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
(www.businessinsider.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 23 Aug 2023 20:00
https://lemmy.world/post/3706812
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 23 Aug 2023 20:00
https://lemmy.world/post/3706812
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.
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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.
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 🤔
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
Lol. Looking for trouble.
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.
Something something dogfooding
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 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.
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 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.
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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.
Does your company not do water cooler sessions for your team? Also you can message people during presentations online to gossip. I just did it yesterday to make fun of some idiotic desperation move our execs are getting ready to pull.
When people say “you can’t do X remotely” what they actually mean is they either put no effort into it or they can do it, but it doesn’t feel the same to them, which is a completely different statement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because they aren’t putting effort into it and neither is the company.
If you can talk to someone you can form a relationship with them. Period. This is not hard to figure out.
Remote culture requires putting effort into it. You have regular online events with the team just for fun and you ask people to stay after the scrum for an open floor once a week or so, etc. You invest in the social aspect of remote work.
Studies can say important things but they can’t contradict lived experience and their methodology can also be flawed or biased.
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.
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
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.
Definitely disagree on this one. Worked a job across the pandemic that was completely virtual and I never met my coworkers in person. A number of us left about 6 months ago due to layoffs but we all flew out to meet up with each other last week and hang out. That’s almost an entire department of folk that now work in different companies taking the time and personal expense to travel and hang out with each other so I’d say a meaningful bond was built. It absolutely can happen, managers just need to be informed on how to do it. If any org should be prepared for this it’s Zoom. This is just being super lazy on the part of Zoom and having a lack of confidence in their own product.
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 know it’s very popular online to brag about being an asocial shut-in, but believe it or not some people like their jobs and like the social aspect of the office. The problem is the bigwigs applying the same rule for everyone either due to being out-of-touch with normal humans or just through greed, but don’t assume your experience is universal!
Alanis Morissette perks up
I
Went to your house
Walked up the stairs
Joined a zoom meeting
Disabled my cam
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.
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.
His argument is essentially that people are not toxic enough in online meetings to innovate.
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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 disagree completely. I love the word terroir. It’s a good metaphor. A good wine comes from a grapes in a specific place, with specific soil conditions, with specific weather conditions that can’t be predicted or replicated. Even if you could replicate the controllable variables again, the variables are too great to replicate. Sometimes terroir happens at work, and it requires all these things to come together in a place and time. I was lucky to have that in my career. But with remote work I don’t think that will ever happen again and remote work will prohibit that. I love working from home 2 days a week. But I wish we could figure out a 3 days a week in office that makes sense.
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.
Maybe if companies actually tried offering affordable employment housing so people aren’t having to do long commute times or losing a chunk of their salary living closer people would not be against working in the office.
There’s too much personal monetary and time inconveniences of working in the office over remote on an individual level that it’s hard to care about wanting to get to know someone being enough of a draw to work in the office.
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.
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
I honestly don’t know why people use zoom or google meet when Jitsi exists.
Because they work at a job that requires them to.
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.
maybe they should use teams
Zoom CEO says that his companies product is trash.
Someone is getting tired of paying for HVAC, electricity, and plumbing for a vacant office building 😢
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
From what I understand, it’s all about the companies trying to inflate their value with real estate.
The other way around. They’ve invested in so much real estate they need to justify it.
Thanks for the insight, it does make more sens
It’s purely about control. WFH is cheaper and more efficient.
WFH being taken from folks is just about real estate. Yet another reason why capitalism is gonna kill us all. You know how you get a bunch of cars off of the road? WFH.
Control or real estate. ¿Por qué no los dos?
Capitalism is gonna save us.
There are three other options:
You’re not wrong but all those things require costly infrastructure changes whereas many jobs can be wfh right now with no upfront cost required.
Both would be cool though
Third option does not require new infrastructure even if you don’t have PT. Just make city-wide limit in 30 km/h, then maybe ban cars.
Those things are fine, but don’t negate the problem of pointlessly being required to travel to a pointless office.
I don’t negate, but this also solves how to travel to relatives.
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…
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.
“I can’t be as innovative over zoom”
Fixed that for you
Oh nooooo people have to come into the workplace and cant have 5 full time jobs!!! Think of those poor programmers who cant afford to retire by 27 by taking advantage of their colleagues anymore.
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.
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.
I never socialized with work people before COVID.
Depends on the workplace and the job in general.
Offices are cages for humans, no less than that. They want to own us.
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?
What the fuck is so ‘innovative’ about sitting around a big table while people blab on and on about mundane things around the workplace?
God, that word is just spammed so much from tech companies of people who don’t even know what innovation is because they themselves haven’t done any damn thing innovative in their life times except recycle ideas.
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.
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.
Bone apple tea!
I mean, people shit talk on discord all the time
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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”.
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.
Don’t get high on your own supply? I guess?
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 :(
Tell me you are doing something illegal without telling me you are doing something illegal.
I feel that they might change their logo to snake eating its own tail.
Point barrel at foot. Pull trigger
Eric, you need to un-moot
Paywall can’t read
Of course paywalls can’t read. Paywalls don’t have eyes.
They needed to pay for those
archive.is/rDQPO
Oh cool, guess I can cancel my Zoom subscription then.
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” theguardian.com/…/gerald-ratner-jewellery-total-c…
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
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.
(It’s definitely not.)
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.
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.
Sounds like to many meetings. Can’t do work at a meeting.
I agree. The problem is meetings.
And the idiots who schedule many of them…
I just get scheduled into meetings without my involvement or knowledge. Sometimes minutes before they’re due to start.
