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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

#631

Post by timmg »

whinvik wrote: post #586

Threads like these are always one sided with people against RTO. What I would really like to see is arguments from the other side. Can someone steelman RTO. Preferably with evidence, anecdotal or otherwise.

I don’t know the reason, nor do I have proof of anything. But: to me this is a great time to consider Occam’s Razor.

Executives seem to (mostly) universally want people to RTO. Why would they?

They obviously have lots of data. If it was bad for productivity, why would they do it?

Answers seem to be things like “power trip” or “need to justify real estate”. I’m pretty sure most companies would save money by giving up their leases. Maybe they are all having power trips, but irrational behavior from leaders won’t win out in the long run.

My observation from my time is that, likely: some people are really good at getting stuff done at home. But most probably get less done. And I suspect the leaders find this in their data.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#632

Post by throwsep10 »

jimbob45 wrote: post #291
slaw wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economy will not recover to hire people. Tech companies will not be begging as all jobs will be in India and China.

Trump will outright win 2026 if he bans H-1Bs after this RTO charade and neither party would be able to oppose such a ban without fatal public outcry. With India choosing Russia over the US, there would be very little political backlash to wrecking their economy too. Huge unemployed force in the US to fill the gap too. That is to say, if H-1Bs aren’t banned now, in what seem to be the most favorable possible conditio…

[dead]

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#633

Post by throwaway2037 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #369
the_gipsy wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it omg that explains so many things!

The way these people think - if employees like it, it must be a perk/benefit. Therefore with the current job market we don’t need to be generous with it. Related - JPMorgan is opening a new HQ with a big nice gym, and plan to charge employees to use it, lol. Thanks I’ll just leave the building Jamie.

I saw a few clickbait articles highlighting that JPMorgan's new world headquarters in Manhattan (270 Park Ave) has a gym but will charge employees to use it. Why is this so interesting? I have worked in many different tall office buildings in my career. I saw a variety of setups: (1) company gym, (2) third party gym, (3) no gym. You always had to pay a fee to use the gym. Why does requiring employees to pay trigger such a hostile reaction from people? Also, the people working in this specific building are very well paid. They can easily afford the fees. Some other points that people don't mention: If it was free, it might be overloaded. That building is expected to have 14,000 employees! Also, no gym can possibly provide everything that everyone wants. In Manhattan, you are spoiled for choice with gyms.

I am sure that a few people will reply to say: If the gym were free, then more people would use it, and the company would benefit from lower healthcare costs. (Specific to the US: Most large corporations are self-insured for healthcare, but use third party providers to administer the programme.) Maybe so, but difficult to prove. If that is true, the company should also provide healthy lunches, etc. The list goes on and on. And Internet randos will have a never ending list of things that a "good company" must do for their employees.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#634

Post by ponector »

neves wrote: post #446
keeda wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 on…

There's just one solution: unionize. As you can see, your bosses already did.

Can you unionize your offshore teams? Oh wait, that was one of the reasons to move your jobs overseas...

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#635

Post by aurareturn »

dragonwriter wrote: post #513
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…

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’…

(4) In person teams outperform remote/hybrid teams.

I'm surprised this was not mentioned as a possibility.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#636

Post by throwaway2037 »

anon22981 wrote: post #510
chii wrote: post #480

Earlier 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…

Those lazy employees need that strict supervision! Maybe these c suites and other employee hating assholes are projecting their own lazyness. Or maybe they think they are so superior compared to ”common” people that the ”common” people must be lazy trash. I don’t know, but it is weird to assume most people won’t do their job without ”strict supervision”. Like super weird. (Btw, anecdotally, most people I know work mo…

    > Those lazy employees need that strict supervision!
This comment is a bit reactionary. It would be more balanced to say that lower motivation employees will benefit from a more structured working environment.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#637

Post by holowoodman »

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 guessing that there is a difference between "offshoring, while still having the offshore people picked and employed by you" (let's call it "pure offshoring") and "offshoring and outsourcing to a local company" (let's call it "outsourcing to offshore").

With pure offshoring, you do have control over who you pick, what their mode of work is, whom to fire, etc.

With outsourcing to offshore, the local company hires people, usually on the cheap, to only just fullfill your contract and no more. If people underperform, you may complain, and maybe they'll be moved to a less prominent and visible role, or maybe they'll be shuffled to the next customer of theirs. So things will be bad, because it is not in the interest of the local company to do one iota more than necessary. And you'll still have to have your own QA, architects, etc., to make sure you at least get what you paid for.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#638

Post by otikik »

guiriduro wrote: post #570
otikik wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just (3)

Two things about backdoor layoffs. Mostly its about who. When its corporate dictat, those most likely to leave are those with other options, ie the best talent. So sure a business might save on severances in aggregate, but it doesn't get to decide on who, but simple statistics show it will be the best who move on. So a demoralised and increasingly mediocre workforce is then faced with a much tougher hiring environmen…

"My bonus is tied to making the line go up this quarter"

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#639

Post by throwaway2037 »

chii wrote: post #480
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..…

> 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…

    > lots of people claim that WFH means they can "do the laundry" and/or go to the post office
I mostly work from the office. Since the end of COVID-19, my teams are always mixed where some people WFH. One issue that I frequently encounter: People do their chores at random times in the middle of day, so frequently you cannot corral a group of people to quickly discuss something. In the office, this is trivial: Turn around in your chair. Over time, I find that I reach out to WFH staff less and less and work more closely with in-office teammates. I'm not rewarded for overcoming this friction with WFH teammates, so why would I try?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#640

Post by aurareturn »

QuiEgo wrote: post #519

Personal observations: - There are times when in-person collaboration is invaluable. - There are times when having quiet focus time alone is invaluable. - Every team and job is different. Sitting on Zoom all day in an open office full of strangers doesn't make sense. Getting blocked because I bricked my proto board and I need a tech to rework it but I'm wfh and the tech is wfh and now we have to do a mail dance and b…

Hybrid is the worst of both worlds. Go into the office just to sit in a Zoom call.
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