Nothing is requiring employees to be in the office five days a week
CEO Carl Pei says remote work “is not compatible” with the company.
Ngl, that's a genius headline
“this is a company for grown ups.”
That's too bad. I was thinking of getting their phone when I needed a new one, I guess I'll just add them to my mental list of companies to avoid.
I’m a grown up. I’ve been remote for a decade. I’m pretty successful too.
Right? Imagine thinking that working in a cubicle is something to aspire to as a "grown up." Fuck that. I'll continue working from home, like an adult, thanks.
goddamn i read parts of the article trying to figure out which company... Im not a marketing guy, but nobody can tell me that "nothing" is marketable brand.
Allow me to introduce you to their main competitor, elon musk.
Oh, I don't mean competitor in the business market. I mean their main competitor for worlds least marketable brand identity.
He took twitter, which had it's own global brand awareness, and blundered it so bad that every media company refers to it as "X (formerly twitter)" because they know that if they had just put X, nobody would know what the hell they were talking about.
And his other company is literally named "The Boring Company". Where I assume they make disease, and murderous robots that are somehow racist.
Clearly it's not a company for grown ups because you think they're all children that won't play together unless you cram them into a classroom and tell them, "Make nice."
Right? Grown ups can be trusted to get their work done without someone watching them all the time. It's small children who need constant supervision.
I guess I'll just add them to my mental list of companies to avoid.
😆 mental ?! I already have my list in my browser bookmarks
It baffles me because in many of the quotes they are clearly trying to be understanding and respectful toward those who disagree with this, but then they come out and call them children
Ironically, that’s a really childish thing to do.
“this is a company for grown ups.”
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. – C.S. Lewis
If only most CEO's knew how to read. smh
Don't I have one and it's the only Android device I've owned that crashes and reboots almost daily. I can't recall any other device ever doing it actually.
This company's all about the next gimmick and couldn't care less about actually making decent phones.
Part of it is literally named teenage engineering! The division working on the earbuds.
Teenage Engineering is a hardware design firm that Nothing contracts with for hardware design. They aren't a division of Nothing and they don't work on just earbuds.
Teenage engineering partnered with Nothing. That isn’t the same thing.
"Remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed,” Pei said in the email, telling employees who are worried about flexibility that “this is a company for grown ups.”
Sounds like he actually means it's a company for exploitable young people and socopathic assholes. Grown-ups have other responsibilities and don't want work to commandeer their whole lives.
"This company is for grown ups. Now sit over there where I can check on you constantly and do what I tell you like a child that can't be trusted alone."
Guarantee this is a ploy to chase off the 'less committed' employees (read: less desperate), while not having to announce mass layoffs.
The real problem is that Nothing brings.... nothing to the table. Oh look, another startup making another Android phone in a sea of companies making Android phones, with yet another skin.
What do you mean? Their phone has lights on the back.
This just means they're a struggling company who needs to cut headcount and want to do it without paying severance
Considering this company was founded as a remote work company from the beginning, you're absolutely right.
It's such bullshit too because drastically changing someone's working conditions is clearly a constructive dismissal and should lead to severance payments.
The way this usually works out is you loose all the good employees and you’re left with the dregs who were unable to find another remote position in time.
And Nothing is going to fire you if you don’t find a creative way to meet their bullshit attendance metrics.
I love being treated like a gradeschooler. Really boosts my morale, especially with nearly two fucking decades of experience and being on the wrong side of 35.
Stop bothering me and let me do my fucking job, for christ’s sake.
Edit: all that said, the company name does make for an amusing headline
This is an interesting approach from the CEO, in that it demonstrates why unions are mandatory.
I've just right now noticed that they are talking about the company...
I'd meet those rules out of spite, and do a really crappy job while there. They'd essentially be forced to fire me, and I'd consider suing for wrongful termination in not providing a suitable work environment for me to do my job (evidence is my productivity before and after being forced back to the office).
uhhhh...
anyone else totally misinterpret the lede to mean "there's no reason to go to work at an office" lol?
Yep. Pretty sure the editor knew what they were doing 🙂
It's like god damn Odysseus and Polyphemus up in here.
Definite "Friday was the name of his horse!" energy here.
nice, yet another company to avoid as either employee or customer
As a customer, why do you care if the employees are wfh or not lol
Because you vote with your money.
As long as those businesses keep receiving money, they will continue these malpractices and damage the market.
I wanna see them pay for office hours AND commute hours. In a big city you easily have 1+ hour a day irrevocably lost to commuting.
