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.
Wait till you hear about Word!
Or “Windows App”
what the fuck is with Windows App? it takes gigs and it’s literally just an RDP wrapper.
Also literally no one uses it. Everyone just uses remote desktop which is still in windows anyway.
And “office”.
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!
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.
It’s also a justification for the millions of dollars they already spent on office space that isn’t necessary anymore.
Yep. And as another commenter pointed out, the “leaders” pushing these return to office mandates usually have substantial commercial real estate investments.
No conflict of interest there…
Well they’re not wrong; Teams is a godawful product and should never be used.
If being proficient at using teams means people can work from where they prefer, it’s my opinion that it’s your duty to do it, so everyone has better choices.
Obviously that isn’t the opinion held here, but that is more indicative of companies trying to reduce headcount because their growth has slowed. Growing companies are meeting people where they are. Broadly speaking of course.
I know a contractor working on teams. It was as eyerolling as you could expect.
Was it Teams or Teams (New) or Teams (School & Work) or Teams…
“Please sign out to sign in”
The only reason people use teams over slack is that it comes bundled with everything else Microsoft makes, why make a good product when you can leverage your position in the market
I’ve also heard that Slack get real expensive for larger enterprises.
Makes me laugh additionally because the modern conception of “dogfooding” in tech was popularized by Microsoft itself back in the 1990s. This is the opposite of dogfooding and really is a big condemnation of Teams as a software solution for connected work, at least on paper.
Teams wasn’t specifically built for remote work though. It was built for internal chat/messaging, document sharing, planning, etc. It is 100% used internally at MS even when people aren’t working remotely.
I know because people at MS have been complaining about it since a few years before the pandemic.
But github was built for remote async work and since ms acquired it got even more remote work features.
This is a fair point, I was being a bit facetious, but I’m sure there are plenty of teams both totally in person and totally remote using it. It is just bad optics I think. Like if Teams isn’t useful enough for them that they have to be in person despite having an ostensibly full-featured videoconferencing and calendar coordination and chat, the hell good is it for my organization?
Microsoft also owns Github which is the best asynchronous remote workplace tool on the market imo. Yet here we are.
Once you get big enough you just fail upwards. Microsoft, Oracle, Google etc all have to get 1 thing right out of a 100 failures and will still continue to succeed.
I feel like this misses the mark slightly: Microsoft owns Github now, in precisely the same way that Melon Husk owns Xitter. Microsoft didn’t “fail upwards” with github, they used the power of unforgivably offensive amounts of capital to make a purchase of an already-extremely-profitable company, in order to ensure that all of Microsoft’s other software dingleberries, hanging from the fetid prolapse that is their own company, continue to hang on and accomplish the only two things they care about:
- that the girth of their proverbial ass does not decrease (and thus continue to keep every market they can firmly under its weight)
And
- that its stench continues poisoning the well for anything that could potentially compete with them.
With these two feats accomplished, they can keep their monopoly going.
Teams isn’t really designed to do anything, it’s mostly just a conferencing app but it’s absolute rubbish at collaboration work because it essentially doesn’t have any tools in that area. Why Microsoft have never bothered to create their own version of slack I do not know.
Why Microsoft have never bothered to create their own version of slack I do not know.
The parts of Slack that Teams doesn’t fail to make usable are available in unusable form in Azure Devops.
“You want to use teams a bit? We have a session here” “I’d be happy to, actually. Not really, but it wouldn’t be bad” “Not really? If you say so, I have a teams session ready right here” “No. No. I’m not stupid” “People use it every day.” “Tell the truth” “It’s a good user experience.” “So are you ready to use it? For 5 minutes?” “No, I’m not an idiot.”
I already knew where this link would take me XD.
my guess
team team team team team? I even like saying the word team?
called it
Some people think this is a picture of my family. Well, it’s not. It’s a picture of
Tap for spoiler
The A-Team!
The real problem here is thinking Teams is the same as all remote work solutions
But who’s on first?
What?
What’s on second.
I don’t know!
Third base!
On Teams? Kinky!
… I bet they’d be able to work remotely if they switched to Slack :P
Of all things to poke Microsoft for this one makes no sense. Isn’t understanding your weaknesses a strength?
An RTO mandate isn’t growth. Growth would be if they mandated all hard drives containing Teams source code be thrown into a dumpster, and the dumpster lit on fire.
I don’t think microsoft understands shit. I think their leaders are out of touch, lying, idiots. They continue to exist based on inertia and past success.
Not on
Lemmysocial media 😜
Teams teams team Teams teams
It’s true though, and there’s no technological improvement to communication software that can ever change this.
