Leaked Zoom all-hands: CEO says employees must return to offices because they can’t be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom::Zoom CEO Eric Yuan discussed the benefits of in-person work in a leaked meeting.
Zoom CEO says that his companies product is trash.
“No, no, you misunderstood! I’m just terrible at my job!"
Why not both?
Ya, this guy is toast. He just told the world he thinks his product sucks - the sane know he’s wrong at least.
The product sucks for work and productivity purposes. It can still be useful for meetings where productivity is not a factor (social, medical, many other situations.)
I don’t really care which teleconferencing software I use but without zoom I would lose access to several medical providers and need to travel a couple hours to them which is untenable.
I gotta say I’m shocked that Zoom is secure enough for use in patient care given how heavily regulated the industry is
Do you really think any doctors gave a second of thought to patient privacy when they made those decisions?
Everybody was in a tizzy because of COVID so everyone just said “I’ve heard of zoom! Let’s use that! Other people are using it so it must be fine!” And nobody gave a split fucking second of thought to computer security.
(It’s definitely not.)
They have a HIPAA-compliant version although not sure how secure it really is. In general, companies seem to care more about companies’ privacy than individuals.
From a security perspective, the product has sucked for many years now, but it never halted their popularity. If he can survive Apple needing to intervent to remove a web server they installed on people’s machines, he’ll survive this.
Ya know, I’m not super happy with my salary (they’re really bad at keeping up with inflation), but … the promise of permanent WFH (we are actively getting rid of our last office, and hiring fully remote) with ability to live in ~half of the states without salary adjustment is basically keeping me complacent for now.
Well that was an impressive way to destroy your entire business model
LoL right?
I mean the company clearly benefited from the pandemic and people working from home. Why would they want that to stop??
Money. This guy is getting leaned on to send the message that wfh is a mistake. There is about 2.5 trillion in corporate real estate debt floating around and when contracts are negotiated conditions are made. Government and invested business are shitting bricks and doing everything they can to force occupation of otherwise obsolete buildings.
Socialization is always brought up as an excuse not to allow WFH. The thing is though, replacing real socialization with work fucking blows. Talking to a coworker to get the latest TPS report isn’t socialization. It’s work. The only time you do any real socialization is after work ends. And there’s nothing stopping you from going out to dinner with coworkers when you work from home.
I don’t know, the fact that 4 of the 5 other members on my team live at least 2 time zones away from me keeps me from socializing with them after work ends.
(I do not want to leave this job, fwiw.)
Very fair. That said, going into the office isn’t going to help that.
I never socialized with work people before COVID.
So true. But personally it feels like an extension of work when I go out with coworkers. Some of them we have nothing in common, different age groups, and even different generations. The only thing in common is: work.
I like to keep it separate. Have my own friends outside of work for socialization. Work people likely never to meet my circle of personal friends.
Valid. I’m not huge on going out with coworkers either unless we click on mutual interests.
Depends on the workplace and the job in general.
I don’t want to ‘get to know’ my coworkers. I’m not there for friendships, or a pseudo family. I’m there to do a job and be paid for it.
But, this might just be my introvert side.
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Hey, I need to expand my lease.
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it is X amount of money
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What if I commit 10 years
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it is X/2
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Deal!
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Oh, he reduced costs and increased footprint. He is a genius!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/zoom-offices-hybrid-remote-work-11661977375
- Well. Out workers are remote. What the hell do we do with the office?
- Eeerrrrr. Ok let people have fun.
- But we are starting to need ways of saving costs. What do we do?
- The plan was always to return to office.
- Let’s do that, then.
Older than life. A situation changes and somebody whose personal interests are over the groups interests.
Typical corporate.
Upper manager goal is Y (not using the letter before it anymore thanks to dippy boy). But we’re Y -3% this quarter
Solution? Treat workers like shit until it’s Y. Doesn’t matter if it makes them unhappy, they leave, or next year’s results suck. Now now now
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CEO can’t even eat its own dog food. How pathetic
Why would you expect Zoom to push for 100% working remotely over Zoom? So if my company makes mobility scooters, I’m not allowed to walk?
