Leaked Zoom all-hands: CEO says employees must return to offices because they can’t be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom::Zoom CEO Eric Yuan discussed the benefits of in-person work in a leaked meeting.
I’m going to choose to believe the CEO is actively trying to tank the share price for some reason. This is approaching get fired or sued by shareholders level.
Either that or a forced reduction in workforce without having to do layoffs.
It’s this. All the tech companies overexpanded during COVID when free investment money was everywhere. Now they’re all over staffed and want employees to self select out of employment rather than announce widespread layoffs. Meanwhile ruining life for everyone who can’t afford to quit.
That and seeing corporate real estate tanking. Its in the best interest of anyone who owns an office space to encourage return to work to try to help prop up the market long enough to exit.
According to local news media, small businesses want this return to office because their restaurants are hurting. Doesn’t seem like they would lie about that.
But the “WORK FROM HOME” company should be doing EVERYTHING to encourage the activity that keeps THEM in business. It’s mind-boggling!
They are not all overstaffed lol, that is total nonsense. Most “tech” companies are not FAANG or flashy startups.
These companies are greedy and trying to prop up real estate value while flexing on their employees, that’s all there is to it. My company is severely understaffed and still refusing to hire people out of sheer greed.
This is what I believe as well.
Companies noticed people like to give up when mistreated so they now bully them into it. Reminder: Soft Quitting is a Reactionary method. People wouldn’t do it at all if they were simply dissatisfied.
Golden parachute too nice to pass up.
They should try using Teams, should solve the problem.
The only problem teams solves is “why are people too happy with remote work”, and it’s very effective at fixing that.
I actually charge a teams tax on my wage requirements if I find out they’re using broken last-gen weak shit like teams, Ansible, or vro.
last-gen weak shit like teams, Ansible, or vro.
A role I worked had this holy trinity. Moving to teams was nail in the coffin for me. Out of interest, what is “broken and last gen” about Ansible? And what’s newer and better than it? I find it to be okay for infra patching tasks…
What’s wrong with Ansible?
I dunno man, that’s what I was trying to find out… I thought I was out of the loop on something here.
Tribalism will affect how this is received, like cursing out vi or apple in a crowded room, but it’s important to see what else is out there and what they offer. Hint: If Ansible is bolting things onto the side of itself like event-driven triggers and connecting to AWX, then you have a good idea of what Ansible needs crutches to do and keep up to last-gen tech. One can only bolt so many bags on the side before the entirety falls apart, and IBM no longer has the goodwill to keep enthusiasts doing the heavy-lifting – even if IBM is repeating what Canonical did a decade or more ago without repercussion.
Patching shouldn’t need an automation scaffolding. I’ll leave that there, that it’s entirely possible to patch your systems in a very automated, patchset-promoted fashion and not need to touch what we currently call Automation. I’ve seen and done it 20+ years, but to be fair that’s only how long I’ve been in the Enterprise space where that was the focus vs the relaxed tolerances of the soho/robo market.
This-gen tech is responsive and self-organizing from the ground up, and responds in real-time to changes. Comically, it’s usually a collection of well-established components like consul that powers the this-gen stuff.
I joined a job with this holy trinity, but they pay the tax every paycheque. I “dead sea” left a toxic mess with failing puppet managers a FIN coup had installed but with good tooling, to a great environment with known faces and good management left behind after their arrogant toxicity couldn’t cope with remote-first workers and bailed. The fact the tooling is complete shite is just a feature we cope with in this awesome environment, and while the environment stays excellent we’ll solve that technical challenge or we’ll bail if the environment gets toxic again first.
Better upgrade them* networks dawg
I don’t want to ‘get to know’ my coworkers. I’m not there for friendships, or a pseudo family. I’m there to do a job and be paid for it.
But, this might just be my introvert side.
Oh nooooo people have to come into the workplace and cant have 5 full time jobs!!! Think of those poor programmers who cant afford to retire by 27 by taking advantage of their colleagues anymore.
I don’t see anything ironic about this. Zoom is just a tool for making video calls, it’s not even close to being a sufficient replacement for face-to-face interaction with people. A lot of people aren’t motivated to get work done when they are at home by themselves. In isolation you can feel like the work you’re doing is meaningless and not providing any value to anyone. When lockdowns affected my workplace productivity plummeted - we had people ostensibly ‘working from home’ that were answering a few emails here and there and then checking out without having done any actual valuable work at all.
If you hate your job, maybe it’s the work/management/culture that is the problem. WFH isn’t a solution to that, it’s just hiding away from the causes of your misery.
