Zoom CEO says employees can't be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom

https://www.businessinsider.com/zoom-ceo-employees-return-to-office-2023-8

by jordanpg • 3 years ago

81 198 3 years ago

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.

AA-BA-94-2A-56• 3 years ago

Zoom CEO wants to tank the stock price apparently

klyrs• 3 years ago

Or, he's more focused on his real estate holdings and he'll still be fuck-you rich if Zoom collapses.

pxc• 3 years ago

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!

What is Zoom using internally for chat?

sf4lifer6• 3 years ago

Zoom chat. It's a slack/teams competitor

jfghi• 3 years ago

None of these arguments were ever made when sending engineering teams offshore.

missedthecue2• 3 years ago

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.

nitwit005• 3 years ago

It does mean statements aren't completely honest though. Public statements by companies unsurprisingly tend to leave out the downsides of decisions.

CameronNemo2• 3 years ago

This is assuming that when offshoring, it is only the medium of communication that changes.

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).

Affric5• 3 years ago

100%

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.

bonestamp2• 3 years ago

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.

Terr_• 3 years ago

Well there's a major difference here. [Money]

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."

unlikelytomato• 3 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.

timetraveller26• 3 years ago

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.

chucky_z• 3 years ago

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.

NolF• 3 years ago

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.

Gigachad6• 3 years ago

What do you suggest? I’m yet to see a company that makes remote work feel as connected and personal as in office work.

The Friday afternoon beer call was funny and entertaining during covid but it’s worn thin and people want to physically meet up again.

blinded• 3 years ago

Yes I think of solutions for all my awesome work problems in bumper to bumper traffic on my hour long commute. <sarcasm>

adamckay• 3 years ago

It's a bold move to say the product your company sells is total crap, but not unheard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner#Career

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

There’s a level of honesty in Ratner’s response that I doubt most tech execs are capable of.

paulddraper6• 3 years ago

What was said =/= "Zoom is total crap"

Gigachad6• 3 years ago

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.

version_five2• 3 years ago

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.

add-sub-mul-div2• 3 years ago

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.

shadowofneptune• 3 years ago

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.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I think you're not assuming good faith here.

jedberg5• 3 years ago

I bet the McDonald's CEO doesn't think you should eat it at every meal.

Actually, he does (well 10 meals a week):

https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-ceo-eats-every-week/

version_five2• 3 years ago

Haha ok well I think that's ridiculous, I should have found a different example. Wendy's? Hopefully my point still stands.

kylecazar• 3 years ago

Working in-office and I still use Zoom pretty regularly. I don't think this negates it's value as a tool...

HWR_14• 3 years ago

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.

samorozco• 3 years ago

That seems bad for business.

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

idk, Jeffrey Toobin's coworkers probably have a different point of view

steno132• 3 years ago

Sorry, where’s the hypocrisy?

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.

mkl95• 3 years ago

Chapter 95 of capitalist owns real estate and does not want to look silly

paulddraper6• 3 years ago

Breaking news: McDonalds CEO doesn't eat at McDonalds for every meal

jedberg5• 3 years ago

Actually, he does (well 10 meals a week):

https://www.eatthis.com/mcdonalds-ceo-eats-every-week/

paulddraper6• 3 years ago

Impressive

badrabbit• 3 years ago

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.

hankchinaski• 3 years ago

Don’t get high on your own supply

nerdchum• 3 years ago

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.

sf4lifer6• 3 years ago

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).

ABeeSea• 3 years ago

Those conversations now happen in slack DMs in my experience.

jedberg5• 3 years ago

Or Slack huddles.

gaws3• 3 years ago

Hopefully saying nothing you wouldn't want IT to print out and sent to your bosses.

dottjt• 3 years ago

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.

CoolCold• 3 years ago

I like concept of local and global optimals.

For you, your local optimum may be great, but global optimum for the company as a whole may not. And vice versa.

jedberg5• 3 years ago

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.)

sf4lifer6• 3 years ago

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

solarkraft• 3 years ago

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).

Gigachad6• 3 years ago

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.

r00fus• 3 years ago

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.

benterix3• 3 years ago

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.

solatic• 3 years ago

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.

