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.
If I’m plugged into the local switch, my IP address is a static 192.168.x.x. If I connect via WiFi, it’s dynamic 10.10.x.x. If I’m coming in via VPN, I’m crossing the external firewall, routed to a dedicated remote VLAN based on network permissions, and dynamically assigned 10.70.x.x.
A business doesn’t need Teams to tell them if you’re remote or not. This is just to wave a big public red flag and sow division.
I’m sure this “feature” is aimed at the tech-illiterate micromanagers, like the C-Suite, giving them a nice little icon, not at IT who can easily see this type of thing many different ways.
In my experience the illiterate micromanagers got the nerds to send them reports. Or set up a dashboard to give them a real-time view into how many local vs remote connections there were.
Our RTO mandate was December 2020.
But just think about how much easier it is to see the little icon right there in Teams.
I wish for a world where AI would be put to actual good use and vet such managers seeking such bullshit metrics and dashboard and icons like that, and inform the hiring manager(s) that this kind of thing is incredibly toxic and destroys effectiveness, morale and so on, and that unless such a manager could be retrained to drop such micromanagement nonsense, that the company should pass on hiring them…
What country? I didn’t realize companies were doing that so early.
I know our company started making some kind of noises about it - in fits and starts - but more along the lines of "when we are all coming back in, yadda yadda ", maybe starting in the fall of 2020, but then wave after wave kept happening, we started hiring people in other parts of the country nowhere near an office and people that were near an office started moving away to cheaper locations or places near their aging parents or near their own adult kids, and we started to hear it less and less…
USA.
Most of the tech teams spent their days working with people in offices across the country (and in Europe), so being physically in the office didn’t matter much unless there was a hardware install or something. Didn’t stop brass (headquartered in the Deep South) from doing their best to wag their dicks around (furloughs and pay cuts for those that remained were not enough, it seemed). Before another 12 months passed half the network team had left and there was constant churn on the sysadmin team. Didn’t matter. The company got bought by a bigger fish and the execs got golden parachutes despite nearly running the company into the ground. Meritocracy!
Oh, god, I’m sorry to hear that. Yeah, I still don’t understand, especially after Covid, how so many people in management still have such an obsession with in-person work.
I’d get it if we were talking about the Silent Generation or something. But hell, remote work has been possible since when boomers were in their prime working years. I remember seeing my uncle (boomer) having a terminal at his house back in the 80s. Modems were a thing, etc…some work was definitely something that could be done remote. Journalists had machines they’d carry around with them to send in stories, etc. So it definitely got its start long, long ago. Before I entered the workforce.
But often, it’s now Gen Y that are some of these managers that seem excited to get people into the same crowded space with shitty fluorescent lighting and lots of distractions, shitty chairs and desks, public restrooms, long commutes, paying for parking, stupid dress codes, etc…I mean, WTF. By the time Gen Y hit the workforce, remote work was something very well known and solved. Do they have some kind of weird FOMO for 90s work culture?
Bssids give away your location.