End of an era: Zoom tells employees to return to office for work
The tech company blew up as one of the main means of communication for people forced to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I guess this could just as easily be posted in an anti-work community
I can't think of a worse marketing strategy for a company that relies on remote work to remain relevant. This would be like if General Motors forced every employee within 50 miles of an assembly plant to ride a bike to work.
We make remote work viable.
NOT FOR US THO LMAO
These are fun. For any other CEOs reading along, here's your new policy/advertisement:
Starbucks bans coffee in its offices, cites study saying its bad for your health. Stocks herbal tea instead.
IKEA now only buy from furniture row.
Boeing ban employees from taking aircraft, citing safety concerns with their aircraft.
USPS require all packages be delivered by courier - I can actually see that one happening
Atlassian and Salseforce could shift their internal help desks to in-person only with 100% paper records.
That would probably be an improvement for Salesforce. I truly hate their software. It's god awful.
That Master Lock one seems entirely plausible.
I like the way you think.
That is hilarious
I don't think that Zoom specifically advocates for companies to end work in the office.
Like, say you work for Coca-Cola. Their company health plan probably does not encourage people to drink nothing but Coca-Cola, even if they do make it available in the office.
is now asking all employees within 50 miles of a company office to go in at least two days a week on a hybrid schedule.
I briefly worked for a company that took this approach. The oversight they made was they had 2 offices (different teams in each), but as long as you lived within 50 miles of one of the offices, you had to come in.
Even if your team was exclusively in office 1, and you lived outside the radius of office 1 BUT were in the radius of office 2...you had to come in to office 2...and teleconference with your team in office 1 🤦
I’d just move further away lol
see that little shack about 40 miles away, out town road 37, past the old faded barn and the tree that looks like homer simpson?....
no. the other barn. the one on the edge of that huge dairy farm.
yea. that's the one. well, that shack is outhouse at your new office. the office itself is the smaller shack behind it.
wifi? sure! at the adjacent on-site outdoor gym, there's an old exercise bike hooked up to a generator to power it.
Wow that’s next level dumb. My job did something similar. Someone whose team was based out of Texas yet they still made the 2 people from MI go to the MI office. And on separate days “so someone was always available”
Then the same company closed 75% of their massive building and said the hybrid employees have to share cubes with other people. I’m so glad HR made me permanent remote.
50 miles during a commute is way too far. My employer has pushed for people whose commute would be 1 hour maximum during rush hour to try to come into an office once a week. Where I live it can take an hour to go 10-15 miles during rush hour…
There's a guy at my company that lives in Sacramento, and commutes twice a week to go in the office in mountain view. That's a 4 hour commute with no traffic.
His entire team is in the San diego office. There's literally zero point, but I guess his manager isn't willing or capable of fighting for an exception to the hybrid mandate.
Was it 50 miles in a straight line or 50 on your odometer?
50 mile radius of the office address.
So if your home was 40 miles away but your commute was 55 miles...you still had to go 🙄
Commuting is a total loss, and I find being in the office makes it much harder to actually get work done. Fuck all this shit.
I've been getting a lot of messages on LinkedIn from recruiters, a lot of these are asking me to be in the office 2 to 3 times a week. If I was to commute, I'd leave before my son is awake and arrive after he has gone to bed, working from home, I see him whenever I want.
I've been able to be there for almost all of my second daughters first year milestones thanks to WFH. You can't put a pricetag on that.
I always ask if there's in office and will flat out reject anything more than 1-2 days per week
I like being in the office but the commute is so fucking dumb. Giant swarms of gridlocked cars blasting pollution into the air, wasting vast amounts of time/money/public resources... then you think about how you worked perfectly fine 100% remote for a year and yet these tech companies are all of a sudden herding everyone back into the office doing everything possible to piss away a valuable tool to reduce pollution, increase space for housing while reducing their own overhead, and build resiliency against future pandemics.
It's frustrating.
It's just weak management. Some people work best from home. For some people, that doesn't really work. For people like myself, I need to come into the office once per week and I'm good.
But it's easier to manage via policy instead of managing individuals. So that's what they do.
I mean... as a software developer, Sorry, I will not be returning to the office.
You need me, more than I need you. The market is HOT right now.
Companies will learn, the hard way.
Is the market hot right now? With all the layoffs, the sentiment on blind seems to be don't try to find a job now
Big tech overhired. There is still a massive number of companies that are in dire need of software devs. They won't pay 300k though
90% of the people who were laid off in December had a new job by February. That timeframe has been consistent across the board.
There is still a huge talent gap and there are still a huge amount of high paying jobs available for folks in software. You may have more trouble getting into the largest orgs, but aim a bit smaller and you can find work pretty quickly.
The tech hiring market is most definitely NOT hot right now. It's the worst it's been since the 2008 crisis aftermath.
Obviously there are still things out there but companies are hiring less and the market is flooded with big tech layoffs. Companies are being flooded with applications for available roles.
Startups are also struggling to raise which means there are less new jobs in startups too.
Return to office to sit at computer on zoom.
I'm in this picture and I don't like it
"THE REAL ESTATE! PLEASE THINK OF HOW MUCH WE PAY FOR THE PRETTY BUILDING!"
Worst argument though. The building has already been paid for or has a lease. Using or not using it won't bring that money back. The only thing that can bring the money back is subleasing it. Even not using it saves some money (energy bills).
