Microsoft Teams Starts Telling Your Company If You’re Not At Work
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.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/10/22/microsoft-teams-starts-telling-your-company-if-youre-not-at-work/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works538
Comments127
Glad I work at a place that wouldn't give a fuck as long as I'm getting shit done. This sort of bullshit undermines how people feel about work and likely harms productivity more than it helps (as is tradition with micromanaging people instead of setting them up for success and giving them the space they need to do their job).
Also, people who actually are slacking will find so many ways around this anyhow that it won't actually matter to them because they already don't care and are probably smart enough to get around it.
In a lot of ways, I have the opposite of micromanagement, they really don't care what the hell I am doing as long as I'm delivering my projects effectively.
Sounds like you work at a place that trusts you to do the job you were hired to do.
My take is: If they don't trust me, wtf am I even doing at a such a fucked up place? Then find a better place to work.
The sad thing is that some orgs that start off with healthy environments can slowly erode into really toxic environments and it's like a frog boiling in water.
Sometimes it can happen very quickly - all it takes is one person of enough prominence being replaced with another, and something that took years to cultivate is shredded in weeks/months.
Unfortunately, I've seen both of these happen up close and personal. Sometimes it's not always a viable option to try to pick up and move to another job...
Companies also get bought out by other companies and then change drastically overnight.
Yes, without question. That's usually a fast-track to a highly toxic place, because often the people that they have acquired are viewed as just somehow being there accidentally, or worse, illegitimately, because the new management had no role in finding them, hiring them, and working to create/preserve a culture with them.
Also, many weak managers just want loyalists and that kind of personality just worries that they didn't get to vet people so the people they have bought won't be sufficiently loyal...
In my current job, I don't mind doing a little overtime or working a weekend every now and than. They don't care what I do, as long as it gets done. They don't care that I go to the gym during office hours. I'm happy and I'm passionate about my work.
But if they started doing shit like this. I'd be working 9 to 5 and not giving a shit if work gets done or not. I'd become a drone and I'd be looking for other employment.
Fancy that? Don't you love it when your work treat you like...wait for it... an Adult. Rewarded accordingly, help accountable accordingly. Who'd 've thought! 🤔
Jokes on them! My company made everyone remote during COVID. It worked so well that they sold the corporate office buildings. We are all remote permanently! As long as I work my scheduled hours, they don't care where in the world I am.
We JUST did this. I work in commercial real estate and we talked about it in 2018 but management chickened out. After the Pandemic, they forced us to go back for a year but moral fell to the lowest point ever and we couldn’t hire anyone.
Finally, it was time to decide on renewing our lease again and we switched back to remote. It’s been awesome and we’ve hired tons of people from our competitors who are pushing in office mandates.
I hope everyone keeps pushing their office to change. It’s possible.
Lucky bastard
This is definitely a step in the right direction, but why stop there? They should be paying you for getting work done to some agreed-upon standard, regardless of whether that takes 40 hours a week or far less.
Can I work at your workplace? Do they need an IT guy?
Are people just not going into the office without telling anyone? Like, who is this actually affecting?
Also, if they have to VPN into their company network, like assume many do, won't that register as being in the office anyway?
I'd view it as more of the opposite: a tool built into the Teams suite to tattle on who isn't complying with Return to Office policies.
VPNs would depend a bit on configuration. I know my ubiqiti router will let me dump VPN traffic into its own vlan (with dedicated IP range), so it would absolutely be possible to tell it apart from local traffic. At the same time, I'm pretty sure my workplace has all site network traffic VPN'd to the home office, so I'm not if the same logic would apply...
Oh, my employer already can and does track compliance via badge-ins, so they definitely know when they're getting a return on investment from the corporate real estate.
I hadn't thought about the connecting IP address though, that would absolutely be logged.
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?
I think there are two things. There's definitely a level of brainwashing where mediocre MBAs who have built a career on "failing upwards" project their own lack of scruples onto their workforce i.e. "if I worked from home I'd just play golf all day so I assume this is true for everyone". They genuinely don't understand management models beyond micromanagement because they have no frame of reference for "self-motivated" or "autonomous".
Then the other factor is that many of the c-level execs at these companies or their bosses (the board) have commercial real estate portfolios. Propping up the value of those units is contingent on companies renting office space. The bosses know which side their bread is buttered and even if they don't have skin in the game directly will happily do favours for 'friends' who they want to impress to help them climb that next rung of the ladder.
Bssids give away your location.
This does worry me a bit. We have an RTO policy. I report to a satellite office far away from corporate HQ which i transferred to after COVID, where I literally work with nobody in this actual building.
