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Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

businessinsider.com

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Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#281

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #233
kokanee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I've been remote for 5 years across three different companies, and if anything I've had the opposite experience: my remote coworkers are far more responsive than my on-site coworkers, who are always in meetings, in transit, having in-person chit chat, or taking a break.

I've been managing remote teams for over a decade. Your management must be doing performance management well. Most remote coworkers and employees I've had have been good, but that was only because the company aggressively pruned people who abused remote work. Remote job postings attract deadbeats at a higher rate than in-office jobs. There are even New York Times Bestseller books with example scripts of how to negoti…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#282

Post by yahoozoo »

deejaaymac wrote: post #232
wordofx wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

When I was a teenager I played World of Warcraft for 5 years. During that time we did "raids" where 40 people have to pay attention and communicate, sometimes for longer than 8 hours, with people from around the globe. If teenagers can do it, adults can do it. Period. And if they can't, skill issue I guess.

Based example

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#283

Post by prmoustache »

Aurornis wrote: post #245
tokai wrote: post #66

Commute time should be salaried time. Then the whole office/home work discussion could be taken with the true costs involved.

> Commute time should be salaried time. Salary means you're paid a fixed amount per pay period, regardless of hours worked. So including commute in your hours worked wouldn't change your salary, which is by definition a fixed amount. Did you mean that commute time should be paid hourly at an additional rate?

This depends on the juridictions.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#284

Post by shmerl »

Mobius01 wrote: post #139

I work in a large company that mandated 4-day RTO last year. Even taking a completely objetive point of view on the situation leads to the conclusion that something else is needed. We spend our days at our desks, on Zoom calls. People won’t get up to join in person - mostly because the conference rooms are all blocked by “special projects”, but mostly due to the offshoring of positions and distributed workforce post-…

Office space / real estate owners don't care. It's their plot to increase profits and companies are colluded with them on it. There is no other obvious reason besides may be Big Brother monitoring mentality.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#285

Post by prmoustache »

ghaff wrote: post #247
rimunroe wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I'm glad that I at least get reimbursed for a portion of my home internet connection and for office equipment.

Most of which you would have anyway. I never cared about incremental costs for internet, electricity, etc. if any. I could have probably collected double-digit dollars per month during COVID but I wasn't even officially remote anyway.

I definitely pay for more bandwith than if I wasn't working from home. Also I saw a difference in my electricity bills.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#286

Post by jimbob45 »

zero_shift wrote: post #190

At $org, we too are undertaking a mandatory RTO order, enforced with door access logs. People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller locales, where the offices we have are perfunctory at best. The rationale is the usual one: collaboration, watercooler chat, unspecific evidence / "research" about productivity (that we are told definitely exists, but is yet to be shared). I remain baffled by executives' obse…

Well every company just happens to be undertaking RTO at the same time so it seems to be above the exec level. I’ve seen hypotheses on here that city councils are putting on pressure to boost their local economies and another that boards of directors are pushing this as the last chance to layoff->outsource before H-1Bs are banned. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t appear to stem from innovative or independent executive thought.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#287

Post by Consultant32452 »

dakiol wrote: post #203
sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having done years in both settings, random non-work related discussions were always more prevalent in office type atmospheres. Whether you realize it or not, these are team-building exercises. It brings people closer, sometimes too close (I slept with one of them lol), but overall this is a net plus for team dynamics. It's really hard to bond with people exclusively through chat. Especially if you hide behind an an…

I don't need to bond with you. I don't need team-building exercises. I have been working for over a decade and made 0 friends at the office. I'm an easy going guy, though, no complaints or anything. Just keeping it professional is good enough. A bit tired of the whole "we are a family" thing really. Plenty of successful open source projects are successful and driven by people working together remotely and behind avat…

Most workers enjoy being emotionally manipulated by their employers.

A friend of mine was gushing because their new employer sent some chocolates to everyone at Christmas time. They felt “appreciated”.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#288

Post by scarface_74 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #230
scarface_74 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn’t take a lawyer to know what “at will employment” means. A case for what unless it’s discriminatory. Your employer doesn’t have to justify letting you go - at all. Even looking at your citation, it shows that constructive dismissal is only actionable if you can show that they made working conditions harder and they were targeting you under a law meant to protect you against discrimination Companies ha…

>It really doesn’t take a lawyer to know what “at will employment” means. It takes a lawyer to understand an individual's situation, background, and contract in order to see if this is just a bad but legal hand, or in fact something worth filing against. We don't know every engineer's story that is impacted here. >Companies have been giving employees an ultimatum between “relocate or quit” forever. Yes, and severance…

Were you really confused by “your contract” at any job? I’ve signed 10 over the years and they basically all spell out - how much you are going to get paid, when your start date is and you are an at will employee.

I was also hired by BigTech in 2020 and assigned to a “virtual office” and my position was designated as “field by design” meaning that it was suppose to be permanently remote.

There was nowhere in my contract that I would never be expected to return to office and in fact AWS did tell all of their “field by design” roles that they would have to come into the office by the beginning of the year.

I was already gone by then. Don’t you think you would have heard at least one case of a successful lawsuit by employees of at least one of these companies? Especially the US’s second largest employer?

You think a local lawyer “recommended by a family friend” is going to successfully take on a trillion dollar+ market cap company?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#289

Post by Aurornis »

xtracto wrote: post #278

Just out of curiosity, how much compensation would people be willing to leave on the table in lieu of "Remote" work? (this is different to, how much would you ASK to go from remote to a new in-office job). 10%, 25%, 50%? I've worked remotely for 5 years now, and there is NO way I would return to an office based job. I even have moved to a small town where there are practically 0 tech jobs; and at this point there's N…

This question isn't very revealing because it almost entirely depends on this one variable:

> maybe I am even in a privileged position financially; but at this moment in my life I would rather quit my job

Someone closer to retirement with a lot of savings and low expenses will have a completely different answer than a younger person with low savings and a family.

The second variable it depends on is their current salary. Someone who currently earns a huge number can afford to give up a higher percentage than someone who earns barely enough to make ends meet.

The question becomes a proxy for the person's financial situation and current salary, not their remote work preferences.

This is also a question where people's claims don't match their actions. Similar to every election season when a lot of people declare they're going to move to a different country if their party loses, but the number of people who actually do it is much smaller.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#290

Post by willio58 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #279
Mobius01 wrote: post #139

I work in a large company that mandated 4-day RTO last year. Even taking a completely objetive point of view on the situation leads to the conclusion that something else is needed. We spend our days at our desks, on Zoom calls. People won’t get up to join in person - mostly because the conference rooms are all blocked by “special projects”, but mostly due to the offshoring of positions and distributed workforce post-…

If I returned to the office I'd be working with teammates in India, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, and Delaware and none of them would be in my office. I'd be essentially working remote from an office that I commute to. The worst of all worlds.

Funny/sad story, my friend works for the government making maps for watersheds. Elon comes along and forces people to go back to office. She’d been remote since she was hired 3+ years ago. So suddenly she’s assigned to the closest gov office near her, which is an ICE OFFICE in SF, about an hour commute from where she lives (each way). She’s massively against the goings-on at ICE and asks for an alternate spot. She now has to commute 1:15 each way to an animal holding office in SFO. She is currently zooming into work each day from an office full of transient animals and no humans related to anything she does, all in the name of government efficiency. Needless to say, her work efficiency has diminished greatly.
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