Our seating availability is first come, first served. It was great for 6 months but has gone downhill these past 2 months. Teams are laying claim to groups of unassigned drop-in desks. This week has been the worst. I was confronted by employees on Monday and Tuesday on different floors. I asked if they had seating reservations or a specific assignment in Phone. I suggested they contact CRE if they needed a group seating assignment. I've observed a few similar confrontations during the past month. Also employees leaving personal items stacked on a drop-in desk to mark their spot for the next day. CRE needs to reaffirm their seating rules to Leadership. Such confrontations create tension in the workspaces.
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With all the downsizing, my building is 70% empty. Grab one and put your name on it. Better yet, grab a few and rearrange the walls to make one huge cube.
Used to feel guilty walking past my home office with the laptop and three monitors wrapping around the desk. Often would peak at email at all times after hours and even get su-ked into doing some additional work picking up where I left off at 5. Now? RTO, the laptop stays in its bag when I get home. Great for getting more work done. I had purchased those monitors with my own funds. Good luck getting equip out of ATT during the lockdown. Have since connected them to my tower, the home office desk is now for home office work only. Real jump in production there.
“Be a problem solver and not a complainer. There’s no reason you can’t bring a folding camp chair in.”
Do this, take pics, send to Insider. Maybe they will run a story on you on how you persevered.
Be a problem solver and not a complainer. There’s no reason you can’t bring a folding camp chair in.
No problems here. 20-25% of the drop-in desks are open. Even more on Fridays.
“If the company wants me in an office and miserable it’s their responsibility to accommodate it, or I just will badge and leave and if I ever get caught (yeah, right) I’ll say there were no seats.”
This is the way.
Youre supposed to share cubes. It’s part of DEI and collaboration. Grab a lap and sit on it.
"employees leaving personal items stacked on a drop-in desk to mark their spot for the next day"
A woman in our office arrives and chooses her work station and then begins clearing those personal items left at the stations around her and dumps them in the trash. It's wrong, but it's so right.
They literally get bonuses based on how many people in their org they convince to quit or retire without severance. Stop kidding yourself. RTO is all about forced attrition.
“But we’re required to reserve a seat via the reservation system. So that would be the first question asked. Why aren’t you reserving a seat? .”
Because I’m a $200k a year software engineer and I’m not reserving a seat every single day like it’s some fu--ing restaurant.
No.
Fu-k you, not doing it, would be my response.
It’s a waste of my time.
If the company wants me in an office and miserable it’s their responsibility to accommodate it, or I just will badge and leave and if I ever get caught (yeah, right) I’ll say there were no seats.
"So that would be the first question asked. Why aren’t you reserving a seat?"
The drop in seats in my building are not in YWR and we are not allowed to put them in there. There are no reservations for those seats.
Has anyone else's team recently been lectured about how the new presence report no longer reflects "green" status for the week, if you took any vacation, unlike the previous system?
Have heard many complaining about the reservation system. I don't know of anyone using it for regular single desks. Never had a need for it myself. Too many open seats.
I don’t understand this “ couldn’t find a place to sit” argument.
Don’t get me wrong, I too think the whole thing is lunacy.
But we’re required to reserve a seat via the reservation system.
So that would be the first question asked. Why aren’t you reserving a seat? .
Never had an issue in the Dallas.
I've been coming into the office everyday for a little more than a year. The only times i've had trouble finding a seat was when I came in late after a morning dental/doctor appointment. My manager told me in the future to just finish out those days as WFH. No harm, no foul.
“ Badge in, you’re good - that’s it.”
This just isn’t true at all.
I seriously think HR must have a few people who visit these boards to make RTO positive comments and downvote comments telling people to just badge and leave.
No one else would disagree, except those mad that so many of us are flaunting these pointless rules but they can’t for whatever reason.
Not at all. It is wide open in Atlanta offices.
Notify your boss that you are going home, and why. After a few times tell your boss you cannot get any work done and will be WFH
Log in at home, go to the office, log in and log out. Go home. Do again tomorrow. In about 10 years someone might notice.
I left a skid mark on several chairs in Dallas. Only way you will know is if you sit in it. Good luck
“AT&T has been running daily reports on tracking your IP address, badge scans & also the activity on your PC for 6 yrs.”
I’ve been on the calls for the presence reporting, they can’t do any of this.
This person obviously doesn’t know what an IP address actually is, or how it’s assigned (it’s dynamic).
They can ping you when you’re in the office, but only once an hour and only on LAN.
WiFi only pings once a day, so if you’re not on WiFi when it pings you don’t get recorded.
Macs can’t be tracked at all.
Badge swipes are really all that matter and they don’t record time or location.
You can badge in Atlanta, and if you’re assigned Dallas it’ll look like you badged into Dallas (for the reporting).
The PowerBi reporting tool doesn’t have a lot of flexibility or power.
Badge in, you’re good - that’s it.
