Zoom CEO says employees can't be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom

I&#x27;ve been working remotely for 15 years. The pandemic didn&#x27;t really change anything for me as my company is in another state (and now, another country).<p>While I wouldn&#x27;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.<p>There are so many collaboration tools out there and with modern, fast, Internet speeds, it&#x27;s like you&#x27;re in the same room as the other person.<p>Some issues I have noticed: Managers need to know how to manage remotely. When a manager can&#x27;t manage remotely, it shows, and it&#x27;s bad. A bad manager will just blame the employee (which happened to me).<p>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.<p>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.

&gt; Yuan told employees that Zoom the product does not allow Zoom the company to &quot;build as much trust or be as innovative as in the office.&quot; So why does it even exist and how is it making money?<p>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%.<p>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.<p>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.

I believe Eric is right. It&#x27;s often the moments before or after the scheduled meeting when the side conversations happen that build relationships. Sometimes the insight comes 20 minutes after the meeting ends and you walk up to the person at their desk and keep going (even though there is no scheduled meeting). These things are still possible remotely over zoom, but they don&#x27;t hit the same. In 3 years I think I&#x27;ve answered 3 zoom cold calls (from people I knew). The real value to the company of being in office is unstructured time together.<p>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).

The problem with remote work is management not employees.<p>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.<p>For some reason it&#x27;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?<p>The managers and executives are the ones who meed to be going into the office to collaborate.<p>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.<p>No this is all about control and &#x27;cultural fit&#x27; 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.<p>It&#x27;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.

I am not going to defend Zoom&#x27;s RTO plan because I do truly believe that most people who work on computers can work remotely (I do, and I enjoy it).<p>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.

Regardless of Zoom&#x27;s quality as a video calling platform, the real place that daily collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas happens for remote workers is never video calls anyway IME. It&#x27;s open-ended, text-based group discussions— not meetings!<p>What is Zoom using internally for chat?

Sorry, where’s the hypocrisy?<p>Zoom never said video calls are the best way to work.<p>They said video calls offer a level of globally distributed collaboration unprecedented in history. And that’s true.

It&#x27;s a bold move to say the product your company sells is total crap, but not unheard of.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gerald_Ratner#Career" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gerald_Ratner#Career</a>

Makes sense and seems to lined up with what I&#x27;ve experienced. New hire aren&#x27;t developing anywhere near the same as pre-remote hires. Maybe we&#x27;ll figure it out but we&#x27;re having issues really identifying why and figuring out how to resolve it.<p>I expect remote heavy companies to undergo some massive shifts in a few years when people train&#x2F;hiring in this new regime become the majority. I also expect an almost complete end of employee activism.

Why is that incongruous? I bet the McDonald&#x27;s CEO doesn&#x27;t think you should eat it at every meal. It has a place. It would actually be a lot weirder or untenable if he advocated moving all work to zoom.

This is not the first or the last case of CEOs not using&#x2F;trusting their own products, Zuckerberg covering the camera, Jobs banning his kids from using iPads, Gates limiting his kids’ tech use, and list goes on.

I have a feeling this is a pretext for Zoom looking to shed staff.

While he might have this opinion himself, he is acting against the best interest of his company by his actions. A good CEO of a company that thrived during the pandemic would be to enhance the product (or create a new one) to add the missing elements of the puzzle so that remote teams could enjoy increased levels of innovation etc.[0] as compared to teams using competitors&#x27; products. Saying &quot;it&#x27;s impossible&quot; is akin to Selipsky saying &quot;AWS is a different type of service and we&#x27;ll never offer flat-rate instances or k8s&quot; instead of adding Lightsail and EKS to their offering.<p>[0] That is, if his words are backed up with actual data - if these are just personal opinions, there is nothing to act upon.

None of these arguments were ever made when sending engineering teams offshore.

Video calls are like the fast food of social interaction. They are fine in small amounts but when you replace your whole connection to other people with calls and instant messaging, that’s where the deficiencies become noticeable.<p>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.

If CEOs had their way, even the janitors and helpdesk would be &quot;innovative&quot; and they need to bounce ideas off of each other most of the day to do that.<p>I swear, it isn&#x27;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.<p>Never wish another person&#x27;s turd out your arsehole as george washington put it.

We should listen to the guy.<p>Use Slack instead of other suitable platform. Zoom really isn&#x27;t useful for more than call, that will likely be recorded anyway. Screw Zoom.

