So this is the story that's been making me laugh into my coffee for the past two days: Zoom (the company, the actual Zoom, the one whose entire business model is "you don't need to be in a room with people") is telling its own employees to come back to an office.
Business Insider got the memo first, and by yesterday it was everywhere. The policy is that anyone living within about 50 miles of a Zoom office needs to show up in person at least twice a week. A "structured hybrid approach," they're calling it, which is corporate for "we changed our minds." Zoom's official line is that being together in person helps with complicated conversations and builds trust faster, which, sure, maybe, but read that sentence again and tell me it doesn't feel like it's describing exactly the problem Zoom sold everyone a solution for in 2020.
I don't even think the policy itself is crazy. Twice a week, if you live close by, isn't some draconian five-day mandate. Plenty of companies I actually respect run some version of that. What gets me is the company doing it. This is the outfit whose stock went up something like 400% in the pandemic because it made "does this really need to be a meeting in a room" feel obsolete. Eric Yuan built an $80-some-billion company on the premise that a laptop camera is good enough. And now apparently a laptop camera isn't good enough for Zoom's own staff. Pick a lane.
I'll admit I've got a dog in this fight. I've worked from a spare bedroom that used to be a nursery for going on four years now, and my daily commute is fourteen steps and a coffee maker. Every time one of these RTO stories breaks I read it a little defensively, because there's always a subtext of "see, even the remote-work companies know it doesn't really work," and I don't think that's actually what's happening here. I think what's happening is a lot of companies over-hired in 2021, real estate leases don't cancel themselves, and "culture and collaboration" is a much nicer sentence to put in a memo than "we're paying for a building we're not using." Zoom just happens to be the funniest possible company to watch do this, because the irony writes itself.
There's a smaller thing tangled up in this too, which is what's been happening with Threads. Meta's app launched with something like 100 million signups in its first five days back in July and everyone was writing think pieces about the death of Twitter. Fast forward a few weeks and the numbers being reported this week show daily active users cut roughly in half from the peak. Same pattern, different flavor: a tool built for a specific pandemic-era craving (in this case, "somewhere that isn't Twitter to doomscroll") loses its shine fast once the initial novelty wears off and there's no reply function or DMs to actually keep people there. I bring it up because I think both stories are secretly about the same thing — a lot of 2023 is turning out to be the year everyone finds out which pandemic behaviors were actual permanent shifts and which ones were just what we did because we were bored and locked inside.
Anyway. My actual prediction, for the record, since I like going back and checking these later: Zoom's policy gets quietly loosened within a year. Not reversed, necessarily, but the "twice a week" turns into "come in when it makes sense" the way most of these mandates eventually do once managers realize enforcing it is its own headache. I've been wrong about tech predictions before (I was extremely confident in 2019 that folding phones were a dead end, and here we are with a drawer full of Z Flip reviews I've written since), so take that with whatever grain of salt you want.
If you're one of the maybe three people who've been reading this blog since 2011 and remember when I used to write these posts from a coworking space in an actual office building — no, I'm not going back either. My spare bedroom and I are staying put.