If you are like me and just want to watch the video instead of reading articles referring to something that you haven’t yet watched, here is the place I was able to see the video. https://twitter.com/maxwellstrachan/status/1745446449343795506
Are all of the department heads in the video talking about their perceived benefits of RTO standing in front of a green screen? Doesn’t that seem a little tone deaf?
Yeah they all seem green screened and a couple of the participants look like they’re reading off a cue card they themselves had no hand in writing and may have been given 2 minutes before being filmed.
The video was also mirrored on the Mastodon link in the OP. Here is an embed of that:
It’s also top comment on the .social link
That was a rough watch.
Fire people, give them their severance and see what new people you can find. Good luck!
What fresh hell of link rings is this.
A lemmy post, linking to a Mastodon post (yes, the video is linked as a comment here), linking to a vice article.
Relatively normal so far.
Except, it’s an article about a video. The only copy of the video in the article is actually a twitter embed of the author posting the article and then replying to the tweet with the video.
Why isn’t the video just in the article?!
But that’s so much precious engagement, why won’t people think of the engagement.
Precious precious engagement… My precious…
In the first days of the Internet, just a drop of engagement could power a website for days. Now websites need 12 liters of engagement per hour. As engagement becomes more scarce, the Engagement Wars initially pit websites against each other, until they discovered they could exponentially increase engagement by all extracting a share instead of fighting over it.
Someday, we’ll use up all the engagement and move back to interacting only with our cats and dogs.
lol love the fact that like 90% of the people are green screened in and not actually in the same office.
Eat shit and die “ceo”.
Bizarre. These guys are bizarre.
Right? They need like actual to goodness hobbies.
“Don’t mess with us and our nepo baby middle managers, we have to keep them busy somehow and that somehow is micromanaging you all into the ground” -this guy, probably, if they were more honest
Commercial mortgage backed securities.
RTO policy is driven by rich people’s solidarity with one another.
We can beat them with even a fraction of the same solidarity. Fuck RTO, and fuck any job that demands it.
One additional detail, many corporations lease buildings. The buildings are often owned by executives from this same company.
Microsoft’s buildings (pre-pandemic there 130+ just in the Redmond/Seattle area) are all over, and many of them were owned by Paul Allen (co-founder of Msft), and now his family.
Can you name any business that’s been successful at scale without managers?
Fuck me, what a dystopian workplace. If I wanted to ensure no one ever voluntarily returned to my office, I’d show them this video.
That may be the goal - destroying working conditions to motivate attrition allows you to trim headcount without the hassle of layoffs or spooking shareholders.
WebMD will probably cease to exist either way. So, it might be best to start considering moving on anyway. The best resources will or already have. That is how RTO work. The more negative an constrained the work environment the more top performers decide it’s time to go elsewhere. I imagine WebMD may not think they need the best, brightest, or most driven anyway.
Quote from a colleague who retired with her full pension last year and then went looking for a job this year:
For anyone who needs to hear this, there is no reason to stay on a team that is making you miserable. Opportunities abound.
There is a climate of desperation among employers because of a scarcity of folks with high level skills.
She left our group because our management has become “challenging”. However, as boneheaded as they are, they have not mandated RTO.
Of course, we’re a non-profit that doesn’t invest in rental properties. The only thing our CEO has said related to RTO (early in the pandemic) was why the hell are we paying so much for office space if people can do the same job from home?
edit:
I guess if you don’t have high-level skills, you are still kind of fucked, but you can do what everyone else does and work the shitty jobs until you have the skills and experience, then jump ship. I think MedMD might be hiring soon.
I work for a big corporation that most people have probably never heard of. Our CEO recently said something to the effect of “We’ve managed to recruit talent from all over the world because we’re flexible. Most of these companies that are doing RTO mandates are not doing well and we’re more than happy to take advantage of their bad business decisions.”
If you’re an executive who’s pushing RTO, just know that you’re gift wrapping your best talent and shipping them straight to your competitors. It might save you a little money now but it’s going to cost you a fortune in the long term.
Kind of assumed the executives pushing RTO aren’t concerned about long term company welfare. They want a minor quarterly bump so they can exit with their golden parachute.
Oh, most definitely. I personally look forward to the “nObOdY wAnTs To WoRk AnYmOrE” bitchfest to follow.
Dancing as disgusting corporate manipulation will mark this era as plainly as edgelord insults marked the nineties.
Time to strike I guess.
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That looks like some expensive real estate. But it’s the need to get workers to collaborate in person “eye to eye” and absolutely nothing to do with the enormous monthly rent they can’t get out of. /s
I can make solid arguments for working in person. Seriously! But I won’t bother with this crowd. (I can probably argue better for remote work, but it’s complicated.)
Eating out with senior management a year or two ago and the CEO was floating the idea that it would be better if we were in the office. While agreeing, somewhat, I related an anecdote from reddit.
“So this guy is a software recruiter (what we do). He keeps a list of local companies mandating a return to office and calls on those employees offering remote work. ‘Like shooting fish in a barrel.’, was the quote I believe.”
Mandate office work and you’ll end up with the people that have no choice. FAFO.
I can make solid arguments for working in person. Seriously! But I won’t bother with this crowd. (I can probably argue better for remote work, but it’s complicated.)
If you’re not going to make an argument, then why do you even bother saying that you could? All you told me is that you’re not confident enough to make unpopular statements.
Companies want do downsize. They don’t care. They think workers are like replacable cogs. They don’t understand that the WFH people who are jumping ship are the productive ones with options, and the people who can’t jump ship are the shitty ones.
Same thing with doing “spill and fills” The ones who know they’re good will find another job no hassles so they put their hand up. The useless ones ones will want to stay so you end up with a team of ‘meh’ people while the good ones move on to something better.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Things are complicated all the time.
