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‘Don’t Mess With Us’: WebMD Parent Company Demands Return to Office in Bizarre Video

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxqnx/dont-mess-with-us-webmd-parent-company-demands-return-to-office-in-bizarre-video

“I've seen better acting by hostages in direct to DVD movies,” one anonymous worker wrote about the video.

‘Don’t Mess With Us’: WebMD Parent Company Demands Return to Office in Bizarre Video::“I've seen better acting by hostages in direct to DVD movies,” one anonymous worker wrote about the video.

139 comments

Wermhatswormhat

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I’m so tired of businesses claiming that the only way for a company to be successful is if everyone is in person for the dear dear meetings. We all know exactly what this is about. 1. It’s more dofficult to micromanage employees when a manger can’t constantly observe them, and 2. All the giant real estate investments companies have made is now coming due and they cant fill up their buildings fast enough to get those tax breaks. Why the hell else are they “tracking” people in the office. Meanwhile senior leadership can come and go whenever they see fit. It’s control. Plain and simple.

Wutangforemer

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WebMD is owned by Internet Brands, which is owned by KKR, an investment group with $64 billion in real estate assets. This has fuck all to do with productivity or middle management.

https://www.kkrreit.com/our-company/about-us

https://www.webmd.com/corporate/press/20170915/internet-brands-kkr-portfolio-company-successfully-completes

Rascabin

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Fuckin kkr. The ones who got Toys R Us to go bankrupt just to make a buck. They also purchased the company i worked for then sold it to another company which resulted in big layoffs some years back. They can eat shit and die.

timetraveller

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I miss Toys R Us

Seleni

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Well, good news—Macy’s has brought them back.

NotSteve_

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We still have them in Canada!

crapton_america

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There are company’s where their whole business strategy is to get their employees on the board of a struggling company with the plan to enact policies that seem like they will help but just dig the hole deeper. Until they can start selling off assets, move to bankruptcy, then sail away with golden parachutes to do it all again.

DigitalTraveler42

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It's really just "we need people so that our real estate investments don't tank", I'm rooting for their shit to tank, fuck the rich.

czardestructo

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My company had a badge in/badge out procedure, badge out was new after covid. No one actually badged out. They have since installed security guards at all exits and they will chase you out the door if you forget to badge out.

laurelraven

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What'll they do, tackle you and drag you back inside?

This seems like a horrible reaction to me, which sounds about corp

trebuchet

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All the giant real estate investments companies have made is now coming due and they cant fill up their buildings fast enough to get those tax breaks

What are these tax breaks for filling up buildings?

Telodzrum

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They don't exist. This made up tale about commercial real estate driving RTO policies has been around since early 2021 when things started opening back up on larger scales. It's a fiction that just won't die.

StereoTrespasser

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Because it's not fiction. City leaders and even Congress, at the behest of lobbyists, have clearly urged RTO as a cure to real estate woes.

US Real Estate Firms Urge Federal Government To Bring Workers Back to the Office

Reverendender

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Can you back that up with any evidence whatsoever?

ChrislyBear

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Evidence, that something doesn't exist?

Here: ...

You can also use this evidence freely to prove, that you didn't receive the package that you ordered.

b3an

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It’s time for a boycott WebMD campaign. Let’s see how well they handle THAT 👹

Stretch2m

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Doing my part. I literally never visit that toxic site.

wooki

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You have it backwards. Completely.

I have no intentions of bringing my work home, work is a job, it has no place in my home impacting my family.
I will not lose a part of my home to my jobs business. Its not their property, it is my home.i would rather the office be a bedroom so my children dont have to share a room.
We evolved without video conferencing, it is natural and easier to meet with someone in person to convey emotion and understand people we meet with. It is too easy to dismiss someone over a screen, empathy is too easily lost. It is also harder to be ignored in person.
I can see when my ataff are struggling off meeting or when talking to others and help them. This is a bit micro-managey however I value the insight especially for staff that struggle to communicate.

The only thing I loath about working in another building is: the commute and distractions. The commute is expensive and a huge waste of time. I try and minimise the time waste with audio books but its forced waste of money. The distractions can be minimised with headphones.

Seleni

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I’d say it depends on the job and the person. If it’s the sort of job that can be done remotely, and the office culture is such that people are constantly getting interrupted by people ‘just passing by’ and ‘oh one more quick question’, and/or dragged into hours-long meetings that could easily have been a quick email thread, then it’s not a stretch at all to see that WFH has improved their productivity.

wooki

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The realestate claim is just plain backwards. It does depend on the person, but making the claim that people in general are happy to donate part of their home to their employer and impact their families with work from home is just wrong. Emails instead of meetings should be common sense for status meetings and has no impact on the choice to work from home. Meetings that have agendas should be in person, especially if its on sensitive topics. All reasons I have listed above.

