"Our product is so bad, WE won't even use it."
It's not bad though. Zoom is great. Apparently their leadership sucks, but as a product its always done what I needed it to do without issue.
What are you comparing it to? Zoom is mediocre, in my experience. I've honestly had a better experience just using hangouts on Slack
It's pretty bad when your CEO disparages your product that much. It's like if Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said they'd be switching to Google Workspace because Microsoft Teams was inefficient and difficult to use.
Absolutely scathing.
Isn’t this like the second time the ceo said something like that? I think he probably needs to be unseated from his position.
Zoom does legitimately suck though, but not for the reasons he thinks. Moreso from a privacy perspective.
Let him keep shit-talking Zoom until my employers switch to a better alternative!
Fair enough! :)
He’s not saying Zoom is a bad product.
Teams and Zoom are great for remote work, and I get how a lot of people love just dialing in to meetings, but there’s definitely a different dynamic to being in the office.
During the pandemic my dev team grew from two people to six. Since it was in waves we got to try being at the office and being at home using remote work only interchangeably.
Especially as a manager I see the benefits of working in the office. Not necessarily every day, but regularly.
Not necessarily from a raw productivity perspective. The office has a lot of apparent drawbacks, but these drawbacks are what triggers the dynamic that makes the office better - at least for me and my team.
I find that the office conversations triggers more ideas and better collaboration.
With my manager hat on I find that it’s easier for me to see if I need to get involved in discussions or let people handle it themselves.
People are different, teams are different, but it’s not black and white.
People love the flexibility of remote work, and some people are certainly better off working “alone” at home than being with the team, but for me it’s all about finding the balance. I don’t want to micromanage anyone, but there’s a reason a lot of people need managers, and that is simply that left to their own devices they will start working on 200 things and not finish anything.
As boring as it is our job is to deliver value to the company.
But on occasion, I will let people run wild with ideas and see where it goes. And then rein them back in when there are deadlines to be met.
As someone else in management I would take the higher morale boost I have from my completely remote engineering team to some “good conversations” and “interesting ideas” that may pop up from time to time. It’s not their job to come up with that shit. It’s either mine or products and they are definitely able to do it organically if you facilitate casual working sessions that promote conversation over productivity.
Edit: also if you have people who can’t manage their work without you stating over their shoulder that’s a failure on your part not theirs. Yes some people just aren’t cut out for some jobs but if the difference is being remote or in the office that is totally on you.
Typical manager mentality.
You are trying really hard to keep your micro manager position aren't you?
If people are working on 200 things at once it's your job to provide them with clear cut tasks, priorities, and deadlines.
No, he's saying that the product is ineffective at what it aims to do.
Unless he doesn't believe zoom is intended to solve the problem of remote work.
There's a difference in scale of making a zoom call occasionally to add flexibility and having your entire business run off zoom for its day to day. Some things you'd want to solve for in the second but not the first case: Remote learning, team building events, snack distribution.
Offloading the entire office experience to remote isn't as easy as just using a video conferencing app.
Unless he doesn't believe zoom is intended to solve the problem of remote work.
Remote work fucking MADE his company into what it is today. Nobody even heard of Zoom before the pandemic. They were a nothing company with a shitty product amongst many. He knows this very well, he just can't keep his own micro-managing inner asshole down.
Remote work is such a boon to workers, and from my perception there is not a lot of benefit of mandating in-person work.
It really feels like the push to return to in-person is primarily driven by a combination of propping up the industrial real estate industry as well as managers not trusting their employees, and perhaps some level of maliciousness towards employees.
The return on investment on operating an office space for the nominal increase in productivity really makes in-person work feel like it's only for the managers' egos.
The fact that the Zoom CEO is pushing for this to me does not represent a lack of faith in their product, but a strong desire to squeeze every drop of productivity out of their employees regardless on quality of life and regardless of return on investment of the cost of operating the office.
Nestled at the end of the article is the following quote, coming from survey data
But there's also the power trip. Remarkably, a recent survey of company execs revealed that most mandated returns to the office were based on something as ironclad as "gut feeling," and that 80 percent actually regret ever making the decision.
I think the reality is that like most policy decisions at a workplace, they are based on nothing. They simply are drawn from how the people at the top feel like an organization should be or because that's simply how these decision makers are used to (or comfortable with) doing things.
I truly think it's just the corporate real estate thing. Those 80% that regret return to office are CEOs that weighed the loss from real estate contracts against the blowback from forcing employees back to office, and they are saying that they feel they made the wrong decision.