We are supposed to go in 2 days a week. I haven't come to the office in over a year. And the only guy I knew in this office retired recently. I will be surprised if my desk hasn't been cannibalized.
I guess I'm in a bit of a bind now. Lol! Shit. I don't like this article.
Hold on. Let me say this.
If your boss cares more about where you are doing your work, than if your work is getting completed, you need a new boss.
I work in IT support and I'll say that this isn't really anything that couldn't be done before, is just more visible. Office 365 logs what device and app you're using to connect, the IP address of the requester, what you were requesting from which service... The list is long. It's a massive amount of data that largely, nobody cares about.
The only time I even look at that information is when some security software flags some action as suspicious, then, and only then, do I even bother.
If you go on vacation and suddenly connect from Florida when you are normally connecting from the UK, I get a notification. If you suddenly start using a well known VPN, I get a notification. The logic is for security. If you suddenly log in from a new place, then it's more likely that the login in question wasn't you, and you've been hijacked. That's literally my only interest in your location. Most bosses don't give a shit either.
I can't find a new job. I literally hate my current one. My entire management team is full of micromanaging dipshits.
I keep applying for jobs and nothing happens.
I'm not saying it would be easy to find a new job, just that if you're in that situation, you need one.
Lmao any corporate IT department can do this at any time anyways
Well, the IT stuff made a log of it, but I think teams is promising to actually rat on you. Like, if it detects it, it'll send a notice to the boss that you're being remote
It updates your location status to "in the office"
It also changes to "away" if you don't move the mouse for long enough.
Anyone looking to these as workers not doing their job, is looking in the wrong place.
I hope Teams announces when my CEO and other executives are not in the office. Just to level the field.
Hah, it will almost certainly have admin options that allow high level people to turn off that feature.
It'd be easier to list when they are
Teams is already such a bloated fucking mess of an application.
I've gone back and forth with my opinion on Teams, but now I agree with you. Earlier there was a lot of shit talk about it, and it just worked for me with no problems. After all of the additional bloat (now we have Copilot in it) it crashes all the time.
It never crashes for me - because I have to use the browser PWA app, because the native app doesn't work on Linux that great.
On the other hand, the UX is absolutely terrible.
The native app for Linux is no longer supported anyway. PWA is the only official way now.
And yes the UX is terrible. Especially the search function, it always finds unrelated things and almost never what I'm looking for. Same thing with Outlook (the real outlook and the 'new' one), OneNote and Sharepoint.
It is my #1 and pretty much only usecase for copilot. I think copilot for office is not great but searching for my stuff it does do very well. Paying $30 a month to fix something that should have worked in the first place is a bit mad though.
You might just not be noticing the crashes because it likes to restart silently. I'll only notice it because sometimes it happens when teams is active on my other monitor and it auddenly disappears. Might be auto update, or maybe even a "we know this app gets worse over time so let's just restart it regularly as a solution".
Yeah people hated it for being Microsoft for such a long time that by the time it actually sucked people had been crying wolf for so long it was hard to believe.
To me it has always sucked compared to something like Slack. It has really low information density for example with its huge bubbles around everything. Multi-tenant switching was a really slow and painful process unlike slack which simply has a sidebar for quick switching, and it creates a huge garbage dump in sharepoint when people upload stuff to a chat.
I can't disagree about multi-tenant, I just used Firefox containers for that because it was only for working with vendors so it wasn't always on. I think they fixed that in 2022 give or take. The file thing is common with slack, there's still a garbage dump of files.
I think the information density is a matter of taste. Given the popularity of google products, macos, and gnome and that sort of thing, its safe to say there is a huge market for people who prefer giant whitespace to actual content.
Well i guess i am lucky because my laptop remains on site and i connect to vdi and then rdp to my laptop. (When working from home) so the data will be meaningless. At least in my case.
That particular data is meaningless in all cases
Apparently some people pretend to be at the office when they've actually stayed at home
I am glad I work where nobody monitors teams because that would be stupid.
But exactly how will this work for the people who are actually using modern computing? So I am on Azure Virtual Desktop for one instance of teams, and another that I use for calls on a personal laptop, maybe on their wifi but always with a VPN because we habitually run vpns.
So where am I?
List of locations it compiles for you, based on a heuristic analysis of data, time of day, and cross-referenced by your consumer data would do it pretty nicely
As always it's the worst product that got the most marketing that gets used by everyone.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Apparently it's dirt cheap as compared to alternatives
I think it's more the case it gets bundled in for free (or near enough) with other MS crap like Office.