Some people sure do benefit working from home. I liked no commute, it saved a lot of money and wasted time but it made home worse.

We work to live. Work should have no place in our home.

Seleni

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What I was describing was something many people who are happy to work from home have said about their jobs. Others cite their terrible commute as the reason they love not having to go into the office.

If you don’t want to give up a part of your home to your job that’s totally fine. But don’t go around saying that everyone should do things your way. Many people are quite happy working from home, and cite having more time for their family and hobbies, and never having to deal with annoying meetings or commutes.

You can see many examples in the comments on this very post, as well as the sheer number of people quitting when their jobs tried to force them back into the office.

ThePowerOfGeek

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Yeah this is bullshit. Just middle and senior management trying to justify their jobs and all the expenses they've made on office real estate. I've worked 100% from home for 3 years now, and not only is my productivity much higher, but the team dynamic is better and the worker output overall is better too.

I get some people do better face to face with colleagues, and are happier and more productive. And to those people I say: Go for it! Go into the office and be at your best!

But companies should not force the rest of us to piss time and money away commuting for zero gain and just extra frustration and unhappiness.

_number8_

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it's honestly blowing my mind learning recently how many people not only literally love their shitty jobs but also want to see millions of others subjugated to the grind for absolutely no net benefit

books

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That and layoffs without firing people.

ChrislyBear

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to piss time and money away commuting

So much this! Why is it OK for us to waste our most valuable resource, time?? If you waste company time or assets, you'll be fired.

thesystemisdown

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As a consumer, I will now forever remember that WebMD's C Suite is most interested in "crushing their competition" and being heavy handed with their employees. I once thought that they were concerned about the betterment of societal health. This is how you lose your most performant employees.

I can't believe they published this to a publically available platform like Vimeo. Did they already lose their Marketing executive?

avidamoeba

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With Kagi, WebMD never showing up again is just two clicks away:

Aaand done!

noodlejetski

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and if for whatever reason you don't want to pay for Kagi, you can use uBlacklist to achieve the same thing with a search engine of your choice https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublacklist/

Scotty_Trees

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Things I didn't know I needed, thank you! Gonna give this a try right now for duckdudckgo

avidamoeba

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Oh nice.

Garbanzo

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Dude's delusional thinking he's going to crush Mayo Clinic while his employees pass COVID back and forth. Straight goofball thinking.

Wermhatswormhat

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Yeah, I’m with you. At least make the video private…

ChunkMcHorkle

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Permanently Deleted

Fixbeat

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I am not even sure what webmd does, but F them.

bajabound

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They run a website that helps you self diagnose even the slightest illness as cancer.

RiikkaTheIcePrincess

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[Joke] C'mon, be fair!

It also suggests other horrific, life-threatening diseases as the reason for itchy eyes or cramps or whatever!

dezmd

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Cystic fibrosis or legionairres disease.

RainfallSonata

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Fucking UNIONIZE.

Chetzemoka

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Just did. Won our vote Wednesday night 💪

ChunkMcHorkle

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Oh, that is righteous. Congratulations!

Mojojojo1993

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Louder

Sekrayray

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I’m so sick and god damned tired of corporations and governments making sweeping decisions with no evidence base to back them up. I work in a field where there is no option for remote work, but I think it’s pretty clear at this point that most non-service industries can be just as effective via remote options. All of this is just about control and it’s so stupid.

01189998819991197253

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I slightly disagree on one aspect. I have read several studies (relatively short term, but still) about how WFH and Remote Work employees are measurably and significantly more effective and productive than their in-office counterparts. Evidence actually supports remote work.

Powerpoint

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Yup. WFH/Remote increases productivity. Any CEO who limits their companies productivity should be relieved of their job. In office is and should be a thing of the past for most day to day operations.

laurelraven

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The companies were even praising the benefits of WFH earlier in the pandemic, boasting about record productivity, and those same people and companies are now saying they need to bring people back without acknowledging their prior statements. It's perfectly bizarre.

They want closer collaboration, there are ways to do that remotely, and do it well. I think MMOs have proven that people can collaborate effectively for long periods with people they've never met, don't know what they look like, what their voice sounds like, or even their name.

Sekrayray

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Yeah, so the decision is actually counter to the evidence.

NocturnalEngineer

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They don't care. It's about control and real estate.

IDriveWhileTired

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More about real estate than anything else, to be honest. You have far more control over remote work than in the office. I know how many minutes each member of my team spends on any and all websites, can log keyboards, to the point I don’t recommend to anyone working remotely to access bank accounts on their work computers.

tias

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I don't see how working from home changes anything. If you can do that kind of logging on their work computers at home, you can do it at the office too. Besides (in the EU at least) you have to inform employees about the extent of the monitoring beforehand. Can't imagine how they expect to attract competent employees that way though.

