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Zoom Demands Workers Return to Office Two Days a Week. Is The Remote-Working Revolution Dead? (msn.com) 176

Posted by EditorDavid from the tell-a-conferencer dept.
Even Zoom is now telling its 8,400 employees to stop working remotely at least two days a week and return to the office. The policy applies to employees within 50 miles of a Zoom office ith a Zoom spokesperson calling this hybrid approach the "most effective".

Business Insider quips that Zoom making the move means "The remote work revolution is officially dead."

And earlier this week The Los Angeles Times argues that "After watching and waiting, some chaotic back-and-forth and a few false starts, the white-collar American workforce appears to be settling — for now — in a hybrid mode." Even as more corporations are moving to call workers back to the office, arguing it's better for preserving company culture and decision-making, few employers have required employees to work on-site five days a week. Most are like Meta and Los Angeles-based Farmers Group, which recently announced that most employees who had been working remotely will have to come in three days a week starting in September.

Some firms have backtracked in favor of a more flexible system, or put return-to-office plans on ice, because of worker resistance and other changes wrought by the pandemic... [M]any other companies have stayed silent on the issue of remote work, maintaining vague or largely unenforced policies as they wait to see where the struggle ends. More unions, including the guild at the Los Angeles Times, are wrestling with management over remote work, which has become a top labor issue. For all these reasons, the overall amount of work done from home has held remarkably steady this year at about 28%, according to monthly surveys of thousands of workers by WFH Research, a group including Stanford and the University of Chicago. That's way up from roughly 5% of work done at home before COVID-19.

And there are some signs that employers are giving workers greater flexibility in their work schedules and when they can work from home. In a nationwide survey conducted last month for The Times by polling firm Leger, 27% of full-time workers said their employers had become more lenient over the last year about working remotely. Only 15% said their employers got stricter. Most of the rest said there was no change. Leger's survey showed that 11% of full-time employees work 100% from home, and 31% work a hybrid schedule, with most saying they choose which days to come into the office. The remainder said that they work fully on company premises or that their jobs aren't compatible with at-home work. These results line up almost exactly with WFH data...

Rob Sadow, chief executive at Scoop Technologies, a firm specializing in flexible-work software and research, says the percentages of employers that are fully remote and fully in-office have both declined since the start of the year. What's grown in their place is a "structured" hybrid model in which employees and employers have essentially split the difference. "This two to three days a week is starting to feel like a pretty decent, happy medium," Sadow said. "Executives and employees are finding somewhat of a truce in terms of how much time is spent in the office and at home."
The article also points out that "Some employees have quit and moved to more remote-work friendly firms."
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Zoom Demands Workers Return to Office Two Days a Week. Is The Remote-Working Revolution Dead? More

Zoom Demands Workers Return to Office Two Days a Week. Is The Remote-Working Revolution Dead?

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  • preserving company culture? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @12:37PM (#63744530)

    Most cultures in companies are best kept in Petri dishes in secure areas. They tend to be pretty toxic.

  • "truce" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @12:38PM (#63744534) Journal

    "This two to three days a week is starting to feel like a pretty decent, happy medium," Sadow said.

    ... to employers.

    "Executives and employees are finding somewhat of a truce in terms of how much time is spent in the office and at home."

    If by "truce" you mean "the most we can get without losing everybody".

    • Re:"truce" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @12:44PM (#63744542)

      The mere fact that they call it a "truce", i.e. an agreement between warring parties, shows pretty much what their attitude really is.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        What is really lame is the underlying reason they want people to come back is that the people running the company are invested in real estate. Even if the company has a 20 year lease on a property, it doesn't start costing more because it is mostly empty... actually they still save on utilities. But the impact on home values over time when nobody needs to work within driving distance and when the labor market catches up so they can't underpay people based on where they live... yikes, suddenly every executiv

        • Re:"truce" (Score:4, Interesting)

          by TheEyes ( 1686556 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @03:57AM (#63746226)

          Property? In my experience, the main reason you need in-office days is for training new / inexperienced people. Our office has tripled in personnel over the past year; for those new people, being able to walk down the hall or even just holler over a cube wall and get an answer is incredibly valuable. And that value isn't going away any time soon; yes, for experienced workers you can be more productive working from home, but that's a stance that sacrifices the future of the company for benefits in the present, because those experienced people aren't going to stay in their positions forever, and when they promote / retire / quit / die you'd better have cross-trained people ready to take those duties or the company is sunk.

