spending more time trying to internally prove that the product is bad than time spent externally trying to prove it is good is a very strange approach at selling product.
Regardless of Zoom's quality as a video calling platform, the real place that daily collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas happens for remote workers is never video calls anyway IME. It's open-ended, text-based group discussions— not meetings!
Well there's a major difference here. Paying a dev overseas $50,000 a year instead of $180,000 a year could be well worth it even though you incur losses in areas like coordination, community, and communication.
But paying devs $180,000 a year to sit alone 20km away from each other, while they slack and zoom doesn't have the same cost/benefit ratio to consider. You still lose the benefits mentioned above, but don't save anything on costs.
This isn't an argument for or against remote work, but offshoring and WFH have important differences.
Having worked in offices, remotely, and with offshore teams I can say that remote work leads to really bad outcomes from team members who don’t want to be part of the team. Worse than having them in the office.
I think the big part is that, at least in work culture here, that you simply cannot call someone out for not doing their job. There’s no shame. No cost. Nothing to avoid.
There’s performance plans. There’s meetings. There’s never radical intervention that leads to the change needed to have people shit or get off the pot.
This is good financially for these people in the short term but in my experience much worse for their careers in the long term.
WFH would be way easier on us if people had the freedom/were enabled to leave jobs they hate.
Got a guy with a few examples of times where he spent a whole sprint writing just one or two lines of code for some simple task. And in some cases the code didn’t even pass code review because it didn’t even meet the requirements properly.
Probably wouldn’t even work. Imagine getting called up about low performance and instead of responding to it you pull up a list of what everyone else is doing.
If I was their manager, that would be a really bad look for the person.
>I keep a file on my computer with many co-workers names an
I honestly don’t think it’s your mistake to act that way, I think it’s the leadership in there who are not working enough to build enough trust in that work environment so that so you need a CYA folder.
That sounds very toxic. Are you working on your "file" on company time, or are you spending your personal time compiling a case against your own coworkers?
If you're delivering value then you don't need the file, and if you're not, then you should be fired.
I don't want to be a part of your team. I don't want to be a part of any team. Being a part of a team is used as leverage to make me willing to do shit that I'm not paid for. I don't care about you, your kids, your parents, your spouse. If you got hit by a bus tomorrow I wouldn't care. So and so died? Whatever. Why should I care? Let's say we all come together as a team and knock it out what happens? Layoffs and one or more of us have to go. We get a $25 gift card to Starbucks?
If you want me to be a part of the team you have to make that team have meaning and benefit. That I work with you is neither. Those I work with are no more important to me than the shit stain I power washed off the toilet bowl.
If we miss goals? What happens. Nothing. If we hit goals what happens? Maybe the PM and EM will get a small bonus and we're all made to work hard to achieve that level of productivity with no benefit. So, sorry, no, I don't want to be a part of your team.
Yeah... so why are you wherever you are in the first place? To cynically carry out actions as though you aren't just doing what you are railing against anyway?
That's exactly my point. Why be there except for your need of income to be exploited?
I have a job to pay my bills. I do not have a job to play pretend friends with my coworkers who won't give two shits if I get fired, quit, or die in a week. Anything I say to them can and will be used against me in the court of HR. There's no benefit to engaging with them beyond having my time wasted by listening to them talk about their insufferable lives.
Teams are groups of people working together to achieve a common goal where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Any further prescription is management gaslighting.
> You still lose the benefits mentioned above, but don't save anything on costs.
It depends on how you measure the costs of remote... the company I used to work for saved $5 million/year in real estate costs by switching to full remote at the start of covid. That is one thing to consider when comparing remote and on-site costs.
*It took about 2 years to reach those savings as we waited for some leases to expire.
I'd also like to interject that "Productivity" metrics are almost never some kind of efficiency of human potential to create civilization against a hostile universe. They're b(i)ased on what the employer spends.
So even if a study says an employee is X% more "productive" at the office, that means ignoring all the time/money spent commuting, since that's typically shouldered entirely by employees.
So watch out for people conflating "employers get a better deal" with "offices are good for society."
Nevermind that "the 8 hour work day" included your lunch hour at one point. With an average one-way commute of 30 minutes for my state (California), here's basically 2 hours of on-the-clock time you aren't getting paid for.
