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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

#721

Post by farceSpherule »

Microsoft, like other tech companies, over hired during COVID. This is their way of fixing that glitch while lessening the financial burden of severance packages handed out during layoffs.

It's a standard McKinsey & Co. playbook that is going around the various tech companies as a way to reduce headcount.

And, productivity is going to tank. If you force me to RTO, I will show up exactly at 8am, take my 1 hour lunch away from the office, and leave exactly at 5pm. And, when I do leave the office at 5pm, my work phone gets turned off and I will not do anything work related until 8am the next morning.

You would think these tech companies would do something innovative. A f*cking monkey can cut costs by firing people. How about you stop over hiring? How about you stop leasing building space and use the products you create that enable remote collaboration?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#722

Post by wiseowise »

non_aligned wrote: post #484
t-writescode wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the people more productive at home because they have less overall life stress, no pain of commute, disabilities which make commute painful or hard, etc. And I suspect that’s a *LOT* more people than you’re giving credit. To be very clear, I’m in that group, and probably so. Several engineers I’ve worked with are in that group, as well. I suspect it’s actually quite common in software.

I honestly don't think this shows in the data. As a software engineer, I really want to believe it, but I think we're prone to confusing well-being with productivity. We feel better about the work, but if you try to quantify it in any imaginable way, it's not there. Not in launch velocity, not in the number of pull requests, not the number of design docs created, bugs fixed, etc... Of course, all of these metrics are…

If you are delivering same output while being happier that’s by definition increased productivity.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#723

Post by alchemism »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #573
dragonwriter wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was very clear, I thought, when I said “RTO mandates are about...”, that I was not saying “All of these factors are relevant to Microsoft”. With Microsoft its probably mostly (3), with maybe some degree of (2), with (1) maybe, especially in the political salience, being a plus in the eyes of some decision-makers but not really driving the decision. There are firms (and public agencies) where the relationship betwee…

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?

The City of Philadelphia sent all of its workers back to the office with an explicit statement from the Mayor about struggling commercial office real estate in the city center. They may not be "running the country" but they are definitely heavyweight players in the market.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#725

Post by wiseowise »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #436

What always shocks me on these threads is the naiveté a bunch of Über privileged tech workers have about the job market in general. This is it folks. Corp screws you when they can. Welcome to the machine. For most working people, showing up at the office (or place of work) is the absolute minimum requirement. People here seem to talk about what legal right a company has to let people go just because they didnt want t…

> If you go to a restaurant, do you worry about how many hours the waiter, the chef, etc had to travel in the morning to put food in your face?

I don’t give a shit how long they work a day and from where, as long as I have food my plate.

If they could deliver food from their home, I would certainly take this option over forcing them into the restaurant kitchen.

Knowledge workers do not have to be in the office to deliver value, period.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#726

Post by wiseowise »

aurareturn wrote: post #711
wiseowise wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you “see” anyone else as a top employee - you’re not a top employee by definition. Literally all, without exception, top employees that I saw in my career never gave a single shit about anyone else besides themselves.

Really? The top employees I saw in my career had the ability to both lead others and be competent in individual tasks.

Ability to lead others is caring whether Lizz the Frizz is not delivering up to someone’s standards?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#727

Post by throwaw12 »

simoncion wrote: post #675
throwaw12 wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things which might be contributing to the RTO in my opinion: 1. Showing up. Practically speaking, when you're at home, you can do whatever you want (sleep, watch TV, work sometimes), while delivering stellar result for the company, but when you're in the office there is a chance you will deliver your stellar results and additionally contribute more, because you literally can't watch TV and take a nap. 2. Some leaders…

> ...when you're in the office there is a chance you will deliver your stellar results and additionally contribute more, because you literally can't watch TV and take a nap. I see you've never seen many Silicon Valley software companies. Couches and comfortable chairs are a not-infrequent sight in the trendy open-plan offices, as are folks sleeping, reading, or otherwise slacking off atop them.

it's not about missing amenities, it's about pressure from your peers and additional eyes in the office to make you work.

At home you can literally spend whole day in front of TV and work a little, in the office you can as well watch TV, but not consistently, every day for full day.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#728

Post by lupusreal »

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]

Trump is probaby too senile to even know what RTO is, and even if he does, I'm pretty sure he doesn't own Microsoft's office buildings. And the premise that Microsoft would let themselves get bullied into RTO, causing a lot of their best employees to quit, without raising a public stink about it? Far fetched.

This is the doing of Microsoft's own leadership, not Trump.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#729

Post by devnullbrain »

lukasschwab wrote: post #218
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…

> An RTO mandate is also an excellent thing for a CEO to show investors they are doing, if they are not making money and lack better ideas. I think of Jeffrey Pfeffer's "social contagion" arguments a lot — first with regards to layoffs[^1], but increasingly also to RTO policies and tracked AI use. It seems very unlikely execs (esp. in small organizations) are taking the time to read and seriously evaluate research ab…

>the normal behavior shareholders expect.

And for each CEO, those shareholders are mostly the same people.

It's easy to get sucked into thinking this is just the way the world works but really we've just enshrined a local and temporal phenomenon. Layoffs aren't a physical law. There are places and times where this would not happen.

Let me put my investor hat on: hiring at the top and firing at the bottom is a predictable inefficiency and represents a CEO failing at their responsibilities. You don't get to be a CEO and claim ignorance of market cycles.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#730

Post by steveBK123 »

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…

It's called performance management.

If middle management can't figure it out for remote or in-office employees, they need a new line of work.

The people that are slackers at home have low output in the office and are probably the annoying gabber distracting the rest of the team in-office.

Collective punishment isn't a solution, and the best will walk.

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