- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
‘Don’t Mess With Us’: WebMD Parent Company Demands Return to Office in Bizarre Video::“I’ve seen better acting by hostages in direct to DVD movies,” one anonymous worker wrote about the video.
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I’m so tired of businesses claiming that the only way for a company to be successful is if everyone is in person for the dear dear meetings. We all know exactly what this is about. 1. It’s more dofficult to micromanage employees when a manger can’t constantly observe them, and 2. All the giant real estate investments companies have made is now coming due and they cant fill up their buildings fast enough to get those tax breaks. Why the hell else are they “tracking” people in the office. Meanwhile senior leadership can come and go whenever they see fit. It’s control. Plain and simple.
WebMD is owned by Internet Brands, which is owned by KKR, an investment group with $64 billion in real estate assets. This has fuck all to do with productivity or middle management.
Fuckin kkr. The ones who got Toys R Us to go bankrupt just to make a buck. They also purchased the company i worked for then sold it to another company which resulted in big layoffs some years back. They can eat shit and die.
I miss Toys R Us
We still have them in Canada!
It’s really just “we need people so that our real estate investments don’t tank”, I’m rooting for their shit to tank, fuck the rich.
My company had a badge in/badge out procedure, badge out was new after covid. No one actually badged out. They have since installed security guards at all exits and they will chase you out the door if you forget to badge out.
What’ll they do, tackle you and drag you back inside?
This seems like a horrible reaction to me, which sounds about corp
All the giant real estate investments companies have made is now coming due and they cant fill up their buildings fast enough to get those tax breaks
What are these tax breaks for filling up buildings?
They don’t exist. This made up tale about commercial real estate driving RTO policies has been around since early 2021 when things started opening back up on larger scales. It’s a fiction that just won’t die.
Can you back that up with any evidence whatsoever?
Evidence, that something doesn’t exist?
Here: …
You can also use this evidence freely to prove, that you didn’t receive the package that you ordered.
It’s time for a boycott WebMD campaign. Let’s see how well they handle THAT 👹
Doing my part. I literally never visit that toxic site.
You have it backwards. Completely.
- I have no intentions of bringing my work home, work is a job, it has no place in my home impacting my family.
- I will not lose a part of my home to my jobs business. Its not their property, it is my home.i would rather the office be a bedroom so my children dont have to share a room.
- We evolved without video conferencing, it is natural and easier to meet with someone in person to convey emotion and understand people we meet with. It is too easy to dismiss someone over a screen, empathy is too easily lost. It is also harder to be ignored in person.
- I can see when my ataff are struggling off meeting or when talking to others and help them. This is a bit micro-managey however I value the insight especially for staff that struggle to communicate.
The only thing I loath about working in another building is: the commute and distractions. The commute is expensive and a huge waste of time. I try and minimise the time waste with audio books but its forced waste of money. The distractions can be minimised with headphones.
As a consumer, I will now forever remember that WebMD’s C Suite is most interested in “crushing their competition” and being heavy handed with their employees. I once thought that they were concerned about the betterment of societal health. This is how you lose your most performant employees.
I can’t believe they published this to a publically available platform like Vimeo. Did they already lose their Marketing executive?
With Kagi, WebMD never showing up again is just two clicks away:
Aaand done!
and if for whatever reason you don’t want to pay for Kagi, you can use uBlacklist to achieve the same thing with a search engine of your choice https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
Oh nice.
Yeah, I’m with you. At least make the video private…
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Dude’s delusional thinking he’s going to crush Mayo Clinic while his employees pass COVID back and forth. Straight goofball thinking.
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They run a website that helps you self diagnose even the slightest illness as cancer.
[Joke] C’mon, be fair!
It also suggests other horrific, life-threatening diseases as the reason for itchy eyes or cramps or whatever!
Yeah this is bullshit. Just middle and senior management trying to justify their jobs and all the expenses they’ve made on office real estate. I’ve worked 100% from home for 3 years now, and not only is my productivity much higher, but the team dynamic is better and the worker output overall is better too.
I get some people do better face to face with colleagues, and are happier and more productive. And to those people I say: Go for it! Go into the office and be at your best!
But companies should not force the rest of us to piss time and money away commuting for zero gain and just extra frustration and unhappiness.
it’s honestly blowing my mind learning recently how many people not only literally love their shitty jobs but also want to see millions of others subjugated to the grind for absolutely no net benefit
That and layoffs without firing people.
to piss time and money away commuting
So much this! Why is it OK for us to waste our most valuable resource, time?? If you waste company time or assets, you’ll be fired.
Fucking UNIONIZE.
Louder
Just did. Won our vote Wednesday night 💪
Oh, that is righteous. Congratulations!
Web MD. The website. The website designed to make visitors feel a false sense of expertise about their health so that they don’t leave home to see a doctor about illness, is threatening their workers to leave their homes, to unnecessarily return to work, during a wave of life threatening and easily transmitable illness, that they will have to bring home.
WebMD? They realize we’re in the midst of a Covid resurgence, right? You’d think a company like that would be a bit more understanding of stuff like that, given that they’re supposed to be experts on medicine and all.
I know a few people getting RSV. They’ve been out of work for like a month.
Last year I was sick for 7 weeks with covid, RSV, the flu, and then covid again. I had to go to work while still sick with covid because I was out of sick time, even though their own policies should have prevented me from returning. I told all my coworkers to stay away from me and avoided them like I had the plague, because I essentially did. Had I actually not cared about other people’s health, I could have lied and destroyed the entire department for months with recurring spreading illness.
