Zoom does legitimately suck though, but not for the reasons he thinks. Moreso from a privacy perspective.

Let him keep shit-talking Zoom until my employers switch to a better alternative!

As someone else in management I would take the higher morale boost I have from my completely remote engineering team to some “good conversations” and “interesting ideas” that may pop up from time to time. It’s not their job to come up with that shit. It’s either mine or products and they are definitely able to do it organically if you facilitate casual working sessions that promote conversation over productivity.

Edit: also if you have people who can’t manage their work without you stating over their shoulder that’s a failure on your part not theirs. Yes some people just aren’t cut out for some jobs but if the difference is being remote or in the office that is totally on you.

Typical manager mentality.

You are trying really hard to keep your micro manager position aren't you?

No, he's saying that the product is ineffective at what it aims to do.

If people are working on 200 things at once it's your job to provide them with clear cut tasks, priorities, and deadlines.

Unless he doesn't believe zoom is intended to solve the problem of remote work.

Remote work fucking MADE his company into what it is today. Nobody even heard of Zoom before the pandemic. They were a nothing company with a shitty product amongst many. He knows this very well, he just can't keep his own micro-managing inner asshole down.

I've been working remotely in game development for 10 years. A highly collaborative field. Requiring artists, producers, engineers, designers, QA, and marketing all communicating across levels. Meaning junior designers need to talk to lead engineers and everyone wears many hats.

You are completely correct. In fact, zoom is a terrible system to use. I highly recommend no one use it for remote work. Use Google meet, discord or mumble for persistent voice and video. Use slack, discord, or teams for text. Use Google docs or confluence for document sharing. Use trello, Asana, jira, or hacknplan for task planning. Use Miro for idea boards.

You need a full suite of services but not in a single field would I recommend zoom. It's such a bad piece of software that I'd literally recommend jitsi over it.

This is probably why they are returning to the office. Their software is so bad they'd have to use something else to be productive and the best way to save face there is to say that your software isn't unique and that no software can replace physical offices. In reality you have full business that have been remote for decades without problems. Business that require far more collaboration than zoom.