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Artificial Intelligence Changes Everything

January 27, 2023 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

AI Changes Everything
AI Changes Everything

Six years ago, I wrote The World Has Turned and Left Us Here. The title, inspired by a Weezer song about lost love, came after realizing that my three and four-year-old boys would have very different career choices than I had. At the time, many retail stores were closing as more people bought from Amazon. The news of retail store closings has died down a bit (though Bed, Bath, and Beyond’s impending bankruptcy may change things).

Also, self-driving cars looked like they’d potentially be available in 12-15 years. There are five levels of car autonomy. The first level 3 autonomous car is coming to Nevada around now. Car makers have five years until I have to start teaching my 10-year-old how to drive. I’m not betting on carmakers and lawmakers to figure it out that quickly. However, fully automated cars are inevitable.

Artificial Intelligence is the start. What I didn’t see coming six years ago was DALL-E and ChatGPT – two viral artificial intelligence developments in the last few months. If you haven’t been following, DALL-E can make surprisingly good images from text. The image that you see for this blog post was done by me typing, “Robot changing the earth, digital art.” I could have made it an oil painting or in the style of Van Gogh. It’s not perfect, but it’s reasonably good. I’m sure you’ve heard of ChatGPT by now – it’s all over the news. It passed an MBA final exam at Wharton the other day.

The Artificial Intelligence Blogger

Let’s take a career such as a blogger as an example. I never figured I’d blog into my 17th year, but here I am. It’s possible that ChatGPT could write an entire blog post for me. I’ve tested it a few times. I even published part of one of those tests. Maybe you can find it in the last month of blog posts? Some of the other tests, I’ve put aside to review later. Of course, the writing doesn’t sound like me, but I could take the general ideas and “Lazify” them.

I’ve already mentioned the image. It’s at least 10x better than I could do on my own. It’s also better than the stock images that just look weird.

What if I embedded a video of me explaining the concept in more detail? Making a video is a lot of work, which is one reason you won’t find me on YouTube. However, once again, artificial intelligence is here to do all the work for me. Companies like Rephrase AI and D-ID will digitize your face and voice to create a personal avatar. That avatar can be programmed to say anything in front of a green screen and look very natural. All you need to do is give your avatar a script to read – essentially something from ChatGPT.

None of these pieces are perfect, but they’ll only get better. For now, it takes a human editor to paste them all together and maybe make it seem a little natural. For example, the robot picture in this blog post isn’t the first one that DALL-E came up with. I thought it was the best of 8. However, maybe you like this one better?

AI Changes Everything
AI Changes Everything

In the end, you have a writer, an artist, and a video production team available to create a blog post on anything topic you have in mind.

The End of Jobs?

That’s a scary heading. It reminds me a bit of WALL-E, where the humans have machines that do everything and can barely stand or walk on their own. I don’t think it’s the end of work any time soon. There are still drains to be unclogged. I think that will continue to be the case for a long time. (Though, sign me up for a robo-plumber!)

One of the interesting things to me is that AI can outperform doctors according to this Harvard Business Review. That article is over three years old, so imagine how much better the AI bots are now.

This sounds dismal, but I see humans working with AI, such as my hypothetical blogger above. Perhaps an AI doctor discovers something that the human didn’t, and the patient is better for it. AI is already helping doctors in surgery, perhaps roughly analogous to autonomous driving – just with a scalpel.

So when might AI threaten jobs? Price Waterhouse Coopers predicts it is coming very quickly. They estimate that AI automation places 3% of jobs at risk today (early 2020s). They also predict that the number will grow to 30% by mid-2030s (Source). They note that financial services are particularly vulnerable to automation in the late 2020s.

Looks like my blog has an expiration date! Maybe I should brush up on my plumbing skills? What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: Artificial Intelligence

And Just Like That…

December 15, 2021 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

… our lives were changed forever. No, no one has died. This is good life-changing news.

Did you expect something different with that title? Well, I’ve never been a fan of Sex and the City.

