Just like DEI, companies never believed their own rhetoric about WFH.
Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
541–550 of 969 posts
Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think CEO types simply believe (rightly or wrongly) that a large number of people are taking advantage of WFH to barely work.
I'd like to ask these CEOs, for people which are taking advantage of the system, why are they not let go? Could it be that management often have no clue how much value each employee brings to the team? Is RTO being mandated to avoid facing that uncomfortable truth?
Because their hiring process will just hire more employees who will take advantage of the system
Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
#543At $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 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…
I think there are a large number of competent but mostly checked-out engineers who will consistently work just enough to not get fired. If you want more productivity, you could raise the bar and fire a lot of people, but this also sucks and it creates a "hunger games" culture like at Amazon or Meta. I think a lot of those people actually will do more work if you make them sit in an office for 8 hours a day, since they have nothing better to do and there's immediate social pressure to work (unlike in their homes which presumably have many more pleasant activities available).
This isn't obvious to people who are highly disciplined and intrinsically motivated, since they actually get more done in the quiet environment of their home. But some people need the structure and social pressure of an office to get them to work. Your strategy could be "only hire highly disciplined and intrinsically motivated people", but you'll have to compete with everyone else for them, and they're expensive and less common than the other type. It's also hard to test for in an interview.
If you're really exceptional, they'll quietly let you WFH anyway.
Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
#544Does this mean they will pay us enough to live nearby?
Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not understand the real estate investor conspiracy theory. Why would it be better for vanguard if Microsoft paid rent to a real estate firm that managed office space, earned an X% profit margin, and then got taxed on the earnings before they were attributed to shareholders? It makes much more sense to take a bath on the office investments and have Microsoft pay the difference in dividends or buybacks. The net am…
I don't get why the various tax incentives and such (plus stealth layoffs) aren't enough to explain it. I've seen companies do some weird shit for those "X workers at location Y at least Z hours per year" tax incentives. I'd believe it's a major motivator for RTO (though probably somewhat behind the layoffs motivation)
The incentives don't pencil out. They don't make an entire separate corporate structure and several extra layers of taxation result in more money for investors instead of just... giving it to investors.
Why the push for RTO? The most simple and boring answer. Most people work and especially learn from each other better in-person than over Zoom and Slack. Practically zero people will try to pretend that remote school was great for the average student during covid, even at the university level. But for some reason everything inverts when it comes to work. I get that there are superperformers that work better in a closed room with zero interruptions ever and require little collaboration to do their jobs, and some students were 3 grade levels ahead during covid. But in a company of 200,000 people you have more average people than lone wolf superperformers, and so going in person is better than 200,000 slack pfps. Simplest yet most hated answer.
Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
#546Earlier 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..…
> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it I read it as the feeling that they know somehow that the employees are not putting in 100% of their attention at home on the work assigned. And i do believe it to be true - lots of people claim that WFH means they can "do the laundry" and/or go to the post office. The fact is that there's very few self-starters and intrinsically motivated employees. Most are…
You know what's a good way to make people less motivated? Impose useless corporate policies like having to go to the office, for no reason whatsoever.
> Most are just there for the pay cheque, and will do the minimum work that is required of them
That's just capitalism? Every player is supposed to optimise.
Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Looks cool. You work on this as an IC? And you genuinely like your job? What part of the stack are you in? Fellow ex-Googler, looking for an interesting systems programming role.
Kernel and drivers currently, hoping to move lower level to MCUs soon (i like that world more). My contact info is in my profile here, feel free to email. GM does not (as far as i know) have referral bonuses so i have no reason to oversell it :)
Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it I read it as the feeling that they know somehow that the employees are not putting in 100% of their attention at home on the work assigned. And i do believe it to be true - lots of people claim that WFH means they can "do the laundry" and/or go to the post office. The fact is that there's very few self-starters and intrinsically motivated employees. Most are…
> Not to mention the fact that it is indeed much harder to have collaborative discussions that are spontaneous and unplanned in a WFH setting, compared to the office. This is a culture thing that is easily fixed by mandating cameras on, buying everyone good microphones, and a consensus that you can ping someone with a question, go back and forth, and know that you aren't imposing by throwing a /zoom into the Slack DM…
So bring all the constant interruptions and inability to focus that is in the office at home as well?
The fact that you think is good tells me you're probably some kind of middle manager with too little actual work to do.
Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
RTO mandates are about many things, but actual business value of being in the office to the business doing the mandate is low on the list. Among the things it is about: (1) Executives with emotional attachment to certain leadership styles that are enabled by physical presence, (2) Interest in the investor class for the commercial real estate market. The business impacted may not be invested in it, but the businesses’…
2 and 3 aren't real. Nobody gives a damn about their shareholders other investments, and no one company has the numbers to save them anyway. And nobody is dumb enough to do RTO as a layoff proxy because anybody with a brain knows you're going to lose the people with options, who are exactly the people you don't want to lose. 1 is spot on.
You couldn't be more wrong, no evidence supports your assertions.
https://fortune.com/2024/07/24/return-to-office-mandates-lay... https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/its-offi... https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/12/why-rto-mandates-are-layoffs...
You are very ignorant of the real world.
Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
RTO mandates are about many things, but actual business value of being in the office to the business doing the mandate is low on the list. Among the things it is about: (1) Executives with emotional attachment to certain leadership styles that are enabled by physical presence, (2) Interest in the investor class for the commercial real estate market. The business impacted may not be invested in it, but the businesses’…
2 and 3 aren't real. Nobody gives a damn about their shareholders other investments, and no one company has the numbers to save them anyway. And nobody is dumb enough to do RTO as a layoff proxy because anybody with a brain knows you're going to lose the people with options, who are exactly the people you don't want to lose. 1 is spot on.
3 is real, this is what was behind Amazon’s RTO mandates. Its designed to ensure that people decide to quit.