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

Ice cream factory urges its employees not to eat ice cream.
- Dog food company doesn't want to serve its food to their own dogs 🤔
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
  For those who are unaware. Highly relevant.
  
  If only there was some generic term for this phenomenon.
- Couldn't have said it better myself! It's like telling someone to work at an ice cream factory but not have any ice cream. Just doesn't make sense.
  
  You def couldn’t have said it better because you just repeated what they said

Zoom CEO says that his companies product is trash.
- “No, no, you misunderstood! I’m just terrible at my job!"
  
  Why not both?

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.
  
  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.

Why tf do out of touch executives and managers always think that we want to make friends at work? I don't really care to know any of my coworkers, I just want to do my job in a professional manner, get paid well for it, and then either go home or close the laptop and leave my home office.
Also the only creativity that the office gives me is how to creatively get around the Internet restrictions they place on us, or how to creatively appear to be working when there's nothing to do.
If I wanted to make friends I'd go to a bar or something else that adults do together in groups, like bowling leagues.
- Why tf do out of touch executives and managers always think that we want to make friends at work?
  Because it's the type of people they are, and they think everyone is just like them. I worked a corporate job for 10 years and saw a lot of people who made the company their whole identity. Their whole friend group was their co-workers.
  
  That's a great point, these people's who lives revolve around their jobs, it makes perfect sense.
- I bet their real goal is to shed employees without having to do layoffs. They know some of these people will refuse to come back (or moved far away) and therefore can be fired with little press or blowback.
- Because the #1 reason why employees will stay at a job that underpays them is because they like the people they work with. And you can’t form those bonds remotely.
  
  I agree with the first part, disagree with the second part. You absolutely can form bond remotely, some of my closest friends are online-only. I've even met some of my online-only friends IRL once or twice. I've become close with online-only coworkers too, honestly closer than I was with a lot of people in the office.
  Remote work does work. Return to office is just a power grab by companies and real estate sunken cost fallacy.
  
  Except that you absolutely can if the company has a good remote culture.
  The company I was at prior to the pandemic and all throughout the height of the pandemic had such a culture. Even before the pandemic our work chat had rooms for different teams, different products/projects, and general subjects including non-work-related ones. And the chats were active and lively. And during the pandemic it only got more so. There was a very strong bond between coworkers, including new people first onboarded as WFH.
  After we got bought out by a new company and they mandated 100% from the office, I left (as did over 50% of the years of experience in the dev teams). My new company is actually still hybrid/remote, with most people working from the office occasionally but anything including 100% remote being allowed at least after initial onboarding.
  But I actually think this company is really bad at remote culture. There are a handful of public chat rooms but they almost never get used, and there's nothing off-topic at all. It creates a feeling that reaching out to someone is a bigger hurdle than it was at my last place, and greatly reduces collaboration.
  At my last place, working collaboratively was the norm and it translated extremely well to remote work. Here everyone is much more siloed and I don't think it works as well. Especially if your goal is to create interpersonal bonds.
  
  Yes you can, what on earth are you talking about? I've been remote for 5 years now and I have close relationships with most of the people I work with, especially the devs on my team. Sometimes we'll debug an issue or discuss something and then afterwards bullshit for a while on the phone.
  Are people really this inept? You can have remote relationships especially if you make time for it.
  
  But it doesn’t make sense. If I would have people which I like so much in the office would, you know, go to the office. If I don’t wonna go well… then I don’t like those people enough and there can’t be bonds anyway. We will just come, say hi, do job, go home. What a great creativity boost
  
  Definitely disagree on this one. Worked a job across the pandemic that was completely virtual and I never met my coworkers in person. A number of us left about 6 months ago due to layoffs but we all flew out to meet up with each other last week and hang out. That’s almost an entire department of folk that now work in different companies taking the time and personal expense to travel and hang out with each other so I’d say a meaningful bond was built. It absolutely can happen, managers just need to be informed on how to do it. If any org should be prepared for this it’s Zoom. This is just being super lazy on the part of Zoom and having a lack of confidence in their own product.
  
  Been remote for years, number two is just flat out bull shit.
- Depends on the type of work. Workshops and strategy sessions are definitely better in person than online for me.
  
