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Zoom CEO says employees can't be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom
- catchnear4321 3y agospending more time trying to internally prove that the product is bad than time spent externally trying to prove it is good is a very strange approach at selling product.
- AA-BA-94-2A-56 3y agoZoom CEO wants to tank the stock price apparently
- klyrs 3y agoOr, he's more focused on his real estate holdings and he'll still be fuck-you rich if Zoom collapses.
- pxc 3y agoRegardless of Zoom's quality as a video calling platform, the real place that daily collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas happens for remote workers is never video calls anyway IME. It's open-ended, text-based group discussions— not meetings! What is Zoom using internally for chat?
- sf4lifer 3y agoZoom chat. It's a slack/teams competitor
- jfghi 3y agoNone of these arguments were ever made when sending engineering teams offshore.
- missedthecue 3y agoWell there's a major difference here. Paying a dev overseas $50,000 a year instead of $180,000 a year could be well worth it even though you incur losses in areas like coordination, community, and communication. But paying devs $180,000 a year to sit alone 20km away from each other, while they slack and zoom doesn't have the same cost/benefit ratio to consider. You still lose the benefits mentioned above, but don't save anything on costs. This isn't an argument for or against remote work, but offshoring and WFH have important differences.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nitwit005 3y agoIt does mean statements aren't completely honest though. Public statements by companies unsurprisingly tend to leave out the downsides of decisions.
- CameronNemo 3y agoThis is assuming that when offshoring, it is only the medium of communication that changes. Language barriers, dialects, and social norms can all be quite different when offshoring. The local worker, even if they are working from home, is still more in sync culturally (presumably, maybe you hire some real weirdos).
- missedthecue 3y agoRight there all kinds of seen and unseen costs associated with offshoring. My point is that there is a huge benefit in cost savings.
- CameronNemo 3y agoSorry, I'm not best with social cues. Thank goodness for companies that hire local weirdos like me!
- Affric 3y ago
- timetraveller26 3y agoYou know what would be cool? If some company would fix those remote working problems instead of forcing people to work in place. But I guess it's not their job.
- chucky_z 3y agoMaybe I’ll take flak for this. I feel like Slack and kin have done the best job here for providing remote collaboration tools. I feel much more productive in write-first teams. Meetings can be done over Zoom then, and they’re always short and productive. Anything works at that point.
- NolF 3y agoCompany: we have "connectedness" issues with remote work Everyone: what have you tried? Company: Nothing, it didn't work, and we are out of ideas. Back to the office. Genuinely, all these companies raising issues with training, and collaboration, and connection, but in the last 3 years have put zero effort to address these issues with respect to remote work so they throw the baby with the bath water and force people to return.
- Gigachad 3y agoWhat do you suggest? I’m yet to see a company that makes remote work feel as connected and personal as in office work. The Friday afternoon beer call was funny and entertaining during covid but it’s worn thin and people want to physically meet up again.
- blinded 3y agoYes I think of solutions for all my awesome work problems in bumper to bumper traffic on my hour long commute. <sarcasm>
- adamckay 3y agoIt's a bold move to say the product your company sells is total crap, but not unheard of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner#Career
- Waterluvian 3y agoThere’s a level of honesty in Ratner’s response that I doubt most tech execs are capable of.
- paulddraper 3y agoWhat was said =/= "Zoom is total crap"
- Gigachad 3y agoIt would be like if McDonalds acknowledged that cheeseburgers are not a complete diet. It’s true and we all know it but that doesn’t reduce their value. Video calls are still going to be required for cross company and cross city communication because it’s better than nothing.
- version_five 3y agoWhy is that incongruous? I bet the McDonald's CEO doesn't think you should eat it at every meal. It has a place. It would actually be a lot weirder or untenable if he advocated moving all work to zoom.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoPeople here are obviously working backwards from a strong desire to work from home. It's not worth your time to take the specific arguments literally or seriously. It's a community of severe introverts I guess, I don't consider it representative of the greater culture.
