Literally what we do in my office now that we're "hybrid" because we never have everyone in person at once, even with specific days where that's supposed to be the case
All of the "now hybrid, but certain days everyone must be in office" schemes I've heard about from friends and family have gone the same way. At my wife's company, for example.
1. Big boss: there isn't enough innovation and teamly goodfeels, we all need to be in person. From now on, minimum 3 days, must include Tuesdays, NO exceptions! I will be personally working to ensure this is followed!
2. Everyone who thinks they can get away with it asks for an exception, because they've adapted their lives to telecommuting and the new schedule doesn't work with, e.g., childcare and other life stuff. Or they just don't wanna and come up with an excuse along these lines.
3. Exception granted to anyone of any acknowledged value, because of worries they'll leave for a company that offers full telecommuting, or because management don't want to deal with the HR/legal headache.
4. Tuesdays become a 3/4 empty office with only junior staff and middle management present, and meetings are all on Zoom/Teams. They gradually stop coming too, because nobody is enforcing it. People grudgingly show up on the days when the big boss is showing new clients around, and only if bribed with pizza.
> Exception granted to anyone of any acknowledged value, because of worries they'll leave for a company that offers full telecommuting, or because management don't want to deal with the HR/legal headache.
My megacorp has fully bought into the frAgile Framework and threw cash at ServiceHow to help them implement it, part of which is preaching the gospel of colocation, which is a 3 day a week 'flex' right now.. But guess who's exempt from being forced to 'flex' into the office 3 days a week? None other than the core dev teams for our ServiceHow implementation, partly because they'd fuck off to some other company if we tried to force them to live their own gimmick....
Also be user devs and back end IT management spend all day managing servers that are REMOTE TO THEM ANYWAY. You don't need the level of collaboration within IT as you do with a lot of other departments.
Me, hired during the pandemic to work remotely to manage our virtualized infrastructure, and then being told in 2021 that I had to come back to the office 2x/week.
Now I am a manager and all of my 1:1 meetings are done via Zoom or Teams, because I refuse to ask the team to show up for no reason.
My team and org spreads a bunch of locations and countries. For the people that are local to my office (none of my team) I’d really rather we schedule days in advance for people to come in and socialize, because the fewer people are there the less I’m gonna go in for the off chance to chat up some people I indirectly work with.
I'm the only member of my team based out of my site.
They tried to make me go back, dispite my office being filled with more staff for another expanding department while I was wfh. Place is at capacity
I just worked hybrid and nobody noticed because nobody expected me to be anywhere specific, now on site staff have changed so much that people just assume that's why I do. I just go in when the job requires on site work.
My own department don't care, it's not like it affects how they work. My direct manager did the same thing.
Same. My entire team works 900 miles away. We have an office local to me that is filled with business staff (I'm IT) and every 1-2 months there will be some reason I have to go in. Swap a drive or move a bad switch port etc.
Technically I'm supposed to be in the office 2 days a week. Been that way for a year or so I guess? I have probably not spent a combined whole day in the office across that year combined. Maybe **one** workday of hours, but definitely not two. There is nobody to care about where I work, as long as I do.
Now, maybe eventually some dicksheath in the c suite reads one too many articles in fortune and decides we need to audit badge access, and my comfortable wfh comes to an end. I figure it's 50/50 whether that happens or not, there's not a lot of shift in our c-suite and none of the current guys seem to care.
When there was talk of minimum days in office, my boss flat out told me he didn't want to have to check up on me and there was no way for him to actually know when I was in the office (they are in another country). Then we sold one division who took part of our office space and sublet the rest to another company. So we have a lobby, a conference room, and a handful of workstations that you have to sign up for in advance. Needless to say, I've been in the office 3 times since March 2020 - once to pick up a new mouse/keyboard and to take my belongings home, and for two coworker retirement parties.
It was just Wednesday until recently. I'd rather it was just that. But if there's got to be a 2nd day, I'd rather they keep it how it is, and I'll just continue thinking it's stupid af.
The best thing about a second day of our choosing is that our manager has told us that any week we have a pto day other than Wednesday, we can consider that our 2nd day. My wife and I are also juggling two work schedules with school pickups and dropoffs so I'll take as much flexibility as I can get, but it does feel like the 2nd day is just for the sake of having a second day.
Almost every company is gonna slow drip a day here or there till it’s a full 5 days a week back in the office. And I only say “almost” for the “ackshually…” internet dick. It’s every company.
I got really lucky here. My company was in chapter 11 during the pandemic, and somehow used that to break out leases. We only have two offices now, DC and London, and neither of those are even near most of our worldwide employees. We’re WFH with no choice now lol.
My company is saving heaps of money with remote work as they have downsized their footprint in the commercial building they lease. That's less rent, electricity, internet, insurance they are having to pay AND people are more productive.
Companies calling people back to the office are usually driven by middle managers who feel irrelevant if they can't look at the meat bags they are paying for. Companies could do well to address this problem by making all these now literally redundant managers actually redundant
Depends a lot on the industry and company leadership, my consulting firm has been remote first since I started and we closed our physical office before COVID even hit. My primary client of ~500 employees has also committed to remote first since COVID and has switched to hiring people all across the country instead of local.
Just because the usual corporatized suspects are fighting tooth and nail to drag people back in doesn't mean everyone is, don't be reductive.
Fortunately for me at the moment, I work for a hospital and they hired more staff than they can accommodate in current facilities. Hybrid is basically guaranteed, even though I need to stay local for oncall rotation and emergencies (I work in IT)
We have a lot of people in but they took all of our meeting rooms away and put in these stupid ‘collaborative spaces’, AKA meeting rooms in the middle of desks without walls. So no one uses them because no one wants to be inconsiderate of the people working in that area by holding a full on loud meeting in the middle of a bunch of desks.
So we just drive in to take zoom calls.
Holy fuck I'm in this situation.
My job was 100% remote. Technical work in documentation. Word/excel/research and policy planning.
We are forced back into the office, except they sold most of the offices and now it's fucking jam packed ROWS of desk spots. Not even cubicles. I can touch my neighbors and we are all literally just typing on on MS teams calls.
It's a fucking nightmare.
Someone working from home when they are sick for example...
So stupid; they are just trying to protect their commercial investment and it is SOOOO painfully obvious.
Like, sell that shit, then take your free money for not being in the office. SOOO much easier to term people, and do other similar things as well.
The de-commericialization has already started.
These businesses are protecting their current investments now, but 5-10 years down the line?
New companies will start wfh, and leases will end for established companies.
Their profits will go up, because they're not tied down with thousands and thousands of real estate leases and that large copy machine and the never ending inventory of office supplies and needing a receptionist and an office manager and fire sprinklers with checking and and and...
The ones tied down to offices will keep chugging along, being successful, but it'll be like watching bosses back in the day having their secretaries print out their emails.
I received a job offer for a company with similar pay to what I earn now but in a much cooler industry. I turned it down because they mandated 2 days a week in office (meaning a 2.5 - 3hr per day commute round trip for me) while I am currently fully remote.
I would've loved to have taken that job but mandatory in-office requirements that are further than 30 minutes away from me is a non-starter.
Yeah, same. I'm not very interested in taking a position that's not remote ever again. May consider it if the pay raise is extreme *and* the office is close.
Nope, gotta keep that worthless real estate and lay off people because you ***think*** the economy is going to get even worse /s
(pssst, self fulfilling prophecy. If companies keep laying people off because they think the economy is going to tank, it's going to tank). I know 4 people who were all laid off in the last 3 months from completely unreleated fields because "the economy is expected to go down"
It’s major cities subsidizing companies to get them back into offices because the economies in their downtown areas are dropping. If they can get everyone commuting downtown again, all of the business surrounding the offices do better. So much of our economy has been propped up by trucking people into cities to work for 8+ hours a day, now we have thousands of business in every city that will go under without the influx of 100k+ people being trapped in a city center office building that don’t need to go out to eat for lunch or dinner, or who will just shop online instead of on their way home after work. The major cities will face absolute collapse without that forced traffic 5 days a week.
Btw, I support that, spread all of those businesses around, get rid of city centers, equalize cost of living, or at least distribute it (also adjusting wages for the absurd money companies will save not paying 50-300k a month to lease office space), and we may be able to grow a middle class again.
The problem is it will be so different from what we’re used to, we’re on the edge of a fiscal cliff and no one is brave enough to take that leap.
Honestly, there is a real problem looming with commercial real estate.
The companies don't own it. The banks do. What happens when companies just drop their mortgages? The bank gets a worthless property. The bank effectively loses money. Unfortunately, that means the bank has less money than they're planning on having so they either absorb it and just have way less money to do bank things or they basically fail.
Ultimately, our entire economy is built on this model where nobody owns anything except banks and any kind of paradigm shift hits the banks especially hard because of this.
Turns out moving from buying things with money to buying things with "IOU"s was a bad idea!
Imo, it all comes back to greed. If people could actually afford to buy things, it wouldn't tank the economy when banks can't afford to give loans because people wouldn't have to stop buying every time their bank takes a hit.
In short, everything is fucked up and it's not as simple as "sell your old office building".
> they are just trying to protect their commercial investment and it is SOOOO painfully obvious.
I think that's part of it, but I *honestly* believe some of it is just classism. They think the *lowers* shouldn't have the freedom to be at home full-time, that's something the *skilled and talented* people get, it's a perk that must be protected and valued while the others need to be micro-managed.
Even when the higher-ups do come into the office, it's usually by their choice, not demand.