The big news is that my wife is changing jobs. That doesn’t seem big on the surface. She’ll still be in the Uniformed Services earning the same officer pay she has for about 9 years now (though it has been adjusted for inflation). One difference is that she knows she’s going to like this job a lot. How does she know? She did it for a few months in an emergency capacity to help with the COVID response. She’d end the work-day saying, “I like this (virtual) deployment better than my regular job.”

It seems that the feeling was mutual because they created a full-time position, called up my wife, and said, “We want you doing this full-time.” She got the paperwork in and it was finalized a few days ago.

This is a good time to catch you up on where she was with her career. She’s been passed over for military promotion eight times now. They keep asking her to do new things such as adding an MBA to her Pharm. D. It took years, but she did it. She became the president of a six-thousand-officer group and was invited to the White House this year (which is typical with that job duty). I go into a lot more detail about how we were hoping to receive the million dollar email. That’s roughly how much the promotion would be worth to us when you factor in current earnings and the future pension increase.

Since she has the pension and we’re in a good financial place she doesn’t need to work. With the combination of a job she didn’t enjoy, the rat race requiring her to do more and more unpaid work, and the annual promotion rejection, why should she stay? That’s why, back in January, we started to plan the exit: Can My Wife Retire? We’ve been saving cash to have as big of a cushion as possible.

As recently as late September, I wrote Where Do We Go From Here detailing how she’s in “for one more year” until her presidency term is up. That happens just around the time that the 2022 promotion list comes out in June. The conclusion is that we had another eight months or so to save cash and finally get out if she wasn’t promoted.

Big Changes All Around

Obviously, working at a job you like with you people you like will change your career outlook. She’s also getting out of all the extra committees and organizations that they recommended she have to get promoted. She’s done them all and it’s time to do less and give other people a chance to hold those positions. Those two big changes will do a lot to improve her work/life balance. That means that the push to retire isn’t as strong.

There’s one more thing though.

Military jobs have a thing called a billet associated with them*. The billet can be translated to General Schedule (GS) levels of government work. Roughly, it equates to the importance of the position. Work at a higher GS level and you’ll get paid more. However, with the military, you are paid based on your rank, not the billet level of work that you do. Theoretically, you could be an O-7 (a top officer) in an O-3 billet and you’d get O-7 pay. You could be an O-3 (a lower-ranking officer) in an O-7 billet and you’d get O-3 pay.

My wife is an O-5 officer, but she’s been in an O-5 billet this entire century. When we moved to California in 2006 it was because we were both in bad work environments, but also because her job offer was an O-6 billet. When we got there they readjusted the billets across the board and it was reclassified as an O-5 billet. When we moved back to Boston in 2013 it was to get closer to our families with our first kid was an infant. But also, the job was an O-6 billet. They reclassified it as an O-5 billet again.

The elephant in the room about the promotion rejection has always been the billet. I’m convinced the promotion board looked at that and said, “This officer hasn’t progressed in 20 years. Why promote her?” The promotion board gives recommendations on how to improve (get an MBA for example) and that’s always been on there.

There’s never been a good solution to the billet problem. I have no confidence in the system – moving for a higher billet seems useless. Since my wife can choose where she works (a very unique position for officers), why uproot the family for a gamble that never seems to pay off? There have been very few local O-6 billets available. The ones that have come up are management positions in Boston – a two-hour, each-way commute from where we live in Newport, RI. My wife technically works out of Boston but has had a generous work-from-home policy (even before COVID) which made living here possible. Managers don’t get work-from-home, so it would be another 20 hours in a car.

The last four paragraphs were a long way of explaining, that this job is an O-6 billet. Officially. She’s accepted the job and is starting early next year.

Last year, they promoted 5% of the officers at her rank. From what we can gather about the scoring system, she would have had it if they promoted 5.2%. They used to promote around 20-25%, but the percentage has been shrinking every year. With the billet problem solved, it feels like this could be the year.

My wife surprised me with something else though.

