Hi Leonard,
You said: "... a manager who thought if he couldn't see you, you weren't working ..." This is the government mentality I referred to earlier. Here is one other weird fact .., the per capita insanity (in Yiddish M'shugaas) rises from municipal to state/provincial to federal. (I've worked at all 3.) If anyone wants, I've got all  kinds of crazy stories to tell (just like everyone else, I'm sure).

Regarding the uncooperative colleagues, I worked at a place where the SysProg-in-chief decided that I would not be permitted to run DFSFSMSdss in TSO (to make application backups to disk), because, I might impinge on someone else's Address Space. (TSO Tape mounts were out of the question, which didn't bother me.) This  veto was after his underlings saw no issue with my request, but, had to get his "blessing". This person had no clue what Virtual Storage means, let alone its implementation.

Regards,
David

On 2023-02-20 20:08, Leonard D Woren wrote:
When I started as the primary and basically only real sysprog at a small shop almost 40 years ago, it tooks weeks to get up to speed because the junior guys there resented me being brought in to be their supervisor, and wouldn't tell me anything.  The previous lead guy was being kept on as a part-time consultant until I could get up to speed, but he was nearly useless.  "Where's the IOGEN source?"  "I don't know." Sigh.

This article  is almost 3 years old and was written when COVID-19 vaccine was just a hope, yet in my opinion it's still mostly valid:

   Never Go Back to the Office
https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fideas%2Farchive%2F2020%2F05%2Fnever-go-back-office%2F611830%2F&data=05%7C01%7C%7C2ab92f9bdf0d4e07f61c08db13a8300b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C638125385402690889%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=gYtkt8%2B2AElM3xVnuV9bp36O2Anpqa9lBlfc%2Bc%2Fskoo%3D&reserved=0

What I remember of working in an office, other than commutes being horrid resulting in people starting their workday in a bad mood, is people getting to the office, getting their coffee, standing around socializing for 15-30 minutes, and then maybe starting useful work.

The last time I worked in an office was at a small start-up for a manager who thought if he couldn't see you, you weren't working. But for some reason he didn't notice the guy without enough to do who spent a major chunk of his time transcribing books.

In lieu of having coworkers at arm's reach for helping supply information (where's the IOGEN?), now there's Jabber, or the mess called Slack, or Microsoft Teams, etc, plus WebEx, Zoom, etc.  And old-school email.


Tom Brennan wrote on 2/20/2023 8:19 AM:
In the 80's I purposely bought a house only 12 minutes away from where I planned to work until retirement.  But this is Los Angeles so that 12 minutes eventually turned into a painful 30-45 with few work-from-home options.  When I got outsourced and got a new job, I remember calling the owner of the new company asking what office I should work at and he basically replied, "What in the world are you talking about - I don't want you wasting time driving."  Now that's a modern attitude!

On 2/20/2023 7:46 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:
Yeah, I commuted half an hour one-way on the interstate for a good many years and took it for granted. I would have said it didn't cause any stress.  Then my wife talked me into buying a house in a different location, and suddenly I was commuting ten minutes by back roads...and I realized I'd been wrong, it really did make a difference.

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