> The supposed benefit of being in the office is because teams work better in person. If everybody else is at the office, it’s obvious who isn’t there.
We're talking about corporate America here. They say "RTO because teams work better in person" while they simultaneously contradict themselves requiring distributed teams. What really matters is the leader is tall, looks important in suit, and makes the number go up (with stock buybacks if necessary).
Well, obviously the managers won't be working from the office, they're perfectly capable of WFH. Really funny in a way, since their work output is way harder to measure.
MS tries to do way too much with M365 Teams. Why is this application concerned at all about the details of my WiFi connection? What if I’m wired? Tattle then?
Teams has it’s own bug-addled system-independent audio settings too, and it completely broke compatibility with my Bluetooth headset device some years ago. Took forever to diagnose. MS can’t help but layer complexity on needless complexity in Teams while allowing this bloatware to continue to harbor extremely obvious and annoying bugs.
My biggest pet peeve - Ctrl plus shift plus v pastes unformatted but right next to it is Ctrl plus shift plus c which starts a call in whatever chat you are in. Also there is no way within ms teams to remove this binding. Wat‽
You should be able to capture this keybinding with autohotkey. I don't have my script handy, on mobile, but you can capture keys based on the active window. These keystrokes aren't passed to the active window, so you could have it take an alternate (or no) action.
I’m not sure who would really care about this feature.
We can usually tell based on your background. And the people that have to be in office are tracked typically with badge swipes. And if you’re really that determined to work remote and your company doesn’t support it, wouldn’t it be better just to find a company that does rather than sneaking around?
I think it can and willl be used more statistically. Yes, from your background you will get a sense and form an opinion, but with this, you can generate a report that says with high accuracy where you have spent every hour. This will be more sharp ammunition in case the employer want to use it against you.
If it goes by WIFI and not the wired network it'll be rather of useless in every enterprise organisation I've ever worked in. I'm not sure I've even worked in a place where the WIFI wasn't a guest network. Don't get me wrong, I'd like the feature. I work in a fully flexible place, but part of that is setting your status to be "working from outside the office" when you're not there. If that could happen automatically that'd be great.
Not really. Decent tele-conference platforms can automatically replace your background. I have a corporate-provided background in google meet, for example.
> And the people that have to be in office are tracked typically with badge swipes.
Often badges are just for automatic doors, not really connected to any real information / data collection system. Not all companies are data-collecting monsters. The company I work for, as an example, has no badges at all (but has people at the reception).
> And if you’re really that determined to work remote and your company doesn’t support it, wouldn’t it be better just to find a company that does rather than sneaking around?
Agree on this.
But the sad truth is that not everybody has all the necessary degrees of freedom to do that.
I might (and I would). But then again, I'm 33, single, no spouse and no kids. I don't have those responsibilities and I can take the risks. People with kids for example would be (understandably) more cautious.
Plus, in the EU, it is unlikely to be legal to use badge-swipe data for attendance tracking (I think this is prevailing opinion rather than legally tested so far).
The charitable interpretation is that this feature is just so your coworkers can tell if you are in the office so they know if they should go find you or have a call.
Reading more about technologies like this it seems to create a unique profile of your usual type and style of usage (clicking, scrolling, typing) which can then be compared against.
Not condoning cheating - the point about just finding another job is it might not be that easy for people depending on what they do, what industry it's in, the number of jobs accessible to them at any given time, or average for those skills.
Every recent employer I've had uses a VPN to get into their internal network when you're not logged into wifi or ethernet from inside a building, so I don't see this Teams change as a big deal. Must be something for small employers without much, if any, IT infrastructure or IT dept.
Hardware dongles (e.g. yubikeys) have replaced required VPN logins to access internal sites at my recent workplaces. If you access any internal sites or do basically anything on your corporate laptop, there's definitely the potential for creepy tracking...
My guess, based on the reading article, is they're doing the locating via WiFi BSSID. So, VPN won't matter... But, it's easy enough to spoof a BSSID from home >:)
> Well, the main thing this brings to mind is an Amazon tactic that emerged after the pandemic. There was a big move to get people back to working in the office, and Amazon staffers who weren't happy with that could change their SSID (home Wi-Fi name) to match the company’s official office network.
> Now, do not take this as advice to do the same! It’s highly likely that a more advanced application like Teams has a more advanced check going on here, such as making sure your device has an IP address that matches the corporate office network, or checking the MAC address of the router.
Is there any reason you can't spoof literally all of that?
But if your boss really wants to know if you're in the office or not, they can track badge-swipes. That's what my employer does to enforce RTO compliance.
MacBooks just provide their GPS location to Jamf thanks to FindMy. Sure, you could spoof that by keeping it in a Faraday cage and use a $10,000 signal generator to generate GPS signals.
But then you go to all that trouble and still have to VPN into the office from an IP outside of your office.
> MacBooks just provide their GPS location to Jamf thanks to FindMy.
1. Do MacBooks even have proper GPS hardware onboard? Honest question.
2. I wouldn't think GPS would actually work very well, given how cavernous office buildings are--no clear view of the sky for GPS. And if you get a GPS signal indoors at home, it shouldn't be too hard to block.
