Leaked Zoom all-hands: CEO says employees must return to offices because they can't be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom
businessinsider.com
Leaked Zoom all-hands: CEO says employees must return to offices because they can't be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom::Zoom CEO Eric Yuan discussed the benefits of in-person work in a leaked meeting.
Ice cream factory urges its employees not to eat ice cream.
Dog food company doesn't want to serve its food to their own dogs 🤔
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
For those who are unaware. Highly relevant.
If only there was some generic term for this phenomenon.
Food-dogging. It’s like raw-digging but for food. Wait…
Zoom CEO says that his companies product is trash.
“No, no, you misunderstood! I’m just terrible at my job!"
I'm going to choose to believe the CEO is actively trying to tank the share price for some reason. This is approaching get fired or sued by shareholders level.
Either that or a forced reduction in workforce without having to do layoffs.
It’s this. All the tech companies overexpanded during COVID when free investment money was everywhere. Now they’re all over staffed and want employees to self select out of employment rather than announce widespread layoffs. Meanwhile ruining life for everyone who can’t afford to quit.
That and seeing corporate real estate tanking. Its in the best interest of anyone who owns an office space to encourage return to work to try to help prop up the market long enough to exit.
But the “WORK FROM HOME” company should be doing EVERYTHING to encourage the activity that keeps THEM in business. It’s mind-boggling!
They are not all overstaffed lol, that is total nonsense. Most "tech" companies are not FAANG or flashy startups.
These companies are greedy and trying to prop up real estate value while flexing on their employees, that's all there is to it. My company is severely understaffed and still refusing to hire people out of sheer greed.
This is what I believe as well.
Companies noticed people like to give up when mistreated so they now bully them into it. Reminder: Soft Quitting is a Reactionary method. People wouldn't do it at all if they were simply dissatisfied.
Why tf do out of touch executives and managers always think that we want to make friends at work? I don't really care to know any of my coworkers, I just want to do my job in a professional manner, get paid well for it, and then either go home or close the laptop and leave my home office.
Also the only creativity that the office gives me is how to creatively get around the Internet restrictions they place on us, or how to creatively appear to be working when there's nothing to do.
If I wanted to make friends I'd go to a bar or something else that adults do together in groups, like bowling leagues.
Because it's the type of people they are, and they think everyone is just like them. I worked a corporate job for 10 years and saw a lot of people who made the company their whole identity. Their whole friend group was their co-workers.
That's a great point, these people's who lives revolve around their jobs, it makes perfect sense.
I bet their real goal is to shed employees without having to do layoffs. They know some of these people will refuse to come back (or moved far away) and therefore can be fired with little press or blowback.
Depends on the type of work. Workshops and strategy sessions are definitely better in person than online for me.
Okay so what are you getting from either of those that you can't get from attending the same on Teams/Zoom etc.?
Workshops also just feel like school and the presenters always talk too fast, quiet, or accented for my hearing and ADHD to make it worth me going to one, some dedicated study time always was the better route for me.
Meanwhile strategy sesh's are just conversations with an end goal, nothing difficult about that at all.
One thing people who are against work from home have to realize is that not everybody functions the same, some people do better remotely, others need the office.
I just wish we could be treated like adults and work in the way we feel most comfortable and efficiently without being mistreated over it and without being astroturfed against it by entities like the Wall St. journal and Bloomberg, sorry rich people but I just don't give a fuck about your corporate property values.
I don't get the "Bill, we can't hear you; you're on mute" twenty times per hour. Or the guy who doesn't realize he should be muted but isn't, and the chat is flooded with his background noise. I don't get to whisper snarky comments about the presenter to my coworker whom I'm sitting next to. I don't get to spontaneously engage people hanging around the coffee stand between sessions.
There are tangible differences between remote and in-person. As much of an introvert as I am, and as much as I love working remotely, I recognize that I do better collaborative work when I'm in-person. YMMV, but mine doesn't.
I found that keeping up with people over video works better when you're in the same time zone. When I was managing teams at +8 hours and -12.5 relative hours, communication and trust just weakened steadily over time and creative collaboration stalled. Spending a week there in person usually got things unstuck.
I know people on split engineering teams between LA and Seattle who prefer all virtual and it's worked long term. LA to NY I think would be a heavier lift.
And, of course, this whole discussion is always dominated by software engineers; there are lots of jobs that involve actual manipulation of matter where in person collaboration is essential to communicate skills.
Oh definitely, timezones do throw a wrench in things a bit, but there are easy ways around that usually, splitting engineering teams like the way you described is a pretty good workaround.
I completely agree that jobs that just can't be done remotely obviously shouldn't be, but any job that can be should have the option available. I just feel like most of the work from home backlash comes from people who cannot do their jobs from home and managers/executives that just want someone to babysit, usually in order to justify their own professional existence. It just seems like a lot of "crabs in a bucket" behavior.
Firstly real human interaction. There is a lot of team building that can occur just from having lunch together. Second, just physically being able to put sticky notes or drawing lines and watching someone else do so without having to have someone try to point out where exactly they put something to you in a virtual whiteboard is way more efficient.
Firstly if you just have a presenter talking to you, then that doesn't sound like a collaborative workshop. Workshops might have someone who guides the discussion but never just presenters otherwise that's not really a workshop and more just a presentation that can be done online.
I am not sure what kind of strategy sessions you are having but when you are setting things like commercial STRAP for divisions of 20K or more employees, you need more than just a conversation. You need to draw out roadmaps, have working sessions, even the human interactions through lunches and dinners plays a big part.
It's not black or white. I am a remote worker who travels regularly. Would I ever give up being remote. No. More than half my job can be done from home and I am not wasting my time travelling to the office. But that doesn't mean I don't acknowledge when something is just better in person. Not everything is perfect remote and not everything needs to be done in the office. You can have a mix of both and choose based on the requirements of the task.