I had to have a meeting where I was being threatened with a PIP for attendance, while I was still sick and wearing a mask, for my job at a vaccine laboratory.
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Return to the office isn’t about medicine, it’s about entitled executives power tripping over the workers. At every medium/large company I worked for, upper management lived in its own bubble completely disconnected from the rest. I can give so many examples of poor decisions made by upper management that had a huge negative impact on the company and especially the workers. But regardless, they never gave a shit about our opinions and feedback. They didn’t even tell us why they made those decisions.
Are they in front of green screens? Did he not even bother to come into the office to record this?
I remember WebMD was one of the most chaotic places I worked at. It was 2000-2001 and there was a president Marv Rich and a CEO Marty Wygod. They were both building duplicate ERP systems that basically did the same thing. One day, my boss Al was in a meeting, and they told him that he needed us to move the data center to the East Coast. The most valuable part was a bunch of big EMC Symmetrix arrays with all their data. He was freaking out because he got into an argument about loading all of them into one airplane, and he didn’t want to do it. He was telling them that if the airplane goes down, all of WebMD would be gone, and it needed to be loaded onto two airplanes. I don’t know why, but for some reason, that story always reminded me of my time at WebMD.
The one time I moved a data center, we did it in two trucks for this very reason. Of course, it wouldn’t have been the whole organization lost, we had more than one data center. But yeah - the two planes part of this story makes complete sense to me.
Yeah, I feel like the part about developing two different systems to apparently do the same thing, was much stupider.
Marty Wygod
Or, as they called him down the pub, Wygod Y.
This has real Dunder Mifflin Local Ad vibes.
People who haven’t come in to the office yet do it for a reason. They like it. They are happier. Happier employees are better employees.
They get more sleep so they are more alert or have more time for hobbies and recreation. They don’t have to spend as much on gas or childcare. They don’t use the office’s electricity, water, facilities, coffee/snacks.
Make it a choice. For the betterment of humanity and the planet.
When someone makes videos like this, you don’t get the best people to come work for your company, you get the most desperate.
But then again, maybe that’s what they want. Idiots.
I am with you on almost all of that. Depending on the age of the child, I don’t think you should be tending to a child if you’re WFH.
Lol I used to work for a company that has been bought and renamed several times and now is under the WebMD umbrella. They were trying that “remote work is bad” be a decade ago, and it’s funny that now they are part of a larger company that still isn’t with the times.
They ALL are on green screen. There isn’t anyone int his video present “in person”!
Totally this. There’s not a single person there who isn’t an SVP or an EVP. And I’m speaking as someone with an official title of EVP; unless you get the team to say “it’s awesome to be back in” on a video, this just comes across as so “because we say so”.
Our team is already distributed across 8 time zones and 5 countries; why do we need to be in the office to sit in the same calls across our regions?
There are some jobs that are much better done in person and then there are jobs that aren’t. For most roles, some tasks in that role is better in person, for some tasks it doesn’t make a difference and for some tasks it’s specifically better to be remote.
A video like this needs to explain WHY - and with more than just “we are better together!”; ok, but why?
And poorly executed at that … Each exec kept moving to completely different background scenes each time they showed up, one they botched so badly they made it look like he was standing in the counter… It’s like they didn’t even care enough to try
And that was the weirdest “happy dance” the “employees” were doing at the end
Jesus. What fucking lunatics. That video never needed to exist. Just be like every other corp and send an email. At least that news story would have blended in with all the other RTO trash.
Now I’ll just forever remember that webMDs parent company is operated by unhinged boomers.
This is is some Black Mirror shit.
Not really. This is typical boomer behavior. They’re old stupid brains can’t wrap their heads around the idea that offices are outdated unneeded concepts in the new digital age. They actually think remote work is somehow losing money for them because workers aren’t getting dressed up and commuting to the office. That somehow by not coming to the office workers are being lazy and not working hard enough for them. And their dumb boomer brains refuse to acknowledge the mountain of evidence that shows that remote workers are actually tremendously more productive than in-office workers
This is typical boomer behavior.
“Boomer”? I don’t know if any of the people in that video was old enough to be a boomer. Heck, most of the execs were definitely under 50.
I don’t think ageism is the answer to the problem. here.
There’s ample evidence this is “stupid corporate culture” shit.
The people in the video are either actors or peons, the person who made the policy is the boomer and he is definitely old enough.
Like the CTO and Senior Directors and stuff?
Add in a nice side of paranoia over how much of their 401k is tied to office real estate in some way.
Bullshit to the "We are more productive when together " line.
No, they are not. Commutes eat into productivity big time. It would take my wife sometimes 2+ hours to get into work in Boston. Now, she puts the kids onto the bus and logs in. Last year, they even said they were the most productive they’ve been in the companies history (200 plus years, mind you).
Now it’s “We need to be in person to be more productive” bullshit. These assholes sunk too much money into corporate real estate.
Plus, let’s be real, most in person interactions with coworkers are not productive. I worked at home and then hybrid from June 2020-October 2021 and was far more productive on my at home days. Everyone spent about half their in office days socializing and then went home and actually got stuff done. My job is entirely in person now and some of the projects I do are taking way longer just because there are constant distractions in the office and they put me literally in the middle of the room. I kind of don’t even care because if they want me there, those are the consequences.
