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.
Zoom CEO says that his companies product is trash.
“No, no, you misunderstood! I’m just terrible at my job!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that any study you find over the past 30 years will show that while online relationships can be meaningful in some cases, the average person will not form as strong a connection as they would in person.
Been remote for years, number two is just flat out bull shit.
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
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 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 don’t remember where this quote is from but i think it’s useful.
We are not friends. Our interaction is because I’m paid to be here.
Something like that. I’m all for having comradery and if you happen to be friends then that’s great. But often times, and i know I’ve fallen victim to this, we work too much and dont have social lives that exist outside of work.
CEO can’t even eat its own dog food. How pathetic
Ya this guy is toast lol.
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 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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
an easy way to reduce costs that make the employees happy
That’s the problem, right there.
Yes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Depends on the workplace and the job in general.
man i just spent 30m this morning telling jokes to my remote coworker over slack, I’ve seen him only once in my life, according to this CEO I couldn’t have possibly gotten to know him.
Funny watching the CEOs trying to do the verbal splits, coming up with excuses where it’s just “waah we’re paying for an office that nobody uses :(”
we have nothing to lose but our commutes
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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.
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.
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.
I mean, people shit talk on discord all the time
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 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.
Because the innovation is done by engineers and artists, not MBAs.
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.
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.
At first, I thought this was an Onion story
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Hey, I need to expand my lease.
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it is X amount of money
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What if I commit 10 years
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it is X/2
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Deal!
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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
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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.
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