- shadowofneptune 3y agoIf the workplace sucks, as most do right now, there's about three options for what to do: 1. Force out the people who are making it suck. This is difficult with how managers are trained nowadays, never to take sides even if one party is clearly a drag on the group. Shunning and isolation are options, but ones very hard to keep up without support. If it's the manager who is the bad influence, you might as well be trying to shame a baron out of owning a castle. 2. Stop caring about work. Phone it in. Don't care anymore. 3. Don't be present physically in that environment. Of course people want to work from home when every interaction is unpleasant, when management is badgering you into doing things. It also saves on transportation cost, cost of caring for family, every single thing that an employer likes to pretend is not their cost to pay. It's not about people being naturally 'introverted' or 'extroverted,' it's about the social environment everyone, including management, creates around them.
- redshiftza 3y agoI've tried options 2 and 3 and I prefer spending my time working instead of constantly having to look busy. Remote work (aside from the obvious life and time benefits) in my experience has forced management to evaluate performance based on output and not bums on seats.Change is scary but I don't think this is going away anytime soon.
- 3y ago
- kylecazar 3y agoWorking in-office and I still use Zoom pretty regularly. I don't think this negates it's value as a tool...
- HWR_14 3y agoGiven that Zoom is paid for monthly but accrues costs by the use, maybe they want to lower the average use of the product to save money. Like how people subscribed to HBO just for GoT.
- samorozco 3y agoThat seems bad for business.
- xCEO 3y ago[flagged]
- anigbrowl 3y agoidk, Jeffrey Toobin's coworkers probably have a different point of view
- mkl95 3y agoChapter 95 of capitalist owns real estate and does not want to look silly
- steno132 3y agoSorry, where’s the hypocrisy? Zoom never said video calls are the best way to work. They said video calls offer a level of globally distributed collaboration unprecedented in history. And that’s true.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- paulddraper 3y agoBreaking news: McDonalds CEO doesn't eat at McDonalds for every meal
- jedberg 3y agoActually, he does (well 10 meals a week): https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-ceo-eats-every-week/ https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-ceo-eats-every-week/
- paulddraper 3y agoImpressive
- _8j50 3y agoIf CEOs had their way, even the janitors and helpdesk would be "innovative" and they need to bounce ideas off of each other most of the day to do that. I swear, it isn't just CEOs but most humans just cannot fathom or think of others as living in a completely different headspace. The opposite end is service workers thinking CEOs are overpaid because they sit in a nice office and order people around. Never wish another person's turd out your arsehole as george washington put it.
- hankchinaski 3y agoDon’t get high on your own supply
- Ecstatify 3y agoHonestly how many companies are actually innovating, most of the time people are just imitating. I don’t use Zoom but have used Microsoft Teams for the last few years and basically nothing has changed in the app. All their “innovation” is just junk features that they remove from the app 3 months later. They have all this data on how people use the app. How haven’t I improved my productivity at work 10x using this app everyday?
- nerdchum 3y agoThe problem with remote work is management not employees. ICs job is literally to work not to come up with innovative new ideas to advance the company. Thats what MANAGERS AND EXECUTIVES ARE SUPPOSED TO DO and the ICs implement those ideas. For some reason it's expected now for IC s to be doing managements jobs and for that reason they need to be coming into the office for collaboration? The managers and executives are the ones who meed to be going into the office to collaborate. Good management would come up with the ideas and efficiently break it down so that ICs can take the work and run with it no collaboration needed. No this is all about control and 'cultural fit' shaming to fear people into doing their jobs rather than being a good manager that is capable of distributing work in an efficient way and treating people in a way that people are inspired to do great work for you a thousand miles away even without any supervision. It's a lot more difficult to be a manager that people follow out of respect and love vs a manager people follow out of fear and constant monitoring.
- sf4lifer 3y agoI believe Eric is right. It's often the moments before or after the scheduled meeting when the side conversations happen that build relationships. Sometimes the insight comes 20 minutes after the meeting ends and you walk up to the person at their desk and keep going (even though there is no scheduled meeting). These things are still possible remotely over zoom, but they don't hit the same. In 3 years I think I've answered 3 zoom cold calls (from people I knew). The real value to the company of being in office is unstructured time together. All that said, I fall into the camp of lets get in-person together once a quarter to plan and then execute remotely. We can meet up occasionally in between somewhere awesome (not in an office).
