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Frontier Airlines CEO says the pandemic made workers 'lazy' and less productive: 'People are still allowing people to work from home, all this silliness, right?'

https://www.businessinsider.com/frontier-airlines-ceo-comments-pandemic-remote-workers-lazy-productivity-2023-9

Frontier Airlines CEO Barry Biffle blamed higher overhead costs on workers being less productive, calling it a "society-wide" problem.

Frontier Airlines CEO says the pandemic made workers 'lazy' and less productive: 'People are still allowing people to work from home, all this silliness, right?'

111 comments

esadatari

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jesus fuck i cannot wait for these old bags to fucking croak and take their outdated logic with them.

MisterNeon

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Hate to break it to you, but the old bags will be replaced by new younger douchebags.

MossBear

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Unless employee owned companies become the norm and CEO driven companies are seen as outdated relic of feudalism.

lobut

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Yup. I think the ChatGPT punkass is fairly young blood: https://fortune.com/2023/05/05/openai-ceo-sam-altman-remote-work-mistake-return-to-office/

That miserable cunt probably has a lot of years left.

JustAManOnAToilet

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It's almost like business school teaches a few things random commenters on a website might not fully grasp.

Fapper_McFapper

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I think you meant to post this to LinkedIn. That’s where all the corporate fellatio happens.

nilloc

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I still wonder how much is performative, so you can get your next job, and how many have actually drank the Koolaid.

lennybird

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It's almost like business school is for those who couldn't quite cut it as a doctor or lawyer or scientist or engineer...

As though it predominantly attracts a certain type of person who exhibits psychopathic tendencies in their obsessive pursuit of power.

cmbabul

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Also anyone with a random office job that wants an easy raise without really learning anything

Baines

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mmm dickbag school

gravitas_deficiency

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It’s almost like there’s an entire management philosophy our economy pushes that’s categorically suboptimal for and often at odds with making a solid, sustainable, and engineering-first organization.

The only thing “classical” business experts are good at is trying to find the quickest route to monetization. This pretty much never yields a product that actual helps people in a meaningful and consistent fashion in the long term.

Make a thing, and make it well, and it will sell itself. Boeing did this until they acquihired McDonnell Douglass leadership and transitioned their entire business model towards being “investor-first”… and that gave us delights like the 737 MCAS debacle (exacerbated, of course, by deregulation and poor auditing). They used to be one of the true paragons of American engineering. Now they’re just another profit über alles corporation.

Engineering-centric organizations need to focus a whole hell of a lot more on engineering ethics. These days, it’s mostly an afterthought.

JustAManOnAToilet

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That philosophy might hold water if we weren't living in a world where products have to be designed to a price point for consumers. The highest quality engineered lamp will be outsold by orders of magnitude by the okay lamp that costs less than half as much. Not everyone makes airplanes.

gravitas_deficiency

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That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not universally anti-capitalist. Someone who makes a useful thing is absolutely justified in trying to make it efficiently as possible, both in terms of capital as well as environmental considerations (edit: addendum here), as well as some compensation for their expertise, time, and effort, according to which and/or how many customers use it.

What I object to is the constant drive towards short-term benefit over long-term investment, almost always at the cost of user experience - or these days, more broadly the constant march towards enshitification.

Our current system of unbounded amoral, and largely unregulated capitalism is very obviously harmful and parasitic to our society in a holistic sense. Milton Friedman’s “shareholder value first” philosophy (which has become standard practice for most of the western world’s corporate governance) has been a cancer on our societies since the moment those words left his mouth.

Also, fuck the entire concept of omnipresent advertisements with a rusty pipe.

Gumbyyy

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Like sociopathy?

jcit878

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being a cunt 101 sounds like it would be a useful class, but its just reaffirmation for existing cunts

filefly

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lol get fucked

athos77

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The pandemic made it clear to us that our literal lives don't matter. Record profits have pretty much never made their way into worker's pockets. Wages have been stagnant against forty years of inflation and record housing costs, while shareholders and C-suites struggle to decide between a private jet or a second yacht. And climate change is coming for all of us. Given all that, why the fuck should we care about some job that has literally never cared about us? Why wouldn't we get to pursue some work-life balance, and spend what little time and money that are being left to us on something that makes us happy?

snooggums

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Plus the increased work life balance has been proven by studies to be more productive because people working shorter hours and/or from home are more productive then the regular 40 in the office.

