Not enough office space: safe from RTO?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Spouse has been RTO for about a year. There is no office space. He drives an hour, scans his badge for attendance, and works from his car in the parking lot or a table in the cafeteria. He’ll go in the building for meetings, but then back to his car for phone calls. Then 1.5 hours home.

So. So. Dumb.

This is absurd. This will be my souse too. Find a random place to sit, even if he goes in really early.

If you can work from your car then you can work from anywhere. No way would I stick around to work in my car.

No one is. Fake news.

Yes; you can fit 20-30 people in a room. You cannot fit 1000 in floor space designed for 200. It's just not possible.

If its an entire floor of a building you can fit a few hundred or more. There are no rooms anymore.

This. The closest comparison for how my company has done it is a school cafeteria. They run power strips down the center of the table in a very large room and you sit elbow to elbow with colleagues. Each seat has a docking station and double monitor. It's amazing how many people you can pack in, especially if you account for some being out sick, some on PTO, some on travel, some in a meeting, staggered schedules, some at lunch or on break, etc. The biggest issue has actually been parking and sufficient bathrooms--you can't increase the number of people at the site to such a large extent without those being choke points.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Spouse has been RTO for about a year. There is no office space. He drives an hour, scans his badge for attendance, and works from his car in the parking lot or a table in the cafeteria. He’ll go in the building for meetings, but then back to his car for phone calls. Then 1.5 hours home.

So. So. Dumb.

This is absurd. This will be my souse too. Find a random place to sit, even if he goes in really early.

If you can work from your car then you can work from anywhere. No way would I stick around to work in my car.

No one is. Fake news.

Yes; you can fit 20-30 people in a room. You cannot fit 1000 in floor space designed for 200. It's just not possible.

If its an entire floor of a building you can fit a few hundred or more. There are no rooms anymore.

This. The closest comparison for how my company has done it is a school cafeteria. They run power strips down the center of the table in a very large room and you sit elbow to elbow with colleagues. Each seat has a docking station and double monitor. It's amazing how many people you can pack in, especially if you account for some being out sick, some on PTO, some on travel, some in a meeting, staggered schedules, some at lunch or on break, etc. The biggest issue has actually been parking and sufficient bathrooms--you can't increase the number of people at the site to such a large extent without those being choke points.

Oh, what’s the name of this company?

[Anonymous]

If anything, my agency is trying to resist RTO. Higher ups just signed a MOU with the union, extending the agreement 4 years, they ended the lease on four buildings and one of the parking garages, extended remote work to Puerto Rico, and they just refreshed everyone's telework equipment.

So they're certainly not acting like they're planning on RTO.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We got rid of some office space during pandemic, remote employees have changed office location, although most remote employees are remote locally. Basically, some employees change teleworking status (before Covid) to remote status, with SF 50 duty station changed too.

There is no funding to get more office space (flat funding, majority of funding goes to employees' salary; while salary/other costs increase annually, there is not even enough money to fill every vacancy).

Why people are so concerned about RTO?

+1. The panic is downright bizarre. To me it gives credit to the argument that people are working less at home. Doing laundry, prepping dinner, picking up kids from school and not paying for aftercare. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in panic mode at the thought of going back.

For the millionth time - wanting to be at home at 5:00, instead of an hour away at 5:00, is not nefarious. It's how people make their lives work. Starting your day 30 minutes early so that you can take a 30 minute break later, to drive your kid between school and aftercare because there's no bus, is not nefarious it is literally people using aftercare and accounting for their time. I could give a dozen different examples.

The naysayers are chanting "I didn't have to do that pre-covid" but the fact is, a lot of people DID need to do these things pre-covid and the solution at the time was to be unemployed or underemployed in order to make the household work. So yes, RTO will be a serious income drop / career killer for people who are good at their jobs.

This, but the problem is a lot of jobs aren't 9-5, and often you have to take calls early in the AM and throughout the night. So, how is this all going ot work? The expectation is you still keep that schedule. My spouse's supervisor lives across the country, and co-workers live around the world as do the customes they interact with. The West Coast folks expect calls from 5-8 at night as they are just ramping up after lunch when East Coast are getting ready to leave. If you are a gov't employee, 9-5 may be easier but that's not the reality anymore.

