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.
Well. I’m remote. So they know I’m not at work.
Teams is already such a bloated fucking mess of an application.
To be fair, Microsoft never had “Don’t be evil” as their motto.
The company your work for is Microsoft’s biggest client - not you… Not even you if you use Windows on your own home computer. Use Linux at home, use Linux at work if you can.
Microsoft’s products are no longer usable.
Not safe, not sensible, not smart.
Hold on. Let me say this.
If your boss cares more about where you are doing your work, than if your work is getting completed, you need a new boss.
I work in IT support and I’ll say that this isn’t really anything that couldn’t be done before, is just more visible. Office 365 logs what device and app you’re using to connect, the IP address of the requester, what you were requesting from which service… The list is long. It’s a massive amount of data that largely, nobody cares about.
The only time I even look at that information is when some security software flags some action as suspicious, then, and only then, do I even bother.
If you go on vacation and suddenly connect from Florida when you are normally connecting from the UK, I get a notification. If you suddenly start using a well known VPN, I get a notification. The logic is for security. If you suddenly log in from a new place, then it’s more likely that the login in question wasn’t you, and you’ve been hijacked. That’s literally my only interest in your location. Most bosses don’t give a shit either.
If your boss cares more about where you are doing your work, than if your work is getting completed, you need a new boss.
Sure, in principle. Getting a new boss though… do you have any extra lobs laying around?
I work in IT
Aaaand here we go, of course you thought finding a new job was a viable alternative.
I am glad I work where nobody monitors teams because that would be stupid.
But exactly how will this work for the people who are actually using modern computing? So I am on Azure Virtual Desktop for one instance of teams, and another that I use for calls on a personal laptop, maybe on their wifi but always with a VPN because we habitually run vpns.
So where am I?
List of locations it compiles for you, based on a heuristic analysis of data, time of day, and cross-referenced by your consumer data would do it pretty nicely
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.
This is going to fuck over people who are exploiting WFH to say, work two jobs
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 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.
all of this effort by microsoft is annoying.
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.
Mac / iPhone have location services since find my mac / iphone and sends location of your device to apple and nobody gives a fuck, android sees and sends your every action, so is facebook that trains on your voice and photos, but no windows in workplace is your real enemy !
To begin with, all of the things you listed are bad and we complain about them just as much. It’s never a good argument when people complain about some bad thing and your reasoning is “but what about this other bad thing?”.
Secondly, this particular update is not about general location tracking, which Microsoft already does quite a lot of, but also being a narc and telling your boss about it, which adds a whole new layer of reasons to complain.
And to finish off… Yes, Windows in the workplace is your enemy. So is Windows at home. Or in an ATM, supermarket cashier, airport totem, or any other computing device.
they things I listed doesn’t involve earning money so that’s the difference
It’s that any boss would presumably have easy and direct access to the information without having to ask IT. It turns what should be diagnostic/device security information into disciplinarily actionable.
you can change work and don’t give a fuck about teams, you can’t change the things I listed, see the difference ?
“You can change work” has similar, though not as bad, of vibes as “just move to a different state” these days. My resume isn’t good enough for decent appropriate work but also makes me look riskily overqualified for lesser jobs.
Another feature no one asked for.
Oh, this was asked for, I assure you.
Not by workers, but it was asked for.
No. I’m sure managers asked for this…
You, the worker, are not Microsoft’s customer. You and your data are the product.
If you are not the customer, you are the product!
Eh, most companies that allow Work From Home are already tracking your login location and use their own robust VPN anyway that sends your login location to validate who you are. Teams is just trying to sell what most companies already do as a “new feature.”
I can’t really think of a way this is going to harm most users unless you’re already trying to scam your employer by vacationing without using your PTO and trying to show up to meetings from the hotel WiFi, or working two jobs. (Both of which I’ve had to deal with managing WFH teams.)
Jokes on them! My company made everyone remote during COVID. It worked so well that they sold the corporate office buildings. We are all remote permanently! As long as I work my scheduled hours, they don’t care where in the world I am.
I’ve gone through two companies that embraced Work From Home, a lot of companies saw no drop in productivity or results from having their employees comfortable and able to get to work on time.