"But I can't recognize it by looking at it so everyone must be lazy" some rich jackass.

penguin

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Also, a lazy worker at home will be lazy in an office too.

If someone likes to procrastinate, you can't really change that via environment alone.

snooggums

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Unfortunately, leadership positions tend to be mostly interactions with others by forming working relationships and establishing trust so they see skilled workers who are avoiding work by chatting about non-work stuff to be productive team building even when done to excess. So they consider that not being lazy even if it is when done to excess for that particular position.

Can't talk about sports teams and 'team build' in the same way when working at home in their eyes.

Semi-Hemi-Demigod

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I think it’s because they can’t pull people into their office and give them illegal or unethical tasks off the record. Slack and email all leave a paper trail.

flathead

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Ugh. The number of vacuous conversations endured/overheard in offices about sports. And the insufferable adages, analogies and idiotic motivational speeches comparing sports and wage slavery. Where's my fucking stapler?

prole

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Setting aside how fucking stupid it is to think that way, people can still talk about stuff like that. In fact, they can now do it without even having to leave their PC!

No logic here beyond a bunch of loser control freaks missing their completely unnecessary micromanaging.

TheWoozy

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This is true. Ask me how I know.

player1

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How do you know

prole

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Because we're not people to them, we're numbers on a screen.

FlyingSquid

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"I'm perfectly happy in my large, quiet office, sitting in my $2000 executive chair in front of my mahogany desk and using my private executive bathroom. I don't know what these people on the fourth floor are complaining about. We give them cubicles and a ping-pong table (do not use during work hours), don't we?"

TOModera

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Cubicles? In this economy?

Semi-Hemi-Demigod

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Cubicles break things up. To maximize synergy we need an open floor plan so everyone can hear and see everyone else.

TOModera

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I've never been so angry reading something I had to go through at 3 different jobs.

aesthelete

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To maximize efficiency we cannot have the cubicle walls potentially blocking the path of the farts and sneezes they must all breathe in. Every fart and sneeze must be fully breathed in by staff to cut down on cleaning costs!

penguin

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Now they're all about open floor plans for collaboration (read: for squeezing more people in the same space).

TOModera

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Worked at 3 of them that did that. Worst working environmentsever. Current one is experimenting with it, but I'm WFH all the time so I just made it known I never want that.

FlyingSquid

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Sometimes you have to give them a little extra to make them more productive. It's okay, we found a loophole in accounting so it's a write-off.

MossBear

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Having done cleaning in offices such as these for at least one of the top companies in the world, I fail to see why even this sort of office is all that compelling. Look, a miniature golf statue...

FlyingSquid

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They're not compelling to you and I. They're a way to show fellow executives how powerful you are. A huge office with expensive furniture means you're important.

aesthelete

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Gotta gather in a room to compare business cards like they do in American Psycho or it just isn't businessing!

Fapper_McFapper

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And we had our yearly cook out last month!

_haha_oh_wow_

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Sounds like something a lazy, entitled, unproductive CEO would say.

PlasmaDistortion

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He just pissed that business travel is still down. Sorry, it’s never going back to the way it was.

YoBuckStopsHere

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He is mad because the pandemic allowed people to review their priorities and turn towards their personal lives rather than focusing on career lives. People today are less willing to work overtime, less willing to go above and beyond because they don't care about that. It means less money for the fat cats which is why they are bitching so much.

captainlezbian

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Yeah promotions don’t exist anymore, raises only come when you threaten to quit, and the only reward for loyalty is vacation time to use on getting sick. I’m not gonna show unrequited loyalty.

TheWoozy

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I'm extremely pissed that my company went to "unlimited personal leave" as long as you can get your work done. I'm already salaried, so technically, I could have always done that. Now I've lost the 4 weeks of vacation (earned by decades of seniority) that once enjoyed without guilt or worry.

prole

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More reasons we need more unions.

cybersandwich

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Over the course of the pandemic I lost my dad and had a baby. I also changed jobs and took a promotion. That really gave me quite a bit of perspective and my priorities absolutely shifted.