          For these purposes, a 1-2 day per week schedule seems to be the ideal happy medium.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      That tells me the "Truce" is finding enough people who were willing to come back at all.

      Here's the thing, if your job doesn't not entail on-site work. You do not need an office.

      Anyone who says otherwise is completely fooling themselves. It's the same argument about using transit.

      If you can not transit to work, you do not need an office. If your job does not permit you to use transit (Eg you need a truck full of tools, instruments, construction materials, etc) then you also do not need an office to go to. Yo

      • I'm an advocate for remote work and I agree with your assessment in theory, but not in practice.

        At any skill, experience or education level you will find two types of employees.

        1. Honest, motivated employees that meet agreed upon expectations, are self motivated and can be trusted to work a certain amount of time or produce a certain amount of output.

        2. Dishonest or unmotivated employees, that left unsupervised, will not meet agreed upon expectations or produce expected output.

        Both types will cl

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          This idea only works to a limited degree. Because type 2 will not produce good results even when supervised. Many of them will actually have negative productivity overall due to low result quality and effort to get them to produce even that, and forcing them to work more may well lead to a worse outcome. You would be well advised to get rid of type 2 completely.

      • Seems weird that a remote work company wants staff in. Either their software is terrible or their management are.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      If by "truce" you mean "the most we can get without losing everybody".

      Well, they will lose people they really need, because those are the ones that can get work elsewhere easily and often have been thinking about it for a while anyways. Classical way to arrange for a company to start dying slowly.

    • "This two to three days a week is starting to feel like a pretty decent, happy medium," Sadow said.

      ... to employers.

      "Executives and employees are finding somewhat of a truce in terms of how much time is spent in the office and at home."

      If by "truce" you mean "the most we can get without losing everybody".

      This alludes to the real underlying truth in the worker market. Those companies that are doing well and are desirable can largely dictate their terms, as has always been the case. Similarly for the exceptional workers, they can dictate their terms. It's the less desirable companies and workers that must grab what they can.

      There was a while during and immediately after the pandemic when pretty much all companies allowed or even mandated fully remote work. That time is now over.

  • ZOOM demands... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sxpert ( 139117 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @12:46PM (#63744546)

    jokes on them, I guess

    the video conferencing company can't seem to use it's own product companywide and do what they're preaching others do with their product.

    oh the irony !

    • Don't forget Meta, whose entire platform is selling people on the idea of virtual presence, wanted people to be physically present.

  • Funny (sad) and Ironic (Score:3)

    by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @12:46PM (#63744548) Homepage Journal

    Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • 51 miles (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ApproachingLinux ( 756909 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @12:47PM (#63744554)
    "The policy applies to employees within 50 miles of a Zoom office"
    In other news, Zoom mystified by sudden trend where employees move 51 miles away from the office

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sxpert ( 139117 )

      THIS !

    • I'd switch my main residence immediately to another place if my company tried that.

      There's plenty of places I can "allegedly" live at.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Too much effort. Just switch employers. If you actually have a job you would like to keep, tell them you are now looking for a better employer unless they let you work remotely. Pretty surprising how exceptions suddenly become possible.

        • If you want me to work remotely, the office works remotely. I'm so not going to let you get the rest of the office get upset at me for special treatment.

          I want a rule, not an exception.

    • Four hours each way (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tepples ( 727027 ) <.tepples. .at. .gmail.com.> on Sunday August 06, 2023 @01:11PM (#63744594) Homepage Journal

      Not to mention that 50 miles (80 km) is four hours each way for a cyclist.

