Let’s not forget that all “return to office” mandates are really just a way for the C-suite to reduce headcount while appearing strong/decisive, avoiding negative press (and therefore spooking investors), and not having to pay severance.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of Teams. The fact that the software is named after a common organizational unit, and also a feature within the software is named after that same thing, is insane. Also, I haven’t seen such an unnecessary resource hog since the original Microsoft Edge.
Also:
Gotta keep the commercial real estate market from imploding.
Whole lotta corpo money and financing tied up in that, sure would be a shame if most office space just wasn’t actually needed for most office work.
Also also:
Most managers just personally need the ability to neg employees in-person, even if it is detrimental to actual output, that doesn’t matter, what matters is sating their need to feel powerful and important.
Anyway, Zoom did basically the same thing either earlier this year or last year… yep, Zoom employees, the people who make and sell business oriented virtual collaboration software… all need to RTO.
Found it: https://fortune.com/2024/07/09/remote-work-outlook-zoom-return-to-office-chief-people-officer/
Oh yeah, I totally forgot the real estate side of things.
I work for a midsize company that divides up their office space rental costs between divisions/departments. Our CEO also owns the commercial property management company, and he also owns the holding company that owns the building.
He’s been fighting me for a while now on my division’s “flex work” policy. Finally he gave up, but my division still pays our “fair share” of rent despite several of my team members moving out of state. Oh well.
Yeah thats called you realizing your CEO is scamming the entire business and running it as a franchise that he somehow is both in charge of and also not fully legally / financially responsible for.
That reminds me of how a huge part of why SEARS went out of business was because they broke each building up into the floor space sections per department that each ran as their own mini psuedo businesses and effectively had to pay footage based rent to that building’s GM…
As opposed to, you know, a business leveraging synergies, fostering teamwork and having a solid central leadership… nah, fuck all that, each SEARS location is now its own marketplace of competing fiefdoms, all the departments hate all the other departments, central command is now just Pontius Pilate washing his hands over all the bloodshed he oversees.
IMO that kind of set up should just be illegal, its fraud with extra steps.
I blame people more than Microsoft. People were either duped or too lazy to say “Microsoft Teams” in full. It’s not too crazy to have services like “Apple Music” because people aren’t allowing Apple to control the word by just saying “Music” casually. People need to go back to saying “Microsoft Teams.” Alas, it will never happen. 😒
I’ve taken to say Fucking Teams™. Our company has Slack and our client uses Fucking Teams™ and it’s a constant meme of audio not working, sharing not working, notifications not working, etc.
I just hate the thing. It’s inferior in every way except that it’s dirt cheap for the client and it’s already there with office suite.
Office suite is another pet peeve of mine when it comes to sharing information. Just make a PDF! Do not share your .docx file. Half of my team don’t even have an office suite installed. So we get 3 or 4 different renditions of the same document depending on where we open it in (Libre, Word regular, Word web, Google docs). Just make a god damn PDF!
Wait till you hear about Word!
Or “Windows App”
I don’t know about you guys, but my company just mandated RTO a few months ago.
As expected, we now
spendwaste 8 hours: Commuting, Walking to and from meeting rooms, etc.And the meetings, and the “collaboration”, which are basically non stop all day long now, are just us talking round and round about all the things we need to do and how to do them for the 8th time, without actually doing them. But we sure LOOK really productive and busy. And I guess that’s what management wants? Who knows.
With remote work I would do my job for 8+ hours per workday in pure focus mode. Knocking out solution after solution. You want XYZ to happen? Already done, here’s a link to it. Have a meeting? Click join Teams call 1 minute early, listen and talk, while continuing to working on XYZ. You think we should try ABC for the XYZ project? Ok, I’ll have it ready by tomorrow.
In office work is now spent walking from meeting to meeting, and you gotta leave 15 minutes before and it takes 15 minutes to get back and settled and you did not work on anything during. And they ask “so, how is project XYZ going?” “Good, good. Should be done in a few more weeks.” And you maybe work on XYZ for 30 minutes uninterrupted that entire day, decide to skip any testing or QC, skip those extra features, skip checking with other teams if it will impact them, you have to skip all that to get it done on time. And it takes 3 weeks to do a 5 minute task. And it’s inferior. And you talk about XYZ every meeting of every day, time after time, updates and statuses and comments on the ticket. And you finally announce you got XYZ completed and it’s “yay good job” and management asks how the RTO is going and everyone is terrified to say “this is stupid and a gigantic waste of everyone’s time and your money to put us in a giant expensive building just to not work on work, but to talk about working on work and we are getting only 10% done vs remote work”. So we say “oh, fine” and management puts a little golden star on their report they made for themselves and they feel all warm and fuzzy that work is going great.
