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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

#341

Post by neilv »

Aurornis wrote: post #220
neilv wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, in combination with possible constructive dismissal, the company is possibly defaming the employees in a way that predictably adversely affects their ability to gain new employment. And there may be other potential problems that aren't apparent to me, since I'm not a lawyer. 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…

> the company is possibly defaming the employees in a way that predictably adversely affects their ability to gain new employment. And there may be other potential problems that aren't apparent to me, since I'm not a lawyer. 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.

> 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?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#342

Post by cesarb »

rjsw wrote: post #195
jbm wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, honestly my whole karma score is built from pithy comments about Teams. 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 goo…

Given that Teams doesn't work in anything other than Chrome, I would hope that it didn't crash all the time.

> Given that Teams doesn't work in anything other than Chrome

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).

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#343

Post by dmitrygr »

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…

Come join GM (formerly Cruise) ADAS org. We are hiring. Work is pretty cool at every level from kernel and drivers to userspace linux to frameworks, to ML. And, as long as you are >50 mi from detroit, you are going to be fully remote. Pay is good. People are good.

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.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#344

Post by llbbdd »

mikewarot wrote: post #249
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.

This assumes productive work in a highly collaborative environment. Meetings aren't usually any of those things. The rest can be done remotely.

The idea that meetings of all things are the part we need to be physically present for is hilarious

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#345

Post by typewithrhythm »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #252
fzeroracer wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offshoring always ends in disaster, companies have tried this time and time again but the end result is an awful product that requires more money to fix than they needed to make it in the first place. 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 m…

Offshoring might frequently be a disaster. On the other hand, Microsoft and the rest of FAANG and other large tech companies have had overseas development centers staffed by full fledged FTEs for many years now with, as far as anyone can tell, success. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any reason they couldn't expand those.

I'm not sure if it actually is working out, or if the companies outsourcing are just absorbing the inefficiency.

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).

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#346

Post by bwestergard »

dan-robertson wrote: post #311
ponector wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> where it comes from 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 becau…

A big difference between feudalism and modern societies is that in feudalism, you expect to earn much less than the value of the land you inherit and pass on (or the custom or right of your family farming the land) whereas in modern societies most people will earn much more in lifetime earnings than they would inherit or pass on. This results in far more social mobility and much more freedom in praxis. I don’t think…

There was no market in land, so land could not have a monetary value in feudalism proper.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#348

Post by _mu »

jleyank wrote: post #234

It’s hard on two professional couples, as it’s not always easy or even possible to find two jobs in many areas. But such couples tend to be older and we all know how that goes down in the biz. Especially if they’ve committed parenthood.

> committed parenthood.

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!"

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#349

Post by typewithrhythm »

incone123 wrote: post #4

Are they going to claim remote working is to blame for the unpopularity of Windows 11? Maybe getting together in the office will help come up with better ideas than just more ads and telemetry?

More likely they have decided popularity is irrelevant since they are so entrenched, so may as well try to find the cheapest possible maintenance engineer to manage the value extraction.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#350

Post by steveBK123 »

ponector wrote: post #222
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…

>> where it comes from 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 becau…

My friend is CTO of a smaller company say ~250 people, and RTO constantly comes up in the C-suite.

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.

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