https://nypost.com/2023/08/05/zoom-tells-employees-to-return-to-office-for-work/
The tech company blew up as one of the main means of communication for people forced to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I guess this could just as easily be posted in an anti-work community
I can't think of a worse marketing strategy for a company that relies on remote work to remain relevant. This would be like if General Motors forced every employee within 50 miles of an assembly plant to ride a bike to work.
These are fun. For any other CEOs reading along, here's your new policy/advertisement:
Microsoft could require Macs for all employees.
Xfinity could only offer dialup at their offices.
Dairy Queen could only hire diabetics.
The cafeteria at Purdue Farms headquarters could be all-vegan.
Barnes and Noble staff must have a library card and check out books regularly.
Amazon delivery drivers must have their license suspended.
Bed, Bath and Beyond could require their floor staff to only come in if they haven't showered.
Starbucks bans coffee in its offices, cites study saying its bad for your health. Stocks herbal tea instead.
IKEA now only buy from furniture row.
Boeing ban employees from taking aircraft, citing safety concerns with their aircraft.
USPS require all packages be delivered by courier - I can actually see that one happening
Atlassian and Salseforce could shift their internal help desks to in-person only with 100% paper records.
That would probably be an improvement for Salesforce. I truly hate their software. It's god awful.
I don’t mind going into an office but if I worker for zoom. I’d expect they’d demand I work remotely.
I don't think that Zoom specifically advocates for companies to end work in the office.
Like, say you work for Coca-Cola. Their company health plan probably does not encourage people to drink nothing but Coca-Cola, even if they do make it available in the office.
is now asking all employees within 50 miles of a company office to go in at least two days a week on a hybrid schedule.
I briefly worked for a company that took this approach. The oversight they made was they had 2 offices (different teams in each), but as long as you lived within 50 miles of one of the offices, you had to come in.
Even if your team was exclusively in office 1, and you lived outside the radius of office 1 BUT were in the radius of office 2...you had to come in to office 2...and teleconference with your team in office 1 🤦
I know a lawyer in the Boston suburbs who went full WFH during the pandemic. He loved his job but was upset when his boss pushed for him to come back to the office. Boss said he lived too close to the office in Boston to justify it.
Lawyer moved to Vermont with his girlfriend and still works fully remote for the same law office.
most have contingencies that if you are in the 50, then move out of the 50, that’s on you. You still gotta come in.
see that little shack about 40 miles away, out town road 37, past the old faded barn and the tree that looks like homer simpson?....
no. the other barn. the one on the edge of that huge dairy farm.
yea. that's the one. well, that shack is outhouse at your new office. the office itself is the smaller shack behind it.
wifi? sure! at the adjacent on-site outdoor gym, there's an old exercise bike hooked up to a generator to power it.
Wow that’s next level dumb. My job did something similar. Someone whose team was based out of Texas yet they still made the 2 people from MI go to the MI office. And on separate days “so someone was always available”
Then the same company closed 75% of their massive building and said the hybrid employees have to share cubes with other people. I’m so glad HR made me permanent remote.
50 miles during a commute is way too far. My employer has pushed for people whose commute would be 1 hour maximum during rush hour to try to come into an office once a week. Where I live it can take an hour to go 10-15 miles during rush hour…
There's a guy at my company that lives in Sacramento, and commutes twice a week to go in the office in mountain view. That's a 4 hour commute with no traffic.
His entire team is in the San diego office. There's literally zero point, but I guess his manager isn't willing or capable of fighting for an exception to the hybrid mandate.
A friend of mine works for amazon (well, worked). He was fully remote. He moved from seattle to chicago.
Then they told everyone to go back to the office, lol.
This happened to me although I don't work for Amazon.
I have great fun telling them I don't even live on the same continent anymore. Somehow they thought it was my fault, despite the fact that they said that it was fully remote.
50 mile radius of the office address.
So if your home was 40 miles away but your commute was 55 miles...you still had to go 🙄
Commuting is a total loss, and I find being in the office makes it much harder to actually get work done. Fuck all this shit.