  Okay so what are you getting from either of those that you can't get from attending the same on Teams/Zoom etc.?
  Workshops also just feel like school and the presenters always talk too fast, quiet, or accented for my hearing and ADHD to make it worth me going to one, some dedicated study time always was the better route for me.
  Meanwhile strategy sesh's are just conversations with an end goal, nothing difficult about that at all.
  One thing people who are against work from home have to realize is that not everybody functions the same, some people do better remotely, others need the office.
  I just wish we could be treated like adults and work in the way we feel most comfortable and efficiently without being mistreated over it and without being astroturfed against it by entities like the Wall St. journal and Bloomberg, sorry rich people but I just don't give a fuck about your corporate property values.
  
  Even if that is the case I don't find myself caring enough to want to work in the office when going to work has such a huge impact on time and money wasted commuting, and plays such a huge role on where people can live. Its hard to care when it's such a drain on personal time and expenses.
- Because if your social life is tied to work you'll stick around longer during the day and potentially do more work. You'll also opt to stay at a job that pays less or has worse benefits because it means leaving your friends.
  
  I feel personally attacked
- I know it's very popular online to brag about being an asocial shut-in, but believe it or not some people like their jobs and like the social aspect of the office. The problem is the bigwigs applying the same rule for everyone either due to being out-of-touch with normal humans or just through greed, but don't assume your experience is universal!

They should try using Teams, should solve the problem.
- Better upgrade then networks dawg
- 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...

Glad I'm not a stockholder, since the CEO basically says their only product, remote connectivity, stifles innovation and connection. What a world.
- They've gained about 1.2 billion in market cap this week based on stock price. The super rich do not experience consequences.
- Sure, that's the sensationalist and reactionary headline, but I think the real lesson to learn from all this is that with remote work, like many things, moderation is key. The CEO is not implying "innovation" and "getting to know each other" is necessary for every meeting because it isn't. So what he's really saying is whenever those two aspects are necessary, Zoom won't suffice.
  
  I don't think we should take any lessons from what CEOs say. If studies show that too much remote work indeed makes for worse results, I'm fine with it. If a CEO says it? Most likely a lie.
  
  If your CEO of zoom you have to believe in the product your company makes. Its the basic requirement. When he says this, its a slap in the face to every engineer and worker who has dedicated their life to making zoom a good product.
  Its like the time the dunking donuts ceo said he doesn't like donuts on Marketplace.

CEO can't even eat its own dog food. How pathetic
- Why would you expect Zoom to push for 100% working remotely over Zoom? So if my company makes mobility scooters, I'm not allowed to walk?
  
  I’d push for WFH and say that if work sucks over Zoom, “innovate” until it doesn’t. Kind of our bread and butter.
  
  No, the argument is that instead of improving the product by dog-fooding, he just gave up and told people to go back to the office.
  The fact his product is not solving all the collaboration needs should be a business opportunity, but his underlying message is that he doesn't know how to leverage it, and will not try anymore.
  
  You can walk whenever the fk you want. But why force other people to walk like you when they prefer the scooter?
  
  People that use Zoom are disabled confirmed.

The fact of the matter is when your company revolves around you being able to communicate and work from anywhere, it is a bad look for you tell people you can’t communicate effectively over the product you make. Anyone who knows business should know this and should know to keep their mouth shut and their policies focused on trying to destroy business.
- Makes me feel like someone is paying to or making them do this. If it's best for 'THE' WFH company to WFO, then every company can say it's best their employees WFO.
  
  Yes, the executives who are looking at empty offices with decades-long leases is what's "paying" them to do this.
  Greedy dumbasses around the world are subject to sunk cost fallacy, apparently far worse than normal people.

- you have to reserve a conference room to take a zoom meeting (all meetings).
  Work in an office, they said. It will be easier for meetings, they said.
  It's crazy how shortsighted and dumb companies are.
- 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.
  
  It's incredibly rare anyone actually uses the Team's chat for actual work purposes. If I need to talk to someone for work purposes I usually send passive aggressive emails.
  They've just added to the bottom of that email signatures.
  [Company name], certified a great pace to work 2023 - 2024
  We're just wondering who certified that, the general consensus is that it's probably BS.
- Eh, for certain people they definitely are less productive online(unfortunately including me), but I'm sure some others are more productive online.
  
  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.
  
  That's why they should give people the option to work from home. You can choose which one is best for you.
  
  The question for me is, is maximizing productivity the most important thing?

- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  I mean, people shit talk on discord all the time
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  Ideas don't come from a coffee break, that's superstitious nonsense.
- Because the innovation is done by engineers and artists, not MBAs.
- 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”.
  
  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.
  
  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.

Well that was an impressive way to destroy your entire business model
- LoL right?
  I mean the company clearly benefited from the pandemic and people working from home. Why would they want that to stop??
  
  Control. They don't feel like they have enough control of their plebe workers
  
  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.

I don't get corporate blokes.
They spend their whole working hours finding ways to increase profits by reducing costs everywhere, to the detriment of the company even. Then we finally give them an easy way to reduce costs that make the employees happy, by removing the need for real estate. And they do a complete 180° to not do so?
Even if they have a lease of multiple years, not having to heat/cool the building nor pay the electricity is still cheaper.
Is it really about micromanagement?
- At this point i'm convinced it's more about the fact these higher ups have skin in the real estate game. They either know the people who lease their properties, or are heavily invested in the property itself. So they can't get past the mental block that is the sunk cost fallacy to just ditch it, or lose "good boy points" with their rich peers by saying they don't need the property anymore.
  I guess it's also harder to brag to your rich friends how big your company is when you have less physical locations too, but at this point i'm just grasping. The amount of money these companies could save it massive, but they just absolutely refuse to do it for whatever reason.
- Right? They are also losing the opportunity to hire top talent from remote locations. I guess we found something that is more important to them than profits: their ego.
- an easy way to reduce costs that make the employees happy
  That's the problem, right there.
- Yes.
- They can't just reduce their costs, because they're locked into contracts and/or the corp real estate market is in the trash can
  I'd be willing to bet sunk cost fallacy does play a big part, as a result, but I also think senior leadership there just struggles to manage remotely and thus they assume others do too.
- I think the issue is that they fear giving workers too much freedom. With that newfound freedom, they may start realizing that they can demand more
- CEOs and Corporate blokes are still technically working class. They have bosses to answer to. Their bosses have a large stake in real estate, manufacturing, oil, etc. Happy at home employees buy less and drive less. This is bad for their bosses. It goes way beyond the company's bottom line.
  
  I assure you that the CEO of a large corporation like that has a very different relationship to the means of production than your average working class person. Especially in regard to how their income is generated.
  
  They own enough property that they are not, in fact, working class. They don't have to work for a living (any more), they choose to.
  Bosses like locating in expensive cities because they have the income to buy property in those expensive cities, and rake in the capital gains that come from others locating in those expensive cities. They all stand to lose a lot if people move out of those expensive cities because the housing pyramid that supports the imaginary value of their property collapses.

Ya, this guy is toast. He just told the world he thinks his product sucks - the sane know he's wrong at least.
- Doing a "Ratner" https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/22/gerald-ratner-jewellery-total-crap-1992-archive
- The product sucks for work and productivity purposes. It can still be useful for meetings where productivity is not a factor (social, medical, many other situations.)
  I don't really care which teleconferencing software I use but without zoom I would lose access to several medical providers and need to travel a couple hours to them which is untenable.
  
  I gotta say I'm shocked that Zoom is secure enough for use in patient care given how heavily regulated the industry is
- From a security perspective, the product has sucked for many years now, but it never halted their popularity. If he can survive Apple needing to intervent to remove a web server they installed on people's machines, he'll survive this.

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.
- By old ways, do you mean in-person interviews and work?
  Because I won't lie, I do find it easier to collaborate, focus, and communicate with my coworkers in-person, as opposed to the days I work remotely (I do a combination of in-person and work-from-home). And while I think it's unfair to be denied a job for not being sociable enough (I'm very much in the same boat), the overall idea of wanting employees who communicate with and get along with their coworkers better isn't inherently wrong.
  
  No, he's clearly referring to the "metagame" of career building that centers primarily around making your coworkers and managers like you so that they want to give you that promotion/transfer/whatever. That game is remote work lessens that BS by making everything more about the actual work

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.
- 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.
- I never socialized with work people before COVID.
- 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.
- Depends on the workplace and the job in general.