    • In other news, Zoom mystified by sudden trend where employees move 51 miles away from the office

      I guess you mean a paper move and not a real move right? No one would be stupid enough to actually move house just to stay with a toxic employer who policies they don't like.

    • Zoom employees could move to somewhere cheaper like Tracy or Salinas. But they could also move to somewhere less remote like Berkeley and still manage to be at least 51 miles away from work.

  • Oh, the irony.

  • See-Saw Daily Remote Work Articles. (Score:3)

    by blahbooboo ( 839709 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @01:03PM (#63744576)
    What isn't dying are daily news stories saying "remote is dead" or "remote work is taking over"

    • What's interesting to me is how the amount of remote working being done is framed. If 28% of all work is now remote, and somewhere around half of work requires a physical presence (i.e. carpentry or whatever), then 28% overall is likely a majority of non physical labor.

      I've been going in hybrid a couple days a week, even more voulentarily for a bit when there were distractions at home. It was fine. Management seems to be resigning themselves to the fact that the culture they loved is dead, as frequently I s

  • Looks like mostly companies that need to lose a lot of people seem to be doing this to avoid publicized layoffs. Zoom is definitely in the boat where if they don't scale down they are dead. RTO is a great way to get many people to quit. Most talented will always go first, but after a serious round of layoffs they often switch jobs anyway.

    • Maybe, but in a normal round of layoffs, you can at least cut the dead weight. That way the dead weight is exactly what you retain the most.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed. Making work conditions worse is about the most stupid move you could use to get rid of employees. Basically only makes sense if the company is already dying anyways.

  • Most surprising piece from this story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @01:19PM (#63744620)

    Zoom has 8,400 employees.

  • Somewhat understandable (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ZipNada ( 10152669 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @01:31PM (#63744652)

    I love working remotely, and for the typical reasons. No commute, better environment, fewer distractions. If something domestic requires my attention I can take care of it immediately. But then I'm a conscientious worker who largely enjoys the job and I get a lot of work done from home. At least as much as at the office if not more.

    But as a team leader and former manager I know from experience that there always a certain set of people who do as little actual work as possible. They do only what they are directly told to do (if even that) and no more. This means that someone has to notice they are coasting, and tell them to do something. At the office you can see them buzzing around chatting and wasting other people's time. They are always looking at their phone. When you go over to talk to them they are surfing the internet. In short, they are lazy and require monitoring. Contractors are particularly prone to this, they have no skin in the game anyways. I can imagine that in some workplaces these people will be the norm.

    So yeah, I can definitely understand why employers would want to have eyeballs on their workers. You can prevent them from working an additional full-time job for example. You can more easily identify the uncorrectable slackers and fire them. You can haul people into your office and give them a serious talking-to right there on the spot. If there's an emergency you can pull a working group into a conference room right now and get things straightened out.

    • Re: Somewhat understandable (Score:5, Insightful)

      by irreverentdiscourse ( 1922968 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @02:07PM (#63744754)

      If you need to physically observe someone to know they aren't doing any work then you aren't a "team leader" you are a glorified video camera.

      • Many people working remotely are on 'video camera'. Its called a webcam. Companies have had to install monitoring software that checks to see if the employee (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) is sitting at the computer and at least pretending to do their job. And then there is software that looks for occasional mouse movements. Invasive to be sure, but apparently necessary.

    • Re:Somewhat understandable (Score:5, Insightful)

      by forgottenusername ( 1495209 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @03:09PM (#63744912)

      Someone who slacks off at home is going to do the same in the office, you just get the 'feelies' that they are working harder because of a warm body mentality. Either get better employees or give them more tasks and track their workloads. Usually if employees have the skills required but aren't doing the work, there's a motivation issue that points at lack of empowerment, bad management, bad culture, lack of clarity in role.. something that making them demotivated

      "Only doing the work assigned" literally means they are doing their job. Work is a false-family; the workers get all the insecurity, the layoffs, the pay cuts when times are tough. Not the owners, not the corporations, not the upper management. It seems stupid to me to kill yourself for an entity that does not care about you, we are just interchangeable widgets on a spreadsheet. If you think working hard is going to protect you from layoffs at a company of any size, I got a bridge to sell you.

