Post #1437919
2026-04-20 01:04 UTC
Replies (5)
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@jilleduffy@mastodon.social 2026-04-20 01:10
Mass layoffs really picked up momentum in the 1990s. If you read the popular business books of the time, many of them were basically in defense of layoffs. The absolutely awful Who Moved My Cheese? comes to mind. It's only in the last 10 years that companies have been firing people by email or instant message and locking people out of their company-issued devices, which is the height of disrespect in terms of firing practices
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@trainguyrom@techhub.social 2026-04-20 01:56
@jilleduffy I love how this new paradigm of remote work is causing managers to grapple with the fact that even your best employees don't work 100% of the work day, whether that's in person or remote. It's just where previously it was idle chit chat at the water cooler, solitaire and doodles at the desk now it might be the person going for a walk, painting or even quickly switching a load of laundry during downtime between tasks. it's very important for anyone who does mental work to take brain breaks however that looks for them! Your brain is a muscle and no muscle should be overexerted 40 hours a week for 50 years straight
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@michaelgemar@cosocial.ca 2026-04-20 02:38
@jilleduffy @maxleibman Yeah, I thought the whole point of employment (in most jobs) was to get work done, and not just be at some location putting in hours. The pushback against remote work has really revealed that managers are terrible at tracking what people actually accomplish, and/or they like the control they have when workers are at the office. It’s not about productivity at all.
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@mwyman@mastodon.social 2026-04-20 04:35
@jilleduffy companies have kept invading employees’ personal time with evening emails and slack messages, asking teams to work weekends even when they knew it would make no difference in the final outcome, and insisting on on-call rotations that weren’t in the original job descriptions. Then I remember during Covid remote-work hearing corporate big wigs livid at the thought that employees were doing household chores and more during “work hours”
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@benjamineskola@hachyderm.io 2026-04-20 09:22
@jilleduffy Yeah, ‘on the clock’ is a fuzzy term. I don’t have a set start and end time, I have a set number of hours, and aside from any time-specific obligations (meetings, etc) I’m pretty much free to arrange that however. I don’t think my employer is out of the ordinary either. I mean, I certainly wouldn’t claim a personal errand as ‘working time’ but if I take 15 minutes to go to the post office when I know it won’t be busy, and make up the time later, then why would it matter? I think there’s often a control-freak aspect to this for management (same as for return-to-office mandates).