- ABeeSea 3y agoThose conversations now happen in slack DMs in my experience.
- dottjt 3y agoWhat if I don't really want to get to know my colleagues? What if I literally just want to do my work, and have as little of the other benign work shit in my life? I kind of see getting to know my colleagues as the same as having to commute an hour into work each day. It's just shit I don't want to spend my time on.
- tamimio 3y agoThis is not the first or the last case of CEOs not using/trusting their own products, Zuckerberg covering the camera, Jobs banning his kids from using iPads, Gates limiting his kids’ tech use, and list goes on.
- sys_64738 3y agoDoes the phrase "eat your own dogfood" mean anything to this CEO?
- monomyth 3y agonothing beats getting to know each other on IRC
- archo 3y agohttps://archive.is/rDQPO https://archive.is/rDQPO
- Gigachad 3y agoVideo calls are like the fast food of social interaction. They are fine in small amounts but when you replace your whole connection to other people with calls and instant messaging, that’s where the deficiencies become noticeable. I recently moved to the city where the company office is and I feel like a few days face to face with my team was a stronger connection than a year of MS Teams interaction. Suddenly my coworkers became real people rather than just emotionless icons on a screen.
- LatteLazy 3y agoI attend the office 4.9 days a week on average because that suits my personality, responsibilities etc. But I do find it baffling: half the time I'm told not to interrupt engineers and we have a whole system to let them get on and work without people making them context switch. The other half of the time I'm told how important it is that we all be together in the same room to build community/relationships!?
- benterix 3y agoWhile he might have this opinion himself, he is acting against the best interest of his company by his actions. A good CEO of a company that thrived during the pandemic would be to enhance the product (or create a new one) to add the missing elements of the puzzle so that remote teams could enjoy increased levels of innovation etc.[0] as compared to teams using competitors' products. Saying "it's impossible" is akin to Selipsky saying "AWS is a different type of service and we'll never offer flat-rate instances or k8s" instead of adding Lightsail and EKS to their offering. [0] That is, if his words are backed up with actual data - if these are just personal opinions, there is nothing to act upon.
- johnny99k 3y agoI've been working remotely for 15 years. The pandemic didn't really change anything for me as my company is in another state (and now, another country). While I wouldn't have it any other way, I do think collaboration is pretty easy. I have multiple meetings a day with multiple teams and we have always been able to get projects completed. There are so many collaboration tools out there and with modern, fast, Internet speeds, it's like you're in the same room as the other person. Some issues I have noticed: Managers need to know how to manage remotely. When a manager can't manage remotely, it shows, and it's bad. A bad manager will just blame the employee (which happened to me). Something else I noticed is that I am just not that close to my co-workers. While I have a social life outside of work. Many people use work as a social outlet and it can be very lonely working remotely. I think this is all bullshit. It most likely has to do with rental contracts the company signed and not wanting it to go to waste.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago> I think this is all bullshit. It most likely has to do with rental contracts the company signed and not wanting it to go to waste. This is the sunk cost fallacy. While you've overlooked it, I promise you they haven't. If they already have the lease, they'd be happy to let the building sit empty without paying for utilities, security, etc. They'd be happy to offload facilities costs to employees.
- willsmith72 3y agoI don't buy that for a second. To C-level executives and the members of a board, if we're paying for an office, 99% of the time they're gonna say "use it". They're not thinking about sunk costs.
- jonas21 3y agoNobody thinks that way. If they could save money right now by not paying for utilities and support staff without sacrificing productivity, they absolutely would do it. And eventually that lease is going to come up for renewal, and they'd love to be able to cut costs then too. Bringing everyone back to the office makes that impossible, but they've decided it's worth it.
- photonbeam 3y agoBuy them nice houses near the office then
- gotaran 3y agoBecause Zoom is utter garbage. The competition is so much better.
- mentos 3y agoWhat do you recommend?