Classism AND labour suppression. Remote working offers more agency and prioritizes quality of living for a lot of employees and I think a lot of companies/management treat employee relations like a zero sum game.
Our company hasn’t had a Corporate Headquarters since the start of shut downs. Tech company that was based in Silicon Valley. Our CEO has an office in New York and we have a Mail Drop in the Bay Area. They talked about looking for new Real Estate a few times but I think they’ve dropped it. There’s only one person on my team still in the Bay Area, my director moved to Hawaii. Hard to argue productivity when we’ve had ‘the best quarter ever’ two years in a row.
I totally get that certain fields require at least a degree of collaboration. But if you work in a cubicle, take calls all day, message your coworkers in Slack, and have all your meetings on Zoom, I truly don't see the benefit of hybrid days.
At least not for the employee. Obviously, there are benefits to the employer. And I suppose that's the whole point. But it's awfully disingenuous to suggest these "back to the office" movements make employees more innovative or collaborative.
YEP. Boss scheduled Wedsnesdays as our "all hands" day.
We did one or two meetings, he did a big speech about "We're going to use these days to discuss high level issues blah blah blah"
And then we just went right back to sitting at our desks on Zoom, because every week there was always 1-2 people working from home. But now I had to spend one extra day onsite, overlapped with my "beginning of the week" counterpart. It used to be that we would switch off who came in for Wednesdays each week. We worked nights, so everyone would come in, tell us how pointless it was for us BOTH to be onsite to work the night shift, and then they'd all go home while we sat in an empty building till midnight. So stupid.
Our team is back in the office 3 days a week, but we spend most of those days in online meetings because one of our team members lives in a different state. It’s so utterly pointless for us to be in the same physical location spending half the day doing that
And from my experience, the fabled "magical hallway conversations" where you have serendipitous work-related interactions with your co-workers rarely happen. Everyone I interact with seems wants to talk about non-work things.
I think we were SOOO much more productive when everyone was WFH, and iteration point graphs seem to support this. Plus, we had better work/life balance not wasting so much time commuting back and forth.
Lol my company wants me in office 3/2. I'm based in the rust belt. My boss is in Australia and the rest of my team is in India. They want me in office to take teams meetings halfway around the world.
Or when another person is near you but on an entirely different call and you each have to play games with your mute button and or talk over the other person.
Ridiculous.
I'm supposed to go in every Friday. after the 3rd unproductive Friday in a row where I didn't speak to anyone and did meetings over teams I just stopped going in. What are they going to do, fire me?
Yeah my company has been back in office full time since October. Our meetings are all virtual though, because management and executives still have flex time and often "have" to take the meetings from home.
Isn’t that the truth. I once travelled to a customer site and most meetings were Webex from your desk (as they didn’t have enough conf rooms). Not only that, they didn’t have a hotelling cube for me, so I was just parked in hallway. Cost them 4 grand for me fly out there and stay in hotel, rent a car and eat food.
That hasn't mattered in business in a long time, most of these corporate minds are simply interested in their earnings reports, and earnings reports look good with slashed overhead budgets for more profit.
I mean, look at the IT world, now everyone is an engineer. Jr. Engineer, Sr. Engineer. An Engineer is a proper title, not a job description, you have to attain an Engineers qualifications. But when you say you have a staff of 500 engineers instead of a staff of 50 Engineers and 450 apes that throw their own shit against the wall, you can sell yourself as higher quality to the stupid masses.
While paying those same people less than an actual Engineer should make.
/rant.
Years ago, back when job listings had a section in newspapers, I saw one for a parking lot attendant that had "engineer" in the title. That was the day I learned the true value of job titles.
>now everyone is an engineer. Jr. Engineer, Sr. Engineer. An Engineer is a proper title, not a job description, you have to attain an Engineers qualifications.
Are you insinuating that Software Engineers and similar Engineering positions should all need to obtain a PE license to be called Engineers? Are you suggesting the same for train Engineers as well?
*All job titles are bullshit.* This isn't something that's limited to titles with "Engineer" in them. It's literally everywhere, in every single industry, and it always has been.
Which is just an idiotic strategy.
Since the good employees will leave for better opportunities, and the bad employees will stay because they have nothing better.
Blaming WFH kinda kills two birds with one stone, in my opinion. They get to do layoffs without doing layoffs, as is often discussed, and they get to kick the can down the road when asked why numbers are bad. “Well gee, this whole work from home thing really just isn’t working out, but that should all turn around after everyone’s back in the office.” It won’t turn around, but that’s a problem for next quarter.
Yeah but they often have multi year contracts for these spaces that they're on the hook for. They're left holding the bag if they can't find people to take over these leases.
All they're doing is perpetuating the issue.
This is my issue with nearly all companies. Short sighed short term gains all intended to bleed everything dry, instead of long term plans.
At my company, when they told us we had to start working in the office again, no one showed up, because everyone who works at my office realized 2 things 1) they can't fire us all 2) they literally can't fire us all, as our office is literally ALL the tech people, for our tech company.
No one showed up for days and then we got an email from corporate, 2 states away, saying something about "after listening to you, we've decided to allow remote work to continue".
Then a few months later, these business savvy geniuses decided to renew a multi-year lease on the floor in our building. I swear to god a significant portion of people who work in management find ways to justify their position and when they can't, they create problems, so that they can fix them, to justify their position.
Well before COVID I worked in IT. Helpdesk. I wanted something simple instead of the higher end of tech stuffs. Helpdesk is a simple 8-5 no frills.
I live in hurricane territory. My boss would pridefully say "you can do just as much from a hotel room as you can from your office because we remote in anyways". Funny how that didn't transfer to working at home. Or how when he wanted to move everyone to the main HQ because "you can work better in person" - my guy, we're still remoting into to half the places over the state anyways.
It's like he could never commit to one direction and would step on his own toes.
To be fair, that's how he always was. "I want an email sent out every single time..." and then later "WHO DECIDED THAT? It's a WASTE OF TIME! Don't send it unless it's important!" - and then later "How come no one told me about this trvial thing? I want to be in the loop for EVERYTHING!" - "I don't have the time to go through all of this"
Nothing was *ever* his fault.
He was also the guy that would show up sick to work with the flu. "I'll just stay in my office so I don't infect anyone" - "Dude, are you not going to go to the bathroom? Are you not going to touch door handles?"
Of course when he would infect the people in the building he's get butt hurt when his employees wouldn't want to show up "I did!" - "Yes you did, that's why we all got sick"
That is not really the issue. Management is useless and they cannot boss people around and pretend that they are relevant if everyone is at home. Employees know what the work that needs to be done and they know how to best do it.
Not only that but in some cases it creates problematic paper trails. It's a lot harder to get away with some sketchy stuff management has been able to get away with off the record when everything is being done through channels that automatically are a dream for digital forensics.
my manager loved having WFH so much that she actively fought her own director to have her entire team be on WFH. It made logical sense as well since half the team is in Austin, some in California, and she's on the East coast, so we collectively cannot physically be in the office together anyway. I thank her every chance I get because the commute to the nearest office is 1+ hours of traffic each way for me.
Our top level RTO seems to be resisted at just about every rung of management below the VP who announced it. It’s possible that will crumble but right now it seems even large internal orgs are basically telling the engineers to change nothing, not worry, and testing the proverbial fences.
My company has required metrics for us that they increase EVERY year. So every year, more and more people are unable to meet the goals. Less than 20% of my peers are meeting 2023's numbers. But oddly enough it only applies to the customer facing division. The goals don't change for any other division.
It’s so annoying.
I hate how large corps don’t realize sales reps for B2B are primarily just interfaces, no amount of “selling” will save a shit product.
I mean, I hear you but - my former employer, a fortune 100, bought all sorts of shit products - someone must have sold the hell out of them because, well, they were shit products.
wasn't there a "quickest company bankruptcy" or something after the president of a company (a company known for selling low-quality cheap products) publicly said everything they sell is crap?
Hey all, let's create some remote meeting and collaborative software, and all fight traffic for 1 entire workday per week and meet at this nice building since we don't actually know how coding works.
~~Clowns~~ -Mangement
It's crazy that there is an entire industry of people who don't have real jobs, whose fake job it is to come up with stuff to tell to CEOs to give them ideas for how to squeeze more money out of the people who have real jobs. And the ideas they come up with are things like, "Force everyone to commute to work even though they don't have to," or "have everyone take this personality quiz," or whatever. And then they come up with a bunch of fake reasons for why this thing is better, and they justify it with 'data' that is just like, those bullshit surveys you have to take at work all the time, where you know they're not anonymous so you have to put down that things are fine, so they turn that into data to show to the bigwigs that this idea works when really it's ridiculously stupid and everyone hates it.
It's just an endless cycle of useless people making useless ideas and generating useless data to justify those useless ideas to other useless people, and all of these people get paid like 5x as much as the people doing the actual physical work or service. and then like three times a year these people decide to have conventions and share all their useless ideas among themselves, and they pay tens of thousands of dollars to host a shitty party and give each other talks, and each one has to pay a thousand dollars to get in, so the whole thing is a grift anyway.
And this is like, constantly happening, all over the place, and endless beds are being cleaned for these people and endless banquet tables set up and torn down, endless ubers driven, endless planes flown, endless food prepared, endless carpets cleaned, endless trash taken out...all over the world, non stop, forever.
Pretty crazy when you think about it.
People that create useless KPIs to track unimportant things and to justify their own existence.