Additionally, the type of people who are in positions to set organizational strategy are usually the types of personalities that do function between in person because they are typically extroverted personalities. It's not like I am suggesting you bring a developer to an on site session. I am talking about leaders.
Even if that is the case I don't find myself caring enough to want to work in the office when going to work has such a huge impact on time and money wasted commuting, and plays such a huge role on where people can live. Its hard to care when it's such a drain on personal time and expenses.
I prefer working remote as well and not suggesting going back full time. I just think there are some things that are better in person. Fortunately my work provides a good balance where I am remote 50 - 80% of the time but can fly in to different locations for a F2F when necessary.
I think when I look at when it comes to remote is that as an employee what an employer sees as better in person is not better for me. But, I can see why an employer would see in person as better. As an employee I need to be paid even more to make it worth it, since it is overall a con in my time.
Because the #1 reason why employees will stay at a job that underpays them is because they like the people they work with. And you can’t form those bonds remotely.
I agree with the first part, disagree with the second part. You absolutely can form bond remotely, some of my closest friends are online-only. I've even met some of my online-only friends IRL once or twice. I've become close with online-only coworkers too, honestly closer than I was with a lot of people in the office.
Remote work does work. Return to office is just a power grab by companies and real estate sunken cost fallacy.
Except that you absolutely can if the company has a good remote culture.
The company I was at prior to the pandemic and all throughout the height of the pandemic had such a culture. Even before the pandemic our work chat had rooms for different teams, different products/projects, and general subjects including non-work-related ones. And the chats were active and lively. And during the pandemic it only got more so. There was a very strong bond between coworkers, including new people first onboarded as WFH.
After we got bought out by a new company and they mandated 100% from the office, I left (as did over 50% of the years of experience in the dev teams). My new company is actually still hybrid/remote, with most people working from the office occasionally but anything including 100% remote being allowed at least after initial onboarding.
But I actually think this company is really bad at remote culture. There are a handful of public chat rooms but they almost never get used, and there's nothing off-topic at all. It creates a feeling that reaching out to someone is a bigger hurdle than it was at my last place, and greatly reduces collaboration.
At my last place, working collaboratively was the norm and it translated extremely well to remote work. Here everyone is much more siloed and I don't think it works as well. Especially if your goal is to create interpersonal bonds.
I think that any study you find over the past 30 years will show that while online relationships can be meaningful in some cases, the average person will not form as strong a connection as they would in person.
The term for this is parasocial relationships, and you have truth to your claims
Yes you can, what on earth are you talking about? I've been remote for 5 years now and I have close relationships with most of the people I work with, especially the devs on my team. Sometimes we'll debug an issue or discuss something and then afterwards bullshit for a while on the phone.
Are people really this inept? You can have remote relationships especially if you make time for it.
Been remote for years, number two is just flat out bull shit.
But it doesn’t make sense. If I would have people which I like so much in the office would, you know, go to the office. If I don’t wonna go well… then I don’t like those people enough and there can’t be bonds anyway. We will just come, say hi, do job, go home. What a great creativity boost
Because if your social life is tied to work you'll stick around longer during the day and potentially do more work. You'll also opt to stay at a job that pays less or has worse benefits because it means leaving your friends.
I feel personally attacked
I don't remember where this quote is from but i think it's useful.
Something like that. I'm all for having comradery and if you happen to be friends then that's great. But often times, and i know I've fallen victim to this, we work too much and dont have social lives that exist outside of work.
I like my coworkers well enough but there is not a single person in that office whom I would choose to be around socially.
Glad I'm not a stockholder, since the CEO basically says their only product, remote connectivity, stifles innovation and connection. What a world.
They've gained about 1.2 billion in market cap this week based on stock price. The super rich do not experience consequences.
They should try using Teams, should solve the problem.
Better upgrade them* networks dawg
The only problem teams solves is "why are people too happy with remote work", and it's very effective at fixing that.
I actually charge a teams tax on my wage requirements if I find out they're using broken last-gen weak shit like teams, Ansible, or vro.
A role I worked had this holy trinity. Moving to teams was nail in the coffin for me. Out of interest, what is "broken and last gen" about Ansible? And what's newer and better than it? I find it to be okay for infra patching tasks...
What's wrong with Ansible?
I dunno man, that's what I was trying to find out.... I thought I was out of the loop on something here.
Tribalism will affect how this is received, like cursing out vi or apple in a crowded room, but it's important to see what else is out there and what they offer. Hint: If Ansible is bolting things onto the side of itself like event-driven triggers and connecting to AWX, then you have a good idea of what Ansible needs crutches to do and keep up to last-gen tech. One can only bolt so many bags on the side before the entirety falls apart, and IBM no longer has the goodwill to keep enthusiasts doing the heavy-lifting -- even if IBM is repeating what Canonical did a decade or more ago without repercussion.
Patching shouldn't need an automation scaffolding. I'll leave that there, that it's entirely possible to patch your systems in a very automated, patchset-promoted fashion and not need to touch what we currently call Automation. I've seen and done it 20+ years, but to be fair that's only how long I've been in the Enterprise space where that was the focus vs the relaxed tolerances of the soho/robo market.
This-gen tech is responsive and self-organizing from the ground up, and responds in real-time to changes. Comically, it's usually a collection of well-established components like consul that powers the this-gen stuff.
I joined a job with this holy trinity, but they pay the tax every paycheque. I "dead sea" left a toxic mess with failing puppet managers a FIN coup had installed but with good tooling, to a great environment with known faces and good management left behind after their arrogant toxicity couldn't cope with remote-first workers and bailed. The fact the tooling is complete shite is just a feature we cope with in this awesome environment, and while the environment stays excellent we'll solve that technical challenge or we'll bail if the environment gets toxic again first.