I might argue this statistic also shows that 80% of CEOs underestimate the value of their employees. Not exactly a hot take in 2023, but it's fun to put a number to it.
I dont understand this real estate thing. Cancelling contracts or having empty space is still cheaper than everyone back in the office.
More people in the office means more maintenance, more snacks, more hvac needs, etc.
Unless your or the company's portfolio has lots of commercial real estate securites. The commercial real estate and the financial securities behind them are in a bubble and there is a fear it could pop like it was 2007 with the mortgage securities. That was the fear behind it. And many cities had mayors pushing for a return to office because the downtowns were threatened.
Most of this comes from the C-level execs being "inbred." Meaning many C-level execs sit as board members on other companies. These guys are all trying to scratch each others' backs.
And many cities had mayors pushing for a return to office because the downtowns were threatened.
…with affordable housing. The horror!
We keep hearing about 'productivity' in this context. Let's explore that - back in the days when people were 5 days/week in the office, supervisors and managers concentrated on attendance and punctuality. They still could but now they are focusing on being in the office. In both cases these are proxy measures- they don't directly measure output. What is this 'productivity' here? Because the actual verifiable data tells the opposite story
Basically, I think it's exactly what @Gaywallet@beehaw.org was saying: these decisions aren't being made with any actual facts/ data as the basis. The decisions are solely based on "gut feelings" of the higher-ups. Attendance is the only way the higher-ups know how to gauge productivity, and that is going to trump any actual productivity data.
One consistent thing I notice in all these declarations, especially in speaking with other high-level management sorts... They'll declare "we have better conversations in the office", to which I simply ask "do you not ever simply call someone to shoot-the-shit?"
Case in point: we had a leaver recently, my boss had had a one-on-one and came to me saying "X is leaving, some flaky reason about job security".
My response: "They've got a kid in a new school, and they've been a bit worried about operational security here. They just wanted to work for a bigger company because there's inherently more stability in that sort of environment. Did X not tell you this?"
Boss: "No."
Me: "...How long did you chat to them?"
Boss: "5 min call"
Me: "I pulled X in for a chat, we were talking for 30 mins... Do you not do this with everyone? Do you ever just take people aside for a social call?"
Boss: "..."
It's just people from a different era, they didn't grow up socializing on MSN etc. This is all foreign and scary to them. They'll die (in the workplace) off soon enough.
On top of this, they don't care about best practices. They're shit managers who were better at getting promoted than managing people.
Meetings on Zoom suck? Well, you don't use agendas, meeting notes, etc. Your meetings always sucked, you're just missing the dopamine hit from socializing on the way to and from the meeting.
Bad employee relations? Well, your 1:1s are really only status calls. Your relations always sucked, you're just missing talking to Bill about your kids when you corner him at the coffee machine.
Missing team bonding? Well, your team went to happy hour to bitch about you. They always hated trust falls. You just miss hanging out with your yes-chums.
I think amongst all this is where people get lost. Nearly everyone is capable of having these conversations, not everyone recognizes all the opportunities they have to have them. For the older folks, they can't imagine having conversations like this anywhere but the water cooler, or after a meeting is over, over a lunch they invite their coworker to, or in a closed office. Younger generations, as you mentioned, grew up socializing on the internet so opening a DM, sending a text, or otherwise chatting off topic in a digital channel are all skills they already use. One might make the argument that short videos, text on images, voice chat, streaming, emoji, and other kinds of more modern communication modalities are all extensions of the same thought. If more CEOs and people in power spent time asking their workers and reaching out to people who are capable of socializing effectively online, rather than simply blaming the modality, we'd be in a much better place today. In fact, finding the companies which do this right is likely finding the companies which will be successful in the future - virtual work brings a lot of clear and unambiguous benefits, the trick will be finding out how to offset the negatives.
So thoroughly CEO-brained he’s sabotaging his own business. He’d rather have his serfs in spitting distance than a future for his company. Truly incredible.
Have you ever micromanaged so hard that you micromanaged your way out of micromanaging?
The Board of Directors at Zoom should be having an emergency meeting right now to fire this guy with prejudice for comments directly damaging to the brand. Wonder why that isn't happening? Zoom shareholders should be revolting.
[meme with the sweating guy in front of two buttons]
If they can't have debates over zoom meetings that's a culture problem, not a technology problem
Yeah. I doubt they can have debates in person, either. But getting 7 people in a room so that the 2 highest paid ones can ideate all over each other while the other 5 nod along as a paid audience just feels better for those 2 than looking up to see the glassy-eyed stares of people who are trying to get their work done while sitting in on a pointless vanity meeting.