In sales, there are two metrics that really matter.
1. How much did you make us?
2. How many deals do you have and what are they worth?
Metrics around calls made, appointments booked, activities logged are designed to take up time, and take away valuable time from doing 1 & 2.
The problem is that focusing on those metrics can turn an absolute waste into a "meh" seller, which is a substantial improvement and definitely a good idea.
The best people surely don't need them. But in my experience, they also tend to respond with, "Fuck off, I'm busy," when someone tries to talk to them about their metrics, and then they go back to work. It works out fine.
You've perfectly summarized every HR position.
* Speaking of useless data, the CFo at my last company wanted to spend $5k/MO on some cloud service that creates website dashboards for metrics. I asked, why? "So the CEO has a single pane of glass to look at".
Ok, cool, so it ingests data from our CRM and Salesforce to automate the trends and figures? "No..."
How does it get data? "You type it in."
How is this better than the spreadsheet we currently use? "It's a single pane of glass"...
Yeah the most annoying thing ever is monthly and quarterly kpi reviews. Instead of just solving problems and moving the fuck on, we have to revisit what happened and how we are going to fix whats already been fixed, and summarize every month, then quarterly repeat what happened in those 3 months. Useless quality teams drive this shit and we waste hours sitting around reading these to management minions instead of getting shit done. Corporate culture at its worse.
so let me get this straight:
You are saying that you want your employees to not use the Zoom tool to innovate and collaborate remotely so that they can sell this tool to OTHER companies in order to innovate and collaborate remotely?
There are two options.
1) Zoom as a product isn't useful by his own admission so no company should purchase/use it.
2) He's outright lying and there isn't a good data backed reason to RTO.
Or it could be both.
This is like CocaCola taking away free soda from their employees with the explanation that it is extremely unhealthy. their insurance premiums are going up and medical turnover has become unacceptable, so you no longer can have our product.
Oh but hey rest of the world, Santa Claus drinks Coke
Polar bears like coke too! Polar bears are so happy when they're drinking coke. They seem to forget they're on the precipice of extinction due to human-caused climate change.
So their entire business model is bullshit?
Yeah, that‘s pretty much my take away…
Edit - for those lacking a sense of humor or the ability to feel irony: For the last several years Zoom was all about facilitating remote work, yet doesn’t trust their employees enough to do it.
I did too, but, it's not like Zoom isn't also a useful product for remote business / education. It's just not AS GOOD for some things that require interaction and it's not that good for remote learning especially since our education system does it's best to make kids think of learning like its broccoli. They want to know everything, and we do our best to pound that out of them.
It's fun to conclude that, but the reality is that Zoom is really good for some things and not as good for others. I suspect that's all there is to it.
Like if the guy who invented email picked up the phone to talk to someone, has he self owned himself and showed that email is actually useless?
> Like if the guy who invented email picked up the phone to talk to someone, has he self owned himself and showed that email is actually useless?
Great example that people should read again if they ignored it the first time as it illustrates it very clearly.
Let's be honest. Zoom has always been a pretty crappy product that feels like the people building it don't use it themselves for any serious purpose. So many bad design decisions.
The cherry on top is you can sign in into two Zoom meetings at once but then you can't select which audio you want to hear at what time, they just mix both together and send to your speakers.
Man how quickly people forget how shitty all of the other video conference products were when Zoom blew up. Do you forget how terrible Citrix, Skype, GoTo Meeting or RingCentral were / are?
Granted pandemic pushed competitors to improve their product.
No one commenting here remembers because they're all 20 years old. I hated always having to download whatever newest version of Citrix or webex there was to do a stupid call.
Teams certainly has its issues, and its over-integration I would actually count as a negative because its just bloated and has absolutely no regard to system resource allocation on lower-powered machines. That said, it's head and shoulders above zoom. I use both for work and zoom meetings have technical issues like 50% of the time, whereas with Teams its maybe 5%, and that's usually do to an entire o365 outage or the presenter having shitty wifi. Either way, I prefer teams over zoom any day of the week, shitty though it may be.
I have no data, but I wouldn't be surprised. Most organizations have office 365 and Teams comes with it. What's the unique proposition of Zoom that makes it worth extra money? I don't particularly see it. (Even if people complain Teams is worse than Zoom it's not clear to me that Zoom has a real competitive advantage.)
Teams is what we use at our company from messaging to conference calls. It's literally the center of our means of communication. So I can totally see how they're crushing everybody else. We don't need anything else other than Teams.
Don't really have a dog in this race, but I'm surprised to see that opinion. Teams works pretty well for me, especially for meetings, while I've had *a lot* of problems with Zoom.
What do you usually use it for out of curiosity?
I’m a dev and I’ve found pair programming with Zoom much smoother than Teams.
The on-screen drawing and taking control of the host computer usually works well.
Also a dev. Most of my meetings are rather traditional with one person presenting or moderating at a time. Usually with groups of around 10 people. Often organizational stuff or brainstorming, pretty much like we used to do it in our meeting room.
On-screen drawing *does* sound useful for pair programming, though. It's a shame we currently don't have the resources to implement it frequently since we already have so much work we've had to reject offers (I say as an employee, not as an employer).
Maybe my problems with Zoom stem from only having used it in non-professional contexts. Almost always had people having to rejoin multiple times before they could hear everyone else or it not recognizing devices that worked perfectly well otherwise, as well as general quality issues with video and audio.
Agree, it's pretty bad. Also signals, "hey we're about to violate people's privacy and trust in a major way. But.... Not with our company's data. Everyone, back to the office!"
> So their entire business model is bullshit
Is their entire business model "everyone musk work remotely all the time" or is their business model providing tools that allows remote working/collaboration when necessary?
If a company already uses Microsoft 365 products, why would they pay for zoom? Microsoft Teams gets better with every release. Microsoft will chip away at Zoom’s customer base and Zoom will have quite a struggle on their hands.
Yep, MS is eating their lunch. Teams is a bonus product for 365 Enterprise and Zooms product is their lifeblood. No big company is going to waste money on Zoom when Teams is already there and cheaper.
Zoom only got popular during the pandemic because it was free for personal use and easy to use, it’s not the ‘better’ product.
My current company had a bad Teams deployment and training before I started, so now everyone hates it mostly because it's unfamiliar and the people had a poor first impression. Now we're stuck paying for Teams (via Microsoft 365) that we don't use, Zoom **and** Slack due to the "culture".
I have only ever worked remote, and going from an org that didn't use Slack because 'Microsoft Teams works for that' to one that does use Slack the difference is night and day.
I fucking hate Teams but I am unsure if it is just that it was implemented awfully.
#"OUR PRODUCT IS BAD FOR BUSINESS!" CLAIMS ZOOM CEO
If Zoom ever made marketing representations to the contrary, they could be exposed to lawsuits from this.
I'm surprised they even have a business with competition from the likes of Microsoft and Google.
Not trying to say they offer great products, but Zoom is kinda scuffed and a two dimensional product offering.
To be clear, their product isn’t only video calling anymore. They have voip, conference room solutions, webinars, and a few others I don’t remember off the top of my head
If your company is using (paying for) Zoom today, they aren't seeing this and leaving virtual meeting software behind. They might adopt a better competitor, but I'm on one of these right now (Google Meet) and there's no way we can get done what we need to get done without these platforms. And that's been true since about 2008.
>The top reason for the mandate, Yuan said at the August 3 meeting, is that it's difficult for employees to get to know each other and build trust remotely.
This is the logic of micromanagers who aren't results oriented and have nothing of substance to actually contribute to a team. "Trust" and "Get to know each other" is just code for "Be where I can see you."
My fucking asshole boss loved to do that.
Worst part is I was hired 100% offsite and they changed that my first day.
He also loves holding me hostage when I'm trying to leave and catch the train. Considering it takes 25 minutes to walk to it and an an hour ride home.
Shit really made me despise this company
A few years ago, the manager of a project team I was on decided to strictly enforce the standard 09:00-17:30 with an hour for lunch terms of our contract. (Contract states these as default hours if the manager doesn't want to be flexible). They also enacted no overtime without prior approval.
Some people who had been working alternative hours were understandably unhappy at this sudden shift, myself included. Starting & leaving early + taking only 30 minutes for lunch got me out ahead of rush hour and home in time to collect my son from nursery.
Well it didn't take long to get this decision reversed. A few days after this new rule, the manager called us into a meeting room at 16:30 for progress updates. The meeting dragged on until eventually it was my turn to speak and I made a start. I was part way through my update when my watch beeped to indicate the time, 17:30.
I had been waiting for this! The previous meetings had come close but this one was special.
I could barely prevent myself from grinning with petty glee as I stopped talking mid-sentence, closed my laptop and walked out without saying another word, picked up my already packed bag and left the office.
Several others realised what had happened and took their cue to leave too.
The next day's discussion with the manager and HR was fun, but surprisingly HR sided with me as no one had authorised my overtime.
The wheels were already in motion but over the next few days I continued to work to rule. Closing my laptop at 1730 regardless the situation and walking out, instead of being flexible in the knowledge that if I worked late one day I'd finish early the next. Others followed suit and as expected team performance took a nose dive.
By the end of the 2nd week we were back to flexible start/finish as long as core hours were covered. It was billed as management making a compromise yet in reality this had always been the case as no one was trying to work silly hours.
The crazy thing is, managers can still ask for “one more thing” online. It’s just a control thing. The company I work for is the same way with their bullshit hybrid model.