CEO can't even eat its own dog food. How pathetic
The fact of the matter is when your company revolves around you being able to communicate and work from anywhere, it is a bad look for you tell people you can’t communicate effectively over the product you make. Anyone who knows business should know this and should know to keep their mouth shut and their policies focused on trying to destroy business.
Makes me feel like someone is paying to or making them do this. If it's best for 'THE' WFH company to WFO, then every company can say it's best their employees WFO.
Yes, the executives who are looking at empty offices with decades-long leases is what's "paying" them to do this.
Greedy dumbasses around the world are subject to sunk cost fallacy, apparently far worse than normal people.
Well that was an impressive way to destroy your entire business model
LoL right?
I mean the company clearly benefited from the pandemic and people working from home. Why would they want that to stop??
Control. They don't feel like they have enough control of their plebe workers
I swear, sometimes it feels as though companies are run by a bunch of power hungry psychopaths. The system is really rigged in their favor, too. Their kind of behaviour seems rewarded all the time.
They'll have much less when they lose all their customers and have to downsize lol
Money. This guy is getting leaned on to send the message that wfh is a mistake. There is about 2.5 trillion in corporate real estate debt floating around and when contracts are negotiated conditions are made. Government and invested business are shitting bricks and doing everything they can to force occupation of otherwise obsolete buildings.
Ya, this guy is toast. He just told the world he thinks his product sucks - the sane know he's wrong at least.
Doing a "Ratner" https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/22/gerald-ratner-jewellery-total-crap-1992-archive
The product sucks for work and productivity purposes. It can still be useful for meetings where productivity is not a factor (social, medical, many other situations.)
I don't really care which teleconferencing software I use but without zoom I would lose access to several medical providers and need to travel a couple hours to them which is untenable.
I gotta say I'm shocked that Zoom is secure enough for use in patient care given how heavily regulated the industry is
(It's definitely not.)
Do you really think any doctors gave a second of thought to patient privacy when they made those decisions?
Everybody was in a tizzy because of COVID so everyone just said "I've heard of zoom! Let's use that! Other people are using it so it must be fine!" And nobody gave a split fucking second of thought to computer security.
They have a HIPAA-compliant version although not sure how secure it really is. In general, companies seem to care more about companies' privacy than individuals.
I don't get corporate blokes.
They spend their whole working hours finding ways to increase profits by reducing costs everywhere, to the detriment of the company even. Then we finally give them an easy way to reduce costs that make the employees happy, by removing the need for real estate. And they do a complete 180° to not do so?
Even if they have a lease of multiple years, not having to heat/cool the building nor pay the electricity is still cheaper.
Is it really about micromanagement?
At this point i'm convinced it's more about the fact these higher ups have skin in the real estate game. They either know the people who lease their properties, or are heavily invested in the property itself. So they can't get past the mental block that is the sunk cost fallacy to just ditch it, or lose "good boy points" with their rich peers by saying they don't need the property anymore.
I guess it's also harder to brag to your rich friends how big your company is when you have less physical locations too, but at this point i'm just grasping. The amount of money these companies could save it massive, but they just absolutely refuse to do it for whatever reason.
That's the problem, right there.
Right? They are also losing the opportunity to hire top talent from remote locations. I guess we found something that is more important to them than profits: their ego.
Yes.
The number of jobs I've missed out on and lost exclusively because I'm not normative enough to tell milquetoast jokes around a water cooler with a bunch of people I know two facts about but treat like my best friend numbers in the 100s.
Fuck all these people trying to force the old ways forever just so they can exercise their social capital upon the rest of us.
Socialization is always brought up as an excuse not to allow WFH. The thing is though, replacing real socialization with work fucking blows. Talking to a coworker to get the latest TPS report isn't socialization. It's work. The only time you do any real socialization is after work ends. And there's nothing stopping you from going out to dinner with coworkers when you work from home.
Arguably you're worse off if most of your socialization is from work. It just leaves you lonely and tired back home.
Yup, which is what they want.
I don't know, the fact that 4 of the 5 other members on my team live at least 2 time zones away from me keeps me from socializing with them after work ends.
(I do not want to leave this job, fwiw.)
Very fair. That said, going into the office isn't going to help that.
I never socialized with work people before COVID.
So true. But personally it feels like an extension of work when I go out with coworkers. Some of them we have nothing in common, different age groups, and even different generations. The only thing in common is: work.
I like to keep it separate. Have my own friends outside of work for socialization. Work people likely never to meet my circle of personal friends.
Valid. I'm not huge on going out with coworkers either unless we click on mutual interests.
Depends on the workplace and the job in general.
I don't want to 'get to know' my coworkers. I'm not there for friendships, or a pseudo family. I'm there to do a job and be paid for it.
But, this might just be my introvert side.
Some of the best relationships in ny life have been with people I've worked with. It's the one thing I miss a lot since we started working from home.
Still not worth going into the office, lol. The freedom is too good. But working from home does sort of mess up the work/life balance. I'm basically always on call these days and don't have a set routine.
Sometimes that means not working much for a day or two and then working until 11pm on others. Whereas at the office I typically left at a quarter to 5 and turned work off in my brain until tomorrow 9:30am after the first coffee at work.
Having said all that, I encourage people to try and be friendly with their coworkers. Networking and friendships are valuable things. Both for your career and also just fulfillment. I found that the consistently best way to get raises and promotions in a company is simply to have most people you interact with like you.
And that really isn't hard to do, just takes a bit of authentic conversation and positive vibes. Seriously. If you want to make more money and advance your career - be likeable. It will get you a magnitude more than hard work alone. (Although of course hard work doesn't hurt)
No it is not your introvert side it’s the side that knows your value. You know you can provide the same (or more!) value out of office than you do trapped in some fucking open floor plan that’s constantly loud and distracting.
