I’m an industrial electrician, they make me use teams to talk to the office wanks. Kill me.
Meanwhile, my company was asking us why do we even want an office, can’t we all just work from home? That was years before the pandemic (when Google bought the building we were leasing and the company had to find a new one).
So as soon as the first lockdown happened they immediately closed the office and said everyone is fully remote now. They did give us money to set up a home office, but overall they saved a ton by getting out of an expensive rent (I’ve heard $1m/yr) and getting rid of all the perks we had in office (free breakfast and lunch, snacks, beer and kombucha on tap, unlimited coffee, gym membership, etc.). I don’t imagine them ever deciding to go back to that.
The whole force return to office thing is just a “we own you” moment from leadership. It doesn’t have to make sense for them. And I’ll bet you that the leadership will continue to enjoy remote work benefits. I was recently ordered back to office. The problem is I don’t actually work with or report to any of the folks at that office. So I’m just going to an office to sit on teams calls with my coworkers instead or staying home and doing the same thing.
Aren’t you excited to sit in traffic though?
Plus, also, the missed sleep that the commute will steal from you!
I think it’s worthwhile mentioning that not only did Microsoft buy a superior solution, Skype, but let it languish and ultimately threw it away in favor of Teams.
Teams is just Skype rebranded though.
The fabled “competitive forces” of Capitalism
Teams is inferior to fuckin TeamSpeak my guy.
On your last point about it being easier to do a side task while in a meeting. It is annoying that when someone is talking about something important and then they ask someone else in the meeting:“What is your team doing about it?”, invariably the response is “doing about what? Can you repeat the question?” Delaying and extending meeting time.
Or later asking questions about what was said in the meeting. Really annoying.
And by the way, probably all of us have at some point been the distracted one.
Thats why you have the phrase about a meeting that should have been an email.
“Let’s push EVs to help the environment.”
Also: “Let’s make everyone go back into the office.”
Commuting for jobs that can be effectively done remotely is such an egregious waste of resources and time.
Remember how much less pollution there was during COVID when everyone was working from home?
Look also shipping went down and a few other things. That should also be permanent, we have alternatives but we keep doing the same bullshit for some reason.
If they’re being wasted, someone is buying them in order to waste them. That’s a win as far as they are concerned.
From what I’ve learned by working in top heavy product teams vs slimmer developer teams. The basis for this “in-office leads to productivity” mentality is:
-
People who’s job uses meetings as their main tool, want these meetings to be in person, and push for a lot of otherwise unnecessary meetings. These meetings, are, of course, more effectively conducted in person.
-
People who’s job is ultimately to do the work, want to avoid unnecessary meeting. The work that needs doing, can be done more effectively, with fewer distractions, higher quality of life, less environmental impact from the commute, etc, from home.
The pandemic showed that productivity increased when people worked from home. What you can deduce from that, would be unpleasant for all those in the former category.
I’ll go one step further and say: Developers working from home have better jobs than their managers. The work/life balance, responsibility, and ratio of all that to salary, are practically off the chart compared to how most managers operate. It’s a handful of meetings a day, with hours of uninterrupted creative work, and enough leeway to do chores and errands without impacting productivity. It’s the ultimate perk.
Meanwhile, management via remote is practically no different than in-person, since virtual meetings and in-person meetings take the same time out of your day. Often, you can’t get away from your home office since you don’t get enough time between meetings to go do other stuff. And for people that are hot garbage at video conferencing and email, they tend to perform worse than in-person.
So what we’re seeing here is professional envy, twisted around as a correcting action of a sort. Keeping everyone in-office means their workday is just as fucked up as their managers.
People who’s job uses meetings as their main tool,
Are the ones with any say in the mater, that’s the problem and is not limited to RTO.
My wife would be in the former category (PO for the biggest software product in her company). Some days she has meetings back to back for 8h straight.
She hates in person meetings. According to her:
- Online/hybrid meetings are easier to keep on schedule (both starts and finishes are often delayed)
- In person meetings more often go off topic
- back to back meetings means going from one meeting room to another in person, sometimes in another building. That same time can instead be used to take notes/prepare the next meeting when you don’t have to walk anywhere and just click a button to be In the next call
- when a meeting turns out to be irrelevant or useless to you, it is socially not acceptable to get up and leave. Just not having your camera on and doing other work on the side works without anyone knowing
In person work is only for when companies don’t trust their employees. This is also true for people whose main work tool is meetings.
back to back meetings means going from one meeting room to another in person, sometimes in another building
Lol I used to work as a contractor for a small company at the Comcast Center HQ in Philadelphia. We had the gig producing Comcast’s mobile apps. One day my boss emailed me and said we were going to meet with Time Warner Cable to talk about handling their mobile apps as well. When he showed up I started to put my coat on and he said “what are you doing?” We then took the elevator up to the 16th floor … where TWC had an actual suite of fucking offices in the Comcast Center. The subsequent announcement of the merger between Comcast and TWC was no surprise to me, at least.
She sounds like a great PO. Especially if she is aware and encourages that last point.
I’m currently losing my mind where going to the office is being praised on a weekly basis as this excellent way to increase productivity. At the same time as I’m spending about 90% of time on meetings. They don’t realise that the underlying problem is a dysfunctional management, and exactly what you’re describing, as a trust issue. More than half the meetings are unnecessary, and disguised micromanagement.
This is a class war of sorts, between middle management and the workers.
Got it.