Ecstatify• 3 years ago

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?

tamimio2• 3 years ago

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.

sys_647382• 3 years ago

Does the phrase "eat your own dogfood" mean anything to this CEO?

monomyth• 3 years ago

nothing beats getting to know each other on IRC

archo• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/rDQPO

Gigachad6• 3 years ago

Video calls are like the fast food of social interaction. They are fine in small amounts but when you replace your whole connection to other people with calls and instant messaging, that’s where the deficiencies become noticeable.

I recently moved to the city where the company office is and I feel like a few days face to face with my team was a stronger connection than a year of MS Teams interaction. Suddenly my coworkers became real people rather than just emotionless icons on a screen.

LatteLazy• 3 years ago

I attend the office 4.9 days a week on average because that suits my personality, responsibilities etc. But I do find it baffling: half the time I'm told not to interrupt engineers and we have a whole system to let them get on and work without people making them context switch. The other half of the time I'm told how important it is that we all be together in the same room to build community/relationships!?

benterix3• 3 years ago

While he might have this opinion himself, he is acting against the best interest of his company by his actions. A good CEO of a company that thrived during the pandemic would be to enhance the product (or create a new one) to add the missing elements of the puzzle so that remote teams could enjoy increased levels of innovation etc.[0] as compared to teams using competitors' products. Saying "it's impossible" is akin to Selipsky saying "AWS is a different type of service and we'll never offer flat-rate instances or k8s" instead of adding Lightsail and EKS to their offering.

[0] That is, if his words are backed up with actual data - if these are just personal opinions, there is nothing to act upon.

johnny99k• 3 years ago

I've been working remotely for 15 years. The pandemic didn't really change anything for me as my company is in another state (and now, another country).

While I wouldn't have it any other way, I do think collaboration is pretty easy. I have multiple meetings a day with multiple teams and we have always been able to get projects completed.

There are so many collaboration tools out there and with modern, fast, Internet speeds, it's like you're in the same room as the other person.

Some issues I have noticed: Managers need to know how to manage remotely. When a manager can't manage remotely, it shows, and it's bad. A bad manager will just blame the employee (which happened to me).

Something else I noticed is that I am just not that close to my co-workers. While I have a social life outside of work. Many people use work as a social outlet and it can be very lonely working remotely.

I think this is all bullshit. It most likely has to do with rental contracts the company signed and not wanting it to go to waste.

add-sub-mul-div2• 3 years ago

I think this is all bullshit. It most likely has to do with rental contracts the company signed and not wanting it to go to waste.

This is the sunk cost fallacy. While you've overlooked it, I promise you they haven't. If they already have the lease, they'd be happy to let the building sit empty without paying for utilities, security, etc. They'd be happy to offload facilities costs to employees.

willsmith723• 3 years ago

I don't buy that for a second. To C-level executives and the members of a board, if we're paying for an office, 99% of the time they're gonna say "use it". They're not thinking about sunk costs.

smarmgoblin2• 3 years ago

TFA suggests these companies hold large amounts of commercial real estate as long-term investments, so “let the lease expire” is likely not an option.

bbor3• 3 years ago

What is the job of a chief executive? Optimists say “make the company more profitable”, pessimists say “grow personal wealth and prestige“. Given the widely reported cases of decision makers in big tech also holding massive investments in commercial real estate, along with general “damn kids are lazy and want to WFH so that I can’t watch them” dogma, makes me a pessimist.

TheCoelacanth• 3 years ago

"Sunk cost fallacy" is a phrase precisely because it's something that people often do. No one would have bothered making up a name for it if people consistently avoided making that mistake.

closeparen2• 3 years ago

If that's true, we should expect office work to blow over in <=10 years when the leases expire.

toomuchtodo3• 3 years ago

On the contrary, it’ll happen much sooner. About $626B in debt is coming due for debt collateralized by office buildings in the near term (my note: refinancing? at these interest rates? hooboy). I'd expect much more rapid consolidation, office demos, and conversions to residential considering the financial pain.

Landlords who try to hang on and weather the storm are likely to take a bigger hit than those who cut their losses more quickly, according to Bitner.
“There’s going to be a reckoning,” he said, “and everybody that waited to deal with the problem is going to regret they did.”

With my apologies to Marie-Antoinette, "Let them take haircuts."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-23/landlords... | https://archive.is/2oRH8 (Landlords With $1.2 Trillion of Debt Face Rising Default Risks)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901012 | https://archive.is/ELJET (US Office Space Is on Track to Shrink for First Time on Record)

tick_tock_tick4• 3 years ago

it's like you're in the same room as the other person.