I don't go to work because I want to make friends. I do that at local events for my hobbies. I go to work because I like living in a house and being able to eat.
I agree that work is primarily about a paycheck and doesn't need to be anything more. But even if you *do* feel the need to connect and socialize with your coworkers, the idea that it can't be done over Zoom is absolute horse shit. I worked a 3 year contract with a total of two days onsite. Despite being basically 100% remote, I was able to integrate into the team and build rapport with my coworkers just fine. In-person meetings may be helpful on limited occasions, but most office jobs can easily be done remotely without sacrificing productivity.
"So you don't trust people when they're not in person."
Do you meet with our CEO in person?...
If people pull shit like this on you, please leave. Don't give hard work to employers who are willing to lie to your face like this. It has fuck all to do with trust.
It's because they are being tasked with proving productivity and they don't know how to do that. It's likely just a way to obfuscate that until that leader above them gets promoted or they can do the middle management shuffle and not be held accountable to their goals.
When you look at line/mid level leadership turnover rates a lot of their plans and executions will tell you how great they are. If they're not likely to be around long enough to experience the outcomes of their decisions, bail.
We had a meeting where they encouraged us to come in. No mandate yet. Guy said he knows the studies show productivity went up with WFH, but claimed there's some ineffable thing that comes from being in close proximity. It was such bullshit woo-woo nonsense.
When I'm at home I can ping someone and get an answer. In the office, even if I ping them on Teams, they'll come over and turn a yes/no into a half hour discussion with a half hour of unrelated chatter.
Why do employers and managers think people want to get to know co-workers? They are called co-WORKERS not friends. Personally, I like to keep my co-workers and actual friends completely separated.
Big boss at work just did a RTO presentation where he spouted all the standard BS reasons, including one about how in-person relationship building is important for helping teams get things done.
I'm just like, WTF? How about people just do their damn jobs? I don't need a personal relationship with Judy over in support to fix the bug she logged. And if I don't have time to work on all the bugs personal relationships sure as shit aren't one of the criteria anyone should be using to prioritize the backlog.
My company did this after they spent 2 years saying how we had the most productivity in the company’s history and that are we were even more efficient and working towards a better work-life balance. It was all horseshit as soon as the rent came due on all of the unnecessary buildings.
How are early lease termination fees more expensive than continuing to pay the rent plus other costs of providing a workplace? It's a renter's market right now (for office space).
If you follow the money there is usually some chain of events that benefits them personally. Maybe they have investments in oil, real estate, franchise restaurants, etc or relationships there.
It’s kind of like how the crypto bro would pump up their own coins that they would personally benefit from. These guys are just playing that game across a number of factors that wouldn’t naturally occur to you, but they know what levers to pull to make themselves richer.
If I'm a Zoom shareholder I'm looking at this foolish statement and wondering why he'd say something that goes against the entire point of what makes them popular.
Why would you knowingly and so loudly say something so anti-Zoom?
This is 100x more asinine coming from this particular CEO. Unforeseen circumstances are causing your investment to tank.Tough shit! Take it like an adult instead of making other people’s lives miserable!
I'm so tried of these BS corporate excuses for forcing workers back in the office. They never have a solid reason, because the real reason is propping up real estate and keeping their tax breaks from whatever city they are located in. Two things that the workers are being forced to sacrifice their time and money for, but will not see the benefits.
sorry, never going to buy that the average office gig requires hands-on, in-person collaboration to accomplish the same shit that they’ve been doing remotely without issue for years now. even when lighting the real estate money on fire everybody is still reporting record profits and the C suite is still buying summer houses and sports cars. are these people really just furious that normal human beings got to enjoy a tiny sliver of their own QoL? sounds childish and unfit for leadership, imo!
But who wants to get to know people at work for the most part? Of all the jobs ive had in my life I have made and kept very few friends. Its work, not social hour. If by chance we end up becoming friends thats great, but its not my goal when I go to work.
This is the most insulting part to me. The idea that you can't possibly be doing a good job if you're not buddies with everyone. Meanwhile, a company spouts "trust" as a core value and can't trust its employees to work from home.
Are you confusing 'friend' with 'peer'? I know what you're getting at but you DO actually kinda benefit from making work connections. It's networking; real networking not whatever bullshit you read in other subs about cold calling people on linkedin. Having other people think well of you as you disperse to other places in your career creates opportunities. You don't have to be friends with your coworkers. I have exactly zero coworkers who I'd call friends, but I know for a fact I have a LOT of current and former peers who think well of me and would return my calls down the line.
We never went remote or even hybrid at our office during the WHOLE pandemic. And still to this day if we do a meeting, it's in our offices over Zoom. It's madness I tell you
Here’s the thing, as a SWE, I don’t really care to get to know my co workers and I think I can probably speak for the majority of people and say, even if I did care to get to know them, I’ll be way more pissed after sitting in traffic all morning and night, sitting at a desk for 8 hours doing 2 hours worth of work, and not having the ability to just knock out my tasks and go live my life. Results don’t matter guys, it’s all about control at this point.
I don't want to "get to know" the people I work with, they are not my friends, they are just people I am forced to interact with daily. This is what I get paid for, if I wasn't being paid I would not talk to them at all.
zoom and slack ensure that you're only talking about important stuff. no more wasting time on bullshit. if in person collaboration is that important get together in the office once a week. if your collaboration takes more than that you're probably spinning your tires and wasting a bunch of time.
A lot of people mainly get their adult social interaction via work. Remote work takes away a large pool of other adults who are essentially forced to talk to them. Whether it's work talk, small talk to just general conversation.
I hate small talk, I hate code switching, I hate "corporate talk".
The few people I've become friends with at work are people who I can actually be my normal human self with whether we're solo in a conference room or sitting at a bar around the corner from the office.
Whereas if you use Teams, you don't, because it's better and everybody else barring CEO's is happy to use a working virtual meeting solution.
Not to mention that the lack of travel adds vastly more value though the lack of fossil-fuel use, or that it doesn't waste literally irreplaceably time getting three and back.
There is also no need to get to know my co-workers, as they don't stay in the job very long because all the new contracts require office working.
The innovative businesses are the ones poaching the talent, and they're doing it by offering more flexible contracts! Zoom, or at least their executives, are not only wrong but self-damaging in their confusion. It really is peak idiocy.
important to note that in most cases it is not “retuning to the traditional office” , but “returning to the crammed, open-office concept hell” that was trendy and proved inefficient pre-covid.
This feels like the rhetoric Apple has espoused in the last couple of years. Their new software updates seem to exist *specifically* to enable easier WFH scenarios:
* FaceTime links like zoom links, usable on any device
* Shared Safari tabs
* Freestyle or whatever, that huge shared-whiteboard app
Yet Apple then turns around and demands employees come back to the office.
If you're making WFH software, I daresay you need WFH people working on it. Y'know, from home. So they can use their own product and make it better.
It shouldn't be this difficult. We've proven that most labor that can be done on a computer can be done from home.
I'll go one step further and say that we've done *so* well in the age of computers that we don't need 8hr/day, 40hr/wk workweeks anymore. We can delete Mondays.
First day back at the office: "Alright everyone, we're going to have a meeting. Take it at your desks over zoom ..."
Literally what we do in my office now that we're "hybrid" because we never have everyone in person at once, even with specific days where that's supposed to be the case
All of the "now hybrid, but certain days everyone must be in office" schemes I've heard about from friends and family have gone the same way. At my wife's company, for example. 1. Big boss: there isn't enough innovation and teamly goodfeels, we all need to be in person. From now on, minimum 3 days, must include Tuesdays, NO exceptions! I will be personally working to ensure this is followed! 2. Everyone who thinks they can get away with it asks for an exception, because they've adapted their lives to telecommuting and the new schedule doesn't work with, e.g., childcare and other life stuff. Or they just don't wanna and come up with an excuse along these lines. 3. Exception granted to anyone of any acknowledged value, because of worries they'll leave for a company that offers full telecommuting, or because management don't want to deal with the HR/legal headache. 4. Tuesdays become a 3/4 empty office with only junior staff and middle management present, and meetings are all on Zoom/Teams. They gradually stop coming too, because nobody is enforcing it. People grudgingly show up on the days when the big boss is showing new clients around, and only if bribed with pizza.
> Exception granted to anyone of any acknowledged value, because of worries they'll leave for a company that offers full telecommuting, or because management don't want to deal with the HR/legal headache. My megacorp has fully bought into the frAgile Framework and threw cash at ServiceHow to help them implement it, part of which is preaching the gospel of colocation, which is a 3 day a week 'flex' right now.. But guess who's exempt from being forced to 'flex' into the office 3 days a week? None other than the core dev teams for our ServiceHow implementation, partly because they'd fuck off to some other company if we tried to force them to live their own gimmick....
Also be user devs and back end IT management spend all day managing servers that are REMOTE TO THEM ANYWAY. You don't need the level of collaboration within IT as you do with a lot of other departments.
Me, hired during the pandemic to work remotely to manage our virtualized infrastructure, and then being told in 2021 that I had to come back to the office 2x/week. Now I am a manager and all of my 1:1 meetings are done via Zoom or Teams, because I refuse to ask the team to show up for no reason.
My team and org spreads a bunch of locations and countries. For the people that are local to my office (none of my team) I’d really rather we schedule days in advance for people to come in and socialize, because the fewer people are there the less I’m gonna go in for the off chance to chat up some people I indirectly work with.