I was(am?) a very ambitious, motivated, "go-getter" who has moved up the ranks fairly quickly and am in a very senior leadership position for my age. I genuinely like what I do, so that definitely helps. But I saw an unqualified person take over my old job and is, at best, 'coasting' and more realistically slowly killing an amazing platform I had helped develop--and driving away incredibly talented engineers and analysts.

Leadership changed and just moved on to the next shiny object and seems content to let that platform flounder because...it's not their baby. Why on earth would you continue to move that invaluable platform forward when you can make a name for yourself on something else?

I don't want this to sound like sour grapes, because its not that. It's more that I realized, why did I kill myself for that job? The bigwigs seem to be totally fine cutting it loose. Why did I stress myself out to drive that platform forward so hard? Why should I kill myself, sacrifice limited time with my family to drive products forward when, as soon as leadership changes or as soon as I move on, it will get scrapped or forgotten about? It obviously wasn't nearly as important as they claimed it to be.

So, I am not killing myself for work. I am taking my entire paternity leave and not taking a single call or text from work. I am not going to work overtime. I am not going to work on my day off. I am not going to travel unnecessarily. I am going to prioritize things that benefit me personally. And I am not going back into the office on someone else's terms. (I honestly dont mind going in once or twice a week. I do less work in the office than I do at home tbh--as far as "work" goes its usually a free day. But I am fully remote officially and I'd probably hop to another company if they started to force me back in 'officially' because, like I said, I am prioritizing me and mine and commuting 45-60minutes each way, paying for parking, to sit on the same Zoom calls I can do at home, doesn't really benefit me in any way.

HuddaBudda

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He's also slightly mad because he now has to compete in a labor market where people can choose between:

A shitty waiting job that has you flying out of town daily, pay is about as much as a gas station clerk, has you dealing with some of the craziest ideologies on the planet because no one respects your authority. High Stress, low reward situation.

Then you have work from home: Right off the bat, you get 2 extra hours back from your daily commute. If you have kids, you are now saving hundreds of dollars monthly on child care. Car care costs go down. Gas costs go down. Less stressful situation, and more mentally stable.

The problem isn't just that he is having to compete with work from home jobs, but he is now having to compete against the benefits of work from home. And there is only one way to do that: $$$.

Staple_Diet

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Agree with everything except;

If you have kids, you are now saving hundreds of dollars monthly on child care.

Myself and most WFHers know still put our kids in care, you simply can't work and look after young kids simultaneously unless you only work at night or during naps.

HuddaBudda

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I do apologize, I seemed to have put every parent into the same logical group of thought, and that is wrong on my part.

Though I will reiterate the argument that once you start piling the cost savings from a work from home job, companies would have to pay more at a minimum to match those cost savings.

comedy

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I don't know if "business traveler" is Frontier's main customer, exactly.

HobbitFoot

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Frontier doesn't fly business. If Frontier is pissed off, it is because it is causing the legacy carriers to muscle in on the vacation traffic his company flies.

alienanimals

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This CEO should be forced to work a minimum wage job for the airline to show him what life is like when you're not a spoiled fat fuck.

yokonzo

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Nah he would still have so many safety Ney's that he'd never actually feel real fear or hunger

andrew_bidlaw

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Let them have it as long as they are mopping vomit from the floor or deal with agressive passengers. Would they last long?

prole

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As long as there's no looming threat of homelessness or starvation, it's just not the same. If you have a shit job but you know in the back of your mind that you could walk out at any moment and still be just fine for the rest of your life... that safety net makes all the difference in the world in that situation.

andrew_bidlaw

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On the time of writing it I was thinking like that: they can either be locked in a lowest position their regular employees have and save their wealth OR lose it and start over from a blank page. The conflict is that they won't have trouble going to the top once again with their connections and stuff, but they'd not be brave enough to lose everything and would hold onto their dragon's gold nest whatever it takes. Greed holding them back sounds like a fairy-tailish punishment.

But in a real context you are right.

Fapper_McFapper

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I really wish this guy would take up submarining as a hobby.

cmbabul

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We legit need to encourage more billionaires to take up the call of the submariner, they just have to engineer and pilot it themselves

CptOblivius

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Not biased at all. A transportation CEO wanting people to use transportation to get to work. I can't smell any bias.

lauha

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Pretty sure his employees didn't fly to work before the pandemic either.

