At $org, we too are undertaking a mandatory RTO order, enforced with door access logs.
People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller locales, where the offices we have are perfunctory at best.
The rationale is the usual one: collaboration, watercooler chat, unspecific evidence / "research" about productivity (that we are told definitely exists, but is yet to be shared).
I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO... C suites are committed to spending as much as possible on real estate and geographically limiting their talent pool. Whilst making workers more tired and less productive.
I still have no idea where it comes from. My best guess is that nobody at that level wants to break ranks with the "collective wisdom" of "investors", which creates a kind of groupthink.
(An RTO mandate is also an excellent thing for a CEO to show investors they are doing, if they are not making money and lack better ideas.)
RTO mandates are about many things, but actual business value of being in the office to the business doing the mandate is low on the list. Among the things it is about:
(1) Executives with emotional attachment to certain leadership styles that are enabled by physical presence,
(2) Interest in the investor class for the commercial real estate market. The business impacted may not be invested in it, but the businesses’ shareholders in sufficient numbers probably are, and so are the influential constituents of the politicians they want favors from, in a time of increasingly naked political corruption and cronyism.
(3) Backdoor layoffs. RTO is unpopular with large swathes of the work force, and people will quit because of it. That’s good for a firm likely to be cutting positions anyway; there’s no need for severance, regardles of scale there’s no WARN Act notice requirement, and if you still have to cut more positions afterwards, it makes it less likely that those cuts will hit WARN Act thresholds. And while the people that quit may not be the ones it would be your first choice to cut, they are the ones that would be most likely to quit in the kind of less-employee-friendly and financially leaner (in real terms) times likely to exist for a while after cuts.
It is hilarious that people think the second largest company on the planet, with a market cap over $5 trillion, spends even one second worry about the profit margins of commercial real estate companies, makes any decisions based on that, or is somehow cowed by their alleged political power despite being much, much, much smaller than Microsoft.
I was very clear, I thought, when I said “RTO mandates are about...”, that I was not saying “All of these factors are relevant to Microsoft”.
With Microsoft its probably mostly (3), with maybe some degree of (2), with (1) maybe, especially in the political salience, being a plus in the eyes of some decision-makers but not really driving the decision.
There are firms (and public agencies) where the relationship between those factors is very different in driving RTO mandates.
With Microsoft specifically there's also the fact that it made a massive investment into rebuilding a large chunk of its campus in the last few years (IIRC it began before COVID). They demolished some of the oldest buildings - the ones that were done back when every senior engineer was entitled to an office of their own - and replaced them with "open office" cubicle farms.
Now, I would imagine that there are quite a few in the top management who originally signed off on that expense. Probably the same people who were talking about replacing offices with cubicles since 2015, which means Satya and his inner circle. So now they've spent a lot of money, they have to do something to show to the board that it wasn't wasted. Which means filling those buildings with employees, whether they like it or not.
The City of Philadelphia sent all of its workers back to the office with an explicit statement from the Mayor about struggling commercial office real estate in the city center. They may not be "running the country" but they are definitely heavyweight players in the market.
Umm, yeah, because city executives whose “organizations” are funded by local taxes, especially commercial real estate taxes care about it.
That says nothing about why CEOs of thousands of private firms who have nothing to do with real estate firms would care about those other companies’ profits.
Cfo and shareholder do care about value of their building as these are on the balance sheet as asset and large swings can impact the metrics by which the market evaluates the companies.
I worked for a large company that did just that. They reduced the number of buildings they had to shrink costs, and get rid of employees without 'firing' them. MSFT does not strike me as a company that does not understand cost per employee. Why would you think the cost per employee does not come into the picture? I am just curious about that PoV as it is basically grilled into all MBAs and part of financial calculations of most businesses.
Because who are the profit driven CEOs (are there any other CEOs?) sell their buildings to? The value of their building affects the profit via the depreciation expense. Which is to say the more buildings you have for RTO the bigger the expense-and thus the lower the profit for the profit maximizing CEOs.
From a profit only perspective RTO makes sense only if the cities gave businesses tax breaks tied to business occupancy (the city’s math is they will get some of these taxes back when employees go and spend money in the city). And maybe cities are threatening to stop these taxes back until RTO.
In Microsoft’s case though people only spend some money at the cafeteria-because there is nothing else to spend money on their campus. How big could that tax break could be?
This RTO request from Microsoft does not make much sense.
You should also consider property taxes from where the employees live. In MS's case, plenty of the employees own or rent in the same town, or nearby. At least as a calculation/consideration of tax breaks. I can say that if it weren't for Intel, Wells Fargo and others deciding to build/employ in Chandler, AZ the town wouldn't be half that size in terms of residential population. I'm sure the same is true even for bigger cities relative to business size.
How would this be an incentive for Microsoft to require RTO though? Even if Microsoft would receive tax breaks from the city because employees own property and pay property taxes - the city would get the same amount of property taxes if employees work from home. Microsoft would receive the same tax breaks.
AFAIK Microsoft mandated RTO only for employees that live within 50 miles of an office. So far Microsoft does not require employees to move to a city - and bolster the property taxes the city collects.
I was stating that's a consideration of why a City/State offers the incentives... I can't speak to MS in this case in particular. It's far more likely a soft layoff strategy.
I'd also say, I've seen far more people just sandbag and slack off in WFH than in an actual office.
In the case of Microsoft, their main campus in a thriving suburb of the Seattle Eastside would be prime real estate even if they disappeared tomorrow. They have absolutely zero reason to worry about the value of their real estate regardless of occupancy.
Trump is probaby too senile to even know what RTO is, and even if he does, I'm pretty sure he doesn't own Microsoft's office buildings. And the premise that Microsoft would let themselves get bullied into RTO, causing a lot of their best employees to quit, without raising a public stink about it? Far fetched.
This is the doing of Microsoft's own leadership, not Trump.
It surprises me when I see people call Trump senile given how far Biden got before most people were willing to acknowledge it at all.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things you can justifiably call Trump. He just doesn't seem senile in any way similar to those in my life I've watched go down that road.
I don't think it's really senility. I'm sure you've probably read an article by a news author about a technical subject that you know very well that just gets a lot of basic details/pov wrong as a whole. I'm pretty sure it's that, but with someone who has to take in 10x the amount of information on a daily basis. Combine that with an outsized, fragile ego and you get what you get from Trump. A vague understanding of things observed/read/viewed in passing combined with everything else.
> For the silent down voters, when has Trump shown signs of senility?
For quite a while. Even compared to the already generally incoherent speaking style of his first term, his speech has been unfocussed, his grasp of facts worse, etc., during his second term. Even before that, the cognitive test he bragged about passing his first term isn't sonething that is ever indicated without symptoms of cognitive impairment, his speaking style, grasp of facts, etc., in even his first term shows significant decline from his earlier public life, heck even his extreme forward leaning stance, while it can have other source, is a symptom of certain kinds of dementia.
Aside from fairly extreme media bias issues stemming from business and political interests of media owners that became undeniable with the public active intervention of a number of media owners late in the 2024 campaign, he gets a pass for this for a number of reasons, including the fact that critics generally have a lot of bigger fish to fry, some critics see pointing to cognitive dysfunction as mitigating arguments they want to make about conscious moral evil, incoherence and looseness with facts being a noted feature of his speaking style making people less likely to note changes that are changes in degree rather than kind for him, etc.
Consider the networks of friends and acquaintances the top-level decision makers are likely to be part of. Talking about how they're divesting big corporate dollars from the real estate market probably wouldn't make them more popular at cocktail parties.
You're right that it probably doesn't apply to Microsoft, but some companies were granted tax breaks by the local city, but on the condition they brought a certain number of jobs to the city.
If I would be a commercial real estate mogul, I would invest at least hundreds of millions into covert PR campaigns in various media (including here on HN) to nudge the perception via exactly these sort of claims. And who wants to be seen as anti-business, right?
Just follow the money, it usually works very well. Sometimes, people are just dumb on their own and/or as a group but I don't think thats the case here. Tens of billions if not more in lucrative real estate is at stake.
Those investments would be a matter of public record, either directly or through real estate companies. Any investigator who found these hypothetical investments would get a lot if clicks and eyeballs so there is a hell of a lot of incentive. So where's the proof?
Microsoft owns a lot of commercial real estate. The people who manage the commercial real estate within Microsoft certainly care about the value of those investments.
I always assume a different option, though (3) is likely part of it for Microsoft right now as well.
When leadership decides their velocity is too slow for whatever reason, they look for deck chairs to move. RTO is one big deck chair they can move and many will assume it will improve performance and velocity.
The problem is that I've never seen anyone actually prove that out for RTO with solid data. And that goes both ways, I haven't seen anything to prove that remote-first is universally better for performance.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a significant impact on performance for the kind of work people on HN do. I do my work every day. When I'm done doing my work at the office, I browse HN. After I finish my work at home, I do the dishes. But I do roughly the same amount of work either way.
> When leadership decides their velocity is too slow for whatever reason, they look for deck chairs to move. RTO is one big deck chair they can move and many will assume it will improve performance and velocity.
I’d agree that “do-something-ism” is a factor, both on its own and as an accelerant for any pre-existing bias in that direction that packed an impetus or pretext without bad results.
Backdoor layoffs. It's always backdoor layoffs. If they really appreciated and needed you at the company, they would cater for your needs when you're delivering your work.
If it's layoffs aren't there a very real risk that the most talented people, who enjoy working from home will simply leave, while the less talented returns to the office because they'll have a harder time finding new jobs?
So you're doing backdoor layoffs, but you're laying off the people you'd most likely want to keep, leaving the company with the less experienced/talented people.
>If it's layoffs aren't there a very real risk that the most talented people, who enjoy working from home will simply leave, while the less talented returns to the office because they'll have a harder time finding new jobs?
The corporate structure is not created around talented people, but around mediocrity. In Dilbert land you have no use for brainiacs.
In my current environment one line bugfix takes 3-4 workdays to release. Does it matter one bit if you will do the fix in 10 or 100 minutes if it will be overshadowed by the time THE PROCESS consumes.
This assumes that companies view their employees as individuals. At a certain scale, companies inevitably start viewing their employees as "resources" that behave more like robots than human beings.
There is no way for somebody like Nadella to have an understanding of most employees' performance, and the chain of management is so long that he doesn't trust anyone else's ability to ascertain individual performance. This leads to the introduction of "objective measurements" of performance, which further undermines trust, as everyone now starts trying to manipulate the numbers.
I think at some point, it's just inevitable that C-level management takes decisions based on the assumption that people are replaceable and that the difference between a great performer and a poor performer is essentially irrelevant.
> I think at some point, it's just inevitable that C-level management takes decisions based on the assumption that people are replaceable and that the difference between a great performer and a poor performer is essentially irrelevant.
Maybe, but I find it hard to believe that someone who has spent their entire career in the tech industry actually believes this.
The "backdoor layoffs" theory seems suspect to me more generally. It's not like they're particularly averse to doing layoffs the normal way. Especially now where the signal from big tech company doing layoffs is "we're really good at AI".
A 10 day notice requiring agreement to full 5 day RTO or take a voluntary package. This from a CEO talking bout 'efficiency' and cost cutting, where I know people who have been 100% remote for 5 years.
What are the odds those voluntary packages are worse than whatever contract & law specific in the case of layoffs. And I am sure the (very X/Musk/extreme hardcore coded) agreement employees sign agreeing to RTO means if they are fired later for office attendance its for-cause.
> What are the odds those voluntary packages are worse than whatever contract & law specific in the case of layoffs.
Roughly zero, if the scale as a layoff would be sub-WARN Act level, because it is unlikely that the impacted employees had any contractual severance guarantee or any legal entitlement to any notice of termination of employment or pay in lieu (they might be less than the firm’s historical practice for similar roles, and having an excuse to characterize it as voluntary provides a bit of PR cover for that, but that's not a legal or contractual guarantee.) At-will employment is the rule, rather than the exception, for private, non-uniom employment in the US.
I guess the question is then - why the same Twitter/Musk playbook of creating a forced dichotomy "agree to 5 day RTO in writing or take voluntary package"?
Would imply they are probably planning WARN-act-level layoffs, and trying to get under that with "volunteers"?
> aren't there a very real risk that the most talented people, who enjoy working from home will simply leave, while the less talented returns to the office because they'll have a harder time finding new jobs?
Leave to where? All the other FAANGs and tech companies seem to be doing RTO as well. There's no "dead sea effect" because the less talented are also being flushed out by layoffs specifically targeting low performers. And the job market is so bad right now that there's absolutely no shortage of fresh talented folks to hire.
> aren't there a very real risk that the most talented people, who enjoy working from home will simply leave
company will probably write exceptions for those people into their contracts; my neighbor, a talented senior dev lead at BigTechCo, has it in his contract that he can WFH regardless of RTO calls
There's no reason to covertly plot convoluted "backdoor layoff" schemes when they're openly doing layoffs on a regular basis. "Backdoor layoffs" is a silly meme loved only by the sort of people prone to falling for conspiracy theories.
On the contrary, if anything, it's evidence in support of the point. It shows that Microsoft desires to trim its employee rolls. Now if you do a proper layoff, you have to pay people quite a lot of money. So if you can make at least some of them leave on their own, that's substantial savings.
My personal pet theory (based on no evidence other than personal experience) is that, if your job is in senior management then your day-to-day work is going to meetings. And spending 8-10h on zoom meetings every day is unbelievably soul-crushing.
8h on zoom is far more desirable than 8 hours in person shuffling from meeting room to meeting room for me.
I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. I can wear comfortable pants. I can throw laundry into the wash in the couple minute gap between meetings. And when the last meeting ends, I close the laptop and I'm already home, no miserable drive in rush-hour traffic.
Of course, there is something worse than in-person meetings. Which is meetings that are hybrid, with a groups calling into zoom from two different conference rooms in different locations. Those manage to be far worse than just everyone individually joining the zoom. And ironically, that's the type of meeting that becomes common when you force your distributed workforce back to offices split across a dozen locations.
> I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will.
This works great when you are one of a dozen anonymous people on a zoom call. less so when you are the senior person in the meeting who everyone is actually talking to and expecting you to make a decision.
But this response kind of proves my point. If you are the principal in a meeting, the fact that everyone else in the meeting is zoned out and doing something else is not great.
I spent 7 months on a contract job last year like that... I'm in Phoenix (as well as half the employees involved) but the meetings were East Coast centered, so starting at 5am local. Roughly 38 hours of meetings a week, and in a position where I had to pay attention... It SUCKED so hard... I never got used to being up early and it just burned me up.
At least with actual people, in person there's more to the communication... I miss lunch with coworkers. I now pretty much have to work from home (vision decline, so I cannot drive), I wish it weren't the case.
But here is the thing-almost all meetings are on Temas. Because Microsoft campus is so spread out managers do not have time to go from building to building to meet other managers. Azure for example is spread out over 10 building just 8n Redmond. Never mind connecting with teams in Bay Area, Atlanta and India. All of these mangers spend their meetings on Teams.
One you miss is that if other companies in your industry are RTO, and you don't, the first quarter you under-perform your competitors, your shareholders and activist investors will blame the fact that you haven't RTO when all your competitors have ... !obviously! that is the key issue. Effectively, if everyone else is, you cannot afford not to.
What's also not mentioned is that in multinational companies, especially since remote working became more widespread and attracting talent more difficult, teams are often made up of people from different locations anyway. So you won't have an in-person team, you'll just be joining Zoom (or in M$'s case, probably Teams) calls from the office rather than from home.
> teams are often made up of people from different locations anyway
My wife works at a multinational which has also decided to push RTO. Her closest team member works in an office 200 miles away from her office (in a different country), the vast majority of the rest of team are located between 3000 and 6000 miles away, on a different continent.
A friend of mine at AMZN has the same issue, his team is literally scattered around the globe.
This is also a situation where RTO has clear negative effects. If you have distributed teams, and everybody works from home, communication necessarily moves online. However, when parts of distributed teams are located in shared offices, they create islands of knowledge and personal relationships within the team, leading to all kinds of problems.
My org went for RTO two or three years ago. This year they've also started cutting locations from teams that are too distributed: you can either move or you can leave. There will still be a lot of people living on Teams, but a lot less, and mostly just management layers.
That's the key thing IMO; it's not "return to office" when quite a lot of the people never were in that office to start with. With the rate of turnover in most of these companies and the amount of time they were hiring for positions remotely, it's more "forced relocation, transfer, or 'voluntary' quitting without severance" for a large number of people. You can't return to a status quo that never existed for you.
I mean...you don't have to "voluntarily" quit without severance.
You can tell them, in writing, "I am willing and able to continue to perform the tasks I was hired for. If you insist that it be somewhere else, then you can fire me."
You could, and then presumably still not be paid severance despite being fired, and then have to decide whether it's worth trying to fight them legally. I don't pretend to know the right choice for everyone, but when presented with this exact choice, I pretty quickly realized that it wasn't going to be worth the effort. It sucks, but given the option to spend energy on fighting this battle or saving it to put towards finding a new job to support myself and my family (or trying to do both and likely burning myself out from trying to take on more than I could reasonably handle), it wasn't much of a choice. Sometimes being right doesn't mean that you don't lose.
Why would they not use those metrics internally as part of the RTO policy then? Surely they would be picking particular stats out to highlight the benefits of RTO, talk about how well everyone is doing afterwards, etc.
Because they don't want the public/employees to misconstrue those metrics? Maybe they don't want employees to know how they view productivity?
Surely if they're presented with solid evidence that WFH increases productivity, they'd keep it. Execs make millions in bonuses if the performance of the company hits certain goals. It's baffling that people here still talk about real estate conspiracy theories.
If there were clear metrics showing that in-person teams “out perform” remote teams, we would be hearing about it constantly. The supposed rationale for keeping such data secret sounds far-fetched to me.
It’s absolutely all being done on vibes. The execs don’t have some super-secret productivity dashboard giving them a breakdown of employee output by work location. Maybe, if they’re really on the ball, they have employee profit contributions divided by that, but that would then immediately show all the support staff as unproductive.
> can see productivity metrics that aren't available to the public
I am an employee of a company claiming my productivity is higher in the office. Nobody has ever shown me anything even remotely resembling a productivity metric. They haven’t even tried.
Productivity metrics are a holy grail. If any company created one that works they’d be bragging about it endlessly to shareholders and correlating it with the enormous profits they’d be generating.
If they have one that works I’d like to see it so I can use it to measure changes in my daily habits and further increase my productivity.
Since they can’t articulate this metric at all I can only conclude that it doesn’t exist.
With how contentious RTO has been why haven’t the advocates published data on how big of a boost it has been to their KPIs?
> Unless you think all RTO is a conspiracy.
It’s possible RTO is just regular old incompetence. No need for conspiracy theories.
This is dead on. In software especially, we have established ways for distributed individuals to collaborate (FOSS). RTO is meant to coddle the waterfall-addicted executive class.
It's pretty funny to watch e.g. some little FOSS console game system emulator—an actual toy, or at least, a project in service of a toy and of game-playing, to a large extent, but also technically more challenging than a lot of corporate work—or maybe some FOSS MMO server re-implementation coordinate development across continents with nothing but IRC, email, and Github (if that, LOL) and do it efficiently with little friction and volunteers working in their spare time and zero people with a dedicated "project manager" title, while companies pretend they need this whole fucking edifice of communication systems and people sitting in cubicles in particular places just to shuffle a few gigabytes of spreadsheet data around with Python or whatever.
Yeah. No you don't. You're, somehow, a fraction as competent and professional as some teens and 20-somethings making toys in their spare time, if you do. Definitely deserve seven-plus figure salaries for that.
KDE was supposed to run on Windows, starting 15 years ago. Linux was supposed to flawlessly support laptop sleep and hibernate, 20 years ago. Gimp was supposed to support 32 bit colors (I think) 15 years ago. Etc, etc.
The money is there so that things that are desired happen mostly on time.
Isn't the thing you're ignoring just passion? I find it a small miracle that any company accomplishes anything. it's a ground of hundreds or thousands of people, almost none of whom want to be there and don't care about the product or company, that despite this still somehow accomplish things
but this is survival bias. lots of those FOSS projects go nowhere, unnoticed.
You are flipping this around: "companies pretend they need this whole fucking edifice", but they'd need to pick the winners first. those people need no management for them to do what they are motivated to do, but corporation have some people they are asking to do something they might not care much about - the same results aren't guaranteed.
I feel you. Have my own office right now. Its worth more than €25k salary. It’s really hard to apply somewhere else and go back to noise and chaos in open office even for more money.
(2) Seems like a media narrative rather than truth. I don't think that would be anywhere remotely high on a CEO's priority list unless they were a commercial real estate company.
It's far more likely a mixture of (1) and actual results - in-person/hybrid teams produce better outcomes (even if why that's true hasn't been deeply evaluated or ultimately falls on management)
I think it's naive to think that management would push something so unpopular and expensive just because some kind of emotional attachment or to help some other unrelated commercial property owners.
I think a more reasonable answer is they think employees are more productive and a large swath of employees don't do anything. I wouldn't believe it unless I've seen it myself. At a large org, there is a significant portion of people that don't do anything meaningful. Sure they'll waste time in the office as well, but at least they're somewhat more productive or available. They're not watching Netflix in their underwear. Every large organization I've been at had these people.
It's really that simple. The alternative is really conspiracy level stuff.
I think the real answer is that executives at large companies live in a completely different world than their employees.
For one the circles they run in are going to be full of like-minded people; i.e. people for whom work is the most important part of their life. People like that want RTO and don't understand those who oppose it. When those are your priorities and all of your pees share them, its going to produce an echo chamber where most executives want RTO.
Furthermore their lifestyle is completely different. Most are going to have chauffeurs so they can be productive to/from work. They are going to have aids that take care of the food shopping, laundry, picking kids up from school, cooking, helping with homework etc. RTO does not affect them nearly as much as their employees who still have to deal with all of this in addition to commuting time now.
Its really just as simple as that. They lead completely different lives than their employees, are surrounded by other executives in friend and professional groups who have similar lifestyles, and generally don't understand why someone wouldn't want to RTO.
> They're not watching Netflix in their underwear.
I'm sure leaders believe this, I'm even sure it happens. Yet despite how obviously and deleteriously widespread this phenomenon is, isn't it amazing that we still can't seem to quantify notable efficiency and effectiveness gains from RTO mandates? And that's setting aside whether any hypothesized (at best) productivity gains are sufficiently high enough to justify the expense of office space rentals and office maintenance.
Let's also remember that the typical RTO experience is one where members of a geographically distributed team are RTO'd so they can remain geographically distributed, just working out of company owned or rented spaces instead of their homes.
Two things about backdoor layoffs. Mostly its about who. When its corporate dictat, those most likely to leave are those with other options, ie the best talent. So sure a business might save on severances in aggregate, but it doesn't get to decide on who, but simple statistics show it will be the best who move on. So a demoralised and increasingly mediocre workforce is then faced with a much tougher hiring environment with unfillable positions and the downward cycle continues, destroying customer value and reputation to a far greater degree than any temporary layoff savings. All for what exactly, control? Its the C-suites that should be being marched out the door.
No, quarterly earnings. In this case, retained earnings, but they want to show profits in a situation with high inflation, stagnant employment, and other issues where customers are not as spendy as they once were.
The move of offshoring in many projects, changed my mindest that companies care one second about their talent, at a size like Microsoft is all about replaceable cogs, little ants every doing their own small task.
Why in your opinion do Microsoft or any large org pay software engineers in America or western Europe? India would be cheaper. South America, Phillipines cheaper still. Etc etc etc. Plenty of educated folks speaking English.
I think a large part of it is that they want people physically and culturally close to themselves for projects they care about. Piles of companies have tried outsourcing core development and in my experience whatever minimal home team thats left keeps growing and growing and the oversess guys get pushed to the least desirable jobs. It's almost always a failure in the end, or at least the overseas team ends up being given limited scope, simple tasks while complex work finds it's way back home. I say this having worked with many talented overseas colleagues; I think this is a management level effect, not individual developer
Mostly to play firefighters and many countries in Europe, business people actually rather not deal directly with offshoring teams in English.
Which is what the on site team does, besides firefighting, handling the cultural interface.
For many businesses even if it looks a failure from engineering point of view, as long as it is within the budget, many businesses see it as a success, versus having paid a whole team onsite.
2 and 3 aren't real. Nobody gives a damn about their shareholders other investments, and no one company has the numbers to save them anyway. And nobody is dumb enough to do RTO as a layoff proxy because anybody with a brain knows you're going to lose the people with options, who are exactly the people you don't want to lose.
3 is very real. Sometimes even openly so, as in an executive telling it out loud.
> And nobody is dumb enough to do RTO as a layoff proxy because anybody with a brain knows you're going to lose the people with options, who are exactly the people you don't want to lose.
Here is what our CEO told me once: layoffs always mean you loose more people then those you just fired. That is unavoidable and can amount to additional 30%. And obviously those will be those with options. He said that you can not avoid nor control this factor, there is no point in overly fretting about it. From his point of view, people always have agency to leave and layoffs and surrounding chaos always annoy people and weaken their ties.
These arguments based on "we do not want to loose good people in layoffs" are off mark. Company will loose good people in layoffs.
Being willing to switch employer for convenience does not make someone a good worker and it's not like bad hires can't change employer. I'm guessing the best employee would be someone who hates change and is financially illiterate. Never asks for a raise, works in the same company, does the same thing for 30 years for the same money.
> Being willing to switch employer for convenience does not make someone a good worker and it's not like bad hires can't change employer.
Your comment is really quite out of touch of how layoffs actually affect people.
I’ve been through a few rounds now. Morale is essentially destroyed in the short term. Your team suddenly has a lot more work with no additional support or even acknowledgement that people are now slammed.
It’s not inconvenience. It’s a significantly negative change in the work environment, and a sign that maybe your company’s long-term prospects aren’t great. Of course good people leave in these situations.
I'm talking strictly about RTO as a layoff alternative and even more specifically about the perception that it'll lead to the best workers leaving.
Having a bunch of people leave due to RTO is different than having seemingly random colleagues laid off.
Both are not nice, RTO is more voluntarily and more avoidable since you can sometimes bargain for remote work to be a part of your contract and not just an oral agreement.
It's morally questionable to call for RTO only to get rid of people without technically having layoffs, but in countries like the US getting laid off is probably worse than having working conditions degrade to where you just find another job of your own volition since there's less urgency.
You wont loose only the good people. You will loose the usual mix. Plenty of slackers or not good people are fully capable to make their way through interviews. That is how they got here, after all.
It is always just pure wishful thinking that "all the people you will loose when you alienate someone like me" are totally the best people out there.
From a source closely involved with this- Amazon tracks many productivity metrics of employees and was seeing very significant differences between in-person and remote people, which drove the decision.
Source left since so I don’t know how much productivity has improved.
Advice to new grads: get into the office 5 days a week for at least a few years.
He's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from a guy who knows a kid who's going with the girl who saw him pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I think it's serious.
Why would they share that... come on lets not be naive here. Do they always justify every bigger decision to whole world? It just creates friction surface for various people to catch on. C suite is there to set directions, not to explain themselves to their employees.
Its like getting refused during interview process. Sharing actually why makes no sense for hiring people, no gain and potentially a lot to lose.
I don't like the situation overall or RTO at all since it markedly increases quality of my personal life (which makes me a happier employee too but nobody really cares about that) but we need to be realistic with various people's motivations.
> (2) Interest in the investor class for the commercial real estate market. The business impacted may not be invested in it, but the businesses’ shareholders in sufficient numbers probably are
How is this not a net loss for them?
From their perspective, wouldn’t that just be moving money left to right, plus even more overhead?
If you could discover an email where an executive admitted their RTO strategy was a layoff then maybe, in some jurisdictions. But it's hard to prove, most of the time they could just say their motivation was "culture" or similarly vague and unfalsifiable like that.
I think it depends how far you are. There are laws covering you against forced relocation, treating it essentially as a layoff if it’s >50 miles (not sure exact numbers, and it may be state specific)
It's a power play. To show regular folks their place. Big corpo is a modern feodal state, where CEO is an emperor, c-suites are kings, managers are barons, IC are peasants and external contractors are slaves(but leased from other owner).
It's not only RTO, it's also about timetable and dress code. Yes, I had a beef with IT manager about dress code in the development office of a bank. Just because he can show his power he tried to enforce dress code.
> Big corpo is a modern feodal state, where CEO is an emperor, c-suites are kings, managers are barons
Why do people forget about board members and shareholders?
There's a lot of overlap among the rich. I doubt Satya "wants" to RTO. I would suspect board members / shareholders with real estate interests are forcing the policy. (eg Vanguard holds 10%, with Blackrock close behind).
Big corpo is a feudal state, in the sense of complex incestuous power dynamics. It's oversimplifying to call CEOs emperors.
Because board members are all emperors too, and they have a stated interest in keeping emperors in power. Look at how many board members are C-suite in other companies.
I do not understand the real estate investor conspiracy theory. Why would it be better for vanguard if Microsoft paid rent to a real estate firm that managed office space, earned an X% profit margin, and then got taxed on the earnings before they were attributed to shareholders?
It makes much more sense to take a bath on the office investments and have Microsoft pay the difference in dividends or buybacks. The net amount to vanguard is higher than paying insurance, building and grounds maintainence, janitors, utilities, management fees, and property+ income tax before seeing your first dollar.
I don't get why the various tax incentives and such (plus stealth layoffs) aren't enough to explain it.
I've seen companies do some weird shit for those "X workers at location Y at least Z hours per year" tax incentives. I'd believe it's a major motivator for RTO (though probably somewhat behind the layoffs motivation)
The incentives don't pencil out. They don't make an entire separate corporate structure and several extra layers of taxation result in more money for investors instead of just... giving it to investors.
Why the push for RTO? The most simple and boring answer. Most people work and especially learn from each other better in-person than over Zoom and Slack. Practically zero people will try to pretend that remote school was great for the average student during covid, even at the university level. But for some reason everything inverts when it comes to work. I get that there are superperformers that work better in a closed room with zero interruptions ever and require little collaboration to do their jobs, and some students were 3 grade levels ahead during covid. But in a company of 200,000 people you have more average people than lone wolf superperformers, and so going in person is better than 200,000 slack pfps. Simplest yet most hated answer.
If I am already an owner of real estate, I’m interested not only in monthly rent, but also in property value (I can sell it or I can use it as collateral for a loan).
If offices are half empty across whole town, then property values are down.
On the other hand if you somehow would be able to saturate the office space, them property values go up.
Commercial real estate value is directly connected to occupancy. If I own an office building which was valued ten years ago at $10M (to pick a random number) and today is valued at half that because nobody's going in, that's a direct $5M loss on my accounts, and any loans outstanding secured on it are potentially now underwater. Not only that, but it also weakens the rent I can demand from the tenant not just because the value of the building has dropped, but because they demonstrably don't need all that space any more.
Microsoft is almost certainly a special case in a number of ways, but the incentives are absolutely there for commercial landlords to try to force their tenants' hands.
Not a "conspiracy theory". I've been to board meeting at one of companies, where board member was a real estate investor. They insisted that to obtain more investment company has to lease an office from the investor and ensure the office is occupied as part of the lease. Then they used that company in advertising of their property portfolio as in look who leases from us. It's complex.
You are missing the point that Microsoft might be the loss leader, setting an example or simply ensuring that commercial estate gains in value and the gains are greater than the losses.
It's a fact, you can maintain empty offices only for so long and billions invested can potentially vanish.
The funny thing is, I get more done at the office than at home. And if I’m dressed professionally, I get more done and I get better responses from others than when I’m wearing shorts and a tee shirt.
I’d prefer to work from home wearing pajamas but I can sympathize with why my employer wants me in the office and may even have a dress code.
Be glad you didn’t work in the development office of a bank in the 1990s, you’d be expected to wear a suit and tie to work.
What is happening is some
companies are choosing A and others are choosing B.
Employees who really care about A will prefer companies who chose A, same for B. Employees who care more about other properties C, D, E, etc. but not much about A or B will prefer companies that provide those properties.
So when it’s my idiosyncrasy I’m supposed to shut the fuck up because it’s unprofessional, but when it aligns with whatever goals of some middle manager I’m supposed to take one for the team, because Bob the baby needs a grown up man sitting next to him?
It's not an idiosyncrasy, it's a preference/optimal work environment. And it varies by person. Stop acting like the people that are on the other side of the opinion are being childish/stupid.
Nobody said you needed to stfu. Pointing out what works best for you is important in making sure the best decision is made. But, as I was trying to say, any decision that is made will be wrong for some of the people involved.
> Stop acting like the people that are on the other side of the opinion are being childish/stupid.
No, people on the other side should stop acting like we’re childish/stupid.
I was born a while ago, and know how world works. No need to feed me bullshit about “culture” or “value of communication”.
Regardless of someone's stand on the topic of remote vs in-office, I find it staggering that _anyone_ could believe that either one of them is the one-true-way. There's downsides to both and either decision is likely to make at least some of the participants unhappy.
I'm firmly on the WFH end of things; I much less productive in an office. But I know other people that are better in the office with the ability to talk things over with co-workers in person. And the fact that I'm not there makes it harder for them (and easier for me; tradeoffs)
The productivity is tangential at best to this matter; the discourse around WFH has long devolved into primitive drivel for/against freedom precisely because abstract "freedom" is all that Americans care about. (I don't think WFH is as big in Europe, at least based on my experience—everywhere I worked in Europe has overwhelmingly been in-office.) I get the argument that American cities are really sparse, and sometimes people have to commute a long while, etc etc. but I don't believe that it's the deciding factor. I think it's FAR simpler than that; in view of covid, all companies subscribed to WFH policy, and workers (quite naively) interpreted it as +freedom. The companies are now subscribing to RTO policies, and it's simply read as -freedom. That's it. People find it offensive whenever they're deprived of some extra options, choices, etc. It's nice not having to go to office all the time, but it's in of itself much nicer if you CAN choose not to, isn't it? In my view, that's what it boils down to.
So pay me enough to afford a home nearby so I can work in the office. Hell, I'll wear a suit too. Oh, I can only get enough to commute in from an exurb 1+ hour commute each way? Buzz off.
Been working since the 80s, and no company has ever paid me enough to buy anything nearby.
So I gave up 15 yrs ago and now work full remote where I could afford something.
The owners of the companies we work for are making more money than us, off the value we create through our work, simply by through ownership itself. How’s that for compensation vs difficulty?
If you think that’s an easier route, I doubt it’s ever been easier to found a company and own almost all of it.
On this very site is a link at the bottom to apply for substantial funding and help in succeeding at a modest cost of equity. But if it’s easy enough that you don’t even need that help, you can own it all.
The state of the world is a human product. It’s something we create. We can choose to resign ourselves to it and rationalize it, or try to change it through conscious collective action. Either way we are participating in creating the world we see around us.
I can tell that in Portugal it is a highly paid as any office worker, meaning bad, with unpaid overtime, and until you make it into manager you're failing.
Also doctors and business owners not only make it much more, there are plenty of under the table payment possibilities.
I also know of offshoring countries where folks working in tourism make more in tips from foreigners that any IT worker can ever dream off.
For some people, what they wear has an impact on their own performance. It's not necessarily about how others perceive them, and it's not necessarily logical. Some people work better with music, or with a window to look out... some people work better in fancier attire.
I once moved to a company that still mandated relatively formal work clothes—suit and tie no longer required, but still seen fairly often.
The first casual Friday I was struck now how energized I felt as soon as I walked in (and I didn’t participate, I wore slacks and a blazer that day).
Reflecting on that, I realized that I actually associate jeans and such with “professional office that gets shit done”. Because that’s how it’d been everywhere else I’d worked.
The “professional” dress code was having exactly the opposite effect on me, from what it was supposed to.
My friend is CTO of a smaller company say ~250 people, and RTO constantly comes up in the C-suite.
He is only able to fend it off by pointing out that they do not pay as well as their larger competitors, so the remote flexibility is a recruiting advantage.
He describes the push for RTO from the rest of the C-suite as basically a combination of unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it, and of course.. because they can. Just like many rules at companies.
Likewise many companies in my slice of the industry point to one of the big leaders RTO policies as the reason to do the same, as a sort of cargo cult. However, what the big leader actually does that differentiates is paying 30% premium to have their pick of talent at every level of the org.
> Likewise many companies in my slice of the industry point to one of the big leaders RTO policies as the reason to do the same
This also explains other things, not only RTO. Like when the mass layoffs started about three years ago. Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output. That was enough for many smaller companies, some of them understaffed, to go on and do the same, surely encouraged by their investors. I have friends in a half dozen companies complaining about permanent overtime and severe project delays after the layoffs. Yet, referred companies are either not hiring, or doing it in a very leisurely pace.
> Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output.
The part that's always glossed over in this narrative is that the remaining workers were forced to pick up the slack to keep up the output ("do more with less") which resulted in toxic work cultures. Ask any employees across BigTech companies and they'll tell you of this happening everywhere all at once -- formerly collaborative environments suddenly becoming cut-throat and competitive; high pressure and unreasonable goals for delivery; hiring being scaled back (except in offshore teams!) and new candidates being severely downleveled compared to their experience.
This was not a coincidence; Sure, there were slackers scattered everywhere, but the waves of layoffs were completely disproportional to that. The real intention was to bring the labor market, overheated during Covid and ZIRP, back under control (a power play, as other comments indicate.) And who better than Elon to signal that change with his shenanigans at Twitter.
If it seems surprising that output was not impacted (although I would argue a close look at Twitter shows the opposite) one just needs to look at the record levels of burnout being reported:
Speaking as an immigrant who is now a US citizen, I don't think this is particularly relevant. As far as immigration support from companies goes, Big Tech already offers it, so the real beef is with the federal government - and a trade or company union is hardly the best venue to have that fight. I would first and foremost want a union that protects my interests as a worker against my employer's encroachment, and it was no different when I wasn't a citizen yet.
Congrats. But the top priority for a non-citizen immigrant would be protection, above employer encroachment. Notice how this played out when twitter fired 85%, and who stayed back.
Unions being political players will have to take a side - and in the current climate this makes unions a non starter, since majority can never align.
> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it
I read it as the feeling that they know somehow that the employees are not putting in 100% of their attention at home on the work assigned.
And i do believe it to be true - lots of people claim that WFH means they can "do the laundry" and/or go to the post office.
The fact is that there's very few self-starters and intrinsically motivated employees. Most are just there for the pay cheque, and will do the minimum work that is required of them - esp. if not under strict supervision.
Not to mention the fact that it is indeed much harder to have collaborative discussions that are spontaneous and unplanned in a WFH setting, compared to the office.
Those lazy employees need that strict supervision!
Maybe these c suites and other employee hating assholes are projecting their own lazyness. Or maybe they think they are so superior compared to ”common” people that the ”common” people must be lazy trash.
I don’t know, but it is weird to assume most people won’t do their job without ”strict supervision”. Like super weird.
(Btw, anecdotally, most people I know work more efficiently from home with fewer breaks)
> Those lazy employees need that strict supervision!
This comment is a bit reactionary. It would be more balanced to say that lower motivation employees will benefit from a more structured working environment.
> will do the minimum work that is required of them
So... doing their job?
When I read people wanting to have 100% uptime on their human resources I feel like I'm reading "The goal" again and how machines have to be 100% used in the mind of some managers.
And even when doing chore (or posting on HN), people tend to think about other things. Like their current task. Why do you think people find solutions to problems in the shower or just before sleeping? Because you can think about work (and so for most office jobs, working) even when not on your computer.
> lots of people claim that WFH means they can "do the laundry" and/or go to the post office
I mostly work from the office. Since the end of COVID-19, my teams are always mixed where some people WFH. One issue that I frequently encounter: People do their chores at random times in the middle of day, so frequently you cannot corral a group of people to quickly discuss something. In the office, this is trivial: Turn around in your chair. Over time, I find that I reach out to WFH staff less and less and work more closely with in-office teammates. I'm not rewarded for overcoming this friction with WFH teammates, so why would I try?
> People do their chores at random times in the middle of day...
When I was in-office, people I needed to speak to would be away from their desk (god only knows where) several times a day. Perhaps they were off taking a shit, or getting food, or having a long think in a quiet corner, or crying in the nap closet, or who knows what, but they weren't at their desk and I had no idea how to contact them.
If your coworkers are regularly inaccessible for extended periods, then you're gonna have to do what has been done since way before widespread WFH: talk to your manager to establish core working hours during which everyone is expected to be easily accessible to other folks in the company.
If your manager doesn't see the need to establish and enforce core working hours and neither does their manager, then either stop thinking of it as a problem, or go work for a place that is a better fit for your theory of work.
If you've already established core working hours and these remote employees are ignoring them, then complain to your manager. If their behavior is seriously getting in the way of you getting your work done, it's your manager's job to fix that.
Daily reminder that if a manager can't tell if their employees are effective working from home, that manager is incompetent. There are a million ways to check if someone is actually working, and butt-in-seat isn't one of them.
Also given many orgs are distributed across buildings, cities, and countries.. a manager admitting they need to physically see butts in seats is telling on themselves re: ability to do their job.
> Not to mention the fact that it is indeed much harder to have collaborative discussions that are spontaneous and unplanned in a WFH setting, compared to the office.
This is a culture thing that is easily fixed by mandating cameras on, buying everyone good microphones, and a consensus that you can ping someone with a question, go back and forth, and know that you aren't imposing by throwing a /zoom into the Slack DM and saying "let's just meet about this".
My team is small, sure, but we are cameras on 100%, we know to pause a sec after someone stops talking for latency, and have a spoken agreement "fuck slack just open a room i'll hop in". We have met in person numerous times and each time it feels identical to work in person as we do remote.
When I meet with other teams, people are in their fucking cars driving, cameras off the whole time (but chewing into the mic), can't figure out how to share their screen (still!), like, no shit that isn't productive, you're putting no effort into it!
I don’t think mandating cameras on and insisting on 100% is the right move, but I definitely think you want to aim for a team culture where camera-on is a default and most people have them on 80-90% of the time.
Otherwise, yea participation and engagement seems to take a major hit.
I think some people are misinterpreting 100% as "even when you aren't on a call/Zoom/huddle" which is batshit.
Some people are just unhappy they're being called out for taking meetings while they take a dump.
The latter is precisely why attempting for 100% cameras on during meetings is a good idea. If you're uncomfortable being on camera in a meeting doing it, its a good sign you shouldn't be doing it.
Screw presentability, having a camera pointed at you and on all the time is creepy and awful. It’s not the same as being in a room with actual people, it’s way worse.
Just meetings with 100% camera-on, even, are awkward and draining in ways that meeting in person or just having a call are not. Having a camera on you is like having a person making hard eye contact without blinking or looking somewhere else, ever. It’s bizarre and it sucks.
I can't edit this more but to temper this: I don't mind camera-on for 1-on-1 conversations, I don't mind camera-on while actively participating in larger meetings, that kind of thing, that's fine.
Camera on all the time so someone could just pop in and start watching at any moment, even not during a call? Terrible, absolutely terrible. Camera on for larger meetings the entire time, even when I'm not participating? Tolerable for very short meetings, but brutal and distracting for even a half-hour meeting.
Again, it's like being stared at. If the context of how I'm participating wouldn't naturally have people looking at me more or less uninterrupted if this were an in-person conversation, having the camera on is really unpleasant. So, when I'm talking, fine, being directly addressed by someone, sure, camera on is OK, but in a group setting when I'm not the (or a) current center of attention? Bad.
FWIW I did some work with McKinsey way into the Zoom era, though long enough ago that I can't vouch for their still doing this, but: they culturally favored just using group phone calls, complete with the phone number option being a common way to connect (Teams and such have this, too, but it's more of a back-up that IME doesn't get used unless absolutely necessary—they'd actually dial-a-phone-number call in as a routine way of operating). Even when everyone involved could have used video, they usually just did the call-in audio only thing. I was like "that's weird and old-fashioned" at first, but what I found it to actually be once I got used to it was flexible, robust, and entirely sufficient most of the time. I think people really overrate the importance of (everyone having) a camera for most calls.
>Camera on all the time so someone could just pop in and start watching at any moment, even not during a call?
That's not at all what I meant. I don't think it was how I typed it, I grant it could be, but you might want to read my original comment again. I am not advocating for just sitting there in your Zoom Personal Room, camera on, all day every day. That would be insane. But for synchronous work with others, a camera on that lets me know you're there, listening, providing feedback with body language? Thats why shit just gets done faster in person. Remote teleconferencing is low bitrate on the human communication spectrum. At least, lower bitrate than being in the same room. Cameras increase that bitrate.
In my meetings in Zoom, (scheduled, 1 hour, normal), everyone on my team has cameras on almost all of the time. I don't even turn mine off if I step away to grab the coffee pot from the kitchen, it lets people know immediately I'm not able to speak but can hear them fine.
Since they’re not collaborating with you, and are presumably a well paid professional, maybe their collaborators are perfectly happy with how they work?
Because I need to see if how I'm explaining something is hitting. I need to see if you are listening. I need to know you're actually there and not distracted.
I have found the same with remote. Cameras ON is a huge improvement in how much people are in on the game. Constant communication, frequent ad hoc meetings, screen sharing. Its totally doable, but most people don't do it. There is no feeling worse than presenting an idea to a meeting room of 10 people with all cameras off, and when you ask a question you get crickets. Too many people are phoning it in.
I saw a few clickbait articles highlighting that JPMorgan's new world headquarters in Manhattan (270 Park Ave) has a gym but will charge employees to use it. Why is this so interesting? I have worked in many different tall office buildings in my career. I saw a variety of setups: (1) company gym, (2) third party gym, (3) no gym. You always had to pay a fee to use the gym. Why does requiring employees to pay trigger such a hostile reaction from people? Also, the people working in this specific building are very well paid. They can easily afford the fees. Some other points that people don't mention: If it was free, it might be overloaded. That building is expected to have 14,000 employees! Also, no gym can possibly provide everything that everyone wants. In Manhattan, you are spoiled for choice with gyms.
I am sure that a few people will reply to say: If the gym were free, then more people would use it, and the company would benefit from lower healthcare costs. (Specific to the US: Most large corporations are self-insured for healthcare, but use third party providers to administer the programme.) Maybe so, but difficult to prove. If that is true, the company should also provide healthy lunches, etc. The list goes on and on. And Internet randos will have a never ending list of things that a "good company" must do for their employees.
If you're going above&beyond the industry average and demanding full 5-day-RTO, and pointing at how you just built a brand new HQ with great amenities so suck it up, then don't charge for those amenities?
Anyway, I've recruited with JPM a few times in my career, my spouse worked there at one point, and I know friends who have been through. So I like to pick on them as a good example of a company using their brand as an excuse to have bad pay/benefits relative to rest of industry. Good for investors I suppose, but don't work there.
> if employees like it, it must be a perk/benefit.
Or, for those who have bought into the utterly toxic mindset that employees are always trying to get as much out of the company as possible for as little work as possible, "if employees like it, it must be a scam on us."
A big difference between feudalism and modern societies is that in feudalism, you expect to earn much less than the value of the land you inherit and pass on (or the custom or right of your family farming the land) whereas in modern societies most people will earn much more in lifetime earnings than they would inherit or pass on. This results in far more social mobility and much more freedom in praxis. I don’t think companies are like feudal societies.
A West Coast software engineering career is barely worth the land underneath a house from which you could reasonably commute to it. We're getting there.
This is just straight-up false? My current home - not the land, the home entire - cost just under 3 years of my salary, or under 2 years of my total comp, and I can go door-to-door in 35 minutes on public transit or 20 by car. (and I'm under 40 and still getting good reviews, so can reasonably hope for my pay to increase considerably in the second half of my career)
Don't get me wrong, that's still way too expensive; but your exaggeration is _way_ off the mark.
Do you live in Socal, like the person is implying? You make >500k a year and still live in a pretty small house then? And if so, like basically no one in the united states?
> Do you live in Socal, like the person is implying?
Apologies, I saw "A West Coast software engineering career [...and...] a house from which you could reasonably commute to it" and assumed they meant San Francisco, which is accurate for me (I live in Berkeley, and my office is in the FiDi of SF). I had thought that the Bay Area was both more expensive and more tech-centric than SoCal, but I could be wrong there.
> You make >500k a year and still live in a pretty small house then
Just under 300k, but yeah - it's 3 bed 2 bath, so not huge but not tiny either. And I've saved enough over the ~5 years of living here to be looking at building a 3-4 room extension onto it into the yard next year.
> And if so, like basically no one in the united states?
Again, I didn't claim that my situation is a) typical, or b) ideal - housing in the Bay Area is far too expensive, and it's perfectly valid and reasonable to prefer living elsewhere for any number of reasons. I'm just pointing out that /u/closeparen's statement was a _wild_ exaggeration (if they did indeed mean Bay Area like I assumed and not SoCal. If they did, I have no data to contribute!)
It’s extremely pretty, there’s great food, lots of tech jobs, you meet diverse and interesting people, great public transit (for the US). There are many reasons for living in the Bay Area.
You can find the same in Minneapolis with a better cost of living. (At least the other reply mentioned weather). there are more people in the bay area, but in minneapolis you can find more people in minneapolis than you have time to meet.
there are many other cities in the us that likewise have a great tech scene. The bay is not unique - it has a little more but it isn't unique-
8 years in the Twin Cities from Chicago originally.
People are nice, but everyone who I ever interacted with in stores or outside of work was from somewhere else. The natives just weren’t up for making friends or casual conversation.
Despite the cold, Winters in Minneapolis are 100 times better than winters in Chicago.
Food in Minneapolis can’t hold a candle to Chicago or New York.
Public transportation barely works even if you have a government job where you can leave exactly the same time everyday. You still need a car for everything else.
Grew up in Minneapolis and spent most of my life in the twin cities.
You really can’t compare it to a tech hub, or even a major city like NYC or Chicago. It’s just a different league.
I miss the twin cities quite a lot and will likely eventually move back - but definitely not for professional reasons or the opportunity to expand my exposure to cultural diversity.
Living in both a few mid tier cities like MSP and a major “real” city comparing them is pretty tone deaf to me. Calling public transit even usable in Minneapolis is a joke - and I lived without a car for over 20 years there taking it every day. Not even a comparison to a large city with a rapid transit network.
The Bay Area may have fallen off since I’ve been there, but the tech density even 10 years ago gave opportunity for career growth that Minneapolis simply did not remotely have. If you were a super star developer doing Internet things in the early to mid 2000s you left a lot of money on the table by not being willing to move.
That's an understatement: Bay area weather is magical. It is the same all year round. You don't need "winter" and "summer" attire, your plans never get rained out, and you never have to deal with snowstorms. The downside is sometimes it rains ash.
Personally, I had to leave because the pizza out there is unbearable but damn I miss the bay area weather.
When the sky turned orange in 2020, my wife and I were just done. Also, there's something to be said for living in a place with four seasons, and a sense of time passing by.
For highly-specialized engineers and researchers, there’s often only a tiny handful of companies they could work for that offer jobs in their specialties. For example, if you’re a compilers expert, there are only so many companies that hire compiler developers, whether it’s working on a commercial compiler like Microsoft Visual Studio or contributing to an open-source project such as LLVM (Apple is a major contributor). These jobs tend to be concentrated in a few global metro areas.
Additionally, Silicon Valley in particular benefits from having multiple companies in overlapping specialties. Suppose I’m a GPU expert working for NVIDIA, and suddenly I hit a setback and it’s time for a new job. Well, Apple is just a few miles away, and Apple makes GPUs and NPUs, and so I’d have a shot at working for Apple.
Contrast that with people living in areas with little diversity among tech companies. For example, Intel recently laid off a ton of engineers working near Portland, Oregon. There are few alternative technical employers in the region, especially in the specialties Intel focused on in Portland. Those laid-off engineers are facing the prospects of pivoting to a different tech specialty with more employment opportunities, competing for remote jobs at a time when so many companies are requiring their employees to return to the office, or relocating from Portland, which is massively disruptive and can potentially be very expensive. Some may be forced to retire early.
Silicon Valley may be insanely expensive and ultra-competitive, but it also has critical mass, which is vital for highly-specialized engineers and researchers.
I think the same can be argued for global investment banks. All of their important offices are in six cities globally: New York (Manhattan), London, Tokyo, Hongkong, Singapore, and Sydney. All other locations pale in comparison. Probably 1% of headcount (sales, trading, i-bankers) is responsible for 99% of revenues. There is a reason why investment banks are all crowded into very tall buildings in the same six cities: They are trying to access those "1% people". I see the same for tech clusters around the world. (For tech, I guess that less than 5% of staff generate most of your important intellectual property.) There is a reason why Oracle stays in Silicon Valley instead of moving to Montana or Oklahoma were real estate and salaries would be much cheaper!
There are plenty of other cities with enough job options that isn't something you only get in the bay area.
for the intel emplopees I doupt there is anyone else in the us who needs them. Maybe one or two to a military contactor but most have to find a new spectialty. I wish them luck. Fortunately specalists are mostly easy to retrain.
I think it is a mix between power play and real-estate. During Covid and late-Covid, management had to let people wfh/remote, and companies were either mass-hiring or mass-layoffs. Insecure management felt like they had their "power" stripped away, and now between the uncertain economy and some being embolden due to the current potus admin, they want to "put workers in their place".