Pensions are based on the average of the highest 36 months of your salary. If she got promoted she has always said that she’d stay the 3 years to maximize the pension. Now she’s saying that she’ll work another 7 years. We’ll see how that goes, but I wasn’t expecting that to be on the table. Running the numbers, the difference in lifetime earnings (salary plus pension) of retiring now and retiring with the promotion in 7 years is $2 million.

There are a lot of “ifs” and projections in this article. Maybe she won’t like the new job. Maybe they’ll somehow take the billet down again. Maybe she won’t get promoted. It’s impossible to know. However, it does appear to be life-changing right now.

* For any military people reading this, I’m a civilian and I’m going to make mistakes with the terminology, but this is an explainer of how I have understood it to work.

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: military pension

Worst Interview Experiences

December 8, 2021 by Kosmo 7 Comments

We’ve got another article by Kosmo today. It’s always entertaining to read other people’s horror stories. I included a few of my own at the end. Tomorrow, I hope to post a fresh article covering November’s passive income.

I’ve been pretty optimistic lately, and have focused a lot on the good aspects of my career.  Now it’s time to be negative and look back and some of the worst interview experiences I’ve had over the years.

My fault

One day during my senior year in college, I was awakened by the sound of people in my apartment.

Oh, crap.  This was the day the property management company was going to show my apartment to a potential renter.  There hadn’t been a conflict, because I should be showered and out the door before they arrived.  The fact that they woke me up meant that I had overslept.

Which also meant that I was running late for an interview with one of the big accounting firms.  I meekly waiting for the rental agent and potential renter to leave, and then got ready as quickly as I could.  After a sprint across campus, I arrived out of breath and fifteen minutes late.

I apologized, and they allowed me to interview as if nothing had happened.  But I knew that I had dug a hole for myself, and that the other candidates were going to look better in comparison.

Not surprisingly,  I didn’t get the job.  Also, I had to write a letter apologizing for my lateness.  The on-campus interview were arranged by the university, and if you didn’t arrive on time for an interview, your interviewing privileges were suspended until you wrote a letter of apology.  It was a good idea, as it tended to really cut down on people simply blowing off interviews.  I had the letter submitted by the end of the day, since I couldn’t afford to miss any interviews.

I also called the property management company to apologize for being in the apartment when I had told them I’d be gone – becoming the first tenant in history to apologize to a landlord.

Deja vu

About fifteen years ago, some changes at my company put my teleworking position in danger, and I started to interview at other companies.

One of the interviews was with a local software company.  I interviewed with the CEO, and the impression he gave was that their employees paid zero attention to the clock and were totally committed to the company.  I interpreted this as meaning the company put employees through the meat grinder and had them work long hours on a consistent basis.

It wasn’t the optimal position, but it might be worth considering.  After the on-site interview, I waited to hear from them.  I never heard from them.

About a year later, a headhunter was lining up some interviews for me.  They mentioned a job at this same company.  I said that I was reluctant to interview, since they had ghosted me before.  The headhunter showed surprise and said that it was most likely a one-time glitch.  I agreed to interview with the company again.

I went through the exact same interview process again.  After talking with the exact same people for a second time, they ghosted me again.

The token

I get a call from HR at a large trucking company that is headquartered in the area.  I applied for a position six months earlier, and this is my first contact with them.  He wanted to know if I was still interested, and I responded that I was.  We talked a bit about salaries, and it was clear that I was at the top end of their range.  He said he was going to follow up with the hiring manager and get back to me.

The next day, I hear back from him.  The company is still interested, even at a salary that is at the top of their range.  He sends me links to a few assessment, including a personality assessment and the Wonderlic test.  I carve out time that night and knock out the assessments – coming tantalizing close to finishing all the Wonderlic questions, but not quite making it.

A few days later, I hear back from the guy.  Assessments were good, and he wants to schedule an on-site.

The day of the interview arrives.  I’m going directly from my current job (where I wear jeans and a t-shirt) to the interview, where I’ll be wearing a suit a tie.  In a far corner of the huge parking lot at work, I cover myself with a blanket and awkwardly change my pants and shirt.  I arrive a few minutes early and check in at the front desk.

