Many have commented on the change in culture and how the company has changed for the worse. Does a lot of this have to do with the newer hires over the past few years?
The company has hired a lot of new people and to be fair some have been good. However in many cases it looks like the company’s hired a lot of mediocre employees. It feels like the company used to hire the best of the best. Recently it feels like the scraps are getting picked up.
What does everyone think?
@2dt kept in roles or never even let go? Let’s face it, even when performance is yuck there are schmoozers that not only keep their jobs but thrive with support from other knobs
@OP we have one dude in our office who’s fairly junior and joined a few years ago. It would be a stretch to say he does half a full time job. He is so slow and the quality of his work is terrible. He says a 5 hour job takes 20 hours. Then he does a half baked job with lots of mistakes. He’s barely in the office and once likely pretended he had surgery done so couldn’t come in for months.
He is a massive schmoozer and has support from local leadership including his local reporting line who herself is super fake and all about how things look. She only joined a year or two before him.
The problem with this place is that lazy showy new people are brought in and they keep likeminded lazy showy people who won’t kick up a fuss. Plus being a slow company means these people are kept in roles for way too long.
@mr it’s more like morning surf then go into the office late, go home to feed the kangaroos just before lunch (obviously some shrimp on the barbie with a nice cold beer) and then leave early to watch the cricket or the footy. Go home then watch the dystopia that is the USA on tv with gleeful haughty hilarity (popcorn please), have some beauty sleep and then wake up and do it all again.
Yeah so much of this WFH inequality in Australia. It’s total BS and has been happening since COVID reopening. Some people seem to have the WFH golden ticket (biased much) and even others appear to do a half day at most in the office (come in late, long lunch, catch up coffees and then early finish).
@kj I am in a totally different boat. One girl on my team was granted work from home full time for her kids. I submitted a request for the same reason and was denied. I only wanted an additional day at home. There is definitely resentment.
@kh my point was you should try to get out of it, or don’t come in. No one should be coming in 4 days a week. It’s silly, and I certainly don’t resent people who come up with a way to get out of it, or who just don’t come in 4 days period.
@k7 Agreed. Sick and tired of these exceptions being made for people to get out of the 4 days in office. How is this fair? Everyone has responsibilities outside of the office. I am expected to come in 4 days…I live far away, have 3 young kids and 2 dogs, health issues and still come in 4 days a week instead of trying to get out of it like many of these clowns.
@h4 everyone should be able to work from home, with 1-2 days a week in office. That’s plenty of time for any needed in person collaboration, without the grueling daily commute, unproductive office days, etc. The issue is the lack of equity as some people are fully remote due to luck of timing of when they were hired. If we weren’t in person 4 days a week I wouldn’t care about the remote positions, but as it is now they feel like a slap in the face, I applaud anyone who just doesn’t show up to the office: dare them to say something to you with all the remote positions there are.
@k2 We had a difficult time trying to fill a really basic, entry level role since they wanted them in-person. They ended up hiring someone remote (but somehow we still need to be in-office).
WFH debate seems futile. Just WFH. Management doesn’t seem to be doing anything to keep to policy. In Australia have seen so many over the years take it as a pi-s take.
Who is actually left at this craphole? I would’ve thought all the stars have left leaving a dark void. Dark void with no flows and still overstaffed inefficient teams.
Similarly what calibre people are being attracted to this dumpster fire? New people being duds, really, that shouldn’t be a big surprise.
@gz Right on - And the whole time I have worked on my team, on of the guys supposedly works at home because his wife has "health issues", yet his whole family travels the world at least twice a year, and there she is at national parks and rock climbing. I see these ads on TV for "Visiting Angels" that people have stop in and take care of elderly and others who need that story of help - why can't T Rowe work a deal out with them for a group rate and make all of those people come back in.
@gn And why are some people using their children as an excuse to work from home?? Over half the people here have small children or school age children why do we make exceptions for some people. Playing favorites? It is total nonsense yet they keep preaching equality. This is not equity or inclusion picking and choosing who is allowed to stay home. What a ridiculous company!
@gh If we had assigned seats again, and our team sat together and EVERYONE had to come in, I'd feel a lot better about in office. But it is glaringly pointless. I understand that at HP you have to come in FOUR days a week, AND have to book a flex desk for each day. Most people want to sit in the SAME seat every day and that is how Flex Desks are playing out in reality. And it gets to some people find cheats so they beat everyone else out of the good desks - the ones that have no one behind them, low traffic walking around near them, and not under an air vent (at least those are my 3 wishes!)
