Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It

AIUI, one of the worst cases of interoperability legacy I've ever seen. If even one thing in the pipeline is compatible with POTS ("plain old telephone service", i.e., land lines in all their 3KHz glory), the whole call degrades, and since the whole call is going to be degraded anyhow, almost everything written to handle voice calling just drops straight to the POTS lowest common denominator. Which in a digital world can be even lower than POTS due to our ability to just set a number on our lossy compression codecs with all the regard for how much money bandwidth costs and no regard for quality.

This includes hardware too, e.g., microphones that work fine in the POTS frequency regimes but don't produce high quality audio, speakers chosen just to work well in the old frequency regime, etc.

So, despite the fact I have to imagine the odds of a call hitting the actual physical POTS system approaches zero today, and that in general in 2023 a high-quality phone call wouldn't actually be that expensive, the odds of a call traversing something that lazily fell back to POTS-level standards for whatever reason is still quite high.

One could write a brief sci-fi story in a Star Trek-inspired universe in which galactic war is started because the video call to High Command in the year 2642 is still running on POTS audio quality standards and some words are fatally compromised....

> Audio calls also still suck. Commercials in the 90s advertised "crystal clear audio quality" - they stopped talking about it but it never materialised.

So this is a funny one because its definitely solvable but it's kind of a classic principal agent problem. There's a number of things that are going into 'clear audio quality'.

1. Receiver's audio output quality - This is rarely if ever the problem. People usually use their speakers/headset to listen to stuff besides corporate meetings, so they're motivated to have something at least good enough that they can enjoy their music, talk shows, whatever.

2. Bandwidth allocation - This... this really shouldn't be an issue, but it is because the user isn't paying for the bandwidth, whether that's classic cellphone calls, Teams voice, whatever. And so its in the company's best financial interest to compress the audio as much as is tolerable. This isn't really an issue if #3 isn't a problem and the user is in a place without too much background noise, but with open-plan offices, it is a problem if there's a lot of people talking.

3. User's mic quality - So in gaming communities, people will generally tell you if your mic sucks, because you're just some random stranger. And if your mic sucks and you want people to listen to you, you will probably buy a good mic eventually, tweak the settings etc. In a business context, my experience has been that the audio quality has to be pretty bad before anyone even says anything to the speaker. And then it's up to that person to either try to get it replaced by IT or pay out of pocket for a good quality mic. And this is assuming that they're technical enough to be able to pick out a good mic to begin with or even realize that its something they can solve.

There’s a flip side to this where you’re not observing the negatives coming to the company as a result.

It’s not all bad but it’s not all good either.

Just as an example, I see people complain (a lot) about “cameras on” policies. This is the result of a company trying to eliminate an issue that they are seeing from non-participation to potential instances of fraud. They want to do return to office, but this is a “let’s find a middle ground” step.

And yet, people will act as if it’s the end of the world. The alternative is being in the room itself. You have to pick your battles.

Promises companies failed to keep:

- Decent working environment. I was moved into a single person office with another person that was so cramped I had to move if they needed to use the bathroom and ended up begging to be moved into the open office plan (which was so distracting but less humiliating.)

- Performance based bonuses/promotions

- Not working on weekends/holidays.

- Company Transit (a spot wasn't guaranteed or reservable so it wasn't reliable)

- 40 hour work week. Expected that I will go over 40 hours sometimes but under was taboo. And of course the 2 hours of commuting doesn't count.

- Plenty of other passive aggressive stuff by management during meetings

So I don't think people should feel that bad about negotiating the work environment on their terms. If companies don't follow the rules, why should people always be expected to fulfill your requirements that are something they never wanted.

Being interrupted while I work because someone walked over to talk to me, when they could have sent a message to request to talk to me, is the second strongest reason I refuse to work in an office. The first is that I am not paid to commute, and commute time is non-trivial.

Having multiple tasks on the go is good. I did it even when I worked in an office; it seems common practice to have many active repos hot on disk.