Companies don't even have to pay people for the time spent going through their own required security checks... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_Staffing_Solutions,_Inc._v._Busk
Wow. Now I don't want to go to the US even harder than before.
So glad I live in California. A faulty security gate once prevented me from leaving my job on time. Which pushed me past 12 hours on shift, which automatically meant I was earning twice my hourly wage while I waited. Plus it required a mandatory additional meal break, which I couldn't take. Since I couldn't take it, I was automatically given an additional full hour's wage, as required by state law.
If I'm reading that right, the decision was reversed by the 9th circuit.
The District Court originally dismissed the case, ruling that the security checks were made after the regular work shift and therefore not "an integral and indispensable part" of the job. The Ninth Circuit disagreed, ruling that the checks were necessary to the principal work of the job.[2][3]
Scumbags all.
Open plan offices fucken suck.
Noise, constant distractions, and that one arsehole who never covers their mouth when they sneeze, sending a wave of infectious germs rolling out across the office floor.
God I remember how the flu used to just rip through the office come wintertime... Since switching to remote work, I think I've taken 1 sick day this year.
I'm in an open floor plan with cubicles. There is one asshole who has an office, he insists on having loud conversations, with his door open, on mother fucking speakerphone through his tinny laptop speakers. I've resorted to a white noise playlist on Spotify. He's a client, so not cool telling him to fuck off.
"this is a company for adults" says the CEO of a company who slaps "Glyph" lights on knockoff iPhones and calls it innovative. I hate when I see Carl Pei's smug face pop up every few months. Hey Carl - put a fucking charger in the box. OnePlus is thriving without you.
I won't buy anything that isn't stock Android. Sick of never being able to find anything.
Every other company:
"Hey, we're hiring..."
I have a hypothesis that anyone who is required to be on site without having to do a hands-on thing (e.g. physical maintenance or repair) is actually a garden hermit, that is, hired to perform as an extra for the pleasure of viewing upper management.
I also have a hypothesis that a lot of company budget and material goes towards handling and pacifying upper management (e.g. the way a binky pacifies an infant) since they are accustomed to being coddled and not accustomed to actually managing.
To be fair, I've only been able to observe the relationships between clerical class and management class in a handful of companies, including a small one-store CD-Rom reseller and Bechtel Corporation circa 1990, but my observations have been consistent between them.
I have a hypothesis that anyone who is required to be on site without having to do a hands-on thing (e.g. physical maintenance or repair) is actually a garden hermit, that is, hired to perform as an extra for the pleasure of viewing upper management.
They're Type 1 Bullshit Jobs, aka "Flunkies"
Flunky jobs primarily exist to make someone else look or feel important. Throughout recorded history, rich and powerful people would surround themselves with servants, clients, sycophants, and minions of one sort or another.
This sounds about right to me.
We had a tremendous office culture in the 1950s. Since then, we have had numerous -- very numerous -- improvements and innovations in the telecom space, in the office assistant space (think personal digital assistant, or rather all the ubiquitous tools that do what those used to do), and other general improvements which empower significantly enhanced productivity.
To say people still need to be in the office is to say there have been no improvements. The fact is, we can be at home and be more productive than in an office. Anyone who tells you otherwise has ulterior motives.
Company is too invested in real estate? Sounds like an issue that the C-suite caused and that they alone should fix. Middle management needs to feel useful? Maybe they should find a career that actually has a need for their micromanagement instead of forcing other people into an obsolete box to appear useful. Show me a company against remote work, and I'll show you a company with outdated goals, more outdated methods, and leadership which should be replaced en masse with people from 2024.
WFH is not a new concept, nor restricted to office work. Priya Satia's book Empire of Guns reports that 2/3rds of company-employed Birmingham blacksmiths in the 1700s worked from home, and were more productive for it.
One person does what 10 people did in the 50s, these assholes just want control, and companies like this shit for brains, is going to have workers who don't care and just want a paycheck. He's not getting cream of the crop with his pouting childish screams. He'll be irrelevant in a few years.
We had a tremendous office culture in the 1950s.
If you were a middle class white man, sure.
Excuse for layoff. What I hear from the article is a CEO, who himself is not a grown up, crying me, me, me, my company, my profit, selfish behavior without any concern for his employees who have largely contributed to his startup success.
Humans have a "me" problem in general. The secret is not to create conditions for it to manifest itself.
Anti-monopoly laws, unions, distribution of power, openness, readiness to break nonsense laws, stubbornness in defending important laws, understanding of common sense both in following and in breaking the law, and the same that applies to laws applies to any moral principles.
You know, consciousness of good and evil, wisdom of all the enormous amount of good literature available for anyone able to read in English and other most spoken languages.