The hiring manager takes me back to her office and gives me a five minute explanation of her team.  Then she asks a couple of questions about my background.

Then she just stops.  No follow-up questions to my answers, no new questions, nothing.  I try to jump-start the conversation, but I fail.  The interview lasted less than fifteen minutes.

I try to make sense of things during the drive home.  The couple of questions she had asked were pretty basic, and I wasn’t sure how my answers could have raised any red flags.  Then I realized that likely scenario.  The company probably had a policy that X number of candidates be interviewed for any position.  They had a qualified candidate in house, but needed to rope in a couple of other candidates just to check that box.

I know that a lot of companies have a policy like this.  The idea behind them is good – making sure that you case a wide net instead of simply taking the bird in the hand.  But it only makes sense when you’re actually given each candidate serious consideration.  If you’re just having a couple of BS interview to pad the numbers, this doesn’t help anyone.  It’s a waste of time for the company and for the candidate.

Wrong answer

I had an interview with a smaller company in the area.  The meeting was with the director (hiring manager) and a vice president (her boss).

I arrived a few minutes early and checked in at the front desk.  Ten minutes after the scheduled start time, the director and VP retrieve me from the reception area.

The VP takes control of the interview, doing about 90% of the talking.  This seem a little unusual, since the director was the hiring manager.  Since the candidate would be working directly for her, I would have expected her to be a bit more active in the process.

His questions were very precise – drilling down into the minutiae of textbook knowledge of my discipline.  At this point, I had been out of college for 20+ years, and at the time I went to college, there really wasn’t a textbook for the type of work I was doing.  My work process had evolved through internal training and mentoring, and the process I used didn’t necessarily line up point for point with the current textbook, especially not in terms of terminology.  The focus of the question was on rote memorization rather than actual practical knowledge.  It almost seemed like he was trying to impress my with his encyclopedia knowledge.   I was not impressed.

I walked out of this interview not expected an offer, and also not wanting one.

Your experiences?

What are some of the worst interview experiences you have had?

Editor’s Response

I’ll go first on this. These are a little more about job stories than just the interviews themselves.

The Insurance Company

I actually don’t remember the interview, but this was my first job. The programming was interesting, but the boss was terrible. Everyone hated her, but I guess she got results which was good for the company. At one point she had mentioned having an identical twin and I thought, “Wait, there are two people on Earth like you?” My next thought was, “Why did we get stuck with the evil twin?” Fortunately, I didn’t say what was on my mind.

The Pulled Job

While working there, interviewed at another company and got a job offer for 30% more money. It was doing cutting edge web programming and I jumped on it immediately. When I accepted the offer, they said they already gave it to someone else. I think maybe a day passed. I had already written my resignation letter for the insurance company, but luckily I didn’t send it in.

The HR Blunder

A big internet company interviewed me a couple of times and I really hit it off with them. The HR person in charge of the hire though switched jobs and I was lost in the shuffle. I persisted, but it took about six weeks because it was this time of year of Thanksgiving and holidays. This time I got the job and the 30% raise working on cutting edge search engines. It was the best job I ever had and I moved up the ranks to be a manager very quickly. As a 24-year-old kid, I should not have been the hiring manager, but I was. I may have been the worst interviewer in the history of the world.

The dot-com bust happened and we merged with another big company, so the entire development team was axed. It was supposed to be on 9/11, but they waited a week given the events of the day. The top people at the company recruited me a few years later and I worked with them for a few years until those people left and the new management made things bad.

The Overdress

My first job interview in Silicon Valley was an interesting one. Everyone made fun of me for showing up in a suit. That’s simply not done there. I explained that it’s a culture thing in Boston (and well the rest of the world as far as I know) and it shows respect for the employer. I think it earned me some points, but they probably also viewed me as “Weird Boston Guy”, which I was.

