“With more people in the office, we are in a better position to use our own technologies”??? What? Do they actually know what their product is?
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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When you don't have a good reason for something but you also don't have to justify your actions, this is the kind of dumb shit you throw at the wall to just make the conversation end.
"Middle management are feeling fragile and insecure and solving that matters more than actual productivity, especially for a company who has a share price history that you could ride a sled down". There's a real reason if you want one.
Classic corporate doublespeak, IMO.
"This is bad, but bad is good."
Execs are no doubt panicking because the infinite growth they've promised as a result of their 2020 finances is starting to look unlikely and they need excuses to cut down on employees
fuck infinite growth
Yup, RTO policies are basically just to reduce headcount without the headlines being "zoom lays off 30% of it's workforce"
i genuinely dont see who thought that would be worse than 'zoom has no faith in own product, tells staff to come to office so dont need to use it'
every company at stages goes through layoffs and its always a bad few days of news but shareholders can be placated. what scares them off is a company saying their product is shit
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Previously, they can't test in production because if it cause an outage, zoom employees must use Google Meets to coordinate a fix. If their employees are all in the office, they can push directly to production without fear of being locked out, therefore increasing productivity. /s
Management doesn't know how to deal with it. And instead of research something that would indubitably benefit everyone else, and in this case it includes not only workers, but also customers and even their fucking business model... They go back to a place of false comfort for themselves. That's the sign of a sinking ship if I ever saw one.
This is what I don't get, it took a while to get into place after Covid forced WFH, but my office, in the UK public sector, managed to implement a decent monitoring system to allow managers to make sure home workers aren't taking the mick. How is it all these huge tech companies with infinitly more money and talent at their disposal can't?
I don't understand why managers or anybody really, would care what the fuck I'm doing as long as the work is getting done.
Because, at least from my software dev perspective, if upper management realizes how easy it would be to make someone on the team a "team lead" pay them a smidge more and then use metric tools to make sure stuff got done there would be no need for middle managers.
I work for a fortune 500, tons of beauracracy, and the people always moaning about people being in the office are most often the least useful people in the building. Lording over people's cubes "keeping tabs" is seen as a way to tell their bosses they are valuable.
Ive said it so many times to my boss who is on my side and has fought for me to WFH: "If I stop working you will know it instantly, things won't work and besides theres an entire dashboard I have to self report my progress to which again I can lie on for a bit, but will be obvious if I do so longer than a week".
There's also another factor of the sunk cost fallacy, many corps own buildings or are on long leases, leaving them empty looks like a massive waste of money even though tbh leaving them empty by my assessment would actually save them money.
Same here. Infrastructure engineer of 10 years now, recently got my first fortune 500 job and most companies now are super bloated with middle management. They honestly think their job is to schedule meetings and manage the progress of their team instead of providing support and guidance. A good manager will leave you alone if your job is getting done, but being a good manager implies you have valuable skills that would transfer to other companies, or that you know the job well enough to know how it should be done. I don't see engineers turned management have this problem so much as business people turned managers.
In the US at least, I know quite a few people that are working multiple jobs at once and putting out shit performance on every job. They are also living in locations they are not allowed to live in (company has a policy you have to live within a certain distance of a branch office), so I think some of this RTO stuff is justified, so long as the company stays flexible enough for me to decide which days I want to be in office
A lot of them (Alphabet in particular) overinvested in commercial real estate and are now sitting on a huge sunk cost.
Can you provide any additional information on the "monitoring system". Is it simple "check-ins" with your managers, or more technology dependent where everything is tracked as if someone is standing over your shoulder.
It's time based, everything we do on the system is time coded, if there's a twenty minute gap in your output they will look further into it (I'm sure that's not for all staff but ones they know take the piss but they have to pretend to be fair). Most of the time they look and the notes/paperwork attached to a case and it makes sense why it took a while, if not then they will bring it up with someone. It works for me, doesn't feel like you're being watched all the time and no one is biting your head off for five minutes on your phone between cases, but at least the people I know do take the mick are to up their game.
Maybe the world"s remote workers should avoid Zoom since it isn't even good enough for Zoom to use.
I suspect that's actually part of the problem. Zoom is being ditched for teams left and right - so many enterprise companies already have Office on all their machines on the network. Why would they continue to pay for zoom (who I believe jacked up their prices to capitalize on the COVID influx) when teams is included in their software suite and serves the exact same function, with additional functionality? Not saying teams is as good/better/worse than zoom, but it serves the same purpose. There are also concerns over zooms security, which isn't helped by a huge inrease in cyber attacks just about everywhere - that's also very problematic for zoom since Teams already requires MFA through authenticator to help prevent the latter.