The government doesn't pay enough to work 24/7, even on remote. It's also illegal for feds to work uncompensated hours

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We got rid of some office space during pandemic, remote employees have changed office location, although most remote employees are remote locally. Basically, some employees change teleworking status (before Covid) to remote status, with SF 50 duty station changed too.

There is no funding to get more office space (flat funding, majority of funding goes to employees' salary; while salary/other costs increase annually, there is not even enough money to fill every vacancy).

Why people are so concerned about RTO?

+1. The panic is downright bizarre. To me it gives credit to the argument that people are working less at home. Doing laundry, prepping dinner, picking up kids from school and not paying for aftercare. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in panic mode at the thought of going back.

For the millionth time - wanting to be at home at 5:00, instead of an hour away at 5:00, is not nefarious. It's how people make their lives work. Starting your day 30 minutes early so that you can take a 30 minute break later, to drive your kid between school and aftercare because there's no bus, is not nefarious it is literally people using aftercare and accounting for their time. I could give a dozen different examples.

The naysayers are chanting "I didn't have to do that pre-covid" but the fact is, a lot of people DID need to do these things pre-covid and the solution at the time was to be unemployed or underemployed in order to make the household work. So yes, RTO will be a serious income drop / career killer for people who are good at their jobs.

This, but the problem is a lot of jobs aren't 9-5, and often you have to take calls early in the AM and throughout the night. So, how is this all going ot work? The expectation is you still keep that schedule. My spouse's supervisor lives across the country, and co-workers live around the world as do the customes they interact with. The West Coast folks expect calls from 5-8 at night as they are just ramping up after lunch when East Coast are getting ready to leave. If you are a gov't employee, 9-5 may be easier but that's not the reality anymore.

The government doesn't pay enough to work 24/7, even on remote. It's also illegal for feds to work uncompensated hours

Uncompensated OT is the standard at some agencies, including mine. We actually have two separate systems for tracking our working hours, WebTA where we can only list a maximum of 40 hours a week, and USA-5, where we are encouraged to list the actual hours we worked in a given week.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We got rid of some office space during pandemic, remote employees have changed office location, although most remote employees are remote locally. Basically, some employees change teleworking status (before Covid) to remote status, with SF 50 duty station changed too.

There is no funding to get more office space (flat funding, majority of funding goes to employees' salary; while salary/other costs increase annually, there is not even enough money to fill every vacancy).

Why people are so concerned about RTO?

+1. The panic is downright bizarre. To me it gives credit to the argument that people are working less at home. Doing laundry, prepping dinner, picking up kids from school and not paying for aftercare. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in panic mode at the thought of going back.

For the millionth time - wanting to be at home at 5:00, instead of an hour away at 5:00, is not nefarious. It's how people make their lives work. Starting your day 30 minutes early so that you can take a 30 minute break later, to drive your kid between school and aftercare because there's no bus, is not nefarious it is literally people using aftercare and accounting for their time. I could give a dozen different examples.

The naysayers are chanting "I didn't have to do that pre-covid" but the fact is, a lot of people DID need to do these things pre-covid and the solution at the time was to be unemployed or underemployed in order to make the household work. So yes, RTO will be a serious income drop / career killer for people who are good at their jobs.

This, but the problem is a lot of jobs aren't 9-5, and often you have to take calls early in the AM and throughout the night. So, how is this all going ot work? The expectation is you still keep that schedule. My spouse's supervisor lives across the country, and co-workers live around the world as do the customes they interact with. The West Coast folks expect calls from 5-8 at night as they are just ramping up after lunch when East Coast are getting ready to leave. If you are a gov't employee, 9-5 may be easier but that's not the reality anymore.

The government doesn't pay enough to work 24/7, even on remote. It's also illegal for feds to work uncompensated hours

Uncompensated OT is the standard at some agencies, including mine. We actually have two separate systems for tracking our working hours, WebTA where we can only list a maximum of 40 hours a week, and USA-5, where we are encouraged to list the actual hours we worked in a given week.