This is just corporate bullshit for “go fuck yourselves we want more control over you and want to do it in our fancy building again”
They want to usher in bullshit like THIS: https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-describe-fear-mass-workplace-data-surveillance-wadu-2022-5?op=1
and THIS: https://web.archive.org/web/20230329152820/https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-is-tracking-zoom-calls-workplace-activity-using-wadu-2022-5
If they wanna do crazy tracking they don't need you in the office. They can just force you to install Spyware on your computer and send you a Logitech Webcam that needs to stay on.
I'm glad I've always worked for sane companies. At the end of the day, you gotta treat the employees like adults. If you feel they aren't doing enough, fire them. Don't try and micromanage. But megacorps probably do see some minor bonuses to productivity otherwise they wouldn't do it.
It's just not worth the headache for regular companies, I think.
It makes me wonder if there's a deeper reason besides the real estate thing, that compels CEOs to try to bring workers back to the office.
Consider: If you're at the office, you form stronger attachments to your coworkers. You're more likely to make friends with them and so on. You create bonds. Another way to say this is: you create ties that bind you to your job.
Now, you could use all those extra commute hours to make friends with non-coworkers, and then you don't lose much in terms of social life. But if you did that, you'd want more time with those friends. You'd have bonds that pull you away from your job instead of into it. There's a reason employee satisfaction surveys always ask if you have any friends at work.
If you have the time and motivation to form friendships outside of work, you're going to want more time outside of work. And things like 4-day work weeks. And unions will help you get more time away from work, too.
CEOs don't want you to form bonds outside of work. Only inside of work. Marry your job, they say. Come worship here, as it is a church.
That makes so much sense.
My pre pandemic job was amazing because of the people I worked with. They were great fun and we would also go out together at the weekend.
After lockdown load sof people moved on to higher paid roles as did I.
My last 2 jobs have been friendless, even the hybrid one because even if you're in the office, others are out so you're still not forming relationships.
It would have worked better if it was an "everybody works from home Monday and Friday" but that removes all the flex..
Today in my remote job I have no work friends, but I also got a dog, spend loads of time with my new friends (neighbours who also have dogs), am completing a full time degree while working full time bacuse I have no commute and generally I'm significantly happier.
My house is actually tidy too because my 5 min breaks are tidy up breaks rather than piss about distracting someone else breaks.
You have totaly a point there.
I am working in cultural heritage, so creating bounds that last over jobs is crucial. Who are you on good terms with? Who has a strong opinion on topic x? Who could help you with that non profit project? Who can you take seriosly and who is a scammer?
Working with these kind of people can be so amazing.
But cultural heritage is passion driven, a lot of ways to burn out in that feld or do unpaid work. The silent war against big companies is hard.
nope! It's not just an introvert thing! I work with extroverts that have actual friends OUTSIDE work they do not miss office work either. I won't lie and say it's all roses, but WFH is way better than the alternative and blaming the extroverts isn't the problem. THere is indeed a third more insane human outside the intro/extrovert spectrum, the officevert. or something.
It's not about improving productivity, increasing innovation or 'sharing best practice', as a former workplace put it. Corporations are forcing a return to office work in an attempt to curb a post-COVID real estate crash - which we honestly need since we have far too many luxury offices being built and not enough homes.
For one place where I used to work, RTO drove down staff morale to an all-time low (already low due to high workloads and bad wages) and pushed the staff turnover rate in my department to 95%. They ended up having to outsource the function to an overseas firm.
Geez sure sounds like this real estate market should be like. Heavily controlled and limited by the government. So that objectively good things, like less daily commuting and therefore less greenhouse emissions, can happen without toppling society.
I will never work in an office again. I literally couldn't afford my rent and my food costs if I also had to afford a daily gas expense. I am very much not alone in this.
This is a stupid question maybe, but how does a real-estate crash topple anything?
There's over $1.5 trillion in commercial real estate value that's spiraling in value due to numerous factors, but so many offices going fully remote has definitely contributed to an non-insignificant degree. Additionally, many cities/counties get a shit ton of their tax revenue from the property taxes on that same commercial real estate. If the value of those properties plummet, then tax revenue also plummets. Then you also have a lot of commercial real estate investor that foolishly over extended themselves over the pandemic by buying up a lot of shit when some loan rates were almost 0% at one point. Now, those investments don't look so hot and they're massively in debt and at risk for faulting on those properties.
Tldr; from on my understanding, it's sorta like the 2008 subprime crash, but with commercial real estate and different circumstances.
That being said, fuck those investors and fuck cities heavily relying on property taxes for the bulk of their revenue. Teach them all a lesson, just like they'd unsympathetically teach us common folk a lesson when we fuck up
Why would companies that generally avoid owning real estate act against its own self interest for the profits of real estate companies?? I don’t see the connection.
I agree with this, the theory doesn't track very well unless the executives locked themselves into expensive long term leases for their offices and don't want to feel embarrassed that it's a wasted cost.
I think the more likely explanation is that the companies want to drive people into quitting so they can reduce payroll without being on the hook for unemployment insurance.
This is exactly what happened at Alphabet.
Lots of companies and executives invest in real estate. They see their holdings dwindling and decide its time for the unwashed masses to get their asses back in the office
there might be exceptions. but as a rule tech companies AVOID investing in real estate.
Corporations are pushing RTO because their senior leadership doesn't know how to lead in a modern system.
I won't argue some amount of "responding to waste" isn't there, but this "problem" only exists when the culture isn't healthy enough to be properly managed remotely, which frankly is not that hard.
"Oh no, how terrible"
This has always been the method. I've worked in startups for years, and there's always a game-changing pivot that causes a staff exodus. They replace the with contractors until the company succeeds in the pivot or crashes and burns.
Return to office is just a pivot. If the talent leaves and gets replaced, hopefully their leadership can right the ship. Otherwise it's those who departed who made the right call.
