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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

#811

Post by Tostino »

cebert wrote: post #660
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The platforms give reports to managers on idle time. If the manager is lazy and uses just that as an indicator of if someone is working or not then it's an easy metric to game.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#812

Post by moregrist »

lan321 wrote: post #618
olivermuty wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well RTO mandate means you lose ONLY the good people with other options or make the people with no options have animosity since the deal was changed

Being willing to switch employer for convenience does not make someone a good worker and it's not like bad hires can't change employer. I'm guessing the best employee would be someone who hates change and is financially illiterate. Never asks for a raise, works in the same company, does the same thing for 30 years for the same money.

> Being willing to switch employer for convenience does not make someone a good worker and it's not like bad hires can't change employer.

Your comment is really quite out of touch of how layoffs actually affect people.

I’ve been through a few rounds now. Morale is essentially destroyed in the short term. Your team suddenly has a lot more work with no additional support or even acknowledgement that people are now slammed.

It’s not inconvenience. It’s a significantly negative change in the work environment, and a sign that maybe your company’s long-term prospects aren’t great. Of course good people leave in these situations.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#813

Post by thinkharderdev »

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’…

My personal pet theory (based on no evidence other than personal experience) is that, if your job is in senior management then your day-to-day work is going to meetings. And spending 8-10h on zoom meetings every day is unbelievably soul-crushing.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#814

Post by lucumo »

rob74 wrote: post #701
aurareturn wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(4) In person teams outperform remote/hybrid teams. I'm surprised this was not mentioned as a possibility.

What's also not mentioned is that in multinational companies, especially since remote working became more widespread and attracting talent more difficult, teams are often made up of people from different locations anyway. So you won't have an in-person team, you'll just be joining Zoom (or in M$'s case, probably Teams) calls from the office rather than from home.

My org went for RTO two or three years ago. This year they've also started cutting locations from teams that are too distributed: you can either move or you can leave. There will still be a lot of people living on Teams, but a lot less, and mostly just management layers.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#815

Post by RHSeeger »

tucnak wrote: post #739
RHSeeger wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You /s, but that's actually a fair point - Some people work better at home, away from the office - Some people work better in the office, with their co-workers around them Those two facts are at direct odds with each other. It's unfortunate, but you can't give both groups what they want.

The downvotes are all from guys remote-moonlighting three separate FAANG jobs, each paying out hundred grand a year. They can afford it!

Regardless of someone's stand on the topic of remote vs in-office, I find it staggering that _anyone_ could believe that either one of them is the one-true-way. There's downsides to both and either decision is likely to make at least some of the participants unhappy.

I'm firmly on the WFH end of things; I much less productive in an office. But I know other people that are better in the office with the ability to talk things over with co-workers in person. And the fact that I'm not there makes it harder for them (and easier for me; tradeoffs)

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#816

Post by realusername »

blacklion wrote: post #762
realusername wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends of your company, I personally meet my team roughly every 3 months and I push back any task on the calendar because I know the days in the office aren't even half the productivity of the usual remote days. I even avoid big deployments during these days. Remote is usually all focused work and the office time is mostly coffee chats and random interruptions of unrelated subjects because on how much easier it is t…

Open space is PURE EVIL. Don't have fixed working place where you could leave your headphones (and external DAC in my case), cup, charging wires for your gadgets (not everything is USB-C still), some papers, etc is PURE EVIL too. Combined together it is ninth circle of hell. Never worked in open space and refused (otherwise good) offers twice due to open space in office. Culture in which everybody can ping anybody at…

Well sure I do agree but I've never seen a tech company which isn't working in an open space. The non open-space companies feel even more rare than the remote ones.

So when you compare remote productivity, that's what you have to compare with.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#817

Post by JustExAWS »

sokoloff wrote: post #698
JustExAWS wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll give some real world numbers. Right now I make a little over $200K. I am 51, never struck it rich in tech and make the same as former intern I mentored when I was in BigTech between 2020-2023 and when they got back. They got promoted to an L5 (mid level) earlier this year at 25. We both worked in the Professional Services department. I’ve said no to opportunities that would have paid $250K - 280K that would have…

> I can honestly say there is no amount of money that would convince me to go to an office. I enjoy remote work quite a bit (after thinking I'd hate it). There is absolutely an amount of money that would convince me to take an in-office job though...

More money would do absolutely nothing for me if I had to exchange it for remote work except make my life worse in every way.

I couldn’t spend the time with my 81 and 83 year old parents, I wouldn’t have nearly the amount of time with wife, I couldn’t spend months away from home.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#818

Post by MontyCarloHall »

cebert wrote: post #660
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It’s less about gaming metrics and more about keeping up appearances. The sort of person who uses a mouse jiggler is constantly absent from their computer to a degree that anyone who interacts with them would implicitly notice “huh, this person is literally never online” versus “this person takes a while to respond to messages, they must be busy.”

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#819

Post by devnullbrain »

doom2 wrote: post #148
OptionOfT wrote: post #98

50 miles is a lot. That can easily be 2h in most big cities. To do what exactly? Sit in an open office in Redmond, jump on Teams to call with someone in Fort Lauderdale? Funny thing, I had multiple interviews with them on explicit remote roles (which are different from roles that went remote during COVID). I wonder if the policy changes there.

I live about 100 miles from NYC, which is 2-2.5 hours by car but only 1.5 hours by train. I think that that would be considered an acceptable commute time for companies with a hybrid work plan. However, every time I ask recruiters from NYC-based companies if their commute subsidy would cover the train, I get told employees have to live within a 50 mile radius of the office. Like you said, that could be 2 hours by car…

Agreed, it's hard to understand how much easier commuting by train is until you've done it. YMMV if your local service sucks.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#820

Post by hylaride »

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…

But you tend to lose your most capable employees when you create a bad/undesirable/etc work environment. I think people are attributing malice where the intent is merely...not incompetence, but it's what everybody else is doing. People forget that business goes through fashionable phases just like everything else. Microsoft fell victim to idiotic trends (stack-ranking, AI, etc) just like everybody else has.
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