Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
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.)
That’s my opinion anyway
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
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.
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.
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.
I expect WFH will expect, while remaining relatively niche, much like worker co-operatives.
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.
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.
> all jobs will be in India
"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
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?
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.
Are they really collecting stats on mouse movements? If they were they'd surely detect these predictable movements
Should we also ban sick leave because a few people call in sick when they gasp are not actually sick?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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-
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't get me wrong, that's still way too expensive; but your exaggeration is _way_ off the mark.
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!)
Alameda County is cheaper because the commute to South Bay and to S.F. destinations not near BART is unreasonable. If you’re willing to rule out those jobs you might be able to get away closer to $1.5m at $120k/year.
I’m guessing you bought with a 3% mortgage and before the COVID asset price takeoff.
Another way to look at it is that for each $100m of company value created, you’re looking at perhaps $20m of employee equity, or about 10 employees being able to buy homes (before taxes) if the equity were distributed evenly.
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.
omg that explains so many things!
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.
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."
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.
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.
Chef's kiss.
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.
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...
As you can see, your bosses already did.
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.
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.
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 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!
I don’t need faces, unless I’m interrogating somebody.
In all seriousness: you've outlined what you need. Perhaps you should reflect on what any collaborator needs.
It's a job. Not a confessional booth.
I will not convince you, but there are a lot of people like me, who can operate productively without observing faces.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry.
The fact that you think is good tells me you're probably some kind of middle manager with too little actual work to do.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
> lots of people claim that WFH means they can "do the laundry" and/or go to the post office
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you not read the last part of the sentence?
> window
> fancier attire
one of these things is not like the other
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.
Don't dictate to the rest of us that we have to work the way you work best
- 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.
- 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
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.
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.
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”.
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)
it shouldn't be my problem if a coworker lacks internal locus of control
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 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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
If this is a shareholder action, of a publicly-traded company, then (IIUC) shouldn't that be publicly-available information somewhere?
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/09/01/office-cmbs-delinquency-ra...
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.
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'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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How that guy didn't end up on the receiving end of a load of criminal charges...
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.
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.
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 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.
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 was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day.
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.
You can imagine how well those people feel about RTO, and how it helps their collaboration.
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?
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.
Fellow ex-Googler, looking for an interesting systems programming role.
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.
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 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.
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.
If you’re being blocked by someone online, you’d be blocked offline too.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
The money is there so that things that are desired happen mostly on time.
"That's what the money is for."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
No spherical CEO in a vacuum, maybe.
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.
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.
https://www.phila.gov/2024-05-20-statement-from-mayor-cherel...
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.
Many are asking this!
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'd also say, I've seen far more people just sandbag and slack off in WFH than in an actual office.
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.
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
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 don't like looking dumb and these billions in useless investment are statues to them looking stupid otherwise.
1 is spot on.
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.
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.
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.
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
The evidence that we have is that hybrid work is a net increase in productivity. Do note its hybrid, not remote.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that…
I'm surprised this was not mentioned as a possibility.
Unless you think all RTO is a conspiracy.
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.
The evidence is that there have been more RTO calls than companies switching to pure WFH post-Covid.
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 is nowhere near equal, of course. That's the real rub.
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.
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."
I've also never seen a company that actually tracked that well enough to make a decision like RTO based on their own data.
They can't all love commercial real estate that much right? Not all executives invests in office buildings.
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.
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.
a.k.a Dead Sea effect
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.
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".
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.
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.
Would imply they are probably planning WARN-act-level layoffs, and trying to get under that with "volunteers"?
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.
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’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.
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?
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.
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.
Again I do not have a good explanation for RTO.
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.
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'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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Very advanced tech Corporate has paid for!
> we need the kind of energy and momentum that comes from smart people working side by side, solving challenging problems together
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.
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)
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.
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.
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"
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/press-releases/new-moreno-bill...
