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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely zero chance some HR person goes through your commit history at the end of the month, assigns a value to it and then pays you some amount of money based on that.
You're paid for hours of work, it's there in your contract. If they don't enforce it that's a different thing. If you can't even grasp that ..., I don't think your "output" is that good, lmao.
If they see you working 5 hours per week and don't think you're productive enough, they can fire you, but you aren't paid any more for working more hours. That's what "salaried" means. It's why you've never heard someone getting paid "time and a half" for working weekends in tech.
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?
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 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?
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.
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)
It's not reducing headcount if they hire just as many people overseas.
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.
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).
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 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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
"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?
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?
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.
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-
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.
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."
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.
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
Don't dictate to the rest of us that we have to work the way you work best
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!"
I'll cut Microsoft out of my list of places to apply.
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.
~$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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
toomuchtodo•10h 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