Meanwhile, they cannot or will not add useful features like....being able to have more than one fucking person share a screen. This is after YEARS of lockdown.
And don't get me started on how basic their chat "feature" is. I mean....have they even bothered to look at Slack at all? And it's not like Slack is the only one they might look at...how about Matrix/Riot?
Nope, it's almost like they just know millions of users are stuck with their craptastic solution because it's bundled into the rest of their stack and enterprises are going with it no matter how much it sucks balls.
Maybe I’m dating myself, but it still seems incredible to me that a relatively small update to the location features in one piece of software triggers news articles about the broader societal implications.
Software has too much power over our lives.
And it's a terrible piece of software at that.
Maybe, but M$ has had quite an impact over office life for quite some time, and it seems like nearly every org is still paying the M$ tax, even after all these years. Teams is part of that stack, and while I don't know anyone tech-savvy that actually likes it for anything it supposedly solves, it gets used anyway. It is terrible as an IM client. Only one user at a time can share a screen, so it's terrible at any real collab, also. But it integrates with Outlook for scheduling meetings, so....
In addition, it seems like it is almost intentionally user-hostile when it comes to setting up prefs, like disabling incoming video as a default. This is a feature I've seen asked for over 5 years ago. When everyone was stuck at home and sometimes on rather slow/unreliable networks, Microsoft makes you disable incoming video on every single new Teams session, from all the geniuses that felt they were important enough to have their camera on all the time for no real reason.
Now you'd think they would have adapted to something like this, and turned this around very quickly at the beginning of Covid, as not only was it requested from users, but it would make a lot of sense (and maybe it lightens their servers load, too? Although I imagine video feeds don't get streamed through their servers?) and probably be a decent workaround to having audio properly work on slow/bursty network connections, etc.
And yet....I still don't see the feature as an option. I think I saw an answer about some setting that could be done globally or in a policy, as if that is really the answer. Again, it seems like it is software aimed at being sold to control freaks who also care nothing about the user experience of their captured user base. So, 5 years later, I get to disable incoming video on each call if some inconsiderate person has their video on.
Microsoft's products are no longer usable.
Not safe, not sensible, not smart.
Teams is trash, electron is a miscarriage of an idea, and M$ is totally morally bankrupt.
Shocker.
Electron is amazing, for smaller teams, individuals or whatever BUT a trillion dollar company cutting corners on native apps, even for their own platform... come on
Here I am working remote in my basement like a dumb motherfucker when I could have been anywhere else
This is me everyday. I should get out more.
Another feature no one asked for.
Oh, this was asked for, I assure you.
Not by workers, but it was asked for.
No. I’m sure managers asked for this…
You, the worker, are not Microsoft’s customer. You and your data are the product.
If you are not the customer, you are the product!
In general, that type of multiple job work is both jobs being work from home. I don't think anyone home officing a desk job is going to do minimum wage work on the side.
It would fuck over people who are straw employees where someone else is doing the work but that’s kind of the opposite scenario. There was a story recently about a lot of San Francisco tech startups all hiring the same programmer thinking he was exclusive to them (stock options involved?). Apparently the work was getting done, but didn’t meet their expectations of the type of employee they were hiring.
It gets strange when you are using their cloud services though. You don't really need a VPN to use teams web interface, it should be secure by default. Will Linux leak my location when using teams? I don't know.
Or if I am using virtual desktops in azure, often with a secondary hop to a remote desktop somewhere that is running teams. At this point what are we logging and what location am I really at?
As a side note: all of this effort by microsoft is annoying. Bring your own device is so freeing and cost saving, but it makes the situation I described above.
I work on windows all day, but I don't personally have any. And I like it that way.
I actually wouldn't mind this at all. Where I work, we have an office but most people are only in one or two days a week. I try to keep to a schedule, but some weeks I have to move my office days around. When my schedule changes, I update my Teams location so people know where I am, but I wouldn't mind opting in to do it automatically.
But then again, my boss doesn't really care where I do my work, as long as it gets done. Not everyone has the luxury of a boss who isn't an asshat. If you are working in a place where you have to hide your work-from-home time, you should be looking for a new job.
Yeah I work at MSFT on a completely different team.
Teams recently asked if I wanted this and I was like.... "sure!"
Now when I'm in the office and people check my status it tells people my desk location and when I'm WFH or elsewhere it tells people I'm not in the building. I don't get people asking "hey are you in today?"
A lot of people in this thread are taking the headline literally like it's "are you online or away?". No. This is more of "are you at your desk in the office or working from a different building or from outside the facilities.
