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…
Couldn’t have said it better myself! It’s like telling someone to work at an ice cream factory but not have any ice cream. Just doesn’t make sense.
You def couldn’t have said it better because you just repeated what they said
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.
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.
Golden parachute too nice to pass up.
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.
Sure, that’s the sensationalist and reactionary headline, but I think the real lesson to learn from all this is that with remote work, like many things, moderation is key. The CEO is not implying “innovation” and “getting to know each other” is necessary for every meeting because it isn’t. So what he’s really saying is whenever those two aspects are necessary, Zoom won’t suffice.
I don’t think we should take any lessons from what CEOs say. If studies show that too much remote work indeed makes for worse results, I’m fine with it. If a CEO says it? Most likely a lie.
Seriously I don’t understand the mindset of people who treat everything a CEO says as gospel. How much is a CEO actually involved in the collaboration or innovation going on at the IC level? Somewhere between “barely” and “not at all” I’d guess. No doubt the CEO has personal reasons he wants people back in office, and just put some BS in the all hands meeting to make it sound good
If your CEO of zoom you have to believe in the product your company makes. Its the basic requirement. When he says this, its a slap in the face to every engineer and worker who has dedicated their life to making zoom a good product.
Its like the time the dunking donuts ceo said he doesn’t like donuts on Marketplace.
No, it’s like Dunkin’ CEO saying that donuts are bad for you… Much worse than personally not liking them
Lol. No, it isn’t. It’s a CEO suggesting that he believes that in-person interaction between workforce members is important in certain scenarios.
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.
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.
man i just spent 30m this morning telling jokes to my remote coworker over slack, I’ve seen him only once in my life, according to this CEO I couldn’t have possibly gotten to know him.
Funny watching the CEOs trying to do the verbal splits, coming up with excuses where it’s just “waah we’re paying for an office that nobody uses :(”
we have nothing to lose but our commutes
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Don’t forget the “commuting to an office just to talk on Zoom to somebody 400km away in his own home”
you have to reserve a conference room to take a zoom meeting (all meetings).
Work in an office, they said. It will be easier for meetings, they said.
It’s crazy how shortsighted and dumb companies are.
It’s not that they’re shortsighted and dumb (well, many are, but that’s not why they’re spouting this BS), they know those reasons are full of shit, they just need some excuse that sounds better than “we signed a 4 year lease and so we’re going to make that your problem” or “the CEO is getting lonely and misses being able to walk around the office among all his minions”
True. Even with like 20 - 30 meeting rooms there are always people posted up in all of them. Even if you reserve a desk or room, someone will be there.
Their excuse is usually “I reserved a different one but someone’s in that one now.” So you have to take someone else’s, and they inevitably interrupt your meeting. At the beginning of this chain of room theft is probably an executive who doesn’t even know how to sign up for a room.
Being at home is like 3x better now. I don’t care about free coffee or food. I buy exactly what I want at the supermarket.
Meeting in person is never easier unless you are terrible at technology…which most leadership is.
Someone is always late, someone is always loud and dominates the meeting, and 55 minutes of the 60 minutes in a given meeting is unimportant.
This is purely a move to save corporate real estate and CEO egos.
Eh, for certain people they definitely are less productive online(unfortunately including me), but I’m sure some others are more productive online.
I think the issue is the one-size-fits-all mentality, it leaves no room for each person to do what works best for them.
My wife’s company only rents one of the 4 floors it used to, for those who wanted to return to offices and it’s worked out perfectly, they maintain a space for necessary in office meetings, a place for presentations while only paying a fraction of their old lease.
We’ve been work-from-home since the pandemic kicked off, so about 3.5 years now. They’re working on renovating our office building (and shrinking the footprint we occupy in it), so we’re going to be work-from-home until at least the spring, at which time we’ll have to report a max of one time per week. Supposedly a remote work policy is under development as well, which is what I’m hoping for.
I will say, though, I went to an in-person strategy session for a club I’m in back in May. No zoom at all. What I had forgotten was the hallway conversations, the discussions over dinner, and being able to collaborate like that. It was much easier to talk to my counterparts in the club and see how they were addressing issues, for example. I softened my stance on the full work-from-home idea after that - for certain things, like brainstorming, an in-person meeting is hard to beat. But, our day-to-day work, including the quarterly meetings where we pass motions to revise the club bylaws - those can be (and still are) done virtually.
So you’re saying that a few times per year is enough for in person networking? I agree with that.
I didn’t say that.
Maybe once a year!
The question for me is, is maximizing productivity the most important thing?
It depends to who and how you define productivity
Yeah, it’s really weird seeing these blanket statements from the CEO of Zoom, of all things.
