‘Don’t Mess With Us’: WebMD Parent Company Demands Return to Office in Bizarre Video::“I’ve seen better acting by hostages in direct to DVD movies,” one anonymous worker wrote about the video.
“Don’t fuck with us, or we’ll rip your nuts off!”
All of their tech job openings are in India or Vietnam. I’d have assumed a major US health data handler would be developing onshore!
Have a read/watch of this other asshole CEO going on an unhinged rant about return to office earlier last year.
"Internet Brands did not respond to a request for comment, except to say that people were busy with meetings. "
Well there’s your problem… Probably having meetings about how they need more meetings.
Bullshit to the "We are more productive when together " line.
No, they are not. Commutes eat into productivity big time. It would take my wife sometimes 2+ hours to get into work in Boston. Now, she puts the kids onto the bus and logs in. Last year, they even said they were the most productive they’ve been in the companies history (200 plus years, mind you).
Now it’s “We need to be in person to be more productive” bullshit. These assholes sunk too much money into corporate real estate.
They run a semi-reputable health website which people use for mostly static information that rarely changes. How many new ideas do they really need?
How does creating a web page take so many people?
Web MD. The website. The website designed to make visitors feel a false sense of expertise about their health so that they don’t leave home to see a doctor about illness, is threatening their workers to leave their homes, to unnecessarily return to work, during a wave of life threatening and easily transmitable illness, that they will have to being home.
I remember WebMD was one of the most chaotic places I worked at. It was 2000-2001 and there was a president Marv Rich and a CEO Marty Wygod. They were both building duplicate ERP systems that basically did the same thing. One day, my boss Al was in a meeting, and they told him that he needed us to move the data center to the East Coast. The most valuable part was a bunch of big EMC Symmetrix arrays with all their data. He was freaking out because he got into an argument about loading all of them into one airplane, and he didn’t want to do it. He was telling them that if the airplane goes down, all of WebMD would be gone, and it needed to be loaded onto two airplanes. I don’t know why, but for some reason, that story always reminded me of my time at WebMD.
Marty Wygod
Or, as they called him down the pub, Wygod Y.
Nah, pretty sure they just called him Wangrod
The one time I moved a data center, we did it in two trucks for this very reason. Of course, it wouldn’t have been the whole organization lost, we had more than one data center. But yeah - the two planes part of this story makes complete sense to me.
Yeah, I feel like the part about developing two different systems to apparently do the same thing, was much stupider.
My wife is a business analyst and software tester (not for WebMD) and still gets awards and bonuses for excellence, even while she’s worked at home during Covid.
This guy needs to explain to me why she should be forced back into the office to improve her performance.
Is there a web site out there that can help me determine what kind of cancer that video gave me?
I hear WebMD is good for that…
Cringe
I’m honestly more stunned that this is an internet company. They didn’t think this was a bad idea to post to Vimeo?
This has real Dunder Mifflin Local Ad vibes.
They were probably concerned that all their employees seem to be getting cancer.
Fucking UNIONIZE.
Just did. Won our vote Wednesday night 💪
Oh, that is righteous. Congratulations!