- pythonaut_16 3y agoWhich alternatives have you found to be better? Zoom isn’t great but Teams is worse.
- mvdtnz 3y agoI find Google Meet much better. It has superior audio and video quality and a vastly superior UI all inside the browser.
- tristanb 3y agoI cannot stand Zoom. I had that it tries to install its crapware on the computer.I find Google Meet to be perfect for what we need.
- moralestapia 3y agoSame here, I just click an URL and I'm in, I close and its gone. Compared to all the other gymnastics one has to make to get the exact same functionality, plus having to install malware and whatnot, it's a much better UX.
- Barrin92 3y agoIt's a silly gotcha. I don't think Zoom ever advertised itself as eliminating all in person work, it's simply a conferencing tool. Sort of like going "you can't work drunk at the Whiskey distillery, what a bunch of hypocrites!" I said it early during the pandemic already but I think it's become more obvious over time that video conferencing is not a panacea and doesn't wholesale replace face-to-face contact. Honestly reassuring that a CEO does not treat its own product as the solution to everything.
- tick_tock_tick 3y agoMakes sense and seems to lined up with what I've experienced. New hire aren't developing anywhere near the same as pre-remote hires. Maybe we'll figure it out but we're having issues really identifying why and figuring out how to resolve it. I expect remote heavy companies to undergo some massive shifts in a few years when people train/hiring in this new regime become the majority. I also expect an almost complete end of employee activism.
- gotaran 3y agoMost remote work at CRUD fintech companies will get outsourced. It’s idiotic to pay some Bootcamp grad in Bumfuck Milwaukee a Bay Area salary.
- theptip 3y ago> Yuan told employees that Zoom the product does not allow Zoom the company to "build as much trust or be as innovative as in the office." So why does it even exist and how is it making money? This line of reasoning is asinine. Perfectly defensible to say that Zoom is great for other industries, or orgs built with different structure. While eating your own dogfood is a confidence builder, it’s by no means a requirement for companies to do it 100%. Also to suggest that Zoom is only meaningful as a product if you can run your company fully remote is laughably myopic; there is lots of value to having VCs between offices and teams, even if those teams work in-person. Sure, Zoom has marketing material that leans into remote work. To avoid confused thinking like the OP you should note the purpose of marketing teams and not over-index on what they say.
- benterix 3y ago> While eating your own dogfood is a confidence builder, it’s by no means a requirement for companies to do it 100%. Of course. It is also not a requirement for Microsoft's UI designers to actually use Windows and so on. Nevertheless, if you decide to dogfood, it gives your company many advantages that you otherwise lose.
- wvenable 3y agoIt seems to me to be a missed opportunity. If you believe Zoom is merely a video conferencing app then of course Zoom is only meaningful as that. But remote work is not going away and there is an opportunity to support it by being more than simply video conferencing. Zoom is a remote work product. Zoom says there's a lot of remote issues. That says to me that there is an opportunity to dogfood their own product development. Just going back to the office is a huge waste of potential.
- idealboy 3y agoTotally agree. Why not use this as an opportunity to explore the problem their users are presumably facing?
- theptip 3y agoIn some sense, yes a missed opportunity. On the other hand, their customers are voting with their feet; most are returning to office. I would characterize it more as a bet that didn’t pay off. In 2020 it was a no-brainer to bet on substantially more remote work, and Zoom was one of the best-positioned to make that bet. In 2023 that bet looks way lower in EV. They still have upside potential but I don’t think anyone realistically expects that the F500 are going full or even majority remote anymore. Even with hindsight it seems a good bet, I don’t think they incorrectly evaluated the information they had or could have been expected to have.
- pcurve 3y agoI have a feeling this is a pretext for Zoom looking to shed staff.
- habosa 3y agoI am not going to defend Zoom's RTO plan because I do truly believe that most people who work on computers can work remotely (I do, and I enjoy it). However ... this feels correct. This is basically the same as saying that Zoom is a meeting tool and there is a lot more to building a trusting and productive team than just having meetings. Building a happy remote team is definitely not a simple task. Sounds like Zoom is not doing what it takes, I think that says worse things about their company than their product.