I have a meeting scheduled for Monday. Even though I’m away on Monday and they can see I’m away on Monday in my calendar. I’m just not going to tell them, and see if they noticed that I don’t turn up.
Yeah in those situations I choose to not show up. They gonna not show me respect, I’m not gonna show 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.
businesswire.com/…/Zoom-Expands-Its-Lease-at-KBS’…
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!
wsj.com/…/zoom-offices-hybrid-remote-work-1166197…
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.
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
They’ll have much less when they lose all their customers and have to downsize lol
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.
.
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.
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
Your not wrong. But hot take: it’s better than slack.
Better for video, maybe. Better for chat, never!
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.
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.
Like what? The technology sub is all about these big tech platforms, can you name some others?
Sorry are you asking me to list conferencing software for you? If you have a particular point to make can you just make it, I’m not ChatGPT.
He’s not wrong, remote meetings do suck for getting to know your coworkers, but that’s not a great reason for rtw
I legit use my remote meetings to get to know my team. If there’s not too much work to talk about
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.
At first, I thought this was an Onion story
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.
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.
By old ways, do you mean in-person interviews and work?
Because I won’t lie, I do find it easier to collaborate, focus, and communicate with my coworkers in-person, as opposed to the days I work remotely (I do a combination of in-person and work-from-home). And while I think it’s unfair to be denied a job for not being sociable enough (I’m very much in the same boat), the overall idea of wanting employees who communicate with and get along with their coworkers better isn’t inherently wrong.
No, he’s clearly referring to the “metagame” of career building that centers primarily around making your coworkers and managers like you so that they want to give you that promotion/transfer/whatever. That game is remote work lessens that BS by making everything more about the actual work
Thanks mate. <3
Nah. It’s all still happening. All your coworkers are in a discord. They just didn’t invite you.
.
.
Glad I’m not a stockholder, since the CEO basically says their only product, remote connectivity, stifles innovation and connection. What a world.
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’ve gained about 1.2 billion in market cap this week based on stock price. The super rich do not experience consequences.
sounds rapey
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.
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.
Now that’s a take worth framing. Right up there with the guy that thinks Enron Musk is working class, while the fucking school board is considered ruling class. Complete detachment from reality.
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.
The rest of the investor class consider Musk a joke to actually run the companies he owns himself.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
You’re not wrong, but it’s a process that can be improved. I will 100% say that we’ve had better results in person for newbies, BUT it is not a valid reason as an overall rule. In my mind, the benefits far outweigh the downsides. Fuck the office (not the show, it’s amazing)
Yes I worked the last two years at University and the offices were empty almost constantly. I just didn’t get any connections to anyone and didn’t even know if the people could help my cause, since everyone had different projects and you just didn’t know what they are actually working on
Remote-only companies existed before, during, and continue existing after COVID. And those companies have new people as well. Perhaps you’re right and that it’s harder to ask questions on slack as a newbie (although I believe it’s completely up to personal taste) but is that worth all the benefits of remote work?
I believe it’s not.
Yes there are pros and cons to every situation. You are right that it’s harder for new employees to learn. It takes more time. But the advantages of working from home are amazing and so much worth it anyway.
The entire idea of everyone leaving their apartments every morning, when they have everything they need to work at home, contributing to environment destruction, morning stress to get to work, an entire workday of hours lost in traffic every week etc… What are we doing? It’s madness.
Most people used to spend 10 hours every week traveling to work! That’s 40 hours per month - an entire work week just gone sitting in traffic every month! What if you exercise 40 hours per month instead. You would be in stellar shape.
We are supposed to be living life, don’t waste it.
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.
My girlfriend too, she works for big corp and have tons of meetings. But she is not interested in being a maker (like someone who does the work). She wants to be a manager that tells others what to do. And she is, and she is miserable most of the time.
I think some people just value the status higher than their happiness.
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.
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: businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-desc…
and THIS: web.archive.org/…/jpmorgan-chase-is-tracking-zoom…
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.
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.
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.
Dang, I just applied to a couple positions there. I’ll go ahead and retract those :D
I don’t see anything ironic about this. Zoom is just a tool for making video calls, it’s not even close to being a sufficient replacement for face-to-face interaction with people. A lot of people aren’t motivated to get work done when they are at home by themselves. In isolation you can feel like the work you’re doing is meaningless and not providing any value to anyone. When lockdowns affected my workplace productivity plummeted - we had people ostensibly ‘working from home’ that were answering a few emails here and there and then checking out without having done any actual valuable work at all.
If you hate your job, maybe it’s the work/management/culture that is the problem. WFH isn’t a solution to that, it’s just hiding away from the causes of your misery.
What if this is true?
It is meaningless. People just remember this when being at home.
Good, valuable work has meaning. To assume that it’s all meaningless is a miserable mindset.
You think so? I’m not miserable at all, if that’s what you think… I’m actually really happy. But the work we do have no real meaning I think, but I would love to hear why you think it’s meaningful.
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.
Not sure where you’re getting your numbers. He’s worth 3.4 billion dollars. Unless you’re talking in yen, which would make him worth about 500b yen.
Yo wtf Google him… I’m not even answering this shitty comment. Or at least elaborate cuz what you said may not be what you think you meant
CEO of Zoom is called Eric S Yuan. He’s 53 years old, has 3 kids and net worth of 3.4 billion US dollars in 2023.
Maybe I’m not the guy who needs to try Google lol
Yep yep, my bad, I’m talking about Musk. Well that was dumb
Is this really a thing you think people do?
Why would he care?
Wow, just wow. I liked Zoom when it was an upstart company making good tools for remote work When it got big, ugh.
Zoom software inefficient and ineffective. Got it.