We JUST did this. I work in commercial real estate and we talked about it in 2018 but management chickened out. After the Pandemic, they forced us to go back for a year but moral fell to the lowest point ever and we couldn’t hire anyone.

Finally, it was time to decide on renewing our lease again and we switched back to remote. It’s been awesome and we’ve hired tons of people from our competitors who are pushing in office mandates.

I hope everyone keeps pushing their office to change. It’s possible.

Lucky bastard

This is definitely a step in the right direction, but why stop there? They should be paying you for getting work done to some agreed-upon standard, regardless of whether that takes 40 hours a week or far less.

Can I work at your workplace? Do they need an IT guy?

In a lot of ways, I have the opposite of micromanagement, they really don't care what the hell I am doing as long as I'm delivering my projects effectively.

In my current job, I don't mind doing a little overtime or working a weekend every now and than. They don't care what I do, as long as it gets done. They don't care that I go to the gym during office hours. I'm happy and I'm passionate about my work.

But if they started doing shit like this. I'd be working 9 to 5 and not giving a shit if work gets done or not. I'd become a drone and I'd be looking for other employment.

Fancy that? Don't you love it when your work treat you like...wait for it... an Adult. Rewarded accordingly, help accountable accordingly. Who'd 've thought! 🤔

Hah, it will almost certainly have admin options that allow high level people to turn off that feature.

It'd be easier to list when they are

Well, the IT stuff made a log of it, but I think teams is promising to actually rat on you. Like, if it detects it, it'll send a notice to the boss that you're being remote

I've gone back and forth with my opinion on Teams, but now I agree with you. Earlier there was a lot of shit talk about it, and it just worked for me with no problems. After all of the additional bloat (now we have Copilot in it) it crashes all the time.

That particular data is meaningless in all cases

Apparently it's dirt cheap as compared to alternatives

I think it's more the case it gets bundled in for free (or near enough) with other MS crap like Office.

List of locations it compiles for you, based on a heuristic analysis of data, time of day, and cross-referenced by your consumer data would do it pretty nicely

And it's a terrible piece of software at that.

Maybe, but M$ has had quite an impact over office life for quite some time, and it seems like nearly every org is still paying the M$ tax, even after all these years. Teams is part of that stack, and while I don't know anyone tech-savvy that actually likes it for anything it supposedly solves, it gets used anyway. It is terrible as an IM client. Only one user at a time can share a screen, so it's terrible at any real collab, also. But it integrates with Outlook for scheduling meetings, so....

In addition, it seems like it is almost intentionally user-hostile when it comes to setting up prefs, like disabling incoming video as a default. This is a feature I've seen asked for over 5 years ago. When everyone was stuck at home and sometimes on rather slow/unreliable networks, Microsoft makes you disable incoming video on every single new Teams session, from all the geniuses that felt they were important enough to have their camera on all the time for no real reason.

Now you'd think they would have adapted to something like this, and turned this around very quickly at the beginning of Covid, as not only was it requested from users, but it would make a lot of sense (and maybe it lightens their servers load, too? Although I imagine video feeds don't get streamed through their servers?) and probably be a decent workaround to having audio properly work on slow/bursty network connections, etc.

And yet....I still don't see the feature as an option. I think I saw an answer about some setting that could be done globally or in a policy, as if that is really the answer. Again, it seems like it is software aimed at being sold to control freaks who also care nothing about the user experience of their captured user base. So, 5 years later, I get to disable incoming video on each call if some inconsiderate person has their video on.

Electron is amazing, for smaller teams, individuals or whatever BUT a trillion dollar company cutting corners on native apps, even for their own platform... come on

Oh, this was asked for, I assure you.

Not by workers, but it was asked for.

You, the worker, are not Microsoft’s customer. You and your data are the product.

If you are not the customer, you are the product!

No. I’m sure managers asked for this…

This is me everyday. I should get out more.

Don't be surprised when IT tries to move into your house thinking it is an office building

Bill Gates was an asshole from the start. Happy to use freely available stuff from the early computing community as well as using his school's resources to build either DOS or BASIC and then acting like he had built it all with his own resources when ranting about free software. To be clear, I don't gaf about using free resources to build something and make money from it, but his hypocrisy and anti-competitive BS makes that aspect worse with him.

So it was always shit, it was just that once upon a time, they actually had to make good software that ran on very limited hardware in addition to their anti-competitive BS, and then had a period where they kept trying to make good software but didn't realize yet that they didn't need to (like windows ME was pretty much universally panned, but it didn't drive people away from windows in general).

I think it was win 10 that I first felt like I was in conflict with my OS. Like in win 7, I'd spend time looking at each update's kdb entry to decide if I wanted it (and skipped the nagware ones about win 10 entirely, for example). In win 10, I had to jump through hoops just to be able to control when it applied updates on my own timeline, not MS'. Win 10 was the worst for resetting settings, like I get it set up like I prefer it to be, then a few updates later I'd have to do some of them again. Though tbf, I don't recall that happening in the last few years, but other worse enshitification has settled in since then and now windows never even touched my current main machine.

The problem is they'll know when your not in a company building. So people can't WFH even though their boss isn't watching them at the office anyway.

I think you nearly overestimate the skills and infrastructure at a company. Sure someone already knows, but a built in teams feature that dumbs it down enough for Carol to trivially see something new to bitch about is never a good thing.

Yeah I work at MSFT on a completely different team.

Teams recently asked if I wanted this and I was like.... "sure!"

Now when I'm in the office and people check my status it tells people my desk location and when I'm WFH or elsewhere it tells people I'm not in the building. I don't get people asking "hey are you in today?"

A lot of people in this thread are taking the headline literally like it's "are you online or away?". No. This is more of "are you at your desk in the office or working from a different building or from outside the facilities.

It's more about control than it is about productivity. Has been for a long time.

I mostly work from home ever since Covid. But I live reasonably close to the office and go in every once in a while. Usually it's for something like "team building" or meeting some people deemed "VIPs" (lol) or whatever the fuck. It's not always voluntary.

I have to mentally steel myself for getting very little done on days when I'm in the office. And nearly everyone else I work with does the same thing. It actually adds to the stress because that work load doesn't get any lighter for not being able to get to it.

The reason for all the lack of work? Well, there are longer in-person lunches. There are all the impromptu "pop-ins", the hallway chats, the talk while waiting for some coffee, the extra meetings on the schedule because "in person", etc...all that adds up to very little planned work getting moved forward. You might say there are the benefits of catching up and the occasional serendipity from a random snatch of conversation you eavesdropped on, etc.

While doing this a few times a year might have some benefits (but hard to quantify), I'm quite sure it's not worth doing every day, so I don't. Thankfully I have the option.

CxOs and VPxs have more money that they know what to do with. It isn't about getting work done, it's about making you miserable.

I can see one legitimate application for this, specifically for accountability during an emergency. It's one more thing to tell whomever is checking where to look for people and only if it's actually reliable. I doubt that it would be reliable enough.