IDriveWhileTired

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You’d be surprised how much people actually just don’t care how their work computers are monitored nowadays. We disclose everything, even showed our monitoring tool to employees, and they just don’t care. I guess people know by now that personal stuff should be handled on personal devices, such as phones, tablets and computers. And the things they use their work computers for, they don’t care if we’re looking at it or not,

Funny enough, we never used those tools working in the office, even though they would work. But the fact that people are inside a controlled environment makes companies more lenient about IT security, funny enough. Having a badge seems to make computer monitoring tools redundant (even though they aren’t, of course).

But again, I do think this “back to work” movement has more to do with financial losses in real estate than real team work or control over the team. To some degree, banks, insurers and funds own us all.

Raiderkev

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Even when we were in office, I never logged into anything or browsed for anything personal on my work device. I also never connected my phone to company WiFi on principle. We have tiny pocket computers. No reason to jeopardize my job going on then reddit, now lemmy on the company device.

IDontHavePantsOn

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Web MD. The website. The website designed to make visitors feel a false sense of expertise about their health so that they don't leave home to see a doctor about illness, is threatening their workers to leave their homes, to unnecessarily return to work, during a wave of life threatening and easily transmitable illness, that they will have to bring home.

ChrislyBear

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They ALL are on green screen. There isn't anyone int his video present "in person"!

sunbeam60

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Totally this. There’s not a single person there who isn’t an SVP or an EVP. And I’m speaking as someone with an official title of EVP; unless you get the team to say “it’s awesome to be back in” on a video, this just comes across as so “because we say so”.

Our team is already distributed across 8 time zones and 5 countries; why do we need to be in the office to sit in the same calls across our regions?

There are some jobs that are much better done in person and then there are jobs that aren’t. For most roles, some tasks in that role is better in person, for some tasks it doesn’t make a difference and for some tasks it’s specifically better to be remote.

A video like this needs to explain WHY - and with more than just “we are better together!”; ok, but why?

laurelraven

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And poorly executed at that ... Each exec kept moving to completely different background scenes each time they showed up, one they botched so badly they made it look like he was standing in the counter... It's like they didn't even care enough to try

And that was the weirdest "happy dance" the "employees" were doing at the end

notannpc

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Jesus. What fucking lunatics. That video never needed to exist. Just be like every other corp and send an email. At least that news story would have blended in with all the other RTO trash.

Now I’ll just forever remember that webMDs parent company is operated by unhinged boomers.

foggy

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Do you want more unions?

This is how you get more unions.

Fuck around and find out. I'm ok with more unions.

Make all of us mad and put us all in close proximity. Good idea. Not one of us will consider googling "how to form a union" with a few coworkers. It's probably too hard to do anyways (it isn't).

wanderingmagus

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Do you want more unions?

Yes.

popproxx

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I remember WebMD was one of the most chaotic places I worked at. It was 2000-2001 and there was a president Marv Rich and a CEO Marty Wygod. They were both building duplicate ERP systems that basically did the same thing. One day, my boss Al was in a meeting, and they told him that he needed us to move the data center to the East Coast. The most valuable part was a bunch of big EMC Symmetrix arrays with all their data. He was freaking out because he got into an argument about loading all of them into one airplane, and he didn't want to do it. He was telling them that if the airplane goes down, all of WebMD would be gone, and it needed to be loaded onto two airplanes. I don't know why, but for some reason, that story always reminded me of my time at WebMD.

Nath

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The one time I moved a data center, we did it in two trucks for this very reason. Of course, it wouldn't have been the whole organization lost, we had more than one data center. But yeah - the two planes part of this story makes complete sense to me.

prole

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Yeah, I feel like the part about developing two different systems to apparently do the same thing, was much stupider.

laurelraven

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The planes were protection against an incredibly slim chance considering how incredibly safe air travel is (dramatically more likely to lose them in a truck accident on the way to or from the airport than on the plane), while the two different systems were guaranteed to be a massive waste of resources and time

MadBob

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Marty Wygod

Or, as they called him down the pub, Wygod Y.

laurelraven

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Nah, pretty sure they just called him Wangrod

paddirn

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WebMD? They realize we’re in the midst of a Covid resurgence, right? You’d think a company like that would be a bit more understanding of stuff like that, given that they’re supposed to be experts on medicine and all.

tastysnacks

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I know a few people getting RSV. They've been out of work for like a month.