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.
- Some of the best relationships in ny life have been with people I've worked with. It's the one thing I miss a lot since we started working from home.
  Still not worth going into the office, lol. The freedom is too good. But working from home does sort of mess up the work/life balance. I'm basically always on call these days and don't have a set routine.
  Sometimes that means not working much for a day or two and then working until 11pm on others. Whereas at the office I typically left at a quarter to 5 and turned work off in my brain until tomorrow 9:30am after the first coffee at work.
  Having said all that, I encourage people to try and be friendly with their coworkers. Networking and friendships are valuable things. Both for your career and also just fulfillment. I found that the consistently best way to get raises and promotions in a company is simply to have most people you interact with like you.
  And that really isn't hard to do, just takes a bit of authentic conversation and positive vibes. Seriously. If you want to make more money and advance your career - be likeable. It will get you a magnitude more than hard work alone. (Although of course hard work doesn't hurt)
- No it is not your introvert side it’s the side that knows your value. You know you can provide the same (or more!) value out of office than you do trapped in some fucking open floor plan that’s constantly loud and distracting.
  This is just corporate bullshit for “go fuck yourselves we want more control over you and want to do it in our fancy building again”
  They want to usher in bullshit like THIS: https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-describe-fear-mass-workplace-data-surveillance-wadu-2022-5?op=1
  and THIS: https://web.archive.org/web/20230329152820/https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-is-tracking-zoom-calls-workplace-activity-using-wadu-2022-5
  
  If they wanna do crazy tracking they don't need you in the office. They can just force you to install Spyware on your computer and send you a Logitech Webcam that needs to stay on.
  I'm glad I've always worked for sane companies. At the end of the day, you gotta treat the employees like adults. If you feel they aren't doing enough, fire them. Don't try and micromanage. But megacorps probably do see some minor bonuses to productivity otherwise they wouldn't do it.
  It's just not worth the headache for regular companies, I think.
- It makes me wonder if there's a deeper reason besides the real estate thing, that compels CEOs to try to bring workers back to the office.
  Consider: If you're at the office, you form stronger attachments to your coworkers. You're more likely to make friends with them and so on. You create bonds. Another way to say this is: you create ties that bind you to your job.
  Now, you could use all those extra commute hours to make friends with non-coworkers, and then you don't lose much in terms of social life. But if you did that, you'd want more time with those friends. You'd have bonds that pull you away from your job instead of into it. There's a reason employee satisfaction surveys always ask if you have any friends at work.
  If you have the time and motivation to form friendships outside of work, you're going to want more time outside of work. And things like 4-day work weeks. And unions will help you get more time away from work, too.
  CEOs don't want you to form bonds outside of work. Only inside of work. Marry your job, they say. Come worship here, as it is a church.
  
  That makes so much sense.
  My pre pandemic job was amazing because of the people I worked with. They were great fun and we would also go out together at the weekend.
  After lockdown load sof people moved on to higher paid roles as did I.
  My last 2 jobs have been friendless, even the hybrid one because even if you're in the office, others are out so you're still not forming relationships.
  It would have worked better if it was an "everybody works from home Monday and Friday" but that removes all the flex..
  Today in my remote job I have no work friends, but I also got a dog, spend loads of time with my new friends (neighbours who also have dogs), am completing a full time degree while working full time bacuse I have no commute and generally I'm significantly happier.
  My house is actually tidy too because my 5 min breaks are tidy up breaks rather than piss about distracting someone else breaks.
  
  You have totaly a point there.
  I am working in cultural heritage, so creating bounds that last over jobs is crucial. Who are you on good terms with? Who has a strong opinion on topic x? Who could help you with that non profit project? Who can you take seriosly and who is a scammer?
  Working with these kind of people can be so amazing.
  But cultural heritage is passion driven, a lot of ways to burn out in that feld or do unpaid work. The silent war against big companies is hard.
- nope! It's not just an introvert thing! I work with extroverts that have actual friends OUTSIDE work they do not miss office work either. I won't lie and say it's all roses, but WFH is way better than the alternative and blaming the extroverts isn't the problem. THere is indeed a third more insane human outside the intro/extrovert spectrum, the officevert. or something.

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.
- 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.
  
  This is a stupid question maybe, but how does a real-estate crash topple anything?
  
  the same local governments that just raised my property tax by $190/mo?
  
  The real estate market is in shit because it is already heavily regulated.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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
- 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.
- "Oh no, how terrible"
  C suite looking at all the salary they're saving
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  It's a combination of factors with real estate being a key I've. Don't be so naive.