The Zoom peak declining combined with a competitor rapidly growing means they're losing money, and of course the only solution to that is to force employees back into the office. I mean what else could you possibly do? There's simply no other solution to this problem. They've tried nothing so far and it hasn't worked so, really theor hand has been forced.
Lol it's funny how you compare the safety of Teams vs Zoom when there is currently a targeted cyber attack of like 50 different US agencies using Teams as the vector.
A quick Google search will show that Zoom has a ton of encryption and spyware vulnerability concerns. I also did not say Teams was more secure, just that the already built in MFA that Microsoft is requiring helps combat that, and again....included.
Wow that's not a good look tbh. Pretty shitty leadership if they can't even spin it.
That's a good way to lose all your top talent.
Don't let it fool you, they'll make exceptions to the rule for the ones they want to keep. This is just a way to make their "worst" performers miserable so they quit instead of laying them off. All the ~~shit~~ tech companies are doing it.
As a datapoint from the other side, my company (big tech) is holding the party line no matter what. Lower level engineer or director - if you don't come in the requisite number of days a week, you're out. It's a bafflingly short-sighted move, but company culture is more important than anything apparently.
You don’t have to waste people’s time and burn gas in traffic to foster a meaningful company culture. This is just about management egos needing to feel important, and always has been.
It's just sunk cost fallacy on office space.
Yeah, that's my guess too. I assume there's some nuance to it that I'm not privy to, but real estate has to be a huge factor.
This really depends. You would think that a company would know who it's top performers are, but if you are engineer who is more than two managers away from C suite, chances are the person who decides to end your job doesn't know or give a shit who you are, they just know that your salary is among the higher end. If a company wants to attract top talent they can always do so later
This is the best summary I could come up with:
At that time, Zoom chief financial officer Kelly Steckelberg cited an internal survey showing that about 85 percent of employees who work remotely "want it to stay that way."
It's still unclear why Zoom settled on a 50-mile radius as its requirement for returning to the office, whether employees can seek exemptions, or if performance reviews will depend on in-office attendance, ComputerWorld reported.
But Business Insider reported that market value has since dropped by at least $100 billion, mostly because so many companies over the past two years began requiring workers to return to the office.
Zoom's spokesperson said that with more workers in the office, "as a company, we are in a better position to use our own technologies, continue to innovate, and support our global customers."
Yuan said on an earnings call that building up Zoom's AI capability is a priority, ComputerWorld reported, and it's possible it has become an all-hands-on-deck situation.
The future will tell if pivoting to AI and requiring the majority of employees to return to the office are other mistakes for Zoom or necessary business moves.
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The same BS my last employer was droning on and on about when he forced us all back because “collaboration”!
He spoke about “zoom fatigue”, which isn’t a real thing btw but that’s another matter entirely, and how being in the same building was better for us as a team.
The amount of collaboration it spark was exactly how many fucks I give about Zoom.
More like meeting fatigue. And I had that before we had video calls.
But Zoom is a shit company anyway. I'm still pissed they bought Keybase just to let it die the slow death.
also people of certain personality types that are incapable of recognising that other people have different preferrences or needs to keep them happy and efficient. after the whole 'we're all in this together', 'we care about your wellbeing' propaganda so so quickly turning around and saying 'fuck you, come in' from so many companies, ive become work fatigued and genuinely cant be fucked right now to do more than the bare minimum. probably should use some of my hundreds of sick days
They're just all going to be in the office and attending zoom meetings.
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To be replaced by commute fatigue
I think they are just looking to reduce their headcount
They want that 50 mile radius salary market. Competing with the entire country is expensive.
Please explain. My intuition suggests the opposite. The company's office is in San Jose. Presumably they have to pay high local market wages to retain workers. If they could hire remote workers willing to accept Peoria lL market wages they could conceivably get the same value of labor at lower cost.
20 years ago companies didn't demand local workers to staff their call centers to avoid competing with the entire world. They did the opposite, contracting out to the lowest bidders overseas and firing staff in the global north.
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Microsoft took a lot from them IMO. I use Zoom or Teams even when I'm in the office. I don't like being hindered by meetings.
Why even be in the office then? All this does is contribute pointlessly to burn out and invested carbon emission. I'd rather starve at this point than ever have to work in an office again.
Just before the new covid wave nobody is vaccinated against. Nice.
Is this news I've missed?
EG.5, variant of omicron
Zoom leadership and executives do not trust their own product.
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