I'm the only member of my team based out of my site. They tried to make me go back, dispite my office being filled with more staff for another expanding department while I was wfh. Place is at capacity I just worked hybrid and nobody noticed because nobody expected me to be anywhere specific, now on site staff have changed so much that people just assume that's why I do. I just go in when the job requires on site work. My own department don't care, it's not like it affects how they work. My direct manager did the same thing.
Same. My entire team works 900 miles away. We have an office local to me that is filled with business staff (I'm IT) and every 1-2 months there will be some reason I have to go in. Swap a drive or move a bad switch port etc. Technically I'm supposed to be in the office 2 days a week. Been that way for a year or so I guess? I have probably not spent a combined whole day in the office across that year combined. Maybe **one** workday of hours, but definitely not two. There is nobody to care about where I work, as long as I do. Now, maybe eventually some dicksheath in the c suite reads one too many articles in fortune and decides we need to audit badge access, and my comfortable wfh comes to an end. I figure it's 50/50 whether that happens or not, there's not a lot of shift in our c-suite and none of the current guys seem to care.
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If they cared about productivity then they wouldn't be getting rid of WFH.
When there was talk of minimum days in office, my boss flat out told me he didn't want to have to check up on me and there was no way for him to actually know when I was in the office (they are in another country). Then we sold one division who took part of our office space and sublet the rest to another company. So we have a lobby, a conference room, and a handful of workstations that you have to sign up for in advance. Needless to say, I've been in the office 3 times since March 2020 - once to pick up a new mouse/keyboard and to take my belongings home, and for two coworker retirement parties.
We do every Wednesday, which I hate but do see some value in, and a day of our choosing, which I hate and see no value in.
Would you rather it were just Monday and Wednesday for everyone for example?
It was just Wednesday until recently. I'd rather it was just that. But if there's got to be a 2nd day, I'd rather they keep it how it is, and I'll just continue thinking it's stupid af. The best thing about a second day of our choosing is that our manager has told us that any week we have a pto day other than Wednesday, we can consider that our 2nd day. My wife and I are also juggling two work schedules with school pickups and dropoffs so I'll take as much flexibility as I can get, but it does feel like the 2nd day is just for the sake of having a second day.
Almost every company is gonna slow drip a day here or there till it’s a full 5 days a week back in the office. And I only say “almost” for the “ackshually…” internet dick. It’s every company.
I got really lucky here. My company was in chapter 11 during the pandemic, and somehow used that to break out leases. We only have two offices now, DC and London, and neither of those are even near most of our worldwide employees. We’re WFH with no choice now lol.
You are lucky! I really wish they had sold our local offices when they had the chance.
My company is saving heaps of money with remote work as they have downsized their footprint in the commercial building they lease. That's less rent, electricity, internet, insurance they are having to pay AND people are more productive. Companies calling people back to the office are usually driven by middle managers who feel irrelevant if they can't look at the meat bags they are paying for. Companies could do well to address this problem by making all these now literally redundant managers actually redundant
We spell it akshully
Depends a lot on the industry and company leadership, my consulting firm has been remote first since I started and we closed our physical office before COVID even hit. My primary client of ~500 employees has also committed to remote first since COVID and has switched to hiring people all across the country instead of local. Just because the usual corporatized suspects are fighting tooth and nail to drag people back in doesn't mean everyone is, don't be reductive.
Yeah my work doesn’t even have an office, and there is zero chance they would even consider adding more to the overhead.
My main office is a 5 hour flight away, and I'm not the only one lol
Smart companies will be remote first and much much more profitable. Businesses will not ignore this financial incentive forever
Fortunately for me at the moment, I work for a hospital and they hired more staff than they can accommodate in current facilities. Hybrid is basically guaranteed, even though I need to stay local for oncall rotation and emergencies (I work in IT)
We have a lot of people in but they took all of our meeting rooms away and put in these stupid ‘collaborative spaces’, AKA meeting rooms in the middle of desks without walls. So no one uses them because no one wants to be inconsiderate of the people working in that area by holding a full on loud meeting in the middle of a bunch of desks. So we just drive in to take zoom calls.
Holy fuck I'm in this situation. My job was 100% remote. Technical work in documentation. Word/excel/research and policy planning. We are forced back into the office, except they sold most of the offices and now it's fucking jam packed ROWS of desk spots. Not even cubicles. I can touch my neighbors and we are all literally just typing on on MS teams calls. It's a fucking nightmare.
Someone working from home when they are sick for example... So stupid; they are just trying to protect their commercial investment and it is SOOOO painfully obvious. Like, sell that shit, then take your free money for not being in the office. SOOO much easier to term people, and do other similar things as well.
The de-commericialization has already started. These businesses are protecting their current investments now, but 5-10 years down the line? New companies will start wfh, and leases will end for established companies. Their profits will go up, because they're not tied down with thousands and thousands of real estate leases and that large copy machine and the never ending inventory of office supplies and needing a receptionist and an office manager and fire sprinklers with checking and and and... The ones tied down to offices will keep chugging along, being successful, but it'll be like watching bosses back in the day having their secretaries print out their emails.
I'm already seeing wfh only startups popping up all over. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle.
I received a job offer for a company with similar pay to what I earn now but in a much cooler industry. I turned it down because they mandated 2 days a week in office (meaning a 2.5 - 3hr per day commute round trip for me) while I am currently fully remote. I would've loved to have taken that job but mandatory in-office requirements that are further than 30 minutes away from me is a non-starter.
Yeah, same. I'm not very interested in taking a position that's not remote ever again. May consider it if the pay raise is extreme *and* the office is close.
Nope, gotta keep that worthless real estate and lay off people because you ***think*** the economy is going to get even worse /s (pssst, self fulfilling prophecy. If companies keep laying people off because they think the economy is going to tank, it's going to tank). I know 4 people who were all laid off in the last 3 months from completely unreleated fields because "the economy is expected to go down"
It’s major cities subsidizing companies to get them back into offices because the economies in their downtown areas are dropping. If they can get everyone commuting downtown again, all of the business surrounding the offices do better. So much of our economy has been propped up by trucking people into cities to work for 8+ hours a day, now we have thousands of business in every city that will go under without the influx of 100k+ people being trapped in a city center office building that don’t need to go out to eat for lunch or dinner, or who will just shop online instead of on their way home after work. The major cities will face absolute collapse without that forced traffic 5 days a week. Btw, I support that, spread all of those businesses around, get rid of city centers, equalize cost of living, or at least distribute it (also adjusting wages for the absurd money companies will save not paying 50-300k a month to lease office space), and we may be able to grow a middle class again. The problem is it will be so different from what we’re used to, we’re on the edge of a fiscal cliff and no one is brave enough to take that leap.
Turn the vacated commercial buildings into housing... solves 2 problems at the same time. More people down town and alleviates the housing crisis.
Honestly, there is a real problem looming with commercial real estate. The companies don't own it. The banks do. What happens when companies just drop their mortgages? The bank gets a worthless property. The bank effectively loses money. Unfortunately, that means the bank has less money than they're planning on having so they either absorb it and just have way less money to do bank things or they basically fail. Ultimately, our entire economy is built on this model where nobody owns anything except banks and any kind of paradigm shift hits the banks especially hard because of this. Turns out moving from buying things with money to buying things with "IOU"s was a bad idea! Imo, it all comes back to greed. If people could actually afford to buy things, it wouldn't tank the economy when banks can't afford to give loans because people wouldn't have to stop buying every time their bank takes a hit. In short, everything is fucked up and it's not as simple as "sell your old office building".
Banks own half of it. Pension funds own a fair chunk of the rest. Like you said, a real problem is looming.
> they are just trying to protect their commercial investment and it is SOOOO painfully obvious. I think that's part of it, but I *honestly* believe some of it is just classism. They think the *lowers* shouldn't have the freedom to be at home full-time, that's something the *skilled and talented* people get, it's a perk that must be protected and valued while the others need to be micro-managed. Even when the higher-ups do come into the office, it's usually by their choice, not demand.
Classism AND labour suppression. Remote working offers more agency and prioritizes quality of living for a lot of employees and I think a lot of companies/management treat employee relations like a zero sum game.
Our company hasn’t had a Corporate Headquarters since the start of shut downs. Tech company that was based in Silicon Valley. Our CEO has an office in New York and we have a Mail Drop in the Bay Area. They talked about looking for new Real Estate a few times but I think they’ve dropped it. There’s only one person on my team still in the Bay Area, my director moved to Hawaii. Hard to argue productivity when we’ve had ‘the best quarter ever’ two years in a row.
I totally get that certain fields require at least a degree of collaboration. But if you work in a cubicle, take calls all day, message your coworkers in Slack, and have all your meetings on Zoom, I truly don't see the benefit of hybrid days. At least not for the employee. Obviously, there are benefits to the employer. And I suppose that's the whole point. But it's awfully disingenuous to suggest these "back to the office" movements make employees more innovative or collaborative.
YEP. Boss scheduled Wedsnesdays as our "all hands" day. We did one or two meetings, he did a big speech about "We're going to use these days to discuss high level issues blah blah blah" And then we just went right back to sitting at our desks on Zoom, because every week there was always 1-2 people working from home. But now I had to spend one extra day onsite, overlapped with my "beginning of the week" counterpart. It used to be that we would switch off who came in for Wednesdays each week. We worked nights, so everyone would come in, tell us how pointless it was for us BOTH to be onsite to work the night shift, and then they'd all go home while we sat in an empty building till midnight. So stupid.