Ya know, I'm not super happy with my salary (they're really bad at keeping up with inflation), but ... the promise of permanent WFH (we are actively getting rid of our last office, and hiring fully remote) with ability to live in ~half of the states without salary adjustment is basically keeping me complacent for now.
At first, I thought this was an Onion story
I've been working remotely for over 10 years. Even without Zoom, it's never been a problem. I've met people and developed many relationships with just Slack. Heck I'm sure I'd manage that even with just email.
When I finally met everyone in person at the company retreat, everyone was super happy to know me in person. I was about exactly as they imagined.
Company culture is how you develop it. At every company I've worked with, I introduced social channels and established a continuous background chatter that's for people to share memes or whatever they want, to help establish a personnality that goes beyond "I just deployed X which puts project Y live on production". I have DMs with all sorts of people from all departments, just idle occasional chatter. It makes connections with other departments when you need their help. It works. I always somehow become the guy to reach out to for anything that doesn't necessarily fit a Jira ticket, or sometimes just need help making sure they file the right kind of ticket.
If it doesn't work, then either you have hermits that wouldn't be much more active in an office anyway, or the company is holding it back by discouraging or forbidding any sort of unprofessional or otherwise non-work related activity and the only way to socialize is in the break room in the office.
IMO idle chats on Slack are way less disruptive than in-person, it doesn't take you off your work stretch, you can send replies during Zoom meetings, you can even have textual side threads during a video meeting to go over details without holding the meeting for everyone. Sometimes I have hours long conversations going about projects on Slack, with everyone essentially just chiming in whenever they have new ideas or feedback. It gives people time to think and refine the specs without any "now or never" pressure.
Remote work works, if it doesn't work, it's a company culture problem not an office problem.
Honestly this so much. I'm not a forward enough person to be the one to create that background chatter in my workplace, but I will participate in it.
My last workplace had it and my current one doesn't, and the difference is night and day. Leaving my last company hit hard because among the developers we had such a great culture in spite of upper management's toxicity. I would leave my current role in a heartbeat because there's just no real culture. That's not something management should be aiming for, because higher churn is bad for the business.
Yeah, it really matters. It's the difference between a computer you turn on to do strictly business and a computer you turn on and look forward to engaging with other people and see what cool stuff people are working on. Look at people's delicious breakfasts and coffees in #breakfast, look at people's cats and dogs in #pets.
When done right, tools like Slack can also give you so much more visibility too and chime in. I'm a DevOps/platform engineer, but unless we talk secrets or implementation details we chat in a public channel so backend devs can see what we're doing. I can passively read the support team's channel and give them hints like oh this customer's CNAME points to the wrong site. I can see what the backend team runs into deploying their stuff and propose tooling changes to make their life better. It lets me be extremely proactive, without turning into a "you must keep up with everything everyone is doing". Half of them I have muted but still idle browse every now and then. I've had other teams pop on our public channel and ask details about how it works, so they can better understand how their code will run. I've had other devs chime in and say hey, our app works better in that kind of environment. It's a constant informal feedback loop on top of the usual formal Jira tickets. Saves everyone time, makes everyone happier.
It continuously reinforces the importance of my role, why my team do the things we do, who it's for. It's not soulless work anymore, because you know and see the impact of your work on other people. Even sales is less annoying because you can see them chat about how it's the 50th customer that asks if we can do X, instead of just hearing that sales sold feature X that we don't hace and now it's due next week, because you have context on why.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190625005362/en/Zoom-Expands-Its-Lease-at-KBS%E2%80%99-The-Almaden-to-More-than-87000-Square-Feet
Hey, I need to expand my lease.
it is X amount of money
What if I commit 10 years
it is X/2
Deal!
Oh, he reduced costs and increased footprint. He is a genius!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/zoom-offices-hybrid-remote-work-11661977375
Well. Out workers are remote. What the hell do we do with the office?
Eeerrrrr. Ok let people have fun.
But we are starting to need ways of saving costs. What do we do?
The plan was always to return to office.
Let's do that, then.
Older than life. A situation changes and somebody whose personal interests are over the groups interests.
Typical corporate.
Upper manager goal is Y (not using the letter before it anymore thanks to dippy boy). But we're Y -3% this quarter
Solution? Treat workers like shit until it's Y. Doesn't matter if it makes them unhappy, they leave, or next year's results suck. Now now now
You missed the point tho. This is actively costing them a lot of money. They're just doing it to save face and maintain control.
It's purely about control. WFH is cheaper and more efficient.
maybe they should use teams
Doesn't matter what you think, Big techs ceos are laughing their ass off every time their products gets mentioned and reach the frontpage. Purge their ads and remove their visibility
Maybe people can just use a different video calling program if the CEO of the company doesn't like people using it.
What happened to Skype? Did it just become the basis of Teams?
Skype and Lync had a baby called Teams.
And that baby should have been aborted
I have no problems with teams. Not sure why everyone hates it. If youre already in an AD/Azure environment and use 365 I dont see why you wouldnt use it.
Your not wrong. But hot take: it's better than slack.
Better for video, maybe. Better for chat, never!
Maybe it's because I have only ever been in free plan slack channe's, but I have never understood the appeal. Maybe it's the bots? I looked into making a teams bot, and it was a horrendous experience.
And as Teams continue to downgrade it's markdown support, it is becoming less and less appealing. I hate that I can't add language tags to code block with the triple back ticks, but it turns some of my code snippets to emojis. What the fuck man?
It's a tad more complicated:
Team is a new product developped from scratch.Every now and then Teams breaks and shows it's just a thin layer over SharePoint
Thanks for jogging my memory, I corrected my comment.
It seems to still be around. I used to use it all the time back in the 2010-2015 period but as soon as Discord came out I switched to that and tried to get everyone I knew to also switch.
