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Microsoft Teams will start tracking office attendance

tomsguide.com

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Re: Microsoft Teams will start tracking office attendance

#31

Post by criemen »

nerdsniper wrote: post #27
palmotea wrote: post #9

> 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 m…

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.

I don't think macbooks have a GPS chip built-in, isn't it only wifi geolocation?

Re: Microsoft Teams will start tracking office attendance

#33

Post by MPSimmons »

curiousgal wrote: post #21
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #8

Thankfully this “update” shouldn’t affect me too much. We already have well established guidelines and schedules for remote work. That being said, I feel like complaining about Teams. Who else is frustrated by its unusually short idle timer? Setting my status to “Away” after only five minutes just makes me look bad. There are definitely managers who somehow think that an 8 hour workday actually means 8 hours of conti…

I built a usb mouse jiggler. The off the shelves ones are probably detectable via their PID/VID.

There are some that are wall-powered and have an actual physical spinning disk that moves your mouse around.

Re: Microsoft Teams will start tracking office attendance

#34

Post by palmotea »

bluedino wrote: post #19
palmotea wrote: post #9

> 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 m…

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?

Re: Microsoft Teams will start tracking office attendance

#35

Post by znpy »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #3

? 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?

> We can usually tell based on your background.

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.

Re: Microsoft Teams will start tracking office attendance

#36

Post by palmotea »

onionisafruit wrote: post #20

If you need software to figure out if somebody is in the office, then it isn’t important for them to be in the office. 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.

> 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).

Re: Microsoft Teams will start tracking office attendance

#37

Post by Gigachad »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #3

? 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?

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.

Re: Microsoft Teams will start tracking office attendance

#38

Post by CursedSilicon »

codeduck wrote: post #24
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #8

Thankfully this “update” shouldn’t affect me too much. We already have well established guidelines and schedules for remote work. That being said, I feel like complaining about Teams. Who else is frustrated by its unusually short idle timer? Setting my status to “Away” after only five minutes just makes me look bad. There are definitely managers who somehow think that an 8 hour workday actually means 8 hours of conti…

> I feel like complaining about Teams Brother, there is not enough alcohol in the world.for this conversation.

I saw a post remarking that Microsoft had instituted a return-to-office policy

The jab being something to the effect of "imagine being the group that built a tool to help people work remotely and then it sucks so hard everyone has to come back into the office anyway"

A friend who works internally then remarked to me that apparently the person leading Microsoft's AI efforts cried and whined hard enough that his org was allowed to "use Slack instead"

Really the people I feel for are the MSN Messenger engineers. They built something beautiful nearly 30 years ago and watched Microsoft ruin it, kill it with another product they had already ruined (Skype) and then bury the whole lot by building that Electron monstrosity over their unmarked graves

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