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Zoom, the videoconferencing platform that profited substantially from remote work during the pandemic, is now asking employees to return to the office. Its CEO, Eric Yuan, claims Zoom meetings don’t let people build trust or be innovative.
[…]
Yuan explained that trust is essential “for everything,” and he finds it hard to build not only that but also innovation and debates over Zoom.
“Quite often, you come up with great ideas, but when we are all on Zoom, it’s really hard,” Yuan said, according to Insider. “We cannot have a great conversation. We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call.”
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Ah, the ancient art of ‘Zoomology,’ where gazing at colleagues’ pixelated foreheads supposedly squashes innovation. Clearly, the key to groundbreaking ideas lies in the fluorescent lights and watercooler chitchat of the office jungle
Man that is pure class right there. I’m glad to see this. Someone who takes pride in their offering to the world, and only wants to see it used well.
I’ve discovered, in my first sales job, that it feels extremely good to put the customer’s needs first. I occasionally refer my customers to my competitor’s operation, when they’ve got the better deals.
It seems to work out well for me too. Nothing’s better than realizing you can be nice and succeed at the same time.
Take what he’s saying to its logical conclusion and zoom usage will go back to pre pandemic level and the company will crash even lower than it’s already did because its stock is back to pre pandemic price but with a whole lot more users.
Interesting that Zoom is not making an attempt to build features that increase trust, enable innovation and encourage robust debates in their app. Seems like a missed opportunity.
It’s impossible to implement a feature that prevents employees from recording the zoom meetings when the boss is
abusiverobustly debating their employees.To avoid headaches with HR, we’re going to need you to come into the office so your boss can feel more free to robustly debate you from time to time.
Evidently they couldn’t figure out how to do it over zoom.
Perhaps a C-suite with a healthy sense of the product’s niche could be seen as a feature. Having a target market that’s too wide is bad for product coherence.
neat. time to deplatform
All I heard from this article was “buy puts on zoom”.
bro has clearly not been in any of my discord chats
Head Accountant: “Sir, our stocks have plummeted to Zero!” Eric:
HD surprised pikachu, whaat?
The future is now old man
Zoom is dead in the water. They cannot innovate and this will cause them to fall further behind. Workers are more productive remote.
I wish everyone who works at zoom a very fruitful soft quitting.
This is all a method to get people to quit so they don’t have to list layoff nor have to pay severance.
Fuck them. Go to the office, but give it your 10% at best. Stall things. Claim lack of motivated leadership if HR makes a stink. Make them fire you and get that bread in the meantime.
The amount of “innovation and debate” I’ve seen during remote meetings is no different than when I used to work in an office. Meetings are either exhausting and dead (when they’re the usual bullshit administrative meetings that no one wants to be in and could’ve been handled via email) or they’re fun and engaging (when its something like a working session where the participants want to be there).
This guy is an idiot and, as others in this thread have already stated, he’s got ulterior motives beyond “innovation and debate.”
This part is my favorite:
“Quite often, you come up with great ideas, but when we are all on Zoom, it’s really hard,” Yuan said, according to Insider. “We cannot have a great conversation. We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call.”
Sounds like the issue is people wanting to avoid a talking to by HR for being “uncooperative” to me, but what do I know, I’m not the CEO of a company actively portraying the company’s product as bad at its sole purpose of existing.
For me it’s like this, I have a useful point to add to the conversation but when I interject the lag is juuuuust long enough that it ends up I’m talking over the next person.
So when I lead a meeting with zoom participants I either force dead air to allow the remote people to jump in, or I eat as much dead air as possible to lock them out of the conversation. depending on my own agenda.
incidentally this problem doesn’t exist in asynchronous collaboration methods. but zoom and it’s like win out on shear informwtion bandwidth.
The current video conferencing and remote working systems are indeed amazing feats of technology and social acceptance, but we still need to work on it. a lot.
I’m definitely not pretending Zoom is perfect. It has issues. Not enough issues to make a return to office worthwhile for those who function far better from home, but issues.
