A simple Microsoft 365 Roadmap update will now generate a raft of unhappy headlines. The idea is simple. “When users connect to their organization’s Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in.”
Forget the locational anonymity of a Teams virtual background. Teams will update your location when connected to your company’s WiFi. On video, you may have your usual background complete with company logo. But your boss will know you’re not in work.
I think the takeaway from this article, and I may be wrong, is that Teams uses location to report where you’re logging in from. This is something most corporate networks report anyway for safety.
This isn’t a big deal for the vast majority of Work From Home employees. Most have home offices, and most will make their team or managers aware if they’re logging in from a new location, or everyone is using a robust VPN to connect anyway so it hardly matters.
This is going to fuck over people who are exploiting WFH to say, work two jobs (Yes, it is more common than you think) or people who went on vacation with their family and didn’t want to take PTO so they are trying to log in to join team meetings from the hotel lobby or something.
If your company is so draconian about your login location and you’re hiding where you’re working from, maybe consider changing habits or changing employer.
can you explain how this would catch people working two jobs esp if they are both WFH jobs?
It would fuck over people who are straw employees where someone else is doing the work but that’s kind of the opposite scenario. There was a story recently about a lot of San Francisco tech startups all hiring the same programmer thinking he was exclusive to them (stock options involved?). Apparently the work was getting done, but didn’t meet their expectations of the type of employee they were hiring.
Honestly, I can’t really explain how this will catch people not working in general unless the employer is utter shit at security and doesn’t make an effort to hold regular team calls with video on, and doesn’t have regular productivity metrics.
But assuming that you work in Half-Ass, Inc. and their only way of verifying you’re at home in front of your computer is using fucking Teams then I guess you could log into your work meetings while sitting at the front desk of the Car Wash and just keep the volume muted every time a car goes through the wash.
If your Teams connection shows you’re logged in from Shady’s Secret Car Wash then I guess your boss might start getting suspicious.
In general, that type of multiple job work is both jobs being work from home. I don’t think anyone home officing a desk job is going to do minimum wage work on the side.
I thought so too until I caught one of my team members doing exactly this.
I wouldn’t have said or done shit either, if he was actually pulling off both jobs successfully, we all gotta survive, you know? But he wasn’t getting anything done, and the other members of the team were all overworked and doing as much as they could, it was unfair to everyone so I had to confront him.
I didn’t even make threats or say what he was doing was unacceptable, I just said he needed to help his team more, especially if he wanted that promotion and more responsibility like he kept asking for. He resigned a week later from the office job. I’ll never understand the logic either.
It gets strange when you are using their cloud services though. You don’t really need a VPN to use teams web interface, it should be secure by default. Will Linux leak my location when using teams? I don’t know.
Or if I am using virtual desktops in azure, often with a secondary hop to a remote desktop somewhere that is running teams. At this point what are we logging and what location am I really at?
As a side note: all of this effort by microsoft is annoying. Bring your own device is so freeing and cost saving, but it makes the situation I described above.
I work on windows all day, but I don’t personally have any. And I like it that way.
Most of their changes seem like pointless busywork to keep dev teams employed.
Nobody asked them to “simplify” right-click menus by changing copy and paste commands to icons, I don’t know what that accomplishes either. I don’t know what meeting they had where they decided that the lower left corner for the start-menu access was out of style and we now need to put it in the middle, but here we are.
I could go on for hours and hours.