One company didn’t go down without a fight, it took all the employees including myself, a manager, to speak up and talk to corporate and the CEO’s and say that my team and I oppose returning to the office, we don’t see a reason for it, and many of us will consider alternatives. They key point here is I backed it up with data, showing we only gained productivity and revenue since moving to WFH.
Despite all the hyped headlines out there about “Covid is over, time to go back to work!” we’ve seen for the last couple years, a lot of the changes it ushered in have become permanent. I know a lot of companies yanked the choke-chain around their employee’s necks, but not all.
The second company I moved to was already about 50% WFH, a much larger company too, and they made it totally optional, and they benefited a lot from being able to recruit talent from basically anywhere in the world.
We JUST did this. I work in commercial real estate and we talked about it in 2018 but management chickened out. After the Pandemic, they forced us to go back for a year but moral fell to the lowest point ever and we couldn’t hire anyone.
Finally, it was time to decide on renewing our lease again and we switched back to remote. It’s been awesome and we’ve hired tons of people from our competitors who are pushing in office mandates.
I hope everyone keeps pushing their office to change. It’s possible.
Can I work at your workplace? Do they need an IT guy?
Lucky bastard
This is definitely a step in the right direction, but why stop there? They should be paying you for getting work done to some agreed-upon standard, regardless of whether that takes 40 hours a week or far less.
Lmao any corporate IT department can do this at any time anyways
Well, the IT stuff made a log of it, but I think teams is promising to actually rat on you. Like, if it detects it, it’ll send a notice to the boss that you’re being remote
It updates your location status to “in the office”
It also changes to “away” if you don’t move the mouse for long enough.
Anyone looking to these as workers not doing their job, is looking in the wrong place.
Well i guess i am lucky because my laptop remains on site and i connect to vdi and then rdp to my laptop. (When working from home) so the data will be meaningless. At least in my case.
That particular data is meaningless in all cases
Glad I work at a place that wouldn’t give a fuck as long as I’m getting shit done. This sort of bullshit undermines how people feel about work and likely harms productivity more than it helps (as is tradition with micromanaging people instead of setting them up for success and giving them the space they need to do their job).
Also, people who actually are slacking will find so many ways around this anyhow that it won’t actually matter to them because they already don’t care and are probably smart enough to get around it.
In a lot of ways, I have the opposite of micromanagement, they really don’t care what the hell I am doing as long as I’m delivering my projects effectively.
Sounds like you work at a place that trusts you to do the job you were hired to do.
My take is: If they don’t trust me, wtf am I even doing at a such a fucked up place? Then find a better place to work.
The sad thing is that some orgs that start off with healthy environments can slowly erode into really toxic environments and it’s like a frog boiling in water.
Sometimes it can happen very quickly - all it takes is one person of enough prominence being replaced with another, and something that took years to cultivate is shredded in weeks/months.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen both of these happen up close and personal. Sometimes it’s not always a viable option to try to pick up and move to another job…
Companies also get bought out by other companies and then change drastically overnight.
Yes, without question. That’s usually a fast-track to a highly toxic place, because often the people that they have acquired are viewed as just somehow being there accidentally, or worse, illegitimately, because the new management had no role in finding them, hiring them, and working to create/preserve a culture with them.
Also, many weak managers just want loyalists and that kind of personality just worries that they didn’t get to vet people so the people they have bought won’t be sufficiently loyal…
In my current job, I don’t mind doing a little overtime or working a weekend every now and than. They don’t care what I do, as long as it gets done. They don’t care that I go to the gym during office hours. I’m happy and I’m passionate about my work.
But if they started doing shit like this. I’d be working 9 to 5 and not giving a shit if work gets done or not. I’d become a drone and I’d be looking for other employment.
Fancy that? Don’t you love it when your work treat you like…wait for it… an Adult. Rewarded accordingly, help accountable accordingly. Who’d 've thought! 🤔
No kidding. What dystopian hell do people work in??
As always it’s the worst product that got the most marketing that gets used by everyone.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
I think it’s more the case it gets bundled in for free (or near enough) with other MS crap like Office.
Apparently it’s dirt cheap as compared to alternatives
