Aren't you excited to sit in traffic though?

Teams is just Skype rebranded though.

The fabled "competitive forces" of Capitalism

Nevertheless, in-office sucks far, far worse.

Teams is inferior to contracting Herpes, it’s a low bar

Remember how much less pollution there was during COVID when everyone was working from home?

I'll go one step further and say: Developers working from home have better jobs than their managers. The work/life balance, responsibility, and ratio of all that to salary, are practically off the chart compared to how most managers operate. It's a handful of meetings a day, with hours of uninterrupted creative work, and enough leeway to do chores and errands without impacting productivity. It's the ultimate perk.

Meanwhile, management via remote is practically no different than in-person, since virtual meetings and in-person meetings take the same time out of your day. Often, you can't get away from your home office since you don't get enough time between meetings to go do other stuff. And for people that are hot garbage at video conferencing and email, they tend to perform worse than in-person.

So what we're seeing here is professional envy, twisted around as a correcting action of a sort. Keeping everyone in-office means their workday is just as fucked up as their managers.

People who’s job uses meetings as their main tool,

Are the ones with any say in the mater, that's the problem and is not limited to RTO.

My wife would be in the former category (PO for the biggest software product in her company). Some days she has meetings back to back for 8h straight.

She hates in person meetings. According to her:

• Online/hybrid meetings are easier to keep on schedule (both starts and finishes are often delayed)
• In person meetings more often go off topic
• back to back meetings means going from one meeting room to another in person, sometimes in another building. That same time can instead be used to take notes/prepare the next meeting when you don't have to walk anywhere and just click a button to be In the next call
• when a meeting turns out to be irrelevant or useless to you, it is socially not acceptable to get up and leave. Just not having your camera on and doing other work on the side works without anyone knowing

In person work is only for when companies don't trust their employees. This is also true for people whose main work tool is meetings.

This is a class war of sorts, between middle management and the workers.

Got it.

Yes and no. There's a certain amount of passive communication that you.miss out when you're isolated from a team environment. A good team can mitigate this, however, by advocating regular group water-coolers and voice calls / screen-shares rather than emails or teams messages to get or deliver info. Getting a random teams call from a team member is not much different from them scooting their chair over to you.

I'm a huge advocate of letting people work how they are most happy. Some people like office, some like home. Just let people do their thing and figure out how to make it work. If we force people to work within a system that doesn't suit them then you lose out on acquiring good talent and will hemorrhage the talent you have.

smaller, worker-owned, organizations.

Mondragon tried that, it seems to mostly work. I think the keyword is smaller, companies don't know how to grow without hiring idiots who then become in charge.

I work for a fairly large company and I'm constantly surprised by how much shit I do just does not matter. Me and a coworker have been working on a large project and have had to push it back several times now so that we are almost 3 months behind at this point and there are 0 consequences because none of the bigwigs are affected by it. Then as soon as someone high enough on the chain decides to give a shit half or organization will be expected to drop everything else and get it done.

at least they can all go to lunch together.

Until they get a new manager who decides they have to stagger their lunch breaks

Thats why you have the phrase about a meeting that should have been an email.

If you don’t mind self hosting Mattermost is a pretty great replacement. Comes with some neat productivity tools and integrates with a lot of services including Microsoft stuff.

You can even have a bridge to Teams so you can set it up for the sort of nerds who appreciate full Markdown support with syntax highlighting.

To sell it to your boss, just say “If Teams is down, how will we get it working again?”

Here's the thing.... I work in IT and.... As much as many people don't want to hear it, Microsoft puts everything in one basket, and makes it easy to access and handle that basket.

You could go with gsuite/Google workspaces, and they have a lot of competing tools, like drive, meet, chat, Gmail, and their own office style suite.

Beyond that, you're going to start breaking up services between providers. Dropbox, email, zoom, etc... Each with their own logins per member of the team, increasing complexity exponentially.... Unless you can federate all your logins with someone, but the major players in business-ready, federated logins is.... Microsoft, Google, and companies like Ookla, of all people.

Which isn't to say anything about the compatibility issues with federation, and the complexity of setting it up when it works.

I struggled through trying to get federation working between a lot of different solutions and I'll just say, the whole thing is a nightmare, unless it's designed to go together from the start. You only get that if you go all in on one provider.... Like Microsoft 365.

People can say what they want, but Microsoft has taken their decades of experience making active directory, scaled it up to azure active directory (now entra ID), and built a full scale cloud service suite with everything fully integrated, and bluntly, simple to deploy by comparison. In the past, there were quite a few services, apps, programs, etc that directly interfaced with AD. Now that same functionality is a part of the foundations of entra.