Not really. Maybe it is the case in general. In my experience the distinction is more between useless and useful, and not so much “class”. At least the engineers are better paid. Or, I really do hope they are.
Company I work for, middle management is mostly unhappy about forced in office too, it’s only the directors and above that are forcing RTO. Even a lot of the directors I knew preferred wfh
This company is fucked tho, they refuse to change and have an insane amount of tech debt and inefficiencies in processes.
My company has offices all over and I am.a field worker so I am basically in my own building with mybown office where the equipment is. I am litterally bottom rung.
A couple of managers several levels up from me though got hit with RTO style stuff and they don’t even have regular desks and have to schedule meeting rooms for teams etc. Its wild how awful it seems to be compared to what I have as a bottom tier nobody.
Yes and no. There’s a certain amount of passive communication that you.miss out when you’re isolated from a team environment. A good team can mitigate this, however, by advocating regular group water-coolers and voice calls / screen-shares rather than emails or teams messages to get or deliver info. Getting a random teams call from a team member is not much different from them scooting their chair over to you.
I’m a huge advocate of letting people work how they are most happy. Some people like office, some like home. Just let people do their thing and figure out how to make it work. If we force people to work within a system that doesn’t suit them then you lose out on acquiring good talent and will hemorrhage the talent you have.
I agree with all of what you wrote. I even think having a couple of fixed days a week where it is encouraged to meet at the office, is also helpful. Personally, I go to the office whenever I need social stimuli, and I’m not overloaded with work.
-
There is no logical argument supporting this claim.
It’s always layoffs.
They are right. Teams sucks.
Nevertheless, in-office sucks far, far worse.
WFH was the only good thing that covid brought, so ofc they wanna take that away.
It also brought about the end of the first Trump presidency so there’s that
WFH is good. Teams sucks. I feel like there HAS to be something, anything better because Teams simply can’t be the best there is.
It would have been nice if people tried getting virtual schooling to work right. I think every place should have that as a real, public option.
At least they’re finally being honest about Teams. Now they can fix it…right?..they will fix it right?
If by “fix” you mean “insert a buy premium Teams now!” button, then sure.
Teams is inferior to contracting Herpes, it’s a low bar
I’d like to trade my having to use Teams for 1 herpes, please and thank you.
I get the lip kind. You would probably prefer to use Teams.
The number of times I have canceled plans last minute because of this embarrassment is too damn high!
Yeah at least teams will be abandoned software eventually.
Management lives in a fantasy world of vibes and bullshit. They don’t care about the workers, the product, or the users. They are insulated from consequences.
The mega corporations need to be broken up, and replaced by smaller, worker-owned, organizations.
smaller, worker-owned, organizations.
Mondragon tried that, it seems to mostly work. I think the keyword is smaller, companies don’t know how to grow without hiring idiots who then become in charge.
Thank you. The only example I’ve had prior was British Telecom.
I work for a fairly large company and I’m constantly surprised by how much shit I do just does not matter. Me and a coworker have been working on a large project and have had to push it back several times now so that we are almost 3 months behind at this point and there are 0 consequences because none of the bigwigs are affected by it. Then as soon as someone high enough on the chain decides to give a shit half or organization will be expected to drop everything else and get it done.
Last year I busted my ass on a project with a pricetag measured in millions. 6 months later as we were finalizing the build and about to present it to the stakeholders was the moment executive leadership changed their minds and decided they didn’t want it after all. We shelved the code and will probably never use it for anything else because it was extremely specific to that project, so unless someone in executive leadership decides they want the same thing again, it’s just millions spent for literally nothing
Are you me? Haha. Just kidding. It wasn’t a dev project for me. Same result. Nearly a year of work for it to get tossed. Your tax dollars at work, Canadians…
I used to work for Comcast on their suite of mobile apps. The whole thing was just a giant fucking scam, but one aimed at the C-suite. Customers didn’t actually use the apps, they just installed them so they could get a (temporary) discount on their cable bills. The installed apps pinged our servers once a day and these were counted as “daily users”. Millions of dollars a year for absolutely fucking nothing. The C-suite eventually caught on and cancelled everything, but I was long gone by that point.
Zoom also makes their folks work on site.
Guess they don’t like their own dog food
Yeah the company my BIL works at wanted the IT staff to drive into the office, to then login remotely to customer servers. Go figure.
Let the punishment fit the crime
Microsoft Teams is such a bad product that Microsoft needs all engineers back in the office 😂
Microsoft Everything is such a bad product that Microsoft needs all engineers to work somewhere else. Finally, the corporate tendency to fire fucking everyone makes sense.
Corporate: “Everyone must be in office to encourage in-person discussion and cross-team collaboration.”
Also Corporate: “Is this discussion documented anywhere?”No, you twat. It was discussed in person.
It’s the developer way. Being in office means that the team will never live with the consequences of their shit code. They’ll never fix the 10 things that annoy people every day because they don’t use it. But hey, at least they can all go to lunch together.
at least they can all go to lunch together.
Until they get a new manager who decides they have to stagger their lunch breaks
Realistically, Teams would still get tons of use from people using the IM function so they don’t have to leave their desk, and the video chat function to facilitate meetings between coworkers in different offices.
You know that at any company larger than a small startup, developers tend to have little control over what they work on, right? They can try to convince management, but ultimately the decision is not in their hands.
There’s a ton of things about our app I’d love to fix but my time is limited and other things end up taking more priority.
