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 not both?
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.
Seriously I don’t understand the mindset of people who treat everything a CEO says as gospel. How much is a CEO actually involved in the collaboration or innovation going on at the IC level? Somewhere between “barely” and “not at all” I’d guess. No doubt the CEO has personal reasons he wants people back in office, and just put some BS in the all hands meeting to make it sound good
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.
No, it’s like Dunkin’ CEO saying that donuts are bad for you… Much worse than personally not liking them
Lol. No, it isn’t. It’s a CEO suggesting that he believes that in-person interaction between workforce members is important in certain scenarios.
They should try using Teams, should solve the problem.
Better upgrade them* 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…
What’s wrong with Ansible?
I dunno man, that’s what I was trying to find out… I thought I was out of the loop on something here.
Tribalism will affect how this is received, like cursing out vi or apple in a crowded room, but it’s important to see what else is out there and what they offer. Hint: If Ansible is bolting things onto the side of itself like event-driven triggers and connecting to AWX, then you have a good idea of what Ansible needs crutches to do and keep up to last-gen tech. One can only bolt so many bags on the side before the entirety falls apart, and IBM no longer has the goodwill to keep enthusiasts doing the heavy-lifting – even if IBM is repeating what Canonical did a decade or more ago without repercussion.
Patching shouldn’t need an automation scaffolding. I’ll leave that there, that it’s entirely possible to patch your systems in a very automated, patchset-promoted fashion and not need to touch what we currently call Automation. I’ve seen and done it 20+ years, but to be fair that’s only how long I’ve been in the Enterprise space where that was the focus vs the relaxed tolerances of the soho/robo market.
This-gen tech is responsive and self-organizing from the ground up, and responds in real-time to changes. Comically, it’s usually a collection of well-established components like consul that powers the this-gen stuff.
I joined a job with this holy trinity, but they pay the tax every paycheque. I “dead sea” left a toxic mess with failing puppet managers a FIN coup had installed but with good tooling, to a great environment with known faces and good management left behind after their arrogant toxicity couldn’t cope with remote-first workers and bailed. The fact the tooling is complete shite is just a feature we cope with in this awesome environment, and while the environment stays excellent we’ll solve that technical challenge or we’ll bail if the environment gets toxic again first.
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?
If you’re the company CEO and you’ve spent years shouting a marketing pitch of “scooters! Scooters! Scooters instead of walking! Scooters! They’re the future!” then yes, it’s a bad look if you walk, never mind if you issue a company wide walking mandate.
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.
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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Don’t forget the “commuting to an office just to talk on Zoom to somebody 400km away in his own home”
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.
It’s not that they’re shortsighted and dumb (well, many are, but that’s not why they’re spouting this BS), they know those reasons are full of shit, they just need some excuse that sounds better than “we signed a 4 year lease and so we’re going to make that your problem” or “the CEO is getting lonely and misses being able to walk around the office among all his minions”
True. Even with like 20 - 30 meeting rooms there are always people posted up in all of them. Even if you reserve a desk or room, someone will be there.
Their excuse is usually “I reserved a different one but someone’s in that one now.” So you have to take someone else’s, and they inevitably interrupt your meeting. At the beginning of this chain of room theft is probably an executive who doesn’t even know how to sign up for a room.
Being at home is like 3x better now. I don’t care about free coffee or food. I buy exactly what I want at the supermarket.
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.
My company has 11 people, so Teams is the easiest way for us to communicate other than just talking across the room or walking 10 feet to a different room lol
It all depends on company culture. The last contract I worked was 100% virtual, and the chat channels were all business, all the time. I don’t think I saw a single meme the whole 8 months I worked there.
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.
We’ve been work-from-home since the pandemic kicked off, so about 3.5 years now. They’re working on renovating our office building (and shrinking the footprint we occupy in it), so we’re going to be work-from-home until at least the spring, at which time we’ll have to report a max of one time per week. Supposedly a remote work policy is under development as well, which is what I’m hoping for.
I will say, though, I went to an in-person strategy session for a club I’m in back in May. No zoom at all. What I had forgotten was the hallway conversations, the discussions over dinner, and being able to collaborate like that. It was much easier to talk to my counterparts in the club and see how they were addressing issues, for example. I softened my stance on the full work-from-home idea after that - for certain things, like brainstorming, an in-person meeting is hard to beat. But, our day-to-day work, including the quarterly meetings where we pass motions to revise the club bylaws - those can be (and still are) done virtually.
So you’re saying that a few times per year is enough for in person networking? I agree with that.
I didn’t say that.
Maybe once a year!
That’s why they should give people the option to work from home. You can choose which one is best for you.
I much prefer to work from home, but I am admittedly less productive. That was my point. I choose to work from home given the choice, but would be less productive.
Why do you choose it if you know it makes you less productive?
Because it is much more enjoyable.
The question for me is, is maximizing productivity the most important thing?
I think you have to have a good work-life balance. If you are only focused on maximizing productivity, you risk burnout. I’m not a manager, but I’ve certainly seen burnout lots of times.
It depends to who and how you define productivity
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Nah I’m in the US. Garbage internet provider. No issues.
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.
Phone has usually lower latency than internet. Consequence of circuit vs. packet switching.
But otherwise I hate phone as well. Miserable audio quality.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
tight nit group
Bone apple tea!
