Our long-timers are awesome, and our newcomers have made things even better. I think our company has the right balance of both.
Previous company had a government job culture, very high percentage of long-timers and plenty of dead weight. Much less so when a new president came on and drastically changed things.
My laptop definitely has sensitive info⌠nothing top-secret but still a lot of files locally. Their only rule is no uploading anything to social media/GMail/etc., or a flash drive. However there are easily ways to get around that by using less-known services.
oh, i guess i do have some things i needed to check stored on the desktop now that i think about it. so yeah, they probably should take these laptops back in the end.
My department is having is resuming its practice of having an annual big meeting, bringing in everyone for a day of meetings and a team-building event.
Our admin is both frazzled from making arrangements and somewhat giddy that there will actually be people in the office for a couple of days.
I havenât been masked during my post-lockdown office visits, because there have been so few people around and ventilation has seemed ample given the lack of germ-emitters. However, given the prospect of spending an entire day in a relatively crowded conference roomâŚ
She has a very powerful two-finger typing technique.
I love how blazing fast her printer is!!! 
Oh man, your kid is actually sick that day, you can probably get some work done from home but is there a way to watch on Zoom?
I am attending a wedding soon but they explicitly put in the invites, if you havenât had a least 1 J&J or 2 Pfizer/Moderna shots, please stay home, and they recommend a booster for all. Still a bit skeeved but theyâre close friends and I trust none of those I know would lie about it.
I donât like this type of vaccine requirement. Itâs more virtue signaling than it being an effective policy. I donât consider someone vaccinated in April 2021 to be âvaccinatedâ today. If I had COVID in July 2022, then Iâm coming to that wedding! Itâs possible that these are the requirements of the venue, which may require proof.
That video reminds me of minitel:
France gave away terminals that allowed people to connect to a pre-internet network. They could do a ton of things, including the type of things in that video above.
It was hugely successful, probably the most successful www internet out there (and there were actually a number of them).
source: took a history of the internet course in my undergrad.
Doesnât bother me a bit. If somebody is a staunch anti-vaxxer they will continue to take zero precaution.
My in-laws are anti-vax and gave me COVID because they insisted we come for Christmas. Theyâve been no precaution since the beginning, with their illegal in-house hair stylists and such, so they caught it and gave it to me. So having nobody like that doesnât bother me a little bit.
Vaccinated people are spreading COVID around too, so I donât consider vaccination status to be much of a risk to anyone besides the person who decides not to vaccinate and therefore increase their chances of getting a bad case. The one time I got COVID was a week after I got my 2nd booster.
Given the fact that omicron is essentially a cold for the vast majority of people who are infected, itâs not that much of a risk.
After multiple extensions of a long break, weâre back to the office 2 days a week starting next week. 
I see your point.
decided to check out the office for the first time this year before the push to go back next week. we got new monitors AND wireless keyboards!
decision was mostly because i loathe my neighbors and wanted to leave before they got home from school rather than because i had a burning desire to check out the office.
been in the office at points every day this week. i like the office. i donât like lugging my laptop to the office though since i walk round trip to the office 5 miles a day. my coworker assured me i will grow muscles in my back to support this task. yeah, idk.
in the before times we only had desktops in the office. they were planning to switch to laptop only regardless of the pandemic, but then when the pandemic happened laptops became convenient.
This is supposedly a non-paywalled link:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-return-to-office-rates-hit-pandemic-high-as-more-employers-get-tougher-11663535754?st=2a13dsrrq56mz5t&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Relevant excerpts, in case the paywall is invoked / in case you donât want to click:
Kastle Systems has some infographics on their data here (although they havenât been updated to the values mentioned in the WSJ article as of this post):
When I was in the office last week for a departmental meeting, I was surprised at how many people outside our department were in â maybe 25-33% of the desks were occupied on the floor of the office tower, beyond the section occupied by my department-mates, as opposed to being able to count the number of occupied desks on my fingers as was the case in my other trips in since lockdowns were lifted.
Itâll be interesting to see how full/empty the floor might be when I go back in October.
Should be a non-paywalled link:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/usaa-tells-staff-your-remote-job-is-no-longer-remote-c70685a7?st=2582cl2xa1t6xed&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
I read somewhere today that 40% of tech workers wonât take a job thatâs not remote. 40%. thatâs almost half, and I have a math degree so lemme tell you, I know fractions.
I gave up my office space last year. My marketing person mentioned last summer that they maybe wanted to go into an office space once in a while. So, I told them to decide, and if they wanted it, Iâd get them some shared office space so they can smell other peopleâs farts if thatâs what they want. They said theyâd think about it, so I let it go. Last week I circled back around and asked them if they still wanted me to get them some office space. Nope. Quite happy at home.
One thing they did do was start going to the gym at lunch. So they take an hour and a half for lunch a couple times a week, then just start a bit earlier and work a bit later that day. And because itâs wfh, even that extra time doesnât make a hugely long day - theyâre normally done at 4, on gym days they finish at 4:30.
Plus they sometimes take 15-20 breaks. I donât track or even watch those, I just sometimes notice in our IM system that theyâre away and I wait a bit til theyâre back before I IM them.
tl;dr, wfh is good.
In other news, USAA is hiring to replace all the staff theyâre about to lose.