My company does this. if i start work at 7 i can stop at 3, 8-4, etc. Before we went widely WFH if you were in the office for 8 hours that was it. People ought to have been pushing back on the whole “8 hours is actually 9 hours” years ago.
You can save on costs by spending less money on on office space in favor of team events.
You can also save money with hiring and retention due to happier employees.
Offshore is a reasonable comparison. Virtually all offshore implementations that I have observed result in at least one employee being forced into becoming an offshore orchestrator. Everyone now has to play telephone with the offshore dev through this channel. Even if they could contact them directly, you have a one day communication lag because you only get one shot a day to have a one hour sync with the offshore team. In bad scenarios, the offshore team has all communication channeled through the local team lead creating yet another layer and further communication lag. The point here is that engineering teams have been communicating how this issue is detrimental for years. We saw WFH work in a forced experiment (and had a lot of data about improved productivity). It is obviously not a direct comparison, but the egregious nature of blind positivity towards offshore and blind negativity towards WFH makes the comparison relevant.
You know what would be cool? If some company would fix those remote working problems instead of forcing people to work in place.
But I guess it's not their job.
Maybe I’ll take flak for this. I feel like Slack and kin have done the best job here for providing remote collaboration tools.
I feel much more productive in write-first teams. Meetings can be done over Zoom then, and they’re always short and productive. Anything works at that point.
Company: we have "connectedness" issues with remote work
Everyone: what have you tried?
Company: Nothing, it didn't work, and we are out of ideas. Back to the office.
Genuinely, all these companies raising issues with training, and collaboration, and connection, but in the last 3 years have put zero effort to address these issues with respect to remote work so they throw the baby with the bath water and force people to return.
It would be like if McDonalds acknowledged that cheeseburgers are not a complete diet. It’s true and we all know it but that doesn’t reduce their value. Video calls are still going to be required for cross company and cross city communication because it’s better than nothing.
Why is that incongruous? I bet the McDonald's CEO doesn't think you should eat it at every meal. It has a place. It would actually be a lot weirder or untenable if he advocated moving all work to zoom.
People here are obviously working backwards from a strong desire to work from home. It's not worth your time to take the specific arguments literally or seriously. It's a community of severe introverts I guess, I don't consider it representative of the greater culture.
If the workplace sucks, as most do right now, there's about three options for what to do:
1. Force out the people who are making it suck. This is difficult with how managers are trained nowadays, never to take sides even if one party is clearly a drag on the group. Shunning and isolation are options, but ones very hard to keep up without support. If it's the manager who is the bad influence, you might as well be trying to shame a baron out of owning a castle.
2. Stop caring about work. Phone it in. Don't care anymore.
3. Don't be present physically in that environment.
Of course people want to work from home when every interaction is unpleasant, when management is badgering you into doing things. It also saves on transportation cost, cost of caring for family, every single thing that an employer likes to pretend is not their cost to pay. It's not about people being naturally 'introverted' or 'extroverted,' it's about the social environment everyone, including management, creates around them.
I've tried options 2 and 3 and I prefer spending my time working instead of constantly having to look busy. Remote work (aside from the obvious life and time benefits) in my experience has forced management to evaluate performance based on output and not bums on seats.Change is scary but I don't think this is going away anytime soon.
I totally see your point, but fast food is probably not the best choice. Every fast food CEO makes a point about how often they eat the food and how often their execs eat it.
Every fast food company has a "flagship" store near the HQ, often for the purpose of being seen eating there.
You can google around for the stories and photo ops. :)
But yes, not every CEO believes their product should be used all the time. But most of them at least believe in the core benefit they claim their product provides.
Given that Zoom is paid for monthly but accrues costs by the use, maybe they want to lower the average use of the product to save money. Like how people subscribed to HBO just for GoT.
If CEOs had their way, even the janitors and helpdesk would be "innovative" and they need to bounce ideas off of each other most of the day to do that.
I swear, it isn't just CEOs but most humans just cannot fathom or think of others as living in a completely different headspace. The opposite end is service workers thinking CEOs are overpaid because they sit in a nice office and order people around.
Never wish another person's turd out your arsehole as george washington put it.
The problem with remote work is management not employees.
