8 ms·
Zoom is making its staff return to the office
- slowmovintarget 3y agoThey obviously don't want their staff to be included in the training data for their ML work.
- baq 3y ago> They obviously don't want their staff Probably can just end here
- tamimio 3y agoCan’t they just zoom each other?
- 01100011 3y agoIs this just a struggling company looking for a low-friction way to shed employees?
- wing-_-nuts 3y agoI never understood this line of reasoning. If you want to shed staff, don't you want to control which staff you shed? A RTO mandate just means your best staff leave because they're the ones with real options.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoSo do layoffs.
- MattGaiser 3y agoThis would very explicitly apply to buyouts (paying people to quit) and voluntary layoffs as well, but at least in Canada those are pretty common. One company here had a bit of a panic as way too many employees accepted a buyout. https://financialpost.com/telecom/shaw-to-take-450-million-hit-from-workforce-cuts-after-3300-employees-accept-buyout https://financialpost.com/telecom/shaw-to-take-450-million-h...
- LatteLazy 3y agoI agree. But my current employer is having a hiring freeze for this reason. So good, employable, overworked, smart staff are leaving. And those that we don't really need are staying. It's basically the opposite of what any decent manager should want. So I think senior management see these things differently...
- flowerbreeze 3y agoIn part, I think it's because numbers are all they can see and control. So if all you have is a hammer... On the other hand I also think it's because they are a bit stupid.
- m_rpn 3y agoUpper management just wants people that can be easily controlled, that will follow orders, and that don't create problems or complain. Middle management might care more about performance/skills, but the higher you go the more those things become irrelevant. For the average company a "good employee" doesn't have to be a skilled one, but just one that obeys the boss. This is also true for engineers unless you work for a totally meritocratic PhD led 4 people startup that builds quantum-enabled crypto-agnostic vacuum cleaners.
- LatteLazy 3y agoI guess the more employees you have under you, the more you just view them all as average and accept that they will just be average. That actually makes sense statistically. I'm just surprised it's the dominant model with about 100 people...
- fortylove 3y agoLaughable
- dathinab 3y agoWhy is anyone using zoom? After the encryption and Chinese key server debacle shouldn't zoom be on the permanent ban list of an company taking security and confidentially even the sightliest bit serious. I mean that was bad behavior, intentional not accidental, to a degree where I would say there is no way to ever regain the trust as long as you don't completely replace every person with influence in the company.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoI would love to use another product if one could even compete in the same league. Try using Teams, for instance, and you won’t wonder anymore why people use Zoom
- kyriakos 3y agoMeetings in teams are not bad it's the chat experience that's beyond bad.
- OriginalPenguin 3y agoWhat makes Zoom better than teams?
- barney54 3y agoZoom just works. Teams usually works, but there are random issues from time to time.
- mshron 3y agoNot OP but in my experience it’s more likely to Just Work with fewer glitches and at a higher video resolution. I’d like to get away from Zoom but with consulting work it’s the only thing I’ve found that typically works with clients on the first try and with the fewest artifacts.
- dathinab 3y agoIdk. in my experience Teams nearly always works, but sometimes glitchy. On the other hand with zoom I did had the experience of it just arbitrary not working at all for me.
- dgoldstein0 3y agoI wish some of these companies doing a return to office could share the data driving their decisions - and follow up with the impact. I suspect, but have no real data to prove, that an in office culture could enhance collaboration - within teams, across teams etc; my intuition is that there is more overhead to get the same people in sync when working remotely, than in an office - but I wonder if data anywhere shows that (and for what sort of return - very easy for these 2-3 day a week returns to not achieve all of the benefits). All these articles reporting about return to office never have any data to share though.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoIt’s not productivity data driven.
- wenc 3y agoHow would you measure it quantitatively though? I know for me, I solve problems much more quickly when I can walk over to my co-worker's desk and talk it over. Or have someone walk through a problem with me on the board. Or just random stuff I learn from water cooler conversation triggers thoughts in me that help me move quickly on a problem. But it's very difficult to quantify these things. If these things were tickets, I would track their time to close, but they're not.
- jh00ker 3y agoSurveys - need to baseline, first, though
- wenc 3y agoSurveys capture stated preferences, not revealed ones. Capturing sentiment is useful in itself — it is a kind of data point. But to really see the productivity difference you need an instrument based less on what people say, but what they actually do.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoWeren't those surveys already done around 3.5 years ago when the pandemic first hit? I seem to recall companies like Microsoft reporting increased productivity when going remote. The same sort of thing happens when you start looking at 4 day work weeks as well. (Sorry, I don't have links to any of those surveys/survey reports/data, so if you want to call me out, I'm just going to plead the 5th on being a little lazy.)
- jh00ker 3y agoBefore the pandemic, I feel like the norm was to leave your home at whatever time was necessary for you personally to get into the office at the time that meetings are generally happening (at my company this was 10am, usually for standup). One thing I've noticed on my team as we talk about returning to the office, is that now ICs seem to think about the commute as taking away from their total working hours in the day. Whereas before, they thought of being "on the clock" (so to speak) when they arrived at their desk, now, in the minds of a lot of folks, the clock starts when the commute starts.
- flangola7 3y agoIt should. You're not in the car for your benefit.
- mgrund 3y agoPersonally this is my biggest resistance to in-office work; if the commute was recognized as part of the working hours, I don’t care if I spend some of my workday on the road (although I might feel that time could be better spent, but my employer gets to make that tradeoff).
- tomjakubowski 3y agoI'd want to live a four hour walk from work. I wouldn't have to spend a minute in the office, I'd still get paid, and I'd be in great shape too
- Paul-Craft 3y agoThat was one of the reasons I chose my most recent employer to be a company that doesn't have an office within 2500 miles of where I live. There's no way they could reasonably demand that I come in to their office on more than an every few months basis. Incidentally, they're also pushing an RTO for people who live within 25 miles of their office -- unsurprising, since they just rented a brand new, 16000 square foot space a few months ago. I feel sorry for those who are averse to RTO and couldn't see it coming.
- trymas 3y agoThe jokes are writing themselves. :)
- ar_lan 3y agoIf Zoom, basically the “golden” remote work company, can’t hack it, then I fear remote work really might just not work at scale.
- samtho 3y agoRemote work has been implemented successfully even before the pandemic at even large companies like IBM. Sure there was a strange eb and flow cycles of flexibility vs coming back to the office every few years but a large company like that already works “remotely” due to the vast number of people working there and all employees end up having to work with people outside their office every day if not very often. It’s pretty clear that any directive to force people back into the office at that point is either a petty power move or a way to force voluntary attrition before having to do layoffs.
- sherlockholmes_ 3y agoIsn't their business model reliant on people working from home?
- ulfw 3y agoRidiculous considering they want people to use their app. Goes to show the app is not useful enough then. BTW there is nothing dumber than hybrid work. Either have everyone go to the office or have everyone work from home. There is nothing stupider on this planet than having 3 folks sit in an office, 1 in another office, 4 at home... The office microphones only half-ass pick up voices so you can never really understand some people.
- m_rpn 3y agoHybrid work is totally fine, most big companies are globally distributed anyways so it can't be avoided, my team for example in in other parts of the world so what do i get by being 100% in an office where i don't know anybody and nobody cares of what i do since i'm not i their team? Let people organize as they want, we are not babies. Agreed that graduates or super juniors must spend some time in the office with other people, but mostly to understand how to behave in the work-centric society.
- happytiger 3y agoZoom is making themselves disruptable.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoLots more discussion here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37023215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37023215