I've been getting a lot of messages on LinkedIn from recruiters, a lot of these are asking me to be in the office 2 to 3 times a week. If I was to commute, I'd leave before my son is awake and arrive after he has gone to bed, working from home, I see him whenever I want.
Never saw my dad growing up unless it was the weekends and by then he was tired. He commuted a decent amount. Now he's in his later years and unable to physically do much. I wonder what kind of relationship we would have had. I wish I knew him at his best.
I missed all my kids young years due to work and commute, I'll be damned if I miss their middle/older years. work from home isn't just a preference it is literally giving our family irreplaceable time back. your comment made me sad, I hope you have a good relationship now
I've been able to be there for almost all of my second daughters first year milestones thanks to WFH. You can't put a pricetag on that.
I always ask if there's in office and will flat out reject anything more than 1-2 days per week
Every single serious study about working from home has had the result that it makes workers more productive.
It heavily depends on your circumstances. A lot of people really want to get back to the office.
I'm not suggesting that people should be forbidden to work in the office, just that they shouldn't be forced to do it. My company has a completely liberal policy concerning home office, so you can work from home pretty much all the time, but I still come to the office regularly because I want to.
I like being in the office but the commute is so fucking dumb. Giant swarms of gridlocked cars blasting pollution into the air, wasting vast amounts of time/money/public resources... then you think about how you worked perfectly fine 100% remote for a year and yet these tech companies are all of a sudden herding everyone back into the office doing everything possible to piss away a valuable tool to reduce pollution, increase space for housing while reducing their own overhead, and build resiliency against future pandemics.
It's frustrating.
It’s straight idiotic. I think it’s because the big guys enjoy making the unwashed masses miserable.
It's almost certainly much more about commercial real estate and making sure they don't lose out on the huge investments they have made there. It's always always about money.
It's just weak management. Some people work best from home. For some people, that doesn't really work. For people like myself, I need to come into the office once per week and I'm good.
But it's easier to manage via policy instead of managing individuals. So that's what they do.
I mean... as a software developer, Sorry, I will not be returning to the office.
You need me, more than I need you. The market is HOT right now.
Companies will learn, the hard way.
Is the market hot right now? With all the layoffs, the sentiment on blind seems to be don't try to find a job now
Big tech overhired. There is still a massive number of companies that are in dire need of software devs. They won't pay 300k though
The layoffs were all from the big tech companies, the small ones are still operating as per usual.
Not necessarily. The ones you HEAR about are from big tech companies, but many small tech companies are also tightening their belts to follow suit.
My evidence is inherently anecdotal, but my current (at the time) and previous companies of 100-ish people both also had (multiple) layoffs -- more like 5 people each time rather than thousands, sure, and they never hit the news. I reported mine to layoffs.fyi, with the evidence that "company X just laid me off," and they never posted it.
Zoom is one of the big ones, though, relatively.
They pay big tech salaries. So anyone leaving a job at Zoom would definitely be competing against those 150k who we're laid off this year.
90% of the people who were laid off in December had a new job by February. That timeframe has been consistent across the board.
There is still a huge talent gap and there are still a huge amount of high paying jobs available for folks in software. You may have more trouble getting into the largest orgs, but aim a bit smaller and you can find work pretty quickly.
Exactly. I'm so tried of random folks speculating on how much easier it's going to be to attract developers. Nothing actually changed folks.
A slightly smaller massive shortage is still just a massive shortage.
That's for relatively fresh programmers, and in particular BSc or BA.
If you have years of experience, it's the opposite, companies fight each other to get you.
higher skilled workers are always in higher demand, that's not really dependent on the market
Depends on the skill. I doubt there are too many experts in punch card computing that are in demand at the moment.
I'm turning down recruiters pretty much daily, many offering better pay than my current job. I stay where I am because I like the people I work with.
Nice.