And thus, project XYZ was finally completed. A task that would have taken 1 person a few hours to do remotely, has now taken 8 people, 3 weeks of in office meetings and status updates and endless interruptions and discussions over every aspect of the project over and over again to finally complete. But we all LOOKED super busy doing it. And that’s the important thing.
I’m personally, loving the RTO. I thought I would hate it, but I get to talk with friends all day and sit in meetings and daydream and the day flies by and I barely turned my brain on.
I’m happy to just do my job at home uninterrupted at my desk, but they sure don’t seem to want that, so fine. Hope that works out.
It’s frustrating because management are so colossally, transparently, stupid but they get the big paychecks and the workers get fucked. And then like half the workers sit there going “Well this is just and fair. this is a good world. If the people actually doing the work had more of a say, that’s communism and thus axiomatically bad”
Rise up and take back the means of production!
We should steal
The Declaration of IndependenceMicrosoft Excel!But yeah, execs have no idea what all daily work looks like, but because they siphon 99% of the profits that we creat away from us and no matter how wasteful or unproductive everyone is, enough gets done that they STILL make millions off of us. So they don’t care. We all suffer and get paid JUST enough to not riot, but they make millions and millions just by virtue of being the executive or owner.
I wonder how well a company would actually do if it was fully owned by all workers evenly.
Imagine Microsoft if every employee had the same % share in profits. Wonder what that would look like? I bet middle managers would stop wasting money left and right. I bet pointless projects would stop. Anything you do to make the company more efficient or profitable is celebrated and you actually get a share in that profit.
I also wonder if it would simply fail due to people wanting to coast and not pull their share.
We should steal
The Declaration of IndependenceMicrosoft Excel!This has functionally already been done, its called LibreOffice Calc.
95% chance any business process that uses or touches Excel can be switched over to that with some minor tweaks, 5% chance someone might have to actually code some kind of custom API / batch file shim type thing, or its some stupidly niche situation where you truly are stuck paying your
liscensing feecapitalism tithe to MSFT.No, I mean STEAL it.
Downloading isn’t stealing. Reproducing isn’t stealing. Forking a repo isn’t stealing.
I mean. STEAL IT!
Oh you mean literally steal the source code?
Unfortunately I regret to inform you that this thing called IP Law exists and that definitely is ‘stealing’.
Heck, even reverse engineering from stolen, but ultimately not directly used source code… generally also ‘stealing’.
But uh yeah, Excel definitely does not have a publically available repo that can be forked.
Sure, you could I guess hack into MSFT and leak the source code, but if you live anywhere that has an extradition treaty with the US, you are going to jail forever.
… LibreOffice Calc provides a less risky alternative to this.
Like, sure, I generally agrer with your opinions, but our opinions are not the actual state of how the world works.
They mean steal it. Take it so they don’t have it any more. You know steal it
No, not steal the source code. Steal Excel! We sneak in one night and grab it and bring the corporate world to a halt.
Office Space. But also, Been in all those. It’s weird to remember that your employer doesn’t actually want you to be productive and fix the problems to be profitable. They want to appear to be doing that. You’ll go further in your career by playing those games rather than working. I, unfortunately, like doing the work to keep the company going instead of the games, which is not as profitable for myself, but it keeps the company from dying even though they don’t realize it, and keeps them rich. Win? I’d rather be planting corn at this point.
I’d rather be planting corn at this point
I’ll never understand this. I was born in a city. I never worked in a field. I hate physical exertion. Planting corn would be my definition of hell.
Sports are good for the mind and the body. You should try it
Do you try many things you hate because they’re good for you? Don’t lie.
No, very few. Sports being one of them. It took almost a year but now I like it, and miss it if I don’t get the chance to exercise. Getting a garmin watch helped me stay motivated, because I could see the progress I was making. I went from running 2.5km at 7min/km pace and almost dying to running 10km at 6min/km pace and feeling great, even being able to talk during. And I feel so, so much better in general. It’s like the difference between being hungover vs normal, but all the time.