Well. I’m remote. So they know I’m not at work.
Don't be surprised when IT tries to move into your house thinking it is an office building
To be fair, Microsoft never had "Don't be evil" as their motto.
Bill Gates was an asshole from the start. Happy to use freely available stuff from the early computing community as well as using his school's resources to build either DOS or BASIC and then acting like he had built it all with his own resources when ranting about free software. To be clear, I don't gaf about using free resources to build something and make money from it, but his hypocrisy and anti-competitive BS makes that aspect worse with him.
So it was always shit, it was just that once upon a time, they actually had to make good software that ran on very limited hardware in addition to their anti-competitive BS, and then had a period where they kept trying to make good software but didn't realize yet that they didn't need to (like windows ME was pretty much universally panned, but it didn't drive people away from windows in general).
I think it was win 10 that I first felt like I was in conflict with my OS. Like in win 7, I'd spend time looking at each update's kdb entry to decide if I wanted it (and skipped the nagware ones about win 10 entirely, for example). In win 10, I had to jump through hoops just to be able to control when it applied updates on my own timeline, not MS'. Win 10 was the worst for resetting settings, like I get it set up like I prefer it to be, then a few updates later I'd have to do some of them again. Though tbf, I don't recall that happening in the last few years, but other worse enshitification has settled in since then and now windows never even touched my current main machine.
So people will know in which company building you're in? Who gives a shit lol
The problem is they'll know when your not in a company building. So people can't WFH even though their boss isn't watching them at the office anyway.
That sounds like an issue with the the arrangement between the employee and employer to me.
Yeah, but not everyone has the flexibility to just hop to a different job the second their current one becomes unsatisfactory. Some people have to make do with what they've got.
It sounds like you are defending taking an in person job with the intent to deceive your employer by working at home. Because I still fail to see a circumstance where it would be a problem unless the employee is trying to be deceitful to work from someplace unauthorized.
If there's no reason for them to need to be in the office other than that their middle managers don't know how to do their job remotely then you're damn right I'm defending it. If you need a teams notification to know your reports aren't working from the office then it means they've been getting their work done from home and there's no reason they need to be there. Many places went WFH during Covid and are now dragging their workers back to the office needlessly. Stop bootlicking for corpos.
If you're outright refusing company rules like that then yeah you sorta run the risk of justifiable sacked lol
It's not refusing so much as taking advantage of a grey area. The work is still getting done.
It's not very grey if they've been told to get into the office and they aren't doing that
It's grey if their boss can't tell if they're there or not without a Teams notification. Stupid rules are meant to be ignored.
So it's grey the same way speed limits are? I dunno man, it seems pretty clear cut to me
Well speeding can arguably make driving more dangerous so not really the same thing. No one is being hurt by people doing the job they can easily do from home, from home. If anything danger is reduced because they're spending less time on the roads. Stop bootlicking.
The company your work for is Microsoft's biggest client - not you.. Not even you if you use Windows on your own home computer. Use Linux at home, use Linux at work if you can.
Teams/outlook has been doing this for a while. This is likely more for making it easier to see who is in the office to coordinate in person stuff like meetings and lunch.
If you want to be creeped out by Teams and other similar services, it can
And somehow their implementation of e911 will still not work.
Sounds useful? Weird to imply the purpose of this is to expose people not in the office. The people who care about that already know.
I think you nearly overestimate the skills and infrastructure at a company. Sure someone already knows, but a built in teams feature that dumbs it down enough for Carol to trivially see something new to bitch about is never a good thing.
Why is carol bitching about what she can see on teams that she can't see looking around the office already?
From your question can i assume you've only been part of a group that works within a single room/building/city/country?
Seems like a lot of the incredulous 'why would anyone care about x' type responses to these kinds of things are from people who just don't happen to personally be in the situation that they apply to, or even realize people could possibly experience something different than they do themselves.
I'm part of a distributed team which already makes this information available to everyone. It means when you go to message someone and it says they're in the same office as you that you can just go and talk to them.
Then why was your question suggesting Carol isn't getting any information she can't get by looking around the office? You literally work in a group that your rhetorical question doesn't even work in? It's almost like you were being intentionally obtuse?
If that's your remaining objection then sure.
When I make that comment I was thinking of a single office.
Maybe that's office wouldn't even use teams, or maybe Carol in that office wouldn't be helped.
hahaha I love how ass hat CxOs VPxs still believe that people at a desk in an office means work gets done.... lol. I see people at their desks still achieving diddly squat.
It's more about control than it is about productivity. Has been for a long time.
