#620
#621

Whatā€™s your budget?

Iā€™m more than happy with the one I got the other month, for Ā£240:

Other recommended ones include the Ikea Markus

I think you might struggle to find a decent chair without wheels though, so if youā€™re worried about damage to your floor, then you may have to budget for a rug/protector.

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#623

also interested in finding one of these. looked on gumtree to try and find a bargain and lol noooope.

#624

Another option might be to look at second hand or reconditioned chairs from office clear outs.

There are quite a few places in London that specialise in these - youā€™ll often find top end office chairs that have barely been used, from financial or tech start-ups who splash the VC cash on trinkets and then have to liquidate the company.

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#625

Thatā€™s a great one for the ā€˜IKEA or black metal bandā€™ quiz.

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#626

While I kind of agree with the concept I keep having the same thought whenever anybody mentions this. Once you break the link between worker and workplace why is there any reason to employ somebody in the same country?

#627

So much this.

#629

This is exactly my fear too.

It could mean the rise and rise of the modular company, where different functions are outsourced to different countries.

Doubtless we will hear of a few companies that really go in on this. I know my former employer just centralised a worldwide function within the finance department to Malaysia

Does that last sentence make sense? Iā€™m unsure

#630

Regulations in specific industries maybe. Roles where you need UK specific qualifications fair enough. Weā€™ll be free to ignore EU data security law soon!

If your company is providing an everyday product or service thereā€™s no reason at all not to subcontract all the admin and infrastructure out to somewhere else if youā€™re already separating it physically from the management and customer facing staff.

#631

This is one of those perfect Sam Vines theory of economic inequality things isnā€™t it? If you can afford to get the best chair, itā€™ll last forever and youā€™ll see the health benefits. If you can only get an affordable chair youā€™ll suffer the impacts and probably have to replace it more regularly too.

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#632

Outsourcing has been a big thing since the 90s. I think a lot of companies that would do that sort of thing have done it already. Since I joined my employers jobs have gone out to India, Tunisia, India (again) and Dublin. The first round of redundancies was hard, but over time Iā€™ve come to see it as the changing shape of the way things work.

#633

Yeah, I figured that if this chair lasts as long as my last one - about 20 years - then it will have been worth the money, especially if I end up sitting on it every day for 8 hours now.

I mean, mine was still a quarter of the price of a Herman-Miller Aeron, but I wasnā€™t going to pay that.

#634

I find I tend to get tension headaches sometimes when working from home (they happen at random times tbh, but just happen to strike more reliably after a few hours of WFH). Iā€™m guessing maybe a sort of mind-focussy related thing? Does anyone have any good things they do about this kind of thing?

Aside from I open the window and take a look out every so often

#635

Yeah, every company Iā€™ve ever worked for has had some level of this but also always maintained large offices and workforces in their ā€œhomeā€ country.

I think a logical consequence of being forced to abandon this will be an increase in that among smaller companies or even on individual basis.

#636

Outsourcing kind of came then went away again for a lot of companies. They went too far then pulled back and got more internal people when problems arose.

On a smaller scale someone I knows mail order company outsourced all the warehouse and delivery stuff quite early on but have just moved back to having it all in house again

But obviously recent events will drive companies back to it in earnest for sure, and for good this time

#637

Interestingly, considering how toxic the rest of their office work culture is, this is also very common in Japan.

#638

I get headaches too. Not sure if itā€™s too much sitting, not enough water, or too much staring at the screen.

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#639

Haha, I always try to double down on water but then I just have a bit of a headache and I reaaaallly need to pee

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#640

One of the difficulties in returning to the office whilst social distancing is still required is that it causes problems of its own that I hadnā€™t really thought about before.

So on my maiden post-lockdown office visit yesterday I booked a desk in the same row as a colleague. The desk in between us was blocked out so nobody can work there. I wanted to ask her about something thatā€™s quite sensitive as it involved discussing a criminal offence. But I canā€™t get close to her to have a discrete conversation about it. And I wanted to run the wording of something by her, but couldnā€™t invite her over to read my screen, so ended up reading bits out. Then she tried to tell me about something that sheā€™d overheard from management and we had this almost comical stage whispered conversation which given Iā€™m a bit hard of hearing was almost impossible to follow. Luckily there were only a handful of people in but once thereā€™s people attending in more numbers those conversations across an expanse of desks become quite disruptive.

Had we both been working from home we would have just video called, I could have shared my screen, and we could have had open discussions without disturbing anybody. Until social distancing is done away with, the office environment is as alien as full time WFH was at the start.

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#641

It was the same in architecture. Big firms started to outsource technical drawings to satellite offices in east asia around 2005, but it never really worked because the standard of drawings was so low and took a lot of hours to correct.

I think it will happen eventually though, and itā€™ll be interesting to see whether the middle-classes start to jump up and down about it, having reaped the benefits of manufacturing being outsourced over the past 30 years without raising too many objections.

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