Yep.

thanks Google 😂 Think the very largest of those carries 9 passengers?

Plenty of people and companies need to meet. In person. Plenty of companies have regional sites.

There are countless thousands of jobs like that where staff and customers need to be in one place. Where companies need to work together on a project by being in the same room. Where specialist equipment is used.

Nonsense. You are confusing “want” with “need”.

If surgeons can perform operations remotely via the internet, then pretty much anything is possible. People just have to WANT to do it.

Nonsense. You are confusing “want” with “need”.

I think some companies/industries are better than others at this.

I used to work in TV production and some days you just wondered why you bothered, I’d drive to Manchester from London to measure the internal dimensions of a locker for fitting some kit. Now to be fair it was a good job I did as whoever previously measured it for us had cocked up, but that was still a 300 mile round trip that really didn’t need to be made. But then they’d setup a production team which was 90% locally recruited for the job, whereas previously they’d have made everyone commute from London.

I now work in engineering and can pretty much seamlessly work with the office on the other side of the world, although there is a bit of a threshold whereby sometimes setting up the work is more faff than just doing it yourself but that’s only for a small proportion (e.g. I can delegate 40 hours of work to them easily, then there’ll be a 5 minute job that takes almost as long top setup). Ironically my employer doesn’t allow working from home which means there’s an office of ~1500 people commuting from as far afield as London, Bristol, Birmingham and Kent!

It makes good business sense too. If your business completely relies on one person flying around the UK because you’ve not got that knowledge written down or those skills trained into someone else then you’re your own worst enemy. If that (god forbid) plane crashed you’d be stuffed, and if your not, then why did they need to be on the plane if someone else could have done it?

Ironically my employer doesn’t allow working from home

why? do you work for MI5?! Or is it just the way it’s always been done, and no-one has the guts to demand a change?

Seems to me what with this particular issue and the Covid19 that employers and organisations have a review of employer/employee relationship.

Plenty of work can be done from home with a laptop and some form of connection. Being in the office 5days a week is archaic and totally unnecessary burden on employee/employer.

Heres to the 20thC (since I’ve been able to work remotely since the last decade…

why? do you work for MI5?! Or is it just the way it’s always been done, and no-one has the guts to demand a change?

Basically the latter. I think maybe 10 years ago you could have argued that laptops weren’t upto the task.

And there’s a lot of walking over to peoples desks with drawings to try and resolve stuff. I don’t think the way we work would really translate very well into working from home. But equally I think they could probably be more efficient if we could work across multiple projects from one PC at home rather than creating and disbanding project teams (~200 people) every ~8 months.

And a lack of investment, last time the office was (unofficially*) closed due to snow the systems all crashed when just the managers tried to login remotely, let alone the minions.

*no one could get in, but it was nominally open so you had to take holiday

Nonsense. You are confusing “want” with “need”.

I spent 10 years doing chemical engineering. Last time I checked, my house was not equipped with fume cupboards, hazardous waste disposal facilities and liquid nitrogen.

If the drivers delivering any of our raw materials had decided to work from home, that would also have been rather problematic.

There are plenty of jobs where people simply have to be there. I’m sitting in a cafe on my lunch break, I’d be rather upset if the chef was talking to me via Skype telling me to just prepare the food myself.

There are plenty of jobs where people simply have to be there. I’m sitting in a cafe on my lunch break, I’d be rather upset if the chef was talking to me via Skype telling me to just prepare the food myself.

without accusing you of being deliberately obtuse, do you think he live might live locally and commute a sensible, environmentally considerate distance? Or is he travelling 400km via plane everyday?

Ironically my employer doesn’t allow working from home

Nor does mine.

Even if I had a job that allowed me to work from home, my natural laziness would cause serious problems before long.

There are plenty of jobs where people simply have to be there.

This is obvious, but equally there are plenty of jobs where people simply DO NOT have to be there.

And I’d guess most of the FlyBe regulars aren’t commuting to a regular work place, they are probably people like me who get posted to various places a few months or even a year or two at a time.

It makes good business sense too. If your business completely relies on one person flying around the UK because you’ve not got that knowledge written down or those skills trained into someone else then you’re your own worst enemy.

It’s not quite that simple. If you have enough work for one person in the whole UK and they travel around, it’s not really feasible to have 6 people based in Edinburgh, London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle all doing nothing 1/6 of the time.

