Zoom is making its staff return to the office

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/07/business/zoom-return-to-office/index.html

by lxm • 3 years ago

56 122 3 years ago

cnn.com

slowmovintarget• 3 years ago

They obviously don't want their staff to be included in the training data for their ML work.

baq• 3 years ago

They obviously don't want their staff

Probably can just end here

tamimio2• 3 years ago

Can’t they just zoom each other?

woutr_be• 3 years ago

Jokes aside. Them being remote could be a huge selling point for them. Building software for remote workers, tried and tested by everyone in the company who makes it.

tamimio2• 3 years ago

Made by and for remote employees

Should be a good slogan for the company

fortylove• 3 years ago

Laughable

dathinab3• 3 years ago

Why is anyone using zoom? After the encryption and Chinese key server debacle shouldn't zoom be on the permanent ban list of an company taking security and confidentially even the sightliest bit serious. I mean that was bad behavior, intentional not accidental, to a degree where I would say there is no way to ever regain the trust as long as you don't completely replace every person with influence in the company.

SOLAR_FIELDS4• 3 years ago

I would love to use another product if one could even compete in the same league. Try using Teams, for instance, and you won’t wonder anymore why people use Zoom

OriginalPenguin• 3 years ago

What makes Zoom better than teams?

resolutebat• 3 years ago

Teams is uniquely terrible (well, WebEx is terrible-er). Google Meet, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting, even consumer Skype all work fine.

mattnewton• 3 years ago

I use google meet and haven’t had any problems personally. People complain about it but it has always worked better than zoom for me personally and every team I’ve worked on.

solumunus• 3 years ago

You’ve only tried Teams, haven’t you?

hedgehog3• 3 years ago

Google Meet used to be pretty bad a few years ago but it is totally fine now. I use it every day for work. I trust Chrome's hardening more than most other apps including Zoom.

Edit: Ok actually some Meet complaints: Weird useless white space in the UI. Doesn't put people's faces at the top of the window closer to the camera (will push them to the bottom and put screen share above). Very annoying settings UI. Generally doesn't work well when the window is small. No floating window option. No option to rearrange participant tiles. Probably 100 more like that, but it's still tolerable.

Roark66• 3 years ago

I guess it depends on region. I've been using Google meet, zoom and teams and by a large margin teams provides the best conference experience(best audio quality, less interruptions etc). Shitty web app and lack of desktop app on Linux notwithstanding.

XorNot• 3 years ago

I am using Teams and I don't know what feature people are missing from the video call functionality?

Like...all these products do video calls fine. They all seem to work. What's the killer feature that one has that the others don't?

thefz• 3 years ago

I use Teams almost exclusively and have to say the "new" Teams works leagues better than the previous.

kyriakos3• 3 years ago

Meetings in teams are not bad it's the chat experience that's beyond bad.

ozgung• 3 years ago

We use Around and I think it’s in the same league.

dragonwriter2• 3 years ago

Try using Teams, for instance, and you won’t wonder anymore why people use Zoom

IME, Teams is better than Zoom for meetings.

Its worse than alternatives at everything else (at a text-centric asynchronous multimedia group communication tool, its far worse than Slack, for instance).

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 3 years ago

Zoom noise cancelation set to high is really good: my children can scream and nobody hears them

saulpw• 3 years ago

I like whereby.com. Simple, clean, with fixed urls for rooms.

nikanj• 3 years ago

Because ”it works” trumps ”it’s ideologically sound” for most users.

Zoom is a really great product, they’ve really worked hard on the basic ”join a meeting” user experience. At least a few years back they provided every meeting with a custom installer(!) that deployed Zoom, then automatically whisked you into the right meeting.

The competition has improved by leaps and bounds, but most products used to be either super enterprise-y, requiring seven MSI files and two reboots to get you to a meeting - or super open source, bleeding you to death via a thousand paper cuts

eastbound• 3 years ago

Whereby used to be no login no plugin, it was awesome. Nowadays it requires a login and tries to milk 12€ a month, which I pay because it’s still no-plugin.

(And before you say “zOoM wOrKs iN tHe BrOwSeR tOo”, yes, but Zoom still asks _my_ partners to install the heavy client and uploads files to the Internet. That there’s a dark pattern that allows you to run in the browser is irrelevant).

Propelloni2• 3 years ago

Zoom is a really great product, they’ve really worked hard on the basic ”join a meeting” user experience. At least a few years back they provided every meeting with a custom installer(!) that deployed Zoom, then automatically whisked you into the right meeting.

This is a horrible user experience -- and impossible to do in most enterprise IT environments today. Take a look at other platforms: get a link, click the link, join meeting in already installed browser. Done.

Zoom on the other hand annoys you with user hostile shit to get you to install their client. I wonder why! Their only saving grace is that they are an equal opportunity annoyer, even Linux users are not safe. /s

ARandomerDude• 3 years ago

First I have to convince everyone else to stop using it. Until then I’m stuck with it.

PeterStuer• 3 years ago

Because it works. I had to run and attend a lott of big online meetings involving people from dozens of different companies each time.