      > You can haul people into your office and give them a serious talking-to right there on the spot

      You can just start a 1:1 chat at any time?

      > If there's an emergency you can pull a working group into a conference room right now and get things straightened out.

      We do these online all the time as we're geographically distributed.

      > Contractors are particularly prone to this, they have no skin in the game anyways.

      Right. So why do you need so many contractors? It's the company trying to keep costs down. FTE don't like to engage with contractors, contractors just want their paychecks for minimal work. It's a business failing to be employing a bunch of contractors; they're trying to save money but it causes more problems than solves. At least in IT with any non-monkey job.

      • There are plenty of non-IT jobs out there where people work remotely, or want to, and it is not so easy to measure their work output. As for "Only doing the work assigned", if you've finished your assignment unexpectedly I'll want to give you another one. If I see you glued to your phone or cruising around the office wasting time I'll know to do that. I can't see this when you are at home.

        A lot of jobs are zero fun. That's why they call it work. Boring, repetitive, stressful, whatever. Someday the AI will h

        • I keep hearing that most people hate their jobs but I really don't know anyone for whom this is the case.

          Where are they all? My So works in customer support for a company selling things like cupboard hinges and mechanical drawer thingamajigs. It's nothing glamorous but she knows the product line by heart, can tell the kitchen builder what they need and resolve bizarre shipping issues in a matter of seconds. She's OK with her job. I think many people are?

          • I didn't say a lot of people hate their jobs. I do think a lot of people are doing "Boring, repetitive, stressful, whatever" jobs and will just do the minimum they can get by with. And I have seen plenty of people with jobs that could be interesting but still they are lazy. May be easier to supervise successfully if they spend time at the office.

      • Someone who slacks off at home is going to do the same in the office, you just get the 'feelies' that they are working harder because of a warm body mentality.

        Sure, but they'll slack of less in the office.

        Either get better employees

        And why don't you cut taxes while balancing the budget while you're at it?

        or give them more tasks and track their workloads. Usually if employees have the skills required but aren't doing the work, there's a motivation issue that points at lack of empowerment, bad management, bad culture, lack of clarity in role.. something that making them demotivated

        That something might be working at home without the structure of an office environment.

        "Only doing the work assigned" literally means they are doing their job.

        No it means they're doing the minimal amount of work they can get away with.

        In general, your job isn't to do a series of tasks, it's to use your abilities to help the company. Your task list is just your manager's best idea on how you can help the company.

        If you're finishing the tasks and no more (in gen

        • > In general, your job isn't to do a series of tasks, it's to use your abilities to help the company

          When I was a salaried employee (which I haven't been for a long time as I've worked for myself for years) my job was to perform the tasks I was allocated to the best of my abilities. No more. No less.

          Companies, especially ones run by America MBAs, show no loyalty to employees so don't deserve anything else. I've worked for enough awful companies to have learned never to offer them extra. It's never app

    • People who want to goof off will goof off. At the office or at home. The sensible thing is to fire them if you know they're just slacking.

      I can't talk about anyone else, but I do know that talking sense into someone isn't dependent on being in the same room with them. It's a matter of presence, not whether you're present. If they don't take you serious in a remote setting, they don't take you serious in a personal one either.

      Monitoring the performance of a person works the same whether online or on site. Yo

      • Good points and I agree with you, but the typical manager is not as cerebral or thoughtful as it sounds like you are. They just want the work to get done with a minimum of hassle on their part so THEY don't get fired. Having people at the office frequently makes this easier.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Those people exist. But there is the thing: You cannot get them to positive productivity no matter what. That is just a myth. At the office, they will just waste time of others and make enough mistakes so that overall they have negative productivity. At least in a home-office, they do less damage, so even their productivity is actually higher even if it may still be below zero.