Ya know, I'm not super happy with my salary (they're really bad at keeping up with inflation), but ... the promise of permanent WFH (we are actively getting rid of our last office, and hiring fully remote) with ability to live in ~half of the states without salary adjustment is basically keeping me complacent for now.
- That's one reason I've been toughing out my job situation, but it's driving me crazy so I've been working on my resume and looking for more fully remote options. It's getting harder to find interesting stuff without office commitments :(

At first, I thought this was an Onion story

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.
- 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.
  
  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.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190625005362/en/Zoom-Expands-Its-Lease-at-KBS%E2%80%99-The-Almaden-to-More-than-87000-Square-Feet
Hey, I need to expand my lease.
it is X amount of money
What if I commit 10 years
it is X/2
Deal!
Oh, he reduced costs and increased footprint. He is a genius!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/zoom-offices-hybrid-remote-work-11661977375
Well. Out workers are remote. What the hell do we do with the office?
Eeerrrrr. Ok let people have fun.
But we are starting to need ways of saving costs. What do we do?
The plan was always to return to office.
Let's do that, then.
Older than life. A situation changes and somebody whose personal interests are over the groups interests.
- Typical corporate.
  Upper manager goal is Y (not using the letter before it anymore thanks to dippy boy). But we're Y -3% this quarter
  Solution? Treat workers like shit until it's Y. Doesn't matter if it makes them unhappy, they leave, or next year's results suck. Now now now
  
  You missed the point tho. This is actively costing them a lot of money. They're just doing it to save face and maintain control.

maybe they should use teams

If my work told me i needed to be on the office even a day a week, i would be searching for another job immediately
They want even your time off

Doesn't matter what you think, Big techs ceos are laughing their ass off every time their products gets mentioned and reach the frontpage. Purge their ads and remove their visibility
- Maybe people can just use a different video calling program if the CEO of the company doesn't like people using it.
  
  a different video calling program
  What happened to Skype? Did it just become the basis of Teams?
  
  Like what? The technology sub is all about these big tech platforms, can you name some others?

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.

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.
- I agree. The problem is meetings.
  
  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.
  
  And the idiots who schedule many of them...
  
  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.
- Sounds like to many meetings. Can't do work at a meeting.
  
  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.

Dang, I just applied to a couple positions there. I'll go ahead and retract those :D

Someone is getting tired of paying for HVAC, electricity, and plumbing for a vacant office building 😢
- That's how I understood it as well. Feels like most mandates have nothing to do with company culture and more to do with commercial property expenses/investments.
  
  If only they could make a charitable donation to the city, with the expressed purpose that it be converted to affordable housing/homeless shelters for a profitable tax write-off instead.
  Sometimes I wonder why these chucklefucks get to play with the big bucks. A good CEO allocates resources well. That's it. This just screams failure in that department, and soooo many better options exist.
- When I was working in the office, I'd put the thermostat where I like it, drink 6 K-Cups worth of something a day, and use so much TP. I hated commuting and made sure I got my money's worth. They'll regret bringing people like me back.

I mean, scientifically speaking, they're not wrong. Physical contact with another person causes trust to grow because it causes oxytocin secretion.
But it's still funny that the owner of a video calling company is telling people to go back to the office.
- physical contact
  Can’t think of any instance in which I physically touched my coworkers and I sat next to them every fucking weekday for 5+ years
  
  It's not touching them, it's just interacting with them irl, makes your brain more active and produces more stuffs in it.

His argument is essentially that people are not toxic enough in online meetings to innovate.

It's purely about control. WFH is cheaper and more efficient.

Alanis Morissette perks up
- I
  Went to your house
  Walked up the stairs
  Joined a zoom meeting
  Disabled my cam

"I can't be as innovative over zoom"
Fixed that for you
- This fix is incomplete.
  "I can't be innovative."

Don’t get high on your own supply? I guess?

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!
- Good bot.

Oh cool, guess I can cancel my Zoom subscription then.

Leadership realized they weren't getting the ego stroke they needed virtually. Time to go back to cube hell so this guy can justify his existence.

Eric, you need to un-moot

Lol. Looking for trouble.

Point barrel at foot. Pull trigger

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.

