A company that achieved success due to people having to WFH are now forcing staff back in to the office
Somebody should tell them about that software you can use for video teleconferences in case that opens up options for remote work. Can’t remember what it’s called though.
Teams, right?
The one that is going to use all the data for AI training? They are not that stupid. ;-)
To be fair, I’m certain they have a way to, like, exclude internal conversations from that. They’d be foolish not to have a system to disable collection on some accounts/calls
They rolled out encryption a while back, they wouldn’t have access to fully encrypted ones anyways
Google meet?
No, those types of apps are obviously not useful for remote work, or else they would use one. Back to work.
That’s just bad PR. I can’t imagine the potential profits are worth the risk.
It’s been proven over and over remote work retains top talent and makes people better at their work. And the “productivity loss” is covered by the fact that people maybe get less done in eight hours, but work longer to make up for the productivity they lost to taking more breaks.
But American capitalism has to remind the workers that their misery is part of the point.
I’m not sure there is any productivity loss, I work way more efficiently at home
If you had kids, pets, etc, you might find yourself taking more breaks. But breaks are probably good for productivity too…
My kids are less distracting than the folks who walk into my office to chat while I’m in a working session. “Are you in a meeting? Yes? Oh well, You should have seen…”
A quiet desk with your dog next to you or… soul-crushing commute and a noisy office?
Gee, I wonder why people are generally more productive at home?
Especially with the expansion of the open office… Ugh. I’ve avoided it for most of my career and I hope to never go back to an official office unless it has a door on it.
Plus there’s a multitude of studies showing that people work far less than 8 hours a day, even if they are physically present at the job. I doubt productivity actually drops at all.
I worked in a government office that supported a very seasonal industry.
My coworker had an 8:30 start and would be done her work by 9.
Other times we wouldn’t have time in the day to finish, but the slow season was hell.
Pomodoro babyyyyy
Same. Guy that sits behind me in the office has an average speaking volume of 78 decibels. Yes, I pulled out a sound meter one day because he is so goddamn loud. And I’m stuck in an open floor plan with him.
If you’re in the US, depending on the pitch of his voice, you might genuinely have a hearing safety concern.
https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1910/1910.95
The productivity loss takes place at the office. You go from being able to solve problems all day to having Susie Homemaker and Joe Blob wanting to talk to you about the sportsball event when you’re in the middle of super complicated logic. You go from being able to use the restroom 30 seconds from your desk to walking 10 minutes to get to the closest one at the office. You go from making a quick sandwich and then getting back to work, to driving miles away to find something decent to eat. Every engineer I know is more productive at home.
More likely, they’ve reached critical mass and are now using this as a downsizing move. They know a % will quit. Will reduce the number they have to float until eventual layoffs.
Aren’t they risking losing their most talented workers doing that? I assume they can more easily find jobs providing the flexibility they’re looking for.
I work in tech, at one of the big tech companies (the Rainforest one).
The dirty little secret of tech is that you don’t need the best engineers. You just need people that are “good enough”, and that bar varies wildly across all of tech. I’ve worked with senior engineers from Google that absolutely crumbled outside of building Python web apps, and recent grads in LCOL areas that are better in all areas.
Alongside this, many tier 1 services in big tech are propped up by mid-level engineers. Depending on the company and org, you’d be shocked at how little coding some software engineers actually do, because they’re attending WBR’s, building review decks, running all scrum ceremonies, even responsible for multimillion dollar team budgets. Again, many of these people aren’t particularly talented compared to your standard engineer.
You’re absolutely right, but I doubt any big tech company cares. They want to reduce human cost as much as possible, and if that means letting everyone that knows how shit works go, and hiring new grads to keep your systems alive, so be it.
This only works for so long, then the company hires an MSP which does have top notch engineers and they run it like that for a decade before bringing it back in house. The cycle has always been like this. They did it in 08-11 when a ton of companies laid off their devs and shipped the jobs to code farms in India…then half a decade later when the code was like a house of cards, rehired top talent back in house to fix it all. The cycle will continue, it’s just the way CEOs who aren’t there long term for the company think. Short term profits, aka kick the can down the road to the next guy.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a fucking stupid approach, as do ~90% of IC’s at these companies.
Someone at Amazon put it nicely when they’ve said that there’s a rise in “belief-driven” leadership in tech right now. Instead of following the data and asking people what they want, we’re seeing tech leaders position themselves as visionaries, and making market-changing decisions on gut feeling. It’s absolutely a series a short-term decisions, and all they care about is what they think, and how it’ll save their skin for the next 3-6 months.
Oh man thank you for that phrase. “belief driven leadership” is exactly what’s happening there right now. Spot on. I’m so close to finding somewhere else to work but my immediate leadership thinks the RTO is bullshit as well. However I know they can’t hold off forever.
If I hear “magic” One more fucking time in a town hall meeting…
I have never seen an MSP with top-notch engineers. I worked for a fairly nice one and we were pretty average.
I’ve worked most of my career with msps and yes there are a lot of the lower level guys which are more for triage than fixing anything and they’re average, but the higher levels all have top notch engineers usually. Don’t get me wrong, there will always be those who squeezed by and made it higher but most who are higher up the food chain have a lot of experience from tons of different environments.
Thing is, us “good enough” engineers want to wfh too, and we’re willing to walk because of it
That’s very shortsighted though. One great engineer is worth 10 mediocre engineers, especially when you factor in the time required to manage them. But I’ve never built a trillion dollar company before, so I’m probably not qualified to say that my ideas are better.
Guess who gets exceptions to the policy?
Oh what irony
Yeah, you would think a company that would promote remote working would be company that creates tools for remote working.
These people only care about the supposed “productivity loss” that is supposedly introduced from remote work.
Studies have literally done nothing but show that people are just as or more productive wfh than in office
Absolutely, but that’s the myth they’re pushing. Really what is going on here is, if remote work became the norm, suddenly all these companies would have huge empty offices that nobody wants to buy because everyone would be trying to offload their unnecessary office space. In the short term, a small productivity hit is nothing compared to multi-million dollar real estate instantly having its value slashed in half.
It’s incredibly short sighted decision making only if you assume the leadership actually cares about the company. When you have a golden parachute guaranteeing you escape the companies implosion unharmed, there’s no reason to think about the long term, you can just keep stacking short term profit shit up and glide away safely when it finally collapses.
Yeah… It sucks that companies have no responsibility to make working for them good or even to be environmentally conscious
Absolutely agreed
it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh. HEY!
Is their software so bad that they can’t even use it for its intended purpose?
I personally really don’t like zoom. Apparently still useful for mass layoff calls
In a company meeting yesterday, by any chance?
Why was it even popular in the first place?
This is so deliciously hypocritical.
This is on top of the changes to their Terms of Service that enables them to use anything on your calls to train their AI and scrap any customer data.
I know a lot of therapists and doctors that use Zoom…
Where is Zoom even HQed? These articles are shitty.
Quick search says San Jose, California.
This is just epic shortsightedness.