If my work told me i needed to be on the office even a day a week, i would be searching for another job immediately
They want even your time off
2010 is the year we started going full "remote work" and we sold our office building in 2012. Since then we have somehow managed to thrive and innovate like crazy. I am pretty sure these guys know that what they are saying is bullshit, at least as it relates to tech. Creatives, maybe, but in tech it is far easier to screenshare and discuss than it is to lean over some dude's shoulder to look at their screen...in dark mode...with nano fonts.
I mean, the guy that heads Teams literally said meetings and subsequent overuse of Teams due to ease of making and doing meetings, is a productivity killer.
I agree. The problem is meetings.
The meetings I'm forced to go to at work almost always have nothing to do with my actual job, but do include the owner telling us how much money the company is making in chart and graph form for 20 minutes, which helpfully reminds me that I'm being severely underpaid.
Yes, I am preparing my resume.
My manager just told us our department is under budget on salary by $250k, because we were short staffed and everyone picked up the slack, but has been slow rolling cost of living increases.
Dude's fucked around, now he's going to find out.
Every position cut/not filled should mean an equivalent pay increase for everyone who has to pick up that slack, or that that slack is left where it is.
And the idiots who schedule many of them...
One of the advantages of working from home is you can have the meeting on in the background and get on with some real work. When it comes your time to speak you've lost maybe 5 minutes instead of an hour.
Sounds like to many meetings. Can't do work at a meeting.
I can. Have a meeting in Citrix and I happily work while people yabber on in the background.
The real killer is the face to face meetings. My group supervisor now demands anyone in the office on a particular day go into his office for the team meeting. That's a real time waster.
People online can't hear us properly standing around in his office. Can't get work done while standing in there.
Just let me work from home so I don't have a bunch of people wander over to me to ask stupid questions during the day.
If you want something send me an email and I'll get to it when I have time. Walking into my space, making me take my noise cancelling headphones off so you can yabber at me and break my concentration is so annoying.
I'm untouchable at home. I work until I need a break, then quickly sort questions and queries, then get back into my groove for another hour or two.
Someone is getting tired of paying for HVAC, electricity, and plumbing for a vacant office building 😢
That's how I understood it as well. Feels like most mandates have nothing to do with company culture and more to do with commercial property expenses/investments.
If only they could make a charitable donation to the city, with the expressed purpose that it be converted to affordable housing/homeless shelters for a profitable tax write-off instead.
Sometimes I wonder why these chucklefucks get to play with the big bucks. A good CEO allocates resources well. That's it. This just screams failure in that department, and soooo many better options exist.
They don't need to convert it, keep it as office space for a charity or multiple charities, use it as storage for charities, make workshop spaces for low income or unemployed, etc etc etc
Even better resource allocation. I think Zoom might need a new CEO soon. Send HR a link to this thread homie. One of us is sure to land the job.
In some countries you'd get tax breaks for leasing the building to a charity. It's win win win
When I was working in the office, I'd put the thermostat where I like it, drink 6 K-Cups worth of something a day, and use so much TP. I hated commuting and made sure I got my money's worth. They'll regret bringing people like me back.
He's not wrong, remote meetings do suck for getting to know your coworkers, but that's not a great reason for rtw
I don't understand that notion honestly. I made friends from online gaming over the years that I never met because we live on different continents, but they know me better than some people who pretended to date me.
One of my online friend invited me to his wedding. I went and had the feeling I knew everyone there. They were the same people IRL as they were online.
Getting to know someone does not rely on physical proximity but on the willingness to be open and candid about oneself for everyone that is involved.
It's probably easier to be deceitful with someone that isn't in the same room, but if their agenda is to trick you in the first place, you won't get to know each other either way.
Yeah, right. Back in the days when we were all on forums I got to know a bunch of regulars who contributed on a local site. Eventually we started meeting up and I had a similar experience to what you're describing. I even slept with one of them that first time we all met, we'd been chatting on the forum for over a year and felt like we knew each other well enough for that to be a possibility. Now that I think about it, this is pretty much the principle behind internet dating and that seems to work well enough to have become an industry. I've done that in the past too - you can absolutely build a relationship online and people do it all the time.
my experience with online friendships is that it's much easier to self-select. you absolutely can get to know people really well over the internet, but it's also much easier to completely ignore who seems a bit annoying. at least for me, gathering people in the same room and forcing some physical interaction is more likely to make me get to know the people i probably wouldn't otherwise.
that being said, i think the whole productivity aspect is bunk and bosses want you in the office so they can say the things to you that they're afraid to put into writing. "in person collaboration" isn't code for you talking to your colleague, it's code for bosses want to be able to catch employees in the hallways and ask them to work on pet projects that are outside the employees designated duties or priorities, without a meeting record.
As an introvert he's very wrong. Let me be a hermit and work in peace.
I legit use my remote meetings to get to know my team. If there's not too much work to talk about
His argument is essentially that people are not toxic enough in online meetings to innovate.
Dang, I just applied to a couple positions there. I'll go ahead and retract those :D
I mean, scientifically speaking, they're not wrong. Physical contact with another person causes trust to grow because it causes oxytocin secretion.
But it's still funny that the owner of a video calling company is telling people to go back to the office.
Can’t think of any instance in which I physically touched my coworkers and I sat next to them every fucking weekday for 5+ years
It's not touching them, it's just interacting with them irl, makes your brain more active and produces more stuffs in it.
You'd have to prove the oxytocin gain on net is higher than the overall return produced by having the flexibility to work remotely.
This isn't a zero-sum exchange, and I personally am not convinced it is positive in-person. Rather, remote work with frequent travel-based interaction, paid for by closing offices where possible and renting space where not, seems to be a better return, from what I've seen.
Alanis Morissette perks up
I
Went to your house
Walked up the stairs
Joined a zoom meeting
Disabled my cam
"I can't be as innovative over zoom"
Fixed that for you
This fix is incomplete.
"I can't be innovative."
