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.

    • Cyborganism
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      172 years ago

      LoL right?

      I mean the company clearly benefited from the pandemic and people working from home. Why would they want that to stop??

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        Money. This guy is getting leaned on to send the message that wfh is a mistake. There is about 2.5 trillion in corporate real estate debt floating around and when contracts are negotiated conditions are made. Government and invested business are shitting bricks and doing everything they can to force occupation of otherwise obsolete buildings.

        • Cyborganism
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          42 years ago

          I swear, sometimes it feels as though companies are run by a bunch of power hungry psychopaths. The system is really rigged in their favor, too. Their kind of behaviour seems rewarded all the time.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            Have you read “Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work”? If not, I’d recommend it. It’s frighteningly good.

  • admin
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    22 years ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    1372 years ago

    Glad I’m not a stockholder, since the CEO basically says their only product, remote connectivity, stifles innovation and connection. What a world.

    • @[email protected]
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      142 years ago

      Some person in WorkReform was defending mandatory RTO because an office environment was supposedly more secure. I called bullshit on their claims. Apparently a “cybersecurity expert” lol

      I don’t care if companies want to waste resources on buying commercial properties. But don’t force people to go back to the stupid office. It worked for the past 3 years. Profits are higher than ever. People got to spend more time with their families since hours were no longer wasted commuting and sitting in traffic.

      Also seems like many companies use this culture bullshit as a reason to force RTO. Motherfucker. I produce output. You generate capital. You pay me. That’s our fucking relationship. Fuck your “cUlTuRe”.

      • @[email protected]
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        52 years ago

        an office environment was supposedly more secure.

        My current shop has an office for people who choose to use office space, because it’s not about pushing people into one group or another but more facilitating their best environment.

        Anyway, it was broken into and burgled along with other ground floor tenants. They threw a big fuckoff boulder through an exterior glass door and kept going from unit to unit. Laptops taken. Important shit.

        My home office requires someone to fob past 4 separate doors to get to me. Instead of the ground floor it’s more than 100 feet up in concrete. My location has me at an advantage for power and the feed is underground. Fibre comes up the middle.

        They’re not breaking in.

      • @[email protected]
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        32 years ago

        Did you have a counter argument for calling bullshit? Because he probably had a point, there is definitely a niche for that level of security. It just generally involves state secrets.

        Certain classifications of documents require access only from physically secure locations, called SCIFs, where all access is monitored and logged. Things like phones and cameras aren’t allowed to prevent any data leakage.

        That’s not too say you can’t be secure remotely, but really only against outsiders. Good luck stopping an employee from taking a picture with their personal phone of classified blueprints off their monitor at home. Good luck even knowing they did it before the data is gone.

        When you factor in social engineering being the most successful type of “hacking”, an office setting is undeniably more secure. However, most offices don’t need that level of security, because data breaches aren’t a matter of national security, so remote is an acceptable risk.

    • @[email protected]
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      652 years ago

      I think he has a point. So many great ideas at my company were birthed sitting around the table while eating breakfast or drinking coffee.

      People ask me stuff they they wouldn’t have sent a ticket about because “it’s not a big issue” and by looking into some of it we find way better methods of dealing with types of workflows.

      It’s not the meetings where we find the best ideas. It’s during the coffee breaks. But you need you coworkers to have coffee breaks with so you have something to talk about.

      That being said. I’m not American and we don’t have the American office landscapes or office politics.

      • @[email protected]
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        72 years ago

        I miss coffee breaks.

        But the kind of bad managers who insist on a RTO are also the kind who don’t understand it’s the break time, stupid.

        All the people I’d want to talk with over coffee left before I did.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          I only ever had ‘coffee breaks’ when I was working in a restaurant. Never in the office.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        That said, working from home has so far saved me a lot of both time and money. This is a thing to consider as an employee when considering who to work for (or if your boss takes it away, if you still want to work there after essentially having a benefit revoked unilateraly).