If you’re the company CEO and you’ve spent years shouting a marketing pitch of “scooters! Scooters! Scooters instead of walking! Scooters! They’re the future!” then yes, it’s a bad look if you walk, never mind if you issue a company wide walking mandate.
I’d push for WFH and say that if work sucks over Zoom, “innovate” until it doesn’t. Kind of our bread and butter.
No, the argument is that instead of improving the product by dog-fooding, he just gave up and told people to go back to the office.
The fact his product is not solving all the collaboration needs should be a business opportunity, but his underlying message is that he doesn’t know how to leverage it, and will not try anymore.
People that use Zoom are disabled confirmed.
man i just spent 30m this morning telling jokes to my remote coworker over slack, I’ve seen him only once in my life, according to this CEO I couldn’t have possibly gotten to know him.
Funny watching the CEOs trying to do the verbal splits, coming up with excuses where it’s just “waah we’re paying for an office that nobody uses :(”
we have nothing to lose but our commutes
My coworkers and I are constantly sending each other jokes and memes when any of us are work from home. Sometimes the official company chat will just be everyone communicating through gifs.
It’s incredibly rare anyone actually uses the Team’s chat for actual work purposes. If I need to talk to someone for work purposes I usually send passive aggressive emails.
They’ve just added to the bottom of that email signatures.
[Company name], certified a great pace to work 2023 - 2024
We’re just wondering who certified that, the general consensus is that it’s probably BS.
My company has 11 people, so Teams is the easiest way for us to communicate other than just talking across the room or walking 10 feet to a different room lol
Eh, for certain people they definitely are less productive online(unfortunately including me), but I’m sure some others are more productive online.
I think the issue is the one-size-fits-all mentality, it leaves no room for each person to do what works best for them.
My wife’s company only rents one of the 4 floors it used to, for those who wanted to return to offices and it’s worked out perfectly, they maintain a space for necessary in office meetings, a place for presentations while only paying a fraction of their old lease.
We’ve been work-from-home since the pandemic kicked off, so about 3.5 years now. They’re working on renovating our office building (and shrinking the footprint we occupy in it), so we’re going to be work-from-home until at least the spring, at which time we’ll have to report a max of one time per week. Supposedly a remote work policy is under development as well, which is what I’m hoping for.
I will say, though, I went to an in-person strategy session for a club I’m in back in May. No zoom at all. What I had forgotten was the hallway conversations, the discussions over dinner, and being able to collaborate like that. It was much easier to talk to my counterparts in the club and see how they were addressing issues, for example. I softened my stance on the full work-from-home idea after that - for certain things, like brainstorming, an in-person meeting is hard to beat. But, our day-to-day work, including the quarterly meetings where we pass motions to revise the club bylaws - those can be (and still are) done virtually.
So you’re saying that a few times per year is enough for in person networking? I agree with that.
I didn’t say that.
Maybe once a year!
That’s why they should give people the option to work from home. You can choose which one is best for you.
I mean, the guy that heads Teams literally said meetings and subsequent overuse of Teams due to ease of making and doing meetings, is a productivity killer.
I agree. The problem is meetings.
The meetings I’m forced to go to at work almost always have nothing to do with my actual job, but do include the owner telling us how much money the company is making in chart and graph form for 20 minutes, which helpfully reminds me that I’m being severely underpaid.
Yes, I am preparing my resume.
My manager just told us our department is under budget on salary by $250k, because we were short staffed and everyone picked up the slack, but has been slow rolling cost of living increases.
Dude’s fucked around, now he’s going to find out.
Every position cut/not filled should mean an equivalent pay increase for everyone who has to pick up that slack, or that that slack is left where it is.
And the idiots who schedule many of them…
I just get scheduled into meetings without my involvement or knowledge. Sometimes minutes before they’re due to start.
I have a meeting scheduled for Monday. Even though I’m away on Monday and they can see I’m away on Monday in my calendar. I’m just not going to tell them, and see if they noticed that I don’t turn up.