One of my coworkers is a contractor for a local IT/engineering firm, and another client recently lost one of their principle engineers due to him refusing to RTO and quit. Now the VPs he reported under are bad-mouthing him, saying he was "never any good", "screwed everything up", and "not a team player" - which everyone else knows is BS. The employees are just keeping their heads down trying not to get noticed - morale is bad. Management has even noticed and reversed their recent more formal dress code for a Jeans (and a Food Truck once a month) Friday. Needless to say no one is impressed.
In addition to the other comments (yes, very much a powerplay) it is also likely that employers simply realized remote work is a huge perk they had not accounted for, and RTO is simply a means of renegotiating:
The video presents a compelling theory that post-Covid employers realized that employees CAN be productive remotely, but also put a pretty high premium on being able to do so -- studies show employees are willing to take a hit to bonuses, pay and promotions to keep that perk.
So the current coordinated RTO push is basically a renegotiation of salaries to account for that perk, especially now that it is very much an employer's market... which, BTW, is also the outcome of another very coordinated effort across the industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192092
>studies show employees are willing to take a hit to bonuses, pay and promotions to keep that perk.
That doesn't seem surprising for software. If I can make 300k remote or 400k in the office, that 100k tbh has dimishing returns on my life satisfaction. And 300k total comp is a ton off money in the first place.
Good point. I think a couple things are possible here:
1. They can't outright tell employees "we just realized you were getting a better deal than we bargained for, so now we are re-negotiating." Kind of like they couldn't tell us "you had too much of a good run during Covid and ZIRP, so now sit down," and instead did the layoffs. So they have to couch it in other terms like collaboration and watercoolers. I suspect most RTO policies will have some flexible language to the effect of "existing remote employees can figure it out with their managers," and part of that would be a renegotiation.
This is not without precedence: a similar thing that happened during the height of post-Covid remote work was that employees moved to very low-cost locations, so most BigTech (and other) companies then instituted pay bands that depended on your location. To be fair, they were still very generous salaries for the locations in question, but the reasoning they used was "our pay is competitive relative to the market, and your market just changed." Those must have been some fun conversations for managers but they happened and most employees accepted.
BTW a common argument then was "how does my location matter as long as my output provides the same value." Employers interpreted that as "Hmm, location doesn't really matter, so why not pay somebody across the world who can provide the same value at a fraction of the cost."
2. They are not interested in direct renegotiations and the RTO wave is still part of a "silent" layoff, which also has the side-effect of depressing salaries. Those who remain will be less likely to ask for raises, or be more willing to renegotiate to get back their remote perks. Those looking for new jobs will naturally enter a negotiation phase if they get an offer.
I know of a certain large company I will not name that is sending people back to office while also having a huge percentage of staff augmentation consultants living outside of the US. So you can find teams that have two people in the office, working side by side with another 10 people in the team that are remote, and interacting with teams that might be a 7, 8 timezones away.
You can imagine how well those people feel about RTO, and how it helps their collaboration.
Not short sighted if _that_ is the goal. Maybe it's just to cut off people they have overhired during the pandemic. Maybe they just need fresh faces without costly layoffs
C suites are committed to spending as much as possible on real estate
Executives often own the real estate and lease it back to the company. From Steve Ballmer to the owner of the tiny 85 person company I last worked at, it’s not uncommon.
So, yeah, there’s often some financial incentive there.
Wasn't that one of the (many) dodgy things about wework under the original founder? Something about him buying the buildings and then having wework lease them from him?
How that guy didn't end up on the receiving end of a load of criminal charges...
Several years before the pandemic I was forced to move several states away after my local office was shutdown and the company was looking to force everyone to a few larger offices. It didn’t make any sense. Within my little 10 person team, we had people in 5 states and at least 2 counties, spanning multiple time zones. I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day. I saw very little point to being in the office. If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office. The whole thing was madness.
I do see the value in meeting people face-to-face, but I also think they could be done with the occasional company event. I have to imagine having a few events where people can meeting and build some rapport is cheaper than maintaining offices year round.
If by "on the phone" we mean "in a voice and/or video call", I was in a similar situation to the OP. I'm a programmer.
RTO made no sense for our very geographically distributed team, but the mandate came down anyway. Most of us were staring down the barrel of a multi-hour commute to hot-desk in a notably overcrowded office with underprovisioned Internet service to execute the task of being on the phone all day, every day with a very geographically diverse set of colleagues.
> I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO
same reason some people think "professionalism" is about wearing smart shoes. While these sorts will never admit it to themselves, you are there to make them feel important. What you actually do is secondary, which is why they pay more attention to bullshit like presenteeism, than they do your work.
Man, if I could get the same level of attention on my PRs over the course of my career as I do about being occasionally late, then that'd be great.
My employer is currently mandating a 2 day per-week RTO for all employees within 50 miles of a major office, but in my case, even if they wanted to, they'd be unable to force a return to a 5 day arrangement.
My commute time has more than doubled since they closed and sold my office for a hefty sum of money. As a result of multiple offices converging to one, there are insufficient seats for the number of employees actually assigned to my office; hence, "hotdesking".
I'd wager that maybe a third of the total employees assigned to the office could be present at any one point in time, so unless they purchase some additional properties, we're at a stalemate with the twice a week RTO. Most days over 90% of the desks, sometimes over 99% are taken in the building, requiring reservation weeks in advance through a seat reservation app.
I have no direct teammates in the office and no two members of my 10 person team work in the same office (or state).
I find this idea that there is a 'CEO RTO mania' to be absurd; if WFH was just as good for the company, and more attractive to employees, we should see a boom in WFH-first companies, which does not seem to be happening. Instead, it seems like CEOs see RTO as a way of getting rid of 'slackers', preventing people from multi-tasking while 'working', and in some cases increasing 'teamwork'.
In any case, it makes sense to have either a WFH organization, or an in-person one, but the mixed cases appear to be a friction-filled mess.
> Instead, it seems like CEOs see RTO as a way of getting rid of 'slackers'
"Seems" is an interesting word, because if even you can't locate a rational motive, whilst attempting to apologise for RTO, and are just left making some guesses, then what am I supposed to infer except that this whole thing is based on suspicion, groupthink and anxiety?
"The data is clear", trumpets Microsoft in their internal email. Then why will they not divulge it?
It resembles the same kind of social contagion as the AI usage mandates we see - also completely meritless
You seem to be demanding some proof of the RTO side, which is a reversion to the mean, while providing none for your own side. I see and hear people talking about all the non-work things they due while being paid, and am unsurprised that their managers suspect a negative impact on productivity.
If people aren't getting their work done, then they should be having discussions with their manager that eventually lead to pip or firing if not resolved. If they are getting their work done... Who cares if I do a "non work thing" at a "work time"?
In an agile world with an infinite backlog there's no such thing as being done with work. If you could be working on more work things during work time, they probably want that. Maybe you don't like that but c'mon now. It's clearly what they're after.
Then maybe it doesn't need to be done on a strict work/non-work schedule everyday? If one is an hourly employee, then sure, they should be doing work things when on the clock... but if they are salaried, part of that is not having to clock in and out to switch between work and non-work tasks, and not being a strict work/non-work schedule.
In at least one case it wasn’t released by management because it was absurdly embarrassing. Productivity compared between 2019 and 2023 had statistics similar to the following; average yearly CLs decreased from approximately 70 to under 10, significant revisions pushed in comparable products changed from 26 to 4, meeting time increased by a multiple, email volume decreased similarity. All this with significant increases in seniority and pay among the average employee. Contrapositive scenarios argue that there is a huge opportunity cost to the tech efforts from WFH.
"CL" is a Google-ism for a code change ("change list"). What we'd normally refer to as a pull request I suppose. Googlers like to think the whole world is in on their lingo, but CL is a very unusual acronym outside the Googlosphere.
So they are seriously saying that Google developers on average went from about 70 PRs per year to less than 10 PRs per year when working from home? That seems such an absurdly large decrease that it's hard to believe.
After an initial few-month adjustment period after the shelter-in-place orders my all-remote team at $DAYJOB performed no worse than they had pre-pandemic [0] through to the period where mandatory RTO started being an active fad. During that multi-year "few or no alternatives" WFH period, we all met or exceeded our goals and milestones. We each received raises and/or promotions each year, demonstrating that the business agreed that we were each individually meeting or exceeding our personal performance goals.
Due to my corporate confidentiality agreements I can't provide you with the documentation to back these claims, but they are a true account of the events.
[0] And often notably better, due in part to our ability to fairly-easily flex our schedule to meet with anyone around the world.
> if WFH was just as good for the company, and more attractive to employees, we should see a boom in WFH-first companies, which does not seem to be happening.
In this economy, you can't even make a company, let alone profess their benefits. This is all intentional.
If/when the economy recovers and funding is flowing around, I predict we will see this huge boom in WFH companies, especially with startups.
Unfortunately, larger corps are seeing "WFH" as yet another attempt to offshore as much labor as possible. I can't guarantee after this ebb that top tech companies will be begging for talent the same way they were last decade.
If WFH is a good deal for both sides (in a particular industry), I would expect new entrants to use it as a competitive advantage against existing businesses (likely hiring away talented staff). I agree that web-tech business formation seems depressed, but WFH should eventually win the day if it is all that advocates say.
I expect WFH will expect, while remaining relatively niche, much like worker co-operatives.
Small companies use it as competitive advantage against existing businesses.
The market is fully captured and you do not win by having better productivity or by being able to attract better people. You win by attracting a lot of capital and by being able to eventually create quasi monopoly. You think hot AI companies are somehow productive? They are in massive looses. Or that all those corporations have super productive workforce? Anyone who worked there knows they dont.
The econ 101 thought experiments are just that - thought experiments about ideal world. They have much less to do with how actual companies operate.
I have been hearing this since the mid 1990s. If this were true, why does Silicon Valley exist at all? Why hasn't it all moved to somewhere cheap in India?
Trump will outright win 2026 if he bans H-1Bs after this RTO charade and neither party would be able to oppose such a ban without fatal public outcry. With India choosing Russia over the US, there would be very little political backlash to wrecking their economy too. Huge unemployed force in the US to fill the gap too.
That is to say, if H-1Bs aren’t banned now, in what seem to be the most favorable possible conditions in history for such a thing, then they’re never getting banned.
Banning H1Bs and RTO does not stop companies from simply opening an office in Bangalore and hiring thousands of people there. That's what my employer did.
100% this. remote work is great for some people, but it's definitely taken advantage by a others. And those who take advantage ruin it for everybody. I literally have friends who have bragged about how good their mouse jiggler is.
If a manager can’t tell if an employee is doing their job or not, they deserve to get bilked by an overemployed person. I can’t care at all about what some other person is doing or not doing unless it directly affects my ability to do my job.
Should we also ban sick leave because a few people call in sick when they gasp are not actually sick?
It keeps your Slack/Teams/etc. status as online. These apps will display your status as away if they detect that the computer appears idle (i.e. no mouse/keyboard inputs).
Are there really managers to constantly look at their report’s online presence indicator to determine if they’re being productive or not? What if they’re whiteboard or having an ad-hoc conversation that RTO advocates value so much?
It’s less about gaming metrics and more about keeping up appearances. The sort of person who uses a mouse jiggler is constantly absent from their computer to a degree that anyone who interacts with them would implicitly notice “huh, this person is literally never online” versus “this person takes a while to respond to messages, they must be busy.”
The platforms give reports to managers on idle time. If the manager is lazy and uses just that as an indicator of if someone is working or not then it's an easy metric to game.
Yeah, WFH doesn't work because you can't smell each other over the network. We can transmit video and audio, but so far we can't replicate touch and smell over Zoom calls. Now, touch is obviously not needed, because touching your coworkers is against policy, but smell is really important. As the esteemed researcher Mya S. Smith has shown, people who work emit a specific pheromone, known as the "Busy Efficient Employee" pheromone, or BEE pheromone for short. When a person smells another person's BEE pheromone, that signals their brain to focus on work and they themselves start emitting BEE pheromones too. The end result is a hive of bustling BEEs, delivering productivity, synergy, collaboration, and making line go up! This is also why open-office plans are so important to maximise productivity - it is the easiest way to make sure BEE smell is dispersed to every corner of the office. BEE also makes employees very happy to stay late in the office and work overtime without asking for additional pay.
Don't laugh, but in my org we have a bi-annual "Hive Week" where all Product/Tech (two sub-orgs) bring all the 'bees' home to Office Central for a week of, um, collaboration?
This assumes that executives are all perfectly rational beings and so wouldn't do anything based on personal feeling or beliefs. Sadly, this is not true.
I don't think there have ever been many ‘perfectly rational’ business (or governmental) leaders; the successful ones are just ‘sufficiently rational’. In fact, some business leaders are probably instituting RTO for irrational reasons, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad move for most in-person-based businesses.
I think there are a large number of competent but mostly checked-out engineers who will consistently work just enough to not get fired. If you want more productivity, you could raise the bar and fire a lot of people, but this also sucks and it creates a "hunger games" culture like at Amazon or Meta. I think a lot of those people actually will do more work if you make them sit in an office for 8 hours a day, since they have nothing better to do and there's immediate social pressure to work (unlike in their homes which presumably have many more pleasant activities available).
This isn't obvious to people who are highly disciplined and intrinsically motivated, since they actually get more done in the quiet environment of their home. But some people need the structure and social pressure of an office to get them to work. Your strategy could be "only hire highly disciplined and intrinsically motivated people", but you'll have to compete with everyone else for them, and they're expensive and less common than the other type. It's also hard to test for in an interview.
If you're really exceptional, they'll quietly let you WFH anyway.
Are they requiring VP approval for zoom meetings? Requiring zoom meetings to be restricted to office network IP addresses?
I’m the kind of employee that would comply, not answer my cell phone and require people to leave voicemails on my desk line, call out people who are multitasking, and actively call out managers who attend meetings via zoom.
RTO with back to back zoom meetings all day is a waste of everyone’s time and energy.
Make management show us the benefit of all this RTO collaboration.
Oh, and I’m done checking email and teams after hours. Not safe to do so while driving.
I've been wondering what this really means. So I've been actively observing our open office recently. As far as I can sus out, it's the phenomenon where enough people are subject to conversations they weren't invited to, that someone will always step in and steer obviously wrong/uninformed conversations.
As an operating theory, it also explains why management wants us to make more use of the large slack channels. I've previously made the joke that slack is just the din of an open office for remote workers, and, well, I guess that is the literal deliberate intent.
Sounds like Dell. Michael Dell owns a lot of commercial real estate, especially around main campus hq. More employees in the office, better returns on his commercial real estate.
How does that make sense? "Now that my employees don't need to occupy the space all the time, rent out (possibly parts of) the office for even more $$$" would be how I'd think if I were in his shoes.
Around Dell campus in Austin is a Home Depot, a hotel, a Chili’s, a strip mall with various shopping outlets and what not. You can walk there from the front door. The idea is that all the employees can walk there for lunch, they will buy things on the way home, it’s just extending economic foot traffic to the tenants of Michael Dell’s commercial properties. Now they won’t go out of business! More money for Mr Dell!
This is my theory at least. The foot traffic has increased greatly since the RTO mandate
That’s absurd - the guy’s worth $130B, you think he cares about the not-even-pocket-change that would come from owning the land that a Twin Peaks is on?
Dell’s RTO is purely a silent downsizing.
Board members run scams on stakeholders all the time.
I know of a CEO who is CEO of multiple companies and tells employees of one company (big one with many stakeholders) to work on stuff from his other smaller companies.
I think part of it is that you don't get to feel the power on Zoom meetings. People coming to your office, or lining up for you in conference room ... that's would feel nice and give you sense of importance.
That said, if I was a manager and spend all day on meetings, I'd probably like to be in office as well and see people in person (not necessarily because of feeling important but just that I don't really like online meeting in general). As an IC, I goto office and then do all my meetings online anyway, so feels kind of pointless.
Come join GM (formerly Cruise) ADAS org. We are hiring. Work is pretty cool at every level from kernel and drivers to userspace linux to frameworks, to ML. And, as long as you are >50 mi from detroit, you are going to be fully remote. Pay is good. People are good.
Jobs are posted on GM's jobs site, or reach out to me, if you'd like, and i'll connect you to the right people.
I read things like this and wish that when I was doing my masters at OMSCS I had focused more on ML. What I wouldn't give to work in a shop that was actually building something cool.
There is plenty of non-ML work to do. Drivers do not write themselves, bringup does not do itself, scripts that glue it all together do not write themselves, schematics do not review themselves :)
Kernel and drivers currently, hoping to move lower level to MCUs soon (i like that world more). My contact info is in my profile here, feel free to email. GM does not (as far as i know) have referral bonuses so i have no reason to oversell it :)
> An RTO mandate is also an excellent thing for a CEO to show investors they are doing, if they are not making money and lack better ideas.
I think of Jeffrey Pfeffer's "social contagion" arguments a lot — first with regards to layoffs[^1], but increasingly also to RTO policies and tracked AI use.
It seems very unlikely execs (esp. in small organizations) are taking the time to read and seriously evaluate research about RTO or AI and productivity. (Frankly, it seems much less likely than them doing serious modeling about layoffs.) At some point, the "contagion" becomes a matter of "best practices" — not just a way to show investors what you're doing, but part of the normal behavior shareholders expect.
And for each CEO, those shareholders are mostly the same people.
It's easy to get sucked into thinking this is just the way the world works but really we've just enshrined a local and temporal phenomenon. Layoffs aren't a physical law. There are places and times where this would not happen.
Let me put my investor hat on: hiring at the top and firing at the bottom is a predictable inefficiency and represents a CEO failing at their responsibilities. You don't get to be a CEO and claim ignorance of market cycles.
Just how software engineers are in the hacker news thought bubble you have the VC and CEO thought bubble. It roughly goes like this: Someone has some productivity or whatever problem and RTOs. That costs money, they lose people, so they can’t later admit it was a wash or a net negative. So they go on Twitter or LinkedIn and trumpet how great their hardcore 996 RTO is going. Now others see this and fomo kicks in. They start their own RTO which they are then again highly incentivized to report as successful. Rinse and repeat.
A previous company I worked at has a satellite office with one single employee, and mandates office 3 days a week.
The excuse is that “people in bigger offices will feel bad if we open an exception”, so they’re spending a few thousand a month on real estate to make some poor sod miserable.
Well every company just happens to be undertaking RTO at the same time so it seems to be above the exec level. I’ve seen hypotheses on here that city councils are putting on pressure to boost their local economies and another that boards of directors are pushing this as the last chance to layoff->outsource before H-1Bs are banned. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t appear to stem from innovative or independent executive thought.
They personally know the high exetutives in their area (not always c level). Probably the executive is knocking on doors for their political campaign. Between asking what the company wants they point out things the city wants.
> I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO
It's because although many people do work well in RTO, the vast majority don't. And the various TikTok videos showing "Day in the life of a remote worker" didn't help the cause either. I worked at a fully remote company during the pandemic and trying to get people online was almost impossible. They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them and it was one of the most frustrating experiences in my career.
I love working in the office, mainly for the social aspect and free food, but I need to find remote work for personal reasons. And I'm about 2 years too late because almost no one in Big Tech is allowing remote work anymore.
> trying to get people online was almost impossible. They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them
I don't understand why this is such a problem. I've even heard CEOs complain about this, about their direct reports. Child, if someone is AWOL on their job and they're blocking you, ring their boss. And if you're the boss, hold them to account. Why do so many orgs need a steamroller to level the flower beds.
That's because this isn't actually a thing that's happened. I've seen plenty of remote employees fired for not being available during business hours. The idea that we need mass RTO to handle a few problem employees is silly.
And if a coworker is refusing to speak with you on the system that the company provides you to speak with them, why haven't you complained to your manager (or your manager's manager) about the clear and obvious blocker to getting your work done?
One of the following is true: OP is the biggest doormat in the world, the company OP works for is incredibly dysfunctional and cannot be saved, or OP's story could be found in the "Things That Never Happened" Jeopardy category.
Yeah there is this big lie that most people work the same amount when they have a ton of distractions and can slack off whenever. Not my experience at all. Nobody wants to lose their WFH so everyone pretends productivity didn't change. If what was true you'd never see this RTO push. Offices cost money!
I'd like to ask these CEOs, for people which are taking advantage of the system, why are they not let go? Could it be that management often have no clue how much value each employee brings to the team? Is RTO being mandated to avoid facing that uncomfortable truth?
Things which might be contributing to the RTO in my opinion:
1. Showing up. Practically speaking, when you're at home, you can do whatever you want (sleep, watch TV, work sometimes), while delivering stellar result for the company, but when you're in the office there is a chance you will deliver your stellar results and additionally contribute more, because you literally can't watch TV and take a nap.
2. Some leaders thrive in the presence of others. This is how they get their energy, receiving compliments about how awesome they are, noticing how people are respecting them while they walk around the office and so on. If one of them asks their team to return to the office, similar leaders might envy them when they boast about how much cooler their meetings feel now with five people in the room and sharing their meetings on the LinkedIn.
3. Work style of leadership. If you have noticed VP+ and C levels usually try to get to know each other on a personal level, they attend each others personal events. They work in this way, and they expect to see those same people in the office, because for them, their current network for work and life is same. So they like to see their 'friends' in the office as much as possible. Then naturally, these leaders translate mandate to their reports without context (e.g. their reports don't attend their personal life events, and they are not in their friend network)
> ...when you're in the office there is a chance you will deliver your stellar results and additionally contribute more, because you literally can't watch TV and take a nap.
I see you've never seen many Silicon Valley software companies. Couches and comfortable chairs are a not-infrequent sight in the trendy open-plan offices, as are folks sleeping, reading, or otherwise slacking off atop them.
it's not about missing amenities, it's about pressure from your peers and additional eyes in the office to make you work.
At home you can literally spend whole day in front of TV and work a little, in the office you can as well watch TV, but not consistently, every day for full day.
> it's not about missing amenities, it's about pressure from your peers and additional eyes in the office to make you work.
I agree. Though, you seem to have missed the part of my statement where I said "[It is a not-infrequent sight to find] folks sleeping, reading, or otherwise slacking off atop [the company-provided couches and comfortable chairs in the office].".
Add to that the fact that it's bloody hard for a casual onlooker to distinguish "doing real research on the Internet" from "fucking off on one's computer", and also the fact that heading out for a long lunch or coffee/smoke break to "talk strategy" [0] with a coworker is a common activity in the office, and you end up with a lot of tacitly-company-sanctioned fucking off on company time. Like, a staggering amount.
Perhaps the companies you've worked for have all been merciless results-focused taskmasters and the situations I'm describing are entirely alien to you. If that's the case, then -for you and your coworkers- absolutely nothing relevant would change in an all-WFH environment.
[0] Read as "shoot the shit where noone can overhear"
I find the opposite to be true. If I’m at home I better push a commit, because otherwise people will think I’m slacking off. If I’m in the office and visibly in front of my computer however, I can be doing anything at all and I’d still be considered productive.
The executive class is entirely based on personal branding. If you're not changing anything, it's like being a TikTok influencer without posting any new videos. It doesn't matter what you post really, and often the more controversial you are the better. If you play your cards right, you're not an "idiot" for making the company worse, you're a "bold and innovative thought leader".
You often see the same thing from ambitious managers. Aka, "managers gonna manage".
The other part of the equation is pure politics and PR, which at least does provide some real value to the company (if only temporarily, and at long-term net negative). Amazon made it pretty clear that their RTO was all about maintaining their relationship with politicians.
I hate when people mention "watercooler chats" - not you, of course, but the clueless leadership/HR people that come up with this. Last time I heard it, it was: "the best ideas sometimes come from a watercooler chat, so we need to have people in the office".
I've worked in offices for decades. While every now and then I'd see watercooler chats that were related to work instead of sports/bitching/weather, they never remotely compared to "ad-hoc whiteboarding chats" or "team area chats". Most Engineers I know, myself included, need focus and a space for impromptu conversations with a group of Engineers, preferably away from PMs and salespeople.
If the people advocating "watercooler chats" really wanted to make Engineers productive, they would kill open floor offices and give Engineers privacy for long spontaneous technical conversations with other Engineers.
My employer has never allowed remote work and likely never will. They have private offices for all developers and insist on the unmeasurable value of in person work.
I don't love it, but I at least respect they are upfront about it and are consistent vs flip flopping and impacting people's lives unexpectedly.
“collective wisdom” is basically a polite euphemism for groupthink and given that c level folks are all taking the same mba/sigma/cthulu worship courses it’s not surprising.
In our case we're still hybrid, but unlike before when everyone was in the office, your lunch hour all of a sudden counts against you. They want you in the building a full 8 hours, and despite otherwise being remote, you cannot make up any hours.
I miss when before COVID firms were fine with flexing hours, now it seems they want to be draconian.
I was drastically more productive as a remote software engineer. I have severe insomnia and for some ungodly reason the later hours are my most productive. You wont get that productivity from me if I'm in an office a full 8 hours, I'm NOT working overtime.
My theory is it's just about exerting arbitrary control over employees.
I personally can buy that there are limited productivity benefits to working in person together, but a) we don't see the benefit of that productivity, and b) it comes at enormous personal cost to employees.
A not so small group of people being over-employed or never available or just not pulling their weight tainted the whole thing.
Also honestly once a % of us were back in the office having to talk to remote people over a video call and waiting for the lag and having them speak over you because of the lag or get confused because they can't hear the chat we can all hear in the room builds animosity towards them.
Can probably list 2 people I'm happy to work with remote but the number I worked with who took the piss with it is in the double digits.
I work at a company that tracks productivity in many ways and even the screentime of each employee.
I'm quite sure remote employees or even hybrid employees on their WFH days, spend less time on the screen or doing things productivity trackers track compared to in office colleagues.
Productivity tracker that tracks sport/fashion/travel chats for hours, dozens of smoke breaks and employees shitting every 16 minutes – very advanced tech.
Productivity tracker that tracks the fiftieth complete train-of-thought derailment from the fiftieth loud-ass boisterous conversation initiated by the sales guys across the room from me in the exposed-concrete-from-floor-to-ceiling open-plan office.
I kept myself "in the groove" during those times by reminding myself that Moloch is sustained by this kind of energy. If not for Moloch, then for whom? He undergirds our world!
I don’t know how common this is generally, but I know at least one bigtech corporate campus that is surrounded by local businesses that, by and large, happen to be owned by the individuals in senior management at that company. So in that case it’s a classic vested interest.
It’s simple. It comes from the boards of these companies who have investments in corporate real estate. Got to keep the scam going at the expense of worker mental state, environment, and of course control.
This could be chicken or the egg, but I had a team member (that missed office time) for about 3 weeks, at the same time, they dramatically reduced the number of MRs merged and responsiveness on Slack.
I don’t know if her being in the office would have dampened their lack of engagement or if the office was making it worse.
It's because C-level people are extraverted and believe in torturing others to please themselves. As a concept it fits perfectly with the reasoning that you should earn ten times what another employee at your company does.
In office work is an artifact of the boomer generation and gen X. The world has changed its relationship to work and they can’t seem to come to terms with it.
Not sure Gen X are in love with office work, the X'ers I know (and I am one) loooove working from home. We're at the stage in life where we've settled, got spacious-enough houses where we can dedicate some office space, and working from home gives us space to do stuff like a little home improvement in our lunch breaks, or be home for deliveries and tradespeople. Big win for me not having to commute several hours a day. I'm lucky enough to work for a place where there isn't an office to commute to, and I know I've got it good!
As usual though, I'm sure I'm not representative. I was sure it was my generation that was going to put an end to the pointless war on drugs and other such stupid bullshit, yet here we are at peak influence (ages 45-60 approx) and it turns out the people in power in my generation are no different to those who came before. The problem is the kind of people who climb the greasy poles of politics and business.
tl;dr - it ain't generational. Arseholes in charge are always the arseholes in charge.
Collaboration, Water cooler chats it's all bullshit. Cut through the fat and you find C-Suites need to justify the millions being spent on Real estate.
There’s a shit-ton of people working multiple jobs and outsourcing themselves. Everything is SaaS now, so that creates a liability for many larger companies with .gov or healthcare contracts.
Maybe some positions are or feel worthy only when performed in physically social context. Jobs dealing with human problems have this tendency more often than those dealing more with non-human problems.
I work in a large company that mandated 4-day RTO last year. Even taking a completely objetive point of view on the situation leads to the conclusion that something else is needed. We spend our days at our desks, on Zoom calls. People won’t get up to join in person - mostly because the conference rooms are all blocked by “special projects”, but mostly due to the offshoring of positions and distributed workforce post-pandemic. We are all spending valuable time on commutes to do what was possible from home.
Now I suspect the C-suite has noticed the discrepancy between attendance and occupancy, and I fully expect that their solution in this job market to be a 5-days, monitored attendance RTO soon. We are regressing at an alarming rate.
We should know by now that all these RTO initiatives are not grounded in any reasonable logistics nor financial reasoning. Right now all of tech is in cut mode, and RTO's are a great way to do layoffs without calling them layoffs. Note that when Google got "too many" people RTO'ing, they did layoffs anyway.
If your office does try to make things stricter, it's another layoff attempt. I don't think it will work, because at this point we're in a "sticky" job market; those out of work are facing some of the stiffest markets in decades, those in work are holding on for deal life.
This theory is often-quoted but doesn't make much sense. Big tech including Microsoft already did multiple rounds of layoffs. Why not just do another round?
If you quit (because of, say, RTO) then you quit. It's a fairly standard deal between you and your employer.
If you get laid-off, employer has to give you a severance package for any number of reasons (local labor laws, agreement with the union, corporate PR). This is not a standard deal and is, simply put, more expensive than if the employee just quit of their own accord.
In both cases, employer gets the benefit of reduced head count.
Market dynamics. Everyone is doing some form of RTO now. If you're the only RTO place, then hiring and retaining the people you want will be more difficult. It's a big game of chicken.
Hard to say. Different regions will have different "tools" to use. For a large round, it's probably because they need to cut a lot of staff ASAP or because they have the offshoring ready to replace them. Paying them off is best in those situations.
If you need to fine cut a few particular teams then poking it with an RTO is better than giving them a severance package. This is all conjecture, but that's probably what those up top are considering with every move.
It’s just another tool in the downsizing toolbox. Also traditional layoffs and RTO “layoffs” don’t have to be mutually exclusive, both can easily occur at the same time
you're still avoiding the question. Why does Microsoft decide RTO "layoffs" are the right tool for 2025, but not 2022-2024? Many companies used both tools at the same time. Why did Microsoft wait until 2025?
Because it's politically expedient. They know the political climate is currently hostile to them requesting H1Bs while doing layoffs. RTO lets them get another round of layoffs without calling them layoffs and avoid the bad PR.
Microsoft compensates less than other top tech companies and remote work aligns with their lifestyle-first approach to compensation. Being on the early end of RTO would have worked against the perception that Microsoft is "the tech company with good work life balance," but now that most other companies have done it first they can get away with it as just them following the industry trend.
Which big tech companies provide severance for those who decide to leave because of RTO? It's not normally framed as "declining", either - you're simply expected to be there starting at a specific date, and if you're not then you're basically not performing your assigned work duties. You don't get to "decline".
> If you get laid-off, employer has to give you a severance package for any number of reasons (local labor laws, agreement with the union, corporate PR). This is not a standard deal and is, simply put, more expensive than if the employee just quit of their own accord.
I don't think this is true in the US. And severance packages are cheaper than you think. Most people only get a couple of months of pay.
But you tend to lose your most capable employees when you create a bad/undesirable/etc work environment. I think people are attributing malice where the intent is merely...not incompetence, but it's what everybody else is doing. People forget that business goes through fashionable phases just like everything else. Microsoft fell victim to idiotic trends (stack-ranking, AI, etc) just like everybody else has.
Layoffs are expensive and destroy morale of those that remain (to say nothing of those that have to leave). When people suspect layoffs are coming, all work comes to a screeching halt around the event.
Getting people to quit is much cheaper (no severance if that exists, and your unemployment insurance costs don't go up).
When I was a teenager I played World of Warcraft for 5 years. During that time we did "raids" where 40 people have to pay attention and communicate, sometimes for longer than 8 hours, with people from around the globe.
If teenagers can do it, adults can do it. Period. And if they can't, skill issue I guess.
I’m absolutely shocked that people think this example is a good comparison here. If only our jobs were exactly as stimulating as a video game, and the outcomes didn’t matter at all - then maybe we could use WOW raids as evidence.
Mostly because it’s a lot of fun to get in one room and play together. They’ve pretty consistently said that they’re not even sure that it’s a net benefit for winning.
I have a more moderate view on RTO elsewhere in this post, so I'm not someone who things WFH is always the best approach. But for now, I have yet to see any study suggest that RTO is more productive across the board all the time.
I suspect the C-suite has noticed the discrepancy between attendance and occupancy
The solution is to downsize your physical plant.
My company has a ton of faults, but every time one of these stories hits the HN front page, I thank God that my company remains committed to work from home. So much so that it recently sold its last building, and the few dozen employees whose roles require them to be physically present have been relocated to a much smaller building on a train line.
The work-from-home policy comes very heavily from the top. I suspect it's due to two things:
1. We have no shareholders. So the C-levels don't feel the need to engage in performative monkey-see-monkey-do antics so they have something to talk about during investor calls.
2. The management is extremely female-heavy. If I had to guess, I'd say it's 4:1 female:male. And the biggest beneficiaries of work from home are caregivers, who are statistically more likely to be women.
While I believe that 90% of the "work-life balance" speeches that come out of our HR department are a bunch of bullshit, I also believe that when it comes to work-from-home, management loves it not just for the massive cost savings they say it's provided.
If I returned to the office I'd be working with teammates in India, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, and Delaware and none of them would be in my office. I'd be essentially working remote from an office that I commute to. The worst of all worlds.
Funny/sad story, my friend works for the government making maps for watersheds. Elon comes along and forces people to go back to office. She’d been remote since she was hired 3+ years ago. So suddenly she’s assigned to the closest gov office near her, which is an ICE OFFICE in SF, about an hour commute from where she lives (each way). She’s massively against the goings-on at ICE and asks for an alternate spot. She now has to commute 1:15 each way to an animal holding office in SFO. She is currently zooming into work each day from an office full of transient animals and no humans related to anything she does, all in the name of government efficiency. Needless to say, her work efficiency has diminished greatly.
This is exactly the problem with a lot of the RTO push..
We are more geographically spread out than ever, and companies usually have, at best, 1/2 the conferences rooms required to actually collaborate properly.
So in-office days are spent sitting in a big noisy open floor plan, wearing noise cancelling headphones trying to get work done.. in between producing lots of noise yourself on zoom.
The other having-it-both-ways I see from employers is that in the last 5.5 years of COVID most people I know have expanded their work days to take calls earlier and later for timezone alignment purposes. This was tenable to expand your work day 1-2 hours when you had no commute. Now they think they can get the extra hours out and force a commute.
My wife spends many of her in-office days dialing into 7:30/8am calls, heading into the office late enough to have tons of train delays, and rushing to meet the deadline to get the swipe in so it counts.
It's worse now, but complaints about offices as working spaces were constant pre-pandemic too. Complaining about it then made you seem a bit... wet.
But now the highest levels have brought the productivity benefits of RTO into their wheelhouse. So making the offices suitable also shouldn't be a responsibility punted to a relatively minor position.
Same thing happened where I worked, though that was mostly from what I heard from coworkers since I maintained my WFH status. It's all CEO theater designed to layoff folks while also forcing people who RTO to take an effective pay cut. People need to recognize that and demand more from where they work, whether it's in the form of unionizing or otherwise.
There is always an answer to unionizing and other demands: hiring freeze plus offshoring overseas. Eventually even unionized people will be replaced with offshore buddies.
Offshoring always ends in disaster, companies have tried this time and time again but the end result is an awful product that requires more money to fix than they needed to make it in the first place.
And that also doesn't solve the problem of dealing with institutional knowledge loss if you decide to aggressively cull employees trying to unionize. In either scenario the solution is for union workers to become even more aggressive with their demands and force companies to acquiesce.
Offshoring might frequently be a disaster. On the other hand, Microsoft and the rest of FAANG and other large tech companies have had overseas development centers staffed by full fledged FTEs for many years now with, as far as anyone can tell, success. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any reason they couldn't expand those.
I'm not sure if it actually is working out, or if the companies outsourcing are just absorbing the inefficiency.
Every outsourcing effort I have seen at some of these massive companies has been pretty tragic, where the best that can be said is now there is a shit but cheap option to be used where the quality doesn't matter.
This gets repeated across all the entrenched players simultaneously, while the product quality stagnates or declines (but the stock goes up).
I'm guessing that there is a difference between "offshoring, while still having the offshore people picked and employed by you" (let's call it "pure offshoring") and "offshoring and outsourcing to a local company" (let's call it "outsourcing to offshore").
With pure offshoring, you do have control over who you pick, what their mode of work is, whom to fire, etc.
With outsourcing to offshore, the local company hires people, usually on the cheap, to only just fullfill your contract and no more. If people underperform, you may complain, and maybe they'll be moved to a less prominent and visible role, or maybe they'll be shuffled to the next customer of theirs. So things will be bad, because it is not in the interest of the local company to do one iota more than necessary. And you'll still have to have your own QA, architects, etc., to make sure you at least get what you paid for.
when most of the people offshore are employees it can work. The biggest thing is you need to start with good managers there who hire good people. In india good engineers are paid more than their peers in germany, but that is the price you pay for the quality you need for good people. If you don't hire good people you can get plenty of terrible people for really cheap, but the results will be poor quality. Take your pick.
Is it? If it is a disaster , why there are millions of IT folks employed in offshoring locations?
Only the cheapest offshoring ends in disaster. Cheap contractors from TCS will fail you. Open your own dev center, hire few thousands engineer there - a road to success. And yes, no one will actively complain about RTO policies there.
Offshoring can be a success, but because most companies do it for cost reasons, they focus on cost over everything. Outsourcing to India can be cheaper than setting up shop in the western world for relatively equivalent results, but most companies will head to the cheapest outsourcers in India AND not set up the relatively expensive process to deal with quality control, timezone issues, etc. In other words, it's usually driven by bean counters and not engineers.
This is why I stay at a company that’s 100% remote even though I’m sacrificing many thousands of dollars a year in additional income. I just can’t go back for so many reasons. But the most frustrating one in my opinion is exactly what you said, that all of this can be done remotely.
Executives have done all manner of things which reduced productivity. Hoteling alone must have cost billions in lost focus.
They’re suspicious of work from home because employees like it. If they were concerned about productivity they’d make deals where you can work from home but have to work 10% more hours or something to make up for whatever imagined productivity was lost.
If you are so miserable, are you looking for a new job that will allow WFH? I think that is the solution. Also, did you ask your line manager if you can WFH more often? That is a first step. If they say no, they go and find a new job.
If the company enforces RTO at least stop using zoom for meetings. If that means offshored employees can't participate then so be it. Let them come to the office.
Office space / real estate owners don't care. It's their plot to increase profits and companies are colluded with them on it. There is no other obvious reason besides may be Big Brother monitoring mentality.
> Microsoft's new approach is the latest sign of the company increasing performance pressure on employees. It has fired thousands of employees deemed low performers this year and introduced a new performance improvement plan meant to exit low performers more quickly.
Claims who? These also sound like typical sketchy headcount reduction tactics.
Also, it's throwing employees under the bus, because the company is tarring them as low performers, at the same time as the company dumps them onto a hostile job market. Those employees should talk to lawyers.
> > Importantly, this update is not about reducing headcount.
MS had to mention that in the memo, because that's what everyone reading it was thinking?
While sketchy and total crap move on MS. What recourse do employees really have?
MS likely consulted with their army of lawyers before pulling this.
Actions might be crappy but not illegal. Not a lawyer but employers are usually allowed to dictate the terms of the employment agreements and requiring someone to go into an office to work can be one of them. Even changing from permanent remote to onsite at a later time seems like another relatively protected decision.
Unless someone somewhere higher up is on the record saying something like “Oh yeah let’s make them come into the office to actually make it really crappy for them so they leave on their own” I doubt any reasonably reliable legal case can be made.
Constructive Dismissal has been brought up in every RTO thread for years, but I've never heard of a case where it worked.
The key to constructive dismissal is that a reasonable person would have to find the new conditions intolerable and it has to constitute some form of discrimination (e.g. not a change in company policy, but a targeted attack that discriminates against you). So given that most people commute to work, you couldn't argue that it was intolerable to be asked to commute to work.
If you wake up one day to an e-mail from your employer that you, and you alone, need to relocate to their new office in a small town in Alaska for no good reason, you'd have a good case for constructive dismissal.
However if the company changes their policy and applies it equally to everyone requiring employees within 50 miles of an office come in (the case with this RTO move) then you don't have a valid case for a constructive dismissal lawsuit.
that's what the severace packages are for. There's not a lot of people being dumped that wouldn't take 3-6 months of pay in advance in exchange for not being able to engage in a length lawsuit with a trillion dollar corporation.
For better or worse, neither of us is a lawyer, but I'm comfortable in saying that the affected people should:
Talk. To. A. Lawyer.
Isn't that better than us random Internet people telling them -- although we think something shitty is going on -- they definitely don't have a case, and they definitely shouldn't talk to a lawyer? (For all we know, an actual lawyer might tell them that they actually do have a case.)
FYI no reasonable lawyer is going to take a constructive dismissal or defamation claim for this case, like some aggressive commenters are instructing people to do.
These aren't winnable claims. If a lawyer did take your case and start billing you for it, they're just milking you for cash until the inevitable dismissal.
This is why the "I'm not a lawyer, but" advice on the internet isn't as benign as it seems. It gives some people false ideas about what lawyers can do for them which leads to a lot of wasted time talking to lawyers at best, or a lot of wasted money on a dead-end case at worst.
Why do people say this? “Talk to a lawyer”. It’s the most useless advice. Okay, you don’t know. That’s fine. Don’t waste everyone’s time. Why just give this content free advice?
Because if you suspect the law does apply to you then you need a lawyer to vet the details. For most this probably doesn't apply, but you have to decide based on the specifics of your situation and those should include details you wouldn't post publically.
also if you are a lawyer or come off as a lawyer giving legal advice and you miss one rare detail that matters for one person you are liable for bad advice. So saying talk to a lawyer is a way to get around that. Talk to a lawyer if you want to know more detail.
I mean I get it. It’s just that unsolicited advice to talk to a lawyer is kind of useless? In this particular case it’s worse than useless because you’ll never get a good lawyer to take this case. It’s like some automated LLM response.
most talks with lawyers do not lead to court. They can give plenty of useful advice in many other situations. Just knowing how to frame things with the next job for example.
now granted it isn't worth it for most of us to bother. However if there is any doubt ten minutes and a few dollars is worth the cost.
Yes a lawyer is going to be able to give you career advice and tell you how to phrase the answer to the question “why did you leave your last job”?
I already knew what to do. Remove any connections from LinkedIn of anyone who knew that I was PIPed. I knew that any employment verification would go through TheWorkNumber and all it would know were dates and comp amount.
It really doesn’t take a lawyer to know what “at will employment” means.
A case for what unless it’s discriminatory. Your employer doesn’t have to justify letting you go - at all.
Even looking at your citation, it shows that constructive dismissal is only actionable if you can show that they made working conditions harder and they were targeting you under a law meant to protect you against discrimination
Companies have been giving employees an ultimatum between “relocate or quit” forever.
Also, in combination with possible constructive dismissal, the company is possibly defaming the employees in a way that predictably adversely affects their ability to gain new employment. And there may be other potential problems that aren't apparent to me, since I'm not a lawyer.
Talking to a lawyer about this is low-effort, low-risk. You get a lawyer's name from friend/family or another kind of lawyer you know, or you call the local bar association referral service (or, if poor, maybe go first to a law school free clinic near you, to see what resources they can point you at). Then you get a free initial consultation with an actual lawyer, who can tell you whether they think you might have a case.
That's all I have to say on this topic.
(Side Note: You might have been discussing this from a standpoint of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, and you want to help more people understand At-Will, for example. I can understand that. But I was discussing this from a standpoint of Don't Screw Over Vulnerable People By Discouraging Them From Talking To A Lawyer When I Think They Should.)
> the company is possibly defaming the employees in a way that predictably adversely affects their ability to gain new employment. And there may be other potential problems that aren't apparent to me, since I'm not a lawyer.
Why is it that the "I'm not a lawyer, but" comments are always giving the worst legal advice?
There is no defamation case anywhere in this situation.
> There is no defamation case anywhere in this situation.
They said they were terminating lots of people for poor performance, while terminating lots of people.
And there's plausible reason to suspect, given the frenzy of headcount reductions going on, that it wasn't actually for poor performance.
> Why is it that the "I'm not a lawyer, but" comments are always giving the worst legal advice?
Why are a couple people on an epic tour de force of commenting, energetically telling people to definitely don't talk to a lawyer about any possible wrongdoing by this company?
I literally just got let go from AWS two years ago in the midst of hundreds of layoffs. Absolutely no one cared why I wasn’t there anymore or even asked. I had four interviews and three offers within two weeks.
Even more relevant, one of my former coworkers at AWS who was now a director at a well known public non tech company knew I was going through the focus -> PIP process and encouraged me to stay until I made it through my next vest, got offered severance and said call him when it happens and if I’m interested he will either make a permanent position for me if possible or at least give me a very lucrative contract. He didn’t even care and he knew I was getting PIPd
I'm glad that worked out for you. In this other case, a company publicly announced that people were being fired for low performance.
Even if the colleagues of a given person knew/suspected that the person was a good worker, everyone else hiring at other companies doesn't, and they heard what the last employer said.
You don’t think that everyone in the industry who hires doesn’t know how these things work?
Absolutely no one who interviews or screen candidates think less of someone who gets laid off these days. There are tens of thousands who have been laid off in the industry since 2022.
I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to say either way. See a lawyer if you're impacted and see what they say. Don't take legal, medical, nor relationship advice from the internet.
It’s getting to a point where it’s like you’re saying that I’m not a physicist but you might need to ask one before you jump off of a 25 story building, you might survive.
Who said anything about defamation? My n=1 experience at BigTech is that they won’t say anything about why an employee left and you don’t even talk to a human to confirm dates of employment. They redirect you to TheWorkNumber (a real website).
I was Amazoned in 2023 and in none of the five interviews I had within the next two weeks did they ever ask why I left Amazon. I did get LinkedIn recommendations from my former managers there - ie not my then current one.
And we are talking about well paid Microsoft employees who are asked to come into the office. Cry me a river these aren’t “vulnerable” low paid wage slaves.
Yes I work remotely and if I had still been working at Amazon when they announced their “field by design” roles were being forced into RTO six months before it happened, I would have been interviewing and taken the pay cut.
>It really doesn’t take a lawyer to know what “at will employment” means.
It takes a lawyer to understand an individual's situation, background, and contract in order to see if this is just a bad but legal hand, or in fact something worth filing against. We don't know every engineer's story that is impacted here.
>Companies have been giving employees an ultimatum between “relocate or quit” forever.
Yes, and severance packages makes it less tempting to try and look into suing.
Were you really confused by “your contract” at any job? I’ve signed 10 over the years and they basically all spell out - how much you are going to get paid, when your start date is and you are an at will employee.
I was also hired by BigTech in 2020 and assigned to a “virtual office” and my position was designated as “field by design” meaning that it was suppose to be permanently remote.
There was nowhere in my contract that I would never be expected to return to office and in fact AWS did tell all of their “field by design” roles that they would have to come into the office by the beginning of the year.
I was already gone by then. Don’t you think you would have heard at least one case of a successful lawsuit by employees of at least one of these companies? Especially the US’s second largest employer?
You think a local lawyer “recommended by a family friend” is going to successfully take on a trillion dollar+ market cap company?
>Were you really confused by “your contract” at any job?
I live in California and many things have changed over the years in terms of labor laws. So yes, I don't know if what I signed is relevant today (e.g. non-competes).
>There was nowhere in my contract that I would never be expected to return to office and in fact AWS did tell all of their “field by design” roles that they would have to come into the office by the beginning of the year.
Okay, and some employees may have argued for those protections in their contract during negotiations. I'm not that high up, but I imagine some MSFT workers in Seattle may be.
> Don’t you think you would have heard at least one case of a successful lawsuit by employees of at least one of these companies?
It may be out there, but we may not have heard of it. I'm not a lawyer, I don't spend my time digging through court cases, and anything I may find may only be regionally valid and not matter to where you or I live.
>You think a local lawyer “recommended by a family friend” is going to successfully take on a trillion dollar+ market cap company?
Sure, that happens all the time in minor cases. You'd be surprised how sloppy offices can be with compliance. There are still cases of discrimination that courts fine to this day.
Again, that's not for me to determine, though. That's for a firm to analyze, accept or reject. I don't know why you're questioning me about a sector I'm not involved in. Ask your "family friend" lawyer to dig up cases for you. They are much better at that than me.
> live in California and many things have changed over the years in terms of labor laws. So yes, I don't know if what I signed is relevant today (e.g. non-competes).
Unless you signed your contract in California before 1872, when you signed your contract, non competes were already illegal in California.
I challenge you to find any citation in any contract written by any BigTech company where legal would ever let them put in a contract that they guarantee that you will never have to work in an office.
> Sure, that happens all the time in minor cases. You'd be surprised how sloppy offices can be with compliance. There are still cases of discrimination that courts fine to this day.
Any company would have their team of lawyers bury your little family lawyer so as not to set a precedent. Do you think that lawyer is going to work pro bono? They are going to charge you for every hour and then not win the case. These people have eight months to find another job.
> Again, that's not for me to determine, though. That's for a firm to analyze, accept or reject. I don't know why you're questioning me about a sector I'm not involved in. Ask your "family friend" lawyer to dig up cases for you. They are much better at that than me
Because anyone who knows how the industry works knows that the entire idea of suing a company because they enforced RTO is foolhardy. What are the chances that these multi trillion dollar companies are making these kind of policies without passing them by their team of lawyers?
>I challenge you to find any citation in any contract written by any BigTech company where legal would ever let them put in a contract that they guarantee that you will never have to work in an office.
Why do you assume I have access to every employee's contract? Have you never negotiated terms?
I don't have someone's direct contract but I worked directly with two people who had very particular stipulations for when and where they can work. One at a medium sized studio who basicallyhelped establish core tech they use to this da. One from a director at big recognizable company. They were both talent who clearly could shop and bid for jobs anytime and anywhere they wanted to.
It's not common, but we're not talking common talent. Anyone can negotiate, what you get in the contract depends on a variety of factors.
> Do you think that lawyer is going to work pro bono?
I don't know. I'll ask them about it the next time we ever meet.
I'm not really a fan of pre-maturely giving up. If I really feel wronged, a consultation isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things.
> What are the chances that these multi trillion dollar companies are making these kind of policies without passing them by their team of lawyers?
Higher than you think. Hanlon's razor applies here.
Again, I'm not sure why you're so against the idea of deferring to an actual expert. At worst you waste a fee hundred dollars and hours of your time. At best, the company was dumb and they settle under the hood so you can at least get a bit more piece of mind.
Because some things are common sense. Instead of wasting time and money chasing windmills and hoping your family lawyer can beat a multi trillion dollar company, you are much better off spending your time and energy looking for another job if you want to work remotely. When I go into “job search” mode which I have done 10 times in 30 years. My focus isn’t on my current or former employee.
Do you think a lawyer would be necessary if your contract outright stated that you never had to go into an office?
Besides that, every single contract I’ve signed said that nothing said outside of the contract is legally binding.
And legal is very (small c) conservative, they aren’t going to go through the trouble of making a special contract for random employee #1256374 everything is very standardized at these companies except for very high level executives. They are “common talent”. You really have a high opinion of BigTech employees if you think they are “special talent”.
I don't know. When a company uses RTO to reduce headcount they usually include all employees, with the expectation that those who live far away from the office will resign instead of relocate.
If I'm reading this right, it only applies to people who already live within 50 miles of the office. Remote-remote employees are exempt.
50 miles is a US government defined "commutable distance" (I was just talking about this at work with a human resources person, but unfortunately I can't recall what agency defined it as such).
An agency may prescribe a mileage radius of not greater than 50 miles to determine whether an employee's travel is within or outside the limits of the employee's official duty station for determining entitlement to overtime pay for travel.
If it is really two hours by a reasonable route then you likely have a case that the commute is unreasonable and you would not have taken the job without them paying moving expenses if it offered that way. Therefore they need to offer moving expenses. I'd ask the boss first as they may have contacts in hr that can handle this.
If they won't offer moving expenses odds are you can convince an unemployment judge this is an unreasonable change in working conditions and so you can collect unemployment. (A lawyer can give more detail)
It is enough to survive if you cut back, hopefully long enough to find a new job.
If it is worth that risk is up to you. I won't call you stupid for not taking it. You can also accept it for the moment and start sending out resumes while working. It will take a little longer but there are other jobs.
There are large offices is nearly every major city in the world. On my team, two are in Canada, one is in Singapore, and another in India. All fully remote.
Just out of curiosity, how much compensation would people be willing to leave on the table in lieu of "Remote" work? (this is different to, how much would you ASK to go from remote to a new in-office job). 10%, 25%, 50%?
