“Let’s push EVs to help the environment.”
Also: “Let’s make everyone go back into the office.”
Commuting for jobs that can be effectively done remotely is such an egregious waste of resources and time.
Remember how much less pollution there was during COVID when everyone was working from home?
Look also shipping went down and a few other things. That should also be permanent, we have alternatives but we keep doing the same bullshit for some reason.
If they’re being wasted, someone is buying them in order to waste them. That’s a win as far as they are concerned.
From what I’ve learned by working in top heavy product teams vs slimmer developer teams. The basis for this “in-office leads to productivity” mentality is:
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People who’s job uses meetings as their main tool, want these meetings to be in person, and push for a lot of otherwise unnecessary meetings. These meetings, are, of course, more effectively conducted in person.
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People who’s job is ultimately to do the work, want to avoid unnecessary meeting. The work that needs doing, can be done more effectively, with fewer distractions, higher quality of life, less environmental impact from the commute, etc, from home.
The pandemic showed that productivity increased when people worked from home. What you can deduce from that, would be unpleasant for all those in the former category.
My wife would be in the former category (PO for the biggest software product in her company). Some days she has meetings back to back for 8h straight.
She hates in person meetings. According to her:
- Online/hybrid meetings are easier to keep on schedule (both starts and finishes are often delayed)
- In person meetings more often go off topic
- back to back meetings means going from one meeting room to another in person, sometimes in another building. That same time can instead be used to take notes/prepare the next meeting when you don’t have to walk anywhere and just click a button to be In the next call
- when a meeting turns out to be irrelevant or useless to you, it is socially not acceptable to get up and leave. Just not having your camera on and doing other work on the side works without anyone knowing
In person work is only for when companies don’t trust their employees. This is also true for people whose main work tool is meetings.
back to back meetings means going from one meeting room to another in person, sometimes in another building
Lol I used to work as a contractor for a small company at the Comcast Center HQ in Philadelphia. We had the gig producing Comcast’s mobile apps. One day my boss emailed me and said we were going to meet with Time Warner Cable to talk about handling their mobile apps as well. When he showed up I started to put my coat on and he said “what are you doing?” We then took the elevator up to the 16th floor … where TWC had an actual suite of fucking offices in the Comcast Center. The subsequent announcement of the merger between Comcast and TWC was no surprise to me, at least.
She sounds like a great PO. Especially if she is aware and encourages that last point.
I’m currently losing my mind where going to the office is being praised on a weekly basis as this excellent way to increase productivity. At the same time as I’m spending about 90% of time on meetings. They don’t realise that the underlying problem is a dysfunctional management, and exactly what you’re describing, as a trust issue. More than half the meetings are unnecessary, and disguised micromanagement.
Yes and no. There’s a certain amount of passive communication that you.miss out when you’re isolated from a team environment. A good team can mitigate this, however, by advocating regular group water-coolers and voice calls / screen-shares rather than emails or teams messages to get or deliver info. Getting a random teams call from a team member is not much different from them scooting their chair over to you.
I’m a huge advocate of letting people work how they are most happy. Some people like office, some like home. Just let people do their thing and figure out how to make it work. If we force people to work within a system that doesn’t suit them then you lose out on acquiring good talent and will hemorrhage the talent you have.
I agree with all of what you wrote. I even think having a couple of fixed days a week where it is encouraged to meet at the office, is also helpful. Personally, I go to the office whenever I need social stimuli, and I’m not overloaded with work.
This is a class war of sorts, between middle management and the workers.
Got it.
Not really. Maybe it is the case in general. In my experience the distinction is more between useless and useful, and not so much “class”. At least the engineers are better paid. Or, I really do hope they are.
Company I work for, middle management is mostly unhappy about forced in office too, it’s only the directors and above that are forcing RTO. Even a lot of the directors I knew preferred wfh
This company is fucked tho, they refuse to change and have an insane amount of tech debt and inefficiencies in processes.
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Microsoft Teams is such a bad product that Microsoft needs all engineers back in the office 😂
Microsoft Everything is such a bad product that Microsoft needs all engineers to work somewhere else. Finally, the corporate tendency to fire fucking everyone makes sense.
They are right. Teams sucks.
Nevertheless, in-office sucks far, far worse.
WFH was the only good thing that covid brought, so ofc they wanna take that away.
WFH is good. Teams sucks. I feel like there HAS to be something, anything better because Teams simply can’t be the best there is.
It would have been nice if people tried getting virtual schooling to work right. I think every place should have that as a real, public option.
At least they’re finally being honest about Teams. Now they can fix it…right?..they will fix it right?
If by “fix” you mean “insert a buy premium Teams now!” button, then sure.
Teams is inferior to contracting Herpes, it’s a low bar
I’d like to trade my having to use Teams for 1 herpes, please and thank you.
I get the lip kind. You would probably prefer to use Teams.
The number of times I have canceled plans last minute because of this embarrassment is too damn high!
Yeah at least teams will be abandoned software eventually.
Management lives in a fantasy world of vibes and bullshit. They don’t care about the workers, the product, or the users. They are insulated from consequences.
The mega corporations need to be broken up, and replaced by smaller, worker-owned, organizations.