I just think that if there’s one person who has a huge state in pretending it is perfect, it should be this guy. And the most baffling part is that the issues he’s making up are rooted in human behavior that would still be present in an office setting (like being too nice to avoid HR), not his tech.
The entirety of business being conducted over Zoom isn’t the company’s sole reason for existing, any more than the purpose of a toaster is so you can eat toast for every meal.
Consider Star Trek. When shit gets real, they beam over to talk.
Consider that star trek is fiction and not real life. It’s a damn tv show.
I just love these near-daily reminders that the “new car smell” of kbin and lemmy is starting to wear off, as people stop being kind and fall back into old habits… like taking a flippant comment to its most extreme possible interpretation despite it being clear that wasn’t even close to the intent.
The sole purpose of Zoom is to collaborate over long distances. The CEO of Zoom says it’s too hard to build trust, innovate, or debate on Zoom. He didn’t qualify the statement as “you can’t build trust, innovate, and debate when all collaboration is done entirely on zoom,” and neither did I. Taking it to that new context is the same as taking it out of context, intentionally, so that you can be right on the internet. Stop it. Bad commenter. Bad. Down.
I don’t really understand what you’re saying with talking to me like a dog.
Not every business interaction needs to be building trust, innovating, or debating. There are other valuable modes of communication such as reporting, inquiring, coordinating, and those work fine over Zoom.
The guy is not saying that Zoom has no use. He’s saying that Zoom does not fulfill all the communication functions of a business, and that some things (not all) are only possible in person.
You’re being spoken to like a dog because you’re making as much sense as one
everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a zoom call
I’m sorry but are you suggesting hostility leads to innovation? Are you a fucking sociopath?
Are you a fucking sociopath?
Very likely. Capitalism encourages this type of behavior, to get (and stay) at the top you need to be a greedy, unhinged sociopath.
Shit take lol
No, but I think he means that people hold back opposing ideas because of fear of hurting others. Then there are other group dynamics involved which suppress people expressing them selfies. I would have thought this wold be less of a problem in online meetings
Zoom needs to implement whiteboards and people need to be issued digitizing pens/tables so they can draw diagrams freely
Yup, they have whiteboards, which is the most kindergarten-level attempt to “increase trust, enable innovation and encourage robust debates”. There is so much potential in this space. Check out these demos of Loomio for a glimpse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuWfEwlWFlw
https://youtu.be/itXYid8eSiI?si=hsq4RzMFAe_mVlG_&t=212Zoom has had a whiteboard since multiple years… But yeah, issuing tablets would make that feature more productive.
Zoom needs to be nuked from the orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
What an insightful comment.
Game over, man, GAME OVER!
It’s not over until it’s over. And it’s not over yet.
So just because he is psychotically social, everyone has to be?
This doesn’t seem to be maximizing shareholders’ investment. I give it three months before he “moves on to the next opportunity.”
My guess: This guy, and all his rich friends have a ton of money invested in commercial real estate. He’s putting his own interest before the interest of his company. The more people work from home the better for Zoom, but the worse off he and his rich friends are.
Wow that’s pretty cynical. Is it so hard to believe someone might not want their influence on the world to be negative?
No. Being valued at $39M is not a success story, it’s a mental disease.
And a public policy failure
People say that way of thinking is cynical, but I have worked in the system implementation and system consulting arms of EDS, IBM, and Accenture and that assumption (that the whole thing can be maintained by junior devs one the initial build is complete) is actually how middle managers within client companies have to budget their transition from “build” into “business as usual” stage so that senior managers approve the system implementation/migration.
While the concept that it takes specialized knowledge and experience is true, not having means to retain experience means that it will be chaos some six months down the road when some manager wants to do an enhancement as none of the juniors will understand why certain design choices were made and the implications on the rest of the architecture
Or it’s a way to lower the head count without doing layoffs. The problem with doing it this way of course is that you’ll lose your best employees.
They don’t care. They think once the initial build is complete you only need junior devs to maintain.