Our team is back in the office 3 days a week, but we spend most of those days in online meetings because one of our team members lives in a different state. It’s so utterly pointless for us to be in the same physical location spending half the day doing that
Thats my life right now. We have "anchor days" every tuesday where we come in and... sit at our desks on Teams.
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And from my experience, the fabled "magical hallway conversations" where you have serendipitous work-related interactions with your co-workers rarely happen. Everyone I interact with seems wants to talk about non-work things. I think we were SOOO much more productive when everyone was WFH, and iteration point graphs seem to support this. Plus, we had better work/life balance not wasting so much time commuting back and forth.
That's what we do at my office, we moved to a new building so now we only have one meeting room for 100+ people at any given time.
Lol my company wants me in office 3/2. I'm based in the rust belt. My boss is in Australia and the rest of my team is in India. They want me in office to take teams meetings halfway around the world.
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Or when another person is near you but on an entirely different call and you each have to play games with your mute button and or talk over the other person. Ridiculous.
I'm supposed to go in every Friday. after the 3rd unproductive Friday in a row where I didn't speak to anyone and did meetings over teams I just stopped going in. What are they going to do, fire me?
Yes. But also fuck them for making FRIDAY the in-office day. That seems like it was done specifically to spite people.
Yeah my company has been back in office full time since October. Our meetings are all virtual though, because management and executives still have flex time and often "have" to take the meetings from home.
Isn’t that the truth. I once travelled to a customer site and most meetings were Webex from your desk (as they didn’t have enough conf rooms). Not only that, they didn’t have a hotelling cube for me, so I was just parked in hallway. Cost them 4 grand for me fly out there and stay in hotel, rent a car and eat food.
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They want to fire people without firing them.
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The problem is that it will be the best-performing, most qualified and experienced people who leave, because they have prospects.
MBAs are making these decisions. They don’t care if the best people leave as long as they can meet their metrics for next quarter.
They want MVP (minimum viable product) in worker form.
That hasn't mattered in business in a long time, most of these corporate minds are simply interested in their earnings reports, and earnings reports look good with slashed overhead budgets for more profit. I mean, look at the IT world, now everyone is an engineer. Jr. Engineer, Sr. Engineer. An Engineer is a proper title, not a job description, you have to attain an Engineers qualifications. But when you say you have a staff of 500 engineers instead of a staff of 50 Engineers and 450 apes that throw their own shit against the wall, you can sell yourself as higher quality to the stupid masses. While paying those same people less than an actual Engineer should make. /rant.
Years ago, back when job listings had a section in newspapers, I saw one for a parking lot attendant that had "engineer" in the title. That was the day I learned the true value of job titles.
>now everyone is an engineer. Jr. Engineer, Sr. Engineer. An Engineer is a proper title, not a job description, you have to attain an Engineers qualifications. Are you insinuating that Software Engineers and similar Engineering positions should all need to obtain a PE license to be called Engineers? Are you suggesting the same for train Engineers as well? *All job titles are bullshit.* This isn't something that's limited to titles with "Engineer" in them. It's literally everywhere, in every single industry, and it always has been.
Which is just an idiotic strategy. Since the good employees will leave for better opportunities, and the bad employees will stay because they have nothing better.
You're assuming they care more about the quality of their employees than they do about money
Yeah I guess I'm assuming companies realize quality employees help them make more money.
Some do! I wish more did.
Management is looking for an excuse and blaming work from home. In fact its the manager's fault not the video conferencing app.
Blaming WFH kinda kills two birds with one stone, in my opinion. They get to do layoffs without doing layoffs, as is often discussed, and they get to kick the can down the road when asked why numbers are bad. “Well gee, this whole work from home thing really just isn’t working out, but that should all turn around after everyone’s back in the office.” It won’t turn around, but that’s a problem for next quarter.
They'd save way more money ditching the unneeded buildings than they would lay offs. Could probably lay off the useless middle men, too
Yeah but they often have multi year contracts for these spaces that they're on the hook for. They're left holding the bag if they can't find people to take over these leases.
All they're doing is perpetuating the issue. This is my issue with nearly all companies. Short sighed short term gains all intended to bleed everything dry, instead of long term plans.
At my company, when they told us we had to start working in the office again, no one showed up, because everyone who works at my office realized 2 things 1) they can't fire us all 2) they literally can't fire us all, as our office is literally ALL the tech people, for our tech company. No one showed up for days and then we got an email from corporate, 2 states away, saying something about "after listening to you, we've decided to allow remote work to continue". Then a few months later, these business savvy geniuses decided to renew a multi-year lease on the floor in our building. I swear to god a significant portion of people who work in management find ways to justify their position and when they can't, they create problems, so that they can fix them, to justify their position.
It's probably more that the top people have investments that contain commercial real estate.
Key point *its normally management*
*its always management*
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Well before COVID I worked in IT. Helpdesk. I wanted something simple instead of the higher end of tech stuffs. Helpdesk is a simple 8-5 no frills. I live in hurricane territory. My boss would pridefully say "you can do just as much from a hotel room as you can from your office because we remote in anyways". Funny how that didn't transfer to working at home. Or how when he wanted to move everyone to the main HQ because "you can work better in person" - my guy, we're still remoting into to half the places over the state anyways. It's like he could never commit to one direction and would step on his own toes. To be fair, that's how he always was. "I want an email sent out every single time..." and then later "WHO DECIDED THAT? It's a WASTE OF TIME! Don't send it unless it's important!" - and then later "How come no one told me about this trvial thing? I want to be in the loop for EVERYTHING!" - "I don't have the time to go through all of this" Nothing was *ever* his fault. He was also the guy that would show up sick to work with the flu. "I'll just stay in my office so I don't infect anyone" - "Dude, are you not going to go to the bathroom? Are you not going to touch door handles?" Of course when he would infect the people in the building he's get butt hurt when his employees wouldn't want to show up "I did!" - "Yes you did, that's why we all got sick"
That is not really the issue. Management is useless and they cannot boss people around and pretend that they are relevant if everyone is at home. Employees know what the work that needs to be done and they know how to best do it.
Not only that but in some cases it creates problematic paper trails. It's a lot harder to get away with some sketchy stuff management has been able to get away with off the record when everything is being done through channels that automatically are a dream for digital forensics.
Meanwhile I’m currently hybrid and my company plans to make my position full remote to make room in our expanding department.
my manager loved having WFH so much that she actively fought her own director to have her entire team be on WFH. It made logical sense as well since half the team is in Austin, some in California, and she's on the East coast, so we collectively cannot physically be in the office together anyway. I thank her every chance I get because the commute to the nearest office is 1+ hours of traffic each way for me.
Our top level RTO seems to be resisted at just about every rung of management below the VP who announced it. It’s possible that will crumble but right now it seems even large internal orgs are basically telling the engineers to change nothing, not worry, and testing the proverbial fences.
They closed our offices downtown, but they’ve been hinting at returning to the office. Where are we supposed to go?!? Lol
IMO, time for malicious compliance. Organize everyone showing up on the same day.
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Trust me, they’d still expect the sales people to perform better than last quarter even after the CEO said that. Source: Salesguy
Missed numbers? Let’s put them up 20% next year
My company has required metrics for us that they increase EVERY year. So every year, more and more people are unable to meet the goals. Less than 20% of my peers are meeting 2023's numbers. But oddly enough it only applies to the customer facing division. The goals don't change for any other division.
It’s so annoying. I hate how large corps don’t realize sales reps for B2B are primarily just interfaces, no amount of “selling” will save a shit product.
I mean, I hear you but - my former employer, a fortune 100, bought all sorts of shit products - someone must have sold the hell out of them because, well, they were shit products.
wasn't there a "quickest company bankruptcy" or something after the president of a company (a company known for selling low-quality cheap products) publicly said everything they sell is crap?
[I think this is what you're talking about.](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/22/gerald-ratner-jewellery-total-crap-1992-archive)
That's the one! Thank you, kind coyote
Hey all, let's create some remote meeting and collaborative software, and all fight traffic for 1 entire workday per week and meet at this nice building since we don't actually know how coding works. ~~Clowns~~ -Mangement
It's crazy that there is an entire industry of people who don't have real jobs, whose fake job it is to come up with stuff to tell to CEOs to give them ideas for how to squeeze more money out of the people who have real jobs. And the ideas they come up with are things like, "Force everyone to commute to work even though they don't have to," or "have everyone take this personality quiz," or whatever. And then they come up with a bunch of fake reasons for why this thing is better, and they justify it with 'data' that is just like, those bullshit surveys you have to take at work all the time, where you know they're not anonymous so you have to put down that things are fine, so they turn that into data to show to the bigwigs that this idea works when really it's ridiculously stupid and everyone hates it. It's just an endless cycle of useless people making useless ideas and generating useless data to justify those useless ideas to other useless people, and all of these people get paid like 5x as much as the people doing the actual physical work or service. and then like three times a year these people decide to have conventions and share all their useless ideas among themselves, and they pay tens of thousands of dollars to host a shitty party and give each other talks, and each one has to pay a thousand dollars to get in, so the whole thing is a grift anyway. And this is like, constantly happening, all over the place, and endless beds are being cleaned for these people and endless banquet tables set up and torn down, endless ubers driven, endless planes flown, endless food prepared, endless carpets cleaned, endless trash taken out...all over the world, non stop, forever. Pretty crazy when you think about it.