I've worked remotely for 5 years now, and there is NO way I would return to an office based job. I even have moved to a small town where there are practically 0 tech jobs; and at this point there's NO way I would relocate for a new job. Maybe it is my age (44), or maybe I am even in a privileged position financially; but at this moment in my life I would rather quit my job if they made me return to office (even for one day a week, as it would mean having to move to wherever the office is). Fortunately I am in a position where I can go several months without a paycheck, and I have some passive income.
This question isn't very revealing because it almost entirely depends on this one variable:
> maybe I am even in a privileged position financially; but at this moment in my life I would rather quit my job
Someone closer to retirement with a lot of savings and low expenses will have a completely different answer than a younger person with low savings and a family.
The second variable it depends on is their current salary. Someone who currently earns a huge number can afford to give up a higher percentage than someone who earns barely enough to make ends meet.
The question becomes a proxy for the person's financial situation and current salary, not their remote work preferences.
This is also a question where people's claims don't match their actions. Similar to every election season when a lot of people declare they're going to move to a different country if their party loses, but the number of people who actually do it is much smaller.
>Someone closer to retirement with a lot of savings and low expenses will have a completely different answer than a younger person with low savings and a family.
Maybe this is the way companies rid themselves of older workers who push back on things. The FIRE movement is huge in tech, and I imagine a not insignificant number of people have RTO as the last straw where they pull the ripcord. Personally, for me? There's no going back. The only way you could get me into the office on a regular basis is if you let me work on rovers at JPL or something.
For myself, I'd love nothing more if I could code part time in retirement, for the rest of my life, but I won't RTO to do it. If I have to leave development behind? So be it.
You got the underlying reason for my question almost in passing:
I've been involved in hiring Software devs from US and LatAm for several years in different management positions. I wondered how feasible would be for say, a company in Mexico to compete on hiring a dev in the USA at a lower cost (normally, a Mexico dev is between 1/3 to 1/2 the price of a US one), by leveraging the value of [allowing] working Remote.
EDIT: Which actually made me think of a crazy idea: A job board called something like "Work for Less", where small companies or companies from overseas offer jobs that have compensations more focused on Quality of Living vs compensation. So for example, a job opening might have "We offer: 70% of your last salary. 3 day weekends, remote work". Or if it is say, a Mexican company, "We offer: 80% of your last salary. Comprehensive relocation help to live/work in a Mexican beach for 4 months a year. Medical Tourism coverage (don't know what this is called, but basically, help in say, taking people to high quality medical places)".
Maybe it is a stupid idea, but at the end of the day, Remote Work is one of several "Levers" for Quality of Life, and although historically the US has focused on monetary compensation, maybe newer generations value other aspects more.
There is also the unknown future. How stable is this remote-pay-discount bargain opportunity? If the company goes bust and you need to RTO, you need to live in a market with employment options.
I’ll give some real world numbers. Right now I make a little over $200K. I am 51, never struck it rich in tech and make the same as former intern I mentored when I was in BigTech between 2020-2023 and when they got back. They got promoted to an L5 (mid level) earlier this year at 25. We both worked in the Professional Services department.
I’ve said no to opportunities that would have paid $250K - 280K that would have required me to relocate and be in an office. I can honestly say there is no amount of money that would convince me to go to an office.
My wife and I already travel extensively, I “retired her” at 44 years old in 2020. We have done the digital nomad thing for a year since then and we are planning to spend a couple of months in Costa Rica next year and be away from home during much of the summer.
I have the freedom to spend a week with my parents and work from there and fly to another city to see my friends and adult sons.
Why do I need more money? I’ve had the big house in the burbs built twice and we sold and downsized from the second one.
I also have a year savings in the bank outside of retirement savings
More money would do absolutely nothing for me if I had to exchange it for remote work except make my life worse in every way.
I couldn’t spend the time with my 81 and 83 year old parents, I wouldn’t have nearly the amount of time with wife, I couldn’t spend months away from home.
Short version: At 51, the value of my time is too important. My wife and I are gym rats, very healthy and I am not willing to trade this time in my life for more money. My health is not going to be better in 5 years statistically. Not that we have any debilitating illness, but no one beats aging.
The tradeoffs would be too great. I’m my parents only child. While they are as healthy as an 83 and 81 year old can be, time catches up with all of us. I’ve enjoyed the past 5 years (Covid times excepted) being able to see them and spend a couple of weeks with them multiple of times a year.
When the time comes that I do need to pack a bag and see about them for an extended period of time, my wife and I can do that. There is no amount of money that I would trade for that.
It’s the same about travel. I wouldn’t give up our travel now and put it off any longer than we already have because of financial and family obligations (raising my two step sons).
What would more money do for me right now? Allow me to travel more? Allow me to get a bigger house even though we already had the big house in the burbs and sold it for twice what we had it built for and downsized to a 1250 square foot condo in a vacation community in Florida where everyone ride uses their home as vacation home.
Nicer cars? We sold both of our cars when we traveled for a year and bought the cheapest new car that we could stand when we settled down.
A better retirement? By the time I retire, we will have traveled to every place we could possibly want to go and plan to go back and forth between our current home and spend extended periods of time in other cities both domestically and internationally. We are experimenting with that now. But in US time zones.
I left an on-site job for a fully remote job, taking about a 35% cut to do so. Literally every aspect of my life improved, including financially.
The financial savings come from 3 things: downsizing to one car and elimination of transport costs; dramatically reduced lunch and coffee expenses; not buying a bunch of stuff to cope with the emotional toll (by far the biggest component).
The savings are even more dramatic if I factor in the opportunity costs of commute time. After accounting for the two way commute time, gas station line time, and vehicle maintenance time, my effective hourly rate working in-office was probably lower than working remote.
> Just out of curiosity, how much compensation would people be willing to leave on the table in lieu of "Remote" work? (this is different to, how much would you ASK to go from remote to a new in-office job). 10%, 25%, 50%?
Where's the office? The bike ride through some parks like my last? A ten minute drive in surface streets? A 20 minute rail ride away? A half hour drive on crowded highways?
I'd go back to the office a bicycle ride away without issue. I like a nice office, and it's nice being able to separate the work space from the home, it's like I gained a room of my home back. I'd probably require a lot of benefits or a good bit more pay to take a job with a long highway commute.
I'd have to do the math on what the commute would cost me in time and financial cost.
I don't own a car. I have no plans to buy one. If I "needed" one for a job, that would be brought up at the salary negotiation. Sorry, I'm not going to pay for a car I don't otherwise need and lose $15K a year for something decent. What a scam!
On the time, well, it just depends on what they're going to pay me. Divide by work hours per year. Add 2 hours a day. Add that to the offer. I don't work for free. I don't travel for free. When I need to fly somewhere I get free ground transport, free meals, free flights, free hotel, but because we put "we're forcing you to travel 10 miles a day for no reason" in a little special box called "expected" we can force you to spend your own salary on it. *Scam*. It's all a big scam. They're subsidizing their bottom line with your time, your money, and your air.
I worked a terrible job in high school because I could walk there. There was no point in going someplace else that paid more because I would've burned all the extra money up in gas.
Based upon the recruiters messaging me, if I gave up my remote job for one that required in-office attendance I would get an immediate 30% pay bump.
That would however, demand an hour and half commute each way and that would impact my ability to take my children to school and be involved with family meals. Back when I did have a hour commute each way it was costing me £2,800 a year in fuel, plus £2,220 in parking fees, plus about the same again for lunch out with colleagues.
So yeah, i'd get a 30-40% pay bump, but a large percentage would be consumed by additional costs with no benefit to my performance.
Enough to win the competition for the fixed number of available homes in good neighborhoods convenient to the office. Which is effectively an infinite amount, if every employer in the area is trying to throw money at the problem.
I would never take less pay to work from home. Im good with working in office or at home. Also, Im doing the same job either way, so I'm not sure why I'd be paid differently one way or the other. If anything, I'd think it's more expensive (insignificantly) for the company to give me a desk.
In 2008 I was given 2 offers from a company: WFH or paid relocation to work in-office. I chose the former, which came with a 26% lower salary, and have been remote ever since. Just comparing the salaries in that case is a little disingenuous, however, since the relocation was from a low cost of living city to a high cost of living city.
A large impact on the extent to which WFH may need to come at a discount is specialization: If you're easily replaceable with an in-office worker, why would the company deal with remote? If you're not so easily replaceable, the company is more likely to be willing to work with you on your terms.
There's generally been a large disconnect between the job market in the tech sector and the rest of the economy, at least until a few years ago. There's now much more of a bifurcation within the tech job market, where rank-and-file and entry level software engineers are suffering while experienced and specialized software engineers may be doing better than ever. This plays into the RTO/WFH discussion because some people may not have the option to get their preference at any discount, or given either option in the first place.
> Maybe it is my age (44), or maybe I am even in a privileged position financially
You think? I was so sure that anyone who can get by without working would immediately rush to upend their life and suffer the many annoyances of working in an office! /s
If it wasn't obvious, a lot people don't have a choice. They can always leave, but this RTO thing is everywhere and it's not so easy working remotely nowadays.
It is funny to see how in one (IT) culture there is two narratives, often supported by same people:
1) Office is bad, people more productive working remote from their homes, and corporate C-levels issue and enforce RTO, which is silly and anti-productive.
2) All jokes about Zoom/Meet/Teams, with all these «Each meeting consists of “are you hear me?” questions», etc.
Maybe, I'm unique (I'm sure I'm not), but I was twice less productive at remote (when it was mandated by anti-COVID measures of my Government) and I've happily returned to office as soon as I was allowed to.
For me, there are multitude of reasons to want to go to office, including endless number of shelves I need to mount at home (it is easy to procrastinate when you have OTHER real things to do, like home improvement, and not only meme-scrolling), mental resource to prepare one more meal each day (I have canteen at the office and lunch becomes no-brainer and takes 15-20 minutes instead of additional shopping & cooking at home), etc.
But main and most important reason is, personal meetings and, yes, this proverbial cooler chats. I'm 10x more effective in communication in person than all these videocalls. I dread planned calls, I cannot «read» counterparts well via videocall and it takes me much more time to explain ideas, problems and opinions via any remote communication. Also, a lot of «small» questions are postponed indefinitely because there is no this cooler, when you can ask somebody opinion or bounce off half-backed ideas against your colleague without scheduling yet another meeting and WITHOUT throwing your colleague out of the flow (because you know that he leaved flow to drink some tea already!).
I'm glad, that I can visit office every day, but also I'm glad that I can WFH for one day if I needed to (for example, when I need to meet plumber or alike).
Yes, there is commuting, but my commute is 15-20 minutes one way :-)
I think the simple and boring answer is it really depends. As you say, your commute is short, but also I think there's just a personality element to it. Some people absolutely thrive and are way more productive remotely (and I think HN skews towards that type of person), and other people are the opposite, losing their minds if they don't have colleagues beside them to talk and collaborate with.
> I think the simple and boring answer is it really depends
Yep, people are different.
> are way more productive remotely
Is this measured, or they are feel more productive? (I think, answer is the same: there is full spectrum here and somebody is less productive but feels more productive and somebody is really more productive and, maybe, feels the same :-))
But my previous team (where I worked at the peak of COVID) was less productive for sure (I can compare release notes between product release and see as they are shrinking from release to release at COVID time!), though we have some team members who thought that they become more productive!.
Also, long time ago I worked in distributed team (St.Petersburg, Russia / Boston, USA / Santa Clara, USA) and we had twice-a-year week-long whole-team in-person meetings in Boston office (I was from St.Petersburg). These were two hyper-productive weeks, when we solved a lot of problems which accumulated between these meeting, fast and efficient. It was before video-conferencing, so all other meetings was phone-calls (only audio), but still.
I understand, that it is not statistics, it is anecdotal, but I'm very skeptical about broad claims that distributed / remote teams (!) can be as efficient (or even more) as local ones. Personal contributors — sure, all people are different, but whole teams — I'm in doubt. We are social animals, and all these video calls are still conversation with pixels, not people.
Depends of your company, I personally meet my team roughly every 3 months and I push back any task on the calendar because I know the days in the office aren't even half the productivity of the usual remote days. I even avoid big deployments during these days.
Remote is usually all focused work and the office time is mostly coffee chats and random interruptions of unrelated subjects because on how much easier it is to ping people.
So on my case it's the opposite, I'm a bit skeptical you can achieve the level of focus you have in a remote team in a standard open space, that would require some discipline that not everybody has.
Not to mention the abomination of the open space with no reserved desk so you aren't even guaranteed to sit close to your team, removing the only potential useful advantage of being on-site.
Open space is PURE EVIL. Don't have fixed working place where you could leave your headphones (and external DAC in my case), cup, charging wires for your gadgets (not everything is USB-C still), some papers, etc is PURE EVIL too. Combined together it is ninth circle of hell.
Never worked in open space and refused (otherwise good) offers
twice due to open space in office.
Culture in which everybody can ping anybody at any time is bad too. It is why I speak about cooler chat (when person already distracted), not any chat :-)
The combination of these things you're mentioning is one of the main reasons, at least for me, that WFH is so much more productive. A lot of tech companies have evolved a culture and built offices that are in opposition to doing good work. Open plan offices have been the norm in my experience over the last 10 years (maybe more). Anytime interruption via Slack/Teams is the typical culture.
I was much more open to working in the office when I actually had my own office.
Well sure I do agree but I've never seen a tech company which isn't working in an open space. The non open-space companies feel even more rare than the remote ones.
So when you compare remote productivity, that's what you have to compare with.
Oh, I agree fully. I enjoy going to office. I also enjoy WFH. But after two days of WFH I am so bored.
Like many above like to call managers 'managers' I like to call developers/devopsengineers/* 'IT people'. Office is not a 'manager' or 'c-suite' thing. Put it differently: not going to office is an 'IT people' thing.
Being productive is not only the number of lines of code you crank out. Being productive is cranking out the right lines of code. You need to communicate for that. Casually joining a few colleagues talking about work delivers so much value. Maybe make a few decisions without planning a meeting. That is productive!
It is also not only about being productive, It is also about having fun with my team or colleagues. But I also like to sense how my team members are behaving, are people super tired? Are they happy? Etc etc.
Oh and the good old whiteboard sessions, I love them and I miss them.
If I tell my non 'it people' friends my colleagues only want to go to office max 1 time a week... or not at all, most friends call it crazy.
Tomorrow to the office again, yes! 45 minute lunch walk through the city... Close the door at 17:00 and call it a day! Love it!
I'm a big believer in empowerment. 90% of employees will usually do the right thing for themselves and the business IF YOU JUST LET THEM. For example, mandating 5 day RTO only to have your sales engineers take a full meeting room by themselves to sit on sales calls all day is idiotic for everybody.
You’re speaking from a very privileged position. A 15–20 minute commute and an office with a canteen is not the reality for most workers. Many spend 1–3 hours daily stuck in traffic or on crowded trains, which is pure wasted time. Add in rising transport costs, pollution, and the fact that not everyone can afford to live near their workplace, and commuting becomes one of the biggest drains on productivity and well-being.
So while it’s great that the office works for you, dismissing WFH as “less productive” ignores the fact that for many people, it’s the only way they can actually be productive, stay healthy, and remain in the workforce at all.
Commute is very location-specific and will be very different between USA and Europe, and different even between different locations in USA and different countries in Europe, you are right.
But when we speaking about Microsoft, Google, FaceBook, etc., workers, I think canteen is a norm, not reality for most workers.
And many workers outside IT cannot WFH at all. You cannot be salesman or welder or teacher or plumber WFH... We all are very privileged, no matter how long is our commute.
You’re not alone. I absolutely love going to office every day but also love the flexibility to occasionally wfh if needed. I just feel like when I enter the office and put on my “unreachable” focus mode on I’m in the zone and very productive. At home there’s endless distractions (my cats make sure to check in with me every time get too focused). Also I do like interacting with colleagues. I think I started liking going to office even more once I broke up with my gf that was living with me for 4 years. Something about working the entire day from my apartment completely alone is… not appealing to my social side of the brain.
It’s completely fine to prefer the office, that’s your choice and it works for you. The problem isn’t people going in, it’s when companies force everyone to go. Reading your post, it almost sounds like you want others dragged back just to fill the gap left in your own private life. That’s not a good reason to mandate office work for everyone.
If a portion of the team is remote, then the whole "remote team" apparatus and culture are necessary.
Same with hybrid offices in which the WFH days are random instead of set for everyone.
I fully understand that this is a polarized personal preference issue. I don't think there's a way to make both work in the same company.
People have different preferences, some people are going to be more productive at home and some less. Some people simply can’t work from home.
I think the challenge is that leadership isn’t coherent when it comes to RTO:
1. Leadership has largely abandoned the notion of geography when hiring or building teams. Building geographic centers of excellence where all team members with the same function working closely together used to be a thing. Leadership wants the flexibility to pick the best talent, at the best prices, on short notice but also wants ad-hoc collaboration. Workers are rightly confused when every meeting they have in an office is on Zoom.
2. Leadership has largely abandoned the notion of timezone alignment and structured working days. Leadership wants to hire talent across the globe which requires more cross-timezone collaboration and non-standard-work hour meetings. That wasn’t possible when at 5PM to 7PM everyone was commuting. It also isn’t reasonable to expect people to hold a rigid 8AM to 5PM in-office schedule and then take 2 hours of meetings from 6PM to 8PM.
3. Leadership is complains that office space is both essential to productivity AND too expensive to spend money on. Employees home setups in terms of working space, noise isolation, connectivity and configuration are now more productive than what is offered in-office. When leadership took people from dedicated offices, to cubicles, to open seating and then to “hot desking” it was justified that commercial real estate was scarce, expensive and required the sacrifice of productivity to manage costs. Now that it is plentiful and cheap? Leadership is saying that RTO is needed for productivity AND that they will continue to reduce spending on office space per employee.
The only way to mentally reconcile that is to either assume that leadership is incompetent or that they want to return to 18th century sweat shops and envy China’s 9x9x6 culture. I can see why mid-level management is struggling getting compliance which is why they are relying on badge swipes.
Thanks for being honest. I cannot imagine trying to work from home and I think it is a shared charade we are all caught up in. Be thankful you have a job to go into work to, that may not always be the case for everyone…
I'm privileged enough to work in places where my managers understand that life is life and sometimes you need to be at home but don't want to take full day-off because you still work even before COVID and externally (government) enforced full-remote.
Managers trusted us (engineers) that we will not abuse this system. It was always like social contract: engineers doesn't complain about occasional crunches and overtimes (not like game industry where it is norm, but may be once a month), managers lets people stay home for a day if they needed without additional paperwork.
Of course, when KPI is enforced by automatic clocks-in system or doors logs it is another story.
On the other hand, we all are very privileged compared to industrial workers, builders, retail workers, etc. Not only in salary, but in our schedules too.
MSFT employees - better make sure not to work from home anymore considering your jobs can’t be done from there. Close your laptops at 5pm, do not re-open them until you are back in office at 9am the next day.
I have worked for 7 years in the office and 7 years remote, and for me the 7 years remote were not as enjoyable.
I like the routines and processes that I adhere to more when I have a separate work location; I find it more difficult to adhere to those same processes when I can roll out of bed and walk to my computer half asleep and zone in on work.
For example, I find it much more likely I’ll consistently shower, get dressed, eat breakfast etc, when I go into the office than when I work from home.
Additionally, when working remote, I find that there’s often more of a bias towards threads or messages starting off related to something work related; I do try to ask about colleagues weekends occasionally for example, but when remote it often feels more like you’re consuming their bandwidth or attention vs just minor conversation in passing.
Sometimes things take time to compile, or conversations over text-mediums are difficult; having a manager nearby that can sense when things are difficult and more effectively help is great. I’ve had many times where I’ve sighed about something and my coworker heard and asked what got me flustered and explaining it helped lead to resolution.
What I would suggest is that perhaps some teams should be remote and some local if possible to facilitate different types of employees.
I totally get working remote, I’d probably do it if I was back in a relationship and/or had kids.
I strongly prefer RTO for myself personally. I can’t stand working from home. I believe the solution is have a shorter commute and live closer to the office (even though I live far away, I am trying to convince my wife to move). I have mixed feelings about forcing RTO because I know some strongly prefer WFH. Maybe 2 or 3 days is the best middle ground. Personally I miss when everyone was at the office 5 days a week.
> solution is have a shorter commute and live closer to the office
With a short commute, a private office, and environment conducive to both focused work and collaboration as required, I imagine a lot more folks would be happy to RTO. However, this is not the reality for most who are asked to waste hours commuting (or uproot families to move closer) to sit surrounded by noise and distraction.
I suspect “I miss when everyone was at the office 5 days a week” is behind many of these RTO mandates, and I am not sure the sacrifice made by people (like you) who don’t get to see colleagues quite as often is balanced against the sacrifice made by folks who have to uproot their whole lives or waste hours per day commuting.
Great, then you don't have to work remote. Your preferences are orthogonal to the freedom other people have or don't have to make the choices that are appropriate for them.
The only thing I hated worse than going into the office was our remote employees, who never seemed to be available when you needed them, had their status set to Away (or wouldn't respond for hours if they were green).
It was a privilege, people abused it, and now it's over. And managers were the worst offenders.
Interesting. I've been remote for 5 years across three different companies, and if anything I've had the opposite experience: my remote coworkers are far more responsive than my on-site coworkers, who are always in meetings, in transit, having in-person chit chat, or taking a break.
I've been managing remote teams for over a decade. Your management must be doing performance management well. Most remote coworkers and employees I've had have been good, but that was only because the company aggressively pruned people who abused remote work.
Remote job postings attract deadbeats at a higher rate than in-office jobs. There are even New York Times Bestseller books with example scripts of how to negotiate remote work with your boss so you can travel the world, outsource your work to virtual assistants, and respond to e-mails once a week. These people always come in with a "if I get my job done, it shouldn't matter that..." attitude and then they fail to get their job done.
Remote is also the target for the /r/overemployed people who try to get as many jobs as they can and then do as little work as possible at each. Once someone has 3, 4, or more jobs they don't really care if they get fired. They'll string you along with excuses until you let them go. The first time it happens to you, your sense of sympathy overrides your instinct to cut the person and you let them string you along way too long. The 3rd or 4th time you have someone you suspect of abusing remote, you PIP them hard and cut them quickly because you know how much damage and frustration they can bring to the rest of the team.
I think remote work gets increasingly hard to manage the larger a company gets.
My parents both worked for the same Fortune 500 company when COVID hit and the thousands of employees in their branch had to abruptly transition to WFH. Something like 10% of employees just disappeared, never to be heard from again. Lots of people who had been perfectly fine employees in the office ended up getting fired because with WFH they couldn't manage to stay at their desk and get their work done. That division of the company was seriously crippled for about six months.
My own job is with a small business that has been remote-only since before COVID and it's all been great. They've never even needed to "prune" anyone who abused remote work. I guess they're good at determining how reliable someone will be during interviews. We're all adults and there's a high level of trust that we're all doing our jobs, but the team is small enough that it would take a maximum of a single day to notice if someone is slacking.
But when the company gets really large, they sometimes have to manage to the lowest common denominator, and "we're all adults" becomes an increasingly shaky assumption. So I kind of understand where the anti-WFH CEOs are coming from if they were at the helm of a massive company and saw all kinds of chaos during COVID. But I also think small, geographically distributed teams can massively outperform if you hire the right people.
I went into the office for the first time 2 months ago.
The worst part was how massively distracting it was.
The people who like going into the office at my work, go in to socialize.
They are bored at home. It literally has nothing to do with being productive.
I am sure this is all a matter of scale though. My place is really small. At the scale of Microsoft I am sure there are thousands of people really gaming the system badly.
You mean you don’t love the horrible office politics? Where people treat each other terribly to get ahead by any means necessary? Where being “cool” is rewarded instead of actual results?
That's the experience I have had too, particularly regarding managers who are in the office for the day. They are not spending much time at their desk.
This is really the crux of it, and I think a larger motivator than is given credit. If wfh = +2 Engineering -2 Management and you are weak on management, you RTO.
Have had the same experience over the last 5 or so years and that too working in early stage startups.
Everyone is free to get their personal lives in order and in turn they organize and execute everything with much more dedication than i've every seen them in a corporate environment.
>> my remote coworkers are far more responsive than my on-site coworkers, who are always in meetings, in transit, having in-person chit chat, or taking a break.
1. In meetings - working
2. In transit - before and after working hours
3. Having in person chit-chat - working
4. Taking a break - remote workers should also take these
>> I've had the opposite experience
I think it depends on the type of people you're working with. I've found hand-on engineers (i.e. people writing code) are really available and perhaps they shouldn't be. Business-type people are so much more reliably flaky.
Having done years in both settings, random non-work related discussions were always more prevalent in office type atmospheres.
Only semi-related but in office at a cubicle is the least productive environment I've ever seen for companies. I cannot personally take a leadership team serious if they care about productivity & fiscal responsibility when they have cubicle farms of more than 10 people in an area.
> Having done years in both settings, random non-work related discussions were always more prevalent in office type atmospheres.
Whether you realize it or not, these are team-building exercises. It brings people closer, sometimes too close (I slept with one of them lol), but overall this is a net plus for team dynamics.
It's really hard to bond with people exclusively through chat. Especially if you hide behind an anime avatar or refuse to switch on your video.
I don't need to bond with you. I don't need team-building exercises. I have been working for over a decade and made 0 friends at the office. I'm an easy going guy, though, no complaints or anything. Just keeping it professional is good enough. A bit tired of the whole "we are a family" thing really. Plenty of successful open source projects are successful and driven by people working together remotely and behind avatars.
How common are cubicles now? I haven't seen one in nearly 20 years. And I find open-office environments kind of discourage non-work chat because you know you're disturbing others for no good reason.
Unfortunately this is a strawman. They said remote workers were more available than in-office workers. Not that in-office workers weren't working when they were unavailable.
I have a more nuanced take here. For low performing or junior employees, remote work was generally a terrible thing that led to less productivity (and more managerial overhead). For strongly performing employees with obligations at home, there were many who preferred working at home.
I fall more into the latter camp (at least I hope so) and, given I've only worked in nice offices with catered lunches, gyms, video games, offsites, etc, I enjoy a 3 day hybrid schedule works best for me.
Then COVID hit and everyone got a taste of it. Including the folks who discovered they could get paid to stay home and play video games and jackin' off during work hours.
In a way you could say this group ruined it for everyone. But that's usually how these things go.
The hammer comes down on everyone because otherwise it leads to uncomfortable questions like "why does HE get to work from home and I don't?" and people getting doctor's notes claiming they're autistic and can't be around people and that's why they can't ever see the inside of an office.
I'm sorry to take a belligerent tone, but this is total revisionism. People have always slacked off and bringing them into the office doesn't change that.
Maybe I'm an old greybeard as someone with more than five years experience in the workforce, but don't you remember before COVID? People screwed around all the time! On coffee breaks or smoke breaks or extended meetings or late lunches or ping-pong tables or just browsing Facebook on their desks.
I remember the pre COVID times and people messed around, but they were available. You could actually find them in the building if they were just playing ping pong or something. In the remote world it can be very difficult to reach somebody.
I prefer remote work, but not everybody is good at it and it can ruin it for everybody.
> play video games and jackin' off during work hours.
Most of the hardest working remote people I've known, and I've worked remote at over 5 companies across two decades, often don't work standard hours. I honestly don't see the problem with someone gaming at 2pm if they're also making sure shit gets deployed at midnight.
I also have found that anytime I show up in an actual office it's hilarious how little work actually happens.
The people who get nothing done remote, also tend to get nothing done in an office they just create the illusion of it.
> The people who get nothing done remote, also tend to get nothing done in an office they just create the illusion of it.
Maybe, maybe not but it surely create cost on people to come to office. Just as example person can't just use whole Friday / monday for starting, finishing weekend travel while claiming as working.
For business even if they can't monitor person whole day at work, getting them to workplace and checking status face to face is something better than nothing.
Even when I was working in an office I would sometimes take 2 to 3hours bicycle rides at lunch time because it was the best moment to be doing sport outdoors in winter.
I would just make sure I had no scheduled meeting and had people in my team available. Sometimes I would do it to make up for extra time outside of office hours. This also allowed some of my coworkers to leave earlier because they knew I would stay longer to do my regular shift.
If there's a need for "core business hours" those can be established. My most recent company was evenly distributed around the globe so needing someone at 2pm PST is not much different than needing someone at 12am PST.
The vast majority of companies I've worked at remote have a strong async culture and are better for it. With some obvious exceptions, if you need a response in 15 minutes there's something wrong with your planning.
If people are slacking off at home, they’re gonna slack off at work too. This notion that a low performing employee will suddenly perform better in the office is a myth that needs to die.
Times are changing. A couple of years back people would not only work from home but angrily demand that employers need to share all that office cost saving with employees who are working remotely.
That seems like an issue of company leadership and culture. There are many remote companies where this isn’t true. I’ve seen comments from Amazon workers talking about they were much more productive in a remote work situation, even though their leader (Andy Jassy) chose to make the company go back to the office 5 days a week with invasive monitoring of how people badge in and out.
I'm very pro remote working, but I think people like me need to realize that this is a real issue. It happens in the office too, but it's a bit harder to get away with, and it's really a performance management issue which brings us nicely to your second point.
I agree, managers are always the worst offenders when it comes to this sort of thing. But they do the same in the office by disappearing into meeting rooms for the entire day. I'd love to know how you can effectively manage a team by constantly being in meetings with other managers.
>I'd love to know how you can effectively manage a team by constantly being in meetings with other managers.
Hopefully, they work meetings with their team in but meeting with other managers is a big part of their job--and shielding people from stuff coming down from above.
It always seems weird to me how people complain about such things. Just do your thing and don't care about others. If others are blocking you, just say so in the daily or to your manager. Easy.
I don't really care about unproductive people, I care about myself.
I abuse the WFH thing because my manager promised me a raise if I complete a project and then sabotaged it, then put the blame on me, and finally changed the raise requirements. Really can't stay motivated in such an environment. If the game is "who fucks harder the other party" then don't be surprised that I watch porn during WFH and then try to convince other employees to do the same.
I will forever fight this with saying that chat is an async medium. If you need a response right now, pick up the phone.
Worst offenders are people who say things like: Hey, how are you doing?
And then ... nothing.
Or maybe people are actually working on something. And your 2 minute question might cause them to lose 30 minutes.
This is why it is important to have multiple work-streams going when doing remote work, so that you don't sit around and wait until you have your answer.
> It was a privilege, people abused it, and now it's over. And managers were the worst offenders.
IME, managers do this in the office just as much as remote.
Look at the typical manager's schedule. It's completely full of meetings - most of which are bullshit "busy" meetings, and they never respond to anything timely.
Hardly. It was COVID. It forced companies to do the most logical thing they could in a world of high speed internet. Many of them refused to read the writing on the wall and assumed it would return to normal one day. They made no efforts to internally reorient themselves around this new work strategy.
> people abused it
Other than your anecdote what evidence is there that this is true? Has the economy faltered? Is there any second source for the data which shows _any_ impact _at all_?
Abused it in which way? Don't touch the money-makers. And if you're in the office, don't daydream about 'improvements' you could make that touch the money-makers in a vain attempt to quell your anxiety about not appearing to do anything of value.
Reading this comment I can't help but imagine a high school student using the same pattern to respond to an "open period" being changed to "study hall" with mandatory in-library presence; which is not to dig on you, just to raise the idea that maybe k-12 education really is a conspiracy to train people to sit in factories.
This is the issue. Too many people take the absolute piss with it. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have people who don't switch off and put in a lot of extra hours essentially picking up the slack. I'm finding a lot more people (both at work and amongst friends) who are desperate to avoid speaking on calls or turning their video on because it makes them nervous. Probably healthier for everyone to just be in the office.
A manager who’s not doing their job and is never reachable can be pretty demoralizing. That same manager would probably not be great in person either, but at least you’d know where to find them.
As long as a company is able and willing to move out or correct low performers quickly, remote work is fine.
I literally do this IN the office. I will step away and go to a coffee shop and pick something up. Hell I ask my boss if they want anything. I may go for a walk and get a breather. Go to a doc appointment. GO get my teeth cleaned. My bosses do not give a shit as long as my tasks are done to the standard.
One company near me had parents cancel their daycare when they were allowed to WFH. A lot of employees were trying to care for young kids and "work" at the same time.
> that they would go out and run errands during work hours
So? I do this when I work in an office, and I do this when I work remote. If someone doesn't like it, they can go screw. I put in my hours, and I get my work done.
I don't see what this has to do with remote work. Although I also don't see why anyone would care.
As a salaried employee there is no "salaried time." You're paid for your output not the time spent on it. This goes especially true for Microsoft where lots of people put in far less than a 40hr workweek. Literally no one bats an eye at arriving at the office late so if you want to start your commute at 9 and include that in your "working hours" no one would care.
I disagree completely with that, at least for software engineers.
The work queue is infinite, measuring output with any sort of precision is almost impossible for a lot of the work (maintenance, actually necessary refactors, security, mentoring juniors, managing stakeholders, etc etc etc). There's no "I've finished my work for today".
I'm not saying that I like it, or that it's a good thing, but in my understanding engineers are paid to be available doing work roughly 40h/week.
> This goes especially true for Microsoft where lots of people put in far less than a 40hr workweek.
No offence, but this shows in the products.
It's a standard expectation for managers to see you physically located in the office for 40hrs per week in semi-flexible arrangements (if you're lucky).
You may forget that as tech workers we are incredibly privileged with the way our office life is compared to others typically, that we can sometimes come in late and leave early: may be another "perk" (like remote work) which goes away in time or during the next squeeze.
So it's a poor defense, as it's not reflected in other similar industries, nor is it relevant when we're discussing flexibility being reduced by the same company doing the flexibility reduction.
You are definitely paid for the "hours" in your contract and not the output, if you were paid for output some workers would be able to work harder to make more money by creating more things; as it stands you get the same money if you do 80hrs or 40hrs or 20hrs at any level of effort. You're not paid for time or output, you're paid to be "of service".
Maybe you get more money at promotion time (maybe), but pay is certainly *not* linked to compensation.
At most tech companies, you can work 5 hours per week or 100 and your salary remains the same.
If they see you working 5 hours per week and don't think you're productive enough, they can fire you, but you aren't paid any more for working more hours. That's what "salaried" means. It's why you've never heard someone getting paid "time and a half" for working weekends in tech.
I have yet to experience a role where workers are allowed to deliver while clocking less than 40 hours. 5 hours per week on salary is only if you do not tell management.
> It's why you've never heard someone getting paid "time and a half" for working weekends in tech.
It depends on the state. In California there are minimum salary requirements, that are adjusted every year, that must be met to be an exempt position. Otherwise you are required to pay hourly.
It's honestly one of the nice features of the state.
Sounds a bit extreme, but OTOH this is what tradesfolk typically do - charge $100 to ring your doorbell and take it from there, since it does cost them money just to get to you.
Still, even if there is some sort of justification (moreso if the company chooses to locate themselves away from residential/affordable areas), I'm not sure how you would avoid abuse. Maybe just pay employees a fixed amount for each day they are required to drive to the office ?
With tradesfolk you can choose who to call, and somebody from farther away will charge more for getting to your door. With workers that is not a consideration today (in most roles), but if companies had to pay for travel time it absolutely would be. But that leads to uncomfortable questions about moving. If you get children and move to an area with a better school, can and will your work now fire you because your commute got more expensive for them?
A fixed payment for office days would remove that, but then how do you determine the price of that payment?
I think my contractors have generally had a general service area. And, if you're out of it, they're probably not interested. Now, mind you, I often don't have a super-itemized bill. But I'm not sure I've seen a commute time/cost line item.
Yeah, I can't recall anyone ever putting it down explicitly as a line item, but a number of them will tell on the phone you there's a minimum charge for coming out. For some reason locksmiths seem to always do this.
I expect a lot of jobs that locksmiths do are pretty quick and easy for them. I went down a file cabinet lockpicking hole a couple of months back and ended up just drilling out the lock. I expect a locksmith could have handled it in a few minutes (if that) but if they had to drive 30 minutes to my house they have to collect for that somehow.
Some do. My last full time role had some $100/month stipend for personal supplies. Pretty much paid for my internet bill in that time.
Another before that had some 3000 dollar a year stipend for approved office supplies over the pandemic; basically anything that wasn't groceries could be put on there. I even fancied putting a PS5 on there at once point, but then realize high quality office chairs and desks would drain that stipend quickly.
Most of which you would have anyway. I never cared about incremental costs for internet, electricity, etc. if any. I could have probably collected double-digit dollars per month during COVID but I wasn't even officially remote anyway.
The standard residential plan I had was fine for any work purposes. As far as I'm concerned, incremental needs for normal work are in the noise. I did have outages now and then but they were pretty much for reasons that would have applied to any business service as lines were down.
That depends on which timeline we're working in. In alternative universes, Microsoft is called Megahard and is started in a town called Rougeworld, WA.
Nobody's stopping you from moving closer to the office, and incentivizing people to move further away is the last thing we should do
Yes, rent 5 minutes from the office is likely very high, and it's much cheaper two hours away, and that's why most people live far away. But that is already a factor in salaries. If the office is in a high-cost-of-living area they have to offer higher salaries to get an equal caliber of workers.
>Nobody's stopping you from moving closer to the office
the stiff housing market indeed is. You can't buy land that isn't for sale.
Nevermind that most people cannot just up and move whenever their work fancies it. And you don't want to. Too many horror stories of people who moved for their job only to get laid off a few months later. Corporate isn't taking my community with them.
>If the office is in a high-cost-of-living area they have to offer higher salaries to get an equal caliber of workers.
This definitely is not how it works. There are a ton of companies in Irvine for example that vastly underpay their developers compared to the cost of living in the area. And if you were to assume that's how it works, then companies should be offering salary increases for RTO which is very obviously not happening.
Companies that underpay compared to cost of living exist everywhere, even in the cheap places. They usually end up with the people who can't get or don't want a better paying job.
And yes, companies should be paying salary increases for RTO if they hired on the promise of remote work. Not doing that will just means you now offer worse compensation compared to job conditions and are going to lose some people to greener pastures. Which might be a factor in Microsoft's timing: less job mobility right now
50 miles is a lot. That can easily be 2h in most big cities.
To do what exactly? Sit in an open office in Redmond, jump on Teams to call with someone in Fort Lauderdale?
Funny thing, I had multiple interviews with them on explicit remote roles (which are different from roles that went remote during COVID). I wonder if the policy changes there.
I live about 100 miles from NYC, which is 2-2.5 hours by car but only 1.5 hours by train. I think that that would be considered an acceptable commute time for companies with a hybrid work plan. However, every time I ask recruiters from NYC-based companies if their commute subsidy would cover the train, I get told employees have to live within a 50 mile radius of the office. Like you said, that could be 2 hours by car! For the right salary and benefits, I'd happily spend 3 hours a day on a train. At least I wouldn't be driving.
Yeah it's weird. I was just over 50 miles from NYC at some point. A place I worked remotely at was having a small team get together and they asked me to join.
Given it's a ~2 hour journey from door to office (car + train + walk) I asked if I could leave early so I didn't have to put in a ~13-14 hour day.
They said no, I had to work a full 9-6 day or use a PTO day. Meanwhile they flew a few people in from around the US and put them in a hotel.
That was a principle level role where I survived multiple rounds of layoffs so it wasn't like I was treated poorly. It's just the company wouldn't budge on their policies.
I grudgingly did it for a while to Boston. And yes, it was something like $50/day to commute however I did it. It got old even on the train even though I didn't need to go in every day. Wouldn't have done it long-term.
This is going to lead to these abstract discussions of subjective perceptual "productivity" as it always does, but by the actual economic definition of labor productivity, revenue per employee, Microsoft has gone from $143 billion with 163,000 in 2020 ($877,000 per head) to $282 billion with 228,000 ($1.24 million per head) so far this year. They've become the 2nd largest company in the world by market cap, in large part specifically because Microsoft employees are so economically productive.
It says a lot about a team when they win, and instead of rewarding the players that got them the win, they do shit like this.
Because the idea of productivity per employee its relevant to look at capital spending as well.
Otherwise people claim Microsoft is successful and hires well (with outsourcing or RTO or whatever), but in reality they are in a shift to a more capital intensive business.
I'm sorry, but this is a meaningless stat when evaluating remote work productivity.
Microsoft is a huge company with a lot of momentum and so many products that you can't reasonably conclude anything about remote work from this stat alone. Worse, you don't even account for inflation (!).
What about revenue per employee before covid? What if I chose any arbitrary time period in the last 20 years? Lastly, maybe revenue per employee could've grown significantly more during 2020-2024 if everyone was in the office?
Great point. MS employee productivity as measured has improved. But who cares about facts anymore.
This drove me nuts during all the hullabaloo about DOGE. People would confidently state that the Federal government is inefficient – while data showed the opposite! Federal workforce has remained largely the same since 1950, while administering more services, for more people, with a much larger budget. As measured, the government workforce is more productive than ever.
Having to sit in the car, train, or even walking can be seen as a punishment when the 80% to 890 of your work is done sitting by yourself in front of a computer.
At the office there where those who clearly wanted to minimize human interactions and people who thrived and performed better when interacting with others.
And then there is liminal spaces (Severance) the place where hope and creativity comes to die.
It mentions this was based on some “data” (in emailsto employees) that it will yield better output but I somehow doubt it. I wonder what happens with the stock. It sort of makes it worse for the teams that are distributed and harms collab between sites in different zones like Europe/Asia and US/Europe. When you are working from home it is easy to stay later or start earlier and join calls. If you are in the office this is not that easy due to commute.
Given that MS does not have top salaries, my bet is that folks will leave to other companies given that the main leverage like WFH is gone.
It’s a common thing here on HN to believe that remote is superior for productivity, and I’m always reminded of Richard Hammond’s observations about open door vs closed door coworkers. He noticed over time that the closed door workers were more productive. He also noticed that the closed door workers were less impactful in their fields years later. His were observations in R&D settings, but I suspect they can be extrapolated. People who are interrupted get less done. This seems largely indisputable, but what is the other takeaway? People who don’t interract with peers don’t course correct enough, seems to be solid advice based on what we know about the OODA loop. People who don’t interact with coworkers don’t get enough time saving advice? I know I’ve saved lots of effort by having coworkers who know things I didn’t about related problems.
What complicated things, is return to work will cause all the best to rethink their employment. I’ve seen HBR surveys that suggest the top talent is ending up places that allow them to stay remote. I think this leaves businesses in a tight place. I have every reason to believe that companies with lots of employee interactions have better acceleration/trajetory than fully remote, but it’s a big hit to lose top talent. And remote may have so much velocity from gaining this talent that they don’t care about the acceleration tradeoff.
Further, concentration of talent in a region also cannot be discounted. Certain things can’t happen without the exchange of ideas (partly why I think cities/counties should ban non competes). I don’t know how much a given company can control this concentration of talent, but I know that Seattle wouldn’t be what it is without Boeing, and then Microsoft attracting very smart people.
It's worth observing that when remoters talk about "productivity", they talk about their personal ability of chugging through tickets and not overall team productivity which includes a lot of teaching, mentoring, conversations and getting on the same page.
So yeah, what's happening is that senior folks "productivity" as they perceive it has risen while the output of whole teams over time suffered.
Goodheart's Law strikes again. If churning through 10 more tickets rather than brainstorming with a team on a feature gets them promoted, then you're going to get a "team" of loners and much less productivity for the real features.
I do think there is a balance here. In my experience, brainstorming or deep design discussions are horrible over Zoom. Likewise, new grads really do suffer when they start their careers with no direct mentor to talk to at a moments notice.
I think even just the first year or 2 for juniors should be at least 3 days in-office a week. Likewise, you should be able to go in office a few times a month just to properly collaborate and plan. It doesn't need to be much in tech, because a lot of time is indeed just heads-down development instead of designing.
As you point out, Its important to note that Hamming makes this observation specifically in the domain of research which requires a lot of collaboration between people, and is enhanced by interaction with other people doing research. Most standard software engineering jobs don’t require that kind of research activity (although it does require some; product development is a creative process).
> Most standard software engineering jobs don’t require that kind of research activity (although it does require some; product development is a creative process)
This seems to describe what good engineers above the senior level do. Certainly everyone with a PhD I work with who rose through the ranks said that being very senior was a lot like being a good researcher - albeit with much more pressure on execution.
I think it totally depends on the job. It's like a process running on a CPU. I've seen software development roles that are "batch processes," where the developer goes into a cave to crank through his tasks uninterrupted, and then emerges in a week to deliver the results. And others that are "interactive, event-driven processes," where there is a lot of back and forth between product owners, UX, and other stakeholders, and lots of iteration and refinement. And then there is a whole spectrum in between! One size doesn't necessarily fit all development styles.
I think it would be hard to argue that working all together in an office - like before covid - isn't more productive. In-person meetings are easier. Whiteboarding and brainstorming is way easier. Spontaneous conversations are easier. Helping junior people is easier. People actually pay attention in meetings. You get to know colleagues better.
Have you ever had to "now click on the left... no, up a bit. No go back you were just there. It's the third one from th... I'll just paste the link in chat" when you were standing next to someone's desk? No.
The only benefits of working from home are:
1. No commute.
2. Can do life stuff (we finally have a solution to the dumb problem that shops etc. are only open when people are at work).
3. The company doesn't need to spend money on offices.
The first two are huge bonuses for employees, but the company doesn't give a shit about them. At best they care about paying for offices, but that's pretty minor (especially when they've already paid for them and they're sitting there empty).
I entirely agree on the benefits of in person work. I personally don't enjoy the remoteness of remote work, but the time, money, and sanity cost of commuting still ends up making me prefer working remotely overall.
If I could live in the same building as my job, I would.
> Have you ever had to "now click on the left... no, up a bit. No go back you were just there. It's the third one from th... I'll just paste the link in chat" when you were standing next to someone's desk?
Yes.
I resolve it the same way in person as I do remotely, either by pointing at the screen, asking for (and receiving) control of the mouse and keyboard, or both. If you don't know how to use the features of your screen-sharing software that permit this, you need to learn them. If your screen-sharing software does not have these features, urge your company to switch to one that does (or just switch to one that does, if your company policies permit).
> People actually pay attention in meetings.
I've seen no difference in overall meeting attentiveness in the switch to WFH. Perhaps I've been blessed to work with unusually competent and mindful people.
> Spontaneous conversations are easier. ... You get to know colleagues better.
I don't, no. If anything, spontaneous conversations are way easier remotely, as most of the "water cooler" conversations in the office happen in large "off-topic" channels. This is really good for knowing what's going on at the company, because it massively expands the audience for chatter, gossip, and unofficial news from just a handful of people to the entire company. Plus, it's async communications, which means that you don't miss out just because you weren't there.
> Whiteboarding ... is way easier.
This is true. Most folks don't have cameras hooked up to their whiteboards (or even have whiteboards!).
> [B]rainstorming is way easier.
Disagree. Virtual post-it notes and a shared text document of some kind, plus a group voice call works great.
> I resolve it the same way in person as I do remotely, either by pointing at the screen, asking for (and receiving) control of the mouse and keyboard, or both. If you don't know how to use the features of your screen-sharing software that permit this, you need to learn them.
We used Google Meet, and recently switched to Teams (on Linux). Neither support either feature. I think it's impossible to do it on the web because there's no screen sharing web API (due to security fears) and no overlay drawing API either (again presumably due to security fears).
You need a native app, and Google don't make one, and Teams doesn't support Linux.
> If your screen-sharing software does not have these features, urge your company to switch to one that does (or just switch to one that does, if your company policies permit).
Should you choose to embark on it, I sincerely wish you the best of luck in your quest to get collaboration software that's not crippled by platform limitations.
Having said that...
> I think it's impossible to do it on the web because there's no screen sharing web API...
Weirdly, this isn't true. Discord claims to be able to share your screen even in the web browser version. From the "How To Stream In A Discord Channel" section of [0]:
> Info: Currently audio can only be captured by the Windows desktop, MacOS desktop, Chrome browser, and mobile clients. Unfortunately, audio sharing is unavailable on Linux.
I notice a conspicuous absence of "this doesn't work in a web browser" caveats for any of the other screen-sharing things that Discord does. The only caveats I notice are for audio capture on Firefox and on Linux in general.
And yes, while the Info box at the top of the article says that it covers how to do this in the Desktop Client, I tested screen sharing a moment ago in the latest version of Firefox on Linux. It works just fine. When I choose to share my screen in Discord, the web browser pops up a dialog asking me if I'd like to share my screen, and -if so- would I select which window (or the entire screen) to share?
> ...and no overlay drawing API either...
I don't know how one would handle the "permit others to draw on top of the shared window" mechanism, but there's little doubt in my mind that something can be cooked up that's clever and not too offputting to use... assuming that there's not something already available to be used that neither of us are aware of.
I completely agree, but just as the company couldn't care less about the employee's benefits from WFH, I couldn't care less about the company's benefits from WFO.
Most organizations are so inefficient, that all of this is barely a factor - whether or not work is getting done at 1% of the rate of what it should be getting done, or 1.3% isn't really a dealbreaker for the company.
During the 3 days I wfh, I get the most work done. I can focus and organize my day around executing a plan.
During the 2 days I'm in the office, I can get answers from people much quicker. Some people (new hires in particular) don't know how to describe their problem, or they're just really bad at it. My solution to endless teams convos is to just say "I'll head over to your desk" and then we work it out in person.
I think working with people in person can be very powerful. Is it essential though? No. Most corps don't even bother though. And most managers are bad at management. Working entirely wfh requires good managers with actual project management skills. Most corps are unwilling to train or prioritize hiring for that.
> My solution to endless teams convos is to just say "I'll head over to your desk" and then we work it out in person.
A good replacement for this is a voice or video call with screen sharing. As a bonus, you can rope in folks who are at another site just as easily as you can the first participant. Need to see notes on paper or a whiteboard? Pay the one-time cost to up another camera.
If the folks you work with don't have a "Always respond quickly to urgent messaging requests" habit, then they'll need to develop that. But, IMO, not having that habit is roughly the same as being the type that is rarely at their desk (whether because he's off helping others, or because he prefers to work on a laptop somewhere else in the building).
I find the progress is much faster at the office because me and my coworkers can more easily consult with each other on both major and minor stuff. On chat wfh they might answer immediately or 4 hrs from now. so, I can’t get in a semi flow because of long interruptions waiting for answers. also chat is slow and annoying.
I know someone is going to chime in a claim those conversations break flow. That might be true for some particular deep problems but I’ve never seen it affect any team I’ve been on and I have 40 years of work experience. Not saying my experience fits everyone else but I’ve seen no real evidence of it being an actual problem.
I don’t know the reason, nor do I have proof of anything. But: to me this is a great time to consider Occam’s Razor.
Executives seem to (mostly) universally want people to RTO. Why would they?
They obviously have lots of data. If it was bad for productivity, why would they do it?
Answers seem to be things like “power trip” or “need to justify real estate”. I’m pretty sure most companies would save money by giving up their leases. Maybe they are all having power trips, but irrational behavior from leaders won’t win out in the long run.
My observation from my time is that, likely: some people are really good at getting stuff done at home. But most probably get less done. And I suspect the leaders find this in their data.
I'm sympathetic to your reasoning, and I actually think your conclusion about how people wfh is probably true (a minority finding it wildly more productive) but the problem I see is that most execs don't understand what a lot of their employees do on a day to day basis, nor do I think they could properly understand the data even if they had it as a result. And, if they did have it, why don't they show it if the conclusions are so self evident?
In reality I think it's much simpler: the work that executives (and some upper level managers) do relies on a certain amount of theater. They need to be seen (in person) and they to be seen doing work (in person). That's part of the "deal" with being an exec --- you need to be able to act the part. Then, they just assume that's how it should or needs to be for everyone else.
The interesting thing is that "Darwinism" will sort it out for us in the long run. If the execs are right: more work gets done in the office, those companies will do better; if people are happier and more productive at home, those companies will tend to do better.
There is a part of the population that are opportunistic freeloaders. People who don't have intrinsic motivation to do their work but do it to avoid the consequences.
I think it's a pretty big part of the population! And I also think that, while managers are likely to have encountered them, reaching a software development role (and then choosing to spend your spare time commenting on HN) filters out a lot of them. So there is a mismatch where managers want to defend against the freeloaders while the employees commenting here can't accept the lack of trust inherent in the mandate and won't countenance the micro-management needed to prove that trust would be earned.
I think it also partly explains why we've failed to see remote companies gain a competitive advantage in hiring. They have adverse selection for active freeloaders.
I'm really not sure where 1 to 3 come from? 1 and 2 are about spending time with people. 3 can't also be true, just look at all the innovations that OSS has created (at least 90 perc. remote collaboration).
Number 4 is a real problem and a symptom of the biggest problem imo, which is that it's hard to build trust online/remotely.
Things that are inherently "about spending time with people" are very likely to be more effective in a higher bandwidth, more natural setting (read: in-person).
On the spectrum from postal mail, e-mail, text/instant messaging, phone calls, video calls, in-person discussions, the quality of "spending time with people" is increasing as you go farther down the list.
