> 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.
People are down voting you but this is very similar to the answer I got from a real employee (as opposed to a v dash) at Microsoft. Their solution was they use something called power toys, which is technically a Microsoft product.
Problem is I've worked at places where I don't have admin access to my own machine and it is more common the you'd think.
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.
There are an array of devices you can buy online that automatically jiggle the mouse cursor to prevent idling, because supervisors are using Microsoft teams to determine if someone is working.
Even if the charitable interpretation was Microsoft's intent, managers put a lot of weight behind the Team's status icon.
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.
I don’t know if it’s real GPS or something more like how phones lookup near by wifi networks to get location, but MacBooks seem to get pinpoint precision location
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?
Honestly probably because the badge system is ancient and there's some Windows 95 machine in a furnace room somewhere that nobody knows how to get the swipe info from, or they can't separate it by employee/department etc
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.
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 continuous activity. Why can’t this be changed or configured to some other span of time? I wouldn’t complain about 15 minutes.
I got around this by downloading a program called caffeine. There are some other workarounds like preparing to start a fake call, or by entering a PowerPoint presentation and then alt-tabbing away from it.
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
> Thankfully this “update” shouldn’t affect me too much. We already have well established guidelines and schedules for remote work
Not yet. Whenever you feel “this doesn’t affect me” about anything, just pause and think “if my situation was different, would I feel differently about it?”. If the answer is yes, you should react the same way as if you’re affected by it.
Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a bad thing. Microsoft has really ticked me off lately, and I lament the fact that there’s really nothing I can do to change this. Microsoft doesn’t really listen to feedback, and when they do, they tend to just delay the rollout until after the controversy has died down (Recall).
Sounds like a useful feature tbh. I wouldn't ever work for a company again that didn't have fully flexible working (no requirements to come into the office at all if you don't want). But I also wouldn't lie to my boss about it.
I guess you can always use the web version via a VPN or something. I doubt it can deal with that.
This seems redundant with all of the other corporate spyware. My work laptop already is loaded to the gills with software that tracks my usage. At minimum, the VPN already knows when I am natively on the work network so it can be bypassed.
I think the only rational response (well, below "decline to play", don't work for assholes) is just arrange for it to be constantly snitching. Be that pizza shop with the worst yelp reviews.
> In a new feature update rolling out December 2025, the platform will track a worker’s location using the office Wi-Fi, to see whether you’re actually there or not.
I always despised Teams because it was a shitty chat app.
But now I despise it on an ideological level. So much so that I'm tempted to add something along the lines of "Do not invite me for interviews if your company (or your client's company, if you're a recruiter) uses Microsoft Teams for chat" to my LinkedIn profile.
I thought the "work location" feature, where you set your work location to "office" or "remote", was pretty OK for letting people know if you are in the office. People do a similar thing with slack so you don't waste time trying to find someone in the office if they are working remotely.
(Am I the only person with wired ethernet on my desk(s)? I gave up on wi-fi during the pandemic due to terrible Zoom performance, and have kept wired ever since - lower latency, lower jitter, no interference, and faster overall.)
Maybe the new bit for Teams is aggregation and tracking. That probably isn't going to have any good effects.
One thing I know about Teams is it shows me as not active almost 100% of the time. I have to refresh the page in order to get the green "hey look, I'm working!" icon. On one hand, I don't care...on the other, it's annoying. So I basically never trust that location / status info.
Maybe this is a setup issue within our org, I don't know.
Flagging this, clickbaity articles shouldn't be here. The author is speculating, which they admit, and there is nothing about snitching to bosses. You can do better than this please.
Nothing a little rpi nano running some lightweight VPN and some clever glue code couldn't fix. It isn't terribly difficult to slip into an IDF unnoticed and your IT department is probably disgruntled enough you could work them for a few months and get them to look the other way, anyway.
Really though this is all very exhausting. The media, controlled exclusively by corporate interests, has come up with all kinds of terms to disparage people. Just doing your job and getting by is "quiet quitting", etc. For those that didn't RTO you are probably getting railroaded.
I despise what I read here from pro-RTO posters because they miss the point. The great propaganda dispensed to us that "being the office was necessary" was proven wrong, without loss of generality, during COVID for nearly every cube farm job. It surprised no one when billions of dollars were spent buying news coverage about how RTO "harmed collaboration" and all kinds of other things. If going back to the office is such an amazing productivity boost why do you need nanny software? The answer is simple and we all have known it. It's only about control. We know that majority of capital for VCs comes from extortion level rates for multi-year leases of office buildings. VCs, too, are frauds. All of them. VCs control the C and Vs, C and Vs control the tax cattle.
It's bullshit of the highest order. All corporate work is just a pyramid scheme in different clothes. The sociopaths who run companies (of which I believe anyone who makes it to V or C level displays two or more sociopathic traits) do not like it when their reality distortion field falls apart.
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.