The same argument was made with regard to the consumer retail banking experience when ATMs were introduced in 1967!
Asynchronous remote transactions are commonplace today; this is all a smokescreen for over-leveraged commercial real estate interests held by major US financial institutions.
I enjoyed the year I consulted at JPMC, they have some sharp people, and on the surface of it, who am I to criticise the boss of such a successful company? OTOH…
I can see the argument that young people aren’t being exposed to older peers the same way and their learning may be stunted.
But… I haven’t set foot in an office for five years now and I’m as productive as I ever was. Possibly more.
As for his “people are distracted during meetings”, perhaps there ought to be more focus on only holding necessary meetings, rather than dragging people in when there’s no reason for them to be there and nothing to hold their interest? In my experience that’s the cause of a lot of the snark and slacking.
> I can see the argument that young people aren’t being exposed to older peers the same way and their learning may be stunted.
I agree with this, but I didn't grow up with a phone in my hand. I didn't have a mobile phone until I was about 30 years old and I didn't have a smartphone until I was in my 40s. I can't work well with people over remote calls, I hate Zoom and desktop sharing, don't like slack or teams. I find it so much more efficient to sit with another person or small group if there is a group task to be completed or a group decision to be made.
That said, unnecessary meetings are a real thing, have been a problem in large orgs forever, and Zoom doesn't fix that. Might make it worse, as invites are not limited by the physical size of the room.
Counter-perspective, but largely in agreement: I did grow up with a mobile phone and instant messaging and whatnot, and so using Slack (and to some extent, Zoom, as much as I dislike video compared to text) feels very natural to me.
To me, as someone who has deep and meaningful friendships with certain people mediated almost entirely through Discord messaging, which is basically non-work Slack, asynchronous mentorship and collaboration don't seem strange at all. I do recognize not everyone's a fan, and that there is a certain learning curve involved if you're not used to it (gamers, for example, seem to fall into virtual work naturally), but it's absolutely doable and these C-levels who say it's not are behind the curve.
I'm in my 40s. I prefer zoom meetings. I don't think mobile phone usage has all that much to do with it tbh. Some people just really seem to want other people to be in the room with them and at the same time are somewhat oblivious to the fact that we don't care or don't want to be there.
I can, and so can many others. I guess it comes down to preference and personality.
I spent so many years in offices, in open plan offices where whole teams would sit with their headphones on loud, trying to ignore the presence of all other humans, that actually working in my own space has been a relief.
In my 40s now though, I work on stuff I’m interested in, and have a work ethic that doesn’t require oversight. 20 years ago I may not have been so good at it.
And realistically how many times is Jamie Dimon meeting with the entry level Zoomers? Here and there but the CEO spends his time meeting with exec and mid level management.
What is your model? That is, how did you measure this? Productivity and the impacts to it are highly multivariate and most analysis thus far has failed to do show convincing effects in either direction from remote work.
Genuinely, there is too much appeal to emotion from both sides of the argument and not enough substance, so if you have something here I'd be interested to read about it.
Through the number of tasks on the board that staff were getting cleared per month. The results are so clear that we have actually gone further than just reversing the work from home policies enacted post Covid, to actually banning it entirely (pre-covid it was allowed with permission)
Yes, we're making you all come into the office just to annoy you all and cause you hassle. It has nothing at all to do with the effects it had on productivity, and people being discovered running their own side busineses at the same time, or watching television and countless other issues they can get away with without others being able to see their screens
It feels like he's just old and pining for days gone by - in person meetings have people staring at their laptops and phones too. I dislike that as well, but that's not a WFH issue.
> in person meetings have people staring at their laptops and phones too
I've worked at a variety of places with a variety of problems, but I've never seen that kind of rudeness be widespread or persistent. It was corrected in different ways depending on the company culture, but it was corrected.
We have some really phoning it in zoom folks we've hired who do their job semi ok but are just awful and don't contribute to culture, are super dialed out.
I don't want to totally damn them, because they have families and lives and other things going. But I've had a number of coworkers tell me they have re-adapted their code review to say near nothing (it won't be well received) and to otherwise end their own good-culture practices to adapt to really hostile remote culture.
