[REPOST]
As part of the plan to return to office post covid, my company has done a lot of re-designating of who can permanently work from home, who can hybrid, etc. I really wanted to work from home full time. I hate the office with a burning passion - itās distracting, itās a long commute, thereās no benefit to being there, so on and so forth. Iād just rather be at home.
Well when we thought May was going to be go back to office time they started giving out the new designations. I got designated as in office full time. It made no sense to me. I work on a team of 8 people and each of us is in a different office somewhere in the country. Iāve literally never been to an in person meeting or needed to do in person work in 3 years at this company. Every single other person on my team got designated to work from home. So I brought it up with my boss and asked to work from home. When I started at this company and lived elsewhere I got to work from home for 4 months before I moved and the past 14 months during covid have been at home, so 18/36 months at the company have been WFH. What I was told is that I go idle too often in chat to trust to work from home.
Basically we have a company wide IM system that shows you as available, idle, or in a meeting. If you donāt touch your keyboard for 5 minutes you show as idle. So theyāve decided to use this as a measure for who is working and who isnāt. The thing is, like many people in many types of jobs, I donāt have shit to do for a full 8 hours every single day. The amount of work I have to do on a typical day takes 3-5 hours of actual attention. There simply isnāt something to do ALL the time. My performance numbers actually went up working from home, by all objective KPI numbers Iām a better worker at home. In fact, in the KPIs that I donāt flat out lead the team in, I come in second. There isnāt work to do that Iām neglecting or procrastinating, when something comes up I simply do it until itās done or until I canāt do anymore due to waiting on someone else then stop. And Iāve done that method long enough that my work queue stays empty because I worked to get my queue down to the point where when something comes up I can immediately address it and be done with it. But because I have other ways to spend my time in down time instead of messing around online at my cube pretending to be working meaning I show idle more often, Iām a worse worker apparently. I was told if it werenāt for that they would let me work at home.
So I wrote a 6 line powershell script that virtually inputs the period key every 4 minutes that starts running every day at 8am and stops at 5pm. So now I literally never go idle. I do the same amount of work and still read books, watch tv, and play video games on the side. But I have a shiny green check next to my name all day.
Because of covid complications they eventually said no going back until after labor day. I just had a meeting with my boss and he said over this time theyāve noticed I go idle a lot less than I used to so theyāre changing my designation to work from home, all because of a little icon in some software. This concludes my TED talk on why low to middle level managers are the dumbest, most useless do-nothing positions in all of corporate America
EDIT: I do not need to be told to buy a mouse jiggler for the 30th time. Iām aware of what they are. This cost me no money and achieves the same thing. Why would I pay to achieve an effect Iāve already achieved for free?
EDIT 2: A lot of people are understandably asking for the script:
$dummyshell = New-Object -com "Wscript.shell"
$dummyshell.sendkeys(".")
Thatās the backbone of the whole thing. Thereās different ways to implement it with for loops or scheduled tasks or whatever, that parts up to you, but thatās all the powershell needs at itās core to accomplish this. A lot of people have pointed out that sending Insert or F13 instead of period would be better so change that up if you want.
To all the people commenting that Iām a shitty employee and obviously trying to insult me over it: I wish I could make you feel just how little I care. To all the people implying a work day isnāt valid if you arenāt at 100% capacity from 8 - 5, keep it up, you truly are an ideal employeeā¦to them. Enjoy the taste of leather, bootlickers
Edit 3: Some of yāall would be pissed as fuck if I explained the concept of firefighters to you
Yeah, I think part of the āback to the officeā push is coming from companies that arenāt smart enough to objectively measure productivity. That, or theyāre using āreturn to officeā as a way to pressure certain employees into quitting (which seems to be the case here).
Iāve heard that - in some cases, at least - its about management being afraid theyāll be deemed worthless when they canāt walk from cube to cube to check on people as if theyāre cracking the whip. Which is silly, to be honest - thereās a place and function for managers and they donāt have to be breathing down your neck in person to fulfill those functions.
To add to what @_bug0ut said, some managers are just on a power trip, and they canāt be the high school bully if youāre not around. Most of my department is 100% on site reporting rather than meeting daily in the office every morning. The only time they ever make someone report to the office is when they want to keep an eye on them and ādisciplineā them.
My boss was all 100% for stay WFH. All of us are in different countries so it would literally affect 5 people total. Nope. They had a big higher ups meeting with just him and suddenly he has no good arguments for it but he is 100% for āwe will all go back to the officeā. I have a few guesses as to why he changed his mind and most of them start with: āThey told you that if we didnāt go back they didnāt need you anymore.ā