Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#831

Post by thinkharderdev » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 1:26 PM UTC

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #792

mrweasel wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's layoffs aren't there a very real risk that the most talented people, who enjoy working from home will simply leave, while the less talented returns to the office because they'll have a harder time finding new jobs? So you're doing backdoor layoffs, but you're laying off the people you'd most likely want to keep, leaving the company with the less experienced/talented people.

This assumes that companies view their employees as individuals. At a certain scale, companies inevitably start viewing their employees as "resources" that behave more like robots than human beings. There is no way for somebody like Nadella to have an understanding of most employees' performance, and the chain of management is so long that he doesn't trust anyone else's ability to ascertain individual performance. Th…

> I think at some point, it's just inevitable that C-level management takes decisions based on the assumption that people are replaceable and that the difference between a great performer and a poor performer is essentially irrelevant.

Maybe, but I find it hard to believe that someone who has spent their entire career in the tech industry actually believes this.

The "backdoor layoffs" theory seems suspect to me more generally. It's not like they're particularly averse to doing layoffs the normal way. Especially now where the signal from big tech company doing layoffs is "we're really good at AI".

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#832

Post by _heimdall » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 1:26 PM UTC

_heimdall wrote: post #751

lupusreal wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It surprises me when I see people call Trump senile given how far Biden got before most people were willing to acknowledge it at all. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things you can justifiably call Trump. He just doesn't seem senile in any way similar to those in my life I've watched go down that road.

For the silent down voters, when has Trump shown signs of senility?

There's plenty to dislike about him, and he does seem to have health issues, but I just haven't seen signs of serious cognitive decline.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#833

Post by Chris2048 » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 1:28 PM UTC

yepitwas wrote: post #533

whateveracct wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is dead on. In software especially, we have established ways for distributed individuals to collaborate (FOSS). RTO is meant to coddle the waterfall-addicted executive class.

It's pretty funny to watch e.g. some little FOSS console game system emulator—an actual toy, or at least, a project in service of a toy and of game-playing, to a large extent, but also technically more challenging than a lot of corporate work—or maybe some FOSS MMO server re-implementation coordinate development across continents with nothing but IRC, email, and Github (if that, LOL) and do it efficiently with little…

but this is survival bias. lots of those FOSS projects go nowhere, unnoticed.

You are flipping this around: "companies pretend they need this whole fucking edifice", but they'd need to pick the winners first. those people need no management for them to do what they are motivated to do, but corporation have some people they are asking to do something they might not care much about - the same results aren't guaranteed.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#834

Post by thinkharderdev » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 1:29 PM UTC

Newlaptop wrote: post #828

thinkharderdev wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

> 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.

This works great when you are one of a dozen anonymous people on a zoom call. less so when you are the senior person in the meeting who everyone is actually talking to and expecting you to make a decision.

But this response kind of proves my point. If you are the principal in a meeting, the fact that everyone else in the meeting is zoned out and doing something else is not great.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#835

Post by Tempest1981 » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

SauciestGNU wrote: post #526

dymk wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many employees do you think msft has that don’t live within that 50 mile radius? I’d bet it’s an incredibly small percentage. They chose 50 miles because it’s big enough to cover almost everyone. I’m within that but my commute is two hours one direction.

50 miles is a US government defined "commutable distance" (I was just talking about this at work with a human resources person, but unfortunately I can't recall what agency defined it as such).

Maybe OPM: (U.S. Office of Personnel Management)

https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/work-sch...

Official Duty Station

An agency may prescribe a mileage radius of not greater than 50 miles to determine whether an employee's travel is within or outside the limits of the employee's official duty station for determining entitlement to overtime pay for travel.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#836

Post by HelloMcFly » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 1:42 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #825

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’…

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 porti…

> They're not watching Netflix in their underwear.

I'm sure leaders believe this, I'm even sure it happens. Yet despite how obviously and deleteriously widespread this phenomenon is, isn't it amazing that we still can't seem to quantify notable efficiency and effectiveness gains from RTO mandates? And that's setting aside whether any hypothesized (at best) productivity gains are sufficiently high enough to justify the expense of office space rentals and office maintenance.

Let's also remember that the typical RTO experience is one where members of a geographically distributed team are RTO'd so they can remain geographically distributed, just working out of company owned or rented spaces instead of their homes.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#837

Post by blacklion » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 1:44 PM UTC

timcobb wrote: post #801

blacklion wrote: post #714

It is funny to see how in one (IT) culture there is two narratives, often supported by same people: 1) Office is bad, people more productive working remote from their homes, and corporate C-levels issue and enforce RTO, which is silly and anti-productive. 2) All jokes about Zoom/Meet/Teams, with all these «Each meeting consists of “are you hear me?” questions», etc. Maybe, I'm unique (I'm sure I'm not), but I was twi…

The issue is that it's mandated. I bet most people would say they like hybrid.

I'm privileged enough to work in places where my managers understand that life is life and sometimes you need to be at home but don't want to take full day-off because you still work even before COVID and externally (government) enforced full-remote.

Managers trusted us (engineers) that we will not abuse this system. It was always like social contract: engineers doesn't complain about occasional crunches and overtimes (not like game industry where it is norm, but may be once a month), managers lets people stay home for a day if they needed without additional paperwork.

Of course, when KPI is enforced by automatic clocks-in system or doors logs it is another story.

On the other hand, we all are very privileged compared to industrial workers, builders, retail workers, etc. Not only in salary, but in our schedules too.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#838

Post by lan321 » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 1:44 PM UTC

moregrist wrote: post #812

lan321 wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 slam…

I'm talking strictly about RTO as a layoff alternative and even more specifically about the perception that it'll lead to the best workers leaving.

Having a bunch of people leave due to RTO is different than having seemingly random colleagues laid off.

Both are not nice, RTO is more voluntarily and more avoidable since you can sometimes bargain for remote work to be a part of your contract and not just an oral agreement.

It's morally questionable to call for RTO only to get rid of people without technically having layoffs, but in countries like the US getting laid off is probably worse than having working conditions degrade to where you just find another job of your own volition since there's less urgency.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#839

Post by jon-wood » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 1:46 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #673

mulmen wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not mentioned as a possibility because nobody has ever been able to substantiate that claim.

Shouldn't we trust that the execs have this data and can see productivity metrics that aren't available to the public? Unless you think all RTO is a conspiracy.

It’s absolutely all being done on vibes. The execs don’t have some super-secret productivity dashboard giving them a breakdown of employee output by work location. Maybe, if they’re really on the ball, they have employee profit contributions divided by that, but that would then immediately show all the support staff as unproductive.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#840

Post by sokoloff » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

JustExAWS wrote: post #817

sokoloff wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There might be no amount of money that someone is likely to pay you, but I bet there's an amount of money that you would do it for.