717 - WFH feat. Libby Watson (3/24/23)

I wish I did not agree with you. The best thing about Trump was the dingdong was all talk. Clinton knew how to get authentic evil done.

Jim McKenna

Bill Fucking Clinton. He's worse than Trump in all points that matter.

Khemith

The cruelty is the point with Medicaid repossessions. It’s hard to get poor workers to hate programs that care for them but a lengthy means test and repo-ing what little wealth grandma might have — that will cause widespread resentment.

David Peters

I must say I fall into the sliver of people who has an office job, I have been working from home since COVID (hybrid schedule for a while now), but my job is 100% pivotal to the economy, AND I still have to actually work hard as fuck for 8 hours a day, AND I get paid like shit. All of the stigma of the WFH desk jockey with 0 of the benefits. Absolutely cucked. Been trying to find a better job for years now. Been to dozens of interviews and, surprise surprise, all of these people who are complaining that they're short staffed because nobody wants to work anymore are absolutely refusing to LET anyone work anymore. Every hiring manager's job for the last two years has been to interview as many people as possible and make absolutely sure that they never fill a single open position to give as many people interview-induced schizophrenia as possible.

MinkL0af

A little late to listening to this, but great episode. There were parts of working from home I didn’t like, but last week I totaled my car because I fell asleep on the Long Island Expressway driving home from work - really would’ve loved a day at home then!

KyleMSherry

big shoutouts to side pocket. fun fact: the sequel for the sega saturn was adapted in the US as "minnesota fats, pool legend" and has some of the funniest, most amazingly 90s horrible FMV scenes in any video game

A M

💃 https://youtu.be/LQaWbo0DJBU

Gumbo Pie

🤷

Gumbo Pie

libby's Woke from Home was actually a pretty awesome quick joke

hotspur

Just here to show love to “woke from home”, 10/10 line.

Ryan

Prick for the win 🏆 👏

justDave

And if I’m an independent physician (look up what it means to practice not inside a monopolistic hospital system before you answer)? Pure ignorance on your part.

Prick Commenter

I guarantee your essential skill, and the identity you gain from it, will be as fleeting as a vapor in the reality in which the world is faced.

CE

autistic man yells at cloud

Percle

It’s kind of a blur but i swear i used to work ~8hrs a day at the office and then drive home, mostly disconnected until the next business day. I now work ~12hrs a day from home, and permanently connected to incoming requests/notifications. WFH worked for me!

m@tt

I was laid off from a corporate job where it was hard to legitimately say I did more than three to four hours of actual work in a day. Now I work from home for a company that outsources the exact work I was doing at the other job and I absolutely work seven to eight hours a day if not more. Is any of it "necessary" or "meaningful", who the fuck knows?

DW Lynch

Had to turn this one off (second part) when you started saying "well we don't work at work anyways". Speak for yourself. At times, I really do hope ChatGPT steals the jobs of everyone mentioned in the article. Learn an essential job if you want to be essential, and stop crying you have to drive to your watercooler time wasting job.

Gumbo Pie

I was cracking up at how sinister they were making it sound, but if you didn’t use it and we’re just on the outside looking in I can see their characterization of it so clearly 🤣

Emily Richardson

I wish I did not know what Salesforce is

Mike B

Love that Libby digging some seriously esoteric shit on snes virtual console. Side Pocket is a glorious time capsule indeed.

Padjoe

The analogies from Will on WFH working in an office is a religious ritual, employers see themselves as “benevolent parents” giving their “children” (an allowance - i.e. a salary- were so spot on. At the end of the day, these CEOs are grasping at straws to figure out how to rationalize getting people back into an office; and the tautology becomes so evident with the double-sided nature of arguments like Zuck’s: people are productive in-person, but let’s build a meta verse! I think corporations are desperately trying to justify commercial real estate leases, despite all the talk about “collaboration” and “creativity” being lost. And most people can see right through the facade.

Mark Kobzik

ehh it’s basically just a digital rolodex

chronye

My best estimate is that 70-90% of all office jobs are just producing and looking at powerpoint presentations (lovingly called “decks” by those in the industry).

Ryan O. Smith

SalesForce at least makes a regular product businesses actually need and have been for a long time. More like an Intuit. But who knows if or when they’ll diversify into the metaverse or crypto bucks

(Once again credit to Brace and Liz for approximately 60% of my internal sound board.)

Rohmer Simpson

I always laugh when I hear Matt say something for the first time, like 30 minutes into the episode lol.

Terrance McDonald

The thing I keep returning to again and again is that capitalism, in spirit and letter, only makes sense if you are completely insane. Competition is good, huh? Problem solving? Keeping a cool head under pressure? *employees want higher wages and better benefits and improved workplace conditions* oh noooo my tummy hurts oooooo please won’t anyone think of the C-suiters?

Rohmer Simpson

Good episode - Libbys reporting is awesome. Long-term care - not so much. My godmother is in a long-term boarding care facility after a stroke here in LA. It charges $300 a day for her room plus $400-500 more for her to have a caregiver who helps her do basic things like move to a chair or go to the bathroom... Not a nurse mind you. A lot of these people don't really seem to have the experience they need to do this job. Even if you were a person who grew up in the time where a two-story house in LA cost $25,000 instead of $2 million dollars and you managed to live frugally and save enough to retire (she was a teacher) they will claw any savings you had back from you the second you get sick. When I heard the number all I could think of was the fact that this is the cost of a luxury hotel in a lot of places that aren't LA. She couldn't have afforded it when she was working...let alone in retirement. Just wait until it's people our age who could never afford the house to begin with :(

Michelle B

As the Epstein JPMorgan documents are demonstrating, Jamie Dimon definitely knows what "works for kids"

Michael S. Judge

Salesforce is, in practice, a scaffold onto which you can drape any organization which otherwise would have trouble appearing to do or produce anything of value. Originally it was just a way to optimize sales processes by, like, tracking if your sales team was actually doing anything ever day, which is the state of being most despised by the salesperson. Over time SFDC (the hip industry name for it) absorbed more and more business-service features until it, itself, became a byzantine system in which you needed specific expertise - and so it spawned a sprawling secondary market of experts, expert trainers, middleware, addons, seminars, competitors, and support staff. So much of software-as-a-service platforms, SFDC above them all, is providing a narrative and almost game-like structure to justify the existence of bullshit jobs. What do you tell you boss you do all day as a marketer? Why, SFDC has these graphs of your Lead-Gen stats and Customer Funnel to show them! Why aren't your support team getting good reviews? Hire an analyst to set up new workflows in Salesforce and connect it to a bunch of industry-standard (AKA: Entrail reading) KPIs! In my opinion SFDC became leviathan by (after its initial success as a sales management tool) providing a systematic framework to justify the existing and growing market of fake/email jobs. It's the nexus of a massive network of Business-To-Business service platforms, all of which use SFDC themselves and try to sell their services to one another. They symbiotically connect with tech money and finance service groups, rent commercial property, and generally just move the money around in the ways that keep society limping along - all while keeping the university-educated employed at something vaguely professional. The bubble will pop eventually, probably when the banks fall over again. Don't know why I wrote all this, but I've done it now so I sure am going to hit Post. I know all this because I work for one of SFDC's various sub-remoras.

UltraCoil