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by tablespoon 1698 days ago
> Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed.

That's actually a good point. Conference speakerphones are garbage, so once one needed person is remote, everyone has to dial in. The experience is really only workable if everyone is using a headset.

> in-office folks are mad that they are being forced to use clunky online tools strictly to accommodate their remote-only peers.

This isn't just a side effect of WFH, offshoring/distributed teams force it too. Even before the pandemic, most of my co-located team's meetings were online, since we almost always had to accommodate someone who was based at another site.

To go a little off-topic, there are a lot of good arguments against open office plans, but weirdly the one that seemed hardest for advocates to shrug off was the difficulty of having a bunch of co-located people joining the same call, and having to deal with echo. I think that's because it challenged the assumption that work happened mainly in a very particular co-located way (e.g. like a bunch of people sitting at consoles in a mission control center).

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I find it hilarious that people think there is still justification for an expense as large as office real estate / office rent, when the non-biased peer-reviewed studies all show a 15-20% productivity gain from WFH anyway. So what, you want to spend way more to be less productive? Offices are dead. Wouldn't want to be whatever idiot apple exec just commissioned their new campus. Useless real estate. Dollar value of $0.