The thing is, this isn't at all zoom. This isn't remote. It's companies that are just shit poor bad about letting bottom up knowledge trickle up. It's about terrible management that has made being in touch with their workforce hard. And in most cases, that's not the workforce: it's the management, it's the company.
It's easier to do this job of running a company in person, to spy & get information. But it's your laziness, it's your being awful at your job, that makes you rely on this in-touch layer.
How do you get people to stop looking at their fucking phones during zoom meetings? Sure if we had a magic perfect management fairy that could sprinkle perfect management skills on the managers maybe people would be better at working remotely but people are mostly lazy and will mostly do whatever they can get away with. And its way easier to get away with looking at your fucking phone during a zoom meeting than an in person meeting.
If people are checked out during meetings, maybe they don't really have to be there. When I set up a meeting I try to ensure only people who really, really need to be there are invited. Way too many meetings are like: "1. Eng Lead Presenter, 2. VP who's receiving the update, and 3-10. Team members involved in the project." If 3-10 are not expected to speak/contribute and already know what 1 is presenting, why the fuck are they there? To sit there and pick their noses? They could be a lot more focused and productive back at their desks (or not connected to video conference). I don't invite them, and if I invite them by mistake and they know they aren't contributing, I expect them to decline and not show up! I don’t want tourists at my meetings.
Companies where non-contributors and non-receivers feel pressured to come to meetings just to show their faces are Doing It Wrong.
Or maybe they do have to be there, but they aren't paying attention? It isn't a given that people will pay attention if they need to, that is the whole point.
There are lots of reasons someone might be in a meeting. They might be there to receive certain information. They might be there because they're going to be assigned work as a result of it. They might be there because hearing the actual conversation with the client is useful for being able to understand the context of the work. Getting that third hand from someone that didn't talk to the client is nowhere near as good. That is what leads to wasting time and money doing work nobody wanted.
Sometimes people just don't pay attention when they should. That is real. It is not sensible to immediately assume they're justified in not paying attention. Even if you aren't needed and you aren't interested, it is your job. You are paid good money to be there. Your contract requires you to follow lawful instructions from your employer. Do the job properly and look at your phone at lunchtime. You don't have the right to switch off and start playing with your phone because you are a bit bored and have the attention span of a teenager brought up on Tiktok.
Nope suppose they do need to be there and they arent listening because they're sending text messages and then when they are asked for their opinion they are lost because they weren't listening. This is the norm for zoom meetings.
I’m a big proponent of optional and required on meeting invites.
Required: tech lead and VP.
Optional: everyone else.
I have nothing against people showing up just because they want to snoop on what’s being said and spending half the time on their phone — but I reply maybe to anything optional sent to me.
I find people sort themselves out if you have enough floating optional invites you can’t attend all of them.
fewer, more purposeful meetings usually helps (not saying you do too many useless meetings, but it’s the general sentiment on here and with people i know IRL about why they slack off - cis the meetings they’re in are usually a waste of time)
edit — was also going to suggest, at the start of the meeting politely but assertively request everyone turns their phone off at the start.
if it looks like someone is fucking around with their phone, pause the meeting. remind everyone about the request at the start of the meeting. resume the meeting. don’t drag it out and turn it into a rant. don’t call the individual out. just make it known that the behaviour is not okay. get back on with things. do it each time it happens.
do that for every meeting for a few weeks. some people will hopefully get the message. some people might not. hopefully enough people get the message to make a difference.
they might think you’re a dick for it, at least to begin with (it’s enforced change from an authority), but up to you to decide whether it’s valuable enough to see through.
Apart from anything else, I see most people at in person meetings in conferences on their laptops and such working away, that’s not a problem, but doing similar remotely is?
Seems more like neither of them really actually needed to be there. If you didn’t actually miss or note their lack of contribution, then they were perhaps less necessary. I’m perfectly engaged with the meetings that meet those criteria.
Phones are an addiction. I know executives who have a box outside the conference room and everyone has to put their phone in the box as they enter the meeting. They pick up their phone on the way out.
After seeing this happen for years, it comes down to one simple thing, at least while at the office. Is the employee getting paid enough? If they are, they will use the phone less. The more junior the employee, the worse they're getting paid, and so the more they will use their phone.
