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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

#821

Post by [deleted] »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #409
Aurornis wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question isn't very revealing because it almost entirely depends on this one variable: > maybe I am even in a privileged position financially; but at this moment in my life I would rather quit my job Someone closer to retirement with a lot of savings and low expenses will have a completely different answer than a younger person with low savings and a family. The second variable it depends on is their current sal…

There is also the unknown future. How stable is this remote-pay-discount bargain opportunity? If the company goes bust and you need to RTO, you need to live in a market with employment options.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#822

Post by steveBK123 »

tpxl wrote: post #558
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…

Daily reminder that if a manager can't tell if their employees are effective working from home, that manager is incompetent. There are a million ways to check if someone is actually working, and butt-in-seat isn't one of them.

Also given many orgs are distributed across buildings, cities, and countries.. a manager admitting they need to physically see butts in seats is telling on themselves re: ability to do their job.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#823

Post by RajT88 »

o1bf2k25n8g5 wrote: post #569
kamaal wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Be glad you didn’t work in the development office of a bank in the 1990s, you’d be expected to wear a suit and tie to work. Priorities matter. I worked for a India IT services firm that mandated neck ties. They would even enforce it with fines. Eventually we saw the whole company had been reduced to these cosmetic pedantry about neck ties, badge-in/out times etc. Nobody every got anything done, because this was all…

Were bow ties acceptable? What about Bolo ties?

Did women have to wear ties too?

Were garish father's day ties acceptable?

Was wearing a tie as a rambo style headband a firable offense at office parties?

I have many questions.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#824

Post by hylaride »

fzeroracer wrote: post #217
ponector wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is always an answer to unionizing and other demands: hiring freeze plus offshoring overseas. Eventually even unionized people will be replaced with offshore buddies.

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 can be a success, but because most companies do it for cost reasons, they focus on cost over everything. Outsourcing to India can be cheaper than setting up shop in the western world for relatively equivalent results, but most companies will head to the cheapest outsourcers in India AND not set up the relatively expensive process to deal with quality control, timezone issues, etc. In other words, it's usually driven by bean counters and not engineers.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#825

Post by bko »

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’…

I think it's naive to think that management would push something so unpopular and expensive just because some kind of emotional attachment or to help some other unrelated commercial property owners.

I think a more reasonable answer is they think employees are more productive and a large swath of employees don't do anything. I wouldn't believe it unless I've seen it myself. At a large org, there is a significant portion of people that don't do anything meaningful. Sure they'll waste time in the office as well, but at least they're somewhat more productive or available. They're not watching Netflix in their underwear. Every large organization I've been at had these people.

It's really that simple. The alternative is really conspiracy level stuff.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#826

Post by brianshaler »

xtracto wrote: post #278

Just out of curiosity, how much compensation would people be willing to leave on the table in lieu of "Remote" work? (this is different to, how much would you ASK to go from remote to a new in-office job). 10%, 25%, 50%? I've worked remotely for 5 years now, and there is NO way I would return to an office based job. I even have moved to a small town where there are practically 0 tech jobs; and at this point there's N…

In 2008 I was given 2 offers from a company: WFH or paid relocation to work in-office. I chose the former, which came with a 26% lower salary, and have been remote ever since. Just comparing the salaries in that case is a little disingenuous, however, since the relocation was from a low cost of living city to a high cost of living city.

A large impact on the extent to which WFH may need to come at a discount is specialization: If you're easily replaceable with an in-office worker, why would the company deal with remote? If you're not so easily replaceable, the company is more likely to be willing to work with you on your terms.

There's generally been a large disconnect between the job market in the tech sector and the rest of the economy, at least until a few years ago. There's now much more of a bifurcation within the tech job market, where rank-and-file and entry level software engineers are suffering while experienced and specialized software engineers may be doing better than ever. This plays into the RTO/WFH discussion because some people may not have the option to get their preference at any discount, or given either option in the first place.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#827

Post by _heimdall »

aurareturn wrote: post #780
_heimdall wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a possibility, but I've never come across data that supports either approach reliably outperforming the other. I've also never seen a company that actually tracked that well enough to make a decision like RTO based on their own data.

The evidence is that more companies are returning to old pre-covid policies than companies that are going remote only. They can't all love commercial real estate that much right? Not all executives invests in office buildings.

Sorry I may have lost the thread a bit here. Are you proposing that as evidence that in office teams outperform remote teams?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#828

Post by Newlaptop »

thinkharderdev wrote: post #813
dragonwriter wrote: post #513

Earlier 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’…

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.

8h on zoom is far more desirable than 8 hours in person shuffling from meeting room to meeting room for me.

I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. I can wear comfortable pants. I can throw laundry into the wash in the couple minute gap between meetings. And when the last meeting ends, I close the laptop and I'm already home, no miserable drive in rush-hour traffic.

Of course, there is something worse than in-person meetings. Which is meetings that are hybrid, with a groups calling into zoom from two different conference rooms in different locations. Those manage to be far worse than just everyone individually joining the zoom. And ironically, that's the type of meeting that becomes common when you force your distributed workforce back to offices split across a dozen locations.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#829

Post by wiseowise »

RHSeeger wrote: post #809
wiseowise wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when it’s my idiosyncrasy I’m supposed to shut the fuck up because it’s unprofessional, but when it aligns with whatever goals of some middle manager I’m supposed to take one for the team, because Bob the baby needs a grown up man sitting next to him?

No? It's not an idiosyncrasy, it's a preference/optimal work environment. And it varies by person. Stop acting like the people that are on the other side of the opinion are being childish/stupid. Nobody said you needed to stfu. Pointing out what works best for you is important in making sure the best decision is made. But, as I was trying to say, any decision that is made will be wrong for some of the people involved…

> Stop acting like the people that are on the other side of the opinion are being childish/stupid.

No, people on the other side should stop acting like we’re childish/stupid. I was born a while ago, and know how world works. No need to feed me bullshit about “culture” or “value of communication”.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#830

Post by Tempest1981 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #131
neilv wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To non-lawyer me, this sounds like something for which lawyers have a term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal If I've heard of this angle, I assume that lawyers know many angles that may apply.

And? As long as it isn’t discriminatory, since 49 of the 50 states are at will employment, you can be let go at anytime for any reason or no reason. It might come into play with unemployment insurance but the weekly amount is so low it’s laughable.

> 49 of the 50 states are at will employment

Montana is the exception, passing a "Wrongful Discharge" law in 1987

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