ICs job is literally to work not to come up with innovative new ideas to advance the company. Thats what MANAGERS AND EXECUTIVES ARE SUPPOSED TO DO and the ICs implement those ideas.
For some reason it's expected now for IC s to be doing managements jobs and for that reason they need to be coming into the office for collaboration?
The managers and executives are the ones who meed to be going into the office to collaborate.
Good management would come up with the ideas and efficiently break it down so that ICs can take the work and run with it no collaboration needed.
No this is all about control and 'cultural fit' shaming to fear people into doing their jobs rather than being a good manager that is capable of distributing work in an efficient way and treating people in a way that people are inspired to do great work for you a thousand miles away even without any supervision.
It's a lot more difficult to be a manager that people follow out of respect and love vs a manager people follow out of fear and constant monitoring.
I believe Eric is right. It's often the moments before or after the scheduled meeting when the side conversations happen that build relationships. Sometimes the insight comes 20 minutes after the meeting ends and you walk up to the person at their desk and keep going (even though there is no scheduled meeting). These things are still possible remotely over zoom, but they don't hit the same. In 3 years I think I've answered 3 zoom cold calls (from people I knew). The real value to the company of being in office is unstructured time together.
All that said, I fall into the camp of lets get in-person together once a quarter to plan and then execute remotely. We can meet up occasionally in between somewhere awesome (not in an office).
What if I don't really want to get to know my colleagues? What if I literally just want to do my work, and have as little of the other benign work shit in my life?
I kind of see getting to know my colleagues as the same as having to commute an hour into work each day. It's just shit I don't want to spend my time on.
That only works if the team is all in the same office. When everyone is in the same office RTO makes a ton of sense.
When people are spread across multiple offices and all your meetings are on video calls anyway, it's really hard to justify RTO.
And this even applies within the same city. Google has so many offices just in the Bay Area they end up having video calls with local people because it's better than taking a shuttle to another office (same with Apple/Amazon/Meta/etc.)
Totally agreed. This is the part that makes RTO mandates make no sense to me. When I worked in an office, we would video call instead of going up two floors
This would be so easy to solve with the right software. I'm amazed that even after years of pandemic all the solutions I'm aware of are still such crap.
Discord is pretty good at this (channels, not calls), but there are probably even better paradigms (there still has to be a way to participate in multiple conversations at once).
Part of the magic of in person interactions is that it’s all off record. You can say what you really think, share things that are private.
Meanwhile MS Teams wants to put LLMs in their products to scan DMs for problematic thinking. If corporations want to record and scan everything I say, I just won’t say anything anymore.
Hiding what you really think because you management won't like what you have to say is the reason a bunch of problems go unchecked in almost every company I've ever been in.
People should be able to say what they think in any situation without the fear of reprisals.
But it doesn't work that way because management often can't take criticism and so you're left with back channels and politics to get things done.
This is a management problem and a culture problem not a problem with working from home or not.
I don't know about you, but in our org (which has a large portion of permanent WFH-ers) I slack someone for a bit, and if they have time (confirmed by viewing their availability on the calendar) we /zoom and chat it up.
No doubt in-hall and water-cooler discussions provide some spice to the drudgery of the work, but for me the biggest challenge of office work is the commute.
So I'm kinda ok with hybrid/flex where 2-3 days are in office. I'm also ok with all the folks who are perma-WFH as long as they are responsive.
Yeah, that's why I really appreciate that my teams meets for a few days every couple of months to plan ahead, it's a great time to know my colleagues better and it improves collaboration when working remotely.
But if someone told me to RTO, I would quit on the same day. There is no way I will work in an office ever again. My employer buys my time, not my body.
It's missing from sales, too. Once upon a time, as a salesperson who needed to travel to meet with potential clients, you'd also spend time outside the office - maybe you'd take the client to dinner, maybe the client would host you for a home-cooked meal. It gave you a chance to build rapport with the client and truly understand them and their needs. You'd come to understand when a client was squeezing you for a discount because they legitimately needed one to make the deal happen, versus a client trying to get a discount so that they'll look better to their boss.
When vendor discussions move entirely to Zoom, everything is empty platitudes and keeping the relationship purely transactional. Something is missing. People make up their minds to buy before reaching out, or ghost you when they're no longer interested. The salesperson is just a point-of-contact answering questions and shuttling order forms and contracts. Nobody has a chance to work to earn someone's business anymore.