But I have to warn you - you're playing right into our evil plot of not being shitty bosses. I'll have to let the secret society of non-asshole managers know that our master plan is progressing.
That is true.
Two years ago, if I failed to reach out with an offer within 35 hours of finishing the interview, the candidate had already accepted one of the other two offers.
Today it seems like it can take two months for developers to have 3 competing offers. So if I end up needing to hire this year, I'll have the kind of leverage that lets me take the whole work week to interview every candidate I want to, before making an offer.
The great news for me is that some hiring managers I compete with saw the layoffs and decided it was safe to reveal themselves as assholes. That's going to make my job (of stealing their top talent) easier for many years to come, because people have long memories.
Recruiters are still flooding my DMs (and calling me) so yeah, the market is still hot.
The tech hiring market is most definitely NOT hot right now. It's the worst it's been since the 2008 crisis aftermath.
Obviously there are still things out there but companies are hiring less and the market is flooded with big tech layoffs. Companies are being flooded with applications for available roles.
Startups are also struggling to raise which means there are less new jobs in startups too.
I have over a decade of experience in software engineering and am struggling to find a new job at the moment. Every other time I've looked in the past it's been way easier.
Obviously I could have a job if I wanted, but if you don't want to compromise on role/pay then things are really tough at the moment.
That's true. I've seen developers wait a month or two for the right offer this year.
In previous years, they usually had 3 mind blowing offers within a week of putting out the word that they're looking.
Worst argument though. The building has already been paid for or has a lease. Using or not using it won't bring that money back. The only thing that can bring the money back is subleasing it. Even not using it saves some money (energy bills).
That's not how this stuff works. The buildings belong to people, ultimately most of them being to the oligarchs. Having a lot of people work from home will put pressure on real estate values so the oligarchs might see the line go up a little slower. So they put pressure on CEOs to keep people locked up in their silos. They're also easier to control that way.
I'd love to understand the logic and benefit of come two days a week. But the real reason, not the bullshit they say
They've invested a lot of money in office real estate and hate that it's going to waste.
Also, CEOs tend to be extroverts who want to be around people. They're also sociopaths who think everyone is like them (or they don't care what others think).
Combine the two and you get this.
Also no one actually knows how long tasks take.
If you work from home and only work for 4 hours, lots of managers do not know how to tell if that work you did took 8 hours or 4. In the office they have plausible deniability that they saw you there doing something.
They've invested a lot of money in office real estate and hate that it's going to waste.
But see this makes no sense. The money invested is gone (or contractually tied up). Using it won't make it a good investment.
It's like if you bought a car and then moved somewhere where you're like 1 minute walking from work, the grocery store, the hair salon,.and the best restaurants, and you never travel otherwise. The money spent on the car is objectively wasted. Using your car unnecessarily to drive places you (a) wouldn't normally go to or (b) don't need a car to get to is not only pointless, but actually costs MORE MONEY because of gas and maintenance (or for a building, energy and cleaning).
There's more to it. Companies are getting tax breaks and tax exemptions to bring in people to the office to "stimulate" the ecconony.
Ahh. Didn't know about the tax breaks. Makes sense. You know, as much as if "makes sense" to be forcing people to spend more time and money traveling instead of working or spending time with their families.
No idea whether it's their reason, but anecdotally I've found it has a few benefits. If coordinated properly it's significantly easier to train new(er) staff, it improves cross-organisational understanding to overhear other departments' conversations either at desks or in break rooms, and it stops people becoming isolated pockets of knowledge and culture because they only ever see or interact with the same one or two people.
Because the people creating these mandates don't have to suffer them. They come and go as they please, and they don't work in the pit open office space. They have real offices with furniture, walls, and doors that shut.
I can help you. The benefit is strictly for the maintenance of th bullshit status quo and the logic is, once you're already coming in two days a week, it'll be an easier fight to ask for a third. Then a fourth. And so on.
Zoom app never worked well on Linux and in browser experience was absolute shit.
Sometimes it just wouldn't start without any error message. 10 minutes before meeting. Fuck zoom.