The Facebook

I interviewed to be the head of Facebook’s mobile development division in 2006. Facebook was much, much smaller then, but still growing fast. I don’t think it was as big as MySpace because you still had to have a college account to join. The interviewers all explained how they live at the office and worked 18 hours a day. I had this Lazy Man blog at the time, so that wasn’t going to work. In hindsight, if I could have done the work (it was over my head), I probably would have made a hundred million in stock options. That would have been nice.

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: interview

Was My Job Change the Right Move?

November 30, 2021 by Kosmo 4 Comments

Today we have another article contributed by Kosmo. For about a billion years he worked at the same big company, but over the last few, he’s jumped to a couple of new places. I find it refreshing that his work isn’t about the money – he really focuses on quality of life.

About a year ago, I decided to hunt for a different job. It was a conscious choice to get away from an environment that had turned negative. I spent the first week putting out some feelers. On December 21, I initiated contact with my friend’s employer. I accepted an offer on January 8. Looking back now – did I make the right decision?

Old employer

My team had been thrust into disarray at the old employer. Layoffs had decimated the group, and I had been moved to a new team. I had gone from doing very interesting work to being assigned to a project that management had estimated as three months of work but looked it would be a six-month wild goose chase. The future looked dreary.

I walked away from some money at my old employer. If I had waited three months, I’d have collected my annual bonus. A few months after that, I’d have vested in the retirement plan. It wasn’t a fortune, but it wasn’t an inconsequential amount, either. I had initially decided to suck it up and wait until I had collected that money. Eventually, I got overwhelmed and decided that I shouldn’t delay any further.

First day

The initial plan was for me to come into the office on my first day, do the necessary HR tasks, meet some people, and take equipment home. Then I’d be WFH until further notice.

There was a blizzard forecast for that day. I packed a suitcase and checked to see where the local hotels were. There was an inexpensive one close to the office. I had plenty of clothes, and enough electronics to get through the night. I was prepared.

There were three other new hires that day, including another team member. Three of us quickly worked through the paperwork, with barely a question between us. The fourth person was a woman in her twenties, and she had quite a few questions about concepts that the rest of us considered to be routine matters, such as out-of-pocket maximums on insurance and 401K matching. It made me think back to the times when I was in a similar position, and it made me feel quite old.

The boss decided to change the schedule a bit. We’d meet a few people, and then we’d load up our cars and hit the road so that we could get home before the blizzard hit. I live fifty miles away, and the other new guy lives about forty miles away, so it was very much appreciated. I loaded up a laptop, docking station, and monitor. After a quick stop to get some nuggets and fries, I was headed west on I-80.

My wife immediately had a positive impression of my boss, since he had shown some empathy and common sense on day one. It was the only on-site contact he’d had with me for months, and he willingly cut the day short.

New role

My new company runs pretty lean, due to the size. This means that people tend to have a broader set of responsibilities, rather than having a more specialized role. The bread and butter of my old role was eliciting software requirements from people within the functional business areas, as well as coordinating system testing. My new role also has those tasks, but additional responsibilities such as running the RFP (request for proposal) process.

At previous companies, the RFP process is something that would have been handled by a project manager or management. While I was still learning the ropes, I was given an RFP to run with. Thankfully, I was also given a co-pilot – the friend who had recruited me to the company. The two of us worked with high-ranking people in various business units to drive out high-level requirements. Then we engaged various vendors in a process that culminated in on-site visits from some of them.

This was an entirely new process for me. In the past, my projects had often done the entirety of the development in-house, and when we used a vendor, that vendor had usually been determined before my involvement. I typically hate starting conversations with strangers, so this was definitely outside of my comfort zone. The process ended up being less nerve-wracking than I feared, mostly because everyone wanted to be my best friend and was very accommodating. That happens when you have money to spend. It ended up being a lot of fun. I had to come out of my shell a lot because I was often the person organizing and running meetings.

There are two types of people – people who want to focus on a specialized role, and people who want a lot of variety. I’m the second type, and I knew this would be what I would be getting into.