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/The...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Getting people to quit is much cheaper (no severance if that exists, and your unemployment insurance costs don't go up).
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.
My company did this, then pulled 3 different departments into a 3d/w RTO they didn't even have the space for. Whoops!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal
If I've heard of this angle, I assume that lawyers know many angles that may apply.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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
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.
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 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 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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Montana is the exception, passing a "Wrongful Discharge" law in 1987
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
It's not reducing headcount if they hire just as many people overseas.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remot...
~$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)
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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 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.
I hate fully remote working.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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 :-)
I was much more open to working in the office when I actually had my own office.
So when you compare remote productivity, that's what you have to compare with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Of all the "voices" I'd like to be able to do, corporate shitspeak is definitely the top one.
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
It was a privilege, people abused it, and now it's over. And managers were the worst offenders.
As long as a company is able and willing to move out or correct low performers quickly, remote work is fine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I would never again want to put up with it.
A friend of mine was gushing because their new employer sent some chocolates to everyone at Christmas time. They felt “appreciated”.
In my above statement I was thinking of both cubicles and open office.
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.
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.
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.
And talking in person is much higher bandwidth for reasons we don’t completely understand.
Worst case output is the same, so why should workers suffer more?
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.
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 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.
Seems like a similar situation here.
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.
It depends on if other team members need to be able to reach out to this person at 2pm
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.
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.
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.
Funny that I see the same things from people in toilet stall for 30 minutes at the office. (At least video games and videos..)
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 prefer remote work, but not everybody is good at it and it can ruin it for everybody.
Continue, I’m all ears.
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.
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.
Like, how stupid do you have to be to kill your golden goose of life work balance?
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.
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.
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.
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.
How/can we "montessori-fy"?
I don't really care about unproductive people, I care about myself.
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 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.
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.
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 ?
A fixed payment for office days would remove that, but then how do you determine the price of that payment?
The stipend is flexible. Some of my coworkers stocked their home office with snacks, for example.
Data caps exist and also higher service reliability tiers cost more.
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.
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.
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
Price per square meter is.
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.
Tell me you’re single in early 20s without telling you’re single in 20s.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
To stay employed at Microsoft. After all many may want that some may not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
Where though? I thought the current jobs market for tech wasn't in a nice spot for devs.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah the data is clear, without reference to the data collected or metrics used.
What I would really like to see is arguments from the other side. Can someone steelman RTO. Preferably with evidence, anecdotal or otherwise.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I guess we can just wait and see :)
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
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.
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".
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).
If I could live in the same building as my job, I would.
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.
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.
[0] <https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-G...>
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.
Demanding an immediate impromptu meeting of indeterminate length does feel less rude in person, yes.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
/unpopular opinion
Literally all, without exception, top employees that I saw in my career never gave a single shit about anyone else besides themselves.
As always when feeling terrible check out other places to if and where better things exist.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Latterly if I went into another company's Boston office it was about the same.
> If needed, you can request an exception by Friday, September 19.
Often the exceptions to this sort of policy override the rule.
Oh the irony! double facepalm emojis
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It makes you wonder if it's a fundamental part of our evolution, or something. ;)
It would be very interesting to see their rational.
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".
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?
Is that why we invented machines and AI that will replace humans?
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.
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.
If anyone here is Microsoft employee living in Ukraine, I'd love to heat your take
>With that in mind, we’re updating our flexible work expectations to three days a week in the office.
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.
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.
How much of a pay cut? They could (and probably do) claim that WFH employees are not doing anything so they are worthless.
Interesting. Everyone here is an employee.
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?
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Just this time they're extinguishing their less profitable projects.
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.
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.
Of course, all of these metrics are individually goofy, but in aggregate, they give you some approximation of productivity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You had to use powershell iis commandlet to change per site.
The newest IIS finally fixed that.
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.
- 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.
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.
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'll cut Microsoft out of my list of places to apply.
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.
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.