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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

#291

Post by jimbob45 »

slaw wrote: post #269
johnnyanmac wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if WFH was just as good for the company, and more attractive to employees, we should see a boom in WFH-first companies, which does not seem to be happening. In this economy, you can't even make a company, let alone profess their benefits. This is all intentional. If/when the economy recovers and funding is flowing around, I predict we will see this huge boom in WFH companies, especially with startups. Unfortunately…

Economy will not recover to hire people. Tech companies will not be begging as all jobs will be in India and China.

Trump will outright win 2026 if he bans H-1Bs after this RTO charade and neither party would be able to oppose such a ban without fatal public outcry. With India choosing Russia over the US, there would be very little political backlash to wrecking their economy too. Huge unemployed force in the US to fill the gap too.

That is to say, if H-1Bs aren’t banned now, in what seem to be the most favorable possible conditions in history for such a thing, then they’re never getting banned.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#292

Post by yallpendantools »

aeternum wrote: post #275
johnnyanmac wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should know by now that all these RTO initiatives are not grounded in any reasonable logistics nor financial reasoning. Right now all of tech is in cut mode, and RTO's are a great way to do layoffs without calling them layoffs. Note that when Google got "too many" people RTO'ing, they did layoffs anyway. If your office does try to make things stricter, it's another layoff attempt. I don't think it will work, becau…

This theory is often-quoted but doesn't make much sense. Big tech including Microsoft already did multiple rounds of layoffs. Why not just do another round?

If you quit (because of, say, RTO) then you quit. It's a fairly standard deal between you and your employer.

If you get laid-off, employer has to give you a severance package for any number of reasons (local labor laws, agreement with the union, corporate PR). This is not a standard deal and is, simply put, more expensive than if the employee just quit of their own accord.

In both cases, employer gets the benefit of reduced head count.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#293

Post by SL61 »

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…

I think remote work gets increasingly hard to manage the larger a company gets.

My parents both worked for the same Fortune 500 company when COVID hit and the thousands of employees in their branch had to abruptly transition to WFH. Something like 10% of employees just disappeared, never to be heard from again. Lots of people who had been perfectly fine employees in the office ended up getting fired because with WFH they couldn't manage to stay at their desk and get their work done. That division of the company was seriously crippled for about six months.

My own job is with a small business that has been remote-only since before COVID and it's all been great. They've never even needed to "prune" anyone who abused remote work. I guess they're good at determining how reliable someone will be during interviews. We're all adults and there's a high level of trust that we're all doing our jobs, but the team is small enough that it would take a maximum of a single day to notice if someone is slacking.

But when the company gets really large, they sometimes have to manage to the lowest common denominator, and "we're all adults" becomes an increasingly shaky assumption. So I kind of understand where the anti-WFH CEOs are coming from if they were at the helm of a massive company and saw all kinds of chaos during COVID. But I also think small, geographically distributed teams can massively outperform if you hire the right people.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#294

Post by bingabingabinga »

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 the company enforces RTO at least stop using zoom for meetings. If that means offshored employees can't participate then so be it. Let them come to the office.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#296

Post by johnnyanmac »

outside1234 wrote: post #214

You just know this is disproportionately going to lead to women quitting too. Which we spent YEARS trying to recruit. Just the dumbest era to be alive. :)

Sorry, we don't have to pretend to care about DEI in 2025. You even get compliments for not doing so!

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#297

Post by dymk »

Aurornis wrote: post #206
neilv wrote: post #89

> Microsoft's new approach is the latest sign of the company increasing performance pressure on employees. It has fired thousands of employees deemed low performers this year and introduced a new performance improvement plan meant to exit low performers more quickly. Claims who? These also sound like typical sketchy headcount reduction tactics. Also, it's throwing employees under the bus, because the company is tarri…

I don't know. When a company uses RTO to reduce headcount they usually include all employees , with the expectation that those who live far away from the office will resign instead of relocate. If I'm reading this right, it only applies to people who already live within 50 miles of the office. Remote-remote employees are exempt.

How many employees do you think msft has that don’t live within that 50 mile radius? I’d bet it’s an incredibly small percentage.

They chose 50 miles because it’s big enough to cover almost everyone. I’m within that but my commute is two hours one direction.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#298

Post by esseph »

jimbob45 wrote: post #291
slaw wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economy will not recover to hire people. Tech companies will not be begging as all jobs will be in India and China.

Trump will outright win 2026 if he bans H-1Bs after this RTO charade and neither party would be able to oppose such a ban without fatal public outcry. With India choosing Russia over the US, there would be very little political backlash to wrecking their economy too. Huge unemployed force in the US to fill the gap too. That is to say, if H-1Bs aren’t banned now, in what seem to be the most favorable possible conditio…

Of course it's never getting banned

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#299

Post by Thiez »

nickff wrote: post #264
zero_shift wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead, it seems like CEOs see RTO as a way of getting rid of 'slackers' "Seems" is an interesting word, because if even you can't locate a rational motive, whilst attempting to apologise for RTO, and are just left making some guesses, then what am I supposed to infer except that this whole thing is based on suspicion, groupthink and anxiety? "The data is clear", trumpets Microsoft in their internal email. Then wh…

You seem to be demanding some proof of the RTO side, which is a reversion to the mean, while providing none for your own side. I see and hear people talking about all the non-work things they due while being paid, and am unsurprised that their managers suspect a negative impact on productivity.

Why do we rely on the managers suspicion if there is actual evidence? Why is the evidence not shared?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#300

Post by bingabingabinga »

wordofx wrote: post #241
deejaaymac wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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