I’ve grown up with ICQ, IRC and forums, later worked with a very distributed, international volunteer team and made connections just fine, even though we barely used voice chat (it was still the Skype days) and nobody ever actually saw me or knew my real name.
Those people and connections weren’t somehow less real to me than the superficial, safety-first chit-chat you sometimes get into at work. This obviously isn’t everybody’s experience, but maybe, just maybe, the CEO should “get” this instead of being out of touch with what he’s selling.
Maybe he was left on read one time too many.
My coworkers and I are constantly sending each other jokes and memes when any of us are work from home. Sometimes the official company chat will just be everyone communicating through gifs.
It’s incredibly rare anyone actually uses the Team’s chat for actual work purposes. If I need to talk to someone for work purposes I usually send passive aggressive emails.
They’ve just added to the bottom of that email signatures.
[Company name], certified a great pace to work 2023 - 2024
We’re just wondering who certified that, the general consensus is that it’s probably BS.
My company has 11 people, so Teams is the easiest way for us to communicate other than just talking across the room or walking 10 feet to a different room lol
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I think he has a point. So many great ideas at my company were birthed sitting around the table while eating breakfast or drinking coffee.
People ask me stuff they they wouldn’t have sent a ticket about because “it’s not a big issue” and by looking into some of it we find way better methods of dealing with types of workflows.
It’s not the meetings where we find the best ideas. It’s during the coffee breaks. But you need you coworkers to have coffee breaks with so you have something to talk about.
That being said. I’m not American and we don’t have the American office landscapes or office politics.
My company is complete work from home. The issue is that people can’t imagine coworkers talking to each other and being friends while working remotely.
I spend half of most days in spontaneous voice chats with coworkers where we have these exact same moments. Spontaneous discussions leading to ideas that change the way we do things.
It’s not exclusive to being in an office. You just need to adapt to a new work style.
3/4 of the team I am on work from home, 2 of us full time, We have weekly scheduled meetings with no agenda other than to catch up and this is where ideas can come up, We haven’t all been in an office together since before the lockdown yet we continue to thrive. I also have most of each Friday blocked out to work with one of the team on whatever he happens to be working on that day. We just jump in a meeting and do stuff. And like you we are all open to just spontaneous chats at any time either by text or call. It works perfectly well.
I guess you also have those chats where you pull other people in during the conversation, Oh, Suchandsuch will have input, send them an invite to this meeting etc :)
I love it, I get peace and quite when needed to code, and all the interaction I need to make the job work.
We have a daily SUM which is supposed to last 15 minutes. It is usually over an hour, but work makes up at best 20 minutes. The rest is just us chatting.
We also have regular calls with other teams which follow a similar pattern.
It is easy to have “water-cooler” chats while working remotely.
It’s not exclusive to being in an office. You just need to adapt to a new work style.
I’ve spent 2 years in WFH during COVID and haven’t seen this working in any of the teams (even though there were attempts).
One problem is just that remote calls suck a lot, especially if you have latency and audio issues. People talking over each other, then saying “sorry” and waiting 20 seconds, audio too high or low or just poor quality etc. A lot of it could be solved with technology, but weirdly it hasn’t happened yet.
I’ve spent longer than that and I’m not sure where the issue is. It works fine for us. Perhaps it’s a US thing with poor internet quality?
I’m in the US and haven’t had any issues with being remote and calling a coworker to chat for a bit. It’s not any different than using a phone.
Nah I’m in the US. Garbage internet provider. No issues.
It’s crazy how people have been talking on the phone for like a hundred years and talking over each other was something that was easy to work out.
But put the same technology on a computer and suddenly people forgot how to talk on the phone.
Phone has usually lower latency than internet. Consequence of circuit vs. packet switching.
But otherwise I hate phone as well. Miserable audio quality.
Group calls weren’t the norm until recently. I fucking despise group zoom calls. I normally will just not contribute at all because it’s impossible to be heard. Someone else will always talk over you. This is the 3rd team I’ve worked remote on, and it hasn’t worked on any of them so far.
Idk, I leverage Slack huddles regularly and have absolutely no issues with multiple people hanging out and having casual conversations while working. We do these spontaneously throughout the day.
How old are your coworkers generally? My company is mostly on the younger side of things. We grew up with team speak, steam voice chat, and now are often in discord. This is not unfamiliar territory and has always worked well outside of the office.
Don’t worry- there are a LOT of people here trying to say the remote work is inherently better than office work.
I don’t know why (they’re just trying to safeguard their remote work based on shouting into the fediverse?) but it is possible to be nuanced and say some things work better in the office, some work better (or at least just as well) remotely.