Just being human and understanding that no device of human making can "solve" human nature.
I'd say Tolkien and Lewis on the fantasy side, Heinlein and Asimov and Simak on the sci-fi side, and Lem in between them. Some Jules Verne and Sabatini would be good too. I have a reflex to Russian classics due to having been force-fed them in childhood, but there are things worth learning. And Lucian of Samosata.
Carpe diem, memento mori, astra inclinant sed non obligant. OK, I think my head needs a reboot.
When it comes to addressing the "me" problem, Buddha has to be on the list of people with advice worth checking out. Ego issues may run deep, but modern capitalism encourages and nurtures the worst of them. A lot of what we face today isn't due to any unchangeable human nature, but capitalists will try to persuade us it is, because that undermines our will to grow past the system that serves them.
If they are a company for grown ups why is he acting all controlling like an insecure little child instead of trusting in his employees like a brave adult?
So this is a company whose foundation was work from home and thus has that as it's background culture? Yeah this is just an excuse for layoffs without paying.
Instead of a planned layoff, it's a layoff of random people, with a bias towards laying off the most capable.
"We have just opened our new corporate office in Bumfuck, Nowhere! We'd like to thank the county of Bumfuck for their generous grant of taxpayer dollars. Now all employees will be required to work in person or be terminated for cause."
Metallica/Napster all over again
So Carl Pei sounds like a real douchebag
This is called a silent layoff
Just corporate real estate.
That's literally it. The whole reason.
It's also easier to spy on their employees
I dunno, I felt the most spied upon in my (programming) career when my team had a Slack channel going and everybody was expected to be available during working hours, even though I was WFH. When I actually worked in the main headquarters in downtown Philly, I would fuck off a lot and go shopping or take two hour lunches with beer and stuff like that. They even had a "sick room" on my floor with a very comfortable couch that I would take regular 45 minute naps on after lunch (until the fucking InfoSys contractors discovered it). Nobody ever said shit.
Ultimately both situations required me to produce actual software to keep the bosses happy, but the Slack channel experience was the only time I was really expected to be present mentally the whole official work time.
That headline could use some clarification.
At first I thought it was gonna be an opinion piece supporting fully remote work.
Turns out it's abouy a company named "Nothing".
WOW. I've glanced pass this post maybe 3 or 4 times now, would never have guessed.
Lol, thanks. I would've moved on still thinking it was in favor of HO
“This is a company for grown-ups”.
Says man who makes phones that sparkle and a fidget spinner earbud case.
There's nothing requiring people to work 5 days a week, or 40 hours, or 52 weeks a year. If we worked together we could have way better conditions.
Some companies care about your output rather than how many hours you work. It's common in 'big tech'.
Read the article
I'm sure Carl Pei will always be in office. /s
He's not going to exploit himself, silly!
Remind me to check in 6 months, we'll see headlines that "Nothing's" valuation is going to be doing honours to its name
First devouring all of Fantasia, now this.
Hahaha
I read the title to mean that nobody NEEDS to come into the office lol
I have no intention of buying anything but a fairphone, at least until right-to-repair comes to GrapheneOS pixels
This is a litmus test for who actually reads the article
I went from agreeing with the headline to fuck this guy real quick. I admittedly had never heard of Nothing, because it's a stupid name, and so this decision is par for the course it seems. Just add another name to the Chop List.
I did read it and my opinion stays the same.
To be in 5 days a week is nonsense.
A hybrid schedule would allow for the same collaboration and innovation. 3 days and office and 2 at home. Everyone wins.
Exactly.
I'm in the office 2x/week, and it's the perfect balance for us. We pack those two days w/ collaboration, which leaves the other three relatively open for individual work. And the best part about 2x/week is that you could theoretically fit twice the workers in the same physical space, which should reduce corporate leasing costs.
Ok, good luck with that! Can't wait for this guy to start whining that he can't find employees.
Nothing is requiring employees to be in the office five ANY days a week
FTFY
Not according to the article linked. It never mentions this. I was so confused as someone who read this article more than once to see people in the comments saying things like read the article.
According to this and other articles I've read they were already requiring hybrid work accomodations (and had transitioned to hybrid work from purely WFH). One other thing is this doesn't necessarily seem to effect sales and press related roles.
** "After launching remotely during the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Nothing has now mandated that its 450 employees will have to come into the company’s London office five days a week. In an email to staffers last week, Nothing CEO Carl Pei suggested that those unable to transition from remote working should leave the company and “find an environment where you thrive.”
