Technology

Ice cream factory urges its employees not to eat ice cream.

Zoom CEO says that his companies product is trash.

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.

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.

They should try using Teams, should solve the problem.

Glad I'm not a stockholder, since the CEO basically says their only product, remote connectivity, stifles innovation and connection. What a world.

CEO can't even eat its own dog food. How pathetic

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.

Well that was an impressive way to destroy your entire business model

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?

Ya, this guy is toast. He just told the world he thinks his product sucks - the sane know he's wrong at least.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Someone is getting tired of paying for HVAC, electricity, and plumbing for a vacant office building 😢

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

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

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.