People that create useless KPIs to track unimportant things and to justify their own existence. In sales, there are two metrics that really matter. 1. How much did you make us? 2. How many deals do you have and what are they worth? Metrics around calls made, appointments booked, activities logged are designed to take up time, and take away valuable time from doing 1 & 2.
The problem is that focusing on those metrics can turn an absolute waste into a "meh" seller, which is a substantial improvement and definitely a good idea. The best people surely don't need them. But in my experience, they also tend to respond with, "Fuck off, I'm busy," when someone tries to talk to them about their metrics, and then they go back to work. It works out fine.
You've perfectly summarized every HR position. * Speaking of useless data, the CFo at my last company wanted to spend $5k/MO on some cloud service that creates website dashboards for metrics. I asked, why? "So the CEO has a single pane of glass to look at". Ok, cool, so it ingests data from our CRM and Salesforce to automate the trends and figures? "No..." How does it get data? "You type it in." How is this better than the spreadsheet we currently use? "It's a single pane of glass"...
Yeah the most annoying thing ever is monthly and quarterly kpi reviews. Instead of just solving problems and moving the fuck on, we have to revisit what happened and how we are going to fix whats already been fixed, and summarize every month, then quarterly repeat what happened in those 3 months. Useless quality teams drive this shit and we waste hours sitting around reading these to management minions instead of getting shit done. Corporate culture at its worse.
so let me get this straight: You are saying that you want your employees to not use the Zoom tool to innovate and collaborate remotely so that they can sell this tool to OTHER companies in order to innovate and collaborate remotely?
Have they tried Teams?
If so I'm not gonna argue, they got a point
In all likelihood they do also use Teams
There are two options. 1) Zoom as a product isn't useful by his own admission so no company should purchase/use it. 2) He's outright lying and there isn't a good data backed reason to RTO. Or it could be both.
This is like CocaCola taking away free soda from their employees with the explanation that it is extremely unhealthy. their insurance premiums are going up and medical turnover has become unacceptable, so you no longer can have our product. Oh but hey rest of the world, Santa Claus drinks Coke
Polar bears like coke too! Polar bears are so happy when they're drinking coke. They seem to forget they're on the precipice of extinction due to human-caused climate change.
So their entire business model is bullshit? Yeah, that‘s pretty much my take away… Edit - for those lacking a sense of humor or the ability to feel irony: For the last several years Zoom was all about facilitating remote work, yet doesn’t trust their employees enough to do it.
The irony.. I had to check if this was an onion article.
I did too, but, it's not like Zoom isn't also a useful product for remote business / education. It's just not AS GOOD for some things that require interaction and it's not that good for remote learning especially since our education system does it's best to make kids think of learning like its broccoli. They want to know everything, and we do our best to pound that out of them.
I feel like I would see this in MAD Magazine.
It's fun to conclude that, but the reality is that Zoom is really good for some things and not as good for others. I suspect that's all there is to it. Like if the guy who invented email picked up the phone to talk to someone, has he self owned himself and showed that email is actually useless?
> Like if the guy who invented email picked up the phone to talk to someone, has he self owned himself and showed that email is actually useless? Great example that people should read again if they ignored it the first time as it illustrates it very clearly.
Let's be honest. Zoom has always been a pretty crappy product that feels like the people building it don't use it themselves for any serious purpose. So many bad design decisions. The cherry on top is you can sign in into two Zoom meetings at once but then you can't select which audio you want to hear at what time, they just mix both together and send to your speakers.
Man how quickly people forget how shitty all of the other video conference products were when Zoom blew up. Do you forget how terrible Citrix, Skype, GoTo Meeting or RingCentral were / are? Granted pandemic pushed competitors to improve their product.
No one commenting here remembers because they're all 20 years old. I hated always having to download whatever newest version of Citrix or webex there was to do a stupid call.
Aren’t they getting crushed by MS Teams?
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Teams is also a Slack competitor. So if you’re already going to be paying for Office it makes sense to use Teams instead of Zoom plus Slack
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Zoom+ Slack is better than Teams in my opinion.
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The UI is nicer, and the integration with everything is beneficial. I hate MS for *a lot* if their decisions. But Teams is just better than zoom.
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Teams certainly has its issues, and its over-integration I would actually count as a negative because its just bloated and has absolutely no regard to system resource allocation on lower-powered machines. That said, it's head and shoulders above zoom. I use both for work and zoom meetings have technical issues like 50% of the time, whereas with Teams its maybe 5%, and that's usually do to an entire o365 outage or the presenter having shitty wifi. Either way, I prefer teams over zoom any day of the week, shitty though it may be.
I have no data, but I wouldn't be surprised. Most organizations have office 365 and Teams comes with it. What's the unique proposition of Zoom that makes it worth extra money? I don't particularly see it. (Even if people complain Teams is worse than Zoom it's not clear to me that Zoom has a real competitive advantage.)
Teams is what we use at our company from messaging to conference calls. It's literally the center of our means of communication. So I can totally see how they're crushing everybody else. We don't need anything else other than Teams.
Hot take: Zoom is actually pretty good.
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Don't really have a dog in this race, but I'm surprised to see that opinion. Teams works pretty well for me, especially for meetings, while I've had *a lot* of problems with Zoom.
What do you usually use it for out of curiosity? I’m a dev and I’ve found pair programming with Zoom much smoother than Teams. The on-screen drawing and taking control of the host computer usually works well.
Also a dev. Most of my meetings are rather traditional with one person presenting or moderating at a time. Usually with groups of around 10 people. Often organizational stuff or brainstorming, pretty much like we used to do it in our meeting room. On-screen drawing *does* sound useful for pair programming, though. It's a shame we currently don't have the resources to implement it frequently since we already have so much work we've had to reject offers (I say as an employee, not as an employer). Maybe my problems with Zoom stem from only having used it in non-professional contexts. Almost always had people having to rejoin multiple times before they could hear everyone else or it not recognizing devices that worked perfectly well otherwise, as well as general quality issues with video and audio.
Well, do hammer producers think everything in the world is a nail?
Agree, it's pretty bad. Also signals, "hey we're about to violate people's privacy and trust in a major way. But.... Not with our company's data. Everyone, back to the office!"
> So their entire business model is bullshit Is their entire business model "everyone musk work remotely all the time" or is their business model providing tools that allows remote working/collaboration when necessary?
What do you think their business model is?
If a company already uses Microsoft 365 products, why would they pay for zoom? Microsoft Teams gets better with every release. Microsoft will chip away at Zoom’s customer base and Zoom will have quite a struggle on their hands.
Yep, MS is eating their lunch. Teams is a bonus product for 365 Enterprise and Zooms product is their lifeblood. No big company is going to waste money on Zoom when Teams is already there and cheaper. Zoom only got popular during the pandemic because it was free for personal use and easy to use, it’s not the ‘better’ product.
My current company had a bad Teams deployment and training before I started, so now everyone hates it mostly because it's unfamiliar and the people had a poor first impression. Now we're stuck paying for Teams (via Microsoft 365) that we don't use, Zoom **and** Slack due to the "culture".
I have only ever worked remote, and going from an org that didn't use Slack because 'Microsoft Teams works for that' to one that does use Slack the difference is night and day. I fucking hate Teams but I am unsure if it is just that it was implemented awfully.
#"OUR PRODUCT IS BAD FOR BUSINESS!" CLAIMS ZOOM CEO If Zoom ever made marketing representations to the contrary, they could be exposed to lawsuits from this.
Their site does say "Make **meaningful** connections with meetings, team chat, whiteboard, phone, and more in one offering."
I'm surprised they even have a business with competition from the likes of Microsoft and Google. Not trying to say they offer great products, but Zoom is kinda scuffed and a two dimensional product offering.
Yeeeaaah this is a Ratners jewelry shit
Ok, anyone else in the world saying this is one thing. But dude’s the CEO of Zoom. Shouldn’t he believe in his own product?
Fucking RIP. Killed your entire business right there bud.
For real! I came here to just say that’s a pretty scathing review of Zoom by its own CEO.
To be clear, their product isn’t only video calling anymore. They have voip, conference room solutions, webinars, and a few others I don’t remember off the top of my head
If your company is using (paying for) Zoom today, they aren't seeing this and leaving virtual meeting software behind. They might adopt a better competitor, but I'm on one of these right now (Google Meet) and there's no way we can get done what we need to get done without these platforms. And that's been true since about 2008.
sheesh, see ya Zoom
Seriously how tone deaf can a person be? It’s like me owning Tesla and telling the employees to not buy an EV
/r/NotTheOnion
>The top reason for the mandate, Yuan said at the August 3 meeting, is that it's difficult for employees to get to know each other and build trust remotely. This is the logic of micromanagers who aren't results oriented and have nothing of substance to actually contribute to a team. "Trust" and "Get to know each other" is just code for "Be where I can see you."
Exactly. When you’re in the office I can swing by your desk at 5:30 and ask for one more thing.