        Public transit pass. Actual time for transit which for me was around 90 minutes a day (7.5 hours a week!), more complex lunch logistics (time or money), etc.

        A quieter workplace, no need to book rarely available rooms to take calls/meetings. There were upsides.

        My first remote job had almost no issues at all. We already knew each other and we still took time to discuss issues via calls. New job not so much. We tend to be pressed for time so only focus on obvious “work” and then works suffers because of a lack of communication/common vision.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 years ago

          You’re not going to sit there, and tell me what my own experience is at my own place of work. Fuck off.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        I agree, but wouldn’t underestimate meetings. People say that you’re losing productivity, but IME the largest losses of productivity are caused by working on the wrong things, because of too little communication. Sometimes it’s things that are not needed anymore, sometimes it’s just aspects of the feature which are not important (e.g. overengineering) because of lack of context.

        I’m not saying all meetings are always needed, but in larger organizations the sync between people and teams is very important.

      • @[email protected]
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        72 years ago

        I have tons of spontaneous calls all day on teams when remote. These moments still happen and don’t require an office. These companies that fail to adapt will be left in the dust.

      • @[email protected]
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        132 years ago

        But that means the great idea moments are during unproductive times. People at the office must be allowed to be unproductive. If there is strict no talking and no coffee breaks allowed and strict clocking in because time is money there isn’t much innovative benefit to being in the office.

      • @[email protected]
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        102 years ago

        Sounds like a small company you work at with tight nit group.

        In the states, a good portion of jobs out there are soulless corporate jobs with predefined work. It’s just a grind.

        Let’s be honest. If I discovered good ideas at a soulless corp, I wouldn’t be using those ideas at soulless corp.

      • @[email protected]
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        462 years ago

        My company is complete work from home. The issue is that people can’t imagine coworkers talking to each other and being friends while working remotely.

        I spend half of most days in spontaneous voice chats with coworkers where we have these exact same moments. Spontaneous discussions leading to ideas that change the way we do things.

        It’s not exclusive to being in an office. You just need to adapt to a new work style.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          It’s not exclusive to being in an office. You just need to adapt to a new work style.

          I’ve spent 2 years in WFH during COVID and haven’t seen this working in any of the teams (even though there were attempts).

          One problem is just that remote calls suck a lot, especially if you have latency and audio issues. People talking over each other, then saying “sorry” and waiting 20 seconds, audio too high or low or just poor quality etc. A lot of it could be solved with technology, but weirdly it hasn’t happened yet.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 years ago

              The thing is I spent a LOT of time in voice chats playing games as a kid. It always worked well then. It hasn’t changed at all. I don’t need to be on a video call. I jump into a voice chat channel and hang out. People come and go, and are quiet for the most part.

              Having come from an office environment where everyone worked in cubes, it truly is no different. I don’t need to be face to face with coworkers, because I wasn’t face to face for most of the conversations we had in the office. We’d stare at our screens and talk over the walls.

              When we were looking at each other’s faces, it was in the conference room. Those formal meetings are effectively replaced with video calls - and more often are effectively replaced with emails like they should be.

              This probably largely depends on your field. But for me, my productivity is higher working from home, because at least at home I can choose when to tune out the noise. In the office, management was personally offended by me listening to music while working alone. I was told to focus on my paycheck if I needed help focusing.

          • @[email protected]
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            62 years ago

            I’ve spent longer than that and I’m not sure where the issue is. It works fine for us. Perhaps it’s a US thing with poor internet quality?

            • @[email protected]
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              32 years ago

              I’m in the US and haven’t had any issues with being remote and calling a coworker to chat for a bit. It’s not any different than using a phone.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            Idk, I leverage Slack huddles regularly and have absolutely no issues with multiple people hanging out and having casual conversations while working. We do these spontaneously throughout the day.

            How old are your coworkers generally? My company is mostly on the younger side of things. We grew up with team speak, steam voice chat, and now are often in discord. This is not unfamiliar territory and has always worked well outside of the office.