If you have enough work for one person in the whole UK and they travel around, it’s not really feasible to have 6 people based in Edinburgh, London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle all doing nothing 1/6 of the time.

that misses the point that was being made though. Do businesses seriously operate like that, with zero redundancy for key roles? What if something happens to this one person, he gets corona virus or something? Otherwise it’s a purely hypothetical argument.

Do businesses seriously operate like that

Yes. Lots of them.

Do businesses seriously operate like that, with zero redundancy for key roles?

Yes. Well, some with zero redundancy, and others with only a small amount.

My previous role was pretty specialised. We had a fairly small number of core customers, spread about all over the UK and consequently a small number of resources – for most of my time there there were three of us. Sometimes we’d be on the bench for a few months at a time, other times we’d have to turn away a job or two. The work was intermittent, so if we staffed for the peaks we’d have loads of people idle for most of the quiet times, which was not viable.

The jobs we couldn’t do went to business partners who were in a similar position. And you need continuity in jobs, so you could end up with person A travelling from city X to city Y each week, and person B travelling from city Y to city X each week. But that’s how the businesses needed us to operate. And in this business, IT services, it’s normal.

without accusing you of being deliberately obtuse, do you think he live might live locally and commute a sensible, environmentally considerate distance? Or is he travelling 400km via plane everyday?

Yeah I’d split the travelling by plane and the job to just point out that there are plenty of jobs that rely on people being there in person.

Appreciate that the chef in my local cafe is probably not flying to work each day!

The times I’ve used Flybe for domestic flights, it’s been conferences, interviews, events etc that could not be done remotely due to the practical nature of it. But it’s not something I’ve had to do regularly.

Looked at viability of flying to London when one of our customers there was contemplating buying a highly integrated, highly automated piece of machinery from us that requires specialist support, hands on, certainly early on in its life until staff there got trained. Would have worked ok for staying up there for a good chunk of the week. You wouldn’t want to do it by design, but as there’s two of us on the country and probably 5 or 6 worldwide with the skills and experience to do it…

Probably said this before, but for many years I worked for a company that was one of the UK’s leading suppliers of remote access solutions. I was one of the design and pre-sales people, and spoke to a lot of customers about these products. Big successes were things like entire NHS procurement arms, global mega-corps, etc. They worked well.

What was interesting was that the sales pitches were just as the above: reduce your emissions, have services in place for site loss contingency, and so on. However! internally, we were heavily scrutinised in its use. Eventually, HR decreed that we could use it 1 day per week, agreed in advance and logged on the HR system, and it couldn’t be the same day weekly.

And then I began to ask the question of those we’d sold it to- what’s your uptake been like? How was the reception internally? And then you see that most of those orgs also struggled with the basic problem of employee trust.

I suppose all I’m saying is that the technical solutions exist for many to do this already, and are getting to the very cheap stage. Deploying these would boost the economy, reduce unnecessary travel and emissions, possibly improve work life balance and productivity, but….many employers are wedded to a presentee culture and can’t trust those they hire.

If there’s one good thing about coronavirus, its that I’m hoping that it will finally get employers to embrace this change and grow up a bit about their trust issues, and also that govt will see that they have to step in and offer some encouragement and possibly even some legislation to improve uptake.

Big aside- in some ways, Jeremy Corbyn had the right idea about publicly-owned high-speed internet to the home (lets not use the broadband term here in the interests of accuracy). It needs to be fully regulated and assisted with provision by government. We don’t need more highways, we need more HSI. (Its moving that way anyway, hence why I left the telco job who provided the solutions I mentioned late last year. But not quickly enough)

I’m just keeping an eye on share prices, TUI, IAG, Easyjet and Ryanair who all seemed to be starting to bounce back slightly after Corvid-19 announcements last week all went down by varying degrees this morning.

worth buying one or the other while they’re down?

BA have just fired up their ‘Business Response Scheme’ (as they did just after 9/11) where people can go part-time or take unpaid leave for a year etc. to cut the bills down. They’ve also just announced volutary redundancy (certainly in their IT section at least) so I’m not sure IAG shares are the ones to grab at the moment (and BA are/were the profitable part of IAG, being propping Iberia et al up for years).

Well, there’s no VR/Part Time for the pilots.

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What do we reckon? Will I get my money back if I used PayPal?

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Just in case anyone was losing sleep over my predicament, or are in a similar one themselves, I got confirmation of my refund today.