It is true, and spending time with people over video calls or text chats is a very low-bandwidth, rather thankless job which is generally demotivating long-term. Not that many people are actually willing to channel their emotions for hours daily into pixels on screen with no actual emotional human connection. This means that juniors remain isolated, senior employees feel that tutoring juniors is a waste of their time (which is true in this setup), and good managers either stop caring or burn out.
> 3 can't also be true, just look at all the innovations that OSS has created
Innovating in things you deeply care about is one thing, innovating for yet another work project that brings shareholder value is another. The only recipe that has worked for the latter so far has been "put multiple smart people in one room".
I personally feel home office makes jobs feel much more like jobs. You have no social relation to your coworkers and it's very hard to build one remotely. Most people barely communicate in zoom meetings beyond the minimum what is required of them.
Good office jobs can feel fun, building something with like minded people and building a social relationship at the same time with them.
Many people are not looking for that, many people just want a job that makes money and let's them log off at a set time. I personally don't enjoy that type of job and feel it's not sustainable over decades. I need some fun in my job.
Sure, I'm on both sides depending on the situation so I can help here.
"Collaboration" and "communication" are definitely issues, as employers state openly, but not for the reasons you think.
I worked in a fully remote company for the last three years, I selected people who I knew would be independently motivated and who knew how to communicate effectively in an async manner.
Yet, there were issues still in communication that would have been solved with being able to hear someones tone and body language. Little issues spiralled out of control- and lack of trust crept in when people were quietly doing work that had very small visibility (but was important).
I'm not saying remote work was the reason, but remote work exacerbated certain particular issues in this dimension- eventually the founders (who had lost trust) started laying off people they perceived as not important, despite them being fundamental to any future in which the project would be successful.
You'll also notice that the companies that care the most about RTO do not invest in communication in other ways, they'll probably use awful communication software like Teams, WebEx - or in marginally better cases: Zoom.. and since people don't like to interface with these tools (and they're poor even when you do): there can be a feeling of being out of the loop from upper management as they don't know what's going on.. they just see radio silence.
> We’ve looked at how our teams work best, and the data is clear: when people work together in person more often, they thrive — they are more energized, empowered, and they deliver stronger results.
Ah the data is clear, without reference to the data collected or metrics used.
MS Teams for video teleconferencing...good. On a Windows PC, and using MS365, by far the easiest to set up (or change) a meeting and fewest issues with cameras across multiple devices. (Webex and Zoom are close seconds, Google Meet is a distant last due to constant camera issues.)
MS Teams for IM...okay. Too much white space and too hard to find conversations that I know I've had recently. Very much prefer Slack.
MS Teams for any of that other stuff...rage inducing. Especially the file sharing and other "team" features which break with every minor update. Somehow, even worse than using Sharepoint directly. Went back to email and using network drives to share/store team documents.
Does MS Teams support dual video inputs yet? I refuse to do the whole "click through a powerpoint clumsily while in edit mode with private DM notifications popping off in the background" thing I see too damn often so I use the OBS Virtual Cam. Zoom picks this up easily. Last I ran Teams (admittedly two years ago), if I tried to do the same, it would just set my camera feed to the virtual cam.
If you're on a Mac, you can use BetterDisplay to create a virtual screen that can be used exclusively for sharing stuff on Teams. Make that your secondary display, and problem solved. Best part about this is that you don't need multiple monitors to make this work!
That's not what I'm asking. Any teleconferencing app lets you do that.
Specifically, in Zoom, I can share from a second camera. This could be a USB Webcam, or a USB/PCIe HDMI Capture Card, or OBS' Virtual Camera plugin. I prefer the latter as it gives me lots of flexibility, can present full screen Keynote/Powerpoints while keeping my desktop/windows arranged how I like, with presenter notes up, and switch to a USB HDMI capture card with the click of a button in OBS, with custom text, transitions, etc.
Last I checked, Teams assumed any camera input was for the "Camera", not for the screen share.
I agree with every sentence! I would love to have a native app because the more teams/channels you have, the more resources it’s eating up and it feels pretty slow and laggy. Like a message comes in, you click on the notification and it takes like 15 sec until you can read it.
No need for Teams, this was a Covid thing. Now all bets on Copilot. Bit with all that capex actual souls must leave the machine to make more space gor ai chips.
- There are times when in-person collaboration is invaluable.
- There are times when having quiet focus time alone is invaluable.
- Every team and job is different. Sitting on Zoom all day in an open office full of strangers doesn't make sense. Getting blocked because I bricked my proto board and I need a tech to rework it but I'm wfh and the tech is wfh and now we have to do a mail dance and burn a week for something that used to take a 5 min walk down the hall to deal with doesn't make sense. YMMV.
- The industry seems to be converging to hybrid. I feel like this is kind of like the debates over being mandated to use AI in dev - love it or hate it, it's happening, and there's no point trying to swim against a rip current.
Top employees, ones that can easily get jobs elsewhere, are just going to leave and find ones without RTO. Employees that don't feel confident in their abilities to perform in the job market are going to show up in the office to keep their job.
If that's true, and the employees who can survive brutal tech interviews will leave, it's kind of like an algo for finding a local minimum of talent for the shop enforcing RTO.
I think they’re realizing that there is no meaningful competition for these gigantic corporations. They’re worth 4 trillion. They saw Google got away without any consequence on the Chrome anti trust issue. They know they can keep bundling products, building new dark patterns, throwing up walled gardens, loss leading competitors (like Teams did with Slack), and all of that. And I’m sure Satya is currying favor with Trump like the rest of them to keep things that way. When you have such a situation, your company can get away with anything. If there was competition, workers and customers could go elsewhere.
It just makes me sick growing up in the USA, hearing about the beauty of “competition”, and then growing up to see that not only does it not exist… they cannot even be bothered to pretend.
This announcement is pretty much meaningless, as it's completely up to the VPs of a given org to set the policy. Many teams have already been back 3-5 days a week for over a year, and exceptions aren't hard to get if you're a senior+ employee or otherwise have considerations that prevent this from being feasible.
Anecdotally, I'm at a larger multinational corporation and our site has been mandating a new RTO policy and have not been granting exceptions based solely on seniority. In my personal opinion I believe it's mostly a soft layoff, so they can approve exceptions on a case-by-case basis.
Indeed. Apart from really aggressive, "love the bad press" type of employers most would try to appear reasonable from outside while largely rejecting wfh/remote requests lasting more than few months.
I don't think I'd call it meaningless; this sets the new default for the many orgs who haven't set a mandate already, and it seems to indicate that exceptions will now be harder to get.
Fair point. I've wasted way too much time arguing about this in my org. The messaging is effectively that the "data" (which is never presented to anyone) indicates on-site is better, and if you disagree, feel free to go test the job market.
It's clearly a combination of stealth layoffs and "because we can" attitude by a lot of C-suite right now.
Labor market is soft, so they will take as much as they can while they can, on the status quo bias of "in-office must be more productive, especially if employees don't like it".
It's the dumbest form of stealth layoffs as it's random untargetted regarding the company's actual department/role staffing needs.
Are they going to claim remote working is to blame for the unpopularity of Windows 11? Maybe getting together in the office will help come up with better ideas than just more ads and telemetry?
More likely they have decided popularity is irrelevant since they are so entrenched, so may as well try to find the cheapest possible maintenance engineer to manage the value extraction.
It’s hard on two professional couples, as it’s not always easy or even possible to find two jobs in many areas. But such couples tend to be older and we all know how that goes down in the biz. Especially if they’ve committed parenthood.
Well, they picked the right time - soft job market, AI takeovers, slumping economy … they could probably demand to mulch employees and people would just put up with it.
Oh, no, no...its not "mulching"...we don't dare mulch our employees! We simply streamline their corporeal shell in an effort to improve their ways of working. Its actually part of our new health care offering. In the past these would be called "diets"...but, no, no, we like to call it bodily optimization! And, hey, we hope that all employees participate in the mulching, er, um, i meant bodily optimization...Because, hey, someone needs to be fed to the AI...er, i meant someone needs to provide inputs to the ever-godly AI. ;-) /s
Over the past few years, a lot of teams have shown that remote work can be productive and stable. But as the market cools and power shifts back to management, return-to-office policies are quietly making a comeback.
It feels less about actual performance and more about a need for control. Some of these companies even invested in remote tooling during the pandemic, and now they’re choosing to ignore it. You start to wonder if they’re really looking at output, or just want people back in seats so things look like they’re under control.
I have mixed feelings cause on one hand moving from a remote first company to a primarily in person one has made a material difference in my general satisfaction and engagement. But also I wouldn’t want it to be forced. I like having the choice to work remote. And I like having coworkers who can work remote if they wish. I know many great engineers who live outside of the standard tech hubs and realistically won’t move to them. But for me remote work felt isolating and made my home feel too much like my office
I don't think this is what you're saying but when I've seen debates over choice the pattern I've sen is:
1) The people who feel more engaged at home can stay home, those who feel more engaged at work can go there
2) The latter group fails to feel engaged at work due to everyone being home. They complain.
In other words, they weren't missing being in the office. They were missing being in the office *with others*. Which requires everyone else to either want to work in the office.
Yeah it’s tricky because there’s often a senior/junior dynamic here. Junior people really do benefit from structure and in person mentorship. They also tend to have worse home office setups and more free time. Whereas senior people tend to have families and nicer home offices, so understandably they don’t want to commute in. I’m sympathetic to both and realistically I don’t think management is acting in good faith. But I do think remote work benefits seniors at the cost of juniors
1) until the fed lowers interest rates (and thus makes it easier for small to mid size companies to bring on more employees), hriing will be nowhere near the peak of 2022? where employees had all of the leverage
2) trump tarrif's are probably limiting the ability of the fed to do serious interest rate cuts needed to spur hiring
3) on top of this, AI is imo undoubtedly reducing demand in tech hires (esp. software engineers, but soon most white collar fields imo), something that wasn't the case just a couple of years ago.
4) the latest US revision just showed a downward revision of 1 million less employed than previously posted over the last year or so, last month(?) was revised to job losses and the msot recent job month was basically flat as well.
5) an arguement can be made that RTO, while crappy, greatly benefits cities by forcing a lot of highly paid tech workers to commute downtown, helping restaurant workers, cleaners (sorry the proper term escapes me at the moment), and other workers in support roles for offices keep their jobs (the spike in SF homeless during covid was caused by a big spike in high earning tech workers suddently working remotely causing layoff in these office reliant industries).
In summary, employee leverage is really non existent in this climate, and you should think long and hard about quitting out of emotion. If you want long term freedom, your only hope is to take a big risk and start something on your own, with the added risk of now knowing that the job you left might not be there should you fail either because of AI or company layoffs/hiring freezes (greatly increasing your risk vs normal times). I've been long term unemployed in the past and I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemies in terms of how much stress can impact your life, and how it can easily wreck your sense of self-worth and self-confidence (luckily have been doing relatively great in the past few years).
Like anything, remote vs in-person work is multifaceted
1) For experienced high performers, remote work definitely increases productivity. They're much likely to work longer hours and get more done when they're not in the office.
2) For people who are on the low end or need more guidance, it's more likely for them to slip or get left behind with remote work.
3) It takes longer to onboard new hires working remotely.
4) There's more barriers to cross-team collaboration working remotely. You don't have that natural bumping into each other in the office and unintentional communication that you do on Slack or Teams.
5) Remote work allows you to pull from a much greater talent pool, and you don't have to spend money on office space. This is really beneficial for startups.
6) For larger companies, remote work is excellent for teams that need to support a live product 24/7 since you can pull from many different time zones.
7) For managers and senior leadership, your meetings are all on zoom. And they're all back to back. The natural food or bathroom breaks you get working in an office don't exist. And they're more likely to exist later into the night.
This all leads to high performers picking up a lot more of the team's slack. They tend to thrive. Meanwhile, there's a certain percentage of staff that aren't doing a lot or are struggling. Managers are totally overloaded with meetings and don't have much time to give direct support. And because these are the decision makers, they're more likely to be in favor of RTO.
What I expect to happen with RTO is that junior staff and new hires will pick up more work (hopefully), the meeting burden on managers will be me more reasonable, and there will be better collaboration. But the high performers who teams rely on will be unhappy, will get less done, and are more likely to leave. Productivity will dip at first, and there might be a brain drain. It might be a good decision longer term. But there are tradeoffs any way you do it.
The only "problem" I've noticed in office vs. remote mixes, has been that it really unevens the playing field as far as office politics and influence goes.
The long short of it is that the remote workers become alienated, while the office gang has a good chance of becomes a good ol' boys club.
This is unfortunately very true. So often decisions were made only among the in-office part of the team. It is so tempting just to make a quick meeting in the office or even in the stereotypical kitchen, and discuss something, than to send out invites to remote guys, make sure they are available (even though they supposedly work 9-5 as everyone else), find a meeting room, click buttons etc.
50-75% of the employees at MS HQ regularly work out of the office. (Source: I live close by).
This mandate is not at all surprising given MS invested heavily in new, revamped offices, which they had started before the pandemic. How did folks who relocated to other areas not see this coming.
The first 10-15 minutes of every meeting for the first month were people complaining about it. The first 10-15 minutes of every meeting for the second month were supervisors reminding people everyone they need to do it.
The third month, people started coming in, and now everyone complains about how there's no parking, no open hotel desks, no open meeting rooms, and teams are scattered across offices and there's no meeting rooms so all the meetings are still on Teams.
I believe a purpose of this is to discriminate against older workers with families. This is also a reason to put your facility in a high cost of living area: young single people who don't need as much floor space can live there more easily.
You just know this is disproportionately going to lead to women quitting too. Which we spent YEARS trying to recruit. Just the dumbest era to be alive. :)
I wonder why people with requisite entrepreneurial skills aren't setting up enough remote-(only|friendly) businesses. Clearly, there's a demand for such roles. With RTO policies implemented across the globe, I imagine there'll be a surplus of high-quality talent for hiring as well. This seems like clear case of market inefficiency.
Or they have tried and failed, and market is working as intended. I'd argue this is the case since there have been a surge of companies the past 3 years, and barely a handful are remote, and none at large scale.
Would they have space? Considering that Github was always remote, that's a lot of people to fit into existing space. Though I guess it depends on how many Github employees are within 50 miles of Redmond.
And, in my experience, a 50 mile commute into a big city isn't really sustainable--and that was with a fair bit of travel, etc. mixed in so I wasn't going in every day and pretty accessible commuter rail service if I was going in 8-5 or thereabouts.
Given that all GitHub teams are remote, the chance of having a team member at the same office is approximately 0. What's the point of commuting if you're not co-located with team members?
This does not stop every company from RTO mandates. My wife's employer is approaching full RTO and literally none of her team would go to the same office as her. And she was remote before COVID.
Look at any Microsoft products. They all suck in their own way to be honest. Remote vs in-office won't change that. They'll still be churning put bing, 3d paint, teams etc etc. Doesn't matter that they don't hire the best, the corporate agreements they have are the only thing that matters.
Forcing people back into the office for no real reason is just a power play from middle management trying to justify their pointless existence. What really bothers them is not culture or collaboration, it is that nobody is sucking up to them, because it is usually done in person and not on Teams. When they are not sitting in the same section as their peons pretending to boost efficiency and hard work, it becomes obvious that people can manage perfectly fine without them.
That is the real threat, someone might notice how utterly useless these bozos are and finally cut them off. Especially in software development, where focus and silence are everything, this mandate is beyond ridiculous.
What I find repugnant (but not surprising) is that with the same earnestness and confidence they're announcing that RTOs are for the betterment of their own workforce, they were announcing the same thing about WFH just a couple of years back.
Oh great, can't wait until this is used as something to back up other justifications to strong arm employees into quite often meaningless commute that doesn't increase their quality of life, nor their productivity for many.
50 miles 3 times a week? That seems like a lot. Or maybe I'm getting my miles>km conversion wrong here. Not a commute I'd accept if it's not by high speed commuter rail (and even then...)
From my experience, even with fairly reasonable commuter rail--if not exactly high-speed--about 10 minutes from my house to the rail station or a fairly long drive into an outlying subway station. Plus some walking. You were close to 2 hours each way with a 6am start at the latest.
Latterly if I went into another company's Boston office it was about the same.
WFH got stuck and commercial real estate took a haircut and it's investors took a bath and the sharks moved in and want some blood with whichever way they can
"As we build [employee replacements that are always 100% remote] that will define this era, we need the kind of energy and momentum that comes from smart people working [not remote because remote is too hard to manage]."
AKA - Microsoft is trying to layoff employees without getting more bad layoff press while they make record earnings.
A company where most employees work digitally with people across the world is requiring people to sit at a desk in a physical location. The irony is blinding & shows an utter lack of transparency by leadership.
I certainly saw engagement, collaboration, etc. going down once things switched heavily to video calls (even before COVID) rather than meeting in-person in various ways--especially among people you didn't already know.
Of course, in many situations, it's unavoidable. I'm probably not going to hop on an international trip at the drop of a hat--though I certainly attended events.
But there's some subset of people that just don't want to travel or go into an office at all and IMO they're mostly mis-guided.
I’ve had the opposite effect. Meetings where everyone is on video run so much better.
More on task, plus transcriptions & other features dramatically improve the meeting. I can more easily understand accents, read when people talk over each other, ai generated notes and tasks, and I can rewatch parts of the meeting by searching for something said. Also easy to detect who dominates the meeting and who might need to be included in talking more.
I'm not sure big in-person meetings in rooms are especially useful but eating with people, having discussions in small conference rooms, social events, etc. were. Big online meetings never engaged me much and I certainly almost never rewatched parts of a meeting. And latterly it was sort of "Who are these people" if I hadn't known them before.
I do agree that video conferences that have agendas, collaborative notes, and so forth matured during COVID (though we did them before) but don't require a video meeting.
I wonder what the situation is like for Ukrainian employees. It seems from the article that you can request an exception, but will it be actually approved?
If anyone here is Microsoft employee living in Ukraine, I'd love to heat your take
Terrible. Especially given that the Seattle area has terrible traffic and also issues with safety on public transportation (like many other cities in America). What is the point exactly of getting workers into an office just so they can be on Zoom calls (or Teams, in this case)? This seems a lot like what Amazon was accused of - a way to shake out some workers and get them to quit when they cannot rearrange their life on a whim.
Do you know the stats on what percentage of transit rides result in some sort of assault or theft? It’s always felt pretty safe to me, although you certainly do end up sharing space with some very disadvantaged people.
My issue with US transit is mostly speed and convenience. Even with the traffic it usually takes 3x as long to get somewhere by transit, unless my destination lines up perfectly with the routes.
Deaths are one problem, but they may also not be distributed evenly. Some cities or states have more issues on public transit than others. But also you can still be a victim of assault, harassment, theft, and other issues on public transit. Many of these issues also go unreported or don’t get counted in official stats if not accompanied by a formal police report or whatever. So it doesn’t tell the full story of what people’s real experiences are.
I live in Seattle and take the public transit almost every day since I don't have a car. The real experience which you seem to care about is that I haven't had any issues and most of the fear people spread around public transit is made up.
I always dread travelling by bus in seattle, waiting for what crazy will get on that day, and it affects most buses as they all go to downtown, where most of the homeless/addicts are.
I think people in this thread (and elsewhere) are using "unsafe" to mean "I feel uncomfortable" rather than "there's a serious chance that harm will come to me".
Law enforcement in liberal cities might overlook public urination or petty theft by the mentally ill, but they come down hard on violent crime. Truly violent people are not allowed to roam free on public transit. There's definitely some weird people though, and our society is segregated enough that most rich people probably can't tell the difference between a violent weirdo and a harmless one.
How are you defining ‘dangerous’? Are you counting deaths? Or also things like assault, robbery, sexual harassment, drug abuse (second hand smoke or needles), etc? What about crimes that take place around transit but not on transit itself, like crimes near a train station or whatever? I think it’s easy to construct narratives that are misleading both with data and without data. My point is simply that for many people, they feel safer in private transit and would prefer it. I see some other people here talking about some shuttle network Microsoft runs - presumably that is also a private option and it likely exists because public transit isn’t something many Microsoft employees want to deal with.
we define transit by accidents, because it's a bad argument to say "you don't experience harassment by yourself." by that logic we may as well close down parks and libraries and privatize those with single rooms.
Remote work means traffic congestion gets better and also helps solves the affordable housing crisis, as people can then choose to live in areas with a lower cost of living but further away from the inner city.
I think the return to office phenomenon is inevitable because employers externalize transportation costs, but internalize value capture from employees being in presumably a less distracting and more controlled environment. It’s a systems problem where the incentive only goes one way. I think you could have a balancing incentive of providing employers tax credits if they can prove that they are using remote or partially remote employment. I would even extend this incentive to employers that can show that their work hours are not overlapped with peak traffic hours. 20% of traffic volume might be in a single hour, and highway capacity is often built around accommodating need of only 2 hours of the day. Your state DOT is probably a top 3 expense for the state government.
Pre-pandemic, I had multiple employers that were incentivized via the state and county government to push remote working, ride sharing, and transit utilization as a means of reducing overall government spending on roads and road maintenance. It typically showed up as small benefits to the employee, like a monthly drawing for a $50 Target gift card or preferential parking spots. Based on that, I got the sense that while it may have been helpful in the aggregate, it wasn't wildly cost effective.
I worked at Microsoft pre and post-pandemic. Microsoft has an extensive shuttle network, but the public transit (Sound Transit) to the office was nicer in many ways. It ran more frequently and the seats reclined!
Isn’t most Microsoft presence in the Seattle area on the east side? I haven’t heard of the kinds of public transit safety issues that happen in the city happening there. Traffic still applies though.
>We’ve looked at how our teams work best, and the data is clear: when people work together in person more often, they thrive — they are more energized, empowered, and they deliver stronger results.
Citation needed or this is just more vibe-xecutive decree.
Work at a fortune 200 company. We spent COVID all 100% remote WFH. After several quarters of their entire workforce working remotely, they were gushing about how productivity increased, satisfaction scores went through the roof and the company recorded several record breaking quarters in revenue during a time they expected the exact opposite to happen.
This inevitably lead them to having one helluva hard time trying to get people back into the office since they owned about a dozen buildings where the majority of their employees were supposed to be working. After a year and several attempts, they instead sold most of their real estate holdings and have since consolidated everybody into just a few buildings. The new rule is that if you are less than 30 mins from the office, you need to come in at least twice a week. Not a huge hurdle and so far, has been met with little if any resistance.
I have to give them credit. They tried ordering people back in, and ultimately pivoted and sold their real estate instead.
1. Will you name? Sounds like some sane management; those looking for jobs might find that a useful datapoint.
2. I think making it proportional to the length of the commute is an interesting idea. And even for those who don't like the office... two days a week with a short commute isn't terrible.
1. I can't name them, but they're in the health care industry.
2. Yeah, and all they're doing is taking badge reports. Going in for a Town Hall meeting or a team meeting meets these requirements. You're not required to be in the office a set number of hours - just be there. I've been told its a kind of reverse psychology trick. The more time you spend around your coworkers, grabbing lunch, collabing on little stuff, it will morph into a desire to want to be there more often and thus, the decision will then be yours that you want to be there - not some mandate coming from on high.
I think in a lot of ways its working. Last year, I'd go in for some tech support thing and the building was a ghost town. Barely anybody. This year? Totally different. The ramp is full, people are bustlin about, the cafeteria is packed. Its being around that atmosphere I think is what they want people to be more involved in. I've already had several team lunches on campus and instead of going home, we unpack our laptops and hammer out a few things, then head out. None of us are really there for more than a few hours, but it just feels like really productive face-time with your team.
I just think its cool how the company is just letting the employees figure out without a heavy handed approach and from what I can see, its working.
Honestly, it sounds like the drop-in-drop-out allowance is what makes this tick. Well, that and the short commute thing. You get the best of face-time collaboration without the "grind" of needing to punch a timecard. Just the best possible parts of in-person work, and nothing else. Plus, you get to time-shift so that commute stays nice and short.
it is obviously more nonsense. There is no way one single will approach will work for ALL employees. some people just do not want to spend 4hrs in commute on daily basis. and any senior employee with kids would prefer to spend more time with kid than on
and that is when Office does not hinder productivity through lack of team space, meeting rooms and open office non sense or seting up equipment.
There's no data that proves it. If they had the data they would parade it in front of everyone.
The elites that rule those companies always had WFH as a benefit for as long as I remember. They find it very icky that the underclasses have now a benefit that was exclusive to them. That's the only data there is.
Corporate analysts were "gifted" with a two impossibly rare step functions, that will probably never be repeated in our lifetimes: Near 100% -> near 0% percent in office, then 0% percent -> partial% in office. With most (all?) of the big companies following the same path, I think it's safe to assume the data points to the same conclusion: in whole, humans work better together.
It makes you wonder if it's a fundamental part of our evolution, or something. ;)
It would be very interesting to see their rational.
> With most (all?) of the big companies following the same path, I think it's safe to assume the data points to the same conclusion
That is, at best, very weak evidence supporting your conclusion.
I agree, by the way, that humans do work better together. That doesn't mean, however, that humans work better in an office environment. There are huge drawbacks to that environment that may very well exceed the benefit of physical proximity.
"Humans work better together" is a very different assertion than "humans work better in offices".
Given how I’ve worked and the developers I’ve worked with over the decades, marketeers or managers might work better in bunches but peace and quiet serves the developers. Offices with a door, few interruptions, etc. Rands has talked about being in the zone when working and anything that favours that should be provided by companies interested in software people.
> That is, at best, very weak evidence supporting your conclusion.
Please see the definition of "assume" to help you interpret what I wrote in a way that's closer to what I wrote/was trying to communicate.
Please also see the last sentence, that you missed entirely:
> It would be very interesting to see their rational.
This sentence strongly implies, nearly directly states, that I, in fact, do NOT know their rational.
What's your opinion? Why do you think they're all converging on the same policies? Do you think they're acting irrationally in opposition of data, or without data?
Then the work should be set up so that your teammates and project collaborators actually work from the same office, and not in the space that was most convenient to procure or in lower-cost offshore markets. But executives would pretty much always rather have you take video calls from your desk than incur any cost or inconvenience on their end. They're not acting like they believe this.
> I think it's safe to assume the data points to the same conclusion: in whole, humans work better together.
It makes you wonder if it's a fundamental part of our evolution, or something. ;)
Is that why we invented machines and AI that will replace humans?
Another anecdote. I have a friend who manages his families (started by his father and grandfather) private market investment company. The family is worth nine figures.
He pulled his people back into the office because he said he "felt" like they were not working. Despite graduating from Harvard and from Harvard Business School he could not offer any qualitative or quantitative data to back up his "feelings." He lets his people WFH on Friday's but says he schedules video calls on that day to make sure they are working.
He said, "When they are working from home, I do not know if they are walking their dog for an hour but if they are in the office, I know they aren't."
What made this conversation laughable was that he and I were at a country club having lunch and bullshitting for half the day, on a weekday, while our kids (who had the day off from school) were playing a sport together. He stepped away more than once for "meetings" that he took from his cell phone.
Seeing how many Slackers were hired during and after pandemic (they were hired before, but were forced to work from office) I can totally understand the moves. It’s sad, but there are way too many unskilled people, currently carried by AI to hide themselves in corporate worlds that the companies are already affected in a real, calculable way.
Also this is great proxy for layoffs, but only for those that have options - as already mentioned. So it is a lose-lose for the companies that will make it the most stupid, direct way.
If "AI" S/W dev is going to be a thing, then companies are going to have to wean themselves off of the idea of human face-2-face colab being the key to success.
Why don't they just pay people less if they think WFH causes less value to the company? Give them an option to RTO or take a pay cut. Why would you want people who don't want your company to succeed anymore working for you? I can't imagine anyone used to 3-4 years of WFH (and liking it) wanting the company to succeed after RTO. If they stay, it's probably because they don't have a choice and they'll probably be the least motivated and minimally productive employees.
OTOH, I've noticed the "disruptors" of yesteryears are now full-on right-wing jerks whose mission is to preserve wealth instead of create wealth by doing new and disruptive things. This tells me one important message if nothing else: There is no shortage of talent for the perceived wealth-creating opportunities. The gold rush is over.
I fear this is less about ZIRP and more about complacency (in general) and would-be investors and VC's not having faith in the possibility of high ROI investments.
Makes sense. I would say if productivity is below 30% of RTO then it's RTO. I can't imagine that though. Most people are productive 3-4h at most in office jobs, it shouldn't that difficult to measure output/productivity. Just meetings normally takes at least 1-2h on average out of most people's work days.
Well if you're remote you're in competition with the rest of the world right as they're all remote too and will do they same job cheaper so probably a decent one.
In some sense you can guess the demographics of this site based on their reaction to various things. This particular comment section reveals that few startup people inhabit this site and it’s mostly /r/technology 2.0.
Microsoft, like other tech companies, over hired during COVID. This is their way of fixing that glitch while lessening the financial burden of severance packages handed out during layoffs.
It's a standard McKinsey & Co. playbook that is going around the various tech companies as a way to reduce headcount.
And, productivity is going to tank. If you force me to RTO, I will show up exactly at 8am, take my 1 hour lunch away from the office, and leave exactly at 5pm. And, when I do leave the office at 5pm, my work phone gets turned off and I will not do anything work related until 8am the next morning.
You would think these tech companies would do something innovative. A f*cking monkey can cut costs by firing people. How about you stop over hiring? How about you stop leasing building space and use the products you create that enable remote collaboration?
Why anybody would want to waste their time with working at MSFT is beyond baffling to me. Interned at Redmond, WA and despised it after a few weeks. Looks great on resume at time but definitely set me on a path to avoid large corporate firms like MSFT
I've seen this from both sides, and I think there's about the same amount of bad-faith arguments on both sides. Now, line workers have less power here than the execs, so I'm inclined to side with the former group, but... the whole thing is a bit of a mess.
You can essentially divide IC employees into three categories. First, those who are about as productive from home as they are from the office, but are on average happier working remotely (no commute, etc). That's probably circa 80%. Second, those who are well-intentioned but fall behind over time, because they are less proactive about maintaining soft skills - communications, cross-functional relationship management, etc. That's the bulk of the rest. And third, there are people who actively exploit the situation in ways that the company is going to have an allergic reaction work (outsource their work to a dude in India, half-ass three jobs at competing companies, etc). That's typically <1%, but it's obviously a weird / scary new thing.
Further complicating this picture is the fact that line managers are not perfect either; there is an "out of sight, out of mind" aspect to it, and if a WFH worker is underperforming, it will on average take longer to address the problem, which has some ripple effects.
And on some level, the exec perspective is that the intangible gains in the happiness of the 80% that was previously willing to work for you in the office is not worth the horrors on the bottom end. So there is something resembling a credible argument for RTO.
At the same time, there is a degree of lazy thinking / bad faith on the exec side because the problems can be solved in other ways. You can retrain managers, you can improve performance management, you can monitor for certain types of grift, and you can accept some degree of added risk. In fact, you probably should if it keeps your top performers happier. But the overwhelming preference is for the easy choice of RTO.
You missed the people more productive at home because they have less overall life stress, no pain of commute, disabilities which make commute painful or hard, etc.
And I suspect that’s a *LOT* more people than you’re giving credit.
To be very clear, I’m in that group, and probably so. Several engineers I’ve worked with are in that group, as well. I suspect it’s actually quite common in software.
I honestly don't think this shows in the data. As a software engineer, I really want to believe it, but I think we're prone to confusing well-being with productivity. We feel better about the work, but if you try to quantify it in any imaginable way, it's not there. Not in launch velocity, not in the number of pull requests, not the number of design docs created, bugs fixed, etc...
Of course, all of these metrics are individually goofy, but in aggregate, they give you some approximation of productivity.
For what it's worth, my old job was quantifying it in meaningful ways and we *were* revealing, statistically, to be incredibly productive.
And in my own analysis: PRs, test coverage, "story points finished", lines of code written, etc. I was more productive working from home on a reduced hour schedule than I had been working on a strict, high-hours one, too.
I used to say the same, but now I have to use Slack + Gmail + Meet + Google Calendar + Drive + whatever else Google has.
All of this has integrations into each other. Somehow a slack bot can show me calendar entries. Why I would even need such a broken UI/experience is unclear to me. I can't see when people usually work. Meet chats disappear once the meeting is over.
At Teams/Outlook you have a million other issues, but all things considered, I preferred it.
It's from the modern "rewrite it in Electron every 6 months" arm of Microsoft, not the "With a clever manipulation of the registers, we can eke out another 4 bytes of saved memory" arm of Microsoft. The former has been winning for years, but the latter also exists inside the company. See Raymond Chen for a classic example of the deep technical skill inside MS
No wonder they just tossed Skype in the trash. This explains so much.
> SPOL is even worse a tirefire than, say, even Lotus Notes.
To be fair, Lotus Notes is what we had back in the mid 90's. There really wasn't much else like it. But comparing that today... (checks notes) ...oh. It's still a thing?!
So, neither Lotus Notes (now "HCL Notes" apparently?) or SharePoint have any excuse being as bad as they are. There are a dozen other far more capable examples of this kind of technology. I'm routinely amazed at how bad MS' user experience continues to be, even with all the money and engineers at their disposal.
> The last time was Windows 2000. Now, that was some quality software.
It was good, but IIS had some faults, can't remember what, they wanted to replace it quickly with 2003. There isn't much wrong with Windows XP, objectively speaking.
I was under the impression GitHub built and maintained that, but perhaps that’s changed… If not I wouldn’t consider it a Microsoft built product like windows etc (yes I’m aware ms owns gh)
But it didn’t win by default, it beat out the other alternatives, sublime and a GitHub editor (prior to acquisition).
VS Code (Monaco at the time) was developed by a small team largely in secret to keep it safe from other MS departments so it’s really not like other MS software. It has been safe from meddling for a while there is a chance it’ll be a victim of its own success.
The editor itself, Monaco, is nice enough and I’ve built some browser based ides, with it. Clientele consisting of primarily data scientists seemed to enjoy it
Yeah, honestly my whole karma score is built from pithy comments about Teams.
Thankfully it no longer crashes Chrome all the time, but everything else is meh. I still can't tag people in Japanese. The security settings are a trap for poor quality system admins and checkbox checkers. The meetings crash, the screen sharing only allows one way (so no easy pair programming), etc..
I much prefer working with slack and google meet like I did at my last job.
> Given that Teams doesn't work in anything other than Chrome
That's news to me; I use Teams on Firefox every work day and I see no issues (other than it being one of the very few sites which need third-party cookies to work, but recently Firefox has made it easier to add an exception for a single site like Teams).
Be thankful you can go to the office. If you're working from home you have a lot more competition. Our company has started getting Indian workers into Mexico working US hours, you're competing with them if you're working online.
https://archive.ph/EguQ5
At $org, we too are undertaking a mandatory RTO order, enforced with door access logs.
People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller locales, where the offices we have are perfunctory at best.
The rationale is the usual one: collaboration, watercooler chat, unspecific evidence / "research" about productivity (that we are told definitely exists, but is yet to be shared).
I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO... C suites are committed to spending as much as possible on real estate and geographically limiting their talent pool. Whilst making workers more tired and less productive.
I still have no idea where it comes from. My best guess is that nobody at that level wants to break ranks with the "collective wisdom" of "investors", which creates a kind of groupthink.
(An RTO mandate is also an excellent thing for a CEO to show investors they are doing, if they are not making money and lack better ideas.)
RTO mandates are about many things, but actual business value of being in the office to the business doing the mandate is low on the list. Among the things it is about:
(1) Executives with emotional attachment to certain leadership styles that are enabled by physical presence,
(2) Interest in the investor class for the commercial real estate market. The business impacted may not be invested in it, but the businesses’ shareholders in sufficient numbers probably are, and so are the influential constituents of the politicians they want favors from, in a time of increasingly naked political corruption and cronyism.
(3) Backdoor layoffs. RTO is unpopular with large swathes of the work force, and people will quit because of it. That’s good for a firm likely to be cutting positions anyway; there’s no need for severance, regardles of scale there’s no WARN Act notice requirement, and if you still have to cut more positions afterwards, it makes it less likely that those cuts will hit WARN Act thresholds. And while the people that quit may not be the ones it would be your first choice to cut, they are the ones that would be most likely to quit in the kind of less-employee-friendly and financially leaner (in real terms) times likely to exist for a while after cuts.
It is hilarious that people think the second largest company on the planet, with a market cap over $5 trillion, spends even one second worry about the profit margins of commercial real estate companies, makes any decisions based on that, or is somehow cowed by their alleged political power despite being much, much, much smaller than Microsoft.
I was very clear, I thought, when I said “RTO mandates are about...”, that I was not saying “All of these factors are relevant to Microsoft”.
With Microsoft its probably mostly (3), with maybe some degree of (2), with (1) maybe, especially in the political salience, being a plus in the eyes of some decision-makers but not really driving the decision.
There are firms (and public agencies) where the relationship between those factors is very different in driving RTO mandates.
With Microsoft specifically there's also the fact that it made a massive investment into rebuilding a large chunk of its campus in the last few years (IIRC it began before COVID). They demolished some of the oldest buildings - the ones that were done back when every senior engineer was entitled to an office of their own - and replaced them with "open office" cubicle farms.
Now, I would imagine that there are quite a few in the top management who originally signed off on that expense. Probably the same people who were talking about replacing offices with cubicles since 2015, which means Satya and his inner circle. So now they've spent a lot of money, they have to do something to show to the board that it wasn't wasted. Which means filling those buildings with employees, whether they like it or not.
No CEO cares about commercial real estate profits. It isn't a factor in any major company decision.
Why not extend the baseless paranoia and say it is because they want to see auto company profits go up? And also support petroleum companies?
Or is it just real estate that is boogeyman secretly running the country behind the scenes?
The City of Philadelphia sent all of its workers back to the office with an explicit statement from the Mayor about struggling commercial office real estate in the city center. They may not be "running the country" but they are definitely heavyweight players in the market.
Businesses care about commercial real estate as much a renters care about landlords.
This commercial real estate take is so backwards you have to wonder if it's a plant to make the anti-RTO movement look like idiots.
There was no such explicit statement from the mayor that it was because of real estate.
https://www.phila.gov/2024-05-20-statement-from-mayor-cherel...
Umm, yeah, because city executives whose “organizations” are funded by local taxes, especially commercial real estate taxes care about it.
That says nothing about why CEOs of thousands of private firms who have nothing to do with real estate firms would care about those other companies’ profits.
> No CEO cares about commercial real estate profits. It isn't a factor in any major company decision.
No spherical CEO in a vacuum, maybe.
Cfo and shareholder do care about value of their building as these are on the balance sheet as asset and large swings can impact the metrics by which the market evaluates the companies.
I worked for a large company that did just that. They reduced the number of buildings they had to shrink costs, and get rid of employees without 'firing' them. MSFT does not strike me as a company that does not understand cost per employee. Why would you think the cost per employee does not come into the picture? I am just curious about that PoV as it is basically grilled into all MBAs and part of financial calculations of most businesses.
May you explain why ruthlessly profit driven CEOs of megacorporations don't care about the commercial value of the real estate they own?
Because who are the profit driven CEOs (are there any other CEOs?) sell their buildings to? The value of their building affects the profit via the depreciation expense. Which is to say the more buildings you have for RTO the bigger the expense-and thus the lower the profit for the profit maximizing CEOs.
From a profit only perspective RTO makes sense only if the cities gave businesses tax breaks tied to business occupancy (the city’s math is they will get some of these taxes back when employees go and spend money in the city). And maybe cities are threatening to stop these taxes back until RTO.
In Microsoft’s case though people only spend some money at the cafeteria-because there is nothing else to spend money on their campus. How big could that tax break could be?
This RTO request from Microsoft does not make much sense.
You should also consider property taxes from where the employees live. In MS's case, plenty of the employees own or rent in the same town, or nearby. At least as a calculation/consideration of tax breaks. I can say that if it weren't for Intel, Wells Fargo and others deciding to build/employ in Chandler, AZ the town wouldn't be half that size in terms of residential population. I'm sure the same is true even for bigger cities relative to business size.
How would this be an incentive for Microsoft to require RTO though? Even if Microsoft would receive tax breaks from the city because employees own property and pay property taxes - the city would get the same amount of property taxes if employees work from home. Microsoft would receive the same tax breaks.
AFAIK Microsoft mandated RTO only for employees that live within 50 miles of an office. So far Microsoft does not require employees to move to a city - and bolster the property taxes the city collects.
I still do not understand the logic behind RTO.
I was stating that's a consideration of why a City/State offers the incentives... I can't speak to MS in this case in particular. It's far more likely a soft layoff strategy.
I'd also say, I've seen far more people just sandbag and slack off in WFH than in an actual office.
>How big could that tax break could be?
Many are asking this!
In the case of Microsoft, their main campus in a thriving suburb of the Seattle Eastside would be prime real estate even if they disappeared tomorrow. They have absolutely zero reason to worry about the value of their real estate regardless of occupancy.
It’s likely members of their company’s board cares.
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> and his phallic replacement tower
All towers can be called phallic, my deranged friend.
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Trump is probaby too senile to even know what RTO is, and even if he does, I'm pretty sure he doesn't own Microsoft's office buildings. And the premise that Microsoft would let themselves get bullied into RTO, causing a lot of their best employees to quit, without raising a public stink about it? Far fetched.
This is the doing of Microsoft's own leadership, not Trump.
It surprises me when I see people call Trump senile given how far Biden got before most people were willing to acknowledge it at all.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things you can justifiably call Trump. He just doesn't seem senile in any way similar to those in my life I've watched go down that road.
Agreed. I can’t imagine making up random facts about people I disagree with when there are so many agreed upon things to point out about that person.
Can you imagine you have an entire room hanging on every truth coming out of your mouth and suddenly you blurt out, “And he’s also from Mars!”
Imagine the confused looks in the crowd as they realize they’re listening to someone who isn’t completely aligned with reality.
He's plainly senile, you can tell every time he talks. That Biden was even worse doesn't negate Trump's senility.
I don't think it's really senility. I'm sure you've probably read an article by a news author about a technical subject that you know very well that just gets a lot of basic details/pov wrong as a whole. I'm pretty sure it's that, but with someone who has to take in 10x the amount of information on a daily basis. Combine that with an outsized, fragile ego and you get what you get from Trump. A vague understanding of things observed/read/viewed in passing combined with everything else.
I don't read shit. I have had family members go senile. I have listened to Trump speak. He's senile.
For the silent down voters, when has Trump shown signs of senility?
There's plenty to dislike about him, and he does seem to have health issues, but I just haven't seen signs of serious cognitive decline.
> For the silent down voters, when has Trump shown signs of senility?
For quite a while. Even compared to the already generally incoherent speaking style of his first term, his speech has been unfocussed, his grasp of facts worse, etc., during his second term. Even before that, the cognitive test he bragged about passing his first term isn't sonething that is ever indicated without symptoms of cognitive impairment, his speaking style, grasp of facts, etc., in even his first term shows significant decline from his earlier public life, heck even his extreme forward leaning stance, while it can have other source, is a symptom of certain kinds of dementia.
Aside from fairly extreme media bias issues stemming from business and political interests of media owners that became undeniable with the public active intervention of a number of media owners late in the 2024 campaign, he gets a pass for this for a number of reasons, including the fact that critics generally have a lot of bigger fish to fry, some critics see pointing to cognitive dysfunction as mitigating arguments they want to make about conscious moral evil, incoherence and looseness with facts being a noted feature of his speaking style making people less likely to note changes that are changes in degree rather than kind for him, etc.
Consider the networks of friends and acquaintances the top-level decision makers are likely to be part of. Talking about how they're divesting big corporate dollars from the real estate market probably wouldn't make them more popular at cocktail parties.
You're right that it probably doesn't apply to Microsoft, but some companies were granted tax breaks by the local city, but on the condition they brought a certain number of jobs to the city.
They care insofar as the collapse of commercial real estate is cited as a social harm of WFH by the elite classes outside the business that push RTO.
It's not an explicit decision making factor, just something that's in the background that has contributed to the overall idea that "RTO = good"
These decisions are all being made by vibes, after all, not by a cold rational analysis
If I would be a commercial real estate mogul, I would invest at least hundreds of millions into covert PR campaigns in various media (including here on HN) to nudge the perception via exactly these sort of claims. And who wants to be seen as anti-business, right?
Just follow the money, it usually works very well. Sometimes, people are just dumb on their own and/or as a group but I don't think thats the case here. Tens of billions if not more in lucrative real estate is at stake.
These executives, though, also made billions in investments themselves in Microsoft's Redmond Campus, which mostly otherwise will stand empty.
These executives don't like looking dumb and these billions in useless investment are statues to them looking stupid otherwise.
Those investments would be a matter of public record, either directly or through real estate companies. Any investigator who found these hypothetical investments would get a lot if clicks and eyeballs so there is a hell of a lot of incentive. So where's the proof?
Microsoft owns a lot of commercial real estate. The people who manage the commercial real estate within Microsoft certainly care about the value of those investments.
Nit: current market cap is ~$3.7T
I always assume a different option, though (3) is likely part of it for Microsoft right now as well.
When leadership decides their velocity is too slow for whatever reason, they look for deck chairs to move. RTO is one big deck chair they can move and many will assume it will improve performance and velocity.
The problem is that I've never seen anyone actually prove that out for RTO with solid data. And that goes both ways, I haven't seen anything to prove that remote-first is universally better for performance.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a significant impact on performance for the kind of work people on HN do. I do my work every day. When I'm done doing my work at the office, I browse HN. After I finish my work at home, I do the dishes. But I do roughly the same amount of work either way.
> When leadership decides their velocity is too slow for whatever reason, they look for deck chairs to move. RTO is one big deck chair they can move and many will assume it will improve performance and velocity.
I’d agree that “do-something-ism” is a factor, both on its own and as an accelerant for any pre-existing bias in that direction that packed an impetus or pretext without bad results.
Backdoor layoffs. It's always backdoor layoffs. If they really appreciated and needed you at the company, they would cater for your needs when you're delivering your work.
If it's layoffs aren't there a very real risk that the most talented people, who enjoy working from home will simply leave, while the less talented returns to the office because they'll have a harder time finding new jobs?
So you're doing backdoor layoffs, but you're laying off the people you'd most likely want to keep, leaving the company with the less experienced/talented people.
>If it's layoffs aren't there a very real risk that the most talented people, who enjoy working from home will simply leave, while the less talented returns to the office because they'll have a harder time finding new jobs?
The corporate structure is not created around talented people, but around mediocrity. In Dilbert land you have no use for brainiacs.
In my current environment one line bugfix takes 3-4 workdays to release. Does it matter one bit if you will do the fix in 10 or 100 minutes if it will be overshadowed by the time THE PROCESS consumes.
This assumes that companies view their employees as individuals. At a certain scale, companies inevitably start viewing their employees as "resources" that behave more like robots than human beings.
There is no way for somebody like Nadella to have an understanding of most employees' performance, and the chain of management is so long that he doesn't trust anyone else's ability to ascertain individual performance. This leads to the introduction of "objective measurements" of performance, which further undermines trust, as everyone now starts trying to manipulate the numbers.
I think at some point, it's just inevitable that C-level management takes decisions based on the assumption that people are replaceable and that the difference between a great performer and a poor performer is essentially irrelevant.
> I think at some point, it's just inevitable that C-level management takes decisions based on the assumption that people are replaceable and that the difference between a great performer and a poor performer is essentially irrelevant.
Maybe, but I find it hard to believe that someone who has spent their entire career in the tech industry actually believes this.
The "backdoor layoffs" theory seems suspect to me more generally. It's not like they're particularly averse to doing layoffs the normal way. Especially now where the signal from big tech company doing layoffs is "we're really good at AI".
I mean we still have headlines coming like this
https://fortune.com/2025/09/05/paramount-skydance-ceo-david-...
A 10 day notice requiring agreement to full 5 day RTO or take a voluntary package. This from a CEO talking bout 'efficiency' and cost cutting, where I know people who have been 100% remote for 5 years.
What are the odds those voluntary packages are worse than whatever contract & law specific in the case of layoffs. And I am sure the (very X/Musk/extreme hardcore coded) agreement employees sign agreeing to RTO means if they are fired later for office attendance its for-cause.
> What are the odds those voluntary packages are worse than whatever contract & law specific in the case of layoffs.
Roughly zero, if the scale as a layoff would be sub-WARN Act level, because it is unlikely that the impacted employees had any contractual severance guarantee or any legal entitlement to any notice of termination of employment or pay in lieu (they might be less than the firm’s historical practice for similar roles, and having an excuse to characterize it as voluntary provides a bit of PR cover for that, but that's not a legal or contractual guarantee.) At-will employment is the rule, rather than the exception, for private, non-uniom employment in the US.
I guess the question is then - why the same Twitter/Musk playbook of creating a forced dichotomy "agree to 5 day RTO in writing or take voluntary package"?
Would imply they are probably planning WARN-act-level layoffs, and trying to get under that with "volunteers"?
> aren't there a very real risk that the most talented people, who enjoy working from home will simply leave, while the less talented returns to the office because they'll have a harder time finding new jobs?
a.k.a Dead Sea effect
Leave to where? All the other FAANGs and tech companies seem to be doing RTO as well. There's no "dead sea effect" because the less talented are also being flushed out by layoffs specifically targeting low performers. And the job market is so bad right now that there's absolutely no shortage of fresh talented folks to hire.
NVIDIA is very remote-heavy with no plans to RTO.
> aren't there a very real risk that the most talented people, who enjoy working from home will simply leave
company will probably write exceptions for those people into their contracts; my neighbor, a talented senior dev lead at BigTechCo, has it in his contract that he can WFH regardless of RTO calls
Have you seen some of the people whom they laid off in the recent waves of overt layoffs? There was a lot of talent unceremoniously dumped there.
Back in the real world, "Microsoft Layoffs Continue Into 5th Consecutive Month": https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-la...
There's no reason to covertly plot convoluted "backdoor layoff" schemes when they're openly doing layoffs on a regular basis. "Backdoor layoffs" is a silly meme loved only by the sort of people prone to falling for conspiracy theories.
On the contrary, if anything, it's evidence in support of the point. It shows that Microsoft desires to trim its employee rolls. Now if you do a proper layoff, you have to pay people quite a lot of money. So if you can make at least some of them leave on their own, that's substantial savings.
My personal pet theory (based on no evidence other than personal experience) is that, if your job is in senior management then your day-to-day work is going to meetings. And spending 8-10h on zoom meetings every day is unbelievably soul-crushing.
8h on zoom is far more desirable than 8 hours in person shuffling from meeting room to meeting room for me.
I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. I can wear comfortable pants. I can throw laundry into the wash in the couple minute gap between meetings. And when the last meeting ends, I close the laptop and I'm already home, no miserable drive in rush-hour traffic.
Of course, there is something worse than in-person meetings. Which is meetings that are hybrid, with a groups calling into zoom from two different conference rooms in different locations. Those manage to be far worse than just everyone individually joining the zoom. And ironically, that's the type of meeting that becomes common when you force your distributed workforce back to offices split across a dozen locations.
> I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will.
This works great when you are one of a dozen anonymous people on a zoom call. less so when you are the senior person in the meeting who everyone is actually talking to and expecting you to make a decision.
But this response kind of proves my point. If you are the principal in a meeting, the fact that everyone else in the meeting is zoned out and doing something else is not great.
I spent 7 months on a contract job last year like that... I'm in Phoenix (as well as half the employees involved) but the meetings were East Coast centered, so starting at 5am local. Roughly 38 hours of meetings a week, and in a position where I had to pay attention... It SUCKED so hard... I never got used to being up early and it just burned me up.
At least with actual people, in person there's more to the communication... I miss lunch with coworkers. I now pretty much have to work from home (vision decline, so I cannot drive), I wish it weren't the case.
But here is the thing-almost all meetings are on Temas. Because Microsoft campus is so spread out managers do not have time to go from building to building to meet other managers. Azure for example is spread out over 10 building just 8n Redmond. Never mind connecting with teams in Bay Area, Atlanta and India. All of these mangers spend their meetings on Teams.
Again I do not have a good explanation for RTO.
Is this also the case for senior executives?
One you miss is that if other companies in your industry are RTO, and you don't, the first quarter you under-perform your competitors, your shareholders and activist investors will blame the fact that you haven't RTO when all your competitors have ... !obviously! that is the key issue. Effectively, if everyone else is, you cannot afford not to.
(4) In person teams outperform remote/hybrid teams.
I'm surprised this was not mentioned as a possibility.
What's also not mentioned is that in multinational companies, especially since remote working became more widespread and attracting talent more difficult, teams are often made up of people from different locations anyway. So you won't have an in-person team, you'll just be joining Zoom (or in M$'s case, probably Teams) calls from the office rather than from home.
> teams are often made up of people from different locations anyway
My wife works at a multinational which has also decided to push RTO. Her closest team member works in an office 200 miles away from her office (in a different country), the vast majority of the rest of team are located between 3000 and 6000 miles away, on a different continent.
A friend of mine at AMZN has the same issue, his team is literally scattered around the globe.
This is also a situation where RTO has clear negative effects. If you have distributed teams, and everybody works from home, communication necessarily moves online. However, when parts of distributed teams are located in shared offices, they create islands of knowledge and personal relationships within the team, leading to all kinds of problems.