Zoom is leading the enshittification of the sales process.
Honestly how many companies are actually innovating, most of the time people are just imitating. I don’t use Zoom but have used Microsoft Teams for the last few years and basically nothing has changed in the app. All their “innovation” is just junk features that they remove from the app 3 months later. They have all this data on how people use the app. How haven’t I improved my productivity at work 10x using this app everyday?
This is not the first or the last case of CEOs not using/trusting their own products, Zuckerberg covering the camera, Jobs banning his kids from using iPads, Gates limiting his kids’ tech use, and list goes on.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadWhat is Zoom using internally for chat?
But paying devs $180,000 a year to sit alone 20km away from each other, while they slack and zoom doesn't have the same cost/benefit ratio to consider. You still lose the benefits mentioned above, but don't save anything on costs.
This isn't an argument for or against remote work, but offshoring and WFH have important differences.
Language barriers, dialects, and social norms can all be quite different when offshoring.
The local worker, even if they are working from home, is still more in sync culturally (presumably, maybe you hire some real weirdos).
Having worked in offices, remotely, and with offshore teams I can say that remote work leads to really bad outcomes from team members who don’t want to be part of the team. Worse than having them in the office.
I think the big part is that, at least in work culture here, that you simply cannot call someone out for not doing their job. There’s no shame. No cost. Nothing to avoid.
There’s performance plans. There’s meetings. There’s never radical intervention that leads to the change needed to have people shit or get off the pot.
This is good financially for these people in the short term but in my experience much worse for their careers in the long term.
WFH would be way easier on us if people had the freedom/were enabled to leave jobs they hate.
I keep a file on my computer with many co-workers names and lists of things they’ve done to fuck up or times they didn’t do any work just in case.
If you publicize that list, you are likely to destroy yourself.
Nukes are an effective deterrent only if people think you have them (and think you might use them).
If I was their manager, that would be a really bad look for the person.
I honestly don’t think it’s your mistake to act that way, I think it’s the leadership in there who are not working enough to build enough trust in that work environment so that so you need a CYA folder.
If you're delivering value then you don't need the file, and if you're not, then you should be fired.
garbage in, garbage out.
If you want me to be a part of the team you have to make that team have meaning and benefit. That I work with you is neither. Those I work with are no more important to me than the shit stain I power washed off the toilet bowl.
If we miss goals? What happens. Nothing. If we hit goals what happens? Maybe the PM and EM will get a small bonus and we're all made to work hard to achieve that level of productivity with no benefit. So, sorry, no, I don't want to be a part of your team.
That's exactly my point. Why be there except for your need of income to be exploited?
It depends on how you measure the costs of remote... the company I used to work for saved $5 million/year in real estate costs by switching to full remote at the start of covid. That is one thing to consider when comparing remote and on-site costs.
*It took about 2 years to reach those savings as we waited for some leases to expire.
I'd also like to interject that "Productivity" metrics are almost never some kind of efficiency of human potential to create civilization against a hostile universe. They're b(i)ased on what the employer spends.
So even if a study says an employee is X% more "productive" at the office, that means ignoring all the time/money spent commuting, since that's typically shouldered entirely by employees.
So watch out for people conflating "employers get a better deal" with "offices are good for society."
You can also save money with hiring and retention due to happier employees.
Offshore is a reasonable comparison. Virtually all offshore implementations that I have observed result in at least one employee being forced into becoming an offshore orchestrator. Everyone now has to play telephone with the offshore dev through this channel. Even if they could contact them directly, you have a one day communication lag because you only get one shot a day to have a one hour sync with the offshore team. In bad scenarios, the offshore team has all communication channeled through the local team lead creating yet another layer and further communication lag. The point here is that engineering teams have been communicating how this issue is detrimental for years. We saw WFH work in a forced experiment (and had a lot of data about improved productivity). It is obviously not a direct comparison, but the egregious nature of blind positivity towards offshore and blind negativity towards WFH makes the comparison relevant.
You must read a different HN than I do
I feel much more productive in write-first teams. Meetings can be done over Zoom then, and they’re always short and productive. Anything works at that point.
Genuinely, all these companies raising issues with training, and collaboration, and connection, but in the last 3 years have put zero effort to address these issues with respect to remote work so they throw the baby with the bath water and force people to return.