The number of jobs I’ve missed out on and lost exclusively because I’m not normative enough to tell milquetoast jokes around a water cooler with a bunch of people I know two facts about but treat like my best friend numbers in the 100s.
Fuck all these people trying to force the old ways forever just so they can exercise their social capital upon the rest of us.
At first, I thought this was an Onion story
Socialization is always brought up as an excuse not to allow WFH. The thing is though, replacing real socialization with work fucking blows. Talking to a coworker to get the latest TPS report isn’t socialization. It’s work. The only time you do any real socialization is after work ends. And there’s nothing stopping you from going out to dinner with coworkers when you work from home.
So true. But personally it feels like an extension of work when I go out with coworkers. Some of them we have nothing in common, different age groups, and even different generations. The only thing in common is: work.
I like to keep it separate. Have my own friends outside of work for socialization. Work people likely never to meet my circle of personal friends.
Valid. I’m not huge on going out with coworkers either unless we click on mutual interests.
Arguably you’re worse off if most of your socialization is from work. It just leaves you lonely and tired back home.
Yup, which is what they want.
I don’t know, the fact that 4 of the 5 other members on my team live at least 2 time zones away from me keeps me from socializing with them after work ends.
(I do not want to leave this job, fwiw.)
Very fair. That said, going into the office isn’t going to help that.
Depends on the workplace and the job in general.
I never socialized with work people before COVID.
“I can’t be as innovative over zoom”
Fixed that for you
This fix is incomplete.
“I can’t be innovative.”
Offices are cages for humans, no less than that. They want to own us.
This is a weird debate for me. I do feel like I’m able to coordinate and communicate with my coworkers more effectively in person. Especially with people I don’t already have a close working relationship with. On the other hand i hate being at an office when i could be making lunch and doing laundry while being on a call.
man i just spent 30m this morning telling jokes to my remote coworker over slack, I’ve seen him only once in my life, according to this CEO I couldn’t have possibly gotten to know him.
Funny watching the CEOs trying to do the verbal splits, coming up with excuses where it’s just “waah we’re paying for an office that nobody uses :(”
we have nothing to lose but our commutes
Eh, for certain people they definitely are less productive online(unfortunately including me), but I’m sure some others are more productive online.
The question for me is, is maximizing productivity the most important thing?
That’s why they should give people the option to work from home. You can choose which one is best for you.
I think the issue is the one-size-fits-all mentality, it leaves no room for each person to do what works best for them.
My wife’s company only rents one of the 4 floors it used to, for those who wanted to return to offices and it’s worked out perfectly, they maintain a space for necessary in office meetings, a place for presentations while only paying a fraction of their old lease.
Yeah, it’s really weird seeing these blanket statements from the CEO of Zoom, of all things.
I’ve grown up with ICQ, IRC and forums, later worked with a very distributed, international volunteer team and made connections just fine, even though we barely used voice chat (it was still the Skype days) and nobody ever actually saw me or knew my real name.
Those people and connections weren’t somehow less real to me than the superficial, safety-first chit-chat you sometimes get into at work. This obviously isn’t everybody’s experience, but maybe, just maybe, the CEO should “get” this instead of being out of touch with what he’s selling.
Maybe he was left on read one time too many.
My coworkers and I are constantly sending each other jokes and memes when any of us are work from home. Sometimes the official company chat will just be everyone communicating through gifs.
The most frustrating part of the pro office talking points for me is the line about meeting in person being easier. My team is spread across four states, I’m either on a zoom meeting at my house where there is always a quiet room from which to take a meeting at a comfortable desk. Or I’m in the office, an open office with hot desks where you can’t leave keyboards, mice, computers, etc overnight and you have to reserve a conference room to take a zoom meeting (all meetings). Now I’m wasting time setting up my desk every day, reserving rooms for all my meetings, kicking people out of the rooms I reserved. Huge loss of productivity for the Corp. I’m not staying late because you wasted so much of my time, I gotta hit the road to beat traffic.
Dang, I just applied to a couple positions there. I’ll go ahead and retract those :D
It’s worth noting, and not mentioned in most of these articles, that the CEO is saying that Zoom employees that live near offices must return at least 2 days a week.
They have not demanded that all employees return 5 days a week, but other CEOs don’t do their own research and just think “we need to! Look at Zoom!”.
Ironic that the CEO of a company producing a product designed for remote online meetings telling their staff that remote online meetings don’t work for his company goals.
Our product sucks, I don’t want my employees using this crap.
