It’s funny that they pay “full time” workers to work. They haven’t cared for years that most full timers put in more than 40hrs a week when calculating all the outside “5min” email responses with corp mail on corp or personal devices.
The real problem is not attendance, it’s quantifiable measurement of productivity. The age of assets in chairs is over. Just because you have 100 people sitting there don’t mean there is productivity. Sure there is, but what level? Productivity is 100% per minute. You gotta piss, drink, fart, take time to grab the mouse even.
Donuts not about work or effort, it’s about outcome.
There are times a 30min meeting solves a roadblock that wasted days of time, and multiple people’s cycles. But then again usually meetings just take away from productivity.
The biggest issue is middle managers have zero concept of how to do the direct reports job. So they can’t validate any productivity. It’s hard for them to track productivity across a 30 day scale much less minute by minute.
In reality it’s work. Work is never “done” if it was then the business would fire you, as there is nothing left for you to do.
For years I got paid to MySpace, then Facebook. We used to laugh about it. I sat there all day doing nearly nothing. Boss would give me challenges that would take me 3-5 days to figure out a strategy then I’d solve it the following week. Air idle for another 2-3 weeks.
Management loved me because anything they threw at me got done, faster than most.
My direct upstream once said “i don’t you to work, i pay you as insurance. If shit goes south, you and 4 other guys here can get in a room and have a solution in minutes. I don’t have time to waster and have you drive in, that’s minutes wasted. I want to walk to your cube and say, I need you now. That’s why I pay you to be here”
Fine. I never gave a second thought about my time. 2 hr lunches, didn’t care, as I was 10min away at lunch.
I used to work in-office 5 days a week. I had been looking for remote work but most companies were still extremely against it until covid hit. Then I was still considered "critical staff" and still had to go in on occasion when I needed to touch hardware.
I went from being able to get fuck-all done in a day to getting a week or more work done in a day. I no longer had some moron come bug me in my office for a hour or two just because they wanted to BS.
I think I went from getting maybe around a hour (sometimes two) worth of work in a day to getting a solid 6 hours every day. Not only that, because I was not interrupted every hour my output may as well have been 30+ hours for that single 6 hour day.
As it stands now. I get things done by the deadline (usually long before). I am available as needed during "typical hours" and on-call on a rotation. I don't get yelled at about getting things done and I don't have people randomly wasting 10+ hours of my time per week because they just want to "bs" (forced socialization).
I also don't waste a minimum of 5-10 hours PER WEEK driving to and from work. I don't have to pay for nearly as much fuel, I don't have as much maintenance on my vehicle, etc...
If you can work remotely and you have the right mindset for it, it is the way to go. Some jobs simply cannot be remote, some people can't work remote even if the job can be done remote. It has to fit in both cases.
One contract I was on: Arrive at 9, walk around the office and check on all 30 devs. Any tech issues, server issues, no? Sit at my desk till 10:30 reading the webs. Go to bar that served real lunch (steak house) get there at 11. Eat lunch. Remote into office from bar. Sit there till 5pm drinking tea (yes even when I drank I had principles) Close notebook at 5, start drinking. 5 days a week.
Don’t get me started on smoke breaks that’s such a fucking time waster. Water cooler talk and coffe breaks also. I don’t smoke or drink coffee. I asked another boss: can I get 10min personal time ever 2 hours all day? What no way why? Well all the stink fucks that smoke get this. Why can’t I?