      • I've worked in places where at least half the employees were slackers. It is very commonplace human nature in my experience. They could get work done, but would do it only if they had to. And the 'having to' was supplied by the manager.

        At times I have had to perform that role. I can see how it would be easier if they were in the office at least a few days per week.

  • Office v Home productivity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GreatDrok ( 684119 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @01:49PM (#63744698) Journal

    Before COVID, my workplace was in the process of moving offices to open plan and hot desking. It was disastrous for productivity, arriving and having to find a desk and get set up, often in a location that was different each day with all the associated noise of an office, but different and distracting each day. I struggled to get more than a couple of hours of productive work done with the noise, the disturbance, the general lack of feeling like I was in MY workspace.

    Then COVID hit and we were ordered to work from home, the company funded our home office setup and I settled into a comfortable space with a door and no disturbances and with everything where I needed it. Productivity went way up and we got a nice schedule of Teams meetings, a morning coffee with my colleagues and so on. Highly available, quick to turn around work and not spending three hours a day in a damn car. We havenâ(TM)t been called back but Iâ(TM)ve been quick to point out that I would be much less productive if forced to and would immediately start looking for another job.

    Working from home in a properly set up office is the ideal. We should be pushing to get everyone who can work from home to do so permanently, we have the technology to make it work and it would take a huge amount of pressure off the roads and reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically.

    • This sure isn't wrong but while this also exposes potential problems with employees work behavior the same can be said for managers who also cannot adapt. Many in these cases seem to use in office hovering as a crutch for proper project management, deadline, task assignments and follow up. Both stereotypes exist, the coasting minimum employee and the feckless middle manager who is worried about their actuall uselessness being exposed.

      If a manager has 35 hours of work actionable that needs to be done by

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      You know, I begin to suspect many of the "back to the office" management campaigners actually want the broken, low-productivity model they used before back. At the very least something very non-rational seems to be going on.

      For the regular workers that want back to the office it is clear to me that these are the ones that cannot-do, those that coast along, those that claim work by others as their own and those that like "working" in teams because then they han hide their non-performance.

      • There are a few things at work here, yes there are managers who are vexed by empty desks because their empire has disappeared. There are also property owners who invested heavily in office space who are looking huge losses as a result.

        For companies that react properly though, there are greatly reduced costs for office space and parking, plus less time lost to sickness because staff aren't mixing and spreading germs, happier workers with more free time and lower costs due to not paying to commute and just ov

    • It's a shame you can't mod this up to +10 informative !

  • The other 3 days ... (Score:3)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @01:57PM (#63744716)

    ... they'll have to use MS Teams. :-)

    [But, not sure whom I'd be punishing here...]

  • Environmental supervillainry (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh@@@gmail...com> on Sunday August 06, 2023 @02:27PM (#63744798) Journal

    In the pre-pandemic days, when some people would try to blame corporations entirely for fossil CO2 release and say that consumer choice has no effect, I would point out that corporations aren't burning fossil fuels in volcano lairs for fun while cackling like supervillains, they're burning fossil fuels on their customers' behalf in the process of providing things that customers pay for as allowed by the environmental regulations we vote for.

    But that's not exactly true anymore. Forcing employees to commute after it's been proven through practical experiment that commuting isn't necessary (and in many cases counterproductive) is coming pretty damn close to burning fossil fuels in a volcano lair for fun.

    • besides heating, cooling, water use and lighting a place for five or more days a week. We just proved most companies either don't need office buildings or just need 1/10 the space for meeting rooms when facetime is good for business.

    • "In the pre-pandemic days, when some people would try to blame corporations entirely for fossil CO2 release and say that consumer choice has no effect,"

      It has very little because consumers choose from the options presented to them by corporations.