          • @[email protected]
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            82 years ago

            It’s crazy how people have been talking on the phone for like a hundred years and talking over each other was something that was easy to work out.

            But put the same technology on a computer and suddenly people forgot how to talk on the phone.

            • @[email protected]
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              32 years ago

              Group calls weren’t the norm until recently. I fucking despise group zoom calls. I normally will just not contribute at all because it’s impossible to be heard. Someone else will always talk over you. This is the 3rd team I’ve worked remote on, and it hasn’t worked on any of them so far.

            • @[email protected]
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              2 years ago

              Phone has usually lower latency than internet. Consequence of circuit vs. packet switching.

              But otherwise I hate phone as well. Miserable audio quality.

        • @[email protected]
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          142 years ago

          3/4 of the team I am on work from home, 2 of us full time, We have weekly scheduled meetings with no agenda other than to catch up and this is where ideas can come up, We haven’t all been in an office together since before the lockdown yet we continue to thrive. I also have most of each Friday blocked out to work with one of the team on whatever he happens to be working on that day. We just jump in a meeting and do stuff. And like you we are all open to just spontaneous chats at any time either by text or call. It works perfectly well.

          I guess you also have those chats where you pull other people in during the conversation, Oh, Suchandsuch will have input, send them an invite to this meeting etc :)

          I love it, I get peace and quite when needed to code, and all the interaction I need to make the job work.

          • @[email protected]
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            102 years ago

            We have a daily SUM which is supposed to last 15 minutes. It is usually over an hour, but work makes up at best 20 minutes. The rest is just us chatting.

            We also have regular calls with other teams which follow a similar pattern.

            It is easy to have “water-cooler” chats while working remotely.

        • @[email protected]
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          42 years ago

          Same here. What I hear from people who can’t innovate, collaborate, insert-activity-here, etc. while working remotely is that they have competency issues in their workforce.

          Companies building great things creatively and remotely are not exceptional, and antisocial behaviours when working remotely are a problem with the person, not the technology. But it’s easier to blame the tech than admit your colleagues or team are dysfunctional so “back to the office!” It is for most. I’ll pass though.

  • @[email protected]
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    422 years ago

    I mean, the guy that heads Teams literally said meetings and subsequent overuse of Teams due to ease of making and doing meetings, is a productivity killer.

      • @[email protected]
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        72 years ago

        I can. Have a meeting in Citrix and I happily work while people yabber on in the background.

        The real killer is the face to face meetings. My group supervisor now demands anyone in the office on a particular day go into his office for the team meeting. That’s a real time waster.

        People online can’t hear us properly standing around in his office. Can’t get work done while standing in there.

        Just let me work from home so I don’t have a bunch of people wander over to me to ask stupid questions during the day.

        If you want something send me an email and I’ll get to it when I have time. Walking into my space, making me take my noise cancelling headphones off so you can yabber at me and break my concentration is so annoying.

        I’m untouchable at home. I work until I need a break, then quickly sort questions and queries, then get back into my groove for another hour or two.

        • Echo Dot
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          12 years ago

          I just get scheduled into meetings without my involvement or knowledge. Sometimes minutes before they’re due to start.

          I have a meeting scheduled for Monday. Even though I’m away on Monday and they can see I’m away on Monday in my calendar. I’m just not going to tell them, and see if they noticed that I don’t turn up.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            Yeah in those situations I choose to not show up. They gonna not show me respect, I’m not gonna show them.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        One of the advantages of working from home is you can have the meeting on in the background and get on with some real work. When it comes your time to speak you’ve lost maybe 5 minutes instead of an hour.

      • Flying Squid
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        292 years ago

        The meetings I’m forced to go to at work almost always have nothing to do with my actual job, but do include the owner telling us how much money the company is making in chart and graph form for 20 minutes, which helpfully reminds me that I’m being severely underpaid.