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.
The same thing happens in IM. It’s just a different set of personalities doing it. There are people that actively chat and bring up ideas to teams all the time. The bonus point about IM is that it can be referenced later on.
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 only ever had ‘coffee breaks’ when I was working in a restaurant. Never in the office.
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.
Ideas don’t come from a coffee break, that’s superstitious nonsense.
You’re not going to sit there, and tell me what my own experience is at my own place of work. Fuck off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The term for this is parasocial relationships, and you have truth to your claims
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Huh, weird. The Twitch chats I hang out with and I tend to use “parasocial” as a term in which people develop a relationship with others that people haven’t really seen or spoken to. I’ve seen them and myself use the term to talk about how chats have relationships with streamers themselves, which aligns with your definition, but I’ve also seen it used between Internet users that have minimal interaction with others aside from texting.
I’ve made friends online via Xbox that I have on other social media and that know my face/voice/background, but I try to secure more of my anonymity these days. I wouldn’t consider those relationships as parasocial, but in some ways, depending on how the relationship evolves and grows or decays over time, I’d say they dip in and out of being parasocial and tangible.
Perhaps parasocial might be better thought of as a class of relationships people share that are digital and that don’t manifest IRL in any meaningful ways (excluding face/voice/identity).
Maybe the idea I’m getting at here has a term coined for it already. I’d be willing to change my vocabulary if you suggest something!
Because they aren’t putting effort into it and neither is the company.
If you can talk to someone you can form a relationship with them. Period. This is not hard to figure out.
Remote culture requires putting effort into it. You have regular online events with the team just for fun and you ask people to stay after the scrum for an open floor once a week or so, etc. You invest in the social aspect of remote work.
Studies can say important things but they can’t contradict lived experience and their methodology can also be flawed or biased.
I’m not limiting this to work.
And of course you can have a relationship with someone remotely.
But overall, for the average person, in-person relationships are going to be stronger. Friends, family, romantic relationships, hobbies, work, you name it.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
Have you read “Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work”? If not, I’d recommend it. It’s frighteningly good.
They’ll have much less when they lose all their customers and have to downsize lol
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.
Ya, this guy is toast. He just told the world he thinks his product sucks - the sane know he’s wrong at least.
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
(It’s definitely not.)
Do you really think any doctors gave a second of thought to patient privacy when they made those decisions?
Everybody was in a tizzy because of COVID so everyone just said “I’ve heard of zoom! Let’s use that! Other people are using it so it must be fine!” And nobody gave a split fucking second of thought to computer security.
They have a HIPAA-compliant version although not sure how secure it really is. In general, companies seem to care more about companies’ privacy than individuals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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The rest of the investor class consider Musk a joke to actually run the companies he owns himself.
Y’all need lessons in reading comprehension. I’m downright amazed anyone is reading my comment as sympathetic towards CEOS. I didn’t say they are average, I said they were working class. As in they’re not the 1%. They have to work a job to make money, at least for a time. Famous actors are working class, too. Hence the strikes. They may be out of touch with the average person but they still have a job to do. GD
You’re not wrong but them being the executive class beholden to the investor class is a pretty big distinction from the rest of the working class that they oversee as a part of their work.
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.
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
Thanks mate. <3
Nah. It’s all still happening. All your coworkers are in a discord. They just didn’t invite you.
Thank God 🙏
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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.
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.
I never socialized with work people before COVID.
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.
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?
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
the same local governments that just raised my property tax by $190/mo?
Go to elec. If there are no good candidates - be good candidate.
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
The real estate market is in shit because it is already heavily regulated.
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.
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.
Zoning is not federal in US
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.
Or Newsom just flat out removing zoning restrictions via state law in Cali.
What a Chad.
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
“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.
ROFL, my family is from multiple countries in Europe. I’ve lived in there for multiple years and my wife is from there. I know all about it because I’ve lived it. You’re a fool if you think people can just own homes or build houses there easily. The home ownership is handed down and most live with parents.
Hell it’s not hard to even find this shit out:
“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.
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.
That’s absolutely not true where I live, so maybe be careful with the generalizations.
Where do you live, because a huge number of families do live in multiple generation houses.
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.
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.
Meanwhile in Russia there is opposite problem: too much housing. And there are a lot of regulations.
And all of those regulations are extractive, but in the opposite direction
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.
I live in Copenhagen, and there are new developments going up every day.
Well, good for you.
The point being that Denmark also has regulations…
“Stock shortage”, lol. Not enough paper being printed causes prices to go up?
Dear god you are the poster child for “confidently incorrect”
I think he meant it as inventory
Ah. Well, we live on different planets. On my planet new appartment costs less than on secondary market. And there is oversupply of housing nobody knows what to do with it.
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.
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.
You’d be wrong. Local homeowners don’t vote on new construction. That’s not how any of that works.
Homeowners absolutely have a say in their local elections, and there are many cases where they’ve directly prevented projects from moving towards.
Local homeowners vote on zoning policy tho so he’s basically being correct, just not about the mechanism.
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.
That happens only in US. Well, you can say that US is more regulated that EU. And then think about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
there might be exceptions. but as a rule tech companies AVOID investing in real estate.
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.
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 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.
It’s a combination of factors with real estate being a key I’ve. Don’t be so naive.
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?
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.
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.