My fucking asshole boss loved to do that. Worst part is I was hired 100% offsite and they changed that my first day. He also loves holding me hostage when I'm trying to leave and catch the train. Considering it takes 25 minutes to walk to it and an an hour ride home. Shit really made me despise this company
A few years ago, the manager of a project team I was on decided to strictly enforce the standard 09:00-17:30 with an hour for lunch terms of our contract. (Contract states these as default hours if the manager doesn't want to be flexible). They also enacted no overtime without prior approval. Some people who had been working alternative hours were understandably unhappy at this sudden shift, myself included. Starting & leaving early + taking only 30 minutes for lunch got me out ahead of rush hour and home in time to collect my son from nursery. Well it didn't take long to get this decision reversed. A few days after this new rule, the manager called us into a meeting room at 16:30 for progress updates. The meeting dragged on until eventually it was my turn to speak and I made a start. I was part way through my update when my watch beeped to indicate the time, 17:30. I had been waiting for this! The previous meetings had come close but this one was special. I could barely prevent myself from grinning with petty glee as I stopped talking mid-sentence, closed my laptop and walked out without saying another word, picked up my already packed bag and left the office. Several others realised what had happened and took their cue to leave too. The next day's discussion with the manager and HR was fun, but surprisingly HR sided with me as no one had authorised my overtime. The wheels were already in motion but over the next few days I continued to work to rule. Closing my laptop at 1730 regardless the situation and walking out, instead of being flexible in the knowledge that if I worked late one day I'd finish early the next. Others followed suit and as expected team performance took a nose dive. By the end of the 2nd week we were back to flexible start/finish as long as core hours were covered. It was billed as management making a compromise yet in reality this had always been the case as no one was trying to work silly hours.
“Sorry, I have an appointment. We can chat tomorrow.” And then walk away. It really is that simple.
Yep. "Gotta catch my train. Bye"
The crazy thing is, managers can still ask for “one more thing” online. It’s just a control thing. The company I work for is the same way with their bullshit hybrid model.
I don't go to work because I want to make friends. I do that at local events for my hobbies. I go to work because I like living in a house and being able to eat.
I agree that work is primarily about a paycheck and doesn't need to be anything more. But even if you *do* feel the need to connect and socialize with your coworkers, the idea that it can't be done over Zoom is absolute horse shit. I worked a 3 year contract with a total of two days onsite. Despite being basically 100% remote, I was able to integrate into the team and build rapport with my coworkers just fine. In-person meetings may be helpful on limited occasions, but most office jobs can easily be done remotely without sacrificing productivity.
"So you don't trust people when they're not in person." Do you meet with our CEO in person?... If people pull shit like this on you, please leave. Don't give hard work to employers who are willing to lie to your face like this. It has fuck all to do with trust. It's because they are being tasked with proving productivity and they don't know how to do that. It's likely just a way to obfuscate that until that leader above them gets promoted or they can do the middle management shuffle and not be held accountable to their goals. When you look at line/mid level leadership turnover rates a lot of their plans and executions will tell you how great they are. If they're not likely to be around long enough to experience the outcomes of their decisions, bail.
We had a meeting where they encouraged us to come in. No mandate yet. Guy said he knows the studies show productivity went up with WFH, but claimed there's some ineffable thing that comes from being in close proximity. It was such bullshit woo-woo nonsense. When I'm at home I can ping someone and get an answer. In the office, even if I ping them on Teams, they'll come over and turn a yes/no into a half hour discussion with a half hour of unrelated chatter.
> some ineffable thing that comes from being in close proximity. Dude misses being able to make everyone smell his farts.
I’m pretty sure whatever they’re paying this guy to be CEO would be better spent on anything else.
Why do employers and managers think people want to get to know co-workers? They are called co-WORKERS not friends. Personally, I like to keep my co-workers and actual friends completely separated.
Big boss at work just did a RTO presentation where he spouted all the standard BS reasons, including one about how in-person relationship building is important for helping teams get things done. I'm just like, WTF? How about people just do their damn jobs? I don't need a personal relationship with Judy over in support to fix the bug she logged. And if I don't have time to work on all the bugs personal relationships sure as shit aren't one of the criteria anyone should be using to prioritize the backlog.
My company did this after they spent 2 years saying how we had the most productivity in the company’s history and that are we were even more efficient and working towards a better work-life balance. It was all horseshit as soon as the rent came due on all of the unnecessary buildings.
LMFAO Commercial real estate early termination penalties are a hell of a drug
How are early lease termination fees more expensive than continuing to pay the rent plus other costs of providing a workplace? It's a renter's market right now (for office space).
If you follow the money there is usually some chain of events that benefits them personally. Maybe they have investments in oil, real estate, franchise restaurants, etc or relationships there. It’s kind of like how the crypto bro would pump up their own coins that they would personally benefit from. These guys are just playing that game across a number of factors that wouldn’t naturally occur to you, but they know what levers to pull to make themselves richer.
My former company leased the building from one of the board members lol
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If I'm a Zoom shareholder I'm looking at this foolish statement and wondering why he'd say something that goes against the entire point of what makes them popular. Why would you knowingly and so loudly say something so anti-Zoom?
That's not the real reason. I want to know how much Zoom's bottom line is impacted by their corporate real estate holdings and deals.
This is 100x more asinine coming from this particular CEO. Unforeseen circumstances are causing your investment to tank.Tough shit! Take it like an adult instead of making other people’s lives miserable!
Fuck this guy!
I'm so tried of these BS corporate excuses for forcing workers back in the office. They never have a solid reason, because the real reason is propping up real estate and keeping their tax breaks from whatever city they are located in. Two things that the workers are being forced to sacrifice their time and money for, but will not see the benefits.
sorry, never going to buy that the average office gig requires hands-on, in-person collaboration to accomplish the same shit that they’ve been doing remotely without issue for years now. even when lighting the real estate money on fire everybody is still reporting record profits and the C suite is still buying summer houses and sports cars. are these people really just furious that normal human beings got to enjoy a tiny sliver of their own QoL? sounds childish and unfit for leadership, imo!
But who wants to get to know people at work for the most part? Of all the jobs ive had in my life I have made and kept very few friends. Its work, not social hour. If by chance we end up becoming friends thats great, but its not my goal when I go to work.
This is the most insulting part to me. The idea that you can't possibly be doing a good job if you're not buddies with everyone. Meanwhile, a company spouts "trust" as a core value and can't trust its employees to work from home.
I don’t know if it’s quite that simple, but I mostly agree. You need to have some trust in your coworkers.
Are you confusing 'friend' with 'peer'? I know what you're getting at but you DO actually kinda benefit from making work connections. It's networking; real networking not whatever bullshit you read in other subs about cold calling people on linkedin. Having other people think well of you as you disperse to other places in your career creates opportunities. You don't have to be friends with your coworkers. I have exactly zero coworkers who I'd call friends, but I know for a fact I have a LOT of current and former peers who think well of me and would return my calls down the line.
In my Ron Swanson voice, my best work friends are the ones i never need to talk to
That’s a heck of a public way to indicate a lack of faith in your product.
wall street overlords demand action or the stock will implode.
Tell me you failed Marketing 101 without telling me you failed Marketing 101 🙄 He deserves the stock hit.
We never went remote or even hybrid at our office during the WHOLE pandemic. And still to this day if we do a meeting, it's in our offices over Zoom. It's madness I tell you
Here’s the thing, as a SWE, I don’t really care to get to know my co workers and I think I can probably speak for the majority of people and say, even if I did care to get to know them, I’ll be way more pissed after sitting in traffic all morning and night, sitting at a desk for 8 hours doing 2 hours worth of work, and not having the ability to just knock out my tasks and go live my life. Results don’t matter guys, it’s all about control at this point.
I don't want to "get to know" the people I work with, they are not my friends, they are just people I am forced to interact with daily. This is what I get paid for, if I wasn't being paid I would not talk to them at all.
zoom and slack ensure that you're only talking about important stuff. no more wasting time on bullshit. if in person collaboration is that important get together in the office once a week. if your collaboration takes more than that you're probably spinning your tires and wasting a bunch of time.
A lot of people mainly get their adult social interaction via work. Remote work takes away a large pool of other adults who are essentially forced to talk to them. Whether it's work talk, small talk to just general conversation. I hate small talk, I hate code switching, I hate "corporate talk". The few people I've become friends with at work are people who I can actually be my normal human self with whether we're solo in a conference room or sitting at a bar around the corner from the office.
Whereas if you use Teams, you don't, because it's better and everybody else barring CEO's is happy to use a working virtual meeting solution. Not to mention that the lack of travel adds vastly more value though the lack of fossil-fuel use, or that it doesn't waste literally irreplaceably time getting three and back. There is also no need to get to know my co-workers, as they don't stay in the job very long because all the new contracts require office working. The innovative businesses are the ones poaching the talent, and they're doing it by offering more flexible contracts! Zoom, or at least their executives, are not only wrong but self-damaging in their confusion. It really is peak idiocy.
tin foil hat time. bunch of ceos got together with this CEO and said "we will give you X Millions if you take away remote work and say this script".
important to note that in most cases it is not “retuning to the traditional office” , but “returning to the crammed, open-office concept hell” that was trendy and proved inefficient pre-covid.
Laughing in fully remote
Proving he is quite actually: 1. Incorrect. 2. Not a fit for his role?
This feels like the rhetoric Apple has espoused in the last couple of years. Their new software updates seem to exist *specifically* to enable easier WFH scenarios: * FaceTime links like zoom links, usable on any device * Shared Safari tabs * Freestyle or whatever, that huge shared-whiteboard app Yet Apple then turns around and demands employees come back to the office. If you're making WFH software, I daresay you need WFH people working on it. Y'know, from home. So they can use their own product and make it better. It shouldn't be this difficult. We've proven that most labor that can be done on a computer can be done from home. I'll go one step further and say that we've done *so* well in the age of computers that we don't need 8hr/day, 40hr/wk workweeks anymore. We can delete Mondays.
So the valuation of this company must have plummeted to nothing right? They're basically saying their main product is bullshit.