One of the advantages of working from home is you can have the meeting on in the background and get on with some real work. When it comes your time to speak you’ve lost maybe 5 minutes instead of an hour.
Sounds like to many meetings. Can’t do work at a meeting.
I can. Have a meeting in Citrix and I happily work while people yabber on in the background.
The real killer is the face to face meetings. My group supervisor now demands anyone in the office on a particular day go into his office for the team meeting. That’s a real time waster.
People online can’t hear us properly standing around in his office. Can’t get work done while standing in there.
Just let me work from home so I don’t have a bunch of people wander over to me to ask stupid questions during the day.
If you want something send me an email and I’ll get to it when I have time. Walking into my space, making me take my noise cancelling headphones off so you can yabber at me and break my concentration is so annoying.
I’m untouchable at home. I work until I need a break, then quickly sort questions and queries, then get back into my groove for another hour or two.
Doesn’t matter what you think, Big techs ceos are laughing their ass off every time their products gets mentioned and reach the frontpage. Purge their ads and remove their visibility
Maybe people can just use a different video calling program if the CEO of the company doesn’t like people using it.
a different video calling program
What happened to Skype? Did it just become the basis of Teams?
Skype and Lync had a baby called Teams.
And that baby should have been aborted
I have no problems with teams. Not sure why everyone hates it. If youre already in an AD/Azure environment and use 365 I dont see why you wouldnt use it.
Your not wrong. But hot take: it’s better than slack.
Better for video, maybe. Better for chat, never!
Maybe it’s because I have only ever been in free plan slack channe’s, but I have never understood the appeal. Maybe it’s the bots? I looked into making a teams bot, and it was a horrendous experience.
And as Teams continue to downgrade it’s markdown support, it is becoming less and less appealing. I hate that I can’t add language tags to code block with the triple back ticks, but it turns some of my code snippets to emojis. What the fuck man?
It’s a tad more complicated:
- Skype is still Skype
- but Skype Enterprise is just a skin strapped over the og Lync (which sucks an order of magnitude more that a black hole)
Team is a new product developped from scratch.- Team is an overhaul of sharepoint, I stand corrected.
Every now and then Teams breaks and shows it’s just a thin layer over SharePoint
Thanks for jogging my memory, I corrected my comment.
It seems to still be around. I used to use it all the time back in the 2010-2015 period but as soon as Discord came out I switched to that and tried to get everyone I knew to also switch.
Like what? The technology sub is all about these big tech platforms, can you name some others?
Sorry are you asking me to list conferencing software for you? If you have a particular point to make can you just make it, I’m not ChatGPT.
I don’t get corporate blokes.
They spend their whole working hours finding ways to increase profits by reducing costs everywhere, to the detriment of the company even. Then we finally give them an easy way to reduce costs that make the employees happy, by removing the need for real estate. And they do a complete 180° to not do so?
Even if they have a lease of multiple years, not having to heat/cool the building nor pay the electricity is still cheaper.
Is it really about micromanagement?
an easy way to reduce costs that make the employees happy
That’s the problem, right there.
Right? They are also losing the opportunity to hire top talent from remote locations. I guess we found something that is more important to them than profits: their ego.
They can’t just reduce their costs, because they’re locked into contracts and/or the corp real estate market is in the trash can
I’d be willing to bet sunk cost fallacy does play a big part, as a result, but I also think senior leadership there just struggles to manage remotely and thus they assume others do too.
I think the issue is that they fear giving workers too much freedom. With that newfound freedom, they may start realizing that they can demand more
Oh cool, guess I can cancel my Zoom subscription then.
The number of jobs I’ve missed out on and lost exclusively because I’m not normative enough to tell milquetoast jokes around a water cooler with a bunch of people I know two facts about but treat like my best friend numbers in the 100s.
Fuck all these people trying to force the old ways forever just so they can exercise their social capital upon the rest of us.
Don’t get high on your own supply? I guess?