Anytime someone tried to host a meeting with Teams, they were never able to get/keep everyone connected. After having tried to exhaustion, I just got a GoToMeeting subscription and used that.

Skype used to work fine before Microsoft merged it into their Link abomination. Later there was Zoom that just worked.

Yes, there was lots of MS sales collatoral and infomercials in the press around Zoom insecurity. That was until MS themselves were found lacking in that same department. Later they both cleaned up their act.

hedora2• 3 years ago

Has Microsoft cleaned up their act?

I thought windows still had mostly mandatory telemetry, and as far as I know, they haven’t walked back the thing where engineers can pull arbitrary files off your machine “for diagnostic purposes only”, which means they’re legally obligated to service all sorts of sketchy warrants against machines they don’t own.

sofixa2• 3 years ago

One bad marketing message and one security mistake that could have very well been accidental are enough to entirely ban list software for you? I'd love to hear what sort of software is in your allowed list, because I can't imagine it contains many "Enterprise" vendors.

lloeki• 3 years ago

Things (and their combinations) that come to mind:

    - latency+quality, even with > 10ppl
    - works in challenging network conditions
    - tons of tunables to make it fit one's use case
    - no-account meeting join
    - ability to dial in via phone
    - n:p webconf/webcast mode (with p vastly > n)
    - subroom breakouts
    - live closed captioning
    - recording (incl. chat replay + transcript)
    - non-GSM-quality audio (stereo, no echo cancellation, no passband filter, high bitrate encoding)
    - conference room mode with automatic presence (via ultrasound or something) and individual face extraction
    - many platforms and OSes support

Paul-Craft4• 3 years ago

Let's not forget:

    - Noise cancelling that will mute the sound of a German Shepherd who's just spotted the mailman (though, granted, nobody will hear *you,* either, if it's your German Shepherd :)

    - Sensible defaults to the extent that if you get invited to a Zoom meeting and just download Zoom to open the meeting link, generally what you want to happen will happen (this being the other half of your "tons of tunables" point)

    - A pretty decent web client you can use if you don't *want* to download Zoom

And more, I'm sure.

01100011• 3 years ago

Is this just a struggling company looking for a low-friction way to shed employees?

wing-_-nuts• 3 years ago

I never understood this line of reasoning. If you want to shed staff, don't you want to control which staff you shed? A RTO mandate just means your best staff leave because they're the ones with real options.

lazyasciiart• 3 years ago

So do layoffs.

MattGaiser• 3 years ago

This would very explicitly apply to buyouts (paying people to quit) and voluntary layoffs as well, but at least in Canada those are pretty common.

One company here had a bit of a panic as way too many employees accepted a buyout.

https://financialpost.com/telecom/shaw-to-take-450-million-h...

LatteLazy3• 3 years ago

I agree. But my current employer is having a hiring freeze for this reason. So good, employable, overworked, smart staff are leaving. And those that we don't really need are staying. It's basically the opposite of what any decent manager should want.

So I think senior management see these things differently...

ulfw4• 3 years ago

Layoffs are unpopular. CEOs don't want to be unpopular.

If people leave off their "free will" (haha), so be it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's the line of thought.

smarmgoblin2• 3 years ago

Maybe. But if I’ve learned anything from the layoffs I’ve been a part of or adjacent to, it’s that executives don’t share an engineer’s understanding of who might be a valuable engineer.

At the size of these companies they couldn’t possibly hold that understanding in their head. So they’re thinking more about budgets and strategies, assured by their peers that we’re all replaceable in the end. They’re not entirely wrong.

Of course, later (once the economy recovers and hiring resumes) they’ll cry that new employees aren’t picking up context or contributing fast enough, things seem to be moving slower, coordination is lacking etc.

dgoldstein02• 3 years ago

I wish some of these companies doing a return to office could share the data driving their decisions - and follow up with the impact. I suspect, but have no real data to prove, that an in office culture could enhance collaboration - within teams, across teams etc; my intuition is that there is more overhead to get the same people in sync when working remotely, than in an office - but I wonder if data anywhere shows that (and for what sort of return - very easy for these 2-3 day a week returns to not achieve all of the benefits). All these articles reporting about return to office never have any data to share though.

wahnfrieden• 3 years ago

It’s not productivity data driven.

wenc4• 3 years ago

How would you measure it quantitatively though?

I know for me, I solve problems much more quickly when I can walk over to my co-worker's desk and talk it over. Or have someone walk through a problem with me on the board. Or just random stuff I learn from water cooler conversation triggers thoughts in me that help me move quickly on a problem.

But it's very difficult to quantify these things. If these things were tickets, I would track their time to close, but they're not.

jh00ker2• 3 years ago

Surveys - need to baseline, first, though

cmh892• 3 years ago

I know for me, I solve problems much more quickly when I can walk over to my co-worker's desk and talk it over. Or have someone walk through a problem with me on the board.

Why don't you just give them a call? What's the difference?

