… but if they take up all the meeting rooms, where will the rest of us schedule?
There’s no such thing as the cloud! It’s all just someone else’s space.
(firmly in /s)
It kind of blows my mind that Zoom has 7400 employees.
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I’ve been remote for 7 years - my office is in AZ and I’m in Southern CA.
50 miles each way for a commute would be a non-starter for me. Hell, before I took this particular job and a recruiter would call me about stuff, I would preface it with the fact that I don’t want to drive any further than 15 or 20 miles.
If I WAS close to an office, I would be OK going in a couple days a week, that’s not terrible.
But making people come in 50 miles from downtown San Jose (where their HQ offices are) is pretty lame.
My guess is that most people working there who are not in the immediate area would be coming from Morgan Hill, Gilroy or Hollister. Which is a brutal commute.
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10.4 - which they claim allows them to train AI on user content - is prima facie illegal in the EU.
Since yesterday they have added this bolder section after it “ 1.*Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.**”
I have seen people suggest that this is a death spiral sell to private equity flex. I dunno but I immediately flagged the new TOS - out of hours which I just don’t normally do- to the DPO and heat of IT in the company I work for. We’ve walked away from services for less.
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Gotta keep that fallacy going.
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See this had me immediately looking for another option. I’m absolutely not interested in them using my work or personal calls to train their AI.
The back to work thing doesn’t surprise me at all. I’m sure they’ve been patiently biding their time on this for a while now.
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A company I work closely with has a nearby campus with over 100 office buildings. They, unsurprisingly, demand people on site at least 3 days a week. I know they own the buildings outright as I was involved when they moved to sell off several of them about a decade ago.
Just thinking about if they converted them to housing. All of the offices would make a fairly comfy bedrooms, with the many many conference rooms serving as “premium” bedrooms or other rooms. A few walls put up to fence off areas, which are admittedly not the most rugged construction but certainly work fine to isolate and protect, you could easily make quite comfy living for a dozen or so average families per floor. The restrooms could be converted to dorm-like ones and installing showers would be fairly trivial. I’m mentally using the various “schools converted to living spaces” as a mental blueprint for this work.
The real estate commitment is one of the primary drivers for bringing people back in. Anyone who says otherwise just doesn’t understand how much money is spent on that space (counting utilities, which has grown immensely in my area).
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Yeah, my last commute was 55 miles one way, and until the pandemic I was going in 4 days most weeks, though I’d started doing a WFH Friday the last six months of that. Really terrible drive, but the job was worth (same place I still work). After 3 years of working remotely, no way I intended to ever set foot in the office again except during special events a few times a year.
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headline should read “Zoom Un-ironically tells employees they need to come back to the office”.
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That would be difficult for a lot of buildings if you are expecting to install bathrooms and kitchens for each apartment, they simply don’t have the plumbing in place to change from office density to residential density.
it’s not impossible, but there is a lot of building restructuring involved.
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Sounds like they don’t believe in their tools. Which then makes one wonder why any of their customers should either…
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It’s not even difficult. The underlying structure of commercial real estate is such that it can be easily changed from one function to another. Need more electrical here? Run some conduit. Need better HVAC for servers or labs? Run that here. More plumbing? Here you go.
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Unfortunately, it’s much more difficult than all that. A lot of cities are trying to do this, including Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Calgary. However the cost of converting a floor of commercial space to apartments as astronomical.
Building codes are completely different. There’s no plumbing anywhere you need it. Soundproofing and windows are all wrong for residential. Electrical has to be redone. Meters for water and power have to be run to every space from the mechanical room downstairs. Requirements for elevators, stairwells, and fire escapes are completely different for residential and commercial spaces. This is the tip of the iceberg. It goes on and on.
The few contractors here who have tried it all gave up. It was cheaper to go build a new apartment building elsewhere from scratch. Unless the building is already gutted, such as when old warehouses are converted to hipster lofts, it’s simply too expensive to make all the changes needed.
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I was going to write a reply but @VeronicaConnor said it better.
in general, you can convert a office building to residential but when you start to dig into it, it turns out there a lot more considerations and difficulties than originally envisioned. Especially if you are wanting to convert it into affordable housing.
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It doesn’t have to be affordable housing, nor the whole building converted to residential. When we’re talking about companies that own a building or multiple buildings, it just has to be enough to defray the costs they are accruing from the building itself.
Whatever it takes would be worth to stop hearing their whining about their bad investments in real estate.
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Just bring in some shipping containers!
(I kid! I kid!)
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Yeah, I saw a lot of people online immediately saying, “Well, we can’t use it, then,” because they were involved in discussing scripts, confidential work, medical information, etc. - things that they couldn’t have being intercepted and stored in any form. It’s a pretty strange flex on Zoom’s part, and that “clarification” doesn’t really help.
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hey, and now they could also theoretically decode any passwords typed during meetings
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Yeah the 50 miles thing is something that seems really common from the Federal government as well and sometimes it’s easier to work with already existing standards, regardless of what the local market actually looks like.
And sometimes… it’s not the office space sunk cost at all. It’s that they know full well within 50 miles of somewhere like downtown San Francisco, Manhattan, going across L.A., etc. is easily a 2-3 hour commute each way. They WANT people to either leave on their own accord so they don’t have to do paid layoffs, or to move out of the 50 mile radius, preferably somewhere that it’s cheaper to pay them a cost of living based salary.
And sometimes it’s just the sunk cost because people are idiots.
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