I can't think of a worse marketing strategy for a company that relies on remote work to remain relevant. This would be like if General Motors forced every employee within 50 miles of an assembly plant to ride a bike to work.
I don't think that Zoom specifically advocates for companies to end work in the office.
Like, say you work for Coca-Cola. Their company health plan probably does not encourage people to drink nothing but Coca-Cola, even if they do make it available in the office.
is now asking all employees within 50 miles of a company office to go in at least two days a week on a hybrid schedule.
I briefly worked for a company that took this approach. The oversight they made was they had 2 offices (different teams in each), but as long as you lived within 50 miles of one of the offices, you had to come in.
Even if your team was exclusively in office 1, and you lived outside the radius of office 1 BUT were in the radius of office 2...you had to come in to office 2...and teleconference with your team in office 1 🤦
Wow that’s next level dumb. My job did something similar. Someone whose team was based out of Texas yet they still made the 2 people from MI go to the MI office. And on separate days “so someone was always available”
Then the same company closed 75% of their massive building and said the hybrid employees have to share cubes with other people. I’m so glad HR made me permanent remote.
50 miles during a commute is way too far. My employer has pushed for people whose commute would be 1 hour maximum during rush hour to try to come into an office once a week. Where I live it can take an hour to go 10-15 miles during rush hour…
There's a guy at my company that lives in Sacramento, and commutes twice a week to go in the office in mountain view. That's a 4 hour commute with no traffic.
His entire team is in the San diego office. There's literally zero point, but I guess his manager isn't willing or capable of fighting for an exception to the hybrid mandate.
I've been getting a lot of messages on LinkedIn from recruiters, a lot of these are asking me to be in the office 2 to 3 times a week. If I was to commute, I'd leave before my son is awake and arrive after he has gone to bed, working from home, I see him whenever I want.
Never saw my dad growing up unless it was the weekends and by then he was tired. He commuted a decent amount. Now he's in his later years and unable to physically do much. I wonder what kind of relationship we would have had. I wish I knew him at his best.
I like being in the office but the commute is so fucking dumb. Giant swarms of gridlocked cars blasting pollution into the air, wasting vast amounts of time/money/public resources... then you think about how you worked perfectly fine 100% remote for a year and yet these tech companies are all of a sudden herding everyone back into the office doing everything possible to piss away a valuable tool to reduce pollution, increase space for housing while reducing their own overhead, and build resiliency against future pandemics.
It's just weak management. Some people work best from home. For some people, that doesn't really work. For people like myself, I need to come into the office once per week and I'm good.
But it's easier to manage via policy instead of managing individuals. So that's what they do.
90% of the people who were laid off in December had a new job by February. That timeframe has been consistent across the board.
There is still a huge talent gap and there are still a huge amount of high paying jobs available for folks in software. You may have more trouble getting into the largest orgs, but aim a bit smaller and you can find work pretty quickly.
The tech hiring market is most definitely NOT hot right now. It's the worst it's been since the 2008 crisis aftermath.
Obviously there are still things out there but companies are hiring less and the market is flooded with big tech layoffs. Companies are being flooded with applications for available roles.
Startups are also struggling to raise which means there are less new jobs in startups too.
Worst argument though. The building has already been paid for or has a lease. Using or not using it won't bring that money back. The only thing that can bring the money back is subleasing it. Even not using it saves some money (energy bills).
That's not how this stuff works. The buildings belong to people, ultimately most of them being to the oligarchs. Having a lot of people work from home will put pressure on real estate values so the oligarchs might see the line go up a little slower. So they put pressure on CEOs to keep people locked up in their silos. They're also easier to control that way.
They've invested a lot of money in office real estate and hate that it's going to waste.
Also, CEOs tend to be extroverts who want to be around people. They're also sociopaths who think everyone is like them (or they don't care what others think).
If you work from home and only work for 4 hours, lots of managers do not know how to tell if that work you did took 8 hours or 4. In the office they have plausible deniability that they saw you there doing something.
They've invested a lot of money in office real estate and hate that it's going to waste.
But see this makes no sense. The money invested is gone (or contractually tied up). Using it won't make it a good investment.
It's like if you bought a car and then moved somewhere where you're like 1 minute walking from work, the grocery store, the hair salon,.and the best restaurants, and you never travel otherwise. The money spent on the car is objectively wasted. Using your car unnecessarily to drive places you (a) wouldn't normally go to or (b) don't need a car to get to is not only pointless, but actually costs MORE MONEY because of gas and maintenance (or for a building, energy and cleaning).
No idea whether it's their reason, but anecdotally I've found it has a few benefits. If coordinated properly it's significantly easier to train new(er) staff, it improves cross-organisational understanding to overhear other departments' conversations either at desks or in break rooms, and it stops people becoming isolated pockets of knowledge and culture because they only ever see or interact with the same one or two people.
Because the people creating these mandates don't have to suffer them. They come and go as they please, and they don't work in the pit open office space. They have real offices with furniture, walls, and doors that shut.
I can help you. The benefit is strictly for the maintenance of th bullshit status quo and the logic is, once you're already coming in two days a week, it'll be an easier fight to ask for a third. Then a fourth. And so on.
Currently looking for another job and EVERY job I have seen that's hybrid has multiple offices across the country. So basically they make you come into the office to talk to the rest of your team on zoom. Somehow that is more efficient than talking to them on zoom from your house.
My company is starting to do this as well. They say it’s to “build culture in market”. Really they just want to force you to interact with your coworkers to make things feel less transactional and to keep tabs on people
Zoom, which remains a leader in the post-pandemic remote work trend, is now asking all employees within 50 miles of a company office to go in at least two days a week on a hybrid schedule.
Different circumstances but similarly funny in an absurd way because of how it sounds, I remember reading a news item in the 90s about the time when a riot broke out in a Nerf factory in China.
Wouldn't be surprised if this is just to weed out employees so they don't need to do layoffs. Forcing return to office keeps employees that are "loyal" to the company while potentially trimming down total headcount.
They'll have a ton of workers who are hundreds to thousands of miles away, housed elsewhere, with kids in school, who will have to quit rather than somehow go to that office, so yeah.
I've been saying this since the tech industry has been pushing RTO, I used to work in a large company that hopped on the layoff wave and they were pushing HARRRRDD for RTO. I quit before the bloodbath and found a more fun job :)
As someone starting out their career in a technical field, I would LOVE to be in the office more if more people from the projects I'm working on were regularly there, but it's just not feasible to require it.
Capitalism leaves us with barely any time to live, and so much time has been clawed back from WFH.
No way I'm advocating it to be mandatory to come into the office more than a single day a week.
Maybe it depends on what kind of employees you are onboarding, but in tech it's vastly simpler to onboard employees remotely, you want to be sharing screens so even if you were in an office you'd want to be at your own computers.