Lately, there has been some fuss about people working from home (as opposed to "working from home," which I'll get to in a moment). Especially within the ranks of Federal employees.
A report came out, not too long ago, about the large quantity of office space in Federal buildings which is either not occupied at all, or under-occupied. People (think taxpayers) want to know where are all those people. Who's minding the store?
Well, in many cases, they're working from home. That is, they are not spending one to two hours a day commuting to DC, putting in an eight to twelve hour day (don't laugh, some do), then commuting back to their homes, again one to two hours. I might be a bit conservative on those numbers. Ask anyone who has driven in the DC area in rush hour. Or, more accurately, has sat in their cars praying that traffic will start moving, maybe even get close to the speed limit.
Been there, done that, no fun.
So the new administration wants Federal employees back in their offices. Some people cheer this, some do not, particularly those who have to go back to that daily commute.
Of course, another aspect to all this is trimming the size of the Federal government, which most will admit suffers from a certain amount of bloat. (We can disagree on the amount of bloat, but a fit and trim institution it is not.)
Once upon a time Your Humble Scribe was told, not asked mind you, to work from home. It was during the late "pandemic" of 2020. Fortunately I was what you'd call "between assignments." Which means I was getting paid to do nothing, other than hold myself in readiness should an assignment present itself (which it did eventually).
So every morning I'd get up at a reasonable time (usually eight-ish), fire up the computers (work and personal), check for any new emails (such as one saying "come to the office, you have an assignment"), and then head downstairs to brew up some coffee.
With coffee in hand, I would head aloft and sit down in front of my two computers, one work, one personal, and go through the "morning mail" as Buck was wont to call it.
Eventually I would take the opportunity to shower and shave and put on actual clothing (as opposed to sweats) so that should the call come, I'd be ready. If nothing new was in the offing, I'd head back downstairs and have some food.
Each day would pass with me sitting at the computers, monitoring the work emails, and futzing around on my personal computer. This lasted for a few months until the call came down -
"Sarge, we've got an assignment for you."
"Ah okay, that's awesome. When do I start?"
"Is Monday too soon?"
At this point I'm thinking that as I've been doing nothing for a few months, what could possibly prevent me from starting the new assignment immediately?
I mean do I answer with, "Oooh, that'll be tight, I'm not finished doing nothing yet. Monday is a little soon."
Nope, my answer was, "See you Monday!"
"Uh, you will have to come back to the office."
"I view that as a feature, not a bug. I'll be back in the lab on Monday."
And I went back, with a song in my heart and the wind in what's left of my hair. For you see, I hated working from home. It was stressful, it felt like work had invaded my beloved computer room. I believe fully in the separation of work and home.
That being said, I'm not against folks working from home, if they can still be productive.
I knew a number of folks at the old gig who "worked from home" (there's those quotes again). From what I observed, these folks spent the entire day phoning into (or perhaps Zooming into is more accurate) meetings. All day.
Were they a lead on the project these meetings were for? Sometimes, often they were not, somehow they had found the magic job where you could pretend to be important all day long without actually contributing a damned thing.
OTOH, there were people who were in those meetings for whom working from home (notice, no quotes) worked out well. They were able to contribute in a meaningful way and not have to be physically in the building. They would come in as needed and things worked well, for the company and for them. A hybrid situation if you will (some days at home, some days in the office).
There is a perception, among far too many people, that people who work from home are never productive and are just scamming their employer. All of them. Well, it ain't the case, some are productive, many probably in fact. But you know the old saying, "one bad apple spoils the bunch."
So the fact that some are playing the system leads to the perception that all are playing the system. When in fact it really means most managers do not have a handle on what their people are doing. In twenty-five years at my civilian gig I knew of three, maybe four, managers who would actually get off their asses and go to where their people were working to see what they were doing. The rest were of the "Send me your status report at the end of the week" type. Data would be entered in a spreadsheet and the "status" would be reported up the line as gospel.
Sigh.
Most of my work was classified, so I had to be in the lab. That applies to 99.99999% of all the people working on classified systems. (That 0.00001% consists of the one manager who just tracks status and budget, they don't need to actually see the system, just track that the numbers all line up. They exist and they are important.)
Am I exultant that the new administration is forcing people to go back to their offices?
No, I am not. A case by case assessment by competent management could be done to determine who should be in the office and who can work from home.
But this is the Federal government, competent managers are not that prevalent. Just look at how things have been for the past few decades. Does that look like someone with a brain is actually running things?
I think not.
Yes, the wheat needs to be separated from the chaff. Is this the way to do that (blanket ordering everybody back to work)? Maybe not.
But if it works, those who benefit from the ability to work from home will be able to return to that, the scammers will move on (hopefully), and things will be right as rain.
And if you believe that ...
I have this bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.