DragonTypeWyvern

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Video conferences have directly impacted airline profits.

lauha

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Of course, but most of airline office workers don't commute by plane.

whyNotSquirrel

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Don't think the comment was referring to them. And also doubt that most this guy employees never had the possibility to work from home, so the CEO is talking about other people, eg his possible clients

AttackPanda

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With my job I used to have to fly out and meet business teams every few weeks at their office. Now our business partners have staff working remotely so I no longer have to fly out to their offices as their staff aren’t there. That means we do everything via Zoom and meet more often and engage more directly than previously. It also means that I and my team no longer fly on an airline every few weeks. Everyone wins in this new paradigm except those that focus on business air travel.

billwashere

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No but other people did.

Rawdogg

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This dude can't talk about laziness he's got more chins than a Chinese phone book.

notannpc

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Can we just fucking eat the rich already? How many useless cocksuckers do they need to stick a microphone in front of to call us lazy before we just fuck them all up?

It seems like a daily occurrence at this point that some rich cunt who hasn’t actually done any of the work that makes them rich is saying some brain dead shit like this.

reagansrottencorpse

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Unfortunately more of us will need to be hungry and desperate. We are getting there.

Cryophilia

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After you

ChaoticEntropy

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These lazy fucks who "work" for me got a taste of empowerment, and now they want me to do shit like respect their time.

ohlaph

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He seems like the kind of guy that wants slaves.

Zink

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Oh no, a crazy world event made people start caring about themselves rather than being the most efficient resource for you, their benevolent employer. Won’t somebody think of the CEO and shareholders?

aesthelete

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THE PEASANTS WILL COMMUTE DAILY TO MY OVERPRICED GLASS DILDO DOWNTOWN WHERE THEY WILL HAVE TO PAY FOR PARKING AND THEY WILL LIKE IT AND THANK ME.

American CEOs

billwashere

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What has gotten into all these rich pricks recently? I mean are they all of a sudden without PR folks to keep them from saying just absolutely stupid shit.

Or are they just scared 🤔

RedAggroBest

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They have poor management skills in the first place and only really luck into where they are, because of this they have zero adaptability and all they see is a bill for unused office space and with all the easy money recently drying up investors are gonna put the squeeze on c-suite pricks who would rather shoot up prices than eat their golden parachute.

Middle managers are on board because, similarly, they don't know how to manage remote work and can't adapt, which should just mean their salary appropriately adjust downward but lol.

Moira_Mayhem

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Its common knowledge amongst the rich that we are heading towards a collapse, and 'emergency villas' have had booming sales across the last 10 years.

They know what's coming, and are going to grab as much as they can before they fly off to their safehouses.

Jokes on them, psychology says their own armed guards will be taking out their bosses and taking the villas over as soon as shit gets bad.

vaultdweller013

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Not even just psychology, history says as much do they not know about the Praetorian guard? They killed a lot of emperors because fuck em.

vertigo3pc

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Economic calamity is currently happening, and the wealthy are about to lose after everyone else has lost for decades. They're just saying the quiet part out loud, blaming someone else.

ChillPenguin

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Eat the rich.

AgentOrangesicle

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Suggestions for a wine pairing?

AquaTofana

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I've heard Chianti pairs well with liver

Moira_Mayhem

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I got banned from reddshit for saying that, so now I'm here:

Eat The Rich!

zepheriths

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Crazy coming from a man who's unofficial job description is " kissing ass and sucking dick of board members"

FlyingSquid

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Just FYI:

Barry Biffle 2022 pay: $3.75 million

https://skift.com/2023/06/13/highest-paid-u-s-airline-ceos-in-2022/

Frontier Revenue 2022: $3.3 billion

https://www.statista.com/statistics/765504/operating-revenues-frontier-airlines/

This is from when people were working from home.

echodot

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Does he have actual evidence that employees have become less productive or is this just things he personally feels out of the case.

We really need to stop reporting every time one of these idiots says something dumb otherwise we're just going to fill the front page with "another idiot CEO made another idiot CEO comment" posts

Semi-Hemi-Demigod

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At best the studies show there’s not much difference between WFH and in an office. Some show an increase for one or the other but on average it’s the same.

Coreidan

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This dude is a fat fuck and he’s calling other people lazy. Roflcopter