Wow, well said. I wonder if the arguement that "working in the office is important so that younger/newer employees can recieve mentorship" is just a theme and variation on the same thinking.
working in the office is important so that younger/newer employees can recieve mentorship
That has real "I can't mentor someone unless we're at the strip club" energy.
Maybe it's different for the upper management types, but for me I am easily 3x more productive at home in < 6 hours than I ever was at 8+ hours in the office.
There are soo many distractions in the office environment we had (cubicle farm). People chatting behind me, constant noise, people coming up to my desk throughout the day to ask me something and disrupt my entire workflow.
I work in my quiet home with headphones on listening to music. When people need something from me they ping me in Teams or send an email and I get to choose when to stop my work to respond. And when I really need to focus I can throw on Do Not Disturb mode. In the office "Do Not Disturb" was me booking a conference room for myself to work in silence.
Realistic scenario: half the workers show up in person just to log into a video conference anyway because the other half is remote.
It’s funny because it’s true.
I work in a field where the vast majority of the work done requires an on-site presence. But meetings? I log into those. Even when the physical venue is a half dozen offices from me.
Yeah yeah, let's unite together into a union then
I think its time for you zoomies to start doing the voomies and voom out of that company. lots of nice companies that value you and pay well that are remote.
At work Teams has been great.
Zoom is too bare-bomes.
The I hacked it together at 3am feel of the zoom interface makes me actively hate the damn thing.
Like teams feels like a communication application. Zoom feels like a hobby project.
Lol, I am the opposite.
Teams has not implemented those basic features.
Teams on Linux is pretty garbage though. They removed the desktop app and replaced it with a half-baked PWA which is exceptionally buggy on every browser, even Edge. I can't believe I did so many interviews over Teams this year, thankfully none of those jobs hired me and I got another job using Google Meet which actually works lol
The truest test of post capitolism. Can a company make a communication product so poorly that said company couldn't even use it to unionize?
We've already had Skype. So it's a yes.
The irony of the situation still seems distant to the CEO. According to the leaked meeting on August 3, Yuan told employees that Zoom the product does not allow Zoom the company to "build as much trust or be as innovative as in the office."
Of course it doesn't. It allows people to communicate remotely. But it's not a 100% substitute for meeting people in person, and pretending otherwise would be stupid. Of course meeting in person builds more trust than video-chats. And discussions on a real whiteboard can be much more productive than on a video call, depending on the topic.
So why does it even exist
Why does the telephone exist? Zoom exists for the same reason. To let people talk remotely. It has some extra features a telephone doesn't, but that's it. It's not supposed replace meeting other people.
Now,
But the particular argument this article lays out just makes no sense.
Of course meeting in person builds more trust than video-chats
I disagree with this statement. Every study I've seen trying to examine the difference between "in person" and "virtual" has been poorly designed or resulted in inconclusive results. Retrospective studies on team dynamics often fail to account for spaces critical to trust-building such as water-cooler talk and outside of work events, and fail to replicate virtual versions of predominantly in-person activities. Studies which use naive individuals and compare person to person interaction as compared to virtual are either inconclusive because they involve tasks in which trust is built in the concept of a game and how personal someone is does not matter as much as the task at hand, or do a poor job of measuring trust and are actually measuring other aspects of interpersonal relationships.
And discussions on a real whiteboard can be much more productive than on a video call, depending on the topic.
I primarily see this as a failure of digital technologies and adoption. There are wonderful digital whiteboarding apps, but they are not included in the most prominent digital meeting technologies yet and free products tend to have a poor user experience. There's also an issue of how you are measuring "productive". Scientific measurements on productivity show that whiteboarding and brainstorming are often not actually productive when you evaluate based on the quality of the end product, despite being perceived as productive. If you're measuring how people who worked on the product feel about the direction and the end result, however, there's a bit to unpack about teamwork and managing emotions.
But the particular argument this article lays out just makes no sense.
I think the point of the article is to show that the CEOs empty words are empty and to provide a framework for which one can critically examine them. You're probably overthinking the difference in meeting modality, which is a much more complicated question - in fact, I would argue that a lot of commonly bandied insights about business are based on fluff or nothing at all, but rather "gut feeling" as the article so aptly puts it.
Man. Fuck those guys!
— Zoom Video Communications, Inc CEO Eric Yuan (about Zoom Video Communications, Inc)
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