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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

#651

Post by throwaway2037 »

al_borland wrote: post #333
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…

Several years before the pandemic I was forced to move several states away after my local office was shutdown and the company was looking to force everyone to a few larger offices. It didn’t make any sense. Within my little 10 person team, we had people in 5 states and at least 2 counties, spanning multiple time zones. I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day. I saw very little point to being in the…

    > I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day.
I am curious: What was your job? Sales? Support?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#652

Post by cebert »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #617
lucketone wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I solve problems, I need text, I need diagrams, I need demos (i.e. screen sharing). I don’t need faces, unless I’m interrogating somebody.

> I .. I .. I.. I.. I.. In all seriousness: you've outlined what you need. Perhaps you should reflect on what any collaborator needs.

Why does anyone need to see my face. Work is transactional. Few if any coworkers are actually your friend. We’re getting paid to get a job done.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#653

Post by throwaway2037 »

slaw wrote: post #269
johnnyanmac wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. In this economy, you can't even make a company, let alone profess their benefits. This is all intentional. If/when the economy recovers and funding is flowing around, I predict we will see this huge boom in WFH companies, especially with startups. Unfortunately…

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

    > all jobs will be in India
I have been hearing this since the mid 1990s. If this were true, why does Silicon Valley exist at all? Why hasn't it all moved to somewhere cheap in India?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#654

Post by philipallstar »

holowoodman wrote: post #615
freddie_mercury wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No CEO cares about commercial real estate profits. It isn't a factor in any major company decision. Why not extend the baseless paranoia and say it is because they want to see auto company profits go up? And also support petroleum companies? Or is it just real estate that is boogeyman secretly running the country behind the scenes?

[flagged]

> and his phallic replacement tower

All towers can be called phallic, my deranged friend.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#655

Post by testaburger » 

  1) until the fed lowers interest rates (and thus makes it easier for small to mid size companies to bring on more employees), hriing will be nowhere near the peak of 2022? where employees had all of the leverage
  2) trump tarrif's are probably limiting the ability of the fed to do serious interest rate cuts needed to spur hiring
  3) on top of this, AI is imo undoubtedly reducing demand in tech hires (esp. software engineers, but soon most white collar fields imo), something that wasn't the case just a couple of years ago.
  4) the latest US revision just showed a downward revision of 1 million less employed than previously posted over the last year or so, last month(?) was revised to job losses and the msot recent job month was basically flat as well.
  5) an arguement can be made that RTO, while crappy, greatly benefits cities by forcing a lot of highly paid tech workers to commute downtown, helping restaurant workers, cleaners (sorry the proper term escapes me at the moment), and other workers in support roles for offices keep their jobs (the spike in SF homeless during covid was caused by a big spike in high earning tech workers  suddently working remotely causing layoff in these office reliant industries).
In summary, employee leverage is really non existent in this climate, and you should think long and hard about quitting out of emotion. If you want long term freedom, your only hope is to take a big risk and start something on your own, with the added risk of now knowing that the job you left might not be there should you fail either because of AI or company layoffs/hiring freezes (greatly increasing your risk vs normal times). I've been long term unemployed in the past and I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemies in terms of how much stress can impact your life, and how it can easily wreck your sense of self-worth and self-confidence (luckily have been doing relatively great in the past few years).

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#656

Post by throwaway2037 »

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-…

If you are so miserable, are you looking for a new job that will allow WFH? I think that is the solution. Also, did you ask your line manager if you can WFH more often? That is a first step. If they say no, they go and find a new job.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#657

Post by throwaway2037 »

yallpendantools wrote: post #292
aeternum wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This theory is often-quoted but doesn't make much sense. Big tech including Microsoft already did multiple rounds of layoffs. Why not just do another round?

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…

    > 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.
I don't think this is true in the US. And severance packages are cheaper than you think. Most people only get a couple of months of pay.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#658

Post by amelius »

linguae wrote: post #394
bluGill wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad I live in the midwest. Every story I hear about working in the bay area makes me wonder why anyone would.

For highly-specialized engineers and researchers, there’s often only a tiny handful of companies they could work for that offer jobs in their specialties. For example, if you’re a compilers expert, there are only so many companies that hire compiler developers, whether it’s working on a commercial compiler like Microsoft Visual Studio or contributing to an open-source project such as LLVM (Apple is a major contributo…

Didn't Apple buy the CPU/GPU tech? I suppose the actual team could be located elsewhere.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#660

Post by cebert »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #430
somanyphotons wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It keeps your Slack/Teams/etc. status as online. These apps will display your status as away if they detect that the computer appears idle (i.e. no mouse/keyboard inputs).

Are there really managers to constantly look at their report’s online presence indicator to determine if they’re being productive or not? What if they’re whiteboard or having an ad-hoc conversation that RTO advocates value so much?
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