are decent.

A tech worker I’ve known for 20 years is in this position. He sees no upward mobility and resents his employer’s rightward political turn. But he earns well and has a sweet, hybrid schedule that affords ample time for hobbies. He keeps putting in a good-enough effort at work because the job, though unfulfilling, serves its purpose in his life.

B-teamers like him can be valuable to companies that can’t realistically expect everyone to be an all-star, Yakola says. This is especially true at businesses like the ones he advises, which often need turnarounds and aren’t exactly magnets for top talent.

“I actually like job huggers in a weird sort of way because I can’t replace employees very easily, and I need to keep the experience,” he says.

There is also a strain of type-A job huggers. They reached the upper echelons of their organizations but feel blocked from the very top. They are disillusioned yet too risk-averse to break away. And it’s not in their DNA to slack off.

“I work with somebody who hates being a lawyer but she’s amazing at it,” says Alisia Gill, a former corporate HR chief who coaches midcareer women. “She cries in her car every morning before she goes to work, and then she goes in there and does her job because she doesn’t know what else to do.”

Gentle shove

In cases where a company wants someone to leave, but the person keeps hanging on, firing seems like the obvious solution. But managers say they would much rather have an employee leave voluntarily.

It’s often cheaper, since businesses might owe severance pay to people they let go. A resignation spares the boss an awkward conversation. What’s more, it can preserve relations with the rest of the team. It’s easier to manage people whose friend took another opportunity than it is to lead employees whose pal you just canned.

Research by University of Chicago economist Virginia Minni suggests a relatively simple strategy can help nudge job huggers toward the door: reflection.

She and colleagues studied roughly 3,000 white-collar workers whose employer put them through a series of exercises to suss out their sense of purpose. Overall productivity increased for a few reasons.

“This actually encouraged some people to leave on their own,” Minni says.

While others found better-fitting roles internally, being forced to confront the drudgery of their jobs was enough to make a bunch of low performers quit.

So, if you are hugging your humdrum job and your boss strikes up a philosophical conversation about the meaning of life and work, you’ll know what’s going on.

1. You can perform your job remotely to the same extent you'd perform it at the office
2. You're spending $30 on parking and walking miles, paying tolls, etc to sit on teams and do the same thing you'd do at home. I still haven't, to this day, met in person with anyone since RTO started.
3. Your allocated to a sh---y shared space, without any of the tools you have at your home workspace, in a sh---y office, with tons of people on calls at the same time, screaming, doing work unrelated to your department and it's so distracting you just know in office days are basically 50% productivity maximum. I just expect that I'm never going to get anything of value done at the office.

Notified management has introduced a flop ticketing platform and for the past 2 years it's almost a chaos using it. Frankly speaking the work time has increased because of this platform. Simple tasks have become complicated. Hope the management trashes this time consuming worthless platform. Literally nobody speaks about this messy ticketing system.

I’ll never understand the mindset of people who think their job is validated by swiping into an office instead of actually producing results. Walking past a turnstile doesn’t make you valuable. Sitting in a cube doesn’t make you productive. And bragging about being “present” doesn’t make customers any happier.

The real measure of worth here is what you deliver — the problems you solve, the customers you help, the value you create. That used to be obvious. But now we’ve got folks acting like their contribution is measured in commutes and cube hours. That’s not work, that’s theater.

AT&T doesn’t survive on badge swipes. It survives on results. The sooner this company remembers that, the sooner we stop bleeding talent to competitors who already figured it out.

We are back to back with calls and we see a group of L2 managers posting memes and mocking each other in the chat room. L3s please make your managers work just like we are.

Began learning about six sigma recently. Specifically DMAIC. I know this is a long shot, but I remember a couple years back when some head of a product area was claiming about how agile based statistics showed employees were very productive during connect weeks. I have no idea what those are, he just said “you can look at the stats, they support it”. As if stats can’t ever be broken lol.

Anyways, I was wondering if anyone in the inner circle in Fidelity are certified in six sigma. If so, would anything from the certification or ways of identifying ways to improve business or productivity TRULY show that there’s any good that comes from Fidelity’s advancing hybrid model?

Yes I know this is probably a huge long shot where people are gonna call me an id--t, but I’m just curious. Thank you.

I’m starting to decline these. Including Lunch and learn, aka bring your own lunch, but the deep dives are catered for select clowns in the Ford Big Top Circus. This place is really getting to me and productivity is now worse with RTO and people are super agitated.

It looks that only numbers matters. It's now a CFO driven company.
I've been told that no-one wants to join Oracle now, as can be fired in 1month, 1year. Or low paid jobs for intern/early guys.
Even Gartner magic quadrant won't support, people hate this culture, and are not productive at all.

At this point, I’m ready to quit without a backup plan. I don’t understand the need for a company to spy on their employees. I’m sure their controlling energy could be used in a better way?

I could probably create a kafkaesque youtube-channel about this, but interested in other people's experiences.

What did you accomplish today at work? Keep it general so you don't get identified by some schmuck.

I got mostly spam emails. Most calls were cancelled. I contemplated investing in a mouse jiggler.

The title says it all. We’ve got so much in the way of cybersecurity, spyware, performance monitoring, key logging, etc, that it’s negatively impacting the usability of laptops. Forget blaming the usual sources like Microsoft, or support, this is clearly a self-inflicted wound if you take a look at the application stack consuming a good percentage of your system’s resources.

Dock and undock? Best of luck with that. You’re in for at least a minute or more of zombie mode before the state change is recognized.

Standby? Good luck. Your notebook will continue to run in your bag despite selecting standby. It’s overheat or run out of battery which ever comes first.

At what point do all these "ideation" sessions and powerpoints revolving around AI amount to actual working products in production and increased productivity? We are on year 3 of the company mindlessly pushing this cr-p on people, and all we have to show for it is document summarizing and code review "agents".

When is the board going to ask Candyman when these multiplicative productivity increases that he promised are going to materialize? When will there be an expected return on investment for all this money lit on fire for AI? Cuz right now its all just charlatans making GPT wrappers and demoing to clapping seals while it bugs out

Anyone else wonder if productivity has diminished with the 4 day a week requirement? Everyone was already burnt out from the ever growing workload. Add the commute and I continue to see people’s ability to care fading away.

You can’t drop a layoff announcement and then expect everyone to act like nothing happened.

Letting people go to improve results is short-sighted and self-defeating. It doesn’t solve anything and just shifts the pressure onto those who remain, making everyone miserable and less productive.

“I don’t want to get rid of a bunch of people right now,” Robbins told CNBC last week, stressing that AI was meant to boost productivity, not reduce headcount. “I just want our engineers that we have today to innovate faster and be more productive. That gives us a competitive advantage.”

TECH
Silicon Valley tech giants to cut hundreds of Bay Area jobs AGAIN!!!

Schwawesome Leaders, Where is the efficiency gained by AI? Whose head should roll?

It was a long Monday. Everyone can do what they want, but don't complete surveys. They’re seeking legitimacy for pre-planned actions. The only survey should be work output. That’s the bottom line.