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan told employees this month that the company was making the surprising decision to send some workers back to the office regularly because its flagship remote-work product didn't allow employees to build as much trust or be as innovative as in the office, according to a leaked meeting recording viewed by Insider.
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.
The comments, much like the decision to return some employees to offices, are surprising given the role Zoom's technology plays in remote work.
The company's videoconferencing service became so ubiquitous early in the pandemic that its corporate name became a verb describing the act of firing up any video chat to connect with coworkers online.
Amazon recently asked employees to relocate to their teams' offices or find new jobs.
Zoom's return to office, at least from Yuan's comments, appears less strict, as he directed employees who have issues with the policy to apply for exceptions with the heads of their departments.
The original article contains 395 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 53%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Good bot.
Don’t get high on your own supply? I guess?
Oh cool, guess I can cancel my Zoom subscription then.
Leadership realized they weren't getting the ego stroke they needed virtually. Time to go back to cube hell so this guy can justify his existence.
I want to start off by saying that I work from home and would like to continue doing so indefinitely. I also think these CEOs are chodes and aren't really thinking about the point I'll attempt to make next and typically do not care about such concerns.
Now, I do wonder what effect the loss of the "2nd place" (home, work, community being the "working definition" of places) for vast swathes of the American public will have in a country where the "3rd place" is already pretty non-existent.
In other words, we're already quite an isolated society. What will a large percentage of us also working in isolation have on the country and on mental health in the long run?
I think there's a potential that it could be a good effect or a bad one (or a mixture like most things), and I'm not sure which outcome is more likely.
We could become even more withdrawn from each other...or we could use the time we used to spend in traffic and with coworkers to build up local, community bonds instead. I suppose only time will tell, but I think it's an interesting discussion that I haven't seen talked about much yet.
I can say for certain that wfh has had a marked impact on my real world social interactions, but that's not entirely a bad thing. What it means is that any conversation I have with someone is sparked by genuine interest rather than obligation after having bumped into them at the water cooler.
I think it has effected me in mostly bad ways so far, but it's difficult to 100% decouple that from the awkwardness stemming from the pandemic that coincides with it. I worked remotely before the pandemic hit, but the lack of "office" + the lack of any social venue outside of zoom calls for many months exacerbated things.
Overall, I feel mostly these days like I'm going to have to get a hobby or a meetup or something going because even though I have a pretty low need for social interactions I'm finding myself barely scraping by these days.
What do you mean by this? Just about all of my hobbies are solo ventures, but I have heard many good things about meetups and user groups
I'm not a very social person but I find myself feeling like my social needs are barely being met nowadays.
Ah I see. You have any interests? As you mentioned, hobbies are always a good place to start, even if they're not strictly "social". If anything it gives you something to talk about, and maybe find some common ground with the people you meet.
Yeah, I'm into a bunch of different things. I had a friend group of sorts in this city but it frayed quite a bit during the pandemic and my wife and I are still kinda COVID weirdos (outdoor masklessness only, etc).
It'll be alright.
I also work from home for several extended periods of time, while during others I need to be on site one or two days a week (sometimes it's nice, sometimes it's a drag to be on site).
I have to say, while I can work a 100% of the time from home, the nice parts of being on site is to get to know more personally the people I meet. I don't deny the fact that this be successfully done remotely too, but I believe as humans we need social connections. Yes, we can make friends online (which can carry over IRL and I know that personally) and yes you can meet your partner online too, but it always felt (at least to me) that if you meet others in person, you accelerate the connection.
I mean, I had a fairly bad time in high school, but I had the time of my life on college and met most of my friends then. I'm not sure I'd have made as many friends if it had all been online.
Also, as someone wrote in another post today (but I can't remember where so I can't link it, sorry), sometimes people (perhaps new hires fresh out of college) are not experienced enough to know when to be vocal and object to flaws in a project and in person meeting can be a boon to acquire that skill.
It's a tricky subject, since it's not that WFH or doing things online prevents normal life evolutions, but perhaps can make them more scarce or slow, while in person events can precipitate them.
I agree that companies forcing things is not the way to go, but somehow it feels like doing things entirely online should happen more later in life, when you're settled and not before when you need to learn and make connections who you'll want to meet in person too.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
It's a fair point, but I think the answer is to take action necessarily to reintroduce a proper third space, including moving to more medium density mixed use developments.
Point barrel at foot. Pull trigger
Eric, you need to un-moot
Ironic that the CEO of a company producing a product designed for remote online meetings telling their staff that remote online meetings don't work for his company goals.
Our product sucks, I don't want my employees using this crap.
If you're in a tech job, working from home should be the default. If you're in a service job, working on-site is a requirement. This can have a negative impact on a company overall because you may have both in your workforce, and the ability to work from home breeds resentment and impacts morale.
Amidst COVID, our office workers were told to return to work. The reasoning was a perceived inequity held by the field workers toward those that sit at a desk all day. Nevermind that having everyone return up's everyone's chance for getting infected. Truth be told, those forced to come in would rather risk that than be left out.
They should turn off the AC too, if anybody has to sweat, everybody should have to sweat.
I hope people demanded an eye-watering raise, citing the inequity in remuneration between the workers and C-suite.
Oh - you don't care about equity after all? Why do we need to come back again?
Paywall can't read
Of course paywalls can't read. Paywalls don't have eyes.
They needed to pay for those
https://archive.is/rDQPO
sounds rapey
The article is behind a paywall for me. I have to admit that I don't like online meetings and much prefer the direct contact with people. However, I can be totally productive remotely via email and chat. It's just that I don't like online meetings. Remote work is absolutely fine. It's even better for days that I am working alone on my computer and desk. I avoid all the traffic and waste of time to make myself presentable for the outside world. I've just realised that I don't like meetings with too many people in general; neither live nor online. A huge waste of everyone's time.