Even the biggest fans of remote work won't go that far. I think you've forgotten what it's like to work in person.

bbor3• 3 years ago

I’d go that far! Whatever’s present in a cramped meeting room (or, in modern big tech, some random chairs because all the meeting rooms are reserved) that isn’t in a zoom call, I don’t want ;).

Maybe you could clarify what you meant?

gottorf2• 3 years ago

with modern, fast, Internet speeds, it's like you're in the same room as the other person.

I've been working remotely for nearly as long, and like anything else, it has its advantages and disadvantages. But this assertion is patently false, at least for me. I have a symmetric gigabit fiber connection at home, with 10GbE hardwired everything in my LAN. No tool I use, be it Zoom, Meet, Teams, whatever, comes even close to being in the same room as another person. The combination of latency (however slight) and imperfect duplex sound transmission between different equipment means that people are constantly inadvertently cutting each other off.

midasuni2• 3 years ago

I started working remotely from my team in 2011. By 2014 the people remaining in Hq had closed most meeting rooms and people were expected to dial in from their hot desks - nowhere near each other. It was all the downsides of being in the office with the downsides of video conferencing.

bombcar• 3 years ago

Zoom has a “studio/live audio” setting which can actually work decently well at removing latency. Give it a try! (Everyone will have to turn it on).

redundantly• 3 years ago

The combination of latency (however slight) and imperfect duplex sound transmission between different equipment means that people are constantly inadvertently cutting each other off.

This is trivial compared to people purposefully cutting each other off or willfully misunderstanding the project or issue being worked on.

Minor inconveniences introduced by working virtually are just that: minor. It's not a good enough reason to force workers back into the office just so the c-levels can feel they're doing better at their jobs.

asynchronous3• 3 years ago

As much as I loathe Discord for it replacing forums, I will say that Discord’s audio mixing for multiple speaking members is literally perfect. Or at least closer to perfect than any other competitor. You can actually talk over each other to some extent.

thefz• 3 years ago

people are constantly inadvertently cutting each other off

It's more an effect of not seeing faces / missing some very subtle social cues that help in having "rounds" in a conversation. But you get used to it and learn to counter it, and besides I know a handful of people who cut others off in real life as well.

apercu• 3 years ago

I think certain kinds of work lend themselves to 100% remote being OK. I have worked remotely for about 10-11 years total out of my career. I just had to fly to client sites every once in a while, or drive in to the city to attend meetings.

The best thing about covid is that I haven't had to do either for a couple of years and the time saved (I don't work in airports or on planes, or obviously not while driving) has made me _more_ productive while spending less time on work (getting to and from client offices).

Face time now and then is a good thing, but, like I said, it depends on the type of work one is doing.

elpool2• 3 years ago

My company has been fully remote since 2020, I agree that collaboration is still easy. The sort of meetings where we used to sit in a conference room and brainstorm on a whiteboard just now happen over Teams with screen sharing.

I do think it's much easier when everyone is remote though. It sucks when half the people in a meeting are in a conference room and the rest are remote. You end up dealing with dumb technical difficulties and its too easy to exclude virtual folks from the conversation.

photonbeam• 3 years ago

Buy them nice houses near the office then

gotaran3• 3 years ago

Because Zoom is utter garbage. The competition is so much better.

mentos• 3 years ago

What do you recommend?

pythonaut_16• 3 years ago

Which alternatives have you found to be better?

Zoom isn’t great but Teams is worse.

mvdtnz2• 3 years ago

I find Google Meet much better. It has superior audio and video quality and a vastly superior UI all inside the browser.

tristanb• 3 years ago

I cannot stand Zoom. I had that it tries to install its crapware on the computer.I find Google Meet to be perfect for what we need.

magicmicah852• 3 years ago

Teams has persistent chat, instant messaging, integration into enterprise toolset and custom handlers for teams who want to build their own apps. Teams isn't perfect but my experience has it leagues beyond what Zoom is capable of.

Maultasche• 3 years ago

I concur with the other opinions. After having used Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google meet in the workplace, I've found Google Meet to easily be the best option.

