Zoom CEO says employees can't be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom
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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.
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.
If they could save money right now by not paying for utilities and support staff without sacrificing productivity, they absolutely would do it.
And eventually that lease is going to come up for renewal, and they'd love to be able to cut costs then too. Bringing everyone back to the office makes that impossible, but they've decided it's worth it.
Things like utilities and support staff on large business park leases are often included or heavily discounted, not to mention that they're usually tax-deductible. Where are you getting your info?
EDIT: And if they DO own it, it they would probably prefer to pay some rental management company to rent it out as office space for passive income rather than fill it with their own expensive employees.
A small part may even be that they value work done in-office more than work done remotely. But just pointing out it’s not the most plausible objection to remote work.
> 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)
There's going to be a rude awakening if they think that's a good solution
EDIT: @bbor Absolutely. I believe the challenge is everyone's incentive is inertia. Cities don't want to lose tax dollars and economic activity, even though they will. Asset owners don't want to take haircuts, even though they will. I'm a strong union supporter so workers have agency over their working arrangements, versus being dragged back to the office because some bro who lucked into leadership says "because I say so." Rarely does anyone include happiness and quality of life in these metrics and models, which is unfortunate. Hope this helps.
Not quite, I dont think. If defaults happen, the new owners get the building at lower prices and thus will be willing to lease at lower prices...making RTO more feasible for companies.
Who will make these loans? Lending has dried up for office space, and mid sized banks are in distress over these debts. Maybe PE or hedge funds can piece financing together, but without easy loans from banks, financing will be costly, impairing what purchase price you offer.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-banks-sink-conce...
https://www.costar.com/article/328997282/big-us-banks-pull-b...
https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2023/06/27/fifth...
https://www.axios.com/2023/03/21/small-bank-struggles-could-...
https://www.ft.com/content/a77695ac-a516-4654-8e0f-5aeb4f4ff...
Once the current owners default, the banks own the buildings. They dont have the capital to carry the buildings, so they will fire-sell the buildings. someone will buy the buildings for sure, because if you fire-sell it inexpensively enough there will be buyers. There are numerous buyers, especially sovereign funds who would buy at a sufficient haircut of peak value.
Just like the 2008 resi crisis, there were fire sales at 10% of original value. It isnt clear what the "recovery value" is for Commercial Real Estate, esp office buildings, but it may be so low that lenders are willing to lend. Also, it may be so low that syndicates buy outright.
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.
Maybe you could clarify what you meant?
It all leads to constant interruptions and people speaking over others because all of the natural cues we rely on are missing or time-shifted.
Not to mention the ability to "read the room". You're often trying to gauge what other people are thinking -- are they receptive, confused, afraid to ask a question, satisfied, etc. This is far, far more difficult over Zoom.
Even with cameras on it's hard to tell this stuff.
In person it's easy. It's possible some people (e.g. me) rely on these cues more, or are just uncomfortable with everyone constantly speaking over eachother, or effectively having to interrupt and talk over others.
If two people start speaking at the same time on Zoom, the optimal strategy is probably to just keep speaking and the other person will stop.
When I was in high school I was in a class where we were on a panel with other classmates and asked questions. During the course of a question several of us would have a response, which we indicated to each other by moving our hands forward. The first person to do this spoke first.
Zoom does have a “raise hand” feature but few people use it. If for example there was a key you could hold down to actively raise your hand, this problem would be partially solved.
It is obviously possible to waste or reduce that bandwidth to the point that you would be as efficient online but it is also possible to utilize that higher capacity effectively.
Not even a single order of magnitude (10x) higher, much less orders (100x or more) higher. No evidence of anything close to that assertion.
Remote collab is a skill like any other, it can be mastered, and it can be taught.
Try "10,000 hours of practice" at collaborating remotely, then teach it to others to scale out.
You'll find these remote friendly skills increase day-over-day bandwidth for teams larger than a single table.
Engineering should be more about meaning content than attitude content, and engineering workshopping should not be a poker game.
The stat is not about conversation content, but conveying attitude. The study found attitude was conveyed 55% nonverbal, 38% vocal, and 7% words only.
By that study, using the telephone would be 55% info loss about attitude (tone and words convey 45%), and using video chat adds facial expression (majority of non-verbal attitude). Attitude info, not meaning info.
So no, it's not 10x more info in person, even for the narrow case of conveying negotiation attitude blind over telephone, plus most non-verbal attitude is conveyed by facial expression which comes through on video chat.
> video chat adds facial expression
Delayed and with significantly less detail.
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.
- Have more space for their open office plan.
- Allow managers to have their own offices.
Morale? Who needs that.
The opportunity of covid to get rid of more desks was great, and we’ve closed two more buildings in central london thanks to it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Remote work is a relatively new market that Zoom accidentally fell into. However, they don't seem to have the leadership to capitalize on that early lead and they'll eventually become irrelevant as other companies build video conferencing as a mere feature of a bigger remote work platform.
That said, you could make the same argument about Dropbox and they are still around.
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.
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.
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).
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.
For you, your local optimum may be great, but global optimum for the company as a whole may not. And vice versa.
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.)
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).
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.
People should be able to say what they think in any situation without the fear of reprisals.
But it doesn't work that way because management often can't take criticism and so you're left with back channels and politics to get things done.
This is a management problem and a culture problem not a problem with working from home or not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
0: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/02/new-google-c...
What is Zoom using internally for chat?
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.
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.
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.
Actually, he does (well 10 meals a week):
Every fast food company has a "flagship" store near the HQ, often for the purpose of being seen eating there.
You can google around for the stories and photo ops. :)
But yes, not every CEO believes their product should be used all the time. But most of them at least believe in the core benefit they claim their product provides.
[0] That is, if his words are backed up with actual data - if these are just personal opinions, there is nothing to act upon.
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.
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).
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.
I keep a file on my computer with many co-workers names and lists of things they’ve done to fuck up or times they didn’t do any work just in case.
If you publicize that list, you are likely to destroy yourself.
Nukes are an effective deterrent only if people think you have them (and think you might use them).
If I was their manager, that would be a really bad look for the person.
I honestly don’t think it’s your mistake to act that way, I think it’s the leadership in there who are not working enough to build enough trust in that work environment so that so you need a CYA folder.
If you're delivering value then you don't need the file, and if you're not, then you should be fired.
garbage in, garbage out.
If you want me to be a part of the team you have to make that team have meaning and benefit. That I work with you is neither. Those I work with are no more important to me than the shit stain I power washed off the toilet bowl.
If we miss goals? What happens. Nothing. If we hit goals what happens? Maybe the PM and EM will get a small bonus and we're all made to work hard to achieve that level of productivity with no benefit. So, sorry, no, I don't want to be a part of your team.
That's exactly my point. Why be there except for your need of income to be exploited?
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.
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."
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.
You must read a different HN than I do
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.
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.
Use Slack instead of other suitable platform. Zoom really isn't useful for more than call, that will likely be recorded anyway. Screw Zoom.
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.
Honestly reassuring that a CEO does not treat its own product as the solution to everything.
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.
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.
The Friday afternoon beer call was funny and entertaining during covid but it’s worn thin and people want to physically meet up again.
Y'all wishing you'd moved really far during those 2+ years.
These people live such uninteresting lives.
They own real estate. They don't care!
Zoom isn’t great but Teams is worse.
If you prefer to use other non-google browsers, performance is degraded and some features aren't supported.
Compared to all the other gymnastics one has to make to get the exact same functionality, plus having to install malware and whatnot, it's a much better UX.
It feels like I'm taking a big step back when I have to use Teams or Zoom.