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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

#351

Post by ivape »

hibikir wrote: post #338
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 fee…

They are going lose everyone soon as hiring picks up. Short sighted.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#352

Post by steveBK123 »

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-…

This is exactly the problem with a lot of the RTO push.. We are more geographically spread out than ever, and companies usually have, at best, 1/2 the conferences rooms required to actually collaborate properly.

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.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#353

Post by seriocomic »

Asooka wrote: post #268
nickff wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this idea that there is a 'CEO RTO mania' to be absurd; 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. Instead, it seems like CEOs see RTO as a way of getting rid of 'slackers', preventing people from multi-tasking while 'working', and in some cases increasing 'teamwork'. In any case, it makes sense to…

Yeah, WFH doesn't work because you can't smell each other over the network. We can transmit video and audio, but so far we can't replicate touch and smell over Zoom calls. Now, touch is obviously not needed, because touching your coworkers is against policy, but smell is really important. As the esteemed researcher Mya S. Smith has shown, people who work emit a specific pheromone, known as the "Busy Efficient Employe…

Don't laugh, but in my org we have a bi-annual "Hive Week" where all Product/Tech (two sub-orgs) bring all the 'bees' home to Office Central for a week of, um, collaboration?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#354

Post by stogot »

hibikir wrote: post #338
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 fee…

Sounds like Dell?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#355

Post by somanyphotons »

peab wrote: post #330
nickff wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this idea that there is a 'CEO RTO mania' to be absurd; 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. Instead, it seems like CEOs see RTO as a way of getting rid of 'slackers', preventing people from multi-tasking while 'working', and in some cases increasing 'teamwork'. In any case, it makes sense to…

100% this. remote work is great for some people, but it's definitely taken advantage by a others. And those who take advantage ruin it for everybody. I literally have friends who have bragged about how good their mouse jiggler is.

> mouse jiggler

Are they really collecting stats on mouse movements? If they were they'd surely detect these predictable movements

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#356

Post by titanomachy »

lobf wrote: post #135
SilverElfin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deaths are one problem, but they may also not be distributed evenly. Some cities or states have more issues on public transit than others. But also you can still be a victim of assault, harassment, theft, and other issues on public transit. 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. So it doesn’t tell the full story of what…

>Some cities or states have more issues on public transit than others. 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 tr…

I think people in this thread (and elsewhere) are using "unsafe" to mean "I feel uncomfortable" rather than "there's a serious chance that harm will come to me".

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.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#357

Post by the_gipsy »

steveBK123 wrote: post #350
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…

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..…

> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it

omg that explains so many things!

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#358

Post by alexashka »

steveBK123 wrote: post #350
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…

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..…

> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it

Chef's kiss.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#359

Post by tomhow »

wordofx wrote: post #228
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…

[flagged]

You could express this view without breaking the guidelines or dragging down the standard of discourse here. The guidelines address this specifically:

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#360

Post by vel0city »

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…

Where's the office? The bike ride through some parks like my last? A ten minute drive in surface streets? A 20 minute rail ride away? A half hour drive on crowded highways?

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.

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