        Yes, I am preparing my resume.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          My manager just told us our department is under budget on salary by $250k, because we were short staffed and everyone picked up the slack, but has been slow rolling cost of living increases.

          Dude’s fucked around, now he’s going to find out.

          • @[email protected]
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            62 years ago

            Every position cut/not filled should mean an equivalent pay increase for everyone who has to pick up that slack, or that that slack is left where it is.

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    212 years ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Zoom CEO Eric Yuan told employees this month that the company was making the surprising decision to send some workers back to the office regularly because its flagship remote-work product didn’t allow employees to build as much trust or be as innovative as in the office, according to a leaked meeting recording viewed by Insider.

    The top reason for the mandate, Yuan said at the August 3 meeting, is that it’s difficult for employees to get to know each other and build trust remotely.

    The comments, much like the decision to return some employees to offices, are surprising given the role Zoom’s technology plays in remote work.

    The company’s videoconferencing service became so ubiquitous early in the pandemic that its corporate name became a verb describing the act of firing up any video chat to connect with coworkers online.

    Amazon recently asked employees to relocate to their teams’ offices or find new jobs.

    Zoom’s return to office, at least from Yuan’s comments, appears less strict, as he directed employees who have issues with the policy to apply for exceptions with the heads of their departments.


    The original article contains 395 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 53%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    It’s not about improving productivity, increasing innovation or ‘sharing best practice’, as a former workplace put it. Corporations are forcing a return to office work in an attempt to curb a post-COVID real estate crash - which we honestly need since we have far too many luxury offices being built and not enough homes.

    For one place where I used to work, RTO drove down staff morale to an all-time low (already low due to high workloads and bad wages) and pushed the staff turnover rate in my department to 95%. They ended up having to outsource the function to an overseas firm.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      and pushed the staff turnover rate in my department to 95%. They ended up having to outsource the function to an overseas firm.

      Sounds like their reason behind implementing the RTO plan was successful then.

    • @[email protected]
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      92 years ago

      Corporations are pushing RTO because their senior leadership doesn’t know how to lead in a modern system.

      I won’t argue some amount of “responding to waste” isn’t there, but this “problem” only exists when the culture isn’t healthy enough to be properly managed remotely, which frankly is not that hard.

    • @[email protected]
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      42 years ago

      This has always been the method. I’ve worked in startups for years, and there’s always a game-changing pivot that causes a staff exodus. They replace the with contractors until the company succeeds in the pivot or crashes and burns.

      Return to office is just a pivot. If the talent leaves and gets replaced, hopefully their leadership can right the ship. Otherwise it’s those who departed who made the right call.

    • @[email protected]
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      132 years ago

      Why would companies that generally avoid owning real estate act against its own self interest for the profits of real estate companies?? I don’t see the connection.

      • @[email protected]
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        52 years ago

        Lots of companies and executives invest in real estate. They see their holdings dwindling and decide its time for the unwashed masses to get their asses back in the office

      • @[email protected]
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        112 years ago

        I agree with this, the theory doesn’t track very well unless the executives locked themselves into expensive long term leases for their offices and don’t want to feel embarrassed that it’s a wasted cost.

        I think the more likely explanation is that the companies want to drive people into quitting so they can reduce payroll without being on the hook for unemployment insurance.

        • @[email protected]
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          72 years ago

          the executives locked themselves into expensive long term leases for their offices and don’t want to feel embarrassed that it’s a wasted cost.

          This is exactly what happened at Alphabet.

          • @[email protected]
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            42 years ago

            That’s false. They were not locked. They publicly announced they paid the fines to end those leases early. I think people are just sharing feelings and not facts here.

            • @[email protected]
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              22 years ago

              If they paid fines to cancel, then they were locked in. But they were sensible enough to not fall for sunken cost fallacy and formed up the extra money for the fines to break the lease. Most companies aren’t so forward thinking.

              • @[email protected]
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                12 years ago

                That’s a semantic distinction that makes no difference for their incentives. They are not feeling any pressure that affects their decision making in this regard anymore. That was the original argument.