It feels like I'm taking a big step back when I have to use Teams or Zoom.

manicennui• 3 years ago

Frankly, Google Meet works fairly well.

gumballindie3• 3 years ago

Idk in the long long ago we used skype and slack. They weren't that bad. On slack you just message someone when you get an idea, and then have a skype call to discuss it. End of drama.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

It's a silly gotcha. I don't think Zoom ever advertised itself as eliminating all in person work, it's simply a conferencing tool. Sort of like going "you can't work drunk at the Whiskey distillery, what a bunch of hypocrites!" I said it early during the pandemic already but I think it's become more obvious over time that video conferencing is not a panacea and doesn't wholesale replace face-to-face contact.

Honestly reassuring that a CEO does not treat its own product as the solution to everything.

tick_tock_tick4• 3 years ago

Makes sense and seems to lined up with what I've experienced. New hire aren't developing anywhere near the same as pre-remote hires. Maybe we'll figure it out but we're having issues really identifying why and figuring out how to resolve it.

I expect remote heavy companies to undergo some massive shifts in a few years when people train/hiring in this new regime become the majority. I also expect an almost complete end of employee activism.

gotaran3• 3 years ago

Most remote work at CRUD fintech companies will get outsourced. It’s idiotic to pay some Bootcamp grad in Bumfuck Milwaukee a Bay Area salary.

theptip3• 3 years ago

Yuan told employees that Zoom the product does not allow Zoom the company to "build as much trust or be as innovative as in the office." So why does it even exist and how is it making money?

This line of reasoning is asinine. Perfectly defensible to say that Zoom is great for other industries, or orgs built with different structure. While eating your own dogfood is a confidence builder, it’s by no means a requirement for companies to do it 100%.

Also to suggest that Zoom is only meaningful as a product if you can run your company fully remote is laughably myopic; there is lots of value to having VCs between offices and teams, even if those teams work in-person.

Sure, Zoom has marketing material that leans into remote work. To avoid confused thinking like the OP you should note the purpose of marketing teams and not over-index on what they say.

benterix3• 3 years ago

While eating your own dogfood is a confidence builder, it’s by no means a requirement for companies to do it 100%.

Of course. It is also not a requirement for Microsoft's UI designers to actually use Windows and so on. Nevertheless, if you decide to dogfood, it gives your company many advantages that you otherwise lose.

wvenable2• 3 years ago

It seems to me to be a missed opportunity. If you believe Zoom is merely a video conferencing app then of course Zoom is only meaningful as that. But remote work is not going away and there is an opportunity to support it by being more than simply video conferencing.

Zoom is a remote work product. Zoom says there's a lot of remote issues. That says to me that there is an opportunity to dogfood their own product development. Just going back to the office is a huge waste of potential.

idealboy• 3 years ago

Totally agree. Why not use this as an opportunity to explore the problem their users are presumably facing?

theptip3• 3 years ago

In some sense, yes a missed opportunity. On the other hand, their customers are voting with their feet; most are returning to office.

I would characterize it more as a bet that didn’t pay off. In 2020 it was a no-brainer to bet on substantially more remote work, and Zoom was one of the best-positioned to make that bet. In 2023 that bet looks way lower in EV. They still have upside potential but I don’t think anyone realistically expects that the F500 are going full or even majority remote anymore.

Even with hindsight it seems a good bet, I don’t think they incorrectly evaluated the information they had or could have been expected to have.

toddmorey• 3 years ago

To your point of video conferences between offices and teams... I think the worst possible setup is a zoom conference that's a hybrid of remote and in-person attendees. It's where video conferencing really falls down.

I worked for a company remotely and really hated the experience of being "zoomed in" to a conference room. Couldn't hear, couldn't participate, couldn't jump in, etc. Lots of side conversations at the table. Then the whole table stands up and goes to lunch. It wasn't until the company went fully remote that remote work, well, worked.

mox1• 3 years ago

I would agree with you. But on the other hand, I think there will be a very high rewards for an entity that can "unlock" a easy, repeatable and usable set of remote work patterns. And by reward, other companies would pay a lot for this.

It seems that a lot of the reversal of the WFH / remote work trend is coming from the higher ups at companies, mostly centered around culture, on-boarding of new employees, getting things done, etc.

The "a lot of work got done around here in the 5minute hall way conversation" crowd has some good points honestly. I know at my company, they instituted 2 days in the office, specifically mentioning the erosion of our culture and "ways of working."