My org went for RTO two or three years ago. This year they've also started cutting locations from teams that are too distributed: you can either move or you can leave. There will still be a lot of people living on Teams, but a lot less, and mostly just management layers.
That's the key thing IMO; it's not "return to office" when quite a lot of the people never were in that office to start with. With the rate of turnover in most of these companies and the amount of time they were hiring for positions remotely, it's more "forced relocation, transfer, or 'voluntary' quitting without severance" for a large number of people. You can't return to a status quo that never existed for you.
I mean...you don't have to "voluntarily" quit without severance.
You can tell them, in writing, "I am willing and able to continue to perform the tasks I was hired for. If you insist that it be somewhere else, then you can fire me."
You could, and then presumably still not be paid severance despite being fired, and then have to decide whether it's worth trying to fight them legally. I don't pretend to know the right choice for everyone, but when presented with this exact choice, I pretty quickly realized that it wasn't going to be worth the effort. It sucks, but given the option to spend energy on fighting this battle or saving it to put towards finding a new job to support myself and my family (or trying to do both and likely burning myself out from trying to take on more than I could reasonably handle), it wasn't much of a choice. Sometimes being right doesn't mean that you don't lose.
Its a possibility, but I've never come across data that supports either approach reliably outperforming the other.
I've also never seen a company that actually tracked that well enough to make a decision like RTO based on their own data.
The evidence is that more companies are returning to old pre-covid policies than companies that are going remote only.
They can't all love commercial real estate that much right? Not all executives invests in office buildings.
Sorry I may have lost the thread a bit here. Are you proposing that as evidence that in office teams outperform remote teams?
This might be evidence of a belief, but that's no evidence that be belief is rational.
Would you sit in an airplane designed and built by a full remote workforce?
Would you download a car?
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It’s not mentioned as a possibility because nobody has ever been able to substantiate that claim.
Nobody has been able to substantiate any of the other claims either but that hasn't stopped posters from endlessly repeating them.
False. RTO press releases have explicitly mentioned the benefit to nearby businesses.
Shouldn't we trust that the execs have this data and can see productivity metrics that aren't available to the public?
Unless you think all RTO is a conspiracy.
Why would they not use those metrics internally as part of the RTO policy then? Surely they would be picking particular stats out to highlight the benefits of RTO, talk about how well everyone is doing afterwards, etc.
Because they don't want the public/employees to misconstrue those metrics? Maybe they don't want employees to know how they view productivity?
Surely if they're presented with solid evidence that WFH increases productivity, they'd keep it. Execs make millions in bonuses if the performance of the company hits certain goals. It's baffling that people here still talk about real estate conspiracy theories.
If there were clear metrics showing that in-person teams “out perform” remote teams, we would be hearing about it constantly. The supposed rationale for keeping such data secret sounds far-fetched to me.
The rationale is that there is no upside and pure downside for releasing these metrics to the public. It opens them up to scrutiny.
The evidence is that there have been more RTO calls than companies switching to pure WFH post-Covid.
If more people eat hamburgers than vegetables, you'll start saying that that's evidence that hamburgers are more healthy?
It'd be evidence that people enjoy eating hamburgers more than vegetables.
Yeah, but managers enjoying RTO doesn't mean that it's good for the company
It’s absolutely all being done on vibes. The execs don’t have some super-secret productivity dashboard giving them a breakdown of employee output by work location. Maybe, if they’re really on the ball, they have employee profit contributions divided by that, but that would then immediately show all the support staff as unproductive.
I agree that a lot of smaller companies would do it on vibes. I don't think Microsoft would.
You are talking about a company that shipped Windows 8.
Based on what? Why do you trust Microsoft’s judgment here? They are fallible like anyone else.
> Shouldn't we trust that the execs
No.
> can see productivity metrics that aren't available to the public
I am an employee of a company claiming my productivity is higher in the office. Nobody has ever shown me anything even remotely resembling a productivity metric. They haven’t even tried.
Productivity metrics are a holy grail. If any company created one that works they’d be bragging about it endlessly to shareholders and correlating it with the enormous profits they’d be generating.
If they have one that works I’d like to see it so I can use it to measure changes in my daily habits and further increase my productivity.
Since they can’t articulate this metric at all I can only conclude that it doesn’t exist.
With how contentious RTO has been why haven’t the advocates published data on how big of a boost it has been to their KPIs?
> Unless you think all RTO is a conspiracy.
It’s possible RTO is just regular old incompetence. No need for conspiracy theories.
All else being equal, this is almost certainly true.
All else is nowhere near equal, of course. That's the real rub.
This is dead on. In software especially, we have established ways for distributed individuals to collaborate (FOSS). RTO is meant to coddle the waterfall-addicted executive class.
It's pretty funny to watch e.g. some little FOSS console game system emulator—an actual toy, or at least, a project in service of a toy and of game-playing, to a large extent, but also technically more challenging than a lot of corporate work—or maybe some FOSS MMO server re-implementation coordinate development across continents with nothing but IRC, email, and Github (if that, LOL) and do it efficiently with little friction and volunteers working in their spare time and zero people with a dedicated "project manager" title, while companies pretend they need this whole fucking edifice of communication systems and people sitting in cubicles in particular places just to shuffle a few gigabytes of spreadsheet data around with Python or whatever.
Yeah. No you don't. You're, somehow, a fraction as competent and professional as some teens and 20-somethings making toys in their spare time, if you do. Definitely deserve seven-plus figure salaries for that.
KDE was supposed to run on Windows, starting 15 years ago. Linux was supposed to flawlessly support laptop sleep and hibernate, 20 years ago. Gimp was supposed to support 32 bit colors (I think) 15 years ago. Etc, etc.
The money is there so that things that are desired happen mostly on time.
The question is who they are desired by.
Not by the developers, obviously.
"That's what the money is for."
Isn't the thing you're ignoring just passion? I find it a small miracle that any company accomplishes anything. it's a ground of hundreds or thousands of people, almost none of whom want to be there and don't care about the product or company, that despite this still somehow accomplish things
but this is survival bias. lots of those FOSS projects go nowhere, unnoticed.
You are flipping this around: "companies pretend they need this whole fucking edifice", but they'd need to pick the winners first. those people need no management for them to do what they are motivated to do, but corporation have some people they are asking to do something they might not care much about - the same results aren't guaranteed.
Shit I would fucking love a cubical vs the open plan wall of noise and chaos that’s our brand new office. Sigh.
I feel you. Have my own office right now. Its worth more than €25k salary. It’s really hard to apply somewhere else and go back to noise and chaos in open office even for more money.
(2) Seems like a media narrative rather than truth. I don't think that would be anywhere remotely high on a CEO's priority list unless they were a commercial real estate company.
It's far more likely a mixture of (1) and actual results - in-person/hybrid teams produce better outcomes (even if why that's true hasn't been deeply evaluated or ultimately falls on management)
I think it's naive to think that management would push something so unpopular and expensive just because some kind of emotional attachment or to help some other unrelated commercial property owners.
I think a more reasonable answer is they think employees are more productive and a large swath of employees don't do anything. I wouldn't believe it unless I've seen it myself. At a large org, there is a significant portion of people that don't do anything meaningful. Sure they'll waste time in the office as well, but at least they're somewhat more productive or available. They're not watching Netflix in their underwear. Every large organization I've been at had these people.
It's really that simple. The alternative is really conspiracy level stuff.
I think the real answer is that executives at large companies live in a completely different world than their employees.
For one the circles they run in are going to be full of like-minded people; i.e. people for whom work is the most important part of their life. People like that want RTO and don't understand those who oppose it. When those are your priorities and all of your pees share them, its going to produce an echo chamber where most executives want RTO.
Furthermore their lifestyle is completely different. Most are going to have chauffeurs so they can be productive to/from work. They are going to have aids that take care of the food shopping, laundry, picking kids up from school, cooking, helping with homework etc. RTO does not affect them nearly as much as their employees who still have to deal with all of this in addition to commuting time now.
Its really just as simple as that. They lead completely different lives than their employees, are surrounded by other executives in friend and professional groups who have similar lifestyles, and generally don't understand why someone wouldn't want to RTO.
> They're not watching Netflix in their underwear.
I'm sure leaders believe this, I'm even sure it happens. Yet despite how obviously and deleteriously widespread this phenomenon is, isn't it amazing that we still can't seem to quantify notable efficiency and effectiveness gains from RTO mandates? And that's setting aside whether any hypothesized (at best) productivity gains are sufficiently high enough to justify the expense of office space rentals and office maintenance.
Let's also remember that the typical RTO experience is one where members of a geographically distributed team are RTO'd so they can remain geographically distributed, just working out of company owned or rented spaces instead of their homes.
It’s just (3)
Two things about backdoor layoffs. Mostly its about who. When its corporate dictat, those most likely to leave are those with other options, ie the best talent. So sure a business might save on severances in aggregate, but it doesn't get to decide on who, but simple statistics show it will be the best who move on. So a demoralised and increasingly mediocre workforce is then faced with a much tougher hiring environment with unfillable positions and the downward cycle continues, destroying customer value and reputation to a far greater degree than any temporary layoff savings. All for what exactly, control? Its the C-suites that should be being marched out the door.
>All for what exactly, control?
No, quarterly earnings. In this case, retained earnings, but they want to show profits in a situation with high inflation, stagnant employment, and other issues where customers are not as spendy as they once were.
The move of offshoring in many projects, changed my mindest that companies care one second about their talent, at a size like Microsoft is all about replaceable cogs, little ants every doing their own small task.
Why in your opinion do Microsoft or any large org pay software engineers in America or western Europe? India would be cheaper. South America, Phillipines cheaper still. Etc etc etc. Plenty of educated folks speaking English.
I think a large part of it is that they want people physically and culturally close to themselves for projects they care about. Piles of companies have tried outsourcing core development and in my experience whatever minimal home team thats left keeps growing and growing and the oversess guys get pushed to the least desirable jobs. It's almost always a failure in the end, or at least the overseas team ends up being given limited scope, simple tasks while complex work finds it's way back home. I say this having worked with many talented overseas colleagues; I think this is a management level effect, not individual developer
Mostly to play firefighters and many countries in Europe, business people actually rather not deal directly with offshoring teams in English.
Which is what the on site team does, besides firefighting, handling the cultural interface.
For many businesses even if it looks a failure from engineering point of view, as long as it is within the budget, many businesses see it as a success, versus having paid a whole team onsite.
"My bonus is tied to making the line go up this quarter"
2 and 3 aren't real. Nobody gives a damn about their shareholders other investments, and no one company has the numbers to save them anyway. And nobody is dumb enough to do RTO as a layoff proxy because anybody with a brain knows you're going to lose the people with options, who are exactly the people you don't want to lose.
1 is spot on.
3 is very real. Sometimes even openly so, as in an executive telling it out loud.
> And nobody is dumb enough to do RTO as a layoff proxy because anybody with a brain knows you're going to lose the people with options, who are exactly the people you don't want to lose.
Here is what our CEO told me once: layoffs always mean you loose more people then those you just fired. That is unavoidable and can amount to additional 30%. And obviously those will be those with options. He said that you can not avoid nor control this factor, there is no point in overly fretting about it. From his point of view, people always have agency to leave and layoffs and surrounding chaos always annoy people and weaken their ties.
These arguments based on "we do not want to loose good people in layoffs" are off mark. Company will loose good people in layoffs.
Well RTO mandate means you lose ONLY the good people with other options or make the people with no options have animosity since the deal was changed
Being willing to switch employer for convenience does not make someone a good worker and it's not like bad hires can't change employer. I'm guessing the best employee would be someone who hates change and is financially illiterate. Never asks for a raise, works in the same company, does the same thing for 30 years for the same money.
> Being willing to switch employer for convenience does not make someone a good worker and it's not like bad hires can't change employer.
Your comment is really quite out of touch of how layoffs actually affect people.
I’ve been through a few rounds now. Morale is essentially destroyed in the short term. Your team suddenly has a lot more work with no additional support or even acknowledgement that people are now slammed.
It’s not inconvenience. It’s a significantly negative change in the work environment, and a sign that maybe your company’s long-term prospects aren’t great. Of course good people leave in these situations.
I'm talking strictly about RTO as a layoff alternative and even more specifically about the perception that it'll lead to the best workers leaving.
Having a bunch of people leave due to RTO is different than having seemingly random colleagues laid off.
Both are not nice, RTO is more voluntarily and more avoidable since you can sometimes bargain for remote work to be a part of your contract and not just an oral agreement.
It's morally questionable to call for RTO only to get rid of people without technically having layoffs, but in countries like the US getting laid off is probably worse than having working conditions degrade to where you just find another job of your own volition since there's less urgency.
You wont loose only the good people. You will loose the usual mix. Plenty of slackers or not good people are fully capable to make their way through interviews. That is how they got here, after all.
It is always just pure wishful thinking that "all the people you will loose when you alienate someone like me" are totally the best people out there.
3 is real, this is what was behind Amazon’s RTO mandates. Its designed to ensure that people decide to quit.
From a source closely involved with this- Amazon tracks many productivity metrics of employees and was seeing very significant differences between in-person and remote people, which drove the decision.
Source left since so I don’t know how much productivity has improved.
Advice to new grads: get into the office 5 days a week for at least a few years.
Why is it that these "sources" always remain anonymous and outside the possibility of an external review?
Presumably because they’d be punished for sharing such information and you don’t rat out your friends?
> From a source closely involved with this
Bueller?
He's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from a guy who knows a kid who's going with the girl who saw him pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I think it's serious.
Those numbers were so convincing they have been shared with employees... 0 (ZERO) times.
Why would they share that... come on lets not be naive here. Do they always justify every bigger decision to whole world? It just creates friction surface for various people to catch on. C suite is there to set directions, not to explain themselves to their employees.
Its like getting refused during interview process. Sharing actually why makes no sense for hiring people, no gain and potentially a lot to lose.
I don't like the situation overall or RTO at all since it markedly increases quality of my personal life (which makes me a happier employee too but nobody really cares about that) but we need to be realistic with various people's motivations.
Orders and rules without explanation or motivation, damages morale and loyalty.
That's a reason to publish any statistics they might have (at least internally)
> It's like getting refused during interview process
Not at all! Those rejected, disappear. But grumpy employees are still there, but less productive
Yes. They would. There is a whole world of MBA and business analysis schools that look into this with a microscope.
The evidence that we have is that hybrid work is a net increase in productivity. Do note its hybrid, not remote.
Why would they share it? To counteract employees complaining endlessly about it, presumably.
This would be impressive. since it complete contradicts what reports we do have of hybrid work (hybrid, not remote)
I disagree. Corpo finance doesn’t see names and value, they see cost. Talent can be purchased. They can’t purchase cost reductions
They can and its called management consulting
You couldn't be more wrong, no evidence supports your assertions.
https://fortune.com/2024/07/24/return-to-office-mandates-lay... https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/its-offi... https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/12/why-rto-mandates-are-layoffs...
You are very ignorant of the real world.
Wow, thanks for the links!
> nobody is dumb enough to do RTO as a layoff proxy
I wouldn’t be so sure of that…
> (2) Interest in the investor class for the commercial real estate market. The business impacted may not be invested in it, but the businesses’ shareholders in sufficient numbers probably are
How is this not a net loss for them?
From their perspective, wouldn’t that just be moving money left to right, plus even more overhead?
Commercial real estate crashing would have a huge impact on the economy. Many of these companies are invested heavily in it, too.
Isn't 3 actionable under employment law?
If you could discover an email where an executive admitted their RTO strategy was a layoff then maybe, in some jurisdictions. But it's hard to prove, most of the time they could just say their motivation was "culture" or similarly vague and unfalsifiable like that.
I think it depends how far you are. There are laws covering you against forced relocation, treating it essentially as a layoff if it’s >50 miles (not sure exact numbers, and it may be state specific)
>> where it comes from
It's a power play. To show regular folks their place. Big corpo is a modern feodal state, where CEO is an emperor, c-suites are kings, managers are barons, IC are peasants and external contractors are slaves(but leased from other owner).
It's not only RTO, it's also about timetable and dress code. Yes, I had a beef with IT manager about dress code in the development office of a bank. Just because he can show his power he tried to enforce dress code.
> Big corpo is a modern feodal state, where CEO is an emperor, c-suites are kings, managers are barons
Why do people forget about board members and shareholders?
There's a lot of overlap among the rich. I doubt Satya "wants" to RTO. I would suspect board members / shareholders with real estate interests are forcing the policy. (eg Vanguard holds 10%, with Blackrock close behind).
Big corpo is a feudal state, in the sense of complex incestuous power dynamics. It's oversimplifying to call CEOs emperors.
>> Why do people forget about board members and shareholders
Board members do not have powers over daily business of the company.
I would add the board to the feodal model as a Church. The head of the board is the Pope.
That's theory. In practice they have power. I've been to many board meetings where they pressured C-suite to do this and that or else.
Because board members are all emperors too, and they have a stated interest in keeping emperors in power. Look at how many board members are C-suite in other companies.
Well, then show the evidence.
If this is a shareholder action, of a publicly-traded company, then (IIUC) shouldn't that be publicly-available information somewhere?
This is probably better evidence than any public filing
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/09/01/office-cmbs-delinquency-ra...
...No?
That shows, if I'm reading it right, that commercial real estate is having trouble. We know that; it's not in doubt.
What's in doubt is whether that is the primary motivator behind the RTO efforts.
I do not understand the real estate investor conspiracy theory. Why would it be better for vanguard if Microsoft paid rent to a real estate firm that managed office space, earned an X% profit margin, and then got taxed on the earnings before they were attributed to shareholders?
It makes much more sense to take a bath on the office investments and have Microsoft pay the difference in dividends or buybacks. The net amount to vanguard is higher than paying insurance, building and grounds maintainence, janitors, utilities, management fees, and property+ income tax before seeing your first dollar.
I don't get why the various tax incentives and such (plus stealth layoffs) aren't enough to explain it.
I've seen companies do some weird shit for those "X workers at location Y at least Z hours per year" tax incentives. I'd believe it's a major motivator for RTO (though probably somewhat behind the layoffs motivation)
The incentives don't pencil out. They don't make an entire separate corporate structure and several extra layers of taxation result in more money for investors instead of just... giving it to investors.
Why the push for RTO? The most simple and boring answer. Most people work and especially learn from each other better in-person than over Zoom and Slack. Practically zero people will try to pretend that remote school was great for the average student during covid, even at the university level. But for some reason everything inverts when it comes to work. I get that there are superperformers that work better in a closed room with zero interruptions ever and require little collaboration to do their jobs, and some students were 3 grade levels ahead during covid. But in a company of 200,000 people you have more average people than lone wolf superperformers, and so going in person is better than 200,000 slack pfps. Simplest yet most hated answer.
> The incentives don't pencil out.
Devils advocating:
If I am already an owner of real estate, I’m interested not only in monthly rent, but also in property value (I can sell it or I can use it as collateral for a loan).
If offices are half empty across whole town, then property values are down.
On the other hand if you somehow would be able to saturate the office space, them property values go up.
Commercial real estate value is directly connected to occupancy. If I own an office building which was valued ten years ago at $10M (to pick a random number) and today is valued at half that because nobody's going in, that's a direct $5M loss on my accounts, and any loans outstanding secured on it are potentially now underwater. Not only that, but it also weakens the rent I can demand from the tenant not just because the value of the building has dropped, but because they demonstrably don't need all that space any more.
Microsoft is almost certainly a special case in a number of ways, but the incentives are absolutely there for commercial landlords to try to force their tenants' hands.
Not a "conspiracy theory". I've been to board meeting at one of companies, where board member was a real estate investor. They insisted that to obtain more investment company has to lease an office from the investor and ensure the office is occupied as part of the lease. Then they used that company in advertising of their property portfolio as in look who leases from us. It's complex.
You are missing the point that Microsoft might be the loss leader, setting an example or simply ensuring that commercial estate gains in value and the gains are greater than the losses.
It's a fact, you can maintain empty offices only for so long and billions invested can potentially vanish.
The funny thing is, I get more done at the office than at home. And if I’m dressed professionally, I get more done and I get better responses from others than when I’m wearing shorts and a tee shirt.
I’d prefer to work from home wearing pajamas but I can sympathize with why my employer wants me in the office and may even have a dress code.
Be glad you didn’t work in the development office of a bank in the 1990s, you’d be expected to wear a suit and tie to work.
Okay, great. You can work from the office.
Don't dictate to the rest of us that we have to work the way you work best
They work better with you sitting next to them /s
You /s, but that's actually a fair point
- Some people work better at home, away from the office
- Some people work better in the office, with their co-workers around them
Those two facts are at direct odds with each other. It's unfortunate, but you can't give both groups what they want.
It's not a fair point. The same argument could be made that I work better if I also get your paycheck.
- Some people work better if they get their paycheck and their coworker's paycheck - Some people work better when each person gets their own paycheck
No one is saying that's unfortunate that you can't give both groups what they want
What is happening is some companies are choosing A and others are choosing B.
Employees who really care about A will prefer companies who chose A, same for B. Employees who care more about other properties C, D, E, etc. but not much about A or B will prefer companies that provide those properties.
So when it’s my idiosyncrasy I’m supposed to shut the fuck up because it’s unprofessional, but when it aligns with whatever goals of some middle manager I’m supposed to take one for the team, because Bob the baby needs a grown up man sitting next to him?
No?
It's not an idiosyncrasy, it's a preference/optimal work environment. And it varies by person. Stop acting like the people that are on the other side of the opinion are being childish/stupid.
Nobody said you needed to stfu. Pointing out what works best for you is important in making sure the best decision is made. But, as I was trying to say, any decision that is made will be wrong for some of the people involved.
> Stop acting like the people that are on the other side of the opinion are being childish/stupid.
No, people on the other side should stop acting like we’re childish/stupid. I was born a while ago, and know how world works. No need to feed me bullshit about “culture” or “value of communication”.
You should find an employer that caters to your idiosyncrasy instead of your coworkers
There is a third group: I work better from office when all the noisy coworkers are at home.
> - Some people work better in the office, with their co-workers around them
it shouldn't be my problem if a coworker lacks internal locus of control
The downvotes are all from guys remote-moonlighting three separate FAANG jobs, each paying out hundred grand a year. They can afford it!
Regardless of someone's stand on the topic of remote vs in-office, I find it staggering that _anyone_ could believe that either one of them is the one-true-way. There's downsides to both and either decision is likely to make at least some of the participants unhappy.
I'm firmly on the WFH end of things; I much less productive in an office. But I know other people that are better in the office with the ability to talk things over with co-workers in person. And the fact that I'm not there makes it harder for them (and easier for me; tradeoffs)
The productivity is tangential at best to this matter; the discourse around WFH has long devolved into primitive drivel for/against freedom precisely because abstract "freedom" is all that Americans care about. (I don't think WFH is as big in Europe, at least based on my experience—everywhere I worked in Europe has overwhelmingly been in-office.) I get the argument that American cities are really sparse, and sometimes people have to commute a long while, etc etc. but I don't believe that it's the deciding factor. I think it's FAR simpler than that; in view of covid, all companies subscribed to WFH policy, and workers (quite naively) interpreted it as +freedom. The companies are now subscribing to RTO policies, and it's simply read as -freedom. That's it. People find it offensive whenever they're deprived of some extra options, choices, etc. It's nice not having to go to office all the time, but it's in of itself much nicer if you CAN choose not to, isn't it? In my view, that's what it boils down to.
So pay me enough to afford a home nearby so I can work in the office. Hell, I'll wear a suit too. Oh, I can only get enough to commute in from an exurb 1+ hour commute each way? Buzz off.
Been working since the 80s, and no company has ever paid me enough to buy anything nearby. So I gave up 15 yrs ago and now work full remote where I could afford something.
To be fair, we're the highest paid profession, and the work isn't that difficult either.
The owners of the companies we work for are making more money than us, off the value we create through our work, simply by through ownership itself. How’s that for compensation vs difficulty?
If you think that’s an easier route, I doubt it’s ever been easier to found a company and own almost all of it.
On this very site is a link at the bottom to apply for substantial funding and help in succeeding at a modest cost of equity. But if it’s easy enough that you don’t even need that help, you can own it all.
If you believe that is the case, it is very simple to use some of that pay to buy a slice of that ownership via your preferred brokerage application.
It’s a wonder that people still work for a living when all you have to do is buy a share of SPY, suddenly elevating you to same level as your boss.
Well, how else are you going to buy the share?
(I don't think further engaging on this would be meaningful, as the reactions are all coming from a place of prejudice to state of the world.)
The state of the world is a human product. It’s something we create. We can choose to resign ourselves to it and rationalize it, or try to change it through conscious collective action. Either way we are participating in creating the world we see around us.
Only if you're talking about US market.
Can you call out any other market where another profession is as highly paid and accessible?
I can tell that in Portugal it is a highly paid as any office worker, meaning bad, with unpaid overtime, and until you make it into manager you're failing.
Also doctors and business owners not only make it much more, there are plenty of under the table payment possibilities.
I also know of offshoring countries where folks working in tourism make more in tips from foreigners that any IT worker can ever dream off.
And it’s still not enough to buy houses close to the offices. So something is wrong
That’s a fair statement, we should start giving blowjobs and dance like strippers to justify our salary.
>>Be glad you didn’t work in the development office of a bank in the 1990s, you’d be expected to wear a suit and tie to work.
Priorities matter.
I worked for a India IT services firm that mandated neck ties. They would even enforce it with fines.
Eventually we saw the whole company had been reduced to these cosmetic pedantry about neck ties, badge-in/out times etc.
Nobody every got anything done, because this was all that was left of their ideas to make the company win.
Were bow ties acceptable? What about Bolo ties?
Did women have to wear ties too?
Were garish father's day ties acceptable?
Was wearing a tie as a rambo style headband a firable offense at office parties?
I have many questions.
I think it depends on the task. If I need to figure out a problem someone is having, being present, seeing them work, talking face to face, huge help.
When I have some engineering work to do where I know all the requirements and need to be left alone, staying home is a productivity win.
There's value in the flexibility but employers often do not trust their employees to make the best decision for the organization.
>And if I’m dressed professionally, I get more done and I get better responses from others than when I’m wearing shorts and a tee shirt.
Are you a butler? No offense.
No one in tech would give two f...s about what you're wearing when you push git commits.
For some people, what they wear has an impact on their own performance. It's not necessarily about how others perceive them, and it's not necessarily logical. Some people work better with music, or with a window to look out... some people work better in fancier attire.
If only it was possible to dress up at home…
It only works if people see you. Dressing up for sitting at home feels silly.
So everyone has to suffer because Dick the fashionista needs to show off his attire?
What I wear has an influence. Ties cut off blood supply to the brain, so in fancy attire, I'm less useful.
>and I get better responses from others than when I’m wearing shorts and a tee shirt.
Did you not read the last part of the sentence?
> music
> window
> fancier attire
one of these things is not like the other
Right. Two of these is things you can see, but only one is a thing you can hear.
I once moved to a company that still mandated relatively formal work clothes—suit and tie no longer required, but still seen fairly often.
The first casual Friday I was struck now how energized I felt as soon as I walked in (and I didn’t participate, I wore slacks and a blazer that day).
Reflecting on that, I realized that I actually associate jeans and such with “professional office that gets shit done”. Because that’s how it’d been everywhere else I’d worked.
The “professional” dress code was having exactly the opposite effect on me, from what it was supposed to.
My friend is CTO of a smaller company say ~250 people, and RTO constantly comes up in the C-suite.
He is only able to fend it off by pointing out that they do not pay as well as their larger competitors, so the remote flexibility is a recruiting advantage.
He describes the push for RTO from the rest of the C-suite as basically a combination of unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it, and of course.. because they can. Just like many rules at companies.
Likewise many companies in my slice of the industry point to one of the big leaders RTO policies as the reason to do the same, as a sort of cargo cult. However, what the big leader actually does that differentiates is paying 30% premium to have their pick of talent at every level of the org.
> Likewise many companies in my slice of the industry point to one of the big leaders RTO policies as the reason to do the same
This also explains other things, not only RTO. Like when the mass layoffs started about three years ago. Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output. That was enough for many smaller companies, some of them understaffed, to go on and do the same, surely encouraged by their investors. I have friends in a half dozen companies complaining about permanent overtime and severe project delays after the layoffs. Yet, referred companies are either not hiring, or doing it in a very leisurely pace.
> Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output.
The part that's always glossed over in this narrative is that the remaining workers were forced to pick up the slack to keep up the output ("do more with less") which resulted in toxic work cultures. Ask any employees across BigTech companies and they'll tell you of this happening everywhere all at once -- formerly collaborative environments suddenly becoming cut-throat and competitive; high pressure and unreasonable goals for delivery; hiring being scaled back (except in offshore teams!) and new candidates being severely downleveled compared to their experience.
This was not a coincidence; Sure, there were slackers scattered everywhere, but the waves of layoffs were completely disproportional to that. The real intention was to bring the labor market, overheated during Covid and ZIRP, back under control (a power play, as other comments indicate.) And who better than Elon to signal that change with his shenanigans at Twitter.
If it seems surprising that output was not impacted (although I would argue a close look at Twitter shows the opposite) one just needs to look at the record levels of burnout being reported:
https://leaddev.com/culture/engineering-burnout-rising-2025-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2025/02/08/job-bu...
https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/workplace-burnout-in-2025-...
https://thehill.com/lobbying/5325471-burnout-erupts-among-pr...
There's just one solution: unionize.
As you can see, your bosses already did.
Unionization will never work, since immigrants would want protections no union would provide.
Such as?
Lobby for immigration support from companies, and against any politician/party that espouses any rhetoric (anti-H1B for eg) against legal immigration.
Speaking as an immigrant who is now a US citizen, I don't think this is particularly relevant. As far as immigration support from companies goes, Big Tech already offers it, so the real beef is with the federal government - and a trade or company union is hardly the best venue to have that fight. I would first and foremost want a union that protects my interests as a worker against my employer's encroachment, and it was no different when I wasn't a citizen yet.
Congrats. But the top priority for a non-citizen immigrant would be protection, above employer encroachment. Notice how this played out when twitter fired 85%, and who stayed back.
Unions being political players will have to take a side - and in the current climate this makes unions a non starter, since majority can never align.
Can you unionize your offshore teams? Oh wait, that was one of the reasons to move your jobs overseas...
Wouldn't they unionise in their own country?
You will need to create new organizations in a global economy.
> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it
I read it as the feeling that they know somehow that the employees are not putting in 100% of their attention at home on the work assigned.
And i do believe it to be true - lots of people claim that WFH means they can "do the laundry" and/or go to the post office.
The fact is that there's very few self-starters and intrinsically motivated employees. Most are just there for the pay cheque, and will do the minimum work that is required of them - esp. if not under strict supervision.
Not to mention the fact that it is indeed much harder to have collaborative discussions that are spontaneous and unplanned in a WFH setting, compared to the office.
Those lazy employees need that strict supervision!
Maybe these c suites and other employee hating assholes are projecting their own lazyness. Or maybe they think they are so superior compared to ”common” people that the ”common” people must be lazy trash.
I don’t know, but it is weird to assume most people won’t do their job without ”strict supervision”. Like super weird.
(Btw, anecdotally, most people I know work more efficiently from home with fewer breaks)
Because they know they are creating unfulfilling low paying jobs with shitty objectives, who wouldn't fuck off in that scenario?
> will do the minimum work that is required of them
So... doing their job?
When I read people wanting to have 100% uptime on their human resources I feel like I'm reading "The goal" again and how machines have to be 100% used in the mind of some managers.
And even when doing chore (or posting on HN), people tend to think about other things. Like their current task. Why do you think people find solutions to problems in the shower or just before sleeping? Because you can think about work (and so for most office jobs, working) even when not on your computer.
> > will do the minimum work that is required of them
> So... doing their job?
Can also mean working 5 h instead of 8, but not so little so you'd get fired.
That's not doing one's job completely (if paid for working 8 h), just that no one notices.
> People do their chores at random times in the middle of day...
When I was in-office, people I needed to speak to would be away from their desk (god only knows where) several times a day. Perhaps they were off taking a shit, or getting food, or having a long think in a quiet corner, or crying in the nap closet, or who knows what, but they weren't at their desk and I had no idea how to contact them.
If your coworkers are regularly inaccessible for extended periods, then you're gonna have to do what has been done since way before widespread WFH: talk to your manager to establish core working hours during which everyone is expected to be easily accessible to other folks in the company.
If your manager doesn't see the need to establish and enforce core working hours and neither does their manager, then either stop thinking of it as a problem, or go work for a place that is a better fit for your theory of work.
If you've already established core working hours and these remote employees are ignoring them, then complain to your manager. If their behavior is seriously getting in the way of you getting your work done, it's your manager's job to fix that.
It's called performance management.
If middle management can't figure it out for remote or in-office employees, they need a new line of work.
The people that are slackers at home have low output in the office and are probably the annoying gabber distracting the rest of the team in-office.
Collective punishment isn't a solution, and the best will walk.
Daily reminder that if a manager can't tell if their employees are effective working from home, that manager is incompetent. There are a million ways to check if someone is actually working, and butt-in-seat isn't one of them.
Also given many orgs are distributed across buildings, cities, and countries.. a manager admitting they need to physically see butts in seats is telling on themselves re: ability to do their job.
You know what's a good way to make people less motivated? Impose useless corporate policies like having to go to the office, for no reason whatsoever.
> Most are just there for the pay cheque, and will do the minimum work that is required of them
That's just capitalism? Every player is supposed to optimise.
> Not to mention the fact that it is indeed much harder to have collaborative discussions that are spontaneous and unplanned in a WFH setting, compared to the office.
This is a culture thing that is easily fixed by mandating cameras on, buying everyone good microphones, and a consensus that you can ping someone with a question, go back and forth, and know that you aren't imposing by throwing a /zoom into the Slack DM and saying "let's just meet about this".
My team is small, sure, but we are cameras on 100%, we know to pause a sec after someone stops talking for latency, and have a spoken agreement "fuck slack just open a room i'll hop in". We have met in person numerous times and each time it feels identical to work in person as we do remote.
When I meet with other teams, people are in their fucking cars driving, cameras off the whole time (but chewing into the mic), can't figure out how to share their screen (still!), like, no shit that isn't productive, you're putting no effort into it!
So bring all the constant interruptions and inability to focus that is in the office at home as well?
The fact that you think is good tells me you're probably some kind of middle manager with too little actual work to do.
Nope, just an IC. I have plenty of work to do.
Wow I’m surprised at the heavy downvoted here.
I don’t think mandating cameras on and insisting on 100% is the right move, but I definitely think you want to aim for a team culture where camera-on is a default and most people have them on 80-90% of the time.
Otherwise, yea participation and engagement seems to take a major hit.
I think some people are misinterpreting 100% as "even when you aren't on a call/Zoom/huddle" which is batshit.
Some people are just unhappy they're being called out for taking meetings while they take a dump.
The latter is precisely why attempting for 100% cameras on during meetings is a good idea. If you're uncomfortable being on camera in a meeting doing it, its a good sign you shouldn't be doing it.
> cameras on 100%
i hate the idea of camera on 100% of the time.
I am not presentable when WFH. That's the point.
I might also be on the toilet - which otherwise is dead time!
Screw presentability, having a camera pointed at you and on all the time is creepy and awful. It’s not the same as being in a room with actual people, it’s way worse.
Just meetings with 100% camera-on, even, are awkward and draining in ways that meeting in person or just having a call are not. Having a camera on you is like having a person making hard eye contact without blinking or looking somewhere else, ever. It’s bizarre and it sucks.
I can't edit this more but to temper this: I don't mind camera-on for 1-on-1 conversations, I don't mind camera-on while actively participating in larger meetings, that kind of thing, that's fine.
Camera on all the time so someone could just pop in and start watching at any moment, even not during a call? Terrible, absolutely terrible. Camera on for larger meetings the entire time, even when I'm not participating? Tolerable for very short meetings, but brutal and distracting for even a half-hour meeting.
Again, it's like being stared at. If the context of how I'm participating wouldn't naturally have people looking at me more or less uninterrupted if this were an in-person conversation, having the camera on is really unpleasant. So, when I'm talking, fine, being directly addressed by someone, sure, camera on is OK, but in a group setting when I'm not the (or a) current center of attention? Bad.
FWIW I did some work with McKinsey way into the Zoom era, though long enough ago that I can't vouch for their still doing this, but: they culturally favored just using group phone calls, complete with the phone number option being a common way to connect (Teams and such have this, too, but it's more of a back-up that IME doesn't get used unless absolutely necessary—they'd actually dial-a-phone-number call in as a routine way of operating). Even when everyone involved could have used video, they usually just did the call-in audio only thing. I was like "that's weird and old-fashioned" at first, but what I found it to actually be once I got used to it was flexible, robust, and entirely sufficient most of the time. I think people really overrate the importance of (everyone having) a camera for most calls.
>Camera on all the time so someone could just pop in and start watching at any moment, even not during a call?
That's not at all what I meant. I don't think it was how I typed it, I grant it could be, but you might want to read my original comment again. I am not advocating for just sitting there in your Zoom Personal Room, camera on, all day every day. That would be insane. But for synchronous work with others, a camera on that lets me know you're there, listening, providing feedback with body language? Thats why shit just gets done faster in person. Remote teleconferencing is low bitrate on the human communication spectrum. At least, lower bitrate than being in the same room. Cameras increase that bitrate.
In my meetings in Zoom, (scheduled, 1 hour, normal), everyone on my team has cameras on almost all of the time. I don't even turn mine off if I step away to grab the coffee pot from the kitchen, it lets people know immediately I'm not able to speak but can hear them fine.
One hour with a camera pointing at my face is like one hour of someone staring into my eyes. It’s exhausting and feels gross.
That's weird.
Sorry.
Cameras off is a drain for collaboration. Frankly, I think your productivity would benefit from RTO. Professionalism does help in collaboration.
When I solve problems, I need text, I need diagrams, I need demos (i.e. screen sharing).
I don’t need faces, unless I’m interrogating somebody.
> I .. I .. I.. I.. I..
In all seriousness: you've outlined what you need. Perhaps you should reflect on what any collaborator needs.
Our team is doing just fine, thanks for taking interest.
I will not convince you, but there are a lot of people like me, who can operate productively without observing faces.
Since they’re not collaborating with you, and are presumably a well paid professional, maybe their collaborators are perfectly happy with how they work?
Why does anyone need to see my face. Work is transactional. Few if any coworkers are actually your friend. We’re getting paid to get a job done.
Because I need to see if how I'm explaining something is hitting. I need to see if you are listening. I need to know you're actually there and not distracted.
It's a job. Not a confessional booth.
I’m going to be nowhere near as productive on the toilet at work as I am on the toilet at home.
Hahahaha, my sides. Jesus. That’s the funniest I’ve heard in this thread.
I have found the same with remote. Cameras ON is a huge improvement in how much people are in on the game. Constant communication, frequent ad hoc meetings, screen sharing. Its totally doable, but most people don't do it. There is no feeling worse than presenting an idea to a meeting room of 10 people with all cameras off, and when you ask a question you get crickets. Too many people are phoning it in.
> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it
omg that explains so many things!
The way these people think - if employees like it, it must be a perk/benefit.
Therefore with the current job market we don’t need to be generous with it.
Related - JPMorgan is opening a new HQ with a big nice gym, and plan to charge employees to use it, lol. Thanks I’ll just leave the building Jamie.
No way, they're going to charge for the gym in the office? That's like something out of the onion.
I saw a few clickbait articles highlighting that JPMorgan's new world headquarters in Manhattan (270 Park Ave) has a gym but will charge employees to use it. Why is this so interesting? I have worked in many different tall office buildings in my career. I saw a variety of setups: (1) company gym, (2) third party gym, (3) no gym. You always had to pay a fee to use the gym. Why does requiring employees to pay trigger such a hostile reaction from people? Also, the people working in this specific building are very well paid. They can easily afford the fees. Some other points that people don't mention: If it was free, it might be overloaded. That building is expected to have 14,000 employees! Also, no gym can possibly provide everything that everyone wants. In Manhattan, you are spoiled for choice with gyms.
I am sure that a few people will reply to say: If the gym were free, then more people would use it, and the company would benefit from lower healthcare costs. (Specific to the US: Most large corporations are self-insured for healthcare, but use third party providers to administer the programme.) Maybe so, but difficult to prove. If that is true, the company should also provide healthy lunches, etc. The list goes on and on. And Internet randos will have a never ending list of things that a "good company" must do for their employees.
If you're going above&beyond the industry average and demanding full 5-day-RTO, and pointing at how you just built a brand new HQ with great amenities so suck it up, then don't charge for those amenities?
Anyway, I've recruited with JPM a few times in my career, my spouse worked there at one point, and I know friends who have been through. So I like to pick on them as a good example of a company using their brand as an excuse to have bad pay/benefits relative to rest of industry. Good for investors I suppose, but don't work there.
> if employees like it, it must be a perk/benefit.
Or, for those who have bought into the utterly toxic mindset that employees are always trying to get as much out of the company as possible for as little work as possible, "if employees like it, it must be a scam on us."
Many hold that mindset because that is what they do themselves, and hence believe others must be the same.
> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it
Chef's kiss.
A big difference between feudalism and modern societies is that in feudalism, you expect to earn much less than the value of the land you inherit and pass on (or the custom or right of your family farming the land) whereas in modern societies most people will earn much more in lifetime earnings than they would inherit or pass on. This results in far more social mobility and much more freedom in praxis. I don’t think companies are like feudal societies.
A West Coast software engineering career is barely worth the land underneath a house from which you could reasonably commute to it. We're getting there.
This is just straight-up false? My current home - not the land, the home entire - cost just under 3 years of my salary, or under 2 years of my total comp, and I can go door-to-door in 35 minutes on public transit or 20 by car. (and I'm under 40 and still getting good reviews, so can reasonably hope for my pay to increase considerably in the second half of my career)
Don't get me wrong, that's still way too expensive; but your exaggeration is _way_ off the mark.
Do you live in Socal, like the person is implying? You make >500k a year and still live in a pretty small house then? And if so, like basically no one in the united states?
> Do you live in Socal, like the person is implying?
Apologies, I saw "A West Coast software engineering career [...and...] a house from which you could reasonably commute to it" and assumed they meant San Francisco, which is accurate for me (I live in Berkeley, and my office is in the FiDi of SF). I had thought that the Bay Area was both more expensive and more tech-centric than SoCal, but I could be wrong there.
> You make >500k a year and still live in a pretty small house then
Just under 300k, but yeah - it's 3 bed 2 bath, so not huge but not tiny either. And I've saved enough over the ~5 years of living here to be looking at building a 3-4 room extension onto it into the yard next year.
> And if so, like basically no one in the united states?
Again, I didn't claim that my situation is a) typical, or b) ideal - housing in the Bay Area is far too expensive, and it's perfectly valid and reasonable to prefer living elsewhere for any number of reasons. I'm just pointing out that /u/closeparen's statement was a _wild_ exaggeration (if they did indeed mean Bay Area like I assumed and not SoCal. If they did, I have no data to contribute!)
Ah, you live on a park bench?
I'm glad I live in the midwest. Every story I hear about working in the bay area makes me wonder why anyone would.
It’s extremely pretty, there’s great food, lots of tech jobs, you meet diverse and interesting people, great public transit (for the US). There are many reasons for living in the Bay Area.
You can find the same in Minneapolis with a better cost of living. (At least the other reply mentioned weather). there are more people in the bay area, but in minneapolis you can find more people in minneapolis than you have time to meet.
there are many other cities in the us that likewise have a great tech scene. The bay is not unique - it has a little more but it isn't unique-
8 years in the Twin Cities from Chicago originally.
People are nice, but everyone who I ever interacted with in stores or outside of work was from somewhere else. The natives just weren’t up for making friends or casual conversation.
Despite the cold, Winters in Minneapolis are 100 times better than winters in Chicago.
Food in Minneapolis can’t hold a candle to Chicago or New York.
Public transportation barely works even if you have a government job where you can leave exactly the same time everyday. You still need a car for everything else.
Grew up in Minneapolis and spent most of my life in the twin cities.
You really can’t compare it to a tech hub, or even a major city like NYC or Chicago. It’s just a different league.
I miss the twin cities quite a lot and will likely eventually move back - but definitely not for professional reasons or the opportunity to expand my exposure to cultural diversity.
Living in both a few mid tier cities like MSP and a major “real” city comparing them is pretty tone deaf to me. Calling public transit even usable in Minneapolis is a joke - and I lived without a car for over 20 years there taking it every day. Not even a comparison to a large city with a rapid transit network.
The Bay Area may have fallen off since I’ve been there, but the tech density even 10 years ago gave opportunity for career growth that Minneapolis simply did not remotely have. If you were a super star developer doing Internet things in the early to mid 2000s you left a lot of money on the table by not being willing to move.
Lol you missed the weather... Bay area weather is much more moderate than in the Midwest.
That's an understatement: Bay area weather is magical. It is the same all year round. You don't need "winter" and "summer" attire, your plans never get rained out, and you never have to deal with snowstorms. The downside is sometimes it rains ash.
Personally, I had to leave because the pizza out there is unbearable but damn I miss the bay area weather.
> sometimes it rains ash
When the sky turned orange in 2020, my wife and I were just done. Also, there's something to be said for living in a place with four seasons, and a sense of time passing by.
For highly-specialized engineers and researchers, there’s often only a tiny handful of companies they could work for that offer jobs in their specialties. For example, if you’re a compilers expert, there are only so many companies that hire compiler developers, whether it’s working on a commercial compiler like Microsoft Visual Studio or contributing to an open-source project such as LLVM (Apple is a major contributor). These jobs tend to be concentrated in a few global metro areas.
Additionally, Silicon Valley in particular benefits from having multiple companies in overlapping specialties. Suppose I’m a GPU expert working for NVIDIA, and suddenly I hit a setback and it’s time for a new job. Well, Apple is just a few miles away, and Apple makes GPUs and NPUs, and so I’d have a shot at working for Apple.
Contrast that with people living in areas with little diversity among tech companies. For example, Intel recently laid off a ton of engineers working near Portland, Oregon. There are few alternative technical employers in the region, especially in the specialties Intel focused on in Portland. Those laid-off engineers are facing the prospects of pivoting to a different tech specialty with more employment opportunities, competing for remote jobs at a time when so many companies are requiring their employees to return to the office, or relocating from Portland, which is massively disruptive and can potentially be very expensive. Some may be forced to retire early.
Silicon Valley may be insanely expensive and ultra-competitive, but it also has critical mass, which is vital for highly-specialized engineers and researchers.
But only a small percent of people work in those highly specialized jobs.
This is true, but they have highest impact. As a result, Silicon Valley exists.
Didn't Apple buy the CPU/GPU tech? I suppose the actual team could be located elsewhere.
I think the same can be argued for global investment banks. All of their important offices are in six cities globally: New York (Manhattan), London, Tokyo, Hongkong, Singapore, and Sydney. All other locations pale in comparison. Probably 1% of headcount (sales, trading, i-bankers) is responsible for 99% of revenues. There is a reason why investment banks are all crowded into very tall buildings in the same six cities: They are trying to access those "1% people". I see the same for tech clusters around the world. (For tech, I guess that less than 5% of staff generate most of your important intellectual property.) There is a reason why Oracle stays in Silicon Valley instead of moving to Montana or Oklahoma were real estate and salaries would be much cheaper!
There are plenty of other cities with enough job options that isn't something you only get in the bay area.
for the intel emplopees I doupt there is anyone else in the us who needs them. Maybe one or two to a military contactor but most have to find a new spectialty. I wish them luck. Fortunately specalists are mostly easy to retrain.
There was no market in land, so land could not have a monetary value in feudalism proper.
I think it is a mix between power play and real-estate. During Covid and late-Covid, management had to let people wfh/remote, and companies were either mass-hiring or mass-layoffs. Insecure management felt like they had their "power" stripped away, and now between the uncertain economy and some being embolden due to the current potus admin, they want to "put workers in their place".
One of my coworkers is a contractor for a local IT/engineering firm, and another client recently lost one of their principle engineers due to him refusing to RTO and quit. Now the VPs he reported under are bad-mouthing him, saying he was "never any good", "screwed everything up", and "not a team player" - which everyone else knows is BS. The employees are just keeping their heads down trying not to get noticed - morale is bad. Management has even noticed and reversed their recent more formal dress code for a Jeans (and a Food Truck once a month) Friday. Needless to say no one is impressed.
In addition to the other comments (yes, very much a powerplay) it is also likely that employers simply realized remote work is a huge perk they had not accounted for, and RTO is simply a means of renegotiating:
https://www.tiktok.com/@keds_economist/video/746473188419558...
The video presents a compelling theory that post-Covid employers realized that employees CAN be productive remotely, but also put a pretty high premium on being able to do so -- studies show employees are willing to take a hit to bonuses, pay and promotions to keep that perk.
So the current coordinated RTO push is basically a renegotiation of salaries to account for that perk, especially now that it is very much an employer's market... which, BTW, is also the outcome of another very coordinated effort across the industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192092
Edit, some recent studies:
- https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remot...
- https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/tech-workers-take-much-lowe...
>studies show employees are willing to take a hit to bonuses, pay and promotions to keep that perk.
That doesn't seem surprising for software. If I can make 300k remote or 400k in the office, that 100k tbh has dimishing returns on my life satisfaction. And 300k total comp is a ton off money in the first place.
I like that theory, but where's the actual negotiations? This is a "get back to the office or you're fired".
Good point. I think a couple things are possible here:
1. They can't outright tell employees "we just realized you were getting a better deal than we bargained for, so now we are re-negotiating." Kind of like they couldn't tell us "you had too much of a good run during Covid and ZIRP, so now sit down," and instead did the layoffs. So they have to couch it in other terms like collaboration and watercoolers. I suspect most RTO policies will have some flexible language to the effect of "existing remote employees can figure it out with their managers," and part of that would be a renegotiation.
This is not without precedence: a similar thing that happened during the height of post-Covid remote work was that employees moved to very low-cost locations, so most BigTech (and other) companies then instituted pay bands that depended on your location. To be fair, they were still very generous salaries for the locations in question, but the reasoning they used was "our pay is competitive relative to the market, and your market just changed." Those must have been some fun conversations for managers but they happened and most employees accepted.
BTW a common argument then was "how does my location matter as long as my output provides the same value." Employers interpreted that as "Hmm, location doesn't really matter, so why not pay somebody across the world who can provide the same value at a fraction of the cost."
2. They are not interested in direct renegotiations and the RTO wave is still part of a "silent" layoff, which also has the side-effect of depressing salaries. Those who remain will be less likely to ask for raises, or be more willing to renegotiate to get back their remote perks. Those looking for new jobs will naturally enter a negotiation phase if they get an offer.
There may be other mechanisms at play too.
I know of a certain large company I will not name that is sending people back to office while also having a huge percentage of staff augmentation consultants living outside of the US. So you can find teams that have two people in the office, working side by side with another 10 people in the team that are remote, and interacting with teams that might be a 7, 8 timezones away.
You can imagine how well those people feel about RTO, and how it helps their collaboration.
They are going lose everyone soon as hiring picks up. Short sighted.
Not short sighted if _that_ is the goal. Maybe it's just to cut off people they have overhired during the pandemic. Maybe they just need fresh faces without costly layoffs
I have a hard time believing this a 5th year correction of a past hiring bubble.
Are they though?
Do you see any legitimate opposition to the big tech companies forming from recently laid off employees?
If there's no alternative for people to work for then if the job market improves people are just going to go back to the same companies.
So, are these people who feel spurned by the big tech companies getting together and starting competitors to bring them down?
Lol you can't outcompete microsoft or google.
Sounds like Dell?
Sounds like my company. Sounds like Dell. Sounds like too many companies to guess which one OP is talking about.
C suites are committed to spending as much as possible on real estate
Executives often own the real estate and lease it back to the company. From Steve Ballmer to the owner of the tiny 85 person company I last worked at, it’s not uncommon.
So, yeah, there’s often some financial incentive there.
Wasn't that one of the (many) dodgy things about wework under the original founder? Something about him buying the buildings and then having wework lease them from him?
How that guy didn't end up on the receiving end of a load of criminal charges...
>>there’s often some financial incentive there.
I know managers that were let go because it appeared like their only job was being host to that one stand up meeting everyday, and nothing else.
I guess they just want people to return to save their own jobs.
Don't they lease it whether its mandatory or not?
Several years before the pandemic I was forced to move several states away after my local office was shutdown and the company was looking to force everyone to a few larger offices. It didn’t make any sense. Within my little 10 person team, we had people in 5 states and at least 2 counties, spanning multiple time zones. I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day. I saw very little point to being in the office. If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office. The whole thing was madness.
I do see the value in meeting people face-to-face, but I also think they could be done with the occasional company event. I have to imagine having a few events where people can meeting and build some rapport is cheaper than maintaining offices year round.
> If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office.
As far as I can tell this is what apple does, and it actually makes a lot more sense than "you must be in some office but we don't care where".
I’m sure geographic consolidation is the end state, we’re just taking incremental steps.
Many companies with > 1500 employees were not consolidated in the decade before. Especially those which had grown through acquisition.
If by "on the phone" we mean "in a voice and/or video call", I was in a similar situation to the OP. I'm a programmer.