I attend the office 4.9 days a week on average because that suits my personality, responsibilities etc. But I do find it baffling: half the time I&#x27;m told not to interrupt engineers and we have a whole system to let them get on and work without people making them context switch. The other half of the time I&#x27;m told how important it is that we all be together in the same room to build community&#x2F;relationships!?

Yes I think of solutions for all my awesome work problems in bumper to bumper traffic on my hour long commute. &lt;sarcasm&gt;

Shower thought- people spontaneously form genuine bonds online all of the time. Why do companies struggle with this? Make company intranet or IRC <i>fun</i>. Toss up a Quake, Valheim, or Minecraft server. People outside of work have virtual &quot;teambuilding&quot; exercises all of the time! Am I being naive?

spending more time trying to internally prove that the product is bad than time spent externally trying to prove it is good is a very strange approach at selling product.

I&#x27;m not an expert on building trust, but I do know that one of the quickest ways to <i>burn</i> trust is to mandate an asinine RTO policy without providing good options for your employees, and options for those who may wish to remain remote forever.

Buy them nice houses near the office then

It&#x27;s a silly gotcha. I don&#x27;t think Zoom ever advertised itself as eliminating all in person work, it&#x27;s simply a conferencing tool. Sort of like going &quot;you can&#x27;t work drunk at the Whiskey distillery, what a bunch of hypocrites!&quot; I said it early during the pandemic already but I think it&#x27;s become more obvious over time that video conferencing is not a panacea and doesn&#x27;t wholesale replace face-to-face contact.<p>Honestly reassuring that a CEO does not treat its own product as the solution to everything.

Given that Zoom is paid for monthly but accrues costs by the use, maybe they want to lower the average use of the product to save money. Like how people subscribed to HBO just for GoT.

You know what would be cool? If some company would fix those remote working problems instead of forcing people to work in place. But I guess it&#x27;s not their job.

Remote work needs &quot;common areas&quot; where people can <i>voluntarily</i> just join and leave their camera&#x2F;mic on all the time. Like lurking in an IRC chat. This of course would be abused by employers (&quot;why can&#x27;t I see you at your desk 10 hours a day?&quot;) but it seems to me a way of encouraging the sort of water cooler encounters that being in an office provides.

If the thought that most communication comes through in a non-verbal queues is true, then this seems to be an obvious observation. Trust between humans is often built by going through tough situations together, so to that extent I don’t expect Zoom to be the trust builder, but rather interesting and difficult problems(which is not that easy to come across in a drab work environment).

A lot of companies are doing this. I wonder how many are doing it because they want to reduce head counts through attrition instead of layoffs?

Just a small note: the FLOSS community is essentially remote and in term of innovation is (at least was) definitively innovating.........

&gt; The Reg was quick to point out the paradox of a business that built its fortune on enabling web conferencing throughout the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic only to recall employees living within 50 miles(!!!) back to the office this month for at least two days a week.<p>Y&#x27;all wishing you&#x27;d moved really far during those 2+ years.

Working in-office and I still use Zoom pretty regularly. I don&#x27;t think this negates it&#x27;s value as a tool...

Does the phrase &quot;eat your own dogfood&quot; mean anything to this CEO?

Boomers who have never idled on IRC or met up with friends in video chat live in an entirely different world than those of us who have had experiences collaborating with developer friends internationally, across multiple timezones, right then and there in real-time.<p>These people live such uninteresting lives.

Zoom CEO wants to tank the stock price apparently

So the Zoom CEO doesn&#x27;t want Zoom data going to ChatGPT, like he does with all customer data??? Signals...

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;rDQPO" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;rDQPO</a>

Honestly how many companies are actually innovating, most of the time people are just imitating. I don’t use Zoom but have used Microsoft Teams for the last few years and basically nothing has changed in the app. All their “innovation” is just junk features that they remove from the app 3 months later. They have all this data on how people use the app. How haven’t I improved my productivity at work 10x using this app everyday?

Don’t get high on your own supply

That seems bad for business.

Breaking news: McDonalds CEO doesn&#x27;t eat at McDonalds for every meal

nothing beats getting to know each other on IRC

This feels like a slow motion car crash.

Epic own-goal.

So no eating your own dog food there?

idk, Jeffrey Toobin&#x27;s coworkers probably have a different point of view

Chapter 95 of capitalist owns real estate and does not want to look silly

Because Zoom is utter garbage. The competition is so much better.