That's not how this stuff works. The buildings belong to people, ultimately most of them being to the oligarchs. Having a lot of people work from home will put pressure on real estate values so the oligarchs might see the line go up a little slower. So they put pressure on CEOs to keep people locked up in their silos. They're also easier to control that way.
If you attend send building it will somehow make our poor investment worthwhile.
I'd love to understand the logic and benefit of come two days a week. But the real reason, not the bullshit they say
They've invested a lot of money in office real estate and hate that it's going to waste.
Also, CEOs tend to be extroverts who want to be around people. They're also sociopaths who think everyone is like them (or they don't care what others think).
Combine the two and you get this.
Also no one actually knows how long tasks take.
If you work from home and only work for 4 hours, lots of managers do not know how to tell if that work you did took 8 hours or 4. In the office they have plausible deniability that they saw you there doing something.
They've invested a lot of money in office real estate and hate that it's going to waste.
But see this makes no sense. The money invested is gone (or contractually tied up). Using it won't make it a good investment.
It's like if you bought a car and then moved somewhere where you're like 1 minute walking from work, the grocery store, the hair salon,.and the best restaurants, and you never travel otherwise. The money spent on the car is objectively wasted. Using your car unnecessarily to drive places you (a) wouldn't normally go to or (b) don't need a car to get to is not only pointless, but actually costs MORE MONEY because of gas and maintenance (or for a building, energy and cleaning).
No idea whether it's their reason, but anecdotally I've found it has a few benefits. If coordinated properly it's significantly easier to train new(er) staff, it improves cross-organisational understanding to overhear other departments' conversations either at desks or in break rooms, and it stops people becoming isolated pockets of knowledge and culture because they only ever see or interact with the same one or two people.
Because the people creating these mandates don't have to suffer them. They come and go as they please, and they don't work in the pit open office space. They have real offices with furniture, walls, and doors that shut.
I can help you. The benefit is strictly for the maintenance of th bullshit status quo and the logic is, once you're already coming in two days a week, it'll be an easier fight to ask for a third. Then a fourth. And so on.
Currently looking for another job and EVERY job I have seen that's hybrid has multiple offices across the country. So basically they make you come into the office to talk to the rest of your team on zoom. Somehow that is more efficient than talking to them on zoom from your house.
That's pants-on-head level stupidity.
My company is starting to do this as well. They say it’s to “build culture in market”. Really they just want to force you to interact with your coworkers to make things feel less transactional and to keep tabs on people
Careful, this article might cause irony poisoning
We can only assume the internal memo was:
"Hey guys! Oh shit! Our remote conferencing software is actually crap! We need to return to the office ASAP!"
Good for them not having any "sacred cow" technologies - not even the one they sell, apparently.
Airbnb tells employees to stay at hotels.
Seems like a way of culling staff without having to pay severance.. make it so shit that people leave, but make allowances for the key people you need
That (along with feeding managers' need to micromanage) is the largest reason so many corporations are forcing a return to office
Zoom, which remains a leader in the post-pandemic remote work trend, is now asking all employees within 50 miles of a company office to go in at least two days a week on a hybrid schedule.
lol. That's like an hour each way.
I live 11 miles from work and it takes me 30-40 min to drive in. 50 miles could be 90-120 min easy.
ouch. That sucks.
Don't get high on your own supply
They have to come back to the office, but no getting out of their cubicle to talk. They have to use Zoom for that.
When you really don't believe in your own stuff...
In other news, a bunch of Zoom employees are easily poachable.
Different circumstances but similarly funny in an absurd way because of how it sounds, I remember reading a news item in the 90s about the time when a riot broke out in a Nerf factory in China.
Irony much?
Like ten thousand spoons
That would be stainless steely
Wouldn't be surprised if this is just to weed out employees so they don't need to do layoffs. Forcing return to office keeps employees that are "loyal" to the company while potentially trimming down total headcount.
They'll have a ton of workers who are hundreds to thousands of miles away, housed elsewhere, with kids in school, who will have to quit rather than somehow go to that office, so yeah.
I've been saying this since the tech industry has been pushing RTO, I used to work in a large company that hopped on the layoff wave and they were pushing HARRRRDD for RTO. I quit before the bloodbath and found a more fun job :)
Hahaha Zoom about to be btfo by resignations
That's probably the idea.
Get rid of a load of staff, cut costs, boost profits in the extreme short term.
just slack off those 2/5 days where they force you in the office and kill their network while you're at it (upload unnecessarily)
Stupid af.
C'mon guys.
Onion
Are they doubling tapping themselves on their foot after the BS that they put on their ToS?
Dude! That was some happy horseshit of them to pull!
As someone starting out their career in a technical field, I would LOVE to be in the office more if more people from the projects I'm working on were regularly there, but it's just not feasible to require it.
Capitalism leaves us with barely any time to live, and so much time has been clawed back from WFH.
No way I'm advocating it to be mandatory to come into the office more than a single day a week.
Two days is reasonable imo. WFH has its advantages but some things are still better face-to-face, like onboarding.
Does everyone at your office onboard 2 days out of the week, every week?
Maybe it depends on what kind of employees you are onboarding, but in tech it's vastly simpler to onboard employees remotely, you want to be sharing screens so even if you were in an office you'd want to be at your own computers.
My team onboards people remotely no problem. I'd argue it's better than trying to see what someone is doing over their shoulder.
I had my work stuff shipped across the country to me. No in-person onboarding required
I agree onboarding is a bad example, I think the social part is better face-to-face. I can understand that not everyone needs that in their job.
This simply isn't true.