The Friday afternoon beer call was funny and entertaining during covid but it’s worn thin and people want to physically meet up again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner#Career
1. Force out the people who are making it suck. This is difficult with how managers are trained nowadays, never to take sides even if one party is clearly a drag on the group. Shunning and isolation are options, but ones very hard to keep up without support. If it's the manager who is the bad influence, you might as well be trying to shame a baron out of owning a castle.
2. Stop caring about work. Phone it in. Don't care anymore.
3. Don't be present physically in that environment.
Of course people want to work from home when every interaction is unpleasant, when management is badgering you into doing things. It also saves on transportation cost, cost of caring for family, every single thing that an employer likes to pretend is not their cost to pay. It's not about people being naturally 'introverted' or 'extroverted,' it's about the social environment everyone, including management, creates around them.
Actually, he does (well 10 meals a week):
https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-ceo-eats-every-week/
Every fast food company has a "flagship" store near the HQ, often for the purpose of being seen eating there.
You can google around for the stories and photo ops. :)
But yes, not every CEO believes their product should be used all the time. But most of them at least believe in the core benefit they claim their product provides.
Zoom never said video calls are the best way to work.
They said video calls offer a level of globally distributed collaboration unprecedented in history. And that’s true.
https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-ceo-eats-every-week/
I swear, it isn't just CEOs but most humans just cannot fathom or think of others as living in a completely different headspace. The opposite end is service workers thinking CEOs are overpaid because they sit in a nice office and order people around.
Never wish another person's turd out your arsehole as george washington put it.
ICs job is literally to work not to come up with innovative new ideas to advance the company. Thats what MANAGERS AND EXECUTIVES ARE SUPPOSED TO DO and the ICs implement those ideas.
For some reason it's expected now for IC s to be doing managements jobs and for that reason they need to be coming into the office for collaboration?
The managers and executives are the ones who meed to be going into the office to collaborate.
Good management would come up with the ideas and efficiently break it down so that ICs can take the work and run with it no collaboration needed.
No this is all about control and 'cultural fit' shaming to fear people into doing their jobs rather than being a good manager that is capable of distributing work in an efficient way and treating people in a way that people are inspired to do great work for you a thousand miles away even without any supervision.
It's a lot more difficult to be a manager that people follow out of respect and love vs a manager people follow out of fear and constant monitoring.
All that said, I fall into the camp of lets get in-person together once a quarter to plan and then execute remotely. We can meet up occasionally in between somewhere awesome (not in an office).
I kind of see getting to know my colleagues as the same as having to commute an hour into work each day. It's just shit I don't want to spend my time on.
For you, your local optimum may be great, but global optimum for the company as a whole may not. And vice versa.
When people are spread across multiple offices and all your meetings are on video calls anyway, it's really hard to justify RTO.
And this even applies within the same city. Google has so many offices just in the Bay Area they end up having video calls with local people because it's better than taking a shuttle to another office (same with Apple/Amazon/Meta/etc.)
Discord is pretty good at this (channels, not calls), but there are probably even better paradigms (there still has to be a way to participate in multiple conversations at once).
Meanwhile MS Teams wants to put LLMs in their products to scan DMs for problematic thinking. If corporations want to record and scan everything I say, I just won’t say anything anymore.
People should be able to say what they think in any situation without the fear of reprisals.
But it doesn't work that way because management often can't take criticism and so you're left with back channels and politics to get things done.
This is a management problem and a culture problem not a problem with working from home or not.
No doubt in-hall and water-cooler discussions provide some spice to the drudgery of the work, but for me the biggest challenge of office work is the commute.
So I'm kinda ok with hybrid/flex where 2-3 days are in office. I'm also ok with all the folks who are perma-WFH as long as they are responsive.
But if someone told me to RTO, I would quit on the same day. There is no way I will work in an office ever again. My employer buys my time, not my body.
When vendor discussions move entirely to Zoom, everything is empty platitudes and keeping the relationship purely transactional. Something is missing. People make up their minds to buy before reaching out, or ghost you when they're no longer interested. The salesperson is just a point-of-contact answering questions and shuttling order forms and contracts. Nobody has a chance to work to earn someone's business anymore.
Zoom is leading the enshittification of the sales process.