I personally think you’re right in that these group things and group chats and such don’t work as well (for me, for many?) as well as being in the office. And I think a lot of that is I don’t want to force myself to go into a big video call or chat up people in teams or whatever. I don’t like this purely online method of communication as anything more than just getting work done. I don’t make lifelong friends nor form deeper connections online and I don’t want to.
I agree with some of the more prudent people that say you should be able to basically work remote (if possible for your job) or come in to an office as you please. That would seem to make the most people happy and content I think.
The thing is I spent a LOT of time in voice chats playing games as a kid. It always worked well then. It hasn’t changed at all. I don’t need to be on a video call. I jump into a voice chat channel and hang out. People come and go, and are quiet for the most part.
Having come from an office environment where everyone worked in cubes, it truly is no different. I don’t need to be face to face with coworkers, because I wasn’t face to face for most of the conversations we had in the office. We’d stare at our screens and talk over the walls.
When we were looking at each other’s faces, it was in the conference room. Those formal meetings are effectively replaced with video calls - and more often are effectively replaced with emails like they should be.
This probably largely depends on your field. But for me, my productivity is higher working from home, because at least at home I can choose when to tune out the noise. In the office, management was personally offended by me listening to music while working alone. I was told to focus on my paycheck if I needed help focusing.
Same here. What I hear from people who can’t innovate, collaborate, insert-activity-here, etc. while working remotely is that they have competency issues in their workforce.
Companies building great things creatively and remotely are not exceptional, and antisocial behaviours when working remotely are a problem with the person, not the technology. But it’s easier to blame the tech than admit your colleagues or team are dysfunctional so “back to the office!” It is for most. I’ll pass though.
Sounds like a small company you work at with tight nit group.
In the states, a good portion of jobs out there are soulless corporate jobs with predefined work. It’s just a grind.
Let’s be honest. If I discovered good ideas at a soulless corp, I wouldn’t be using those ideas at soulless corp.
tight nit group
Bone apple tea!
But that means the great idea moments are during unproductive times. People at the office must be allowed to be unproductive. If there is strict no talking and no coffee breaks allowed and strict clocking in because time is money there isn’t much innovative benefit to being in the office.
I miss coffee breaks.
But the kind of bad managers who insist on a RTO are also the kind who don’t understand it’s the break time, stupid.
All the people I’d want to talk with over coffee left before I did.
I only ever had ‘coffee breaks’ when I was working in a restaurant. Never in the office.
I mean, people shit talk on discord all the time
I have tons of spontaneous calls all day on teams when remote. These moments still happen and don’t require an office. These companies that fail to adapt will be left in the dust.
The same thing happens in IM. It’s just a different set of personalities doing it. There are people that actively chat and bring up ideas to teams all the time. The bonus point about IM is that it can be referenced later on.
That said, working from home has so far saved me a lot of both time and money. This is a thing to consider as an employee when considering who to work for (or if your boss takes it away, if you still want to work there after essentially having a benefit revoked unilateraly).
Public transit pass. Actual time for transit which for me was around 90 minutes a day (7.5 hours a week!), more complex lunch logistics (time or money), etc.
A quieter workplace, no need to book rarely available rooms to take calls/meetings. There were upsides.
My first remote job had almost no issues at all. We already knew each other and we still took time to discuss issues via calls. New job not so much. We tend to be pressed for time so only focus on obvious “work” and then works suffers because of a lack of communication/common vision.
I agree, but wouldn’t underestimate meetings. People say that you’re losing productivity, but IME the largest losses of productivity are caused by working on the wrong things, because of too little communication. Sometimes it’s things that are not needed anymore, sometimes it’s just aspects of the feature which are not important (e.g. overengineering) because of lack of context.
I’m not saying all meetings are always needed, but in larger organizations the sync between people and teams is very important.
Because the innovation is done by engineers and artists, not MBAs.
Some person in WorkReform was defending mandatory RTO because an office environment was supposedly more secure. I called bullshit on their claims. Apparently a “cybersecurity expert” lol
I don’t care if companies want to waste resources on buying commercial properties. But don’t force people to go back to the stupid office. It worked for the past 3 years. Profits are higher than ever. People got to spend more time with their families since hours were no longer wasted commuting and sitting in traffic.
Also seems like many companies use this culture bullshit as a reason to force RTO. Motherfucker. I produce output. You generate capital. You pay me. That’s our fucking relationship. Fuck your “cUlTuRe”.
an office environment was supposedly more secure.
My current shop has an office for people who choose to use office space, because it’s not about pushing people into one group or another but more facilitating their best environment.
Anyway, it was broken into and burgled along with other ground floor tenants. They threw a big fuckoff boulder through an exterior glass door and kept going from unit to unit. Laptops taken. Important shit.
My home office requires someone to fob past 4 separate doors to get to me. Instead of the ground floor it’s more than 100 feet up in concrete. My location has me at an advantage for power and the feed is underground. Fibre comes up the middle.