Pei’s goal, according to the email he published on LinkedIn, is to improve collaboration and innovation across design, engineering, and manufacturing, which he argues “does not work well remotely.” The new mandate will take effect in two months, and Pei will be accepting live questions about the decision from Nothing staffers during the company’s next town hall meeting.
“Remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed,” Pei said in the email, telling employees who are worried about flexibility that “this is a company for grown ups.”
“I know this is a controversial decision that may not be a fit for everyone, and there are definitely companies out there that thrive in remote or hybrid setups,” he added. “But that’s not right for our type of business, and won’t help us fully realize our potential as a company.”
Return-to-office mandates are hardly unique in this industry. Meta, Amazon, Google, Roblox, and even Zoom have all scaled back their remote working policies following the winding down of pandemic-driven lockdowns, but most of those changes require staff to be in offices for up to three days a week.
By comparison, Nothing’s demand for five-day office attendance may sting for employees who helped shape the company while embracing its founding work-from-home environment. We haven't found any comments from staffers on the situation, but they may be waiting until the company meeting to voice concerns." **
Guess I won't be buying the CMF Phone after all.
Except bosses?
Except for manager-level peeps who crave the power and control that comes from dictating how people live their lives under them
It's shame they already turn into the dark side
This is disappointing to see - especially since I like a few of their products.
I'm not sure how it is in London, but there's a strong government push to get people to go back to office (the city). Since politics is every politicians side hustle, and a lot of them own commercial real estate that's been tanking post pandemic, I feel like they are forcing companies to bring people back to re-inflate the real estate value.
Since companies can't outright say it's the government, they have to come up with excuses.
The worst part is I don't know what's worse: if I'm wrong or if I'm right :(
I say this all the time. Back in the 80s companies figured out that the same amount of work could be done because of computers. Do you know what they did? HR told them to fire one in four employees and redistribute the work. Same amount of work and fewer people to pay.
“Remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed,” Pei said in the email, telling employees who are worried about flexibility that “this is a company for grown ups.”
“I know this is a controversial decision that may not be a fit for everyone, and there are definitely companies out there that thrive in remote or hybrid setups,” he added. “But that’s not right for our type of business, and won’t help us fully realize our potential as a company.”
Very reminiscent of Musk's message to Twitter employees a couple of years ago.
"Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."
And his own attitudes towards work-from-home:
Musk imposed a strict return-to-the-office policy for Tesla in June 2022, warning them they would lose their jobs if they refused to do so. Employees would need to spend a minimum of 40 hours at the office a week; anything less would be “phoning it in.”
“Get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bullshit,” Musk said, “because they’re asking everyone else to not work from home while they do.”
“If you want to work at Tesla, you want to work at SpaceX, you want to work at Twitter — you got to come into the office every day,” he said.
“Get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bullshit,” Musk said, “because they’re asking everyone else to not work from home while they do.”
elon musk, the great social equity watchdog. watch, next he’s gonna say “Get off the goddamn moral high horse with the fair wages bullshit, because they’re asking everyone else to work for minimum wage while they don’t.”
Right so because he likes to work in an office and feels more productive when surrounded by coworkers, he makes the mistake of thinking that everyone is like that. Or that the most effective workers are extroverts
...but why? They outsource all of the phone's development!
I already hate their name so much and now this makes me hate them even more. Fuck them.
Unnecessary RTO mandates need to be outlawed
They make phones. I had to look this up since I had never heard of this company.
I would find it weird to be referred to as Nothing staff, or a Nothing employee.
Is there a Lemmy community that focuses on technology, and not things tangentially related to technology companies?
Look, I can do everything that I do at work from home, except prevent my boss from realizing that some Indian could do my job from his home at a tenth of the price!
People think this. However the people who actually cost 1/10th are absolute garbage. The people who you might want to hire cost 1/2 as much and work for a company that also want to get paid. By the time you get done you've paid 80% as much for worse work and are dealing with people in a different time zone, with a language and cultural barrier, and misaligned incentives.
Whereas your people want to get as much done as is reasonable so they can stay employed, move up, get raises, improve their cv yada yada the offshoring firm wants to bill you as much as possible without losing your business.
I wouldn't be there to say "I told you so" after they realise that 3 years later. So I'm not going to test this for fun.
Ever since TV remote was invented, people don't even lift their asses off the couch and walk over to the TV to change the channel. Unless a company adapts to changing tech landscape, they can be many things, but not a company for grown-ups.
"Carl" is not compatible with the human race.
We need a human recycling center.
Such a dick move
He just wants to fire people by making them quit.
Well, nothing should require employees to be in the office five days a week