If you sit physically next to your colleagues, you can at all times see what they are working on, talking to each other about, etc., and thereby learn more about the project and the company; if you work remotely and have to explicitly choose to communicate, you miss out on all of that.
Constantly talking to your colleagues degrades the work quality, if anything. I don’t need to hear rumors about our manager’s ex to be able to work on projects
Our team has office days once or twice per month and fuck all gets done on those days. Time is spent on social chitchat, longer coffee breaks and lunch with more small talk, discussing random ideas and almost anything else than actual work. And those are really nice to have, when we’re mostly scattered across few cities and limited to text chat or calls they tend to be strictly about the task at hand. The office days give a sort of a break on normal schedule and while very little gets actually done the discussions often include planning future stuff, going trough previous changes, current situation and workload more broadly and so on. After those days, even if nothing got done, we’re all a bit more on board on almost everything and it’s nice to actually meet the people we interact with every day.
But for actual work, for the stuff we do, the office doesn’t offer anything we couldn’t do remotely. I have more comfortable setup at home than at my cubicle at office, I can listen to whatever I want at how loud I want without disturbing others, no hassle with commute (even if mine is pretty much as short as it can be) and so on.
So what you are saying is that a lot gets done on those days.
Anyway, I agree that hybrid is the best model.
hybrid is the best model.
Depends on how far the office is. Remote work allows companies to hire people from across the country, but that means that they can’t RTO everyone.
Well, I think some fully remote is fine. However, I do think hybrid is the best model. Just my opinion.
One of the “dangers” of fully remote is that they become fully global. The amount a company will pay becomes disconnected from the cost-of-living. That creates inequity. Not just that employees in richer areas may be underpaid but also that remote employees for rich companies may be paid far more than their countrymen in their home market.
I don’t really like the idea of running decades of income lottery while the global order works this all out.
Even within a single country it can be fairly extreme.
I haven’t been in an office since 2020, but the 15 years prior that I spent numerous offices taught me that much of corporate life is spent dealing with office politics instead of accomplishing anything meaningful.
Those “water cooler conversations” that executives are so keen on are mostly spent shootin’ the breeze or complaining about how Bob from marketing is a fucking moron.
Turns out when people step out for a break or head to the water cooler, they don’t want to talk about work. Shocking, I know.
I never had any productive water-cooler conversations but I have had many eye-opening and productive smoke breaks with colleagues when that was a thing. The smoking area was the great equalizer that these companies are waxing nostalgic about.
I learned that I could never concentrate in the office over other people’s conversations, that the boss could and would interrupt me with trivial matters every few minutes regardless of what I’m working on, that Steve on my right was more concerned to be seen working when sick than to prevent others getting sick, that colleagues will always shout out questions they could answer themselves in a few seconds, thus prompting an hour of random chat, that Steve was always sick, and that Steve was the noisiest eater in the world of the most garlicy food in the world, which made him gassy, that the boss’s assessment of my productivity was chiefly based on hours visibly spent suffering Steve, that Steve considers shopping online to be a social activity, and that the boss can detect headphones going on your head and music starting from 50 feet away and instantly be behind you with a burning question that doesn’t make any sense. Working at home has been more productive for us all, except that the boss and Steve don’t seem to know that Teams offers chat channels other than “General”.
I miss casually bumping into people and chatting, but not because it ever helped with the work.
the boss can detect headphones going on your head and music starting from 50 feet away and instantly be behind you with a burning question that doesn’t make any sense.
I’m sure you realize that the question doesn’t make any sense because they had to think of it on the spot, just to prove that you can’t wear headphones in the office due to all the important ambient office talk you need to be a part of.
One of my best, most competent bosses once said to the team “I don’t understand how you guys can work while listening to music, but as long as your output stays high, I’m not going to interfere.”
Downside: Many companies use open-plan offices, which means it’s too busy to concentrate. So everyone wears noise-cancelling headphones in order to be able to work at all.
The only time I actually felt that being present was a benefit was in a company that had one from for every two people.
Do you actually do work or are you one of those middle-men that add dubious value?
And, like, do you think I can read my coworker’s screen from across the room and be like “Ah yes, that is
TransferProjectView.py. I should tell him that I am also planning on touching that file”?And adults can learn to explicitly communicate. It’s not impossible. You just type into the box.
The most brilliant ideas happen on the toilet or in the shower. Naturally- we should poop and bathe with our coworkers.
Right, so my 3 hour round trip doesn’t cut into that?
What ever value you get from chance conversations will overwhelmed by people spending significantly less time actually working.
Found the C-Suite.