Amazon now does this with badge swipe data, and because you must badge in and out of Amazon offices they also track and report on how many hours you’re in the office.
Yeah I’m here like “what are we even talking about? What company is doing this over just reading badge swipe data?”
I know smaller companies might not have badging systems that can provide such analytics (or badging systems at all), but the Amazon anecdote smells fishy to say the least.
Managers couldn't get badge swipe access but they could get wifi data, so that's what they used to find out who was actually coming into work (people were swiping their badge and leaving, etc)
> Managers couldn't get badge swipe access but they could get wifi data...
That seems really weird. Why?
If managers can't get badge swipe data (or reporting based on it), are they doing some kind of weird solo RTO enforcement? And if they can't get badge-swipe, why could they get Wifi data?
I get the optics issue, but companies that want to track this stuff have long had ways to do it. Simple badge taps on doors for example. For example, Amazon has automated reporting that monitors badging in and out of the office so they track what days you’re in and how long you’re in to make sure resources adhere to the RTO5 mandate. HR is alerted in someone doesn’t have enough time badged in.
Readit News
The supposed benefit of being in the office is because teams work better in person. If everybody else is at the office, it’s obvious who isn’t there.
We're talking about corporate America here. They say "RTO because teams work better in person" while they simultaneously contradict themselves requiring distributed teams. What really matters is the leader is tall, looks important in suit, and makes the number go up (with stock buybacks if necessary).
Recently, quite a few remote employees were given advanced notice of lay-offs. Myself impacted.
Fast forward a bit. Now I’m training a contractor in another country to do my job.
We are expected to monitor systems 24/7.
RTO is so clearly a scam.
Also shortens the leash on corp debt slaves.
Edit: this is the "enterprise solution", whereas I agree you're right at the margins.
Just like surprise, low Speed Limit signs that provide probable cause to pull over whoever you like.
Teams has it’s own bug-addled system-independent audio settings too, and it completely broke compatibility with my Bluetooth headset device some years ago. Took forever to diagnose. MS can’t help but layer complexity on needless complexity in Teams while allowing this bloatware to continue to harbor extremely obvious and annoying bugs.
“Paste with formatting” is a scourge of a “feature.” I can’t recall ever wanting to actually do that.
Great. Now the secure VM I use will always appear remote, when I'm in the office.
Teams runs within the VM, as does 100% of the things I'm allowed to use for work. So the "local network" for the VM, is Azure.
I’m not sure who would really care about this feature.
We can usually tell based on your background. And the people that have to be in office are tracked typically with badge swipes. And if you’re really that determined to work remote and your company doesn’t support it, wouldn’t it be better just to find a company that does rather than sneaking around?
Not really. Decent tele-conference platforms can automatically replace your background. I have a corporate-provided background in google meet, for example.
> And the people that have to be in office are tracked typically with badge swipes.
Often badges are just for automatic doors, not really connected to any real information / data collection system. Not all companies are data-collecting monsters. The company I work for, as an example, has no badges at all (but has people at the reception).
> And if you’re really that determined to work remote and your company doesn’t support it, wouldn’t it be better just to find a company that does rather than sneaking around?
Agree on this.
But the sad truth is that not everybody has all the necessary degrees of freedom to do that.
I might (and I would). But then again, I'm 33, single, no spouse and no kids. I don't have those responsibilities and I can take the risks. People with kids for example would be (understandably) more cautious.
Plus, in the EU, it is unlikely to be legal to use badge-swipe data for attendance tracking (I think this is prevailing opinion rather than legally tested so far).
My cynicism makes me think it’s the latter.
Not condoning cheating - the point about just finding another job is it might not be that easy for people depending on what they do, what industry it's in, the number of jobs accessible to them at any given time, or average for those skills.
Some are doing RTO. Most people are coming back. Some are quitting and finding other jobs. And that’s fine for both parties.
Nobody is sticking it to anybody.
> Now, do not take this as advice to do the same! It’s highly likely that a more advanced application like Teams has a more advanced check going on here, such as making sure your device has an IP address that matches the corporate office network, or checking the MAC address of the router.
Is there any reason you can't spoof literally all of that?
But if your boss really wants to know if you're in the office or not, they can track badge-swipes. That's what my employer does to enforce RTO compliance.
But then you go to all that trouble and still have to VPN into the office from an IP outside of your office.
1. Do MacBooks even have proper GPS hardware onboard? Honest question.
2. I wouldn't think GPS would actually work very well, given how cavernous office buildings are--no clear view of the sky for GPS. And if you get a GPS signal indoors at home, it shouldn't be too hard to block.
I know smaller companies might not have badging systems that can provide such analytics (or badging systems at all), but the Amazon anecdote smells fishy to say the least.
A computer can't know anything except what the environment tells it, and since you control the environment you can tell it whatever you want.
That seems really weird. Why?
If managers can't get badge swipe data (or reporting based on it), are they doing some kind of weird solo RTO enforcement? And if they can't get badge-swipe, why could they get Wifi data?
I think that’s what is being insinuated.
And don't think it'll be long till teams has built in jiggler detection too