Teams works even in Firefox on Linux, but desktop client is very solid as well if you're into that.
My company uses both zoom and Google meet, most meetings are thankfully using Google meet but the occasional ones that use zoom are a headache.
My company uses MacBooks and even then the zoom client has constant failures and it's hard to get the browser to work.
Basically, it's not just a Linux problem, it's the platform lol, but yes agreed it's a nightmare in Linux as well.
I have the opposite experience, Teams shits the bed constantly, chat is invisible half of the time, audioproblems galore, random hangups. Meanwhile, zoom works perfectly every time
I had the exact opposite experience so bad, my job required me to install Windows after 5 or 6 years.
Essentially, Teams classrooms cannot be larger than 200 people. Since our classrooms were as big as 800 people, Teams have a system like conference. However, it specifically mentions that you cannot create and host a conference unless you are from Microsoft Desktop App.
I resigned a few months later and finally got rid of Windows, but it was a very bad experience for ne.
I would much rather use teams than zoom. But Google meet is the best, can't believe it was beat by zoom
Thankfully I haven't used teams for a while, but my main issue with it was that it was trying to do everything poorly rather than one thing well. It's text chat, video chat, file storage, it had every MS Office product integrated. That meant you had to force your way past a bloated mess to get to the function you needed. The video chat was lacking the options that zoom had. It didn't have a proper speaker mode at that point, it used phone audio rather than speaker audio, there were less good options for screen sharing(whiteboards ect). It was always slow, memory hungry, buggy and unstable on Firefox/Linux. The desktop app was no better because it's literally just the web app in electron, but it had the added problem of being very difficult to fully close.
Very glad to be rid of teams.
I feel you haven't used Teams in years because none of what you mentioned has been my experience starting using teams 2 years ago. (Only point is that I'm unsure about whiteboards, since I've never needed to use that)
I don't think it's fair to discredit everything I said with "you haven't used teams in 1.5 years".
Some of it is opinion " teams is bloated", some of it is a fact "teams is an electron webapp, which makes it slow and inefficient compared to a native app", some of it is very specific to my setup "teams is broken on my computer with my config of Firefox and Linux".
I've used teams on fast Windows computers with fast internet connections, and it was far less frustrating. Maybe that's why your experience was better.
Only issues I've had using teams are network related. If the pipe ain't there to handle it, of course it's gonna act like trash.
What issues have you had? I do everything on there.
Currently looking for another job and EVERY job I have seen that's hybrid has multiple offices across the country. So basically they make you come into the office to talk to the rest of your team on zoom. Somehow that is more efficient than talking to them on zoom from your house.
My company is starting to do this as well. They say it’s to “build culture in market”. Really they just want to force you to interact with your coworkers to make things feel less transactional and to keep tabs on people
Microsoft is a major contributor to the Linux kernel for decades now. They even were in the top 5 for a while. So yeah, plenty of MS employees use Linux exclusively.
Well, "plenty" probably just consists of teams such as the WSL development team. I highly doubt anyone in sales, marketing, or development for anything Windows or Windows-application related uses Linux exclusively.
We can only assume the internal memo was:
"Hey guys! Oh shit! Our remote conferencing software is actually crap! We need to return to the office ASAP!"
Good for them not having any "sacred cow" technologies - not even the one they sell, apparently.
Seems like a way of culling staff without having to pay severance.. make it so shit that people leave, but make allowances for the key people you need
That (along with feeding managers' need to micromanage) is the largest reason so many corporations are forcing a return to office
Zoom, which remains a leader in the post-pandemic remote work trend, is now asking all employees within 50 miles of a company office to go in at least two days a week on a hybrid schedule.
lol. That's like an hour each way.
They have to come back to the office, but no getting out of their cubicle to talk. They have to use Zoom for that.
Different circumstances but similarly funny in an absurd way because of how it sounds, I remember reading a news item in the 90s about the time when a riot broke out in a Nerf factory in China.