Were I the Zoom CEO, I would 100% be experimenting and iterating on what it means to be a "remote first" Fortune 500 company, because doing that correctly is worth a lot of money.

pcurve• 3 years ago

I have a feeling this is a pretext for Zoom looking to shed staff.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

Shower thought- people spontaneously form genuine bonds online all of the time. Why do companies struggle with this? Make company intranet or IRC fun. Toss up a Quake, Valheim, or Minecraft server. People outside of work have virtual "teambuilding" exercises all of the time! Am I being naive?

gotaran3• 3 years ago

More mandatory fun. Yay.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

I'll take it if it replaces mandatory zoom fun.

alistairSH• 3 years ago

people spontaneously form genuine bonds online all of the time.

Do they?

Maybe I'm the odd one, but all my close friends are from meatspace. I have acquaintances in online communities, but none that I'd consider close. And a predominantly online existence sounds downright miserable to me.

habosa2• 3 years ago

I am not going to defend Zoom's RTO plan because I do truly believe that most people who work on computers can work remotely (I do, and I enjoy it).

However ... this feels correct. This is basically the same as saying that Zoom is a meeting tool and there is a lot more to building a trusting and productive team than just having meetings. Building a happy remote team is definitely not a simple task. Sounds like Zoom is not doing what it takes, I think that says worse things about their company than their product.

ncallaway• 3 years ago

Yes, but as a person who is running a remote first company I'd much rather put my faith in a company that understands how to be a remote first company.

So, Zoom is out as a product for us. We use discord at our company, which just _fits_ a remote workflow so much better than zoom. Which makes sense, given their job listings have a whole lot for "... or Remote" (https://discord.com/careers).

Zoom would be able to build a better product, for more users, and capture more value, if they understood how to build a remote working team, and put in the work to do that.

judge2020• 3 years ago

I wonder how much dogfooding there is at Discord. Do they really use it for their main work communications? Maybe falling back to Google Chat (which looks like it's now a usable experience[0]) for SRE and war room type issues.

0: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/02/new-google-c...

bbertelsen• 3 years ago

A lot of companies are doing this. I wonder how many are doing it because they want to reduce head counts through attrition instead of layoffs?

Melchizedek• 3 years ago

They will lose some of their best people doing that.

he0001• 3 years ago

So no eating your own dog food there?

antisthenes• 3 years ago

I'm not an expert on building trust, but I do know that one of the quickest ways to burn trust is to mandate an asinine RTO policy without providing good options for your employees, and options for those who may wish to remain remote forever.

sys_647382• 3 years ago

This feels like a slow motion car crash.

andrewmcwatters• 3 years ago

Boomers who have never idled on IRC or met up with friends in video chat live in an entirely different world than those of us who have had experiences collaborating with developer friends internationally, across multiple timezones, right then and there in real-time.

These people live such uninteresting lives.

gumballindie3• 3 years ago

The very same boomers that don't mind sending jobs overseas and expect customers to trust them without a brick and mortar store to walk in. Can't make this up.

gaws3• 3 years ago

These people live such uninteresting lives.

They own real estate. They don't care!

russellbeattie• 3 years ago

Remote work needs "common areas" where people can voluntarily just join and leave their camera/mic on all the time. Like lurking in an IRC chat. This of course would be abused by employers ("why can't I see you at your desk 10 hours a day?") but it seems to me a way of encouraging the sort of water cooler encounters that being in an office provides.

asynchronous3• 3 years ago

If there was two people in that call neither would get anything done.

gumballindie3• 3 years ago

We should listen to the guy.

Use Slack instead of other suitable platform. Zoom really isn't useful for more than call, that will likely be recorded anyway. Screw Zoom.

mym1990• 3 years ago

If the thought that most communication comes through in a non-verbal queues is true, then this seems to be an obvious observation. Trust between humans is often built by going through tough situations together, so to that extent I don’t expect Zoom to be the trust builder, but rather interesting and difficult problems(which is not that easy to come across in a drab work environment).

dvorak_typist• 3 years ago

So the Zoom CEO doesn't want Zoom data going to ChatGPT, like he does with all customer data??? Signals...

cryptonector• 3 years ago

The Reg was quick to point out the paradox of a business that built its fortune on enabling web conferencing throughout the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic only to recall employees living within 50 miles(!!!) back to the office this month for at least two days a week.

Y'all wishing you'd moved really far during those 2+ years.

0xbadc0de5• 3 years ago

Epic own-goal.

kkfx• 3 years ago

Just a small note: the FLOSS community is essentially remote and in term of innovation is (at least was) definitively innovating.........

Zoom CEO says employees can't be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom

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