I like where this thread headed - I thought I was alone in some of these issues (flex desk probs and pointless coming in to have a less productive day and no one to talk to when they have "chosen ones" on their team who scored 5x remote weeks and they have no visible health challenges. A few days I went in, I never talked to anyone f2f only Zoom!
There seems to be some healthy banter in this thread.
Yeah, hate the flex desk. The reason most were assigned flex desks, they are expendables
We need a policy about people taking their shoes off. I feel ya.
The sweet heart work from home deals for same pay and leave accrual needs to end. Less
vacation etc
The laptop question is interesting. Thin clients are a cheaper up front cost. Yet the place hands out Macs and iPads like water. So can’t be cost. If the aforementioned Mac’s are going home and connecting to Citrix. We now have an 2k thin clients What a conundrum…
Computers can be used to control other capital (and labor), so that the other capital (and labor) is used more efficiently. Got it..
TRP seems quagmired in a productivity paradox. Chat GPT what is a productivity paradox?
Most of my team is remote, and the rest of unlucky souls that happened to be in Maryland during RTO come into the office multiple days a week (we all have 1hr+ one-way commutes) just to sit around on Zoom calls all day, or even worse, sit around a huddle room where I can’t get anything done since this company doesn’t supply us with laptops anymore. My morale on in-office days is abysmal and I get next-to-nothing done compared to my work from home days.
@fb I sit in Owings Mills at a "flex desk" someone likely coughed and snotted all over. Yeah, I can wipe the area down with bleach wipes, but it is disgusting. I freeze my butt off as they keep it cold in there all the time. People take their shoes off and I smell their disgusting feet. People talk LOUD about non-work, or have full meetings 3 feet away from me with 6 people standing around the flex desk next to me - not bothering to take a huddle room. I used to sit with my team - now some may not have come in office that day or full time remote so I have no one to talk to. Yeah in office is AWESOME T Rowe. Flex desks blow too.
@f8 Exactly some person on my team has some mysterious reason that they are allowed to stay home and show up maybe once a week if that. Guaranteed it is to take care of kid pickup and dropoffs but no one will admit it. Like no one else around here has kid responsibilities. So the BS continues and the morale continues to fall.
@f8 this is exactly correct. Most people I work with aren’t even in Baltimore—why do I need to come into the office for collaboration when there’s no one here for me to collaborate with? It’s absolutely ridiculous.
@bz Morale is terrible here, and the unevenness with which they hand out remote only roles is a big part of that. Our team is told we have to come in the prescribed number of days a week, yet a few members are on permanent remote duty. If you ask "How can I be remote" you have to come up with some extreme circumstance otherwise forget it. And it seems with new hires, they can negotiate that when they get hired - no extensive paperwork/approval process necessary. With all of these "partnerships" (FIS, Abu Dhabi, Goldman Sachs, Accenture, etc) we are expected to work with a dispersed workforce, yet not when it comes to us. Because of this, there is no value in going in the office. The Accenture people are in other countries and they indicate we can work with them just fine.
I actually think the caliber has ticked up a bit over the last two years, at least in my area. But we did hire a lot of very mediocre people over the pandemic, and of course they all get to be fully remote workers because they were hired on like that. So we have a bunch of mediocre workers with sweet remote deals while the rest of us have to go in 4 days a week for “collaboration” with people in transatlantic offices and other remote workers that aren’t even in the office with us.
Not only mediocre but a bunch have deals working from home in Chicago, Boston, Jersey even Baltimore. Loss of cohesion This ain’t the best and brightest folks, they already have good jobs and people knocking at their doors.
Maybe someone could tell Hr that people who jump around a bunch, are not staying here long, and make it hard do any real long term strategic planning. How many MC members have come and gone in the last 10 years? Which in some way has contributed to the current debacle TRP is facing.
@an can we not have another sub turn into some bitter misogynistic, uneducated, foreigner hating IT male going on another rant?
@OP I agree, and given the certifications the company touts on its website for hiring certain numbers of various demographic groups, I think this plays a part in it. When the focus shifts from merit to shoehorning the perfect mix of "representation" then they have lost the plot unfortunately. And then when you see the caliber of the "Accenture Partners" taking over roles held by associates, it further shows merit and other personal positive characteristics are of little concern here now, but in the case of Accenture, it is mostly focus on getting the cheapest labor possible.