“With more people in the office, we are in a better position to use our own technologies”??? What? Do they actually know what their product is?
When you don’t have a good reason for something but you also don’t have to justify your actions, this is the kind of dumb shit you throw at the wall to just make the conversation end.
“Middle management are feeling fragile and insecure and solving that matters more than actual productivity, especially for a company who has a share price history that you could ride a sled down”. There’s a real reason if you want one.
Execs are no doubt panicking because the infinite growth they’ve promised as a result of their 2020 finances is starting to look unlikely and they need excuses to cut down on employees
Yup, RTO policies are basically just to reduce headcount without the headlines being “zoom lays off 30% of it’s workforce”
i genuinely dont see who thought that would be worse than ‘zoom has no faith in own product, tells staff to come to office so dont need to use it’
every company at stages goes through layoffs and its always a bad few days of news but shareholders can be placated. what scares them off is a company saying their product is shit
Previously, they can’t test in production because if it cause an outage, zoom employees must use Google Meets to coordinate a fix. If their employees are all in the office, they can push directly to production without fear of being locked out, therefore increasing productivity. /s
Management doesn’t know how to deal with it. And instead of research something that would indubitably benefit everyone else, and in this case it includes not only workers, but also customers and even their fucking business model… They go back to a place of false comfort for themselves. That’s the sign of a sinking ship if I ever saw one.
I don’t understand why managers or anybody really, would care what the fuck I’m doing as long as the work is getting done.
Because, at least from my software dev perspective, if upper management realizes how easy it would be to make someone on the team a “team lead” pay them a smidge more and then use metric tools to make sure stuff got done there would be no need for middle managers.
I work for a fortune 500, tons of beauracracy, and the people always moaning about people being in the office are most often the least useful people in the building. Lording over people’s cubes “keeping tabs” is seen as a way to tell their bosses they are valuable.
Ive said it so many times to my boss who is on my side and has fought for me to WFH: “If I stop working you will know it instantly, things won’t work and besides theres an entire dashboard I have to self report my progress to which again I can lie on for a bit, but will be obvious if I do so longer than a week”.
There’s also another factor of the sunk cost fallacy, many corps own buildings or are on long leases, leaving them empty looks like a massive waste of money even though tbh leaving them empty by my assessment would actually save them money.
Can you provide any additional information on the “monitoring system”. Is it simple “check-ins” with your managers, or more technology dependent where everything is tracked as if someone is standing over your shoulder.
Maybe the world"s remote workers should avoid Zoom since it isn’t even good enough for Zoom to use.
I suspect that’s actually part of the problem. Zoom is being ditched for teams left and right - so many enterprise companies already have Office on all their machines on the network. Why would they continue to pay for zoom (who I believe jacked up their prices to capitalize on the COVID influx) when teams is included in their software suite and serves the exact same function, with additional functionality? Not saying teams is as good/better/worse than zoom, but it serves the same purpose. There are also concerns over zooms security, which isn’t helped by a huge inrease in cyber attacks just about everywhere - that’s also very problematic for zoom since Teams already requires MFA through authenticator to help prevent the latter.
The Zoom peak declining combined with a competitor rapidly growing means they’re losing money, and of course the only solution to that is to force employees back into the office. I mean what else could you possibly do? There’s simply no other solution to this problem. They’ve tried nothing so far and it hasn’t worked so, really theor hand has been forced.
Lol it’s funny how you compare the safety of Teams vs Zoom when there is currently a targeted cyber attack of like 50 different US agencies using Teams as the vector.
Wow that’s not a good look tbh. Pretty shitty leadership if they can’t even spin it.
That’s a good way to lose all your top talent.
Don’t let it fool you, they’ll make exceptions to the rule for the ones they want to keep. This is just a way to make their “worst” performers miserable so they quit instead of laying them off. All the shit tech companies are doing it.
As a datapoint from the other side, my company (big tech) is holding the party line no matter what. Lower level engineer or director - if you don’t come in the requisite number of days a week, you’re out. It’s a bafflingly short-sighted move, but company culture is more important than anything apparently.
This really depends. You would think that a company would know who it’s top performers are, but if you are engineer who is more than two managers away from C suite, chances are the person who decides to end your job doesn’t know or give a shit who you are, they just know that your salary is among the higher end. If a company wants to attract top talent they can always do so later