RTO made no sense for our very geographically distributed team, but the mandate came down anyway. Most of us were staring down the barrel of a multi-hour commute to hot-desk in a notably overcrowded office with underprovisioned Internet service to execute the task of being on the phone all day, every day with a very geographically diverse set of colleagues.
Such collaboration, such synergy, much wow.
Software engineer, who was often also filling the role of product owner and scrum master as well.
> I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO
same reason some people think "professionalism" is about wearing smart shoes. While these sorts will never admit it to themselves, you are there to make them feel important. What you actually do is secondary, which is why they pay more attention to bullshit like presenteeism, than they do your work.
Man, if I could get the same level of attention on my PRs over the course of my career as I do about being occasionally late, then that'd be great.
My employer is currently mandating a 2 day per-week RTO for all employees within 50 miles of a major office, but in my case, even if they wanted to, they'd be unable to force a return to a 5 day arrangement.
My commute time has more than doubled since they closed and sold my office for a hefty sum of money. As a result of multiple offices converging to one, there are insufficient seats for the number of employees actually assigned to my office; hence, "hotdesking".
I'd wager that maybe a third of the total employees assigned to the office could be present at any one point in time, so unless they purchase some additional properties, we're at a stalemate with the twice a week RTO. Most days over 90% of the desks, sometimes over 99% are taken in the building, requiring reservation weeks in advance through a seat reservation app.
I have no direct teammates in the office and no two members of my 10 person team work in the same office (or state).
Where do you work?
A large insurer with an inexplicable bird mascot
I find this idea that there is a 'CEO RTO mania' to be absurd; if WFH was just as good for the company, and more attractive to employees, we should see a boom in WFH-first companies, which does not seem to be happening. Instead, it seems like CEOs see RTO as a way of getting rid of 'slackers', preventing people from multi-tasking while 'working', and in some cases increasing 'teamwork'.
In any case, it makes sense to have either a WFH organization, or an in-person one, but the mixed cases appear to be a friction-filled mess.
> Instead, it seems like CEOs see RTO as a way of getting rid of 'slackers'
"Seems" is an interesting word, because if even you can't locate a rational motive, whilst attempting to apologise for RTO, and are just left making some guesses, then what am I supposed to infer except that this whole thing is based on suspicion, groupthink and anxiety?
"The data is clear", trumpets Microsoft in their internal email. Then why will they not divulge it?
It resembles the same kind of social contagion as the AI usage mandates we see - also completely meritless
You seem to be demanding some proof of the RTO side, which is a reversion to the mean, while providing none for your own side. I see and hear people talking about all the non-work things they due while being paid, and am unsurprised that their managers suspect a negative impact on productivity.
If people aren't getting their work done, then they should be having discussions with their manager that eventually lead to pip or firing if not resolved. If they are getting their work done... Who cares if I do a "non work thing" at a "work time"?
In an agile world with an infinite backlog there's no such thing as being done with work. If you could be working on more work things during work time, they probably want that. Maybe you don't like that but c'mon now. It's clearly what they're after.
If your work could be easily quantified and measured like that, it would be contracted out to the lowest bidder.
Then maybe it doesn't need to be done on a strict work/non-work schedule everyday? If one is an hourly employee, then sure, they should be doing work things when on the clock... but if they are salaried, part of that is not having to clock in and out to switch between work and non-work tasks, and not being a strict work/non-work schedule.
OK, so it's not that hard but try and follow along.
Did the employees say they have the data to prove it?
No!
Did mgmt. say it?
Yes!
So let's ask mgmt. first to disclose said data.
Got it?
In at least one case it wasn’t released by management because it was absurdly embarrassing. Productivity compared between 2019 and 2023 had statistics similar to the following; average yearly CLs decreased from approximately 70 to under 10, significant revisions pushed in comparable products changed from 26 to 4, meeting time increased by a multiple, email volume decreased similarity. All this with significant increases in seniority and pay among the average employee. Contrapositive scenarios argue that there is a huge opportunity cost to the tech efforts from WFH.
What is a CL? What are "significant revisions pushed in comparable products" and what does it measure?
"CL" is a Google-ism for a code change ("change list"). What we'd normally refer to as a pull request I suppose. Googlers like to think the whole world is in on their lingo, but CL is a very unusual acronym outside the Googlosphere.
So they are seriously saying that Google developers on average went from about 70 PRs per year to less than 10 PRs per year when working from home? That seems such an absurdly large decrease that it's hard to believe.
> ...while providing none for your own side.
After an initial few-month adjustment period after the shelter-in-place orders my all-remote team at $DAYJOB performed no worse than they had pre-pandemic [0] through to the period where mandatory RTO started being an active fad. During that multi-year "few or no alternatives" WFH period, we all met or exceeded our goals and milestones. We each received raises and/or promotions each year, demonstrating that the business agreed that we were each individually meeting or exceeding our personal performance goals.
Due to my corporate confidentiality agreements I can't provide you with the documentation to back these claims, but they are a true account of the events.
[0] And often notably better, due in part to our ability to fairly-easily flex our schedule to meet with anyone around the world.
Why do we rely on the managers suspicion if there is actual evidence? Why is the evidence not shared?
There definitely bad apples that spoil it for the bunch.
> if WFH was just as good for the company, and more attractive to employees, we should see a boom in WFH-first companies, which does not seem to be happening.
In this economy, you can't even make a company, let alone profess their benefits. This is all intentional.
If/when the economy recovers and funding is flowing around, I predict we will see this huge boom in WFH companies, especially with startups.
Unfortunately, larger corps are seeing "WFH" as yet another attempt to offshore as much labor as possible. I can't guarantee after this ebb that top tech companies will be begging for talent the same way they were last decade.
If WFH is a good deal for both sides (in a particular industry), I would expect new entrants to use it as a competitive advantage against existing businesses (likely hiring away talented staff). I agree that web-tech business formation seems depressed, but WFH should eventually win the day if it is all that advocates say.
I expect WFH will expect, while remaining relatively niche, much like worker co-operatives.
Small companies use it as competitive advantage against existing businesses.
The market is fully captured and you do not win by having better productivity or by being able to attract better people. You win by attracting a lot of capital and by being able to eventually create quasi monopoly. You think hot AI companies are somehow productive? They are in massive looses. Or that all those corporations have super productive workforce? Anyone who worked there knows they dont.
The econ 101 thought experiments are just that - thought experiments about ideal world. They have much less to do with how actual companies operate.
What market is fully captured? Do you have sources for that?
Economy will not recover to hire people. Tech companies will not be begging as all jobs will be in India and China.
Trump will outright win 2026 if he bans H-1Bs after this RTO charade and neither party would be able to oppose such a ban without fatal public outcry. With India choosing Russia over the US, there would be very little political backlash to wrecking their economy too. Huge unemployed force in the US to fill the gap too.
That is to say, if H-1Bs aren’t banned now, in what seem to be the most favorable possible conditions in history for such a thing, then they’re never getting banned.
Banning H1Bs and RTO does not stop companies from simply opening an office in Bangalore and hiring thousands of people there. That's what my employer did.
Of course it's never getting banned
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100% this. remote work is great for some people, but it's definitely taken advantage by a others. And those who take advantage ruin it for everybody. I literally have friends who have bragged about how good their mouse jiggler is.
If a manager can’t tell if an employee is doing their job or not, they deserve to get bilked by an overemployed person. I can’t care at all about what some other person is doing or not doing unless it directly affects my ability to do my job.
Should we also ban sick leave because a few people call in sick when they gasp are not actually sick?
If sick leaves are abused, you better believe actions are taken, including parting ways.
> mouse jiggler
Are they really collecting stats on mouse movements? If they were they'd surely detect these predictable movements
It keeps your Slack/Teams/etc. status as online. These apps will display your status as away if they detect that the computer appears idle (i.e. no mouse/keyboard inputs).
Are there really managers to constantly look at their report’s online presence indicator to determine if they’re being productive or not? What if they’re whiteboard or having an ad-hoc conversation that RTO advocates value so much?
It’s less about gaming metrics and more about keeping up appearances. The sort of person who uses a mouse jiggler is constantly absent from their computer to a degree that anyone who interacts with them would implicitly notice “huh, this person is literally never online” versus “this person takes a while to respond to messages, they must be busy.”
The platforms give reports to managers on idle time. If the manager is lazy and uses just that as an indicator of if someone is working or not then it's an easy metric to game.
Yeah, WFH doesn't work because you can't smell each other over the network. We can transmit video and audio, but so far we can't replicate touch and smell over Zoom calls. Now, touch is obviously not needed, because touching your coworkers is against policy, but smell is really important. As the esteemed researcher Mya S. Smith has shown, people who work emit a specific pheromone, known as the "Busy Efficient Employee" pheromone, or BEE pheromone for short. When a person smells another person's BEE pheromone, that signals their brain to focus on work and they themselves start emitting BEE pheromones too. The end result is a hive of bustling BEEs, delivering productivity, synergy, collaboration, and making line go up! This is also why open-office plans are so important to maximise productivity - it is the easiest way to make sure BEE smell is dispersed to every corner of the office. BEE also makes employees very happy to stay late in the office and work overtime without asking for additional pay.
Don't laugh, but in my org we have a bi-annual "Hive Week" where all Product/Tech (two sub-orgs) bring all the 'bees' home to Office Central for a week of, um, collaboration?
JFC! People will say anything. LOL!
This assumes that executives are all perfectly rational beings and so wouldn't do anything based on personal feeling or beliefs. Sadly, this is not true.
I don't think there have ever been many ‘perfectly rational’ business (or governmental) leaders; the successful ones are just ‘sufficiently rational’. In fact, some business leaders are probably instituting RTO for irrational reasons, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad move for most in-person-based businesses.
But you think it's a good move for irrational reasons and have no data to show it.
I think there are a large number of competent but mostly checked-out engineers who will consistently work just enough to not get fired. If you want more productivity, you could raise the bar and fire a lot of people, but this also sucks and it creates a "hunger games" culture like at Amazon or Meta. I think a lot of those people actually will do more work if you make them sit in an office for 8 hours a day, since they have nothing better to do and there's immediate social pressure to work (unlike in their homes which presumably have many more pleasant activities available).
This isn't obvious to people who are highly disciplined and intrinsically motivated, since they actually get more done in the quiet environment of their home. But some people need the structure and social pressure of an office to get them to work. Your strategy could be "only hire highly disciplined and intrinsically motivated people", but you'll have to compete with everyone else for them, and they're expensive and less common than the other type. It's also hard to test for in an interview.
If you're really exceptional, they'll quietly let you WFH anyway.
They can chit chat and do nothing in the office just as well. That's what I normally see when I do go to the office.
Are they requiring VP approval for zoom meetings? Requiring zoom meetings to be restricted to office network IP addresses?
I’m the kind of employee that would comply, not answer my cell phone and require people to leave voicemails on my desk line, call out people who are multitasking, and actively call out managers who attend meetings via zoom.
RTO with back to back zoom meetings all day is a waste of everyone’s time and energy.
Make management show us the benefit of all this RTO collaboration.
Oh, and I’m done checking email and teams after hours. Not safe to do so while driving.
> collaboration, watercooler chat
I've been wondering what this really means. So I've been actively observing our open office recently. As far as I can sus out, it's the phenomenon where enough people are subject to conversations they weren't invited to, that someone will always step in and steer obviously wrong/uninformed conversations.
As an operating theory, it also explains why management wants us to make more use of the large slack channels. I've previously made the joke that slack is just the din of an open office for remote workers, and, well, I guess that is the literal deliberate intent.
Sounds like Dell. Michael Dell owns a lot of commercial real estate, especially around main campus hq. More employees in the office, better returns on his commercial real estate.
That’s my opinion anyway
How does that make sense? "Now that my employees don't need to occupy the space all the time, rent out (possibly parts of) the office for even more $$$" would be how I'd think if I were in his shoes.
What?
Around Dell campus in Austin is a Home Depot, a hotel, a Chili’s, a strip mall with various shopping outlets and what not. You can walk there from the front door. The idea is that all the employees can walk there for lunch, they will buy things on the way home, it’s just extending economic foot traffic to the tenants of Michael Dell’s commercial properties. Now they won’t go out of business! More money for Mr Dell!
This is my theory at least. The foot traffic has increased greatly since the RTO mandate
That’s absurd - the guy’s worth $130B, you think he cares about the not-even-pocket-change that would come from owning the land that a Twin Peaks is on? Dell’s RTO is purely a silent downsizing.
Board members run scams on stakeholders all the time.
I know of a CEO who is CEO of multiple companies and tells employees of one company (big one with many stakeholders) to work on stuff from his other smaller companies.
It's basically just a scam to the stakeholders.
>>> executives' obsession with RTO
I think part of it is that you don't get to feel the power on Zoom meetings. People coming to your office, or lining up for you in conference room ... that's would feel nice and give you sense of importance.
That said, if I was a manager and spend all day on meetings, I'd probably like to be in office as well and see people in person (not necessarily because of feeling important but just that I don't really like online meeting in general). As an IC, I goto office and then do all my meetings online anyway, so feels kind of pointless.
Come join GM (formerly Cruise) ADAS org. We are hiring. Work is pretty cool at every level from kernel and drivers to userspace linux to frameworks, to ML. And, as long as you are >50 mi from detroit, you are going to be fully remote. Pay is good. People are good.
Jobs are posted on GM's jobs site, or reach out to me, if you'd like, and i'll connect you to the right people.
I read things like this and wish that when I was doing my masters at OMSCS I had focused more on ML. What I wouldn't give to work in a shop that was actually building something cool.
There is plenty of non-ML work to do. Drivers do not write themselves, bringup does not do itself, scripts that glue it all together do not write themselves, schematics do not review themselves :)
Looks cool. You work on this as an IC? And you genuinely like your job? What part of the stack are you in?
Fellow ex-Googler, looking for an interesting systems programming role.
Kernel and drivers currently, hoping to move lower level to MCUs soon (i like that world more). My contact info is in my profile here, feel free to email. GM does not (as far as i know) have referral bonuses so i have no reason to oversell it :)
> An RTO mandate is also an excellent thing for a CEO to show investors they are doing, if they are not making money and lack better ideas.
I think of Jeffrey Pfeffer's "social contagion" arguments a lot — first with regards to layoffs[^1], but increasingly also to RTO policies and tracked AI use.
It seems very unlikely execs (esp. in small organizations) are taking the time to read and seriously evaluate research about RTO or AI and productivity. (Frankly, it seems much less likely than them doing serious modeling about layoffs.) At some point, the "contagion" becomes a matter of "best practices" — not just a way to show investors what you're doing, but part of the normal behavior shareholders expect.
Bleak if true!
[^1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/12/explains-recent-te...
>the normal behavior shareholders expect.
And for each CEO, those shareholders are mostly the same people.
It's easy to get sucked into thinking this is just the way the world works but really we've just enshrined a local and temporal phenomenon. Layoffs aren't a physical law. There are places and times where this would not happen.
Let me put my investor hat on: hiring at the top and firing at the bottom is a predictable inefficiency and represents a CEO failing at their responsibilities. You don't get to be a CEO and claim ignorance of market cycles.
Just how software engineers are in the hacker news thought bubble you have the VC and CEO thought bubble. It roughly goes like this: Someone has some productivity or whatever problem and RTOs. That costs money, they lose people, so they can’t later admit it was a wash or a net negative. So they go on Twitter or LinkedIn and trumpet how great their hardcore 996 RTO is going. Now others see this and fomo kicks in. They start their own RTO which they are then again highly incentivized to report as successful. Rinse and repeat.
A previous company I worked at has a satellite office with one single employee, and mandates office 3 days a week.
The excuse is that “people in bigger offices will feel bad if we open an exception”, so they’re spending a few thousand a month on real estate to make some poor sod miserable.
The efficiency of private markets in action.
Well every company just happens to be undertaking RTO at the same time so it seems to be above the exec level. I’ve seen hypotheses on here that city councils are putting on pressure to boost their local economies and another that boards of directors are pushing this as the last chance to layoff->outsource before H-1Bs are banned. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t appear to stem from innovative or independent executive thought.
What leverage does a city council hold over a remote business?
They personally know the high exetutives in their area (not always c level). Probably the executive is knocking on doors for their political campaign. Between asking what the company wants they point out things the city wants.
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Conspiracy theory: A RTO planning meeting at Davos of CEOs is likely the root cause
They've done it with pay and they've done it with hiring.
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> I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO
It's because although many people do work well in RTO, the vast majority don't. And the various TikTok videos showing "Day in the life of a remote worker" didn't help the cause either. I worked at a fully remote company during the pandemic and trying to get people online was almost impossible. They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them and it was one of the most frustrating experiences in my career.
I love working in the office, mainly for the social aspect and free food, but I need to find remote work for personal reasons. And I'm about 2 years too late because almost no one in Big Tech is allowing remote work anymore.
> trying to get people online was almost impossible. They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them
I don't understand why this is such a problem. I've even heard CEOs complain about this, about their direct reports. Child, if someone is AWOL on their job and they're blocking you, ring their boss. And if you're the boss, hold them to account. Why do so many orgs need a steamroller to level the flower beds.
That's because this isn't actually a thing that's happened. I've seen plenty of remote employees fired for not being available during business hours. The idea that we need mass RTO to handle a few problem employees is silly.
> They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them and it was one of the most frustrating experiences in my career.
If you’re being blocked by someone online, you’d be blocked offline too.
And if a coworker is refusing to speak with you on the system that the company provides you to speak with them, why haven't you complained to your manager (or your manager's manager) about the clear and obvious blocker to getting your work done?
One of the following is true: OP is the biggest doormat in the world, the company OP works for is incredibly dysfunctional and cannot be saved, or OP's story could be found in the "Things That Never Happened" Jeopardy category.
Yeah there is this big lie that most people work the same amount when they have a ton of distractions and can slack off whenever. Not my experience at all. Nobody wants to lose their WFH so everyone pretends productivity didn't change. If what was true you'd never see this RTO push. Offices cost money!
I think CEO types simply believe (rightly or wrongly) that a large number of people are taking advantage of WFH to barely work.
I'd like to ask these CEOs, for people which are taking advantage of the system, why are they not let go? Could it be that management often have no clue how much value each employee brings to the team? Is RTO being mandated to avoid facing that uncomfortable truth?
Because their hiring process will just hire more employees who will take advantage of the system
If they admit its true but the solution still stands, would you feel any better?
Things which might be contributing to the RTO in my opinion:
1. Showing up. Practically speaking, when you're at home, you can do whatever you want (sleep, watch TV, work sometimes), while delivering stellar result for the company, but when you're in the office there is a chance you will deliver your stellar results and additionally contribute more, because you literally can't watch TV and take a nap.
2. Some leaders thrive in the presence of others. This is how they get their energy, receiving compliments about how awesome they are, noticing how people are respecting them while they walk around the office and so on. If one of them asks their team to return to the office, similar leaders might envy them when they boast about how much cooler their meetings feel now with five people in the room and sharing their meetings on the LinkedIn.
3. Work style of leadership. If you have noticed VP+ and C levels usually try to get to know each other on a personal level, they attend each others personal events. They work in this way, and they expect to see those same people in the office, because for them, their current network for work and life is same. So they like to see their 'friends' in the office as much as possible. Then naturally, these leaders translate mandate to their reports without context (e.g. their reports don't attend their personal life events, and they are not in their friend network)
> ...when you're in the office there is a chance you will deliver your stellar results and additionally contribute more, because you literally can't watch TV and take a nap.
I see you've never seen many Silicon Valley software companies. Couches and comfortable chairs are a not-infrequent sight in the trendy open-plan offices, as are folks sleeping, reading, or otherwise slacking off atop them.
it's not about missing amenities, it's about pressure from your peers and additional eyes in the office to make you work.
At home you can literally spend whole day in front of TV and work a little, in the office you can as well watch TV, but not consistently, every day for full day.
> it's not about missing amenities, it's about pressure from your peers and additional eyes in the office to make you work.
I agree. Though, you seem to have missed the part of my statement where I said "[It is a not-infrequent sight to find] folks sleeping, reading, or otherwise slacking off atop [the company-provided couches and comfortable chairs in the office].".
Add to that the fact that it's bloody hard for a casual onlooker to distinguish "doing real research on the Internet" from "fucking off on one's computer", and also the fact that heading out for a long lunch or coffee/smoke break to "talk strategy" [0] with a coworker is a common activity in the office, and you end up with a lot of tacitly-company-sanctioned fucking off on company time. Like, a staggering amount.
Perhaps the companies you've worked for have all been merciless results-focused taskmasters and the situations I'm describing are entirely alien to you. If that's the case, then -for you and your coworkers- absolutely nothing relevant would change in an all-WFH environment.
[0] Read as "shoot the shit where noone can overhear"
I find the opposite to be true. If I’m at home I better push a commit, because otherwise people will think I’m slacking off. If I’m in the office and visibly in front of my computer however, I can be doing anything at all and I’d still be considered productive.
The executive class is entirely based on personal branding. If you're not changing anything, it's like being a TikTok influencer without posting any new videos. It doesn't matter what you post really, and often the more controversial you are the better. If you play your cards right, you're not an "idiot" for making the company worse, you're a "bold and innovative thought leader".
You often see the same thing from ambitious managers. Aka, "managers gonna manage".
The other part of the equation is pure politics and PR, which at least does provide some real value to the company (if only temporarily, and at long-term net negative). Amazon made it pretty clear that their RTO was all about maintaining their relationship with politicians.
> I still have no idea where it comes from.
i was chatting with HR boss last week. he's 100% sure these kind of mandates are reductions in force (layoffs) masked as return to office.
At the same time they are offshoring to countries on the other side of the globe so working hours never overlap.
I hate when people mention "watercooler chats" - not you, of course, but the clueless leadership/HR people that come up with this. Last time I heard it, it was: "the best ideas sometimes come from a watercooler chat, so we need to have people in the office".
I've worked in offices for decades. While every now and then I'd see watercooler chats that were related to work instead of sports/bitching/weather, they never remotely compared to "ad-hoc whiteboarding chats" or "team area chats". Most Engineers I know, myself included, need focus and a space for impromptu conversations with a group of Engineers, preferably away from PMs and salespeople.
If the people advocating "watercooler chats" really wanted to make Engineers productive, they would kill open floor offices and give Engineers privacy for long spontaneous technical conversations with other Engineers.
My employer has never allowed remote work and likely never will. They have private offices for all developers and insist on the unmeasurable value of in person work.
I don't love it, but I at least respect they are upfront about it and are consistent vs flip flopping and impacting people's lives unexpectedly.
“collective wisdom” is basically a polite euphemism for groupthink and given that c level folks are all taking the same mba/sigma/cthulu worship courses it’s not surprising.
In our case we're still hybrid, but unlike before when everyone was in the office, your lunch hour all of a sudden counts against you. They want you in the building a full 8 hours, and despite otherwise being remote, you cannot make up any hours.
I miss when before COVID firms were fine with flexing hours, now it seems they want to be draconian.
I was drastically more productive as a remote software engineer. I have severe insomnia and for some ungodly reason the later hours are my most productive. You wont get that productivity from me if I'm in an office a full 8 hours, I'm NOT working overtime.
My theory is it's just about exerting arbitrary control over employees.
I personally can buy that there are limited productivity benefits to working in person together, but a) we don't see the benefit of that productivity, and b) it comes at enormous personal cost to employees.
> I still have no idea where it comes from
A not so small group of people being over-employed or never available or just not pulling their weight tainted the whole thing.
Also honestly once a % of us were back in the office having to talk to remote people over a video call and waiting for the lag and having them speak over you because of the lag or get confused because they can't hear the chat we can all hear in the room builds animosity towards them.
Can probably list 2 people I'm happy to work with remote but the number I worked with who took the piss with it is in the double digits.
> I still have no idea where it comes from.
I work at a company that tracks productivity in many ways and even the screentime of each employee.
I'm quite sure remote employees or even hybrid employees on their WFH days, spend less time on the screen or doing things productivity trackers track compared to in office colleagues.
Productivity tracker that tracks sport/fashion/travel chats for hours, dozens of smoke breaks and employees shitting every 16 minutes – very advanced tech.
Productivity tracker that tracks the fiftieth complete train-of-thought derailment from the fiftieth loud-ass boisterous conversation initiated by the sales guys across the room from me in the exposed-concrete-from-floor-to-ceiling open-plan office.
Very advanced tech Corporate has paid for!
Remember!
> we need the kind of energy and momentum that comes from smart people working side by side, solving challenging problems together
I kept myself "in the groove" during those times by reminding myself that Moloch is sustained by this kind of energy. If not for Moloch, then for whom? He undergirds our world!
It's a control measure for hypocritical companies who can't get their tech shit in order. They will fail though.
So much increased productivity when you come to the office and still make all your meetings over a call.
I don’t know how common this is generally, but I know at least one bigtech corporate campus that is surrounded by local businesses that, by and large, happen to be owned by the individuals in senior management at that company. So in that case it’s a classic vested interest.
It’s simple. It comes from the boards of these companies who have investments in corporate real estate. Got to keep the scam going at the expense of worker mental state, environment, and of course control.
This could be chicken or the egg, but I had a team member (that missed office time) for about 3 weeks, at the same time, they dramatically reduced the number of MRs merged and responsiveness on Slack.
I don’t know if her being in the office would have dampened their lack of engagement or if the office was making it worse.
It's because C-level people are extraverted and believe in torturing others to please themselves. As a concept it fits perfectly with the reasoning that you should earn ten times what another employee at your company does.
It's just a way to do layoffs…
In office work is an artifact of the boomer generation and gen X. The world has changed its relationship to work and they can’t seem to come to terms with it.
Not sure Gen X are in love with office work, the X'ers I know (and I am one) loooove working from home. We're at the stage in life where we've settled, got spacious-enough houses where we can dedicate some office space, and working from home gives us space to do stuff like a little home improvement in our lunch breaks, or be home for deliveries and tradespeople. Big win for me not having to commute several hours a day. I'm lucky enough to work for a place where there isn't an office to commute to, and I know I've got it good!
As usual though, I'm sure I'm not representative. I was sure it was my generation that was going to put an end to the pointless war on drugs and other such stupid bullshit, yet here we are at peak influence (ages 45-60 approx) and it turns out the people in power in my generation are no different to those who came before. The problem is the kind of people who climb the greasy poles of politics and business.
tl;dr - it ain't generational. Arseholes in charge are always the arseholes in charge.
Collaboration, Water cooler chats it's all bullshit. Cut through the fat and you find C-Suites need to justify the millions being spent on Real estate.
Fraud.
There’s a shit-ton of people working multiple jobs and outsourcing themselves. Everything is SaaS now, so that creates a liability for many larger companies with .gov or healthcare contracts.
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Maybe some positions are or feel worthy only when performed in physically social context. Jobs dealing with human problems have this tendency more often than those dealing more with non-human problems.
I work in a large company that mandated 4-day RTO last year. Even taking a completely objetive point of view on the situation leads to the conclusion that something else is needed. We spend our days at our desks, on Zoom calls. People won’t get up to join in person - mostly because the conference rooms are all blocked by “special projects”, but mostly due to the offshoring of positions and distributed workforce post-pandemic. We are all spending valuable time on commutes to do what was possible from home.
Now I suspect the C-suite has noticed the discrepancy between attendance and occupancy, and I fully expect that their solution in this job market to be a 5-days, monitored attendance RTO soon. We are regressing at an alarming rate.
We should know by now that all these RTO initiatives are not grounded in any reasonable logistics nor financial reasoning. Right now all of tech is in cut mode, and RTO's are a great way to do layoffs without calling them layoffs. Note that when Google got "too many" people RTO'ing, they did layoffs anyway.
If your office does try to make things stricter, it's another layoff attempt. I don't think it will work, because at this point we're in a "sticky" job market; those out of work are facing some of the stiffest markets in decades, those in work are holding on for deal life.
This theory is often-quoted but doesn't make much sense. Big tech including Microsoft already did multiple rounds of layoffs. Why not just do another round?
If you quit (because of, say, RTO) then you quit. It's a fairly standard deal between you and your employer.
If you get laid-off, employer has to give you a severance package for any number of reasons (local labor laws, agreement with the union, corporate PR). This is not a standard deal and is, simply put, more expensive than if the employee just quit of their own accord.
In both cases, employer gets the benefit of reduced head count.
Yes… but they are asking why now? Why did Microsoft start with traditional layoffs and then transition into RTO layoffs years later?
Market dynamics. Everyone is doing some form of RTO now. If you're the only RTO place, then hiring and retaining the people you want will be more difficult. It's a big game of chicken.
Hard to say. Different regions will have different "tools" to use. For a large round, it's probably because they need to cut a lot of staff ASAP or because they have the offshoring ready to replace them. Paying them off is best in those situations.
If you need to fine cut a few particular teams then poking it with an RTO is better than giving them a severance package. This is all conjecture, but that's probably what those up top are considering with every move.
It’s just another tool in the downsizing toolbox. Also traditional layoffs and RTO “layoffs” don’t have to be mutually exclusive, both can easily occur at the same time
you're still avoiding the question. Why does Microsoft decide RTO "layoffs" are the right tool for 2025, but not 2022-2024? Many companies used both tools at the same time. Why did Microsoft wait until 2025?
Because it's politically expedient. They know the political climate is currently hostile to them requesting H1Bs while doing layoffs. RTO lets them get another round of layoffs without calling them layoffs and avoid the bad PR.
Microsoft compensates less than other top tech companies and remote work aligns with their lifestyle-first approach to compensation. Being on the early end of RTO would have worked against the perception that Microsoft is "the tech company with good work life balance," but now that most other companies have done it first they can get away with it as just them following the industry trend.
Pretty much every big tech company was still providing severance for those who decline RTO.
Maybe they don't have to but there's sufficient murkiness that it's probably cheaper to just give the severance than go to court.
Which big tech companies provide severance for those who decide to leave because of RTO? It's not normally framed as "declining", either - you're simply expected to be there starting at a specific date, and if you're not then you're basically not performing your assigned work duties. You don't get to "decline".
There are absolutely no labor laws in the US where an employer has to give severance.
But you tend to lose your most capable employees when you create a bad/undesirable/etc work environment. I think people are attributing malice where the intent is merely...not incompetence, but it's what everybody else is doing. People forget that business goes through fashionable phases just like everything else. Microsoft fell victim to idiotic trends (stack-ranking, AI, etc) just like everybody else has.
Layoffs are expensive and destroy morale of those that remain (to say nothing of those that have to leave). When people suspect layoffs are coming, all work comes to a screeching halt around the event.
Getting people to quit is much cheaper (no severance if that exists, and your unemployment insurance costs don't go up).
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You could express this view without breaking the guidelines or dragging down the standard of discourse here. The guidelines address this specifically:
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When I was a teenager I played World of Warcraft for 5 years. During that time we did "raids" where 40 people have to pay attention and communicate, sometimes for longer than 8 hours, with people from around the globe.
If teenagers can do it, adults can do it. Period. And if they can't, skill issue I guess.
This assumes productive work in a highly collaborative environment. Meetings aren't usually any of those things. The rest can be done remotely.
The idea that meetings of all things are the part we need to be physically present for is hilarious
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I’m absolutely shocked that people think this example is a good comparison here. If only our jobs were exactly as stimulating as a video game, and the outcomes didn’t matter at all - then maybe we could use WOW raids as evidence.
Why does Liquid do the RWF in person then?
Mostly because it’s a lot of fun to get in one room and play together. They’ve pretty consistently said that they’re not even sure that it’s a net benefit for winning.
Because they all equally share in the struggle and accomplishment. It’s an actual team not an adult daycare like most jobs.
Every recent RWF, including the one a couple of weeks ago, they have at least a few people who are still remote.
Love this example. So damn true
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Based example
If you have facts to show the class that haven't already been seen, otherwise...
I have a more moderate view on RTO elsewhere in this post, so I'm not someone who things WFH is always the best approach. But for now, I have yet to see any study suggest that RTO is more productive across the board all the time.
Citation needed period
I suspect the C-suite has noticed the discrepancy between attendance and occupancy
The solution is to downsize your physical plant.
My company has a ton of faults, but every time one of these stories hits the HN front page, I thank God that my company remains committed to work from home. So much so that it recently sold its last building, and the few dozen employees whose roles require them to be physically present have been relocated to a much smaller building on a train line.
The work-from-home policy comes very heavily from the top. I suspect it's due to two things:
1. We have no shareholders. So the C-levels don't feel the need to engage in performative monkey-see-monkey-do antics so they have something to talk about during investor calls.
2. The management is extremely female-heavy. If I had to guess, I'd say it's 4:1 female:male. And the biggest beneficiaries of work from home are caregivers, who are statistically more likely to be women.
While I believe that 90% of the "work-life balance" speeches that come out of our HR department are a bunch of bullshit, I also believe that when it comes to work-from-home, management loves it not just for the massive cost savings they say it's provided.
>The solution is to downsize your physical plant.
My company did this, then pulled 3 different departments into a 3d/w RTO they didn't even have the space for. Whoops!
If I returned to the office I'd be working with teammates in India, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, and Delaware and none of them would be in my office. I'd be essentially working remote from an office that I commute to. The worst of all worlds.
Funny/sad story, my friend works for the government making maps for watersheds. Elon comes along and forces people to go back to office. She’d been remote since she was hired 3+ years ago. So suddenly she’s assigned to the closest gov office near her, which is an ICE OFFICE in SF, about an hour commute from where she lives (each way). She’s massively against the goings-on at ICE and asks for an alternate spot. She now has to commute 1:15 each way to an animal holding office in SFO. She is currently zooming into work each day from an office full of transient animals and no humans related to anything she does, all in the name of government efficiency. Needless to say, her work efficiency has diminished greatly.
This is exactly the problem with a lot of the RTO push.. We are more geographically spread out than ever, and companies usually have, at best, 1/2 the conferences rooms required to actually collaborate properly.
So in-office days are spent sitting in a big noisy open floor plan, wearing noise cancelling headphones trying to get work done.. in between producing lots of noise yourself on zoom.
The other having-it-both-ways I see from employers is that in the last 5.5 years of COVID most people I know have expanded their work days to take calls earlier and later for timezone alignment purposes. This was tenable to expand your work day 1-2 hours when you had no commute. Now they think they can get the extra hours out and force a commute.
My wife spends many of her in-office days dialing into 7:30/8am calls, heading into the office late enough to have tons of train delays, and rushing to meet the deadline to get the swipe in so it counts.
It's worse now, but complaints about offices as working spaces were constant pre-pandemic too. Complaining about it then made you seem a bit... wet.
But now the highest levels have brought the productivity benefits of RTO into their wheelhouse. So making the offices suitable also shouldn't be a responsibility punted to a relatively minor position.
Same thing happened where I worked, though that was mostly from what I heard from coworkers since I maintained my WFH status. It's all CEO theater designed to layoff folks while also forcing people who RTO to take an effective pay cut. People need to recognize that and demand more from where they work, whether it's in the form of unionizing or otherwise.
There is always an answer to unionizing and other demands: hiring freeze plus offshoring overseas. Eventually even unionized people will be replaced with offshore buddies.
Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/press-releases/new-moreno-bill...
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/The...
This would be very helpful for American jobs.
Call your Congressional reps, ask them to cosponsor.
Offshoring always ends in disaster, companies have tried this time and time again but the end result is an awful product that requires more money to fix than they needed to make it in the first place.
And that also doesn't solve the problem of dealing with institutional knowledge loss if you decide to aggressively cull employees trying to unionize. In either scenario the solution is for union workers to become even more aggressive with their demands and force companies to acquiesce.
Offshoring might frequently be a disaster. On the other hand, Microsoft and the rest of FAANG and other large tech companies have had overseas development centers staffed by full fledged FTEs for many years now with, as far as anyone can tell, success. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any reason they couldn't expand those.
I'm not sure if it actually is working out, or if the companies outsourcing are just absorbing the inefficiency.
Every outsourcing effort I have seen at some of these massive companies has been pretty tragic, where the best that can be said is now there is a shit but cheap option to be used where the quality doesn't matter.
This gets repeated across all the entrenched players simultaneously, while the product quality stagnates or declines (but the stock goes up).
I'm guessing that there is a difference between "offshoring, while still having the offshore people picked and employed by you" (let's call it "pure offshoring") and "offshoring and outsourcing to a local company" (let's call it "outsourcing to offshore").
With pure offshoring, you do have control over who you pick, what their mode of work is, whom to fire, etc.
With outsourcing to offshore, the local company hires people, usually on the cheap, to only just fullfill your contract and no more. If people underperform, you may complain, and maybe they'll be moved to a less prominent and visible role, or maybe they'll be shuffled to the next customer of theirs. So things will be bad, because it is not in the interest of the local company to do one iota more than necessary. And you'll still have to have your own QA, architects, etc., to make sure you at least get what you paid for.
when most of the people offshore are employees it can work. The biggest thing is you need to start with good managers there who hire good people. In india good engineers are paid more than their peers in germany, but that is the price you pay for the quality you need for good people. If you don't hire good people you can get plenty of terrible people for really cheap, but the results will be poor quality. Take your pick.
Yeah that's why it's called a multinational. Offices everywhere. And yes it's a success.
>>> Offshoring always ends in disaster,
Is it? If it is a disaster , why there are millions of IT folks employed in offshoring locations?
Only the cheapest offshoring ends in disaster. Cheap contractors from TCS will fail you. Open your own dev center, hire few thousands engineer there - a road to success. And yes, no one will actively complain about RTO policies there.
Offshoring can be a success, but because most companies do it for cost reasons, they focus on cost over everything. Outsourcing to India can be cheaper than setting up shop in the western world for relatively equivalent results, but most companies will head to the cheapest outsourcers in India AND not set up the relatively expensive process to deal with quality control, timezone issues, etc. In other words, it's usually driven by bean counters and not engineers.
This is why I stay at a company that’s 100% remote even though I’m sacrificing many thousands of dollars a year in additional income. I just can’t go back for so many reasons. But the most frustrating one in my opinion is exactly what you said, that all of this can be done remotely.
Executives have done all manner of things which reduced productivity. Hoteling alone must have cost billions in lost focus.
They’re suspicious of work from home because employees like it. If they were concerned about productivity they’d make deals where you can work from home but have to work 10% more hours or something to make up for whatever imagined productivity was lost.
That feels like a made up reason because you don't want to accept the two obvious explanations:
1) Mandating RTO is a compliance check that allows you to fire people with cause and avoid other more costly downsizing efforts.
2) Justifying a lease.
If you are so miserable, are you looking for a new job that will allow WFH? I think that is the solution. Also, did you ask your line manager if you can WFH more often? That is a first step. If they say no, they go and find a new job.
If the company enforces RTO at least stop using zoom for meetings. If that means offshored employees can't participate then so be it. Let them come to the office.
Office space / real estate owners don't care. It's their plot to increase profits and companies are colluded with them on it. There is no other obvious reason besides may be Big Brother monitoring mentality.
> Microsoft's new approach is the latest sign of the company increasing performance pressure on employees. It has fired thousands of employees deemed low performers this year and introduced a new performance improvement plan meant to exit low performers more quickly.
Claims who? These also sound like typical sketchy headcount reduction tactics.
Also, it's throwing employees under the bus, because the company is tarring them as low performers, at the same time as the company dumps them onto a hostile job market. Those employees should talk to lawyers.
> > Importantly, this update is not about reducing headcount.
MS had to mention that in the memo, because that's what everyone reading it was thinking?
While sketchy and total crap move on MS. What recourse do employees really have?
MS likely consulted with their army of lawyers before pulling this.
Actions might be crappy but not illegal. Not a lawyer but employers are usually allowed to dictate the terms of the employment agreements and requiring someone to go into an office to work can be one of them. Even changing from permanent remote to onsite at a later time seems like another relatively protected decision.
Unless someone somewhere higher up is on the record saying something like “Oh yeah let’s make them come into the office to actually make it really crappy for them so they leave on their own” I doubt any reasonably reliable legal case can be made.
To non-lawyer me, this sounds like something for which lawyers have a term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal
If I've heard of this angle, I assume that lawyers know many angles that may apply.
Constructive Dismissal has been brought up in every RTO thread for years, but I've never heard of a case where it worked.
The key to constructive dismissal is that a reasonable person would have to find the new conditions intolerable and it has to constitute some form of discrimination (e.g. not a change in company policy, but a targeted attack that discriminates against you). So given that most people commute to work, you couldn't argue that it was intolerable to be asked to commute to work.
If you wake up one day to an e-mail from your employer that you, and you alone, need to relocate to their new office in a small town in Alaska for no good reason, you'd have a good case for constructive dismissal.
However if the company changes their policy and applies it equally to everyone requiring employees within 50 miles of an office come in (the case with this RTO move) then you don't have a valid case for a constructive dismissal lawsuit.
>but I've never heard of a case where it worked.
that's what the severace packages are for. There's not a lot of people being dumped that wouldn't take 3-6 months of pay in advance in exchange for not being able to engage in a length lawsuit with a trillion dollar corporation.
You usually don't get a severance package if you resign or quit due to RTO unless the company goes out of their way to offer one.
Any reasonable person should see the air quality in all American offices as a hostile environment full stop.
And?
As long as it isn’t discriminatory, since 49 of the 50 states are at will employment, you can be let go at anytime for any reason or no reason.
It might come into play with unemployment insurance but the weekly amount is so low it’s laughable.
> 49 of the 50 states are at will employment
Montana is the exception, passing a "Wrongful Discharge" law in 1987
For better or worse, neither of us is a lawyer, but I'm comfortable in saying that the affected people should:
Talk. To. A. Lawyer.
Isn't that better than us random Internet people telling them -- although we think something shitty is going on -- they definitely don't have a case, and they definitely shouldn't talk to a lawyer? (For all we know, an actual lawyer might tell them that they actually do have a case.)
Talk to a lawyer is good advice, and there are approximately zero employment lawyers able to take on new clients in the Puget Sound area.
FYI no reasonable lawyer is going to take a constructive dismissal or defamation claim for this case, like some aggressive commenters are instructing people to do.
These aren't winnable claims. If a lawyer did take your case and start billing you for it, they're just milking you for cash until the inevitable dismissal.
This is why the "I'm not a lawyer, but" advice on the internet isn't as benign as it seems. It gives some people false ideas about what lawyers can do for them which leads to a lot of wasted time talking to lawyers at best, or a lot of wasted money on a dead-end case at worst.
Why do people say this? “Talk to a lawyer”. It’s the most useless advice. Okay, you don’t know. That’s fine. Don’t waste everyone’s time. Why just give this content free advice?
Because if you suspect the law does apply to you then you need a lawyer to vet the details. For most this probably doesn't apply, but you have to decide based on the specifics of your situation and those should include details you wouldn't post publically.
also if you are a lawyer or come off as a lawyer giving legal advice and you miss one rare detail that matters for one person you are liable for bad advice. So saying talk to a lawyer is a way to get around that. Talk to a lawyer if you want to know more detail.
I mean I get it. It’s just that unsolicited advice to talk to a lawyer is kind of useless? In this particular case it’s worse than useless because you’ll never get a good lawyer to take this case. It’s like some automated LLM response.
most talks with lawyers do not lead to court. They can give plenty of useful advice in many other situations. Just knowing how to frame things with the next job for example.
now granted it isn't worth it for most of us to bother. However if there is any doubt ten minutes and a few dollars is worth the cost.
Yes a lawyer is going to be able to give you career advice and tell you how to phrase the answer to the question “why did you leave your last job”?
I already knew what to do. Remove any connections from LinkedIn of anyone who knew that I was PIPed. I knew that any employment verification would go through TheWorkNumber and all it would know were dates and comp amount.
Not that anyone asked…
It really doesn’t take a lawyer to know what “at will employment” means.
A case for what unless it’s discriminatory. Your employer doesn’t have to justify letting you go - at all.
Even looking at your citation, it shows that constructive dismissal is only actionable if you can show that they made working conditions harder and they were targeting you under a law meant to protect you against discrimination
Companies have been giving employees an ultimatum between “relocate or quit” forever.
Also, in combination with possible constructive dismissal, the company is possibly defaming the employees in a way that predictably adversely affects their ability to gain new employment. And there may be other potential problems that aren't apparent to me, since I'm not a lawyer.
Talking to a lawyer about this is low-effort, low-risk. You get a lawyer's name from friend/family or another kind of lawyer you know, or you call the local bar association referral service (or, if poor, maybe go first to a law school free clinic near you, to see what resources they can point you at). Then you get a free initial consultation with an actual lawyer, who can tell you whether they think you might have a case.
That's all I have to say on this topic.
(Side Note: You might have been discussing this from a standpoint of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, and you want to help more people understand At-Will, for example. I can understand that. But I was discussing this from a standpoint of Don't Screw Over Vulnerable People By Discouraging Them From Talking To A Lawyer When I Think They Should.)
> the company is possibly defaming the employees in a way that predictably adversely affects their ability to gain new employment. And there may be other potential problems that aren't apparent to me, since I'm not a lawyer.
Why is it that the "I'm not a lawyer, but" comments are always giving the worst legal advice?
There is no defamation case anywhere in this situation.
> There is no defamation case anywhere in this situation.
They said they were terminating lots of people for poor performance, while terminating lots of people.
And there's plausible reason to suspect, given the frenzy of headcount reductions going on, that it wasn't actually for poor performance.
> Why is it that the "I'm not a lawyer, but" comments are always giving the worst legal advice?
Why are a couple people on an epic tour de force of commenting, energetically telling people to definitely don't talk to a lawyer about any possible wrongdoing by this company?
I literally just got let go from AWS two years ago in the midst of hundreds of layoffs. Absolutely no one cared why I wasn’t there anymore or even asked. I had four interviews and three offers within two weeks.
Even more relevant, one of my former coworkers at AWS who was now a director at a well known public non tech company knew I was going through the focus -> PIP process and encouraged me to stay until I made it through my next vest, got offered severance and said call him when it happens and if I’m interested he will either make a permanent position for me if possible or at least give me a very lucrative contract. He didn’t even care and he knew I was getting PIPd
I'm glad that worked out for you. In this other case, a company publicly announced that people were being fired for low performance.
Even if the colleagues of a given person knew/suspected that the person was a good worker, everyone else hiring at other companies doesn't, and they heard what the last employer said.
You don’t think that everyone in the industry who hires doesn’t know how these things work?
Absolutely no one who interviews or screen candidates think less of someone who gets laid off these days. There are tens of thousands who have been laid off in the industry since 2022.
I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to say either way. See a lawyer if you're impacted and see what they say. Don't take legal, medical, nor relationship advice from the internet.
It’s getting to a point where it’s like you’re saying that I’m not a physicist but you might need to ask one before you jump off of a 25 story building, you might survive.
Who said anything about defamation? My n=1 experience at BigTech is that they won’t say anything about why an employee left and you don’t even talk to a human to confirm dates of employment. They redirect you to TheWorkNumber (a real website).
I was Amazoned in 2023 and in none of the five interviews I had within the next two weeks did they ever ask why I left Amazon. I did get LinkedIn recommendations from my former managers there - ie not my then current one.
And we are talking about well paid Microsoft employees who are asked to come into the office. Cry me a river these aren’t “vulnerable” low paid wage slaves.
Yes I work remotely and if I had still been working at Amazon when they announced their “field by design” roles were being forced into RTO six months before it happened, I would have been interviewing and taken the pay cut.
You're not making any sense. Who is being defamed in this hypothetical scenario, and how?
>It really doesn’t take a lawyer to know what “at will employment” means.
It takes a lawyer to understand an individual's situation, background, and contract in order to see if this is just a bad but legal hand, or in fact something worth filing against. We don't know every engineer's story that is impacted here.
>Companies have been giving employees an ultimatum between “relocate or quit” forever.
Yes, and severance packages makes it less tempting to try and look into suing.
Were you really confused by “your contract” at any job? I’ve signed 10 over the years and they basically all spell out - how much you are going to get paid, when your start date is and you are an at will employee.
I was also hired by BigTech in 2020 and assigned to a “virtual office” and my position was designated as “field by design” meaning that it was suppose to be permanently remote.
There was nowhere in my contract that I would never be expected to return to office and in fact AWS did tell all of their “field by design” roles that they would have to come into the office by the beginning of the year.
I was already gone by then. Don’t you think you would have heard at least one case of a successful lawsuit by employees of at least one of these companies? Especially the US’s second largest employer?
You think a local lawyer “recommended by a family friend” is going to successfully take on a trillion dollar+ market cap company?
>Were you really confused by “your contract” at any job?
I live in California and many things have changed over the years in terms of labor laws. So yes, I don't know if what I signed is relevant today (e.g. non-competes).
>There was nowhere in my contract that I would never be expected to return to office and in fact AWS did tell all of their “field by design” roles that they would have to come into the office by the beginning of the year.
Okay, and some employees may have argued for those protections in their contract during negotiations. I'm not that high up, but I imagine some MSFT workers in Seattle may be.
> Don’t you think you would have heard at least one case of a successful lawsuit by employees of at least one of these companies?
It may be out there, but we may not have heard of it. I'm not a lawyer, I don't spend my time digging through court cases, and anything I may find may only be regionally valid and not matter to where you or I live.
>You think a local lawyer “recommended by a family friend” is going to successfully take on a trillion dollar+ market cap company?
Sure, that happens all the time in minor cases. You'd be surprised how sloppy offices can be with compliance. There are still cases of discrimination that courts fine to this day.
Again, that's not for me to determine, though. That's for a firm to analyze, accept or reject. I don't know why you're questioning me about a sector I'm not involved in. Ask your "family friend" lawyer to dig up cases for you. They are much better at that than me.
> live in California and many things have changed over the years in terms of labor laws. So yes, I don't know if what I signed is relevant today (e.g. non-competes).
Unless you signed your contract in California before 1872, when you signed your contract, non competes were already illegal in California.
I challenge you to find any citation in any contract written by any BigTech company where legal would ever let them put in a contract that they guarantee that you will never have to work in an office.
> Sure, that happens all the time in minor cases. You'd be surprised how sloppy offices can be with compliance. There are still cases of discrimination that courts fine to this day.
Any company would have their team of lawyers bury your little family lawyer so as not to set a precedent. Do you think that lawyer is going to work pro bono? They are going to charge you for every hour and then not win the case. These people have eight months to find another job.
> Again, that's not for me to determine, though. That's for a firm to analyze, accept or reject. I don't know why you're questioning me about a sector I'm not involved in. Ask your "family friend" lawyer to dig up cases for you. They are much better at that than me
Because anyone who knows how the industry works knows that the entire idea of suing a company because they enforced RTO is foolhardy. What are the chances that these multi trillion dollar companies are making these kind of policies without passing them by their team of lawyers?
>I challenge you to find any citation in any contract written by any BigTech company where legal would ever let them put in a contract that they guarantee that you will never have to work in an office.
Why do you assume I have access to every employee's contract? Have you never negotiated terms?
I don't have someone's direct contract but I worked directly with two people who had very particular stipulations for when and where they can work. One at a medium sized studio who basicallyhelped establish core tech they use to this da. One from a director at big recognizable company. They were both talent who clearly could shop and bid for jobs anytime and anywhere they wanted to.
It's not common, but we're not talking common talent. Anyone can negotiate, what you get in the contract depends on a variety of factors.
> Do you think that lawyer is going to work pro bono?
I don't know. I'll ask them about it the next time we ever meet.
I'm not really a fan of pre-maturely giving up. If I really feel wronged, a consultation isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things.
> What are the chances that these multi trillion dollar companies are making these kind of policies without passing them by their team of lawyers?
Higher than you think. Hanlon's razor applies here.
Again, I'm not sure why you're so against the idea of deferring to an actual expert. At worst you waste a fee hundred dollars and hours of your time. At best, the company was dumb and they settle under the hood so you can at least get a bit more piece of mind.
Because some things are common sense. Instead of wasting time and money chasing windmills and hoping your family lawyer can beat a multi trillion dollar company, you are much better off spending your time and energy looking for another job if you want to work remotely. When I go into “job search” mode which I have done 10 times in 30 years. My focus isn’t on my current or former employee.
Do you think a lawyer would be necessary if your contract outright stated that you never had to go into an office?
Besides that, every single contract I’ve signed said that nothing said outside of the contract is legally binding.
And legal is very (small c) conservative, they aren’t going to go through the trouble of making a special contract for random employee #1256374 everything is very standardized at these companies except for very high level executives. They are “common talent”. You really have a high opinion of BigTech employees if you think they are “special talent”.
I don't know. When a company uses RTO to reduce headcount they usually include all employees, with the expectation that those who live far away from the office will resign instead of relocate.
If I'm reading this right, it only applies to people who already live within 50 miles of the office. Remote-remote employees are exempt.
How many employees do you think msft has that don’t live within that 50 mile radius? I’d bet it’s an incredibly small percentage.
They chose 50 miles because it’s big enough to cover almost everyone. I’m within that but my commute is two hours one direction.
50 miles is a US government defined "commutable distance" (I was just talking about this at work with a human resources person, but unfortunately I can't recall what agency defined it as such).
Maybe OPM: (U.S. Office of Personnel Management)
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/work-sch...
Official Duty Station
An agency may prescribe a mileage radius of not greater than 50 miles to determine whether an employee's travel is within or outside the limits of the employee's official duty station for determining entitlement to overtime pay for travel.
