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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

#411

Post by johnnyanmac »

itake wrote: post #378
yallpendantools wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes… but they are asking why now? Why did Microsoft start with traditional layoffs and then transition into RTO layoffs years later?

Hard to say. Different regions will have different "tools" to use. For a large round, it's probably because they need to cut a lot of staff ASAP or because they have the offshoring ready to replace them. Paying them off is best in those situations.

If you need to fine cut a few particular teams then poking it with an RTO is better than giving them a severance package. This is all conjecture, but that's probably what those up top are considering with every move.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#412

Post by moralestapia »

Anon1096 wrote: post #238
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.

As a salaried employee there is no "salaried time." You're paid for your output not the time spent on it. This goes especially true for Microsoft where lots of people put in far less than a 40hr workweek. Literally no one bats an eye at arriving at the office late so if you want to start your commute at 9 and include that in your "working hours" no one would care.

[flagged]

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#413

Post by johnnyanmac »

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]

I have a more moderate view on RTO elsewhere in this post, so I'm not someone who things WFH is always the best approach. But for now, I have yet to see any study suggest that RTO is more productive across the board all the time.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#414

Post by tjr »

moralestapia wrote: post #406
SoftTalker wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is, I get more done at the office than at home. And if I’m dressed professionally, I get more done and I get better responses from others than when I’m wearing shorts and a tee shirt. I’d prefer to work from home wearing pajamas but I can sympathize with why my employer wants me in the office and may even have a dress code. Be glad you didn’t work in the development office of a bank in the 1990s, you’…

>And if I’m dressed professionally, I get more done and I get better responses from others than when I’m wearing shorts and a tee shirt. Are you a butler? No offense. No one in tech would give two f...s about what you're wearing when you push git commits.

For some people, what they wear has an impact on their own performance. It's not necessarily about how others perceive them, and it's not necessarily logical. Some people work better with music, or with a window to look out... some people work better in fancier attire.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#415

Post by moralestapia »

tjr wrote: post #414
moralestapia wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And if I’m dressed professionally, I get more done and I get better responses from others than when I’m wearing shorts and a tee shirt. Are you a butler? No offense. No one in tech would give two f...s about what you're wearing when you push git commits.

For some people, what they wear has an impact on their own performance. It's not necessarily about how others perceive them, and it's not necessarily logical. Some people work better with music, or with a window to look out... some people work better in fancier attire.

>and I get better responses from others than when I’m wearing shorts and a tee shirt.

Did you not read the last part of the sentence?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#416

Post by losteric »

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…

> Big corpo is a modern feodal state, where CEO is an emperor, c-suites are kings, managers are barons

Why do people forget about board members and shareholders?

There's a lot of overlap among the rich. I doubt Satya "wants" to RTO. I would suspect board members / shareholders with real estate interests are forcing the policy. (eg Vanguard holds 10%, with Blackrock close behind).

Big corpo is a feudal state, in the sense of complex incestuous power dynamics. It's oversimplifying to call CEOs emperors.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#418

Post by keeda »

myth2018 wrote: post #373
steveBK123 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

> 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 This also explains other things, not only RTO. Like when the mass layoffs started about three years ago. Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output. That was enough for many smaller companies, some of them understaffed,…

> Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output.

The part that's always glossed over in this narrative is that the remaining workers were forced to pick up the slack to keep up the output ("do more with less") which resulted in toxic work cultures. Ask any employees across BigTech companies and they'll tell you of this happening everywhere all at once -- formerly collaborative environments suddenly becoming cut-throat and competitive; high pressure and unreasonable goals for delivery; hiring being scaled back (except in offshore teams!) and new candidates being severely downleveled compared to their experience.

This was not a coincidence; Sure, there were slackers scattered everywhere, but the waves of layoffs were completely disproportional to that. The real intention was to bring the labor market, overheated during Covid and ZIRP, back under control (a power play, as other comments indicate.) And who better than Elon to signal that change with his shenanigans at Twitter.

If it seems surprising that output was not impacted (although I would argue a close look at Twitter shows the opposite) one just needs to look at the record levels of burnout being reported:

https://leaddev.com/culture/engineering-burnout-rising-2025-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2025/02/08/job-bu...

https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/workplace-burnout-in-2025-...

https://thehill.com/lobbying/5325471-burnout-erupts-among-pr...

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#419

Post by rootusrootus »

dmitrygr wrote: post #343
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.

I read things like this and wish that when I was doing my masters at OMSCS I had focused more on ML. What I wouldn't give to work in a shop that was actually building something cool.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#420

Post by scarface_74 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #408
scarface_74 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). Unless you signed your contract in California before 1872, when you signed your contract, non competes were already illegal in California. I challenge you to find any citation in any contract written by any BigTech company where legal would ever let them…

>I challenge you to find any citation in any contract written by any BigTech company where legal would ever let them put in a contract that they guarantee that you will never have to work in an office. Why do you assume I have access to every employee's contract? Have you never negotiated terms? I don't have someone's direct contract but I worked directly with two people who had very particular stipulations for when…

Because some things are common sense. Instead of wasting time and money chasing windmills and hoping your family lawyer can beat a multi trillion dollar company, you are much better off spending your time and energy looking for another job if you want to work remotely. When I go into “job search” mode which I have done 10 times in 30 years. My focus isn’t on my current or former employee.

Do you think a lawyer would be necessary if your contract outright stated that you never had to go into an office?

Besides that, every single contract I’ve signed said that nothing said outside of the contract is legally binding.

And legal is very (small c) conservative, they aren’t going to go through the trouble of making a special contract for random employee #1256374 everything is very standardized at these companies except for very high level executives. They are “common talent”. You really have a high opinion of BigTech employees if you think they are “special talent”.

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