...you are encouraged to record the fact that your agency is making you do something illegal? Sounds stupid on the part of someone. But maybe let your GC know.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What kind of work do people do where you can concentrate with many, many people around you speaking all of the time? A call center? This can't be anything that involves any sort of mental concentration.

You can't. It's a GD disaster and a waste of a day each time I have to make the godforsaken trek into the sh!tty office.

Our RTO was issued for Sept 2023 and then shortly after they realized, oops, they got rid of our office space during the pandemic. They found a floor for us in a nearby sister building and changed our RTO order to be hybrid. Only the 2 highest bosses get offices. The rest of us get the use of a desk that day while in the office. We have strict set hybrid days to make sure there are enough desks for everyone. We don't have a conference room because that was taken to make a ghetto kitchen since this floor originally shared a kitchen with the floor below, but we can't do that because of security issues. Our "kitchen" has a full-size fridge, 2 tables & 8 chairs, a coffee machine, a water cooler, and a microwave. We have no dishwasher or sink so we have to wash our mugs in one of the 2 unisex bathrooms.

There's zero privacy for anything and people eventually forget this aspect, so you get to learn which coworkers are the nose pickers and the scab/skin pickers. So gross.

I get zero work done the two days each week when I'm required to be in the office. My favorite is how the team hybrid schedules don't match, so half the team may be in the office and the other half WFH that day when a meeting is scheduled, so you have 3 people in a giant room on the same Teams call as the rest of the people in their homes.

For those of you saying it's only "bad" in the private sector not Feds... that above was posted by me, a Fed.

So yes, there are plenty of Feds out there going to "work" each day with the motto of "may the odds be ever in your favor!" that you get a decent desk or any desk. I have friends at other agencies who all race to the office as early as possible to even GET a desk. I've told one to file an anonymous complaint with the county fire marshal. Let them come in and do some checking. Even if it's a Fed office, they have to let the fire marshal in. Let him take care of 75 people in a space for ~45-50. Or leak some photos online. Let the world see their US civil servants toiling away on giant floor pillows and blow-up furniture circa the Delia's catalogue 1999.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We got rid of some office space during pandemic, remote employees have changed office location, although most remote employees are remote locally. Basically, some employees change teleworking status (before Covid) to remote status, with SF 50 duty station changed too.

There is no funding to get more office space (flat funding, majority of funding goes to employees' salary; while salary/other costs increase annually, there is not even enough money to fill every vacancy).

Why people are so concerned about RTO?

+1. The panic is downright bizarre. To me it gives credit to the argument that people are working less at home. Doing laundry, prepping dinner, picking up kids from school and not paying for aftercare. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in panic mode at the thought of going back.

For the millionth time - wanting to be at home at 5:00, instead of an hour away at 5:00, is not nefarious. It's how people make their lives work. Starting your day 30 minutes early so that you can take a 30 minute break later, to drive your kid between school and aftercare because there's no bus, is not nefarious it is literally people using aftercare and accounting for their time. I could give a dozen different examples.

The naysayers are chanting "I didn't have to do that pre-covid" but the fact is, a lot of people DID need to do these things pre-covid and the solution at the time was to be unemployed or underemployed in order to make the household work. So yes, RTO will be a serious income drop / career killer for people who are good at their jobs.

This, but the problem is a lot of jobs aren't 9-5, and often you have to take calls early in the AM and throughout the night. So, how is this all going ot work? The expectation is you still keep that schedule. My spouse's supervisor lives across the country, and co-workers live around the world as do the customes they interact with. The West Coast folks expect calls from 5-8 at night as they are just ramping up after lunch when East Coast are getting ready to leave. If you are a gov't employee, 9-5 may be easier but that's not the reality anymore.

The government doesn't pay enough to work 24/7, even on remote. It's also illegal for feds to work uncompensated hours

Higher up jobs pay well, lower ones don't. And its technically illegal for everyone but that's life.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Spouse has been RTO for about a year. There is no office space. He drives an hour, scans his badge for attendance, and works from his car in the parking lot or a table in the cafeteria. He’ll go in the building for meetings, but then back to his car for phone calls. Then 1.5 hours home.

So. So. Dumb.

This is absurd. This will be my souse too. Find a random place to sit, even if he goes in really early.

If you can work from your car then you can work from anywhere. No way would I stick around to work in my car.

No one is. Fake news.

Yes; you can fit 20-30 people in a room. You cannot fit 1000 in floor space designed for 200. It's just not possible.

If its an entire floor of a building you can fit a few hundred or more. There are no rooms anymore.

This. The closest comparison for how my company has done it is a school cafeteria. They run power strips down the center of the table in a very large room and you sit elbow to elbow with colleagues. Each seat has a docking station and double monitor. It's amazing how many people you can pack in, especially if you account for some being out sick, some on PTO, some on travel, some in a meeting, staggered schedules, some at lunch or on break, etc. The biggest issue has actually been parking and sufficient bathrooms--you can't increase the number of people at the site to such a large extent without those being choke points.

Oh, what’s the name of this company?

This is normal for the big tech companies.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You guys are missing the point that there will be enough space because so many positions will be simply eliminated. Have you not paid attention? They don’t care if you quit - they want you to.

This is what it comes down to as they don't want to look bad and do layoffs so they are trying to get people to quit to bring numbers down.

No, Elon and co want to be seen as eliminating a bunch of people because it will make their brain dead voters happy.

What they don’t want is to actually go through the process of firing people because it can’t happen fast. Their two options are Schedule F or impoundment then RIFs. Both are guaranteed to be stuck in litigation for a long time.

He doesn't know government, he knows private. So, he's doing what he'd do privately. This is normal in private. You never know day to day if you evne have a job.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Spouse has been RTO for about a year. There is no office space. He drives an hour, scans his badge for attendance, and works from his car in the parking lot or a table in the cafeteria. He’ll go in the building for meetings, but then back to his car for phone calls. Then 1.5 hours home.

So. So. Dumb.

This is absurd. This will be my souse too. Find a random place to sit, even if he goes in really early.

If you can work from your car then you can work from anywhere. No way would I stick around to work in my car.

No one is. Fake news.

Yes; you can fit 20-30 people in a room. You cannot fit 1000 in floor space designed for 200. It's just not possible.

If its an entire floor of a building you can fit a few hundred or more. There are no rooms anymore.

It is not an entire floor. Part of the floor belongs to someone else. It is about half the floor, and no, you cannot fit 800 to 1000 people in half a floor.

[Anonymous]

And I never said there had to be rooms that is your straw man. I am talking about whether 800 people can fit in about 2000 square feet of space. And the answer is no.

[Anonymous]

Waiting for the reply that you sat next to your co worker and sniffed their butthole all day because you only had two square feet of space.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Waiting for the reply that you sat next to your co worker and sniffed their butthole all day because you only had two square feet of space.

And they liked it that way! Suck it up, buttercup!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Spouse has been RTO for about a year. There is no office space. He drives an hour, scans his badge for attendance, and works from his car in the parking lot or a table in the cafeteria. He’ll go in the building for meetings, but then back to his car for phone calls. Then 1.5 hours home.

So. So. Dumb.

This is absurd. This will be my souse too. Find a random place to sit, even if he goes in really early.

If you can work from your car then you can work from anywhere. No way would I stick around to work in my car.

No one is. Fake news.

Yes; you can fit 20-30 people in a room. You cannot fit 1000 in floor space designed for 200. It's just not possible.

If its an entire floor of a building you can fit a few hundred or more. There are no rooms anymore.

This. The closest comparison for how my company has done it is a school cafeteria. They run power strips down the center of the table in a very large room and you sit elbow to elbow with colleagues. Each seat has a docking station and double monitor. It's amazing how many people you can pack in, especially if you account for some being out sick, some on PTO, some on travel, some in a meeting, staggered schedules, some at lunch or on break, etc. The biggest issue has actually been parking and sufficient bathrooms--you can't increase the number of people at the site to such a large extent without those being choke points.

Oh, what’s the name of this company?

This is normal for the big tech companies.

Great, then name the company.