    • @[email protected]
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      492 years ago

      Geez sure sounds like this real estate market should be like. Heavily controlled and limited by the government. So that objectively good things, like less daily commuting and therefore less greenhouse emissions, can happen without toppling society.

      I will never work in an office again. I literally couldn’t afford my rent and my food costs if I also had to afford a daily gas expense. I am very much not alone in this.

        • @[email protected]
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          312 years ago

          Yes… heavily regulated… thats why an entire generation of people live with their parents because housing costs are many orders of magnitude too expensive for them to afford. Yup. That’s a clear sign that the government is putting heavy regulations on the cost and distribution of real estate.

          I’m sorry, but the very premise that in our present society real estate is even lightly regulated is utterly ridiculous on its face value. As is the concept that deregulation will make housing affordable. Letting landlords and capitalists do whatever they want with all property will somehow make property cheaper? People motivated solely by profit will make everything cheaper? No, they will continue to sell property at increased costs so they can increase their profits as they always have.

          • @[email protected]
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            102 years ago

            You have no clue what zoning does to buildability, do you.

            Hint: insane ass zoning rules are government regulations. You really want revised government regulations.

            • @[email protected]
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              42 years ago

              All people who think more gov controlling everything should do is look at places like Europe where it’s basically impossible to build and family homes are generational things handed down and you live with your parents until they die and hand over the home to you

              • @[email protected]
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                42 years ago

                “look at places like Europe” is the clearest signifier of someone who has never left the States ever in their life.

                In Europe, there are 50 countries, over 150 distinct cultures, wildly different economies and styles of government representing each country, and over 746 million people living within European borders. Of those 746 million, 70% own their own home, compared to 65% of US Americans. Your generalization is absolute nonsense and you should probably not respond so confidently with your opinion.

              • @[email protected]
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                22 years ago

                “Europe” isn’t just London and Paris. I did some research on real estate in France and Spain recently and it’s significantly cheaper over there if you aren’t living in a major city. Even cheaper than the rural area in the US I currently live in.

                • @[email protected]
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                  22 years ago

                  No shit…this happens in small towns as well. I would know my family is from multiple countries in Europe.

                  They’re cheaper sure, but you also make far less than in the USA.

              • @[email protected]
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                32 years ago

                And way up this thread was referring to localized laws. And you can force certain changes at higher levels, just gotta be prepared for the lawsuit that follows. State of NJ having a huge issue with affordable housing, and Fair Share basically taking a court ruling and running with it and essentially forcing towns to build, or else.

          • @[email protected]
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            32 years ago

            Are you really that ignorant of the housing market? Zoning regulations are the #1 blocker for new housing being built. More regulation = less housing. Just think about it for half a second.

            Also, more housing = lower cost. Supply and demand, dude.

            • @[email protected]
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              2 years ago

              I’d argue it’s more the homeowners themselves. They don’t want high density housing built near them because it drives down the value of their house, so it doesn’t get built. Voting records tell that story extremely well.

              • @[email protected]
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                12 years ago

                You’d be wrong. Local homeowners don’t vote on new construction. That’s not how any of that works.

                • @[email protected]
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                  12 years ago

                  Homeowners absolutely have a say in their local elections, and there are many cases where they’ve directly prevented projects from moving towards.

                • @[email protected]
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                  12 years ago

                  Local homeowners vote on zoning policy tho so he’s basically being correct, just not about the mechanism.

          • @[email protected]
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            62 years ago

            Regulation doesn’t automatically mean better.

            You can make regulations that benefit large real estate corporations and that’s still regulation.

            We have a lot of that in the parts of US. There are rules encouraging landlords to keep high rental rates bc if they lowered it, they’d have to offer that to other renters as well. Many landlords choose to have empty rooms and keep that high rental rate.

          • @[email protected]
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            62 years ago

            This is literally why housing is so expensive. Local governments (or worse, federal), pass stifling legislation that prevents building, almost always due to localized pressure.