For everyone who misses being able to have a quick chat with a coworker, there is another person who is glad that they can get in a work flow without random coworkers coming over to talk about something they aren't currently working on.

silisili• 3 years ago

Not productivity driven. It's a lazy way to do layoffs...

LatteLazy3• 3 years ago

While I agree... We can't really define productivity, let alone measure it. And that's for a manager who WANTS to be open and data driven...

ulfw4• 3 years ago

There is no data.

And even if there was they would never include ALL data, e.g. you have to weigh paying rent in Hong Kong, New York, Sydney, San Francisco, London etc etc expensive places for an office building that a remote-only work place doesn't need.

Being 5% more productive in office might not make up for billions of dollars in rent and overhead.

Turskarama2• 3 years ago

The collaboration thing isn't as simple as it seems though. Yes it becomes easier to reach people, but that means it also becomes easier to disrupt people.

If I am disrupted 5 times with 5 small things in an hour, that will slow me down significantly more than if I am disrupted by one big thing in that same hour.

For a tech analogy (we're on HN after all), being in the office reduces latency but in doing so can also reduce throughput.

For the kind of work managers do latency can be critical, so from their perspective being in the office is extremely helpful. Other can be most productive when given large amounts of time to focus on a single task in which case latency is far less critical.

coffeedan• 3 years ago

> If I am disrupted 5 times with 5 small things in an hour, that will slow me down significantly

But those 5 people who interrupted you are no longer blocked. If they had to schedule a call with you tomorrow or the next day then the overall productivity of the team could very well drop.

Companies care less about your individual productivity and more about the productivity of the entire organization.

jh00ker2• 3 years ago

Before the pandemic, I feel like the norm was to leave your home at whatever time was necessary for you personally to get into the office at the time that meetings are generally happening (at my company this was 10am, usually for standup).

One thing I've noticed on my team as we talk about returning to the office, is that now ICs seem to think about the commute as taking away from their total working hours in the day. Whereas before, they thought of being "on the clock" (so to speak) when they arrived at their desk, now, in the minds of a lot of folks, the clock starts when the commute starts.

flangola7• 3 years ago

It should. You're not in the car for your benefit.

mgrund2• 3 years ago

Personally this is my biggest resistance to in-office work; if the commute was recognized as part of the working hours, I don’t care if I spend some of my workday on the road (although I might feel that time could be better spent, but my employer gets to make that tradeoff).

datadeft• 3 years ago

Legally in many countries commute to work is working. If you have an accident while commuting it counts as a work accident. Not sure what is the status in the USA.

wirrbel2• 3 years ago

but its not on the clock. So if I have an accident on my commute I am insured via work, but regardless the time spent on the commute will not be coming from my 40h/week time account but cut into my free time.

scns• 3 years ago

Interesting that they only realize it now. That is why i never wanted to commute. Saw it as a waste of life. Nowadays it is a good time for me to read (sitting in a train). Commuting by car would still be stolen time i guess.

vincentperes• 3 years ago

I'm listening to audiobooks since years while driving and take it as a personal time before reaching my family. Very enjoyable.

ar_lan3• 3 years ago

My mind shifted this way for sure. Another 2-3 hours of my day is lost when I commute once weekly.

Of those, I fully work because I start at 8am promptly and take short lunches.

Days I go in often feel more like socializing for the sake of socializing - it’s just huge meeting days.

If RTO is mandated at my company I’ll probably try to get in at 6am and leave at 2pm if I’m not going to consider a commute.

trymas• 3 years ago

The jokes are writing themselves. :)

ar_lan3• 3 years ago

If Zoom, basically the “golden” remote work company, can’t hack it, then I fear remote work really might just not work at scale.

samtho• 3 years ago

Remote work has been implemented successfully even before the pandemic at even large companies like IBM. Sure there was a strange eb and flow cycles of flexibility vs coming back to the office every few years but a large company like that already works “remotely” due to the vast number of people working there and all employees end up having to work with people outside their office every day if not very often.

It’s pretty clear that any directive to force people back into the office at that point is either a petty power move or a way to force voluntary attrition before having to do layoffs.

sherlockholmes_• 3 years ago

Isn't their business model reliant on people working from home?

ulfw4• 3 years ago

Ridiculous considering they want people to use their app.

Goes to show the app is not useful enough then.

BTW there is nothing dumber than hybrid work. Either have everyone go to the office or have everyone work from home.

There is nothing stupider on this planet than having 3 folks sit in an office, 1 in another office, 4 at home... The office microphones only half-ass pick up voices so you can never really understand some people.

m_rpn3• 3 years ago

Hybrid work is totally fine, most big companies are globally distributed anyways so it can't be avoided, my team for example in in other parts of the world so what do i get by being 100% in an office where i don't know anybody and nobody cares of what i do since i'm not i their team? Let people organize as they want, we are not babies.

Agreed that graduates or super juniors must spend some time in the office with other people, but mostly to understand how to behave in the work-centric society.

happytiger• 3 years ago

Zoom is making themselves disruptable.

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

[dupe]

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

Lots more discussion here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37023215

Zoom is making its staff return to the office

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