New industry

The change in industries was pretty dramatic. After more than twenty years in insurance and financial services, I was shifting to the food industry. My boss took a risk by hiring someone with no manufacturing experience. My only manufacturing experience was a summer making toys for Ertl in the mid-90s. I had at least a basic understanding of the food industry, since I grew up on a dairy farm. But I went off to college – becoming the first college grad in my family – specifically to get away from the farm. I hated the hard work, long hours, and often terrible working conditions. Imagine my surprise when I landed back in the agriculture sector a quarter of a century later.

I had – and still have – a lot to learn. In one of my first meetings, someone mentioned FSMA, and I dutifully jotted down FISMA, an acronym I was familiar with. I quickly realized that they were talking about the Food Safety Modernization Act, not the Federal Information Security Management Act.

I’ve learned about food safety, warehousing, shipping, animal nutrition, and even a few things about gas chromatographs. I’m leaps and bounds ahead of where I was, but feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ll be a key player in a major project that will kick off in 2022, and am looking forward to learning even more.

Company size

My new company is about a tenth the size of my previous company, which in turn was significantly smaller than the huge company where I spend most of my career.

My employer isn’t tiny, but it’s small enough to be a lot more nimble. There is far less red tape than I am accustomed to. I can request access to something and have it granted within an hour or two, instead of having the request kick around for a week or more. When I call the help desk, I reach an actual human. One of my calls was completely resolved in seventeen seconds – no exaggeration.

Since the building is smaller, the parking situation is better, especially for those of us who arrive at 7:30 AM. This will become more important in the winter when I won’t need to traverse a huge frozen parking lot.

The downside of a smaller building is that there’s no on-site cafeteria. There are a multitude of restaurants nearby, though. I hit KFC (Famous Bowl) and Subway (Ham, American cheese, mayo, onion) pretty often. There’s also a gas station (Kwik Star) that has some legit food. Hardee’s is on the other side of town, unfortunately.

The right choice?

Did I make the right choice?

Remember how I mentioned that I was on a project that I feared would turn into a six-month wild goose chase? I’ve been in contact with friends at the previous employer, and I’ll admit that I was wrong about that. The goose chase lasted a year. Overall, people are overworked, lots of good employees are leaving, and morale is abysmal.

Are there some negative aspects of the new job? Certainly.

For the days when I’m in the office, I more than doubled my commute – it’s fifty miles. But it’s only two days most weeks, so it’s not terrible.

The dress code is business casual. I really, really like my Wranglers and Asics. This is the first time in almost twenty years that I can’t wear jeans and a random t-shirt to work. I miss this and plant the seed into the minds of execs whenever I get the chance – that a more relaxed dress code will make the company more appealing to IT professionals. Maybe something will change a few years down the road. For now, I simply realize that it’s a pretty minor complaint and that I have a good gig.

I can say, with zero hesitation, that I definitely made the right choice and have zero regrets.

Filed Under: Career

What is the New Normal for Workers?

October 12, 2021 by Kosmo 3 Comments

The following is another article by regular contributor, Kosmo.

In March of 2020, COVID-19 started having a big impact on the United States.  More than eighteen months have passed and life still isn’t back to normal.  Many of us have been vaccinated, but millions have not.  The delta variant overwhelmed hospitals in many areas, and nobody knows whether another surge will hit us during the winter months.  Many of us know somehow who has died of COVID.  Most people know someone who is suffering from “long haul” effects.  We’ve managed to keep COVID out of our home to this point.  Three of us are vaccinated, and my eleven-year-old will be getting his shot when he becomes eligible.

Out of necessity, many jobs pivoted to remote work during COVID.  This wasn’t possible for every job.  Grocery store cashiers and brain surgeons, among many others, must be on-site to do their jobs – there simply isn’t a remote option.  Many other jobs, however, can be done remotely.  In the past several months, companies have begun to implement their “new normal” plans, which has typically meant employees returning to the office in some manner.

What’s the new normal?