If it is really two hours by a reasonable route then you likely have a case that the commute is unreasonable and you would not have taken the job without them paying moving expenses if it offered that way. Therefore they need to offer moving expenses. I'd ask the boss first as they may have contacts in hr that can handle this.
If they won't offer moving expenses odds are you can convince an unemployment judge this is an unreasonable change in working conditions and so you can collect unemployment. (A lawyer can give more detail)
$1019 a week - the maximum in Washington - is not nothing. But it’s not life changing.
It is enough to survive if you cut back, hopefully long enough to find a new job.
If it is worth that risk is up to you. I won't call you stupid for not taking it. You can also accept it for the moment and start sending out resumes while working. It will take a little longer but there are other jobs.
Well in my state it maxes out at $275 a week…
There are large offices is nearly every major city in the world. On my team, two are in Canada, one is in Singapore, and another in India. All fully remote.
Redmond only
The 50 mile radius touches Olympia, and that's a conservative centering on building 92. It's basically everybody that they hire in western Washington.
50 miles is a very long way to commute daily!
At my shop employees had to RTO but us consultants are still remote. I suspect this is exactly what it looks like.
>MS had to mention that in the memo, because that's what everyone reading it was thinking?
It's not reducing headcount if they hire just as many people overseas.
Just out of curiosity, how much compensation would people be willing to leave on the table in lieu of "Remote" work? (this is different to, how much would you ASK to go from remote to a new in-office job). 10%, 25%, 50%?
I've worked remotely for 5 years now, and there is NO way I would return to an office based job. I even have moved to a small town where there are practically 0 tech jobs; and at this point there's NO way I would relocate for a new job. Maybe it is my age (44), or maybe I am even in a privileged position financially; but at this moment in my life I would rather quit my job if they made me return to office (even for one day a week, as it would mean having to move to wherever the office is). Fortunately I am in a position where I can go several months without a paycheck, and I have some passive income.
This question isn't very revealing because it almost entirely depends on this one variable:
> maybe I am even in a privileged position financially; but at this moment in my life I would rather quit my job
Someone closer to retirement with a lot of savings and low expenses will have a completely different answer than a younger person with low savings and a family.
The second variable it depends on is their current salary. Someone who currently earns a huge number can afford to give up a higher percentage than someone who earns barely enough to make ends meet.
The question becomes a proxy for the person's financial situation and current salary, not their remote work preferences.
This is also a question where people's claims don't match their actions. Similar to every election season when a lot of people declare they're going to move to a different country if their party loses, but the number of people who actually do it is much smaller.
>Someone closer to retirement with a lot of savings and low expenses will have a completely different answer than a younger person with low savings and a family.
Maybe this is the way companies rid themselves of older workers who push back on things. The FIRE movement is huge in tech, and I imagine a not insignificant number of people have RTO as the last straw where they pull the ripcord. Personally, for me? There's no going back. The only way you could get me into the office on a regular basis is if you let me work on rovers at JPL or something.
For myself, I'd love nothing more if I could code part time in retirement, for the rest of my life, but I won't RTO to do it. If I have to leave development behind? So be it.
This study found the opposite.
https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remot...
Could you outline the opposite findings for me?
You got the underlying reason for my question almost in passing:
I've been involved in hiring Software devs from US and LatAm for several years in different management positions. I wondered how feasible would be for say, a company in Mexico to compete on hiring a dev in the USA at a lower cost (normally, a Mexico dev is between 1/3 to 1/2 the price of a US one), by leveraging the value of [allowing] working Remote.
EDIT: Which actually made me think of a crazy idea: A job board called something like "Work for Less", where small companies or companies from overseas offer jobs that have compensations more focused on Quality of Living vs compensation. So for example, a job opening might have "We offer: 70% of your last salary. 3 day weekends, remote work". Or if it is say, a Mexican company, "We offer: 80% of your last salary. Comprehensive relocation help to live/work in a Mexican beach for 4 months a year. Medical Tourism coverage (don't know what this is called, but basically, help in say, taking people to high quality medical places)".
Maybe it is a stupid idea, but at the end of the day, Remote Work is one of several "Levers" for Quality of Life, and although historically the US has focused on monetary compensation, maybe newer generations value other aspects more.
Workless
Will work.
There is also the unknown future. How stable is this remote-pay-discount bargain opportunity? If the company goes bust and you need to RTO, you need to live in a market with employment options.
I’ll give some real world numbers. Right now I make a little over $200K. I am 51, never struck it rich in tech and make the same as former intern I mentored when I was in BigTech between 2020-2023 and when they got back. They got promoted to an L5 (mid level) earlier this year at 25. We both worked in the Professional Services department.
I’ve said no to opportunities that would have paid $250K - 280K that would have required me to relocate and be in an office. I can honestly say there is no amount of money that would convince me to go to an office.
See the story of the Mexican Fisherman
https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...
My wife and I already travel extensively, I “retired her” at 44 years old in 2020. We have done the digital nomad thing for a year since then and we are planning to spend a couple of months in Costa Rica next year and be away from home during much of the summer.
I have the freedom to spend a week with my parents and work from there and fly to another city to see my friends and adult sons.
Why do I need more money? I’ve had the big house in the burbs built twice and we sold and downsized from the second one.
I also have a year savings in the bank outside of retirement savings
> I can honestly say there is no amount of money that would convince me to go to an office.
I enjoy remote work quite a bit (after thinking I'd hate it).
There is absolutely an amount of money that would convince me to take an in-office job though...
More money would do absolutely nothing for me if I had to exchange it for remote work except make my life worse in every way.
I couldn’t spend the time with my 81 and 83 year old parents, I wouldn’t have nearly the amount of time with wife, I couldn’t spend months away from home.
There might be no amount of money that someone is likely to pay you, but I bet there's an amount of money that you would do it for.
Short version: At 51, the value of my time is too important. My wife and I are gym rats, very healthy and I am not willing to trade this time in my life for more money. My health is not going to be better in 5 years statistically. Not that we have any debilitating illness, but no one beats aging.
The tradeoffs would be too great. I’m my parents only child. While they are as healthy as an 83 and 81 year old can be, time catches up with all of us. I’ve enjoyed the past 5 years (Covid times excepted) being able to see them and spend a couple of weeks with them multiple of times a year.
When the time comes that I do need to pack a bag and see about them for an extended period of time, my wife and I can do that. There is no amount of money that I would trade for that.
It’s the same about travel. I wouldn’t give up our travel now and put it off any longer than we already have because of financial and family obligations (raising my two step sons).
What would more money do for me right now? Allow me to travel more? Allow me to get a bigger house even though we already had the big house in the burbs and sold it for twice what we had it built for and downsized to a 1250 square foot condo in a vacation community in Florida where everyone ride uses their home as vacation home.
Nicer cars? We sold both of our cars when we traveled for a year and bought the cheapest new car that we could stand when we settled down.
A better retirement? By the time I retire, we will have traveled to every place we could possibly want to go and plan to go back and forth between our current home and spend extended periods of time in other cities both domestically and internationally. We are experimenting with that now. But in US time zones.
I left an on-site job for a fully remote job, taking about a 35% cut to do so. Literally every aspect of my life improved, including financially.
The financial savings come from 3 things: downsizing to one car and elimination of transport costs; dramatically reduced lunch and coffee expenses; not buying a bunch of stuff to cope with the emotional toll (by far the biggest component).
The savings are even more dramatic if I factor in the opportunity costs of commute time. After accounting for the two way commute time, gas station line time, and vehicle maintenance time, my effective hourly rate working in-office was probably lower than working remote.
> Just out of curiosity, how much compensation would people be willing to leave on the table in lieu of "Remote" work? (this is different to, how much would you ASK to go from remote to a new in-office job). 10%, 25%, 50%?
~$250k, ~50% of potential day gig comp.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37094928
(remote 10+ years, I'll retire before I go back to an office, I want more time and quality of life, not more money)
Where's the office? The bike ride through some parks like my last? A ten minute drive in surface streets? A 20 minute rail ride away? A half hour drive on crowded highways?
I'd go back to the office a bicycle ride away without issue. I like a nice office, and it's nice being able to separate the work space from the home, it's like I gained a room of my home back. I'd probably require a lot of benefits or a good bit more pay to take a job with a long highway commute.
You make a great point. I would enjoy going back to the office if it involved a 15 minute bike ride.
I'd have to do the math on what the commute would cost me in time and financial cost.
I don't own a car. I have no plans to buy one. If I "needed" one for a job, that would be brought up at the salary negotiation. Sorry, I'm not going to pay for a car I don't otherwise need and lose $15K a year for something decent. What a scam!
On the time, well, it just depends on what they're going to pay me. Divide by work hours per year. Add 2 hours a day. Add that to the offer. I don't work for free. I don't travel for free. When I need to fly somewhere I get free ground transport, free meals, free flights, free hotel, but because we put "we're forcing you to travel 10 miles a day for no reason" in a little special box called "expected" we can force you to spend your own salary on it. *Scam*. It's all a big scam. They're subsidizing their bottom line with your time, your money, and your air.
I worked a terrible job in high school because I could walk there. There was no point in going someplace else that paid more because I would've burned all the extra money up in gas.
There have been some studies on this, turns out employees will give up quite a bit:
https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remot...
https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/tech-workers-take-much-lowe...
Just left a comment elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192176), but it's likely this RTO push is partially to renegotiate to account for this perk.
Based upon the recruiters messaging me, if I gave up my remote job for one that required in-office attendance I would get an immediate 30% pay bump.
That would however, demand an hour and half commute each way and that would impact my ability to take my children to school and be involved with family meals. Back when I did have a hour commute each way it was costing me £2,800 a year in fuel, plus £2,220 in parking fees, plus about the same again for lunch out with colleagues.
So yeah, i'd get a 30-40% pay bump, but a large percentage would be consumed by additional costs with no benefit to my performance.
Enough to win the competition for the fixed number of available homes in good neighborhoods convenient to the office. Which is effectively an infinite amount, if every employer in the area is trying to throw money at the problem.
I would never take less pay to work from home. Im good with working in office or at home. Also, Im doing the same job either way, so I'm not sure why I'd be paid differently one way or the other. If anything, I'd think it's more expensive (insignificantly) for the company to give me a desk.
35-50% is the ballpark when I surveyed amongst friends.
This is the answer, its supply demand and there is likely going to be a different equilibrium price for each.
In 2008 I was given 2 offers from a company: WFH or paid relocation to work in-office. I chose the former, which came with a 26% lower salary, and have been remote ever since. Just comparing the salaries in that case is a little disingenuous, however, since the relocation was from a low cost of living city to a high cost of living city.
A large impact on the extent to which WFH may need to come at a discount is specialization: If you're easily replaceable with an in-office worker, why would the company deal with remote? If you're not so easily replaceable, the company is more likely to be willing to work with you on your terms.
There's generally been a large disconnect between the job market in the tech sector and the rest of the economy, at least until a few years ago. There's now much more of a bifurcation within the tech job market, where rank-and-file and entry level software engineers are suffering while experienced and specialized software engineers may be doing better than ever. This plays into the RTO/WFH discussion because some people may not have the option to get their preference at any discount, or given either option in the first place.
Personally I'd probably want a 25-50% increase to go 100% remote.
I hate fully remote working.
Good strategy. Get bigger salary AND the perk. Keep slaying, king.
> Maybe it is my age (44), or maybe I am even in a privileged position financially
You think? I was so sure that anyone who can get by without working would immediately rush to upend their life and suffer the many annoyances of working in an office! /s
If it wasn't obvious, a lot people don't have a choice. They can always leave, but this RTO thing is everywhere and it's not so easy working remotely nowadays.
It is funny to see how in one (IT) culture there is two narratives, often supported by same people:
1) Office is bad, people more productive working remote from their homes, and corporate C-levels issue and enforce RTO, which is silly and anti-productive.
2) All jokes about Zoom/Meet/Teams, with all these «Each meeting consists of “are you hear me?” questions», etc.
Maybe, I'm unique (I'm sure I'm not), but I was twice less productive at remote (when it was mandated by anti-COVID measures of my Government) and I've happily returned to office as soon as I was allowed to.
For me, there are multitude of reasons to want to go to office, including endless number of shelves I need to mount at home (it is easy to procrastinate when you have OTHER real things to do, like home improvement, and not only meme-scrolling), mental resource to prepare one more meal each day (I have canteen at the office and lunch becomes no-brainer and takes 15-20 minutes instead of additional shopping & cooking at home), etc.
But main and most important reason is, personal meetings and, yes, this proverbial cooler chats. I'm 10x more effective in communication in person than all these videocalls. I dread planned calls, I cannot «read» counterparts well via videocall and it takes me much more time to explain ideas, problems and opinions via any remote communication. Also, a lot of «small» questions are postponed indefinitely because there is no this cooler, when you can ask somebody opinion or bounce off half-backed ideas against your colleague without scheduling yet another meeting and WITHOUT throwing your colleague out of the flow (because you know that he leaved flow to drink some tea already!).
I'm glad, that I can visit office every day, but also I'm glad that I can WFH for one day if I needed to (for example, when I need to meet plumber or alike).
Yes, there is commuting, but my commute is 15-20 minutes one way :-)
I think the simple and boring answer is it really depends. As you say, your commute is short, but also I think there's just a personality element to it. Some people absolutely thrive and are way more productive remotely (and I think HN skews towards that type of person), and other people are the opposite, losing their minds if they don't have colleagues beside them to talk and collaborate with.
> I think the simple and boring answer is it really depends
Yep, people are different.
> are way more productive remotely
Is this measured, or they are feel more productive? (I think, answer is the same: there is full spectrum here and somebody is less productive but feels more productive and somebody is really more productive and, maybe, feels the same :-))
But my previous team (where I worked at the peak of COVID) was less productive for sure (I can compare release notes between product release and see as they are shrinking from release to release at COVID time!), though we have some team members who thought that they become more productive!.
Also, long time ago I worked in distributed team (St.Petersburg, Russia / Boston, USA / Santa Clara, USA) and we had twice-a-year week-long whole-team in-person meetings in Boston office (I was from St.Petersburg). These were two hyper-productive weeks, when we solved a lot of problems which accumulated between these meeting, fast and efficient. It was before video-conferencing, so all other meetings was phone-calls (only audio), but still.
I understand, that it is not statistics, it is anecdotal, but I'm very skeptical about broad claims that distributed / remote teams (!) can be as efficient (or even more) as local ones. Personal contributors — sure, all people are different, but whole teams — I'm in doubt. We are social animals, and all these video calls are still conversation with pixels, not people.
Depends of your company, I personally meet my team roughly every 3 months and I push back any task on the calendar because I know the days in the office aren't even half the productivity of the usual remote days. I even avoid big deployments during these days.
Remote is usually all focused work and the office time is mostly coffee chats and random interruptions of unrelated subjects because on how much easier it is to ping people.
So on my case it's the opposite, I'm a bit skeptical you can achieve the level of focus you have in a remote team in a standard open space, that would require some discipline that not everybody has.
Not to mention the abomination of the open space with no reserved desk so you aren't even guaranteed to sit close to your team, removing the only potential useful advantage of being on-site.
Open space is PURE EVIL. Don't have fixed working place where you could leave your headphones (and external DAC in my case), cup, charging wires for your gadgets (not everything is USB-C still), some papers, etc is PURE EVIL too. Combined together it is ninth circle of hell.
Never worked in open space and refused (otherwise good) offers twice due to open space in office.
Culture in which everybody can ping anybody at any time is bad too. It is why I speak about cooler chat (when person already distracted), not any chat :-)
The combination of these things you're mentioning is one of the main reasons, at least for me, that WFH is so much more productive. A lot of tech companies have evolved a culture and built offices that are in opposition to doing good work. Open plan offices have been the norm in my experience over the last 10 years (maybe more). Anytime interruption via Slack/Teams is the typical culture.
I was much more open to working in the office when I actually had my own office.
Well sure I do agree but I've never seen a tech company which isn't working in an open space. The non open-space companies feel even more rare than the remote ones.
So when you compare remote productivity, that's what you have to compare with.
Oh, I agree fully. I enjoy going to office. I also enjoy WFH. But after two days of WFH I am so bored.
Like many above like to call managers 'managers' I like to call developers/devopsengineers/* 'IT people'. Office is not a 'manager' or 'c-suite' thing. Put it differently: not going to office is an 'IT people' thing.
Being productive is not only the number of lines of code you crank out. Being productive is cranking out the right lines of code. You need to communicate for that. Casually joining a few colleagues talking about work delivers so much value. Maybe make a few decisions without planning a meeting. That is productive!
It is also not only about being productive, It is also about having fun with my team or colleagues. But I also like to sense how my team members are behaving, are people super tired? Are they happy? Etc etc.
Oh and the good old whiteboard sessions, I love them and I miss them.
If I tell my non 'it people' friends my colleagues only want to go to office max 1 time a week... or not at all, most friends call it crazy.
Tomorrow to the office again, yes! 45 minute lunch walk through the city... Close the door at 17:00 and call it a day! Love it!
TL;DR Flexibility is all we need.
I'm a big believer in empowerment. 90% of employees will usually do the right thing for themselves and the business IF YOU JUST LET THEM. For example, mandating 5 day RTO only to have your sales engineers take a full meeting room by themselves to sit on sales calls all day is idiotic for everybody.
You’re speaking from a very privileged position. A 15–20 minute commute and an office with a canteen is not the reality for most workers. Many spend 1–3 hours daily stuck in traffic or on crowded trains, which is pure wasted time. Add in rising transport costs, pollution, and the fact that not everyone can afford to live near their workplace, and commuting becomes one of the biggest drains on productivity and well-being.
So while it’s great that the office works for you, dismissing WFH as “less productive” ignores the fact that for many people, it’s the only way they can actually be productive, stay healthy, and remain in the workforce at all.
Commute is very location-specific and will be very different between USA and Europe, and different even between different locations in USA and different countries in Europe, you are right.
But when we speaking about Microsoft, Google, FaceBook, etc., workers, I think canteen is a norm, not reality for most workers.
And many workers outside IT cannot WFH at all. You cannot be salesman or welder or teacher or plumber WFH... We all are very privileged, no matter how long is our commute.
You’re not alone. I absolutely love going to office every day but also love the flexibility to occasionally wfh if needed. I just feel like when I enter the office and put on my “unreachable” focus mode on I’m in the zone and very productive. At home there’s endless distractions (my cats make sure to check in with me every time get too focused). Also I do like interacting with colleagues. I think I started liking going to office even more once I broke up with my gf that was living with me for 4 years. Something about working the entire day from my apartment completely alone is… not appealing to my social side of the brain.
It’s completely fine to prefer the office, that’s your choice and it works for you. The problem isn’t people going in, it’s when companies force everyone to go. Reading your post, it almost sounds like you want others dragged back just to fill the gap left in your own private life. That’s not a good reason to mandate office work for everyone.
If a portion of the team is remote, then the whole "remote team" apparatus and culture are necessary. Same with hybrid offices in which the WFH days are random instead of set for everyone.
I fully understand that this is a polarized personal preference issue. I don't think there's a way to make both work in the same company.
People have different preferences, some people are going to be more productive at home and some less. Some people simply can’t work from home.
I think the challenge is that leadership isn’t coherent when it comes to RTO:
1. Leadership has largely abandoned the notion of geography when hiring or building teams. Building geographic centers of excellence where all team members with the same function working closely together used to be a thing. Leadership wants the flexibility to pick the best talent, at the best prices, on short notice but also wants ad-hoc collaboration. Workers are rightly confused when every meeting they have in an office is on Zoom. 2. Leadership has largely abandoned the notion of timezone alignment and structured working days. Leadership wants to hire talent across the globe which requires more cross-timezone collaboration and non-standard-work hour meetings. That wasn’t possible when at 5PM to 7PM everyone was commuting. It also isn’t reasonable to expect people to hold a rigid 8AM to 5PM in-office schedule and then take 2 hours of meetings from 6PM to 8PM. 3. Leadership is complains that office space is both essential to productivity AND too expensive to spend money on. Employees home setups in terms of working space, noise isolation, connectivity and configuration are now more productive than what is offered in-office. When leadership took people from dedicated offices, to cubicles, to open seating and then to “hot desking” it was justified that commercial real estate was scarce, expensive and required the sacrifice of productivity to manage costs. Now that it is plentiful and cheap? Leadership is saying that RTO is needed for productivity AND that they will continue to reduce spending on office space per employee.
The only way to mentally reconcile that is to either assume that leadership is incompetent or that they want to return to 18th century sweat shops and envy China’s 9x9x6 culture. I can see why mid-level management is struggling getting compliance which is why they are relying on badge swipes.
Thanks for being honest. I cannot imagine trying to work from home and I think it is a shared charade we are all caught up in. Be thankful you have a job to go into work to, that may not always be the case for everyone…
The issue is that it's mandated. I bet most people would say they like hybrid.
I'm privileged enough to work in places where my managers understand that life is life and sometimes you need to be at home but don't want to take full day-off because you still work even before COVID and externally (government) enforced full-remote.
Managers trusted us (engineers) that we will not abuse this system. It was always like social contract: engineers doesn't complain about occasional crunches and overtimes (not like game industry where it is norm, but may be once a month), managers lets people stay home for a day if they needed without additional paperwork.
Of course, when KPI is enforced by automatic clocks-in system or doors logs it is another story.
On the other hand, we all are very privileged compared to industrial workers, builders, retail workers, etc. Not only in salary, but in our schedules too.
Microsoft: Microsoft updates flexible work expectations to three days a week in the office https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45183560
Verge: Microsoft Mandates a Return to Office https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184017
Geekwire: Microsoft sets new RTO policy, requiring employees in the office 3 days per week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184032
> Microsoft updates flexible work expectations to three days a week in the office
Of all the "voices" I'd like to be able to do, corporate shitspeak is definitely the top one.
I have updated the expectations. Pray I do not update them further...
https://perchance.org/corp-bs
and
https://www.bullshitgenerator.com/
can help out for practice!
https://code-cwa.org/organize
Why Microsoft Has Accepted Unions, Unlike Its Rivals - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/business/economy/microsof... | | https://archive.today/ES3SF - February 28th, 2024
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_unions
[dead]
MSFT employees - better make sure not to work from home anymore considering your jobs can’t be done from there. Close your laptops at 5pm, do not re-open them until you are back in office at 9am the next day.
This, or just go work somewhere that better fits your lifestyle - including WFH.
This is the way.
Hell, leave the laptop!
I have worked for 7 years in the office and 7 years remote, and for me the 7 years remote were not as enjoyable.
I like the routines and processes that I adhere to more when I have a separate work location; I find it more difficult to adhere to those same processes when I can roll out of bed and walk to my computer half asleep and zone in on work.
For example, I find it much more likely I’ll consistently shower, get dressed, eat breakfast etc, when I go into the office than when I work from home.
Additionally, when working remote, I find that there’s often more of a bias towards threads or messages starting off related to something work related; I do try to ask about colleagues weekends occasionally for example, but when remote it often feels more like you’re consuming their bandwidth or attention vs just minor conversation in passing.
Sometimes things take time to compile, or conversations over text-mediums are difficult; having a manager nearby that can sense when things are difficult and more effectively help is great. I’ve had many times where I’ve sighed about something and my coworker heard and asked what got me flustered and explaining it helped lead to resolution.
What I would suggest is that perhaps some teams should be remote and some local if possible to facilitate different types of employees.
I totally get working remote, I’d probably do it if I was back in a relationship and/or had kids.
I strongly prefer RTO for myself personally. I can’t stand working from home. I believe the solution is have a shorter commute and live closer to the office (even though I live far away, I am trying to convince my wife to move). I have mixed feelings about forcing RTO because I know some strongly prefer WFH. Maybe 2 or 3 days is the best middle ground. Personally I miss when everyone was at the office 5 days a week.
> solution is have a shorter commute and live closer to the office
With a short commute, a private office, and environment conducive to both focused work and collaboration as required, I imagine a lot more folks would be happy to RTO. However, this is not the reality for most who are asked to waste hours commuting (or uproot families to move closer) to sit surrounded by noise and distraction.
I suspect “I miss when everyone was at the office 5 days a week” is behind many of these RTO mandates, and I am not sure the sacrifice made by people (like you) who don’t get to see colleagues quite as often is balanced against the sacrifice made by folks who have to uproot their whole lives or waste hours per day commuting.
Great, then you don't have to work remote. Your preferences are orthogonal to the freedom other people have or don't have to make the choices that are appropriate for them.
The only thing I hated worse than going into the office was our remote employees, who never seemed to be available when you needed them, had their status set to Away (or wouldn't respond for hours if they were green).
It was a privilege, people abused it, and now it's over. And managers were the worst offenders.
Interesting. I've been remote for 5 years across three different companies, and if anything I've had the opposite experience: my remote coworkers are far more responsive than my on-site coworkers, who are always in meetings, in transit, having in-person chit chat, or taking a break.
I've been managing remote teams for over a decade. Your management must be doing performance management well. Most remote coworkers and employees I've had have been good, but that was only because the company aggressively pruned people who abused remote work.
Remote job postings attract deadbeats at a higher rate than in-office jobs. There are even New York Times Bestseller books with example scripts of how to negotiate remote work with your boss so you can travel the world, outsource your work to virtual assistants, and respond to e-mails once a week. These people always come in with a "if I get my job done, it shouldn't matter that..." attitude and then they fail to get their job done.
Remote is also the target for the /r/overemployed people who try to get as many jobs as they can and then do as little work as possible at each. Once someone has 3, 4, or more jobs they don't really care if they get fired. They'll string you along with excuses until you let them go. The first time it happens to you, your sense of sympathy overrides your instinct to cut the person and you let them string you along way too long. The 3rd or 4th time you have someone you suspect of abusing remote, you PIP them hard and cut them quickly because you know how much damage and frustration they can bring to the rest of the team.
I think remote work gets increasingly hard to manage the larger a company gets.
My parents both worked for the same Fortune 500 company when COVID hit and the thousands of employees in their branch had to abruptly transition to WFH. Something like 10% of employees just disappeared, never to be heard from again. Lots of people who had been perfectly fine employees in the office ended up getting fired because with WFH they couldn't manage to stay at their desk and get their work done. That division of the company was seriously crippled for about six months.
My own job is with a small business that has been remote-only since before COVID and it's all been great. They've never even needed to "prune" anyone who abused remote work. I guess they're good at determining how reliable someone will be during interviews. We're all adults and there's a high level of trust that we're all doing our jobs, but the team is small enough that it would take a maximum of a single day to notice if someone is slacking.
But when the company gets really large, they sometimes have to manage to the lowest common denominator, and "we're all adults" becomes an increasingly shaky assumption. So I kind of understand where the anti-WFH CEOs are coming from if they were at the helm of a massive company and saw all kinds of chaos during COVID. But I also think small, geographically distributed teams can massively outperform if you hire the right people.
There are plenty of books that explain that you can have a Hollywood actor boyfriend too. How many people does this actually happen to successfully?
I went into the office for the first time 2 months ago. The worst part was how massively distracting it was.
The people who like going into the office at my work, go in to socialize.
They are bored at home. It literally has nothing to do with being productive.
I am sure this is all a matter of scale though. My place is really small. At the scale of Microsoft I am sure there are thousands of people really gaming the system badly.
For some people and some kinds of work, talking to other people is important.
And talking in person is much higher bandwidth for reasons we don’t completely understand.
Love how when it comes to RTO there’s always “some people”, “some work”, “for reasons we don’t completely understand”.
But for work from home you have cold hard objective metrics?
Yes. The world didn’t collapse overnight when everybody worked from home.
Worst case output is the same, so why should workers suffer more?
You mean you don’t love the horrible office politics? Where people treat each other terribly to get ahead by any means necessary? Where being “cool” is rewarded instead of actual results?
And remote workers are available for much longer hours than the office workers or comparing to the old times when everybody was in the office.
That's the experience I have had too, particularly regarding managers who are in the office for the day. They are not spending much time at their desk.
> particularly regarding managers who are in the office for the day. They are not spending much time at their desk
I mean, that's the point of RTO: These companies want people meeting face to face more and sitting alone at their computers less.
I argue that this means it makes more sense for managers and leaders than ICs as a result.
This is really the crux of it, and I think a larger motivator than is given credit. If wfh = +2 Engineering -2 Management and you are weak on management, you RTO.
Have had the same experience over the last 5 or so years and that too working in early stage startups.
Everyone is free to get their personal lives in order and in turn they organize and execute everything with much more dedication than i've every seen them in a corporate environment.
>> my remote coworkers are far more responsive than my on-site coworkers, who are always in meetings, in transit, having in-person chit chat, or taking a break.
1. In meetings - working
2. In transit - before and after working hours
3. Having in person chit-chat - working
4. Taking a break - remote workers should also take these
>> I've had the opposite experience
I think it depends on the type of people you're working with. I've found hand-on engineers (i.e. people writing code) are really available and perhaps they shouldn't be. Business-type people are so much more reliably flaky.
> 3. Having in person chit-chat - working
Having done years in both settings, random non-work related discussions were always more prevalent in office type atmospheres.
Only semi-related but in office at a cubicle is the least productive environment I've ever seen for companies. I cannot personally take a leadership team serious if they care about productivity & fiscal responsibility when they have cubicle farms of more than 10 people in an area.
> Having done years in both settings, random non-work related discussions were always more prevalent in office type atmospheres.
Whether you realize it or not, these are team-building exercises. It brings people closer, sometimes too close (I slept with one of them lol), but overall this is a net plus for team dynamics.
It's really hard to bond with people exclusively through chat. Especially if you hide behind an anime avatar or refuse to switch on your video.
I don't need to bond with you. I don't need team-building exercises. I have been working for over a decade and made 0 friends at the office. I'm an easy going guy, though, no complaints or anything. Just keeping it professional is good enough. A bit tired of the whole "we are a family" thing really. Plenty of successful open source projects are successful and driven by people working together remotely and behind avatars.
Most workers enjoy being emotionally manipulated by their employers.
A friend of mine was gushing because their new employer sent some chocolates to everyone at Christmas time. They felt “appreciated”.
>It's really hard to bond with people exclusively through chat. Especially if you hide behind an anime avatar or refuse to switch on your video.
If they are not bonding virtually, I don't see how much better that relation is going to be when I force these people to be in a corporate space.
I worked in MS Vancouver office
It's a little special since most people there were due to visa issues preventing them working in Seattle
It was too cold. Open layout with people yelling on calls
I'd wander around for a few hours, then go home to actually work. I only had one coworker on same team there
>Open layout with people yelling on calls
I would never again want to put up with it.
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How common are cubicles now? I haven't seen one in nearly 20 years. And I find open-office environments kind of discourage non-work chat because you know you're disturbing others for no good reason.
Apologies. I think of cubicles the same as open office and they’re not. There is kind of a spectrum between these ideas.
In my above statement I was thinking of both cubicles and open office.
Still the norm outside of tech.
Unfortunately this is a strawman. They said remote workers were more available than in-office workers. Not that in-office workers weren't working when they were unavailable.
I have a more nuanced take here. For low performing or junior employees, remote work was generally a terrible thing that led to less productivity (and more managerial overhead). For strongly performing employees with obligations at home, there were many who preferred working at home.
I fall more into the latter camp (at least I hope so) and, given I've only worked in nice offices with catered lunches, gyms, video games, offsites, etc, I enjoy a 3 day hybrid schedule works best for me.
Remote work used to be an earned privilege.
Then COVID hit and everyone got a taste of it. Including the folks who discovered they could get paid to stay home and play video games and jackin' off during work hours.
In a way you could say this group ruined it for everyone. But that's usually how these things go.
The hammer comes down on everyone because otherwise it leads to uncomfortable questions like "why does HE get to work from home and I don't?" and people getting doctor's notes claiming they're autistic and can't be around people and that's why they can't ever see the inside of an office.
I'm sorry to take a belligerent tone, but this is total revisionism. People have always slacked off and bringing them into the office doesn't change that.
Maybe I'm an old greybeard as someone with more than five years experience in the workforce, but don't you remember before COVID? People screwed around all the time! On coffee breaks or smoke breaks or extended meetings or late lunches or ping-pong tables or just browsing Facebook on their desks.
I remember the pre COVID times and people messed around, but they were available. You could actually find them in the building if they were just playing ping pong or something. In the remote world it can be very difficult to reach somebody.
I prefer remote work, but not everybody is good at it and it can ruin it for everybody.
> play video games and jackin' off during work hours.
Most of the hardest working remote people I've known, and I've worked remote at over 5 companies across two decades, often don't work standard hours. I honestly don't see the problem with someone gaming at 2pm if they're also making sure shit gets deployed at midnight.
I also have found that anytime I show up in an actual office it's hilarious how little work actually happens.
The people who get nothing done remote, also tend to get nothing done in an office they just create the illusion of it.
> The people who get nothing done remote, also tend to get nothing done in an office they just create the illusion of it.
Maybe, maybe not but it surely create cost on people to come to office. Just as example person can't just use whole Friday / monday for starting, finishing weekend travel while claiming as working.
For business even if they can't monitor person whole day at work, getting them to workplace and checking status face to face is something better than nothing.
> I honestly don't see the problem with someone gaming at 2pm
It depends on if other team members need to be able to reach out to this person at 2pm
Even when I was working in an office I would sometimes take 2 to 3hours bicycle rides at lunch time because it was the best moment to be doing sport outdoors in winter.
I would just make sure I had no scheduled meeting and had people in my team available. Sometimes I would do it to make up for extra time outside of office hours. This also allowed some of my coworkers to leave earlier because they knew I would stay longer to do my regular shift.
What if a team member needs you at 12am?
If there's a need for "core business hours" those can be established. My most recent company was evenly distributed around the globe so needing someone at 2pm PST is not much different than needing someone at 12am PST.
The vast majority of companies I've worked at remote have a strong async culture and are better for it. With some obvious exceptions, if you need a response in 15 minutes there's something wrong with your planning.
If you talk to a teacher the rule of thumb is that 2 problem children in a classroom of 25-30 can be handled, but 3 ruins the whole class.
Seems like a similar situation here.
If people are slacking off at home, they’re gonna slack off at work too. This notion that a low performing employee will suddenly perform better in the office is a myth that needs to die.
> and people getting doctor's notes claiming they're autistic and can't be around people and that's why they can't ever see the inside of an office.
Continue, I’m all ears.
> get paid to stay home and play video games and jackin' off during work hours.
Funny that I see the same things from people in toilet stall for 30 minutes at the office. (At least video games and videos..)
The only non-management/leadership people that like going into an office post-COVID are boomers.
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How would one go about making a policy that rewards high performance with remote work permit?
Times are changing. A couple of years back people would not only work from home but angrily demand that employers need to share all that office cost saving with employees who are working remotely.
That seems like an issue of company leadership and culture. There are many remote companies where this isn’t true. I’ve seen comments from Amazon workers talking about they were much more productive in a remote work situation, even though their leader (Andy Jassy) chose to make the company go back to the office 5 days a week with invasive monitoring of how people badge in and out.
I'm very pro remote working, but I think people like me need to realize that this is a real issue. It happens in the office too, but it's a bit harder to get away with, and it's really a performance management issue which brings us nicely to your second point.
I agree, managers are always the worst offenders when it comes to this sort of thing. But they do the same in the office by disappearing into meeting rooms for the entire day. I'd love to know how you can effectively manage a team by constantly being in meetings with other managers.
>I'd love to know how you can effectively manage a team by constantly being in meetings with other managers.
Hopefully, they work meetings with their team in but meeting with other managers is a big part of their job--and shielding people from stuff coming down from above.
It always seems weird to me how people complain about such things. Just do your thing and don't care about others. If others are blocking you, just say so in the daily or to your manager. Easy.
I don't really care about unproductive people, I care about myself.
I abuse the WFH thing because my manager promised me a raise if I complete a project and then sabotaged it, then put the blame on me, and finally changed the raise requirements. Really can't stay motivated in such an environment. If the game is "who fucks harder the other party" then don't be surprised that I watch porn during WFH and then try to convince other employees to do the same.
I will forever fight this with saying that chat is an async medium. If you need a response right now, pick up the phone.
Worst offenders are people who say things like: Hey, how are you doing?
And then ... nothing.
Or maybe people are actually working on something. And your 2 minute question might cause them to lose 30 minutes.
This is why it is important to have multiple work-streams going when doing remote work, so that you don't sit around and wait until you have your answer.
> It was a privilege, people abused it, and now it's over. And managers were the worst offenders.
IME, managers do this in the office just as much as remote.
Look at the typical manager's schedule. It's completely full of meetings - most of which are bullshit "busy" meetings, and they never respond to anything timely.
spoken like a true non manager
Tell us about insightful conversations that you had with shareholders that keep the whole company running.
> It was a privilege
Hardly. It was COVID. It forced companies to do the most logical thing they could in a world of high speed internet. Many of them refused to read the writing on the wall and assumed it would return to normal one day. They made no efforts to internally reorient themselves around this new work strategy.
> people abused it
Other than your anecdote what evidence is there that this is true? Has the economy faltered? Is there any second source for the data which shows _any_ impact _at all_?
I've experienced it both ways. The least available and responsive workers were remote, but the most available and responsive workers were also remote.
Abused it in which way? Don't touch the money-makers. And if you're in the office, don't daydream about 'improvements' you could make that touch the money-makers in a vain attempt to quell your anxiety about not appearing to do anything of value.
Reading this comment I can't help but imagine a high school student using the same pattern to respond to an "open period" being changed to "study hall" with mandatory in-library presence; which is not to dig on you, just to raise the idea that maybe k-12 education really is a conspiracy to train people to sit in factories.
How/can we "montessori-fy"?
This is the issue. Too many people take the absolute piss with it. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have people who don't switch off and put in a lot of extra hours essentially picking up the slack. I'm finding a lot more people (both at work and amongst friends) who are desperate to avoid speaking on calls or turning their video on because it makes them nervous. Probably healthier for everyone to just be in the office.
And yet here you are, perpetuating the “crabs in a bucket” mentality that continues to be a blight on our industry.
A manager who’s not doing their job and is never reachable can be pretty demoralizing. That same manager would probably not be great in person either, but at least you’d know where to find them.
As long as a company is able and willing to move out or correct low performers quickly, remote work is fine.
>but at least you’d know where to find them.
In my experience, managers of that calibre tend to fuck off to a meeting room first chance they get and hide there until around 4 when they slip out.
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At our company some people outright admitted on a survey sent out to employees that they would go out and run errands during work hours.
Like, how stupid do you have to be to kill your golden goose of life work balance?
I literally do this IN the office. I will step away and go to a coffee shop and pick something up. Hell I ask my boss if they want anything. I may go for a walk and get a breather. Go to a doc appointment. GO get my teeth cleaned. My bosses do not give a shit as long as my tasks are done to the standard.
That's nothing.
One company near me had parents cancel their daycare when they were allowed to WFH. A lot of employees were trying to care for young kids and "work" at the same time.
I don't see the issue with this as long as the parents would still be putting the same time/effort into their work. It would just be split up.
Why do you care as long as you have the same amount of work as before?
> that they would go out and run errands during work hours
So? I do this when I work in an office, and I do this when I work remote. If someone doesn't like it, they can go screw. I put in my hours, and I get my work done.
I don't see what this has to do with remote work. Although I also don't see why anyone would care.
Commute time should be salaried time. Then the whole office/home work discussion could be taken with the true costs involved.
As a salaried employee there is no "salaried time." You're paid for your output not the time spent on it. This goes especially true for Microsoft where lots of people put in far less than a 40hr workweek. Literally no one bats an eye at arriving at the office late so if you want to start your commute at 9 and include that in your "working hours" no one would care.
I disagree completely with that, at least for software engineers.
The work queue is infinite, measuring output with any sort of precision is almost impossible for a lot of the work (maintenance, actually necessary refactors, security, mentoring juniors, managing stakeholders, etc etc etc). There's no "I've finished my work for today".
I'm not saying that I like it, or that it's a good thing, but in my understanding engineers are paid to be available doing work roughly 40h/week.
All of what you mentioned is quantifiable.
The employer want to pay for the output. But the employee want to be compensated for their time and the quality of it.
> This goes especially true for Microsoft where lots of people put in far less than a 40hr workweek.
No offence, but this shows in the products.
It's a standard expectation for managers to see you physically located in the office for 40hrs per week in semi-flexible arrangements (if you're lucky).
You may forget that as tech workers we are incredibly privileged with the way our office life is compared to others typically, that we can sometimes come in late and leave early: may be another "perk" (like remote work) which goes away in time or during the next squeeze.
So it's a poor defense, as it's not reflected in other similar industries, nor is it relevant when we're discussing flexibility being reduced by the same company doing the flexibility reduction.
You are definitely paid for the "hours" in your contract and not the output, if you were paid for output some workers would be able to work harder to make more money by creating more things; as it stands you get the same money if you do 80hrs or 40hrs or 20hrs at any level of effort. You're not paid for time or output, you're paid to be "of service".
Maybe you get more money at promotion time (maybe), but pay is certainly *not* linked to compensation.
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At most tech companies, you can work 5 hours per week or 100 and your salary remains the same.
If they see you working 5 hours per week and don't think you're productive enough, they can fire you, but you aren't paid any more for working more hours. That's what "salaried" means. It's why you've never heard someone getting paid "time and a half" for working weekends in tech.
I have yet to experience a role where workers are allowed to deliver while clocking less than 40 hours. 5 hours per week on salary is only if you do not tell management.
Or are management.
> It's why you've never heard someone getting paid "time and a half" for working weekends in tech.
It depends on the state. In California there are minimum salary requirements, that are adjusted every year, that must be met to be an exempt position. Otherwise you are required to pay hourly.
It's honestly one of the nice features of the state.
Sounds a bit extreme, but OTOH this is what tradesfolk typically do - charge $100 to ring your doorbell and take it from there, since it does cost them money just to get to you.
Still, even if there is some sort of justification (moreso if the company chooses to locate themselves away from residential/affordable areas), I'm not sure how you would avoid abuse. Maybe just pay employees a fixed amount for each day they are required to drive to the office ?
With tradesfolk you can choose who to call, and somebody from farther away will charge more for getting to your door. With workers that is not a consideration today (in most roles), but if companies had to pay for travel time it absolutely would be. But that leads to uncomfortable questions about moving. If you get children and move to an area with a better school, can and will your work now fire you because your commute got more expensive for them?
A fixed payment for office days would remove that, but then how do you determine the price of that payment?
I think my contractors have generally had a general service area. And, if you're out of it, they're probably not interested. Now, mind you, I often don't have a super-itemized bill. But I'm not sure I've seen a commute time/cost line item.
Yeah, I can't recall anyone ever putting it down explicitly as a line item, but a number of them will tell on the phone you there's a minimum charge for coming out. For some reason locksmiths seem to always do this.
I expect a lot of jobs that locksmiths do are pretty quick and easy for them. I went down a file cabinet lockpicking hole a couple of months back and ended up just drilling out the lock. I expect a locksmith could have handled it in a few minutes (if that) but if they had to drive 30 minutes to my house they have to collect for that somehow.
And workers should be paid to have space to work from home and internet service and food and office supplies and electricity.
I'm a remote worker and I get an annual stipend to equip my home office and reinbursement for my internet and cell phone.
The stipend is flexible. Some of my coworkers stocked their home office with snacks, for example.
Some do. My last full time role had some $100/month stipend for personal supplies. Pretty much paid for my internet bill in that time.
Another before that had some 3000 dollar a year stipend for approved office supplies over the pandemic; basically anything that wasn't groceries could be put on there. I even fancied putting a PS5 on there at once point, but then realize high quality office chairs and desks would drain that stipend quickly.
I do get paid 50 euro per month for working remotely. It's on my contract. I didn't ask for it, but it's ok.
Agreed. I'm glad that I at least get reimbursed for a portion of my home internet connection and for office equipment.
Most of which you would have anyway. I never cared about incremental costs for internet, electricity, etc. if any. I could have probably collected double-digit dollars per month during COVID but I wasn't even officially remote anyway.
I definitely pay for more bandwith than if I wasn't working from home. Also I saw a difference in my electricity bills.
> Most of which you would have anyway.
Data caps exist and also higher service reliability tiers cost more.
The standard residential plan I had was fine for any work purposes. As far as I'm concerned, incremental needs for normal work are in the noise. I did have outages now and then but they were pretty much for reasons that would have applied to any business service as lines were down.
And also workers should be paid for not working 26 days per annum, it's more than a full month!
> Commute time should be salaried time.
Salary means you're paid a fixed amount per pay period, regardless of hours worked.
So including commute in your hours worked wouldn't change your salary, which is by definition a fixed amount.
Did you mean that commute time should be paid hourly at an additional rate?
I'm salaried but my contract specifies 'expected hours' from 9-5 or 8-5 with an unpaid lunch.
This depends on the juridictions.
The jurisdiction is Redmond, WA
That depends on which timeline we're working in. In alternative universes, Microsoft is called Megahard and is started in a town called Rougeworld, WA.
Nobody's stopping you from moving closer to the office, and incentivizing people to move further away is the last thing we should do
Yes, rent 5 minutes from the office is likely very high, and it's much cheaper two hours away, and that's why most people live far away. But that is already a factor in salaries. If the office is in a high-cost-of-living area they have to offer higher salaries to get an equal caliber of workers.
>Nobody's stopping you from moving closer to the office
the stiff housing market indeed is. You can't buy land that isn't for sale.
Nevermind that most people cannot just up and move whenever their work fancies it. And you don't want to. Too many horror stories of people who moved for their job only to get laid off a few months later. Corporate isn't taking my community with them.
>If the office is in a high-cost-of-living area they have to offer higher salaries to get an equal caliber of workers.
Or they just offshore it.
> Nobody's stopping you from moving closer to the office
Price per square meter is.
This definitely is not how it works. There are a ton of companies in Irvine for example that vastly underpay their developers compared to the cost of living in the area. And if you were to assume that's how it works, then companies should be offering salary increases for RTO which is very obviously not happening.
Companies that underpay compared to cost of living exist everywhere, even in the cheap places. They usually end up with the people who can't get or don't want a better paying job.
And yes, companies should be paying salary increases for RTO if they hired on the promise of remote work. Not doing that will just means you now offer worse compensation compared to job conditions and are going to lose some people to greener pastures. Which might be a factor in Microsoft's timing: less job mobility right now
> Nobody's stopping you from moving closer to the office
Tell me you’re single in early 20s without telling you’re single in 20s.
Working at a company that did the same thing earlier, it's incredibly frustrating.
This would have made sense when the company was all at one site, but over the last 5 years my company (and microsoft) have massively expanded.
So now I drive to the office and video call my colleagues in other sites. Brilliant.
50 miles is a lot. That can easily be 2h in most big cities.
To do what exactly? Sit in an open office in Redmond, jump on Teams to call with someone in Fort Lauderdale?
Funny thing, I had multiple interviews with them on explicit remote roles (which are different from roles that went remote during COVID). I wonder if the policy changes there.
I live about 100 miles from NYC, which is 2-2.5 hours by car but only 1.5 hours by train. I think that that would be considered an acceptable commute time for companies with a hybrid work plan. However, every time I ask recruiters from NYC-based companies if their commute subsidy would cover the train, I get told employees have to live within a 50 mile radius of the office. Like you said, that could be 2 hours by car! For the right salary and benefits, I'd happily spend 3 hours a day on a train. At least I wouldn't be driving.
Yeah it's weird. I was just over 50 miles from NYC at some point. A place I worked remotely at was having a small team get together and they asked me to join.
Given it's a ~2 hour journey from door to office (car + train + walk) I asked if I could leave early so I didn't have to put in a ~13-14 hour day.
They said no, I had to work a full 9-6 day or use a PTO day. Meanwhile they flew a few people in from around the US and put them in a hotel.
That was a principle level role where I survived multiple rounds of layoffs so it wasn't like I was treated poorly. It's just the company wouldn't budge on their policies.
I grudgingly did it for a while to Boston. And yes, it was something like $50/day to commute however I did it. It got old even on the train even though I didn't need to go in every day. Wouldn't have done it long-term.
Agreed, it's hard to understand how much easier commuting by train is until you've done it. YMMV if your local service sucks.
> To do what exactly?
To stay employed at Microsoft. After all many may want that some may not.
This is going to lead to these abstract discussions of subjective perceptual "productivity" as it always does, but by the actual economic definition of labor productivity, revenue per employee, Microsoft has gone from $143 billion with 163,000 in 2020 ($877,000 per head) to $282 billion with 228,000 ($1.24 million per head) so far this year. They've become the 2nd largest company in the world by market cap, in large part specifically because Microsoft employees are so economically productive.
It says a lot about a team when they win, and instead of rewarding the players that got them the win, they do shit like this.
How much of that is product engineering and how much is leasing access to capital during a GPU demand spike?
Why does it matter? You're just describing another case where losses get spread around but gains are claimed by those at the top.
Because the idea of productivity per employee its relevant to look at capital spending as well.
Otherwise people claim Microsoft is successful and hires well (with outsourcing or RTO or whatever), but in reality they are in a shift to a more capital intensive business.
That's a 14% difference when taking inflation into account.
I'm sorry, but this is a meaningless stat when evaluating remote work productivity.
Microsoft is a huge company with a lot of momentum and so many products that you can't reasonably conclude anything about remote work from this stat alone. Worse, you don't even account for inflation (!).
What about revenue per employee before covid? What if I chose any arbitrary time period in the last 20 years? Lastly, maybe revenue per employee could've grown significantly more during 2020-2024 if everyone was in the office?
Great point. MS employee productivity as measured has improved. But who cares about facts anymore.
This drove me nuts during all the hullabaloo about DOGE. People would confidently state that the Federal government is inefficient – while data showed the opposite! Federal workforce has remained largely the same since 1950, while administering more services, for more people, with a much larger budget. As measured, the government workforce is more productive than ever.
Having to sit in the car, train, or even walking can be seen as a punishment when the 80% to 890 of your work is done sitting by yourself in front of a computer.
At the office there where those who clearly wanted to minimize human interactions and people who thrived and performed better when interacting with others.
And then there is liminal spaces (Severance) the place where hope and creativity comes to die.
"There must be someway out of here."
Not so stealthy headcount reduction. Admitting that their collaboration tools aren’t worthwhile.
Given this job market? I suspect few people will feel confident to take a stand.
It mentions this was based on some “data” (in emailsto employees) that it will yield better output but I somehow doubt it. I wonder what happens with the stock. It sort of makes it worse for the teams that are distributed and harms collab between sites in different zones like Europe/Asia and US/Europe. When you are working from home it is easy to stay later or start earlier and join calls. If you are in the office this is not that easy due to commute.
Given that MS does not have top salaries, my bet is that folks will leave to other companies given that the main leverage like WFH is gone.
It’s a common thing here on HN to believe that remote is superior for productivity, and I’m always reminded of Richard Hammond’s observations about open door vs closed door coworkers. He noticed over time that the closed door workers were more productive. He also noticed that the closed door workers were less impactful in their fields years later. His were observations in R&D settings, but I suspect they can be extrapolated. People who are interrupted get less done. This seems largely indisputable, but what is the other takeaway? People who don’t interract with peers don’t course correct enough, seems to be solid advice based on what we know about the OODA loop. People who don’t interact with coworkers don’t get enough time saving advice? I know I’ve saved lots of effort by having coworkers who know things I didn’t about related problems.
What complicated things, is return to work will cause all the best to rethink their employment. I’ve seen HBR surveys that suggest the top talent is ending up places that allow them to stay remote. I think this leaves businesses in a tight place. I have every reason to believe that companies with lots of employee interactions have better acceleration/trajetory than fully remote, but it’s a big hit to lose top talent. And remote may have so much velocity from gaining this talent that they don’t care about the acceleration tradeoff.
Further, concentration of talent in a region also cannot be discounted. Certain things can’t happen without the exchange of ideas (partly why I think cities/counties should ban non competes). I don’t know how much a given company can control this concentration of talent, but I know that Seattle wouldn’t be what it is without Boeing, and then Microsoft attracting very smart people.
It's worth observing that when remoters talk about "productivity", they talk about their personal ability of chugging through tickets and not overall team productivity which includes a lot of teaching, mentoring, conversations and getting on the same page.
So yeah, what's happening is that senior folks "productivity" as they perceive it has risen while the output of whole teams over time suffered.
Goodheart's Law strikes again. If churning through 10 more tickets rather than brainstorming with a team on a feature gets them promoted, then you're going to get a "team" of loners and much less productivity for the real features.
I do think there is a balance here. In my experience, brainstorming or deep design discussions are horrible over Zoom. Likewise, new grads really do suffer when they start their careers with no direct mentor to talk to at a moments notice.
I think even just the first year or 2 for juniors should be at least 3 days in-office a week. Likewise, you should be able to go in office a few times a month just to properly collaborate and plan. It doesn't need to be much in tech, because a lot of time is indeed just heads-down development instead of designing.
Richard Hamming. And the essay is here: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html.
As you point out, Its important to note that Hamming makes this observation specifically in the domain of research which requires a lot of collaboration between people, and is enhanced by interaction with other people doing research. Most standard software engineering jobs don’t require that kind of research activity (although it does require some; product development is a creative process).