I am not going to allow anyone else to touch my phone, even by mistake. In fact it is zipped to my clothing, so I don't lose it by accident either. If I were to leave it in a box, if will definitely get lost one day.
i sort of agree wit your sentiment, although probably would use more nuanced language about it.
i’ve had this exact conversation with my 70+ still working father so many times now. i’ve heard the rant in the article over and over again. and, like, he blames remote work too. “its the fucking zoom bullshit”.
but then i explain to him how i do remote work and suddenly gets it. like, remote working means you are required to work in a more direct and efficient way. you have to work hard at comms. you have to write everything with purpose. no “oh hey did you look at X”. instead “hey we need X done by T because otherwise Y. if you need to speak to P about it, they’re available this afternoon. contact me if anything is unclear and i’ll explain it to you on a call asap. let me know when you’ve read this please.”. like, i’ve debugged a production outage on my phone with other devs while in a doctors waiting room.
the problem is, yeah, a lot of people do treat it like a chance to sit at home doing the bare minimum.
and i think you kind of hit the nail on the head for something i hadn’t clocked. they can get away with it because “management” utterly suck at their jobs and haven’t adapted. like, i hear about people stuck in zoom meetings all the time… WHY?!? you don’t need face to face comms to work remotely. at all. it’s clinging on to the old ways of doing things!
up until now i’d been putting it down to a purely generational “can’t teach old dogs new tricks” thing. maybe it kind of is, just not in a way i’d seen before.
Bingo. Remote work requires/rewards good communication, and amplifies the ill effects of poor communication. You have to put in the effort, but a lot of people don't know how or don't think they need to!
he gets it on that call.... then he gets pissed off about it all over the next few months after he's forgotten our call about it. then he complains about it on the phone to me. then i remind him, then he remembers or i explain it again.
> the problem is, yeah, a lot of people do treat it like a chance to sit at home doing the bare minimum
The thing is... I've been in offices before COVID that were full of people doing the bare minimum. And they were able to do that because management, generally, has always sucked and was never good at their jobs.
What I've noticed is that people don't seem to have the attention span to read the document or memo I wrote, and the meeting is so they can get the TL;DR.
The Amazon Way used to be for you to send out a memo so that people would be productive at a meeting, and cancel the meeting on the spot if more than a third hadn’t read it or read enough of it.
Read the book The Mythical Man Month, then work at a big company, and then you'll appreciate the challenges of organizing five different teams to accomplish a large and complex task.
Does anyone find it strange that this argument is always boolean?
(Child of the late 70's/early 80's here)
At my current and prior company everyone enjoys the freedom of adulthood. Of course there are massive productivity benefits to working in person at times. Of course there are massive benefits to working from home at times. Not productive in your current role? Move on or you will be moved on. Pretty straight forward.
We have a small team that is remote by design. Yet everyone has commented that those rare times we can gather see massive uplift in productivity.
For us being in a central location is not possible. But for companies with an office building I can see the human dynamic of being together is very powerful.
Even with all the chat, trackers, conference tools etc “context” is the hardest thing to do remotely.
I'm in the same situation and I agree that when we are together we do collaborate and plan better. On Zoom, people tend to set their mic on mute and very passively engage. However, once we have to actually execute, being in the office is a negative. In the office, it is impossible for me to put my head down and work for a couple hours without someone showing up at my desk with a question. On Slack, I can set dnd with a status message and flow.
My teams velocity increased when we started doing hybrid instead of full remote. Of course thats not proof of anything as our jira points arent objective but it definitely lines up with feeling more productive. We were pretty async while remote. I dont think remote without productivity loss is impossible, but you need very skilled managers and most companies dont have those.
No, and it is highly ironic that sanctimonious Dimon is complaining about others’ work ethic when he is where he is only because his employer is deemed too big to fail.
Let’s see him do his “difficult” job without a blank check from US taxpayers.
Creativity (the ability to form novel ideas, use imagination, engage in investigation, etc.) is a critical component of many workplaces, including banking and finance. Creativity is not a dirty word, nor is it a positive one. Creativity can be used for positive and negative ends. Creativity in finance brought the CFPB, Dodd-Frank, Glass-Stegall... along with De-regulation, Free Trade, or Laissez Faire.
Asynchronous remote transactions are commonplace today; this is all a smokescreen for over-leveraged commercial real estate interests held by major US financial institutions.