- ncallaway 3y agoYes, but as a person who is running a remote first company I'd much rather put my faith in a company that understands how to be a remote first company. So, Zoom is out as a product for us. We use discord at our company, which just _fits_ a remote workflow so much better than zoom. Which makes sense, given their job listings have a whole lot for "... or Remote" (https://discord.com/careers https://discord.com/careers). Zoom would be able to build a better product, for more users, and capture more value, if they understood how to build a remote working team, and put in the work to do that.
- judge2020 3y agoI wonder how much dogfooding there is at Discord. Do they really use it for their main work communications? Maybe falling back to Google Chat (which looks like it's now a usable experience[0]) for SRE and war room type issues. 0: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/02/new-google-chat-spaces-will-be-in-line-threaded.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/02/new-google-c...
- habosa 3y agoFrom what I’ve seen with friends who work at Discord: yes they do.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoShower thought- people spontaneously form genuine bonds online all of the time. Why do companies struggle with this? Make company intranet or IRC fun. Toss up a Quake, Valheim, or Minecraft server. People outside of work have virtual "teambuilding" exercises all of the time! Am I being naive?
- gotaran 3y agoMore mandatory fun. Yay.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoI'll take it if it replaces mandatory zoom fun.
- alistairSH 3y agopeople spontaneously form genuine bonds online all of the time. Do they? Maybe I'm the odd one, but all my close friends are from meatspace. I have acquaintances in online communities, but none that I'd consider close. And a predominantly online existence sounds downright miserable to me.
- he0001 3y agoSo no eating your own dog food there?
- bbertelsen 3y agoA lot of companies are doing this. I wonder how many are doing it because they want to reduce head counts through attrition instead of layoffs?
- Melchizedek 3y agoThey will lose some of their best people doing that.
- antisthenes 3y agoI'm not an expert on building trust, but I do know that one of the quickest ways to burn trust is to mandate an asinine RTO policy without providing good options for your employees, and options for those who may wish to remain remote forever.
- andrewmcwatters 3y agoBoomers who have never idled on IRC or met up with friends in video chat live in an entirely different world than those of us who have had experiences collaborating with developer friends internationally, across multiple timezones, right then and there in real-time. These people live such uninteresting lives.
- gumballindie 3y agoThe very same boomers that don't mind sending jobs overseas and expect customers to trust them without a brick and mortar store to walk in. Can't make this up.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gaws 3y ago> These people live such uninteresting lives. They own real estate. They don't care!
- sys_64738 3y agoThis feels like a slow motion car crash.
- gumballindie 3y agoWe should listen to the guy. Use Slack instead of other suitable platform. Zoom really isn't useful for more than call, that will likely be recorded anyway. Screw Zoom.
- mym1990 3y agoIf the thought that most communication comes through in a non-verbal queues is true, then this seems to be an obvious observation. Trust between humans is often built by going through tough situations together, so to that extent I don’t expect Zoom to be the trust builder, but rather interesting and difficult problems(which is not that easy to come across in a drab work environment).
- russellbeattie 3y agoRemote work needs "common areas" where people can voluntarily just join and leave their camera/mic on all the time. Like lurking in an IRC chat. This of course would be abused by employers ("why can't I see you at your desk 10 hours a day?") but it seems to me a way of encouraging the sort of water cooler encounters that being in an office provides.
- asynchronous 3y agoIf there was two people in that call neither would get anything done.
- dvorak_typist 3y agoSo the Zoom CEO doesn't want Zoom data going to ChatGPT, like he does with all customer data??? Signals...
- cryptonector 3y ago> The Reg was quick to point out the paradox of a business that built its fortune on enabling web conferencing throughout the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic only to recall employees living within 50 miles(!!!) back to the office this month for at least two days a week. Y'all wishing you'd moved really far during those 2+ years.
- MagaMuffin 3y ago[dead]
- 0xbadc0de5 3y agoEpic own-goal.
- kkfx 3y agoJust a small note: the FLOSS community is essentially remote and in term of innovation is (at least was) definitively innovating.........