IDontHavePantsOn

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Last year I was sick for 7 weeks with covid, RSV, the flu, and then covid again. I had to go to work while still sick with covid because I was out of sick time, even though their own policies should have prevented me from returning. I told all my coworkers to stay away from me and avoided them like I had the plague, because I essentially did. Had I actually not cared about other people's health, I could have lied and destroyed the entire department for months with recurring spreading illness.

I had to have a meeting where I was being threatened with a PIP for attendance, while I was still sick and wearing a mask, for my job at a vaccine laboratory.

Zevlen

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Unbelievable!

Thank You for sharing Your story! 😊 We need to all really stand up for our rights. When everyone is getting hustled all the time; enough is enough.

space

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Return to the office isn't about medicine, it's about entitled executives power tripping over the workers. At every medium/large company I worked for, upper management lived in its own bubble completely disconnected from the rest. I can give so many examples of poor decisions made by upper management that had a huge negative impact on the company and especially the workers. But regardless, they never gave a shit about our opinions and feedback. They didn't even tell us why they made those decisions.

foggy

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It's about corporate real estate, profit margins, taxes, banks, interest rates, the economy, and more.

WFH has completely changed the economic landscape, and virtually all industries are impacted.

I embrace the change. Business men with shareholders do not. Banks with trillions of dollars in corporate mortgages and leases also do not. Etc.

cabron_offsets

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Lolbruh. Remember that their unitary purpose is dolla dolla bill.

neclimdul

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Are they in front of green screens? Did he not even bother to come into the office to record this?

ook_the_librarian

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I love response to the backlash. It's basically "Sorry our video was cringy and tonedeaf. We have removed the cringe."

sunbeam60

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Did they change the video? I was at least impressed that they acknowledged the interest in the video but didn’t realise they might also have made changes.

Styxia

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They did, and I quote:

As to comments/criticisms on the tone/style, Yeah, corporate videos are corporate videos!” the company then said, adding a shrug emoji.

Source

sunbeam60

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I saw the original and the changed one. The only thing that it seems they’ve changed is to add the precursor message, acknowledging the palaver. The rest of the video looked the same.

ook_the_librarian

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Ok. Fair point. I guess I should say, they addressed their cringe. But I still thought it seemed like they were feigning concerned but actually doubling down.

sunbeam60

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Completely. Super cringe.

laurelraven

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And with a shrug emoji, like they're trying to see how insulting they can be

frezik

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Is there a web site out there that can help me determine what kind of cancer that video gave me?

kelseybcool

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Yahoo! Answers is the best source for medical information.

https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg

PipedLinkBot

•

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/EShUeudtaFg

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theherk

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That’s terrifying.

01189998819991197253

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I hear WebMD is good for that...

MeekerThanBeaker

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People who haven't come in to the office yet do it for a reason. They like it. They are happier. Happier employees are better employees.

They get more sleep so they are more alert or have more time for hobbies and recreation. They don't have to spend as much on gas or childcare. They don't use the office's electricity, water, facilities, coffee/snacks.

Make it a choice. For the betterment of humanity and the planet.

When someone makes videos like this, you don't get the best people to come work for your company, you get the most desperate.

But then again, maybe that's what they want. Idiots.

dependencyinjection

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I am with you on almost all of that. Depending on the age of the child, I don’t think you should be tending to a child if you’re WFH.

Gerula

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Let the corporate whips crack! Let the slaves fall back in line! We want profits!

Because you're awesome, important to us, we care about your well being. We are a big family after all!

Kbobabob

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Being in the office ≠ more profit

It in fact takes away from the workers profit.

laurelraven

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This is a feature, not a bug

Gerula

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It doesen't matter that much, corporate ghouls have justified their existance!

YurkshireLad

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My wife is a business analyst and software tester (not for WebMD) and still gets awards and bonuses for excellence, even while she’s worked at home during Covid.

This guy needs to explain to me why she should be forced back into the office to improve her performance.

RagingRobot

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Because he means business! Don't forget who thinks they're in charge here.

01189998819991197253

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This has real Dunder Mifflin Local Ad vibes.

Buttons

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They run a semi-reputable health website which people use for mostly static information that rarely changes. How many new ideas do they really need?

How does creating a web page take so many people?

thehatfox

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Creating the website is more or less a solved problem, but they have to keep coming up with new ways to exploit the website's visitors for profit. The demand for infinite growth is never satiated.

alienanimals

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Tech company executives who ignore data need to be held accountable for their actions by their employees. People need to stand up and stop being sheep.

MaxPow3r11

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Exactly. It's time to stand up while we can.

We can't let these fucks take over the entire reality with their own "version" which is complete bullshit.

Anyolduser

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Eventually they will be held accountable by their shareholders. Companies that renew expensive (and now unnecessary) office leases will have a worse bottom line than those that embrace work from home.