I work for a fairly large company and I’m constantly surprised by how much shit I do just does not matter. Me and a coworker have been working on a large project and have had to push it back several times now so that we are almost 3 months behind at this point and there are 0 consequences because none of the bigwigs are affected by it. Then as soon as someone high enough on the chain decides to give a shit half or organization will be expected to drop everything else and get it done.
Last year I busted my ass on a project with a pricetag measured in millions. 6 months later as we were finalizing the build and about to present it to the stakeholders was the moment executive leadership changed their minds and decided they didn’t want it after all. We shelved the code and will probably never use it for anything else because it was extremely specific to that project, so unless someone in executive leadership decides they want the same thing again, it’s just millions spent for literally nothing
I used to work for Comcast on their suite of mobile apps. The whole thing was just a giant fucking scam, but one aimed at the C-suite. Customers didn’t actually use the apps, they just installed them so they could get a (temporary) discount on their cable bills. The installed apps pinged our servers once a day and these were counted as “daily users”. Millions of dollars a year for absolutely fucking nothing. The C-suite eventually caught on and cancelled everything, but I was long gone by that point.
Corporate: “Everyone must be in office to encourage in-person discussion and cross-team collaboration.”
Also Corporate: “Is this discussion documented anywhere?”No, you twat. It was discussed in person.
Zoom also makes their folks work on site.
Guess they don’t like their own dog food
Yeah the company my BIL works at wanted the IT staff to drive into the office, to then login remotely to customer servers. Go figure.
Let the punishment fit the crime
“As an example, if Josh says something stupid over Teams, I can’t throw a water bottle at him.”
i can text josh’s wife “hey i’ll pay you a fiver to huck a water bottle at him” though and it’ll get done, she’s a keeper
It’s the developer way. Being in office means that the team will never live with the consequences of their shit code. They’ll never fix the 10 things that annoy people every day because they don’t use it. But hey, at least they can all go to lunch together.
Realistically, Teams would still get tons of use from people using the IM function so they don’t have to leave their desk, and the video chat function to facilitate meetings between coworkers in different offices.
at least they can all go to lunch together.
Until they get a new manager who decides they have to stagger their lunch breaks
Teams killed my parents.
This fundamentally cannot be a true story. The ms software teams are spread out all over the world.
Oh boy, I had to start coming back into the office because “more collaborative in person” the entire rest of my time what I managed was several thousand miles away. I had to come in to work remotely.
Easy fix: Use Slack and everyone will instantly be more happy and productive.
They don’t even dogfood their own technology. Why should you pay for their stuff?
Advocating person to person contact for higher productivity, while at the same time celebrating less personal contact because A.I. can take over support calls.
The data does not bear out the assertion that it’s actually higher productivity. They just don’t want to pay for empty real estate. It’s a sunk cost fallacy.
Advocating person to person contact
😏
Seriously, what are my options if I want to migrate to something less insane? Our small team today uses Teams, SharePoint and many of the MS 365 Business Premium tools they offer.
Here’s the thing… I work in IT and… As much as many people don’t want to hear it, Microsoft puts everything in one basket, and makes it easy to access and handle that basket.
You could go with gsuite/Google workspaces, and they have a lot of competing tools, like drive, meet, chat, Gmail, and their own office style suite.
Beyond that, you’re going to start breaking up services between providers. Dropbox, email, zoom, etc… Each with their own logins per member of the team, increasing complexity exponentially… Unless you can federate all your logins with someone, but the major players in business-ready, federated logins is… Microsoft, Google, and companies like Ookla, of all people.
Which isn’t to say anything about the compatibility issues with federation, and the complexity of setting it up when it works.
I struggled through trying to get federation working between a lot of different solutions and I’ll just say, the whole thing is a nightmare, unless it’s designed to go together from the start. You only get that if you go all in on one provider… Like Microsoft 365.
People can say what they want, but Microsoft has taken their decades of experience making active directory, scaled it up to azure active directory (now entra ID), and built a full scale cloud service suite with everything fully integrated, and bluntly, simple to deploy by comparison. In the past, there were quite a few services, apps, programs, etc that directly interfaced with AD. Now that same functionality is a part of the foundations of entra.
If you don’t mind self hosting Mattermost is a pretty great replacement. Comes with some neat productivity tools and integrates with a lot of services including Microsoft stuff.
You can even have a bridge to Teams so you can set it up for the sort of nerds who appreciate full Markdown support with syntax highlighting.
To sell it to your boss, just say “If Teams is down, how will we get it working again?”
My last company went to Zoom, funny enough, months before COVID hit and we all went WFH. I was the administrator and was thrilled with it. We used Google for identity management, clicked right in with some simple setup. Not sure how it plays with your MS ecosystem, but I’d bet money it’s every bit as easy to tie your MS accounts to it.
We had a few clients and vendors that would suck us into Teams and Google meets and they fucking sucked. I honestly can’t remember a single complaint I had with Zoom’s software. Tech support was superb at the start, dropped drastically once they exploded in size with WFH and COVID. No idea how it stands now.
I always loved slack. Unless something changed in the past few years it’s great.
Google Chat is… acceptable. But its still invasive.