> Most standard software engineering jobs don’t require that kind of research activity (although it does require some; product development is a creative process)
This seems to describe what good engineers above the senior level do. Certainly everyone with a PhD I work with who rose through the ranks said that being very senior was a lot like being a good researcher - albeit with much more pressure on execution.
I think it totally depends on the job. It's like a process running on a CPU. I've seen software development roles that are "batch processes," where the developer goes into a cave to crank through his tasks uninterrupted, and then emerges in a week to deliver the results. And others that are "interactive, event-driven processes," where there is a lot of back and forth between product owners, UX, and other stakeholders, and lots of iteration and refinement. And then there is a whole spectrum in between! One size doesn't necessarily fit all development styles.
> the closed door workers were less impactful in their fields years later
What evidence is there that the open door is the cause and not the symptom? People are individuals. They're not "interchangeable worker units."
> People who don’t interract with peers don’t course correct enough
I can think of a dozen ways to address that without forcing people to open doors they'd rather leave closed.
[dead]
> my bet is that folks will leave to other companies given that the main leverage like WFH is gone.
Where though? I thought the current jobs market for tech wasn't in a nice spot for devs.
Especially when big employers all collude in the open.
Threads like these are always one sided with people against RTO.
What I would really like to see is arguments from the other side. Can someone steelman RTO. Preferably with evidence, anecdotal or otherwise.
I think it would be hard to argue that working all together in an office - like before covid - isn't more productive. In-person meetings are easier. Whiteboarding and brainstorming is way easier. Spontaneous conversations are easier. Helping junior people is easier. People actually pay attention in meetings. You get to know colleagues better.
Have you ever had to "now click on the left... no, up a bit. No go back you were just there. It's the third one from th... I'll just paste the link in chat" when you were standing next to someone's desk? No.
The only benefits of working from home are:
1. No commute.
2. Can do life stuff (we finally have a solution to the dumb problem that shops etc. are only open when people are at work).
3. The company doesn't need to spend money on offices.
The first two are huge bonuses for employees, but the company doesn't give a shit about them. At best they care about paying for offices, but that's pretty minor (especially when they've already paid for them and they're sitting there empty).
I entirely agree on the benefits of in person work. I personally don't enjoy the remoteness of remote work, but the time, money, and sanity cost of commuting still ends up making me prefer working remotely overall.
If I could live in the same building as my job, I would.
> Have you ever had to "now click on the left... no, up a bit. No go back you were just there. It's the third one from th... I'll just paste the link in chat" when you were standing next to someone's desk?
Yes.
I resolve it the same way in person as I do remotely, either by pointing at the screen, asking for (and receiving) control of the mouse and keyboard, or both. If you don't know how to use the features of your screen-sharing software that permit this, you need to learn them. If your screen-sharing software does not have these features, urge your company to switch to one that does (or just switch to one that does, if your company policies permit).
> People actually pay attention in meetings.
I've seen no difference in overall meeting attentiveness in the switch to WFH. Perhaps I've been blessed to work with unusually competent and mindful people.
> Spontaneous conversations are easier. ... You get to know colleagues better.
I don't, no. If anything, spontaneous conversations are way easier remotely, as most of the "water cooler" conversations in the office happen in large "off-topic" channels. This is really good for knowing what's going on at the company, because it massively expands the audience for chatter, gossip, and unofficial news from just a handful of people to the entire company. Plus, it's async communications, which means that you don't miss out just because you weren't there.
> Whiteboarding ... is way easier.
This is true. Most folks don't have cameras hooked up to their whiteboards (or even have whiteboards!).
> [B]rainstorming is way easier.
Disagree. Virtual post-it notes and a shared text document of some kind, plus a group voice call works great.
> I resolve it the same way in person as I do remotely, either by pointing at the screen, asking for (and receiving) control of the mouse and keyboard, or both. If you don't know how to use the features of your screen-sharing software that permit this, you need to learn them.
We used Google Meet, and recently switched to Teams (on Linux). Neither support either feature. I think it's impossible to do it on the web because there's no screen sharing web API (due to security fears) and no overlay drawing API either (again presumably due to security fears).
You need a native app, and Google don't make one, and Teams doesn't support Linux.
Well, as I said:
> If your screen-sharing software does not have these features, urge your company to switch to one that does (or just switch to one that does, if your company policies permit).
Should you choose to embark on it, I sincerely wish you the best of luck in your quest to get collaboration software that's not crippled by platform limitations.
Having said that...
> I think it's impossible to do it on the web because there's no screen sharing web API...
Weirdly, this isn't true. Discord claims to be able to share your screen even in the web browser version. From the "How To Stream In A Discord Channel" section of [0]:
> Info: Currently audio can only be captured by the Windows desktop, MacOS desktop, Chrome browser, and mobile clients. Unfortunately, audio sharing is unavailable on Linux.
I notice a conspicuous absence of "this doesn't work in a web browser" caveats for any of the other screen-sharing things that Discord does. The only caveats I notice are for audio capture on Firefox and on Linux in general.
And yes, while the Info box at the top of the article says that it covers how to do this in the Desktop Client, I tested screen sharing a moment ago in the latest version of Firefox on Linux. It works just fine. When I choose to share my screen in Discord, the web browser pops up a dialog asking me if I'd like to share my screen, and -if so- would I select which window (or the entire screen) to share?
> ...and no overlay drawing API either...
I don't know how one would handle the "permit others to draw on top of the shared window" mechanism, but there's little doubt in my mind that something can be cooked up that's clever and not too offputting to use... assuming that there's not something already available to be used that neither of us are aware of.
[0] <https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-G...>
I completely agree, but just as the company couldn't care less about the employee's benefits from WFH, I couldn't care less about the company's benefits from WFO.
Most organizations are so inefficient, that all of this is barely a factor - whether or not work is getting done at 1% of the rate of what it should be getting done, or 1.3% isn't really a dealbreaker for the company.
> Spontaneous conversations are easier
Demanding an immediate impromptu meeting of indeterminate length does feel less rude in person, yes.
I work a 2 in 3 out style schedule.
During the 3 days I wfh, I get the most work done. I can focus and organize my day around executing a plan.
During the 2 days I'm in the office, I can get answers from people much quicker. Some people (new hires in particular) don't know how to describe their problem, or they're just really bad at it. My solution to endless teams convos is to just say "I'll head over to your desk" and then we work it out in person.
I think working with people in person can be very powerful. Is it essential though? No. Most corps don't even bother though. And most managers are bad at management. Working entirely wfh requires good managers with actual project management skills. Most corps are unwilling to train or prioritize hiring for that.
> My solution to endless teams convos is to just say "I'll head over to your desk" and then we work it out in person.
A good replacement for this is a voice or video call with screen sharing. As a bonus, you can rope in folks who are at another site just as easily as you can the first participant. Need to see notes on paper or a whiteboard? Pay the one-time cost to up another camera.
If the folks you work with don't have a "Always respond quickly to urgent messaging requests" habit, then they'll need to develop that. But, IMO, not having that habit is roughly the same as being the type that is rarely at their desk (whether because he's off helping others, or because he prefers to work on a laptop somewhere else in the building).
I find the progress is much faster at the office because me and my coworkers can more easily consult with each other on both major and minor stuff. On chat wfh they might answer immediately or 4 hrs from now. so, I can’t get in a semi flow because of long interruptions waiting for answers. also chat is slow and annoying.
I know someone is going to chime in a claim those conversations break flow. That might be true for some particular deep problems but I’ve never seen it affect any team I’ve been on and I have 40 years of work experience. Not saying my experience fits everyone else but I’ve seen no real evidence of it being an actual problem.
I don’t know the reason, nor do I have proof of anything. But: to me this is a great time to consider Occam’s Razor.
Executives seem to (mostly) universally want people to RTO. Why would they?
They obviously have lots of data. If it was bad for productivity, why would they do it?
Answers seem to be things like “power trip” or “need to justify real estate”. I’m pretty sure most companies would save money by giving up their leases. Maybe they are all having power trips, but irrational behavior from leaders won’t win out in the long run.
My observation from my time is that, likely: some people are really good at getting stuff done at home. But most probably get less done. And I suspect the leaders find this in their data.
I'm sympathetic to your reasoning, and I actually think your conclusion about how people wfh is probably true (a minority finding it wildly more productive) but the problem I see is that most execs don't understand what a lot of their employees do on a day to day basis, nor do I think they could properly understand the data even if they had it as a result. And, if they did have it, why don't they show it if the conclusions are so self evident?
In reality I think it's much simpler: the work that executives (and some upper level managers) do relies on a certain amount of theater. They need to be seen (in person) and they to be seen doing work (in person). That's part of the "deal" with being an exec --- you need to be able to act the part. Then, they just assume that's how it should or needs to be for everyone else.
The interesting thing is that "Darwinism" will sort it out for us in the long run. If the execs are right: more work gets done in the office, those companies will do better; if people are happier and more productive at home, those companies will tend to do better.
I guess we can just wait and see :)
If everyone had this clear unambiguous data, you’d think at least one of them would have shared it by now now. Just one!
>Preferably with evidence
Sorry, can't do that. But my take is:
There is a part of the population that are opportunistic freeloaders. People who don't have intrinsic motivation to do their work but do it to avoid the consequences.
I think it's a pretty big part of the population! And I also think that, while managers are likely to have encountered them, reaching a software development role (and then choosing to spend your spare time commenting on HN) filters out a lot of them. So there is a mismatch where managers want to defend against the freeloaders while the employees commenting here can't accept the lack of trust inherent in the mandate and won't countenance the micro-management needed to prove that trust would be earned.
I think it also partly explains why we've failed to see remote companies gain a competitive advantage in hiring. They have adverse selection for active freeloaders.
With WFH the following things become very difficult and/or ineffective:
1. Onboarding and growing junior employees.
2. Managing/coordinating people
3. Doing/coming up with something innovative
4. Making sure an employee is not working another job in parallel
With RTO, companies try go get back the ability to do these things, at the expense of employees’ commute time
Thanks for sticking the head out ;)
I'm really not sure where 1 to 3 come from? 1 and 2 are about spending time with people. 3 can't also be true, just look at all the innovations that OSS has created (at least 90 perc. remote collaboration).
Number 4 is a real problem and a symptom of the biggest problem imo, which is that it's hard to build trust online/remotely.
Things that are inherently "about spending time with people" are very likely to be more effective in a higher bandwidth, more natural setting (read: in-person).
On the spectrum from postal mail, e-mail, text/instant messaging, phone calls, video calls, in-person discussions, the quality of "spending time with people" is increasing as you go farther down the list.
> 1 and 2 are about spending time with people
It is true, and spending time with people over video calls or text chats is a very low-bandwidth, rather thankless job which is generally demotivating long-term. Not that many people are actually willing to channel their emotions for hours daily into pixels on screen with no actual emotional human connection. This means that juniors remain isolated, senior employees feel that tutoring juniors is a waste of their time (which is true in this setup), and good managers either stop caring or burn out.
> 3 can't also be true, just look at all the innovations that OSS has created
Innovating in things you deeply care about is one thing, innovating for yet another work project that brings shareholder value is another. The only recipe that has worked for the latter so far has been "put multiple smart people in one room".
I personally feel home office makes jobs feel much more like jobs. You have no social relation to your coworkers and it's very hard to build one remotely. Most people barely communicate in zoom meetings beyond the minimum what is required of them.
Good office jobs can feel fun, building something with like minded people and building a social relationship at the same time with them.
Many people are not looking for that, many people just want a job that makes money and let's them log off at a set time. I personally don't enjoy that type of job and feel it's not sustainable over decades. I need some fun in my job.
Sure, I'm on both sides depending on the situation so I can help here.
"Collaboration" and "communication" are definitely issues, as employers state openly, but not for the reasons you think.
I worked in a fully remote company for the last three years, I selected people who I knew would be independently motivated and who knew how to communicate effectively in an async manner.
Yet, there were issues still in communication that would have been solved with being able to hear someones tone and body language. Little issues spiralled out of control- and lack of trust crept in when people were quietly doing work that had very small visibility (but was important).
I'm not saying remote work was the reason, but remote work exacerbated certain particular issues in this dimension- eventually the founders (who had lost trust) started laying off people they perceived as not important, despite them being fundamental to any future in which the project would be successful.
You'll also notice that the companies that care the most about RTO do not invest in communication in other ways, they'll probably use awful communication software like Teams, WebEx - or in marginally better cases: Zoom.. and since people don't like to interface with these tools (and they're poor even when you do): there can be a feeling of being out of the loop from upper management as they don't know what's going on.. they just see radio silence.
If people don't go into the offices, the company will not retain the office space and there will no longer be the option of doing so.
The other is too busy managing burnout to argue.
Under RTO new grads enjoy less competition because they’re willing to relocate
> We’ve looked at how our teams work best, and the data is clear: when people work together in person more often, they thrive — they are more energized, empowered, and they deliver stronger results.
Ah the data is clear, without reference to the data collected or metrics used.
The data is clear. So clear, I shall not insult your intelligence by providing it.
Maybe they don’t even want to rely on Microsoft Teams internally anymore…
MS Teams for video teleconferencing...good. On a Windows PC, and using MS365, by far the easiest to set up (or change) a meeting and fewest issues with cameras across multiple devices. (Webex and Zoom are close seconds, Google Meet is a distant last due to constant camera issues.)
MS Teams for IM...okay. Too much white space and too hard to find conversations that I know I've had recently. Very much prefer Slack.
MS Teams for any of that other stuff...rage inducing. Especially the file sharing and other "team" features which break with every minor update. Somehow, even worse than using Sharepoint directly. Went back to email and using network drives to share/store team documents.
Does MS Teams support dual video inputs yet? I refuse to do the whole "click through a powerpoint clumsily while in edit mode with private DM notifications popping off in the background" thing I see too damn often so I use the OBS Virtual Cam. Zoom picks this up easily. Last I ran Teams (admittedly two years ago), if I tried to do the same, it would just set my camera feed to the virtual cam.
If you're on a Mac, you can use BetterDisplay to create a virtual screen that can be used exclusively for sharing stuff on Teams. Make that your secondary display, and problem solved. Best part about this is that you don't need multiple monitors to make this work!
It allows you to choose what screen or window you want to present if that's what your asking.
That's not what I'm asking. Any teleconferencing app lets you do that.
Specifically, in Zoom, I can share from a second camera. This could be a USB Webcam, or a USB/PCIe HDMI Capture Card, or OBS' Virtual Camera plugin. I prefer the latter as it gives me lots of flexibility, can present full screen Keynote/Powerpoints while keeping my desktop/windows arranged how I like, with presenter notes up, and switch to a USB HDMI capture card with the click of a button in OBS, with custom text, transitions, etc.
Last I checked, Teams assumed any camera input was for the "Camera", not for the screen share.
I agree with every sentence! I would love to have a native app because the more teams/channels you have, the more resources it’s eating up and it feels pretty slow and laggy. Like a message comes in, you click on the notification and it takes like 15 sec until you can read it.
Spoken like someone who hasn't witnessed 3 coworkers sitting a few feet apart do a teams meeting with each other (and no one else).
No need for Teams, this was a Covid thing. Now all bets on Copilot. Bit with all that capex actual souls must leave the machine to make more space gor ai chips.
Personal observations:
- There are times when in-person collaboration is invaluable.
- There are times when having quiet focus time alone is invaluable.
- Every team and job is different. Sitting on Zoom all day in an open office full of strangers doesn't make sense. Getting blocked because I bricked my proto board and I need a tech to rework it but I'm wfh and the tech is wfh and now we have to do a mail dance and burn a week for something that used to take a 5 min walk down the hall to deal with doesn't make sense. YMMV.
- The industry seems to be converging to hybrid. I feel like this is kind of like the debates over being mandated to use AI in dev - love it or hate it, it's happening, and there's no point trying to swim against a rip current.
Hybrid is the worst of both worlds. Go into the office just to sit in a Zoom call.
Hybrid is ok if the WFH days are set for everyone, otherwise I agree it's a waste of time, since people are randomly in the office.
Top employees, ones that can easily get jobs elsewhere, are just going to leave and find ones without RTO. Employees that don't feel confident in their abilities to perform in the job market are going to show up in the office to keep their job.
If that's true, and the employees who can survive brutal tech interviews will leave, it's kind of like an algo for finding a local minimum of talent for the shop enforcing RTO.
Or maybe top employees see their remote coworkers slacking off and want everyone in the office.
/unpopular opinion
If you “see” anyone else as a top employee - you’re not a top employee by definition.
Literally all, without exception, top employees that I saw in my career never gave a single shit about anyone else besides themselves.
Really? The top employees I saw in my career had the ability to both lead others and be competent in individual tasks.
Ability to lead others is caring whether Lizz the Frizz is not delivering up to someone’s standards?
Yes. You know. Leaders.
Ah, corporate speak.
No, it's real life.
Worse, the rest will stay and just coast ... ask me how I know, lol.
Microsoft is committed to becoming as terrible as Amazon, I guess.
Folks at Amazon at least earn more.
I think they’re realizing that there is no meaningful competition for these gigantic corporations. They’re worth 4 trillion. They saw Google got away without any consequence on the Chrome anti trust issue. They know they can keep bundling products, building new dark patterns, throwing up walled gardens, loss leading competitors (like Teams did with Slack), and all of that. And I’m sure Satya is currying favor with Trump like the rest of them to keep things that way. When you have such a situation, your company can get away with anything. If there was competition, workers and customers could go elsewhere.
It just makes me sick growing up in the USA, hearing about the beauty of “competition”, and then growing up to see that not only does it not exist… they cannot even be bothered to pretend.
> It just makes me sick growing up in the USA,
As always when feeling terrible check out other places to if and where better things exist.
I mean, doesn't that just make you feel worse?
AWS SDEs are way more competent than Azure SDEs.
Both organizations have some great and some horrible engineers. I don’t think that is the cause for the difference in their products quality.
This announcement is pretty much meaningless, as it's completely up to the VPs of a given org to set the policy. Many teams have already been back 3-5 days a week for over a year, and exceptions aren't hard to get if you're a senior+ employee or otherwise have considerations that prevent this from being feasible.
Anecdotally, I'm at a larger multinational corporation and our site has been mandating a new RTO policy and have not been granting exceptions based solely on seniority. In my personal opinion I believe it's mostly a soft layoff, so they can approve exceptions on a case-by-case basis.
No disagreements there (I'm at Microsoft). I should also note that in the part of the org I work, exceptions are re-evaluated every quarter.
Indeed. Apart from really aggressive, "love the bad press" type of employers most would try to appear reasonable from outside while largely rejecting wfh/remote requests lasting more than few months.
I don't think I'd call it meaningless; this sets the new default for the many orgs who haven't set a mandate already, and it seems to indicate that exceptions will now be harder to get.
Fair point. I've wasted way too much time arguing about this in my org. The messaging is effectively that the "data" (which is never presented to anyone) indicates on-site is better, and if you disagree, feel free to go test the job market.
Don't have to announce layoffs if you can make a few percent quit.
It's clearly a combination of stealth layoffs and "because we can" attitude by a lot of C-suite right now.
Labor market is soft, so they will take as much as they can while they can, on the status quo bias of "in-office must be more productive, especially if employees don't like it".
It's the dumbest form of stealth layoffs as it's random untargetted regarding the company's actual department/role staffing needs.
Particularly the older people who have settled and can't relocate. It's like age discrimination without all the annoying legal drawbacks.
This also filters for subservience.
Yeah, nowadays missing those brave hearts who would turn post lunch walks in to protest walks whenever they saw injustice in the world.
I suggest anyone to read https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/19/starling-ba... and then decide: when 90%, but also 80% of workers quit no business could survive.
Are they going to claim remote working is to blame for the unpopularity of Windows 11? Maybe getting together in the office will help come up with better ideas than just more ads and telemetry?
More likely they have decided popularity is irrelevant since they are so entrenched, so may as well try to find the cheapest possible maintenance engineer to manage the value extraction.
It’s hard on two professional couples, as it’s not always easy or even possible to find two jobs in many areas. But such couples tend to be older and we all know how that goes down in the biz. Especially if they’ve committed parenthood.
> committed parenthood.
I like this phrasing because that really feels like how the employer looks at it ultimately.
"Why, it's as irresponsible as calling in sick!"
Well, they picked the right time - soft job market, AI takeovers, slumping economy … they could probably demand to mulch employees and people would just put up with it.
Oh, no, no...its not "mulching"...we don't dare mulch our employees! We simply streamline their corporeal shell in an effort to improve their ways of working. Its actually part of our new health care offering. In the past these would be called "diets"...but, no, no, we like to call it bodily optimization! And, hey, we hope that all employees participate in the mulching, er, um, i meant bodily optimization...Because, hey, someone needs to be fed to the AI...er, i meant someone needs to provide inputs to the ever-godly AI. ;-) /s
Over the past few years, a lot of teams have shown that remote work can be productive and stable. But as the market cools and power shifts back to management, return-to-office policies are quietly making a comeback.
It feels less about actual performance and more about a need for control. Some of these companies even invested in remote tooling during the pandemic, and now they’re choosing to ignore it. You start to wonder if they’re really looking at output, or just want people back in seats so things look like they’re under control.
I have mixed feelings cause on one hand moving from a remote first company to a primarily in person one has made a material difference in my general satisfaction and engagement. But also I wouldn’t want it to be forced. I like having the choice to work remote. And I like having coworkers who can work remote if they wish. I know many great engineers who live outside of the standard tech hubs and realistically won’t move to them. But for me remote work felt isolating and made my home feel too much like my office
I don't think this is what you're saying but when I've seen debates over choice the pattern I've sen is:
1) The people who feel more engaged at home can stay home, those who feel more engaged at work can go there 2) The latter group fails to feel engaged at work due to everyone being home. They complain.
In other words, they weren't missing being in the office. They were missing being in the office *with others*. Which requires everyone else to either want to work in the office.
Yeah it’s tricky because there’s often a senior/junior dynamic here. Junior people really do benefit from structure and in person mentorship. They also tend to have worse home office setups and more free time. Whereas senior people tend to have families and nicer home offices, so understandably they don’t want to commute in. I’m sympathetic to both and realistically I don’t think management is acting in good faith. But I do think remote work benefits seniors at the cost of juniors
So do LLMs, but Microsoft doesn’t have any problems with copilot existing.
Like anything, remote vs in-person work is multifaceted
1) For experienced high performers, remote work definitely increases productivity. They're much likely to work longer hours and get more done when they're not in the office.
2) For people who are on the low end or need more guidance, it's more likely for them to slip or get left behind with remote work.
3) It takes longer to onboard new hires working remotely.
4) There's more barriers to cross-team collaboration working remotely. You don't have that natural bumping into each other in the office and unintentional communication that you do on Slack or Teams.
5) Remote work allows you to pull from a much greater talent pool, and you don't have to spend money on office space. This is really beneficial for startups.
6) For larger companies, remote work is excellent for teams that need to support a live product 24/7 since you can pull from many different time zones.
7) For managers and senior leadership, your meetings are all on zoom. And they're all back to back. The natural food or bathroom breaks you get working in an office don't exist. And they're more likely to exist later into the night.
This all leads to high performers picking up a lot more of the team's slack. They tend to thrive. Meanwhile, there's a certain percentage of staff that aren't doing a lot or are struggling. Managers are totally overloaded with meetings and don't have much time to give direct support. And because these are the decision makers, they're more likely to be in favor of RTO.
What I expect to happen with RTO is that junior staff and new hires will pick up more work (hopefully), the meeting burden on managers will be me more reasonable, and there will be better collaboration. But the high performers who teams rely on will be unhappy, will get less done, and are more likely to leave. Productivity will dip at first, and there might be a brain drain. It might be a good decision longer term. But there are tradeoffs any way you do it.
The only "problem" I've noticed in office vs. remote mixes, has been that it really unevens the playing field as far as office politics and influence goes.
The long short of it is that the remote workers become alienated, while the office gang has a good chance of becomes a good ol' boys club.
This is unfortunately very true. So often decisions were made only among the in-office part of the team. It is so tempting just to make a quick meeting in the office or even in the stereotypical kitchen, and discuss something, than to send out invites to remote guys, make sure they are available (even though they supposedly work 9-5 as everyone else), find a meeting room, click buttons etc.
> The long short of it is that the remote workers become alienated, while the office gang has a good chance of becomes a good ol' boys club.
This is what it becomes anyway whether I’m in office or not.
50-75% of the employees at MS HQ regularly work out of the office. (Source: I live close by).
This mandate is not at all surprising given MS invested heavily in new, revamped offices, which they had started before the pandemic. How did folks who relocated to other areas not see this coming.
Our company recently started RTO.
The first 10-15 minutes of every meeting for the first month were people complaining about it. The first 10-15 minutes of every meeting for the second month were supervisors reminding people everyone they need to do it.
The third month, people started coming in, and now everyone complains about how there's no parking, no open hotel desks, no open meeting rooms, and teams are scattered across offices and there's no meeting rooms so all the meetings are still on Teams.
Just find a corner for it why do you need a "room"
Because such as important meeting as “daily standup” and “whothefuckknowswhat sync #69” deserved a room, what if there’s a very important discussion?
I believe a purpose of this is to discriminate against older workers with families. This is also a reason to put your facility in a high cost of living area: young single people who don't need as much floor space can live there more easily.
How so? People with families worked in the office for decades
Sounds like a stealth layoff, just like Amazon did a while back.
You just know this is disproportionately going to lead to women quitting too. Which we spent YEARS trying to recruit. Just the dumbest era to be alive. :)
Sorry, we don't have to pretend to care about DEI in 2025. You even get compliments for not doing so!
DEI? That’s so 2022.
I wonder why people with requisite entrepreneurial skills aren't setting up enough remote-(only|friendly) businesses. Clearly, there's a demand for such roles. With RTO policies implemented across the globe, I imagine there'll be a surplus of high-quality talent for hiring as well. This seems like clear case of market inefficiency.
Or they have tried and failed, and market is working as intended. I'd argue this is the case since there have been a surge of companies the past 3 years, and barely a handful are remote, and none at large scale.
Can't tell if this affects Github employees as well? I was under impression that they don't actually have offices to “return to”.
Github is exempt and will be remote first
Hubber here. This didn’t affect us.
I assume that any GitHub employee within 50 miles of a Microsoft office will be expected to commute.
Would they have space? Considering that Github was always remote, that's a lot of people to fit into existing space. Though I guess it depends on how many Github employees are within 50 miles of Redmond.
And, in my experience, a 50 mile commute into a big city isn't really sustainable--and that was with a fair bit of travel, etc. mixed in so I wasn't going in every day and pretty accessible commuter rail service if I was going in 8-5 or thereabouts.
Given that all GitHub teams are remote, the chance of having a team member at the same office is approximately 0. What's the point of commuting if you're not co-located with team members?
I think you’re trying to logic a situation that is not logical.
Yes, question was rhetorical.
This does not stop every company from RTO mandates. My wife's employer is approaching full RTO and literally none of her team would go to the same office as her. And she was remote before COVID.
Look at any Microsoft products. They all suck in their own way to be honest. Remote vs in-office won't change that. They'll still be churning put bing, 3d paint, teams etc etc. Doesn't matter that they don't hire the best, the corporate agreements they have are the only thing that matters.
Forcing people back into the office for no real reason is just a power play from middle management trying to justify their pointless existence. What really bothers them is not culture or collaboration, it is that nobody is sucking up to them, because it is usually done in person and not on Teams. When they are not sitting in the same section as their peons pretending to boost efficiency and hard work, it becomes obvious that people can manage perfectly fine without them.
That is the real threat, someone might notice how utterly useless these bozos are and finally cut them off. Especially in software development, where focus and silence are everything, this mandate is beyond ridiculous.
What I find repugnant (but not surprising) is that with the same earnestness and confidence they're announcing that RTOs are for the betterment of their own workforce, they were announcing the same thing about WFH just a couple of years back.
Microsoft Teams is such a horrible product that Microsoft employees need to be in the same office to collaborate.
Link ought to be https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/09/flexible-work-up...
Oh great, can't wait until this is used as something to back up other justifications to strong arm employees into quite often meaningless commute that doesn't increase their quality of life, nor their productivity for many.
50 miles 3 times a week? That seems like a lot. Or maybe I'm getting my miles>km conversion wrong here. Not a commute I'd accept if it's not by high speed commuter rail (and even then...)
From my experience, even with fairly reasonable commuter rail--if not exactly high-speed--about 10 minutes from my house to the rail station or a fairly long drive into an outlying subway station. Plus some walking. You were close to 2 hours each way with a 6am start at the latest.
Latterly if I went into another company's Boston office it was about the same.
Yeah, I'd be spending 30% of my 40-hour work week in traffic if I were to commute in (~2 hours each way).
Whether this amounts to anything will depend on this line:
> If needed, you can request an exception by Friday, September 19.
Often the exceptions to this sort of policy override the rule.
WFH got stuck and commercial real estate took a haircut and it's investors took a bath and the sharks moved in and want some blood with whichever way they can
All that watercooler chat, network effects and so on, how do you log it in the time tracker? Or is that unpaid work?
Generally I believe RTO is about control. Secondarily, I believe that the corp office culture is still a thing many execs take pride in.
Most of them have dedicated their lives to getting that sweet corner office with the mahogany L-desk. Then theres that sweet nameplate.
I don’t think there’s any reliable data on RTO vs Remote productivity.
Last two places I’ve worked had CEOs mandating this while working by themselves from super small non-HQ “offices” in their state of tax residence…
"As we build [employee replacements that are always 100% remote] that will define this era, we need the kind of energy and momentum that comes from smart people working [not remote because remote is too hard to manage]."
Oh the irony! double facepalm emojis
AKA - Microsoft is trying to layoff employees without getting more bad layoff press while they make record earnings.
A company where most employees work digitally with people across the world is requiring people to sit at a desk in a physical location. The irony is blinding & shows an utter lack of transparency by leadership.
I certainly saw engagement, collaboration, etc. going down once things switched heavily to video calls (even before COVID) rather than meeting in-person in various ways--especially among people you didn't already know.
Of course, in many situations, it's unavoidable. I'm probably not going to hop on an international trip at the drop of a hat--though I certainly attended events.
But there's some subset of people that just don't want to travel or go into an office at all and IMO they're mostly mis-guided.
I’ve had the opposite effect. Meetings where everyone is on video run so much better.
More on task, plus transcriptions & other features dramatically improve the meeting. I can more easily understand accents, read when people talk over each other, ai generated notes and tasks, and I can rewatch parts of the meeting by searching for something said. Also easy to detect who dominates the meeting and who might need to be included in talking more.
I'm not sure big in-person meetings in rooms are especially useful but eating with people, having discussions in small conference rooms, social events, etc. were. Big online meetings never engaged me much and I certainly almost never rewatched parts of a meeting. And latterly it was sort of "Who are these people" if I hadn't known them before.
I do agree that video conferences that have agendas, collaborative notes, and so forth matured during COVID (though we did them before) but don't require a video meeting.
But people have different preferences.
Have you ever thought that “engagement” and”collaboration” that you saw is as hollow as the statement from Microsoft?
MS AI team is already at 4 days (Mustafa's org)
I wonder what the situation is like for Ukrainian employees. It seems from the article that you can request an exception, but will it be actually approved?
If anyone here is Microsoft employee living in Ukraine, I'd love to heat your take
Terrible. Especially given that the Seattle area has terrible traffic and also issues with safety on public transportation (like many other cities in America). What is the point exactly of getting workers into an office just so they can be on Zoom calls (or Teams, in this case)? This seems a lot like what Amazon was accused of - a way to shake out some workers and get them to quit when they cannot rearrange their life on a whim.
> issues with safety on public transportation
Do you know the stats on what percentage of transit rides result in some sort of assault or theft? It’s always felt pretty safe to me, although you certainly do end up sharing space with some very disadvantaged people.
My issue with US transit is mostly speed and convenience. Even with the traffic it usually takes 3x as long to get somewhere by transit, unless my destination lines up perfectly with the routes.
I know the stats and they're absolutely damning.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
You're orders of magnitude more likely to die in a car vs on a bus.
Deaths are one problem, but they may also not be distributed evenly. Some cities or states have more issues on public transit than others. But also you can still be a victim of assault, harassment, theft, and other issues on public transit. Many of these issues also go unreported or don’t get counted in official stats if not accompanied by a formal police report or whatever. So it doesn’t tell the full story of what people’s real experiences are.
I live in Seattle and take the public transit almost every day since I don't have a car. The real experience which you seem to care about is that I haven't had any issues and most of the fear people spread around public transit is made up.
I always dread travelling by bus in seattle, waiting for what crazy will get on that day, and it affects most buses as they all go to downtown, where most of the homeless/addicts are.
>Some cities or states have more issues on public transit than others.
Sure, but that doesn't change the stats.
>But also you can still be a victim of assault, harassment, theft, and other issues on public transit.
As can you in a car.
>Many of these issues also go unreported or don’t get counted in official stats if not accompanied by a formal police report or whatever.
They use estimates for unreported crimes. I trust the institution to provide the best possible data.
>So it doesn’t tell the full story of what people’s real experiences are.
Do you think there's any chance in hell that actual deaths / injuries on public transport even begin to approach those in cars?
I think people in this thread (and elsewhere) are using "unsafe" to mean "I feel uncomfortable" rather than "there's a serious chance that harm will come to me".
Law enforcement in liberal cities might overlook public urination or petty theft by the mentally ill, but they come down hard on violent crime. Truly violent people are not allowed to roam free on public transit. There's definitely some weird people though, and our society is segregated enough that most rich people probably can't tell the difference between a violent weirdo and a harmless one.
And don't forget, you're more likely to encounter a road-rager threatening you than some person on a bus.
I would challenge you to find statistics that show that any public transit system in the U.S. is more dangerous than driving.
How are you defining ‘dangerous’? Are you counting deaths? Or also things like assault, robbery, sexual harassment, drug abuse (second hand smoke or needles), etc? What about crimes that take place around transit but not on transit itself, like crimes near a train station or whatever? I think it’s easy to construct narratives that are misleading both with data and without data. My point is simply that for many people, they feel safer in private transit and would prefer it. I see some other people here talking about some shuttle network Microsoft runs - presumably that is also a private option and it likely exists because public transit isn’t something many Microsoft employees want to deal with.
we define transit by accidents, because it's a bad argument to say "you don't experience harassment by yourself." by that logic we may as well close down parks and libraries and privatize those with single rooms.
Remote work means traffic congestion gets better and also helps solves the affordable housing crisis, as people can then choose to live in areas with a lower cost of living but further away from the inner city.
I think the return to office phenomenon is inevitable because employers externalize transportation costs, but internalize value capture from employees being in presumably a less distracting and more controlled environment. It’s a systems problem where the incentive only goes one way. I think you could have a balancing incentive of providing employers tax credits if they can prove that they are using remote or partially remote employment. I would even extend this incentive to employers that can show that their work hours are not overlapped with peak traffic hours. 20% of traffic volume might be in a single hour, and highway capacity is often built around accommodating need of only 2 hours of the day. Your state DOT is probably a top 3 expense for the state government.
Pre-pandemic, I had multiple employers that were incentivized via the state and county government to push remote working, ride sharing, and transit utilization as a means of reducing overall government spending on roads and road maintenance. It typically showed up as small benefits to the employee, like a monthly drawing for a $50 Target gift card or preferential parking spots. Based on that, I got the sense that while it may have been helpful in the aggregate, it wasn't wildly cost effective.
My state basically did the exact same thing, monthly drawing for gift cards included.
I worked at Microsoft pre and post-pandemic. Microsoft has an extensive shuttle network, but the public transit (Sound Transit) to the office was nicer in many ways. It ran more frequently and the seats reclined!
The Connect shuttles are pretty bad if you live anywhere in South King County or north of U-village. The drop-off points aren't near transit stations.
Isn’t most Microsoft presence in the Seattle area on the east side? I haven’t heard of the kinds of public transit safety issues that happen in the city happening there. Traffic still applies though.
The 520 bridge and the i5 conection have hov dedicated lanes, or are working towards it.
Smart societies would tie RTO with tax dollar incentives to support demographic growth.
>We’ve looked at how our teams work best, and the data is clear: when people work together in person more often, they thrive — they are more energized, empowered, and they deliver stronger results.
Citation needed or this is just more vibe-xecutive decree.
Anecdotal evidence to counter this argument.
Work at a fortune 200 company. We spent COVID all 100% remote WFH. After several quarters of their entire workforce working remotely, they were gushing about how productivity increased, satisfaction scores went through the roof and the company recorded several record breaking quarters in revenue during a time they expected the exact opposite to happen.
This inevitably lead them to having one helluva hard time trying to get people back into the office since they owned about a dozen buildings where the majority of their employees were supposed to be working. After a year and several attempts, they instead sold most of their real estate holdings and have since consolidated everybody into just a few buildings. The new rule is that if you are less than 30 mins from the office, you need to come in at least twice a week. Not a huge hurdle and so far, has been met with little if any resistance.
I have to give them credit. They tried ordering people back in, and ultimately pivoted and sold their real estate instead.
1. Will you name? Sounds like some sane management; those looking for jobs might find that a useful datapoint.
2. I think making it proportional to the length of the commute is an interesting idea. And even for those who don't like the office... two days a week with a short commute isn't terrible.
1. I can't name them, but they're in the health care industry.
2. Yeah, and all they're doing is taking badge reports. Going in for a Town Hall meeting or a team meeting meets these requirements. You're not required to be in the office a set number of hours - just be there. I've been told its a kind of reverse psychology trick. The more time you spend around your coworkers, grabbing lunch, collabing on little stuff, it will morph into a desire to want to be there more often and thus, the decision will then be yours that you want to be there - not some mandate coming from on high.
I think in a lot of ways its working. Last year, I'd go in for some tech support thing and the building was a ghost town. Barely anybody. This year? Totally different. The ramp is full, people are bustlin about, the cafeteria is packed. Its being around that atmosphere I think is what they want people to be more involved in. I've already had several team lunches on campus and instead of going home, we unpack our laptops and hammer out a few things, then head out. None of us are really there for more than a few hours, but it just feels like really productive face-time with your team.
I just think its cool how the company is just letting the employees figure out without a heavy handed approach and from what I can see, its working.
Honestly, it sounds like the drop-in-drop-out allowance is what makes this tick. Well, that and the short commute thing. You get the best of face-time collaboration without the "grind" of needing to punch a timecard. Just the best possible parts of in-person work, and nothing else. Plus, you get to time-shift so that commute stays nice and short.
They need to be in the offices to collaborate with their offshore counterparts...
it is obviously more nonsense. There is no way one single will approach will work for ALL employees. some people just do not want to spend 4hrs in commute on daily basis. and any senior employee with kids would prefer to spend more time with kid than on
and that is when Office does not hinder productivity through lack of team space, meeting rooms and open office non sense or seting up equipment.
There's no data that proves it. If they had the data they would parade it in front of everyone.
The elites that rule those companies always had WFH as a benefit for as long as I remember. They find it very icky that the underclasses have now a benefit that was exclusive to them. That's the only data there is.
Corporate analysts were "gifted" with a two impossibly rare step functions, that will probably never be repeated in our lifetimes: Near 100% -> near 0% percent in office, then 0% percent -> partial% in office. With most (all?) of the big companies following the same path, I think it's safe to assume the data points to the same conclusion: in whole, humans work better together.
It makes you wonder if it's a fundamental part of our evolution, or something. ;)
It would be very interesting to see their rational.
> With most (all?) of the big companies following the same path, I think it's safe to assume the data points to the same conclusion
That is, at best, very weak evidence supporting your conclusion.
I agree, by the way, that humans do work better together. That doesn't mean, however, that humans work better in an office environment. There are huge drawbacks to that environment that may very well exceed the benefit of physical proximity.
"Humans work better together" is a very different assertion than "humans work better in offices".
Given how I’ve worked and the developers I’ve worked with over the decades, marketeers or managers might work better in bunches but peace and quiet serves the developers. Offices with a door, few interruptions, etc. Rands has talked about being in the zone when working and anything that favours that should be provided by companies interested in software people.
> That is, at best, very weak evidence supporting your conclusion.
Please see the definition of "assume" to help you interpret what I wrote in a way that's closer to what I wrote/was trying to communicate.
Please also see the last sentence, that you missed entirely:
> It would be very interesting to see their rational.
This sentence strongly implies, nearly directly states, that I, in fact, do NOT know their rational.
What's your opinion? Why do you think they're all converging on the same policies? Do you think they're acting irrationally in opposition of data, or without data?
Then the work should be set up so that your teammates and project collaborators actually work from the same office, and not in the space that was most convenient to procure or in lower-cost offshore markets. But executives would pretty much always rather have you take video calls from your desk than incur any cost or inconvenience on their end. They're not acting like they believe this.
> I think it's safe to assume the data points to the same conclusion: in whole, humans work better together. It makes you wonder if it's a fundamental part of our evolution, or something. ;)
Is that why we invented machines and AI that will replace humans?
Another anecdote. I have a friend who manages his families (started by his father and grandfather) private market investment company. The family is worth nine figures.
He pulled his people back into the office because he said he "felt" like they were not working. Despite graduating from Harvard and from Harvard Business School he could not offer any qualitative or quantitative data to back up his "feelings." He lets his people WFH on Friday's but says he schedules video calls on that day to make sure they are working.
He said, "When they are working from home, I do not know if they are walking their dog for an hour but if they are in the office, I know they aren't."
What made this conversation laughable was that he and I were at a country club having lunch and bullshitting for half the day, on a weekday, while our kids (who had the day off from school) were playing a sport together. He stepped away more than once for "meetings" that he took from his cell phone.
It was laughable.
This seems paywalled, but there's a blog post from Microsoft: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/09/flexible-work-up...
>With that in mind, we’re updating our flexible work expectations to three days a week in the office.
Seeing how many Slackers were hired during and after pandemic (they were hired before, but were forced to work from office) I can totally understand the moves. It’s sad, but there are way too many unskilled people, currently carried by AI to hide themselves in corporate worlds that the companies are already affected in a real, calculable way. Also this is great proxy for layoffs, but only for those that have options - as already mentioned. So it is a lose-lose for the companies that will make it the most stupid, direct way.
Does this mean they will pay us enough to live nearby?
If "AI" S/W dev is going to be a thing, then companies are going to have to wean themselves off of the idea of human face-2-face colab being the key to success.
If you search for "Return to office September" you see a bunch of companies announcing it. Microsoft, NBCUniversal, Ford Motor Company...
Could be a push my tech companies to push backup the value of their real estate investments
I cant believe that they are also going to apply this to software engineers.
Why don't they just pay people less if they think WFH causes less value to the company? Give them an option to RTO or take a pay cut. Why would you want people who don't want your company to succeed anymore working for you? I can't imagine anyone used to 3-4 years of WFH (and liking it) wanting the company to succeed after RTO. If they stay, it's probably because they don't have a choice and they'll probably be the least motivated and minimally productive employees.
OTOH, I've noticed the "disruptors" of yesteryears are now full-on right-wing jerks whose mission is to preserve wealth instead of create wealth by doing new and disruptive things. This tells me one important message if nothing else: There is no shortage of talent for the perceived wealth-creating opportunities. The gold rush is over.
I fear this is less about ZIRP and more about complacency (in general) and would-be investors and VC's not having faith in the possibility of high ROI investments.
> Give them an option to RTO or take a pay cut.
How much of a pay cut? They could (and probably do) claim that WFH employees are not doing anything so they are worthless.
Makes sense. I would say if productivity is below 30% of RTO then it's RTO. I can't imagine that though. Most people are productive 3-4h at most in office jobs, it shouldn't that difficult to measure output/productivity. Just meetings normally takes at least 1-2h on average out of most people's work days.
Well if you're remote you're in competition with the rest of the world right as they're all remote too and will do they same job cheaper so probably a decent one.
Quiet Firing
In some sense you can guess the demographics of this site based on their reaction to various things. This particular comment section reveals that few startup people inhabit this site and it’s mostly /r/technology 2.0.
Interesting. Everyone here is an employee.
Just like DEI, companies never believed their own rhetoric about WFH.
I’m surprised anyone really believed them.
unionize
Maybe one day. My industry is slowly starting to establish unions. But not without a lot a pushback.
Microsoft, like other tech companies, over hired during COVID. This is their way of fixing that glitch while lessening the financial burden of severance packages handed out during layoffs.
It's a standard McKinsey & Co. playbook that is going around the various tech companies as a way to reduce headcount.
And, productivity is going to tank. If you force me to RTO, I will show up exactly at 8am, take my 1 hour lunch away from the office, and leave exactly at 5pm. And, when I do leave the office at 5pm, my work phone gets turned off and I will not do anything work related until 8am the next morning.
You would think these tech companies would do something innovative. A f*cking monkey can cut costs by firing people. How about you stop over hiring? How about you stop leasing building space and use the products you create that enable remote collaboration?
Tech industry dumpster fire keeps getting hotter. Nothing unexpected here.
Oh great more traffic in Redmond.
I prefer the Office.
Disappointed but not surprised.
Just MSFT laying off people, nothing new here.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Just this time they're extinguishing their less profitable projects.
Why anybody would want to waste their time with working at MSFT is beyond baffling to me. Interned at Redmond, WA and despised it after a few weeks. Looks great on resume at time but definitely set me on a path to avoid large corporate firms like MSFT
I've seen this from both sides, and I think there's about the same amount of bad-faith arguments on both sides. Now, line workers have less power here than the execs, so I'm inclined to side with the former group, but... the whole thing is a bit of a mess.
You can essentially divide IC employees into three categories. First, those who are about as productive from home as they are from the office, but are on average happier working remotely (no commute, etc). That's probably circa 80%. Second, those who are well-intentioned but fall behind over time, because they are less proactive about maintaining soft skills - communications, cross-functional relationship management, etc. That's the bulk of the rest. And third, there are people who actively exploit the situation in ways that the company is going to have an allergic reaction work (outsource their work to a dude in India, half-ass three jobs at competing companies, etc). That's typically <1%, but it's obviously a weird / scary new thing.
Further complicating this picture is the fact that line managers are not perfect either; there is an "out of sight, out of mind" aspect to it, and if a WFH worker is underperforming, it will on average take longer to address the problem, which has some ripple effects.
And on some level, the exec perspective is that the intangible gains in the happiness of the 80% that was previously willing to work for you in the office is not worth the horrors on the bottom end. So there is something resembling a credible argument for RTO.
At the same time, there is a degree of lazy thinking / bad faith on the exec side because the problems can be solved in other ways. You can retrain managers, you can improve performance management, you can monitor for certain types of grift, and you can accept some degree of added risk. In fact, you probably should if it keeps your top performers happier. But the overwhelming preference is for the easy choice of RTO.
You missed the people more productive at home because they have less overall life stress, no pain of commute, disabilities which make commute painful or hard, etc.
And I suspect that’s a *LOT* more people than you’re giving credit.
To be very clear, I’m in that group, and probably so. Several engineers I’ve worked with are in that group, as well. I suspect it’s actually quite common in software.
I honestly don't think this shows in the data. As a software engineer, I really want to believe it, but I think we're prone to confusing well-being with productivity. We feel better about the work, but if you try to quantify it in any imaginable way, it's not there. Not in launch velocity, not in the number of pull requests, not the number of design docs created, bugs fixed, etc...
Of course, all of these metrics are individually goofy, but in aggregate, they give you some approximation of productivity.
For what it's worth, my old job was quantifying it in meaningful ways and we *were* revealing, statistically, to be incredibly productive.
And in my own analysis: PRs, test coverage, "story points finished", lines of code written, etc. I was more productive working from home on a reduced hour schedule than I had been working on a strict, high-hours one, too.
If you are delivering same output while being happier that’s by definition increased productivity.
I'd say Microsoft has deliberately lined this up with the "AI boom" as a way to reduce headcount, without the PR hit of reducing headcount.
Turns out even Microsoft can't get Teams to work.
This kind of commentary is more appropriate for Reddit but in this case I approve.
Also -- why is Teams such trash? It can barely fulfill its core responsibility.
I used to say the same, but now I have to use Slack + Gmail + Meet + Google Calendar + Drive + whatever else Google has.
All of this has integrations into each other. Somehow a slack bot can show me calendar entries. Why I would even need such a broken UI/experience is unclear to me. I can't see when people usually work. Meet chats disappear once the meeting is over.
At Teams/Outlook you have a million other issues, but all things considered, I preferred it.
My general assumption when I see something that insane is
- some large enough customer had a workflow depending on that existing and it was built to sell them
- someone wanted a visible feature to justify being promoted
And in most cases, at least one of those is true.
It's from the modern "rewrite it in Electron every 6 months" arm of Microsoft, not the "With a clever manipulation of the registers, we can eke out another 4 bytes of saved memory" arm of Microsoft. The former has been winning for years, but the latter also exists inside the company. See Raymond Chen for a classic example of the deep technical skill inside MS
Thats because Teams is just a frontend to SharePoint Online.
SPOL is even worse a tirefire than, say, even Lotus Notes. And it's in Electron on top of that, so its 10x slower than a real non-browser application.
Ive only rarely seen Microsoft put out actual good software. The last time was Windows 2000. Now, that was some quality software.
> a frontend to SharePoint
No wonder they just tossed Skype in the trash. This explains so much.
> SPOL is even worse a tirefire than, say, even Lotus Notes.
To be fair, Lotus Notes is what we had back in the mid 90's. There really wasn't much else like it. But comparing that today... (checks notes) ...oh. It's still a thing?!
So, neither Lotus Notes (now "HCL Notes" apparently?) or SharePoint have any excuse being as bad as they are. There are a dozen other far more capable examples of this kind of technology. I'm routinely amazed at how bad MS' user experience continues to be, even with all the money and engineers at their disposal.
Yeah in the end teams is an electron based view of SharePoint in a trench coat pretending to be a chat program and so much more
> The last time was Windows 2000. Now, that was some quality software.
It was good, but IIS had some faults, can't remember what, they wanted to replace it quickly with 2003. There isn't much wrong with Windows XP, objectively speaking.
Prior to iis 9, if you use the GUI to change a SSL cert of a site, it would change ALL sites to that cert.
You had to use powershell iis commandlet to change per site.
The newest IIS finally fixed that.
Has Microsoft built anything in the last decade that isn’t of questionable quality/user experience?
There's no question to the quality of Copilot.
I genuinely don’t know if you mean “it’s unquestionably bad” or “it’s unquestionably good”.
I was under the impression GitHub built and maintained that, but perhaps that’s changed… If not I wouldn’t consider it a Microsoft built product like windows etc (yes I’m aware ms owns gh)
everyone that contributed a project to github built it.
I'm sure there are some people out there somewhere who haven't tried it and so still think it could be good.
Is there? And which Copilot is that? Github? Office 365? Windows? Yet another?
Obligatory link to my comment re: Microsoft product naming and the discussion that followed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40419292
most people like vs code and lots of companies have built on top of it so there must be some quality there that people like.
It's more that there isn't a single credible alternative. So, winning by default, not by merit.
But it didn’t win by default, it beat out the other alternatives, sublime and a GitHub editor (prior to acquisition).
VS Code (Monaco at the time) was developed by a small team largely in secret to keep it safe from other MS departments so it’s really not like other MS software. It has been safe from meddling for a while there is a chance it’ll be a victim of its own success.
The editor itself, Monaco, is nice enough and I’ve built some browser based ides, with it. Clientele consisting of primarily data scientists seemed to enjoy it
Yeah, honestly my whole karma score is built from pithy comments about Teams.
Thankfully it no longer crashes Chrome all the time, but everything else is meh. I still can't tag people in Japanese. The security settings are a trap for poor quality system admins and checkbox checkers. The meetings crash, the screen sharing only allows one way (so no easy pair programming), etc..
I much prefer working with slack and google meet like I did at my last job.
Given that Teams doesn't work in anything other than Chrome, I would hope that it didn't crash all the time.
> Given that Teams doesn't work in anything other than Chrome
That's news to me; I use Teams on Firefox every work day and I see no issues (other than it being one of the very few sites which need third-party cookies to work, but recently Firefox has made it easier to add an exception for a single site like Teams).
I used to use Teams w/ Firefox but the lagging and other issues with video calls led me to using Chrome. Is that still an issue?
But it did crash Chrome all the time. I started runnung it in a VM so it would be less annoying when it crashed
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Well, thanks.
I'll cut Microsoft out of my list of places to apply.
Not sure what they will do without you
What always shocks me on these threads is the naiveté a bunch of Über privileged tech workers have about the job market in general.
This is it folks. Corp screws you when they can. Welcome to the machine.
For most working people, showing up at the office (or place of work) is the absolute minimum requirement.
People here seem to talk about what legal right a company has to let people go just because they didnt want to shop up at work, at the office
If you go to a restaurant, do you worry about how many hours the waiter, the chef, etc had to travel in the morning to put food in your face?
It is not for you like. It is doing what your employer requires.
> If you go to a restaurant, do you worry about how many hours the waiter, the chef, etc had to travel in the morning to put food in your face?
I don’t give a shit how long they work a day and from where, as long as I have food my plate.
If they could deliver food from their home, I would certainly take this option over forcing them into the restaurant kitchen.
Knowledge workers do not have to be in the office to deliver value, period.
Be thankful you can go to the office. If you're working from home you have a lot more competition. Our company has started getting Indian workers into Mexico working US hours, you're competing with them if you're working online.