  • Feds are doing it too [axios.com], by order of the president itself. All their reasons are loopy and unmoored as well. Buttigieg's stood out as extra sycophantic to me.

    I'd like to know more about who is exactly asking for this? I mean, who is gaining? Pete? Joe? Zoom's C level and board? What do you think that all these guys and gals have in common? I'm going to go out on a limb and say REITs. Possibly of the commercial/office kind. But not Warehouses and light industrial which so far still require people.

  • They literally proved businesses can work just fine for weeks/months/years without people being in an office.

    • Most likely they are stuck with either owned property or long-term leases. Zoom being publicly traded almost forces managements hand in this matter I suspect. They'd much rather lose people forcing workers back into the office than have to take the hit on that empty property.

  • Some companies will pay more to have employees come to the office, others will allow work from home, yet others will switch mostly to work from overseas to reduce costs further. A lot of the types of work that can be done remotely probably have multi-year time delays before they impact the bottom line, but they will eventually. Some companies will succeed, some will fail.

    No dog in this fight personally, my work requires that I touch hardware so I can't work from home. I am very curious what the result

  • Management, in general (Score:3)

    by tiqui ( 1024021 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @04:05PM (#63745048)

    Lazy, incompetent, or bad employees NEED in-person management. If left to their own devices and unobserved they will too-often spend their time on things other than what their employers need while still demanding a full paycheck and benefits. The solution is either direct in-person management, or better HR policies that prevent them being hired in the first place, but sadly with a worker shortage there is sometimes no choice but to plug a slacker into a position.

    Incompetent or insecure managers NEED in-person management. Some managers simply cannot figure out how to deploy the management skills they were taught in an environment their instructors never considered, and some fear that if they are not seen MANAGING, then upper-management might see THEM as expendable (and given that upper-management is often as bad as the manager, this is not unfounded).

    As long as these two things are true, the utopian future of everybody who has a desk job working remotely that so many dream of is simply not going to happen. Oh, and good luck getting workers whose jobs cannot be done from home to sympathize...so achieving the goal through politics is unlikely.

  • I have been paying for zoom to conference with clients for a long time now. Remote work is the only work I care about. If they are treating their workers this way, they should not be making money. It is easy enough to connect again after 45 mins if you absolutely need to use zoom instead of moving to another platform. I think I am gonna stop paying them over this - and make it clear to them exactly why, I recommend everyone else does too.

  • If you work a position that is practically unskilled and replaceable like a producer or any kind of middle management, you're stuck with doing what the company tells you to do.

  • How do the janitors get the tar out of the carpets that the executive dinosaurs track in?

  • Training and Mentorship... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheEyes ( 1686556 ) on Monday August 07, 2023 @04:19AM (#63746254)

    ...are the big reasons to need people in the office, and why many offices are likely to find a happy medium of 1-2 days in the office as the sweet spot between productivity and continuity of business. It's been my experience that experienced workers who know their job can work from home, with no issue, but, speaking as someone whose office had to double in size during the pandemic, and then double again in the past year now that we've transitioned to hybrid work, it is so, so much easier to help situate new people when they can ask for help in person, or you can just drop in to show them how something works, especially when the thing you are showing them is the productivity tools themselves. Yes, my home days are definitely more productive, personally, but when I compare how quickly this year's batch of recruits were able to get up to speed on their duties compared to the people we hired in 2020 there's just no comparison.

    Pretty sure that there are studies that back me up on this, too. Wasn't there a study a few months back showing that newer programmers write more / better code when they have office days, while experienced ones write more / better code when working from home?

  • No. Many companies that are trying to stop WFH risk becoming so.

    Why is so much time and effort put into trying to stop WFH? It has been found to be more efficient, cheaper and better all round. So why is so much time and effort being used to try keeping a less profitable system?

    I have heard several reasons. Shareholders of companies trying to stop or limit employees working from home should look into these.

    1. Poor quality middle and upper management.
    2. "We just spent $X million on this new set of offices and w

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