I was working in big enterprises for many years with lots of online meetings, and I was so tired of them. Every day I had hours of meetings, making me so tired and unmotivated.
Now I'm at a smaller company and we don't have standups, 1 on 1s etc. I have 2 meetings per week only. It's fantastic. Made me really like this job.
I have been blessed to have worked only for small companies of less than 25 people. Now I work for a company that I own (minority shareholder) with three more colleagues. Less than 15 people. We are extremely happy now, although I used to say the same for a couple more companies that I was the employee of up until a few years ago. My wife works for big organisations that last few years. I don't know how she copes with all the meetings.
Something something dogfooding
Wow, just wow. I liked Zoom when it was an upstart company making good tools for remote work When it got big, ugh.
I've been doing a combination of working from home and working from the office since the start of COVID. I generally only go into work when there is something broken that needs me to physically repair it. I can honestly say that the times I'm working from home, my productivity is exceptionally higher than it would be otherwise. No distractions from coworkers, a more comfortable environment, better computers and desk ergonomics, no commute.
Employers need to realize that good employees work better from home, and the ones that don't are not worth keeping on the payroll.
Fucking muppet...
This is a weird debate for me. I do feel like I'm able to coordinate and communicate with my coworkers more effectively in person. Especially with people I don't already have a close working relationship with. On the other hand i hate being at an office when i could be making lunch and doing laundry while being on a call.
Why tf is his personal fortune still 200b??? Deam what if he's sabotaging his fortune so that he can keep making way to much money in different projects. Without people freaking out cuz he has 500b, the only what to do that would be in fact to tank a couple of companies in a way that seems not accidental.
Is this really a thing you think people do?
Why would he care?
It's worth noting, and not mentioned in most of these articles, that the CEO is saying that Zoom employees that live near offices must return at least 2 days a week.
They have not demanded that all employees return 5 days a week, but other CEOs don't do their own research and just think "we need to! Look at Zoom!".
Oops.
I'll get downvoted to hell for this, but the CEO is at least partially right. It is really hard to get to know people and build trust remotely.
I started my first post-college job in August of 2020. Most people were remote, but I was not due to the nature of my work. It is extremely hard to get to know people exclusively over email, phone calls, and video calls. It's frustrating not being able to get to know people even at the surface level. Knowing a little bit about your coworkers allows you to build rapport with them. Video and voice calls can be unreliable, and people can be very difficult to understand without in person cues and the ability to read lips. I say all of this as a very introverted person with social anxiety.
That may be true for some people individually, but I believe if no one at a company is able to build any connection (even on a professional level of base rapport ), that's much more an indicator of the company's failures to build a proper company culture that supports that.
People have been making close friends over the Internet with zero in-person interactions for decades now. And that's even without video chat being the primary way of doing it. I work 100% remote at a company with ~2500 employees. I'm pretty introverted, but I've managed to make a few friends mostly over slack that I would ask if they wanted to grab a drink or something if I were traveling through their area. There's no pressure or expectation of that from the company, there's no "we're family" nonsense, they've just created a company culture where that can happen.
I agree. In the old days I was coming in only 3 days a week. But for those 3 days everyone was there. And the weekly end of day knowledge share and training where buckets of beer were passed around that turned into happy hour were natural and organic team building. Also, being able to white board off the cuff when needed to train folks on random topics during on boarding when you discovered a knowledge gap or had to field an off the cuff question with a 20 minute mini lecture...
Video conferencing killed all of that or at best made it way more painfull than it should be.
Also remote work killed the office. Even if I was going in 3 days a week I'm still video conferencing 75% of the time and no conference room is available.
Not downvoted, appreciate you sharing your perspective.
I’ve been successful building trust in remote work settings but it’s a very much about building a narrative that’s much more explicit and communicated in an active way.
But ignoring that bullshit I just typed, I think “building trust” in a professional environment is largely a trap. Not because you can’t trust anyone but that, if you’re building a good team, trust should be implicit. I was hired to do a job, you were hired to do a job, let’s trust that each other to do it.
I think it’s also worth bearing in mind that high trust teams can still build trust, I’m simply advocating for not starting from zero.
Unfortunately so many of the tools and workflows are built explicitly for low trust teams.
I wish people would move away from the will be downvoted for this statement before saying something. It's just meaningless votes, and message is stronger without it than giving the impression of caring about karma or a willingness to stand by it regardless of reaction by not even acknowledging it.
Upvoted because you've definitely touched on a very real problem that needs to be addressed.
But you're completely wrong about the cause. The problem is companies with a bad culture. @Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me said it brilliantly in a comment further up the thread, and I did my best (less elegant) job of explaining it above that. The company needs to take steps to encourage a good relationships between people, for example with casual and non-work-related chats in the chat app of choice, or by having people frequently working on problems in pairs instead of solo, especially when first starting out.
I had better relationships with my coworkers fully remotely at my last job than I do at my current job despite being in the office frequently. And that's all down to how the company manages its culture.
I disagree. Good culture is sometimes an accident. And folks in charge like to take credit for that accident working out
Sure, that's absolutely the case.
But that wasn't my point. My point was that the experience with WFH comes down entirely to the culture, and if you're feeling isolated when WFH it's not a fault of WFH, it's a problem with your company's work culture.
It seems like the vast majority of people are coming at this from the standpoint of "I know how to do my job, why do I need to be an office". This may be unpopular but you do it for the new people who need a Lot of company support to get on their feet. I remember starting out and how much easier it was to ask people questions in person over lunch etc. It's intimidating for a new person to sit in front of a computer and ask random people they've never met questions, really amps that imposter syndrome.
This isn't necessarily invalid but certainly isn't a strong enough of an argument to return to the office.
I have WFH since 2012. I started a new WFH job in 2021. I've never been to an office, never had trouble with training, made good connections with coworkers. I've been promoted already. I could not be this productive in an office. I've tried.