My personal pet theory (based on no evidence other than personal experience) is that, if your job is in senior management then your day-to-day work is going to meetings. And spending 8-10h on zoom meetings every day is unbelievably soul-crushing.

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Newlaptop 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

8h on zoom is far more desirable than 8 hours in person shuffling from meeting room to meeting room for me.

I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. I can wear comfortable pants. I can throw laundry into the wash in the couple minute gap between meetings. And when the last meeting ends, I close the laptop and I'm already home, no miserable drive in rush-hour traffic.

Of course, there is something worse than in-person meetings. Which is meetings that are hybrid, with a groups calling into zoom from two different conference rooms in different locations. Those manage to be far worse than just everyone individually joining the zoom. And ironically, that's the type of meeting that becomes common when you force your distributed workforce back to offices split across a dozen locations.

	▲	thinkharderdev 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. This works great when you are one of a dozen anonymous people on a zoom call. less so when you are the senior person in the meeting who everyone is actually talking to and expecting you to make a decision. But this response kind of proves my point. If you are the principal in a meeting, the fact that everyone else in the meeting is zoned out and doing something else is not great.

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tracker1 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I spent 7 months on a contract job last year like that... I'm in Phoenix (as well as half the employees involved) but the meetings were East Coast centered, so starting at 5am local. Roughly 38 hours of meetings a week, and in a position where I had to pay attention... It SUCKED so hard... I never got used to being up early and it just burned me up.

At least with actual people, in person there's more to the communication... I miss lunch with coworkers. I now pretty much have to work from home (vision decline, so I cannot drive), I wish it weren't the case.

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dh2022 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

But here is the thing-almost all meetings are on Temas. Because Microsoft campus is so spread out managers do not have time to go from building to building to meet other managers. Azure for example is spread out over 10 building just 8n Redmond. Never mind connecting with teams in Bay Area, Atlanta and India. All of these mangers spend their meetings on Teams.

Again I do not have a good explanation for RTO.

	▲	thinkharderdev 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Is this also the case for senior executives?