That’s a hard question.  Some companies developed a comprehensive strategy, while others are charting a path as they go.  Many companies see remote work as a way to reach a larger applicant pool.  This can be a big benefit if you’re seeking an employee who has skills that are hard to find in your home market.

There’s no perfect answer to the question of whether people are more or less productive at home or in the office.  I recently had a friend comment that if they were working from home, they’d be constantly distracted by the television.  After they mentioned this, I took a closer look at my desk setup.  I realized that I’d have to look over my shoulder to even see the television.  I sit facing a wall, in front of three monitors.  Staying immersed in my work is typically not a problem.  There is one caveat to that, however.  When my kids are at home, they can definitely be a distraction – especially if they are fighting.  Now that they are back in school, I’m able to focus a bit better.  Certainly, I can focus easier than I can in the office.

I’ve had three employers since college, and each of them is handling the situation a bit differently.  Note that I am in IT, so your experience may be very different.

Previous employer #1

This company is a huge financial services company that dominates its market segment.  They are hedging their bets a bit.  Some teams are almost never in the office, while others are frequently in the office.  For employees who are working almost exclusively remote, there is the expectation that they are on-site for certain activities.  Some employees moved a significant distance from their home office during COVID.  When they return to the office for these activities, it will be completely at their expense – the company will not reimburse them.  I think this company is waiting for more of the dominoes to fall into place before committing to a long-term plan.

Previous employer #2

This company is a large financial services company.  It’s fairly well known, but not as much of a household name as the previous company.  I was working here at the onset of COVID.  They were actually quicker to respond than a lot of companies.  We were told to switch to remote work 1-2 weeks before most other companies in the area.  As far as I know, there was zero spread of COVID in my large office building and there was minimal disruption to the business at hand.

This company has also had the most flexible response to remote working.  Employees are being given the option to choose fully in the office, fully remote, or hybrid.  These choices are academic for the moment, however.  Nobody is actually being allowed to work from the building until at least the end of 2021.

The one downside is that I had about $15 in my cafeteria account when COVID hit, and I don’t have any way to recoup that, unless I eat at another cafeteria that’s managed by the same group.

Current employer

This company is a mid-size company in the food industry.  Prior to COVID, the company had rarely allowed any work from home.  I negotiated a 60% work from home when I was hired, letting the hiring manager know up front that it was a deal-breaker.  It’s a hundred-mile round trip, and I had some leverage in negotiations, so I used the leverage.  I began coming into the office regularly (two days per week) about three months ago.  My 60% agreement has become the standard for my entire team.  I’m not completely sure that I’m the reason why the team is enjoying this arrangement, but some of my coworkers seem to think so.  One of my coworkers thanked me to pushing for 60%.  Most people on the team are in the office on Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday.  I opted for Tuesday and Wednesday, so that I have the ability to interact with all members of the team on a regular basis.

[Editor’s Note: Before COVID, my wife did a similar schedule and she sometimes stayed overnight at an AirBnb. It cost a little money, but it gave her back nearly four hours of her life.]

My employer is also going through a growth phase and is trying to grow the IT department.  They’re often at a bit of a disadvantage due to geography.  The company’s headquarters are in a very small city, and it’s about an hour from any of the larger cities that constitute the labor pool for the skills they are looking for.  It’s a nice enough place, but it’s not exactly a magnet for employees.  Allowing WFH flexibility was probably a necessity to pull in some of that talent – COVID simply expedited the timeline.  I’m glad to see the company become more accepting of work from home – not just because it benefits me personally, but because I do think that it will result in a stronger team in the future.

Other employers

My wife is employed in the financial services area of a large medical facility.  She went back into the office the same time I did.  The difference is that they’re now in the office 100% of the time, even though her group proved themselves to be very effective working from home.

How is your employer approaching work from home arrangements?  What is your “new normal”?

[Lazy Man here, I’ll answer first. We are still in the old normal. My wife won’t go back until at least the start of 2022. I have been working from home for more than a decade. The difference for me is that working from home doesn’t make me “cool” or “special” anymore.]

Filed Under: Career

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