AT&T is receiving major tax breaks pulling folks back into the offices. They sold the majority of the buildings with option clauses for lease backs. Once AT&T gets numbers down to 65k employees folks won’t have, an issue with seating. The collaboration directive is a joke. Unless your jobs have been moved to Dallas & you sit next to your AVP. Heard one AVP tell the AM she was not doing her job. Well she has never done her job, but still employed. Everyone was spoiled, being able to Telecommute. You should have known it was temporary. Also, those who are using badges to scan in & then walking out, seems like you want to be let go. AT&T has been running daily reports on tracking your IP address, badge scans & also the activity on your PC for 6 yrs. However, reports move frequent over last 3 years. Stop complaining & jump ship. It is only going to get worse & you have options; in which you can control. Wake up & smell the coffee folks.
I was assigned a desk. I started in a temp space but someone came around asking if I wanted a desk and I said sure. I got everything setup, monitor, keyboard, a few other items to make it comfy and was let go a month later. Welp, didn’t have an issue with getting a desk at least.
Typical T, they rushed this and knee jerk pulled everyone back into the office. The fact they made people who were hired and worked remote for a decade come into the office, is ludicrous.
They don’t have the space to give us all a dedicated seat. They want us to be annoyed and inconvenienced. They want people to get so fed up with this daily charade we quit. It’s exhausting.
Plenty of spare cubes in my location. Everyone else picked up and moved to a hub, so its empty here. I only go in twice a week, but I just put my name on one of the empty cubes and now its dedicated. The GRE person is four states away, it'll be years before they find me.
welcome to the school bus
Which hub location is the OP assigned to? Bring your manager/director in that conversation. It is unacceptable for a badged employee to essentially be told "this is ours and we don't want you here". I don't see Corporate supporting such a dialogue.
I usually can find a seat but never the same one everyday. Biggest problem is actually trying to find someone because the insanity of being in a different spot is that it's hard to actually work with people you should be. Once you message them to find where they are, you now have to find a common place to even talk without disturbing an entire floor of people who aren't wearing headsets to keep noise levels down.
The allocating blocks of space for organizations isn't helpful either because just because I'm sitting near someone in my org doesn't mean that's the person I even deal with on a day to day basis. You'd think by now that they'd realize that maybe, just maybe, assigning people spots in locations that don't have space issues might be a smart thing to do. But I think smart is no longer in this company's "culture".
same desk for 2 months. Changed seats for a better view. No problem finding a seat. We were advised space would become limited 4-5 months ago but it never happened
Toilet sear unavailability too. Always a wait. Come on... What are you doing in there for so long??
i usually sit even if there is no laptop.
I love 2024 corporate culture so much.
In one corner you have the majority who have gotten so fed up they’ve just completely dropped the facade of giving a fu-k and we just sit in the corner laughing at the absurdity of it all and cracking jokes.
In the other corner you have those who are, usually older, in areas of upper management, or in HR (and their entire job is pretending like they care about this stupid sh-t) who can’t stop pretending and just “dOeSn’T uNdErStAnD hOw ThE yOuNgEr GeNeRaTiOn CoUlD aCt ThIs WaY”
The difference is, one is the future, and one is the past.
Let that sink in.
OP here. I really want and deserve to sit where I want. That’s my desk. Don’t believe me? Check my name carved on the desk.
“Guys, we’re a tech giant on LinkedIns top 10 best places to work. You must be joking that you can’t work remotely, we sell the tech. Surely you jest we can’t track employees in front of their own computer, we sell cybersecurity. It’s laughable we don’t have office space, CRE and CBRE is a $100M budget. Go check your sources. AT&T = winning!”
I’m glad there’s 1 person in this thread who gets it and how absolutely pathetically d-mb upper management is at this company and how bad most developers are (because we don’t pay sh-t and everyone who knows how to code more than ‘hello world’ and actually knows more than JS and 1 gui framework already quit.)
Guys, we’re a tech giant on LinkedIns top 10 best places to work. You must be joking that you can’t work remotely, we sell the tech. Surely you jest we can’t track employees in front of their own computer, we sell cybersecurity. It’s laughable we don’t have office space, CRE and CBRE is a $100M budget. Go check your sources. AT&T = winning!
Also, I’m never going to an office where I have to make reservations for a desk everyday.
That sh-t is fu--ing re--rded and I’m just not doing it. Period. I’ll skate the system, lie, bend the rules, sit in the parking garage in my car after badging in, I’m not reserving a seat like it’s a fu--ing table at Daniel in Manhattan. Stankey can su-k my D.
“I was one of the people you are referring to. You confronted us, not the other way around. You were not nice about it at all. I’d suggest not approaching people like you did or the next person will walk you out.”
Not OP or even in this office, I’m the person who just badges in, gets coffee, hangs for an hour or two, then goes back to do actual work from home - but uhh why are you blaming this person for trying to get a place to sit and being confrontational with them when in reality you should be mad at the people making you RTO and cage match over an overpriced sh---y steel case chair and desk?
Why not just be like “you know what, you seem to want this desk more than me, you can have it and I’ll just go home.”
Stick it to the man don’t play their silly games.
I saw a confrontation this week. Are you the 400lb cow in see through lululemon pants? How’d you make it to the 2nd floor?