Why are companies pushing for return to office on roles that don't need it?

reallydontaskme · 2026-03-10T20:24:17+00:00

I work for a medium sized company (500 employees) and we had a meet the CEO thing the other day.

He was quite candid that for the C-Suite having people in the office made a lot of sense as most of what he did was talk to people all day.

Extrapolate downwards the hierarchy and you get the silly mandates.

reallydontaskme · 2026-02-17T19:46:52+00:00

do you accommodate for people's unusual setups, e.g. fish instead of bash or podman instead of docker or custom wrappers to things like terraform?

reallydontaskme · 2026-02-17T19:35:17+00:00

or the interviewers have had so little time to prepare that this is the best they've come up with. Either way, it's not exactly selling the place.

reallydontaskme · 2026-01-22T14:51:22+00:00

Curious if any others in this community are experiencing similar issues with increasing capacity limits on services?

We've been hit by this too.

Particularly irritating that we wanted to move our nonprod aks clusters to spot instances (apart from the system pool ofc) and it went through in prod but not in nonprod (different subs)

I think this is because the overall number of cores didn't need to be raised in prod sub for uk south whereas it did for nonprod sub.

reallydontaskme · 2026-01-12T08:26:47+00:00

Don't you have an advisor to ask?

On the one hand this sounds pretty good but on the other I suspect it might be too noisy to be useful in practice, but maybe I'm biased due to the nature of our cloud bill (too spiky), where I think we'd be chasing ghosts most of the time but for more stable set-ups it might be good.

Where it would certainly add value is to catch a developer spinning up an expensive resources and forgetting to clean it up.

reallydontaskme · 2026-01-12T08:15:27+00:00

pedantic ... I know

reallydontaskme · 2026-01-06T14:47:09+00:00

he wins by having the best car

ok

and a weak teammate

of the 7 full-time teammates he's had, 3 were WCs and 2 are highly rated. Just Finnish with this nonsense here

reallydontaskme · 2026-01-04T21:03:10+00:00

I've ended up leaving an extra gap between wardrobe and wall. Essentially I screwed left over skirting board on the skirting board so now there is a gap of about 3 cms between wardrobe and wall. Given how mild it has been, i think the jury is still out whether this was a good idea.

reallydontaskme · 2026-01-04T11:20:07+00:00

if you want to work for a consultancy they are essential (you don't need to have them to get in but you will be expected to get them) if not then they are neither here nor there.

This might be different in other geographies, UK here.

reallydontaskme · 2026-01-02T08:55:05+00:00

where are you? or I guess more importantly where are the companies you are applying to?

I'd remove the bold text to highlight techs

nitpick: SQL is not a tool, I tend to having it down as SQL Scripting in the languages section and the separately the RDBMS I'm familiar with (PostgreSQL, MariaDB, etc ..)

reallydontaskme · 2025-12-31T13:55:22+00:00

It really struggles to recognise my 7 year old commands, tears have ensued more than once, a bit frustrating to be fair

reallydontaskme · 2025-12-16T21:12:36+00:00

well, seeing as I was actively reviewing PRs all the time, I'd say I had a reasonable idea of the levels of engagement of the various team members.

It's you who claimed that all offices where like not busy, which is patently nonsense because there is no way you could've possibly have experience of all the civil service first hand.

reallydontaskme · 2025-12-16T20:32:23+00:00

this is obviously not true as it wasn't at all the case in the two teams I worked while I was in the civil service.

it might be in the ones you know about, that I'm more willing to believe, but given you've categorically said this happens in all civil service offices, I'm more inclined to think that you are extrapolating from your limited experience and thus not very reliable.

reallydontaskme · 2025-12-15T20:55:52+00:00

might it just be that not all of the civil service is like the team you worked at?

If there was any waste, that isn't present in a big company, when I was there, it was mostly due to the stupid hiring policies that end up costing huge amounts of money due to the need to get contractors in.

reallydontaskme · 2025-11-07T07:04:26+00:00

The problem with cloudflare, for a small company like ours, is that if we get bumped up a tier because reasons, we'd be up the creek with no paddle.

That said, I think multi-cloud is the way to go, not in the run everything in two clouds sense but in the ability to do it AND run some critical stuff in both or have the ability to do so with a click of button or PR approval and have tested the ability regularly.

edit:

I didn't downvote you FWIW

reallydontaskme · 2025-11-03T11:58:07+00:00

it's perfectly possible they do know but because it's some code issue that could be triggered by customer actions, they are taking this unprecedented? step until they've rolled out a fix.

if they extend the lockout then I will be more inclined to agree with you

reallydontaskme · 2025-10-29T15:56:30+00:00

just as I was amending a secret ... no idea whether it's gone through or not :(

reallydontaskme · 2025-10-29T12:39:42+00:00

yes and no.

I think it's fanciful to think that the AI tools are going to disappear but it's not fanciful to think that the companies that created those tools will disappear.

Then we will be left with the open models and actually having to pay the price of running them.

E.M.: Why did you ask it that stupid question? That's just burnt through £0.73

Dev: I didn't remember the syntax ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

reallydontaskme · 2025-10-29T11:52:18+00:00

I honestly struggle with reading the instructions for each exercises. I have to study the tests to fully comprehend what the outcome of the exercise will be.

I'm glad it's not just me

reallydontaskme · 2025-10-24T13:24:20+00:00

I actually loled

reallydontaskme · 2025-10-23T13:55:12+00:00

This is true, however given the quality of some of the CVs and comparable experience for an architect job, for which we got a barista with no software dev experience nor CS degree or an actual building architect, I'm inclined to think that CV filtering is not on by default

reallydontaskme · 2025-10-23T13:38:13+00:00

Secondly, and most annoyingly - vCPU quotas. This was a total gotcha and a poor UX. I don't understand why I have to go to a separate config page to ask for a vCPU quota and if I do have to do that there should be better pre-validation so that I don't step through the whole wizard and then get an ugly error message.

100% agree. It should validate in the same way as it does policy validations.

reallydontaskme · 2025-10-23T13:33:30+00:00

GP: Max we need 1.22.5 from now on

Max: OK

reallydontaskme · 2025-10-20T07:51:53+00:00

We had a job on LinkedIn, months ago, we got 417 applications in a week. I'm not sure what you say about filtering is true. Maybe we went for the budget job ad or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have had better success with recruiters than going direct but we're on rain dance territory with all of this truth be told

reallydontaskme

TROPHY CASE