Zoom is making its staff return to the office
cnn.com
cnn.com
On the other hand with zoom I did had the experience of it just arbitrary not working at all for me.
But why are you on a (presumably) work call when you're driving over a hill with two bars? Put the work down for crying out loud. I'd love it if people like you were forced to just turn the god damn thing off when you can't actually attend a meeting instead of setting unrealistic expectations for the rest of us... It is just not that fucking important.
"feels great, jim!"
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.
Zoom just works on both of my devices.
It has steadily gotten worse ever since they started aggressively pushing users to log in, and also have phone browsers force redirect to the app (which is worse than the mobile web version was…)
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?
No, they don't. Teams does not work at all on MacOS with Intel silicon, just for starters.
That's not helpful when you're trying to chat with someone who for whatever reason is stuck with a MacBook. This is why Zoom is so great: you can actually count on it working with everyone's computer. With everything else, there always seems to be some combination of hardware+OS+browser that just doesn't work. That's completely unacceptable for a video chat platform that needs to be usable by everyone. If you're just chatting with one or two friends, one of the others might be fine since number of different platforms isn't very high and you can pick something that works for the 2 of you, but for something that needs to be usable by anyone at any time, it won't work.
Does the browser version work well on macos? I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work on chrome.
Not if you're interviewing candidates using video-chat. What's the company supposed to do, FedEx overnight a company laptop to the candidate just for doing a video interview?
>Does the browser version work well on macos?
In my experience, no. It consumes all the CPU.
What problems are you running into?
Not sure what you're on about. I'm all for shitting on Teams, as the chat and specifically group chat functionality is horrible, especially compared to slack (that has its own issues).
But claiming it doesn't work at all is a big one.
>(It's a massive battery drain and CPU hog, but other than that it works)
That doesn't fit with my definition of "works".
There are some awesome features with teams that other apps lack, meeting chat being integrated into the rest of teams, and getting notifications for when recordings are available. the key features leave a lot to be desired though.
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).
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
(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).
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
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.
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.
I realized this when I first noted a process started by Chrome called "software reporter" that wasn't started by me, I had no knowledge it started and if I knew, I wouldn't let it start. The web was full of tips on how to permanently disable the thing from running. So yes, from the point of view of these companies, they can do whatever they feel is reasonable, and we as users have no say in this.
- 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 - 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
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.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Honestly I've never met anyone in my 20 years of career.
Do you use clock-in, clock-out systems to show presence in an office building? For what?
Genuinely curious.
That said even if you’re not clocking in it’s common to want to work a full 8 hours or close to it.
How you do that differs, but there are companies that run clock-systems for that -- many of them are coupled to the access control systems of your office/factory, so when you use your ID card to enter the building, you automatically clock in. Others require you to maintain timesheets in one system or the other.
How reliable these systems reflect how much time you actually worked is up to debate, but as employer you get into serious trouble if you don't have them.
This means overtime is always compensated either in pay or by taking days off and frankly I would not work any other way anymore in an employment situation (unless self employed)
It was annoying. I'd often be 'in the zone' at 5 and they felt the need to interrupt productive work. Not sure why. Eventually they gave me a key.
In the US and in the tech career field but outside of the tech industry (and maybe even inside it in places that aren’t paying top dollar) in places like California which have a higher-than-federal salary floor for wage/hour exemption in the field, even if nominally reimbursed on a salary basis, plenty of people at junior levels, because they are subject to wage/hour/overtime rules.
Probably also a lot of people in places that have stronger worker protections than the US (which covers, well, most of the developed world.)
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.
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.
Capturing sentiment is useful in itself — it is a kind of data point.
But to really see the productivity difference you need an instrument based less on what people say, but what they actually do.
(Sorry, I don't have links to any of those surveys/survey reports/data, so if you want to call me out, I'm just going to plead the 5th on being a little lazy.)
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.
It’s also lower bandwidth in terms of communication. Losing the ability to gesture and point and to write on a board in real life is significant. It feels like it shouldn’t be, but it is.
> 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.
In corporate life, you lose a lot cumulatively if you’re not generally aware of goings on. People who keep their head down and do their work do ok for a while but over a lifetime they lose out on new ideas and don’t work on important problems. Richard Hamming (of Hamming window, Hamming distance fame) noted this in the 1980s and wrote about it in “you and your research”
http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
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Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, "The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind." I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing — not much, but enough that they miss fame.
I remember being approached all the time while I was busy. I don't think most people are "reading" anything. They are just interrupting."Lower friction" in this case means its harder for a person who is busy to ignore an interruption when it is standing at their desk.
>In corporate life, you lose a lot cumulatively if you’re not generally aware of goings on. People who keep their head down and do their work do ok for a while but over a lifetime they lose out on new ideas and don’t work on important problems.
I'm not sure how this relates to what we are talking about. You can be "generally aware of goings on" without being interrupted every 30 minutes.
>Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, "The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind." I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing — not much, but enough that they miss fame.
This reads as generic corporate leader woo. I regularly have discussions with my coworkers and i know what's going on.
The 'stop by chat' crowd just doesn't understand how to communicate effectively and is upset that they can no longer use inefficient channels to get information.
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.
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.
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.
If you don't have anything else you could be doing for that whole hour you probably aren't that busy anyway, in which case waiting won't hurt you too much.
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...
So I think senior management see these things differently...
For the average company a "good employee" doesn't have to be a skilled one, but just one that obeys the boss. This is also true for engineers unless you work for a totally meritocratic PhD led 4 people startup that builds quantum-enabled crypto-agnostic vacuum cleaners.
Point is that in general people that are upper in the chain are usually pretty self-important and see themselves as indispensable, while everyone below is seen as disposable, so as soon as you drift out of their simpaties and their plans they don't care about you anymore.
Obviously there are senior managers/bosses smart enough to know about those 2 or 3 people that they absolutely need to keep for reasons(they know secrets, they have some super rare skills, ...) otherwise the company will just disintegrate.
Humans are selfish, as simple as that, almost nobody goes up in the company ladder for virtue, more for greed and convenience usually, so it's not so strange that things are like this.
If people leave off their "free will" (haha), so be it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's the line of thought.
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.
Probably can just end here
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.
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.
Should be a good slogan for the company
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.