[jibbirish]

This actually became very obvious 3 weeks ago, when a majority of employers shut down their work from home services because of the Citrix Netscaler vulnerability. There were major traffic jams the following Monday morning which were aptly named "Citrix Jams" on the news.

Apparently many companies were late implementing the security measures and had to take their entire service down 3 weeks after the initial publication of the issue & fix.

[aequitas]

Not only the traffic jams where a problem. Some companies are so forward with working remote they've abolished the concept of a personal workspace/desk for every employee and only have 'flex' workspaces which are shared among all workers (higher ups excluded of course, do as I say, don't do as I do...). So in the morning you never know which desk you'll end up with and if you even sit close to your teammates. The flex spaces (along with the parking spaces) are calculated to the average amount of employees to be expected to work in the office, not the maximum capacity. So you can imagine how productive that monday was.

[toyg]

Flex workspaces predate WFH as a trend. It originated among salespeople and other departments where employees are not actually “in” most of the time - someone figured out they could cut on office costs by reducing “wasted” space. Similarly to open-space modes, hotdesks were then extended to a lot of other places where they didn’t belong, and here we are. I know of entire buildings where people are effectively forced to get to the office horribly early just to ensure they have a decent desk close to their colleagues.

[mercer]

I was surprised to find out that this 'flex' workspaces thing is not just a 'hip company' thing, but pretty common for government workers too.

Not a fan, personally, but still.

[gallypette]

This, and also the fact that Citrix's mitigation was not perfect. NCSC's recommendation was to shut the service waiting for a real patch: https://www.ncsc.nl/actueel/nieuws/2020/januari/16/door-citr...