I want to start off by saying that I work from home and would like to continue doing so indefinitely. I also think these CEOs are chodes and aren't really thinking about the point I'll attempt to make next and typically do not care about such concerns.
Now, I do wonder what effect the loss of the "2nd place" (home, work, community being the "working definition" of places) for vast swathes of the American public will have in a country where the "3rd place" is already pretty non-existent.
In other words, we're already quite an isolated society. What will a large percentage of us also working in isolation have on the country and on mental health in the long run?
I think there's a potential that it could be a good effect or a bad one (or a mixture like most things), and I'm not sure which outcome is more likely.
We could become even more withdrawn from each other...or we could use the time we used to spend in traffic and with coworkers to build up local, community bonds instead. I suppose only time will tell, but I think it's an interesting discussion that I haven't seen talked about much yet.
- It's a fair point, but I think the answer is to take action necessarily to reintroduce a proper third space, including moving to more medium density mixed use developments.
- I also work from home for several extended periods of time, while during others I need to be on site one or two days a week (sometimes it's nice, sometimes it's a drag to be on site).
  I have to say, while I can work a 100% of the time from home, the nice parts of being on site is to get to know more personally the people I meet. I don't deny the fact that this be successfully done remotely too, but I believe as humans we need social connections. Yes, we can make friends online (which can carry over IRL and I know that personally) and yes you can meet your partner online too, but it always felt (at least to me) that if you meet others in person, you accelerate the connection.
  I mean, I had a fairly bad time in high school, but I had the time of my life on college and met most of my friends then. I'm not sure I'd have made as many friends if it had all been online.
  Also, as someone wrote in another post today (but I can't remember where so I can't link it, sorry), sometimes people (perhaps new hires fresh out of college) are not experienced enough to know when to be vocal and object to flaws in a project and in person meeting can be a boon to acquire that skill.
  It's a tricky subject, since it's not that WFH or doing things online prevents normal life evolutions, but perhaps can make them more scarce or slow, while in person events can precipitate them.
  I agree that companies forcing things is not the way to go, but somehow it feels like doing things entirely online should happen more later in life, when you're settled and not before when you need to learn and make connections who you'll want to meet in person too.
  Thanks for coming to my TED talk

I feel that they might change their logo to snake eating its own tail.

Paywall can't read
- Of course paywalls can't read. Paywalls don't have eyes.
  
  They needed to pay for those
- https://archive.is/rDQPO

If you're in a tech job, working from home should be the default. If you're in a service job, working on-site is a requirement. This can have a negative impact on a company overall because you may have both in your workforce, and the ability to work from home breeds resentment and impacts morale.
Amidst COVID, our office workers were told to return to work. The reasoning was a perceived inequity held by the field workers toward those that sit at a desk all day. Nevermind that having everyone return up's everyone's chance for getting infected. Truth be told, those forced to come in would rather risk that than be left out.
- I hope people demanded an eye-watering raise, citing the inequity in remuneration between the workers and C-suite.
  Oh - you don't care about equity after all? Why do we need to come back again?

Clown 🤡

sounds rapey

Wow, just wow. I liked Zoom when it was an upstart company making good tools for remote work When it got big, ugh.

The article is behind a paywall for me. I have to admit that I don't like online meetings and much prefer the direct contact with people. However, I can be totally productive remotely via email and chat. It's just that I don't like online meetings. Remote work is absolutely fine. It's even better for days that I am working alone on my computer and desk. I avoid all the traffic and waste of time to make myself presentable for the outside world. I've just realised that I don't like meetings with too many people in general; neither live nor online. A huge waste of everyone's time.
- I was working in big enterprises for many years with lots of online meetings, and I was so tired of them. Every day I had hours of meetings, making me so tired and unmotivated.
  Now I'm at a smaller company and we don't have standups, 1 on 1s etc. I have 2 meetings per week only. It's fantastic. Made me really like this job.
  
  I have been blessed to have worked only for small companies of less than 25 people. Now I work for a company that I own (minority shareholder) with three more colleagues. Less than 15 people. We are extremely happy now, although I used to say the same for a couple more companies that I was the employee of up until a few years ago. My wife works for big organisations that last few years. I don't know how she copes with all the meetings.

I've been doing a combination of working from home and working from the office since the start of COVID. I generally only go into work when there is something broken that needs me to physically repair it. I can honestly say that the times I'm working from home, my productivity is exceptionally higher than it would be otherwise. No distractions from coworkers, a more comfortable environment, better computers and desk ergonomics, no commute.
Employers need to realize that good employees work better from home, and the ones that don't are not worth keeping on the payroll.

Something something dogfooding

Fucking muppet...

Zoom software inefficient and ineffective. Got it.

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.