Yes, corona virus apparently impacted the company’s decision to make the call voice-only. Perhaps they’ve experienced bandwidth issues and assumed it was this reason.

Not that I’m complaining ... it’s Part 2 (or 3, or 4?) of a job interview, where the hiring manager is about ready to extend to me an offer (according to the recruiter) but for the usual “let’s let a few others on the team help make sure he’s not a freak,” first.

Companies are having major bandwidth and VPN issues. Most were unprepared for having a large percentage of staff working remotely. Once this settles down, my guess is that business continuity consultants will have a field day.

The biggie is that the VPN and VOIP and Video conferencing providers are being overwhelmed. At a corporate level the only thing you can do is demand service levels. And I expect any service level contracts are being discussed as a Force Majeure situation .... this crisis is an 'act of a grouchy god'. So any well written contracts leave the providers an out.

In my company I'm just taking direct calls and remote controlling users computers. So far our in house VPN solution is hanging in there.

Our VPN is not able to handle the numbers of people who will be teleworking. We've been told that we will be going to mass teleworking starting Friday (or earlier if it is warranted). Some estimates that management has floated is that we could be out for 12 weeks. We've been told to work offline as much as possible, only hooking to the VPN to download email a couple of times a day, and if we need to hit the SharePoint to download stuff. They will also be instituting time limits on the VPN to assure nobody is logging into it and staying on.

good luck on the job front

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Hurts like a bastid...

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mrbigstuff
good luck on the job front

This. Hope you get a good and fair offer.

Thanks.

My impression is that they do a lot of GoToMeeting / Zoom type of calls, but maybe there’s a VPN component I’m unaware of.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting.