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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • On checking: You’re correct that the royal mail and the post office are separate organisations. They split in 2012. At the time of the majority of the active development of the horizon scandal, they were the same organisation however.

    I would still want to apply the same test - not just demonstrating a notional or paper loss, but that something has actually been stolen and acquired by some other party. This was one of the signal failures with the horizon scandal: that it was simply a bookkeeping error and they were unable to show beyond that any theft or loss on their part or gain by another party.





  • The thing is the VS code handles everything (with extensions). If I want to use pandoc, or CSV to markdown table, python linting, Go, whatever, there’s extensions that can handle all of these equally well and consistently, for example format on save.

    If I want to use jetbrains then the pycharm for python, intelliJ for Java, Goland for golang… Then there’s licencing depending on whether I’m using a personal licence or corporate laptop, whether I have to get a licence from my employer etc.

    For me it’s not so much that it’s so good, but that it works with everything in a consistent and obvious way plus I can install it on any machine I might be using.









  • The example of Amazon’s mandated RTO has been much discussed elsewhere as a notable exception to that company’s normally data-driven approach. As I saw commented elsewhere:

    “If we have data to show that mandated RTO is more productive then let’s share and act on that. If we’re going with opinions then let’s use mine”

    The elephant in the room here is that ‘the data’ doesn’t exist, and for good reason: ‘Productivity’ is subjective in most jobs to begin with, and even where it isn’t Remote vs Office is not a significant variable.

    Consider some ‘traditional’ proxy measures for productivity- punctuality and attendance. It’s pretty clear that if someone isn’t at work then they aren’t productive and many employers will put employees through formal processes to dismissal in response. Why don’t we see this being highlighted with remote work? Should be easy and obvious to measure and demonstrate right? Could it be that these things improve with remote work?

    Consider also the pandemic impact on remote work and that we are talking about a return. It’s clear that many organisations could manage perfectly well, as they themselves have proved.



  • Article:

    fortune.com

    Most bosses regret how they mandated workers return to the office. They blamed it on not having enough data

    Jane Thier 5–6 minutes

    Why aren’t workers particularly appreciating—much less adhering to—return-to-office mandates? Probably because adults don’t like being ordered around.

    “People do want structure, and people like boundaries,” former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell last year. “But they don’t like to be told what to do, so I think the secret is to not make them feel like their autonomy is being denied or that their ideas aren’t important, while still giving some structure.”

    If only managers had taken the hint. Four in five (80%) of bosses told workplace software firm Envoy that had they had a better grasp on their workplace data, they would have taken a starkly different approach to their return-to-office plans. The problem, they said: They didn’t have access to data that would help them make their decision. In a white paper report, Envoy surveyed 1,156 U.S.-based executives and workplace managers whose employees operate on some form of hybrid schedule.

    Over half (54%) of managers told Envoy they’ve had to forgo making a critical decision about the workplace because they lacked the requisite data to support it. Without that data, nearly a quarter of them admit to making decisions based on “gut instinct,” which naturally leads to resentment and disappointment. Fifty-seven percent of bosses said if they had better access to data, they could better measure the success of their in-office policies.

    One such example is Amazon, whose RTO plan was admittedly prompted by the feelings of senior leadership, not hard data. “It’s time to disagree and commit. We’re here, we’re back—it’s working,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, reportedly said of in-person work. “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”

    It’s difficult to ascertain just how effective in-person days are compared to at-home days, especially when actual productivity could vary based on any number of factors not necessarily related to location. It’s even harder for companies who operate on an ad hoc basis, letting individual teams decide for themselves when to come in. Though experts speak highly of this kind of “organized hybrid,” it can be difficult to assess its effectiveness at a company level. “With so much variability, it’s difficult to know how to improve efficiency in order to save critical budget,” Brooks Gooding, a workplace experience program manager at a software firm called Braze, said in the report.

    Braze operates on a hybrid plan with little consistency in attendance rates, which, as Envoy wrote, can make it “impossible for workplace managers to know how many people are on-site on any given day, and how to best allocate space and resources across the organization.” The RTO mismatch

    Envoy’s data lays bare a fundamental mismatch that’s endured since the earliest days of the pandemic: Most bosses would rather have their workers where they can see them. Most workers demand a bit more latitude than that.

    Granted, there are solid arguments for both time spent in the office and time spent on the couch. On one hand, remote work is proven to be between 10% and 20% less productive and can weaken morale and bonding, especially among younger workers and new workforce entrants. But people still overwhelmingly prefer at least a few days per week at home, arguing that physical office presence is more trouble than it’s worth and is rarely necessary to complete a task.

    Ideally, a mix of both options—at the workers’ discretion—should fix the problem. Workers are flocking to jobs with flexibility, which has quickly become a must-have for most white-collar industries rather than a nice-to-have.

    But many bosses are getting impatient, and many are using the approaching Labor Day holiday as an occasion to officially put “work from anywhere” policies to bed, whether workers like it or not. Alongside the usual suspects (like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs), those even include formerly quite lenient companies, like Meta, Google, and Salesforce.

    Despite the fact that remote workers make more money and have fewer expenses, lower stress levels, and more time for family and errands, the office isn’t likely to disappear. In fact, workers can even be excited by the prospect—if they think it’s their idea. Data from Unispace found that a third of workers felt “happy, motivated, and excited” about an office return, but felt none of those things when the return was mandated.

    As Atlassian’s Annie Dean put it, productivity, innovation, and creativity are “how-to-work problems, not where-to-work problems,” which will be solved only by an overhaul of how we understand work.

    “This is a watershed moment of innovation of how work gets done,” Dean told Fortune, “but we’re still talking about the f–king watercooler.”

    Subscribe to Well Adjusted, our newsletter full of simple strategies to work smarter and live better, from the Fortune Well team. Sign up today.



  • What’s difficult?

    So I’m on both and I work in tech. I’m technically capable, e.g. I verified my Mastodon account with my website. Neither Mastodon not Lemmy is anywhere near ready for non technical users.

    Mastodon

    Hell of a job picking an instance. Confusing to log in because I have to remember the instance not the service. Instance is all local stuff, global stuff is by default garbage.

    I signed up to Mastodon a few months back. Most of the people I followed on Twitter didn’t. Not surprising really given how confusing and complicated it is. I chose a server because someone I followed recommended it. I found most people posting less and less frequently, apart from the instance admin, they seemed to post books worth every singled day and I had to mute them. Then it got really quiet and I saw something about the server admin stepping down. At which point I learned that due to some ridiculous drama involving something the admin of my mastodon instance apparently said that some other instance admin didn’t like, the whole instance/domain was ‘silenced’. In other words ‘the hell with you’ to me because of something I wasn’t even aware of, let alone involved with. Absolutely childish that something like that can even happen, and even better, it seems people often can’t figure out how to make it 'un-happen’.

    None of this covers mobile app issues

    At this point mastodon has failed as an alternative to Twitter for me. There’s about 3 non-twitter-repost-bot posters left in my feed, all either second rate or also posting the same on twitter.

    Lemmy

    A bit better than Mastodon but comparable issues with picking an instance. Dscoverability is slightly better because I can search for topics. I’ve had to create a login on a second instance because my first pick, and then my second pick, both:

    • De-Federated a number of other instances
    • Were de-federated but a number of other instances
    • Have been suffering repeated uptime issues due to DDOS

    So now I’m on my 3rd Lemmy login and I spent half an hour yesterday using someone’s python script to back up my subs and resubscribe with my next account…

    None of this covers mobile app issues

    Overall

    It’s close, really close, and it could work but it’s tough on Lemmy and missing on Mastodon