          • @[email protected]
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            42 years ago

            Well, I don’t know where you live and maybe in your country nothing is regulated, but I live in Europe and in most European countries there are excessive building regulations which prohibit new developments. This results in severe stock shortage. And shortage drives the prices up. That’s just a fact.

            The whole problem is created by the government and they’re the only ones responsible.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          That happens only in US. Well, you can say that US is more regulated that EU. And then think about it.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            US is actually over regulated in general. It’s just that their regulations are a result of corruption (they call it lobbying) and are tailored towards protecting monopolies and not consumers or competitors.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 years ago

          You’re not wrong, but I feel like this is an over generalization. You’re right that the current housing shortage has been caused largely by local regulations. On the other hand, many state legislatures are realizing this fact and working to craft new regulations that loosen and supersede the local ones. E.G Oregon passed a law a few years ago that requires residential areas to be zoned for multi family units in cities over a certain size. I think that kind of law is going to be pretty important to getting the housing situation under control.

        • @[email protected]
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          112 years ago

          There’s over $1.5 trillion in commercial real estate value that’s spiraling in value due to numerous factors, but so many offices going fully remote has definitely contributed to an non-insignificant degree. Additionally, many cities/counties get a shit ton of their tax revenue from the property taxes on that same commercial real estate. If the value of those properties plummet, then tax revenue also plummets. Then you also have a lot of commercial real estate investor that foolishly over extended themselves over the pandemic by buying up a lot of shit when some loan rates were almost 0% at one point. Now, those investments don’t look so hot and they’re massively in debt and at risk for faulting on those properties.

          Tldr; from on my understanding, it’s sorta like the 2008 subprime crash, but with commercial real estate and different circumstances.

          That being said, fuck those investors and fuck cities heavily relying on property taxes for the bulk of their revenue. Teach them all a lesson, just like they’d unsympathetically teach us common folk a lesson when we fuck up

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            I’ve got a full time job and kids. Don’t have time to also get into politics.

            I’ve been to the city council meetings and I vote. Nothing seems to change

    • @[email protected]
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      122 years ago

      People keep bringing up real estate because everyone thinks the rich are evil and this move must be money related somehow.

      Now, I too think they’re pretty rotten for the most part.

      But returning to office is not about real estate.

      Companies are ruthless and if they can increase profits at all, they will do pretty much anything to do so. Firing long-time workers, destroying the planet, etc. So if they had to destroy the real estate market to make more money, they would.

      My point here is that if it was just about money, everyone would remain WFH. They could downsize the office, or even lease out the space to the companies that are returning to the office.

      So then why are they doing it? It’s their preference. They prefer having their underlings in the building and enjoy seeing everyone from their corner office. They like feeling powerful which is harder to do when everyone who works for them is at home.

      They might also have the kind of personality where they get more work done with others around, and they can’t imagine it being different for other people. Many high-up executives only got that far because they have very extroverted personalities.

      Not everything a rich person does is strictly about money. Otherwise they wouldn’t buy mansions, supercars, private planes, etc. Apple wouldn’t have built the billion dollar donut office. They do these things because they’re powerful and want others to know.

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

        Or, it’s a combination of numerous factors, including commercial real estate. There’s no one single explanation that fits for every company reverting WFH.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          It’s not commercial real estate. There’s no reason for a CEO to care about real estate. This is just the reason given by people who believe all companies only ever do things for the money. So they’ve made up a reason they think fits.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        It’s a combination of factors with real estate being a key I’ve. Don’t be so naive.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          Why would a company care about the real estate market when it can make more money having its staff work from home? Have you ever seen a company care about something that doesn’t benefit them in the short term?

  • @[email protected]
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    852 years ago

    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.

  • Grant_M
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    652 years ago

    At first, I thought this was an Onion story

  • Max-P
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    622 years ago

    I’ve been working remotely for over 10 years. Even without Zoom, it’s never been a problem. I’ve met people and developed many relationships with just Slack. Heck I’m sure I’d manage that even with just email.

