As always when feeling terrible check out other places to if and where better things exist.
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.
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.
>With that in mind, we’re updating our flexible work expectations to three days a week in the office.
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.
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.
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.
In my above statement I was thinking of both cubicles and open office.
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.
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.
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.
This sounds like exaggerated bullshit.
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 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.
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.
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.
Oh the irony! double facepalm emojis
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Price per square meter is.
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.
Ah the data is clear, without reference to the data collected or metrics used.
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 always have the wildest lawyer takes?
There is no defamation case anywhere in this situation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Just this time they're extinguishing their less profitable projects.
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 product 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Latterly if I went into another company's Boston office it was about the same.
People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller European 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. It appears pre-rational: ideological, perhaps even superstitious.
(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
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
toomuchtodo•5h ago
Why Microsoft Has Accepted Unions, Unlike Its Rivals - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/business/economy/microsof... | | https://archive.today/ES3SF - February 28th, 2024
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_unions