They’re not breaking in.
Did you have a counter argument for calling bullshit? Because he probably had a point, there is definitely a niche for that level of security. It just generally involves state secrets.
Certain classifications of documents require access only from physically secure locations, called SCIFs, where all access is monitored and logged. Things like phones and cameras aren’t allowed to prevent any data leakage.
That’s not too say you can’t be secure remotely, but really only against outsiders. Good luck stopping an employee from taking a picture with their personal phone of classified blueprints off their monitor at home. Good luck even knowing they did it before the data is gone.
When you factor in social engineering being the most successful type of “hacking”, an office setting is undeniably more secure. However, most offices don’t need that level of security, because data breaches aren’t a matter of national security, so remote is an acceptable risk.
CEO can’t even eat its own dog food. How pathetic
Why would you expect Zoom to push for 100% working remotely over Zoom? So if my company makes mobility scooters, I’m not allowed to walk?
If you’re the company CEO and you’ve spent years shouting a marketing pitch of “scooters! Scooters! Scooters instead of walking! Scooters! They’re the future!” then yes, it’s a bad look if you walk, never mind if you issue a company wide walking mandate.
I’d push for WFH and say that if work sucks over Zoom, “innovate” until it doesn’t. Kind of our bread and butter.
No, the argument is that instead of improving the product by dog-fooding, he just gave up and told people to go back to the office.
The fact his product is not solving all the collaboration needs should be a business opportunity, but his underlying message is that he doesn’t know how to leverage it, and will not try anymore.
You can walk whenever the fk you want. But why force other people to walk like you when they prefer the scooter?
People that use Zoom are disabled confirmed.
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.
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.
an easy way to reduce costs that make the employees happy
That’s the problem, right there.
Yes.
They can’t just reduce their costs, because they’re locked into contracts and/or the corp real estate market is in the trash can
I’d be willing to bet sunk cost fallacy does play a big part, as a result, but I also think senior leadership there just struggles to manage remotely and thus they assume others do too.
I think the issue is that they fear giving workers too much freedom. With that newfound freedom, they may start realizing that they can demand more
CEOs and Corporate blokes are still technically working class. They have bosses to answer to. Their bosses have a large stake in real estate, manufacturing, oil, etc. Happy at home employees buy less and drive less. This is bad for their bosses. It goes way beyond the company’s bottom line.
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The rest of the investor class consider Musk a joke to actually run the companies he owns himself.
Y’all need lessons in reading comprehension. I’m downright amazed anyone is reading my comment as sympathetic towards CEOS. I didn’t say they are average, I said they were working class. As in they’re not the 1%. They have to work a job to make money, at least for a time. Famous actors are working class, too. Hence the strikes. They may be out of touch with the average person but they still have a job to do. GD
You’re not wrong but them being the executive class beholden to the investor class is a pretty big distinction from the rest of the working class that they oversee as a part of their work.
Chops busted, fellow adult. Chops busted.
just because you work a job doesnt make you working class, are you insane
these people literally make tens of millions of dollars a year, they are not working class, working class isnt simply ‘works’
I assure you that the CEO of a large corporation like that has a very different relationship to the means of production than your average working class person. Especially in regard to how their income is generated.
Y’all need lessons in reading comprehension. I’m downright amazed anyone is reading my comment as sympathetic towards CEOS. I didn’t say they are average, I said they were working class. As in they’re not the 1%. They have to work a job to make money, at least for a time. Famous actors are working class, too. Hence the strikes. They may be out of touch with the average person but they still have a job to do. GD
Our reading comprehension is fine. Your understanding of class analysis just needs to extend beyond “do they have a job”.
Chops busted, fellow adult. Chops busted.
You are very ignorant about what working class means
They own enough property that they are not, in fact, working class. They don’t have to work for a living (any more), they choose to.
Bosses like locating in expensive cities because they have the income to buy property in those expensive cities, and rake in the capital gains that come from others locating in those expensive cities. They all stand to lose a lot if people move out of those expensive cities because the housing pyramid that supports the imaginary value of their property collapses.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I never socialized with work people before COVID.
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)
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 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.
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
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.
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.
That’s one reason I’ve been toughing out my job situation, but it’s driving me crazy so I’ve been working on my resume and looking for more fully remote options. It’s getting harder to find interesting stuff without office commitments :(
At first, I thought this was an Onion story
Ya, this guy is toast. He just told the world he thinks his product sucks - the sane know he’s wrong at least.
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.
From a security perspective, the product has sucked for many years now, but it never halted their popularity. If he can survive Apple needing to intervent to remove a web server they installed on people’s machines, he’ll survive this.
