Actual post from Dec. 15 from one of the streams. This is a real topic. As far as promoting women and minorities even if their qualifications are not as good as the white male scientists, I am all for it. We need diversity at the lab and if that is what it takes, so be it. Quit your whining. Look around the lab, what do you see? White male geezers. How many African Americans do you see at the lab? Virtually none. LLNL is one of the MOST undiverse places you will see. Face it folks, LLNL is an institution of white male privilege and they don't want to give up their privileged positions. California, a state of majority Hispanics has the "crown jewel" LLNL nestled in the middle of it with very FEW Hispanics at all!
Comments
7/29/2020 8:43 PM
Nope.
Do you have data, or is that just your impression?
I communicated with one of my former co-workers and they've divided the team into two groups. They alternate which days they physically are at the site. While at home, they try to do what they can remotely, it's hard to do that when working on classified stuff so they leave that type of work to play with at home. I can't say what other areas of the lab are doing but for my former group my joke is accurate.
This what I am seeing but the people that do come every other day only come for about three days, and than many simply skip several days. I would also add that there are unofficially two groups (1) still trying to do work as best they can. (2) Simply giving up and not working at all. I am not sure what the solution is if there is any. I can tell you that I feel bad for the for people are still trying to work under these conditions as it is harder and there is a tendency for the managers to ask more from them since they are the ones doing stuff. As for data it is just from what the managers are telling me and what they are seeing since I can only report on the circle of people I know. I would add there are a couple of people that are loving this and have even said that this is the best time of their lives at the lab. I can only cringe at this. Personally it has been much harder for me to work and I find it very stressful but I can still get it done and I know several people like me. I would add that there is also the third group like support staff that are on call and working from home and their jobs sort of mandate that they must work. There is also the fourth group of people that are going into lab on a full time.
It is the people that just vanish, no one hears from them but you run into them on the trails, in the parks, or they do not respond to you emails on work related issues but send pictures of Wyoming, Montana and Utah instead. Oh and another tad-bit, apparently no one is talking vacations, or vacation time is way down.
8/04/2020 7:52 AM
??? Wow.
What parking lot are looking at? Seriously they utterly empty where I am. Hundreds and hundreds of spots, and maybe four cars. if you walk in a building it is completely empty. I am not sure what productive means. I would guess you could be in manufacturing or something where they need to actually make stuff where yes you can figure out if it is made or not. In other parts of the lab how on earth would you ever quantify productivity. I mean you could quantify it but everyone just argues about what it means. This is on top of the fact that I would guess 1/4 of the people are not even in town anymore.
It is interesting how people come to such different opinions even when they see the same thing. Kind of like how people see the world right now when they watch certain videos.
So in conclusion I could be wrong, you could be wrong or we are both wrong. The other possibility is that we simply work in very different parts of the lab. The manufacturing or pit production part of the lab is in a different world than the other parts of the lab. This of course begs the questions of why are they part of the same lab. Why not do what they did in ORNL and Y12 and split them.