    When I finally met everyone in person at the company retreat, everyone was super happy to know me in person. I was about exactly as they imagined.

    Company culture is how you develop it. At every company I’ve worked with, I introduced social channels and established a continuous background chatter that’s for people to share memes or whatever they want, to help establish a personnality that goes beyond “I just deployed X which puts project Y live on production”. I have DMs with all sorts of people from all departments, just idle occasional chatter. It makes connections with other departments when you need their help. It works. I always somehow become the guy to reach out to for anything that doesn’t necessarily fit a Jira ticket, or sometimes just need help making sure they file the right kind of ticket.

    If it doesn’t work, then either you have hermits that wouldn’t be much more active in an office anyway, or the company is holding it back by discouraging or forbidding any sort of unprofessional or otherwise non-work related activity and the only way to socialize is in the break room in the office.

    IMO idle chats on Slack are way less disruptive than in-person, it doesn’t take you off your work stretch, you can send replies during Zoom meetings, you can even have textual side threads during a video meeting to go over details without holding the meeting for everyone. Sometimes I have hours long conversations going about projects on Slack, with everyone essentially just chiming in whenever they have new ideas or feedback. It gives people time to think and refine the specs without any “now or never” pressure.

    Remote work works, if it doesn’t work, it’s a company culture problem not an office problem.

    • Zagorath
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      22 years ago

      Honestly this so much. I’m not a forward enough person to be the one to create that background chatter in my workplace, but I will participate in it.

      My last workplace had it and my current one doesn’t, and the difference is night and day. Leaving my last company hit hard because among the developers we had such a great culture in spite of upper management’s toxicity. I would leave my current role in a heartbeat because there’s just no real culture. That’s not something management should be aiming for, because higher churn is bad for the business.

      • Max-P
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        22 years ago

        Yeah, it really matters. It’s the difference between a computer you turn on to do strictly business and a computer you turn on and look forward to engaging with other people and see what cool stuff people are working on. Look at people’s delicious breakfasts and coffees in #breakfast, look at people’s cats and dogs in #pets.

        When done right, tools like Slack can also give you so much more visibility too and chime in. I’m a DevOps/platform engineer, but unless we talk secrets or implementation details we chat in a public channel so backend devs can see what we’re doing. I can passively read the support team’s channel and give them hints like oh this customer’s CNAME points to the wrong site. I can see what the backend team runs into deploying their stuff and propose tooling changes to make their life better. It lets me be extremely proactive, without turning into a “you must keep up with everything everyone is doing”. Half of them I have muted but still idle browse every now and then. I’ve had other teams pop on our public channel and ask details about how it works, so they can better understand how their code will run. I’ve had other devs chime in and say hey, our app works better in that kind of environment. It’s a constant informal feedback loop on top of the usual formal Jira tickets. Saves everyone time, makes everyone happier.

        It continuously reinforces the importance of my role, why my team do the things we do, who it’s for. It’s not soulless work anymore, because you know and see the impact of your work on other people. Even sales is less annoying because you can see them chat about how it’s the 50th customer that asks if we can do X, instead of just hearing that sales sold feature X that we don’t hace and now it’s due next week, because you have context on why.

  • @[email protected]
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    72 years ago

    Why tf is his personal fortune still 200b??? Deam what if he’s sabotaging his fortune so that he can keep making way to much money in different projects. Without people freaking out cuz he has 500b, the only what to do that would be in fact to tank a couple of companies in a way that seems not accidental.

  • Jo Miran
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    442 years ago

    2010 is the year we started going full “remote work” and we sold our office building in 2012. Since then we have somehow managed to thrive and innovate like crazy. I am pretty sure these guys know that what they are saying is bullshit, at least as it relates to tech. Creatives, maybe, but in tech it is far easier to screenshare and discuss than it is to lean over some dude’s shoulder to look at their screen…in dark mode…with nano fonts.