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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

#331

Post by hsuduebc2 »

Forcing people back into the office for no real reason is just a power play from middle management trying to justify their pointless existence. What really bothers them is not culture or collaboration, it is that nobody is sucking up to them, because it is usually done in person and not on Teams. When they are not sitting in the same section as their peons pretending to boost efficiency and hard work, it becomes obvious that people can manage perfectly fine without them.

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.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#332

Post by rincebrain »

carstenhag wrote: post #179
boringg wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also -- why is Teams such trash? It can barely fulfill its core responsibility.

I used to say the same, but now I have to use Slack + Gmail + Meet + Google Calendar + Drive + whatever else Google has. 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,…

My general assumption when I see something that insane is

- 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.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#333

Post by al_borland »

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…

Several years before the pandemic I was forced to move several states away after my local office was shutdown and the company was looking to force everyone to a few larger offices. It didn’t make any sense. Within my little 10 person team, we had people in 5 states and at least 2 counties, spanning multiple time zones. I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day. I saw very little point to being in the office. If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office. The whole thing was madness.

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.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#335

Post by ghostpepper »

al_borland wrote: post #333
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…

Several years before the pandemic I was forced to move several states away after my local office was shutdown and the company was looking to force everyone to a few larger offices. It didn’t make any sense. Within my little 10 person team, we had people in 5 states and at least 2 counties, spanning multiple time zones. I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day. I saw very little point to being in the…

> If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office.

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".

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#336

Post by hervature »

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.

Why does Liquid do the RWF in person then?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#337

Post by unclad5968 »

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…

I would never take less pay to work from home. Im good with working in office or at home. Also, Im doing the same job either way, so I'm not sure why I'd be paid differently one way or the other. If anything, I'd think it's more expensive (insignificantly) for the company to give me a desk.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#338

Post by hibikir »

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…

I know of a certain large company I will not name that is sending people back to office while also having a huge percentage of staff augmentation consultants living outside of the US. So you can find teams that have two people in the office, working side by side with another 10 people in the team that are remote, and interacting with teams that might be a 7, 8 timezones away.

You can imagine how well those people feel about RTO, and how it helps their collaboration.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#339

Post by johnnyanmac »

scarface_74 wrote: post #288
johnnyanmac wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 contr…

>Were you really confused by “your contract” at any job?

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.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#340

Post by saagarjha »

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…

There are plenty of books that explain that you can have a Hollywood actor boyfriend too. How many people does this actually happen to successfully?
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