I mostly work from home ever since Covid. But I live reasonably close to the office and go in every once in a while. Usually it's for something like "team building" or meeting some people deemed "VIPs" (lol) or whatever the fuck. It's not always voluntary.
I have to mentally steel myself for getting very little done on days when I'm in the office. And nearly everyone else I work with does the same thing. It actually adds to the stress because that work load doesn't get any lighter for not being able to get to it.
The reason for all the lack of work? Well, there are longer in-person lunches. There are all the impromptu "pop-ins", the hallway chats, the talk while waiting for some coffee, the extra meetings on the schedule because "in person", etc...all that adds up to very little planned work getting moved forward. You might say there are the benefits of catching up and the occasional serendipity from a random snatch of conversation you eavesdropped on, etc.
While doing this a few times a year might have some benefits (but hard to quantify), I'm quite sure it's not worth doing every day, so I don't. Thankfully I have the option.
CxOs and VPxs have more money that they know what to do with. It isn't about getting work done, it's about making you miserable.
And this is useful to me how? A fucking retard HR person who wants you sick at work making everyone else sick too is probably who came up with this genius idea.
No, I want my design completed and my team happy. LOL today someone complained about having no excel in a machine that people normally don't use. I suggested to install libre office and no one complained. In the past I had suggested libre office or open office for various reasons and I would get looked at funny or laughed at or otherwise ignored. Now thanks to Microsoft and the power of AI, libre office is a contender!
Yeah, I had ms office up until June. With all of their trash, I'm finally leaving excel.
I don't get it. Why would it matter that Teams knows where you are working? If you need to hide from your coworkers or your boss then maybe it's time to change company?
On the other hand: if Teams is using Wifi to correlate your position you could mess with it by exchanging the access point positions, ie exchange your bosses AP with the one in the cellar.
I can see one legitimate application for this, specifically for accountability during an emergency. It's one more thing to tell whomever is checking where to look for people and only if it's actually reliable. I doubt that it would be reliable enough.
Yes, I wouldn't go so far and trust MS applications in emergency cases :D
You not working?
AWS down
Oh ok, don't worry
Then I guess I'll always be not at work
Teams once again continuing to undermine it's own existence by using even more stupid tricks to force people into the office.
If you want me in the office then don't force me to use tools that would allow me to do my job from anywhere.
Good luck with that. I work from home, use the unofficial Linux client for Teams and my status is always offline. 😆
I despise this software so much. The boss seems to be at least a bit open to ditching it, but I haven't fully convinced him yet. 🥹
I'm sure if you really wanted to, you could still somehow spoof your location.
My boss knows I work from home. Get wrecked Teams
Jokes on you Teams, my boss doesn't care
I’ll be interested to see how this works: my “office” is on my home network. We use ZTNA for most internal services. My company already knows where I’m at when I’m using internal services; I guess with this new feature they’ll know if I’m on guest wifi somewhere instead of at home?
Labor should organize and tell management if they don't get their heads out of their asses they might lose them.
Wait who was getting away with working from home when their boss thinks they're in the office anyway? Is that a thing in big companies??
My entire agency is like 10 people so we all work in the same room (it is hell, the marketing trio are the most annoying fuckers on earth) so they'd definitely know if I was WFH so this makes no difference to me.
So... no change?
What if you change your SSID to match your work's WiFi?
Good.
Anyone who gets in bed with a company that uses these products deserves all the shit coming their way.
Until all companies start doing this.
Good thing we don't need to rely on software companies for video chat.
Mac / iPhone have location services since find my mac / iphone and sends location of your device to apple and nobody gives a fuck, android sees and sends your every action, so is facebook that trains on your voice and photos, but no windows in workplace is your real enemy !
To begin with, all of the things you listed are bad and we complain about them just as much. It's never a good argument when people complain about some bad thing and your reasoning is "but what about this other bad thing?".
Secondly, this particular update is not about general location tracking, which Microsoft already does quite a lot of, but also being a narc and telling your boss about it, which adds a whole new layer of reasons to complain.
And to finish off... Yes, Windows in the workplace is your enemy. So is Windows at home. Or in an ATM, supermarket cashier, airport totem, or any other computing device.
they things I listed doesn't involve earning money so that's the difference
It's that any boss would presumably have easy and direct access to the information without having to ask IT. It turns what should be diagnostic/device security information into disciplinarily actionable.
you can change work and don't give a fuck about teams, you can't change the things I listed, see the difference ?
"You can change work" has similar, though not as bad, of vibes as "just move to a different state" these days. My resume isn't good enough for decent appropriate work but also makes me look riskily overqualified for lesser jobs.