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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

#871

Post by dh2022 »

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.

But here is the thing-almost all meetings are on Temas. Because Microsoft campus is so spread out managers do not have time to go from building to building to meet other managers. Azure for example is spread out over 10 building just 8n Redmond. Never mind connecting with teams in Bay Area, Atlanta and India. All of these mangers spend their meetings on Teams.

Again I do not have a good explanation for RTO.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#872

Post by simoncion »

throwaw12 wrote: post #727
simoncion wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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.

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

I agree. Though, you seem to have missed the part of my statement where I said "[It is a not-infrequent sight to find] folks sleeping, reading, or otherwise slacking off atop [the company-provided couches and comfortable chairs in the office].".

Add to that the fact that it's bloody hard for a casual onlooker to distinguish "doing real research on the Internet" from "fucking off on one's computer", and also the fact that heading out for a long lunch or coffee/smoke break to "talk strategy" [0] with a coworker is a common activity in the office, and you end up with a lot of tacitly-company-sanctioned fucking off on company time. Like, a staggering amount.

Perhaps the companies you've worked for have all been merciless results-focused taskmasters and the situations I'm describing are entirely alien to you. If that's the case, then -for you and your coworkers- absolutely nothing relevant would change in an all-WFH environment.

[0] Read as "shoot the shit where noone can overhear"

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#873

Post by cutemonster »

arkh wrote: post #687
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…

> will do the minimum work that is required of them So... doing their job? When I read people wanting to have 100% uptime on their human resources I feel like I'm reading "The goal" again and how machines have to be 100% used in the mind of some managers. And even when doing chore (or posting on HN), people tend to think about other things. Like their current task. Why do you think people find solutions to problems i…

> > will do the minimum work that is required of them

> So... doing their job?

Can also mean working 5 h instead of 8, but not so little so you'd get fired.

That's not doing one's job completely (if paid for working 8 h), just that no one notices.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#874

Post by dogleash »

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…

> collaboration, watercooler chat

I've been wondering what this really means. So I've been actively observing our open office recently. As far as I can sus out, it's the phenomenon where enough people are subject to conversations they weren't invited to, that someone will always step in and steer obviously wrong/uninformed conversations.

As an operating theory, it also explains why management wants us to make more use of the large slack channels. I've previously made the joke that slack is just the din of an open office for remote workers, and, well, I guess that is the literal deliberate intent.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#875

Post by steveBK123 »

thinkharderdev wrote: post #831
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean we still have headlines coming like this

https://fortune.com/2025/09/05/paramount-skydance-ceo-david-...

A 10 day notice requiring agreement to full 5 day RTO or take a voluntary package. This from a CEO talking bout 'efficiency' and cost cutting, where I know people who have been 100% remote for 5 years.

What are the odds those voluntary packages are worse than whatever contract & law specific in the case of layoffs. And I am sure the (very X/Musk/extreme hardcore coded) agreement employees sign agreeing to RTO means if they are fired later for office attendance its for-cause.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#876

Post by steveBK123 »

RHSeeger wrote: post #506
foogazi wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They work better with you sitting next to them /s

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.

> - Some people work better in the office, with their co-workers around them

it shouldn't be my problem if a coworker lacks internal locus of control

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#877

Post by [deleted] »

pm90 wrote: post #386
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.

It’s extremely pretty, there’s great food, lots of tech jobs, you meet diverse and interesting people, great public transit (for the US). There are many reasons for living in the Bay Area.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#878

Post by lupusreal »

_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.

He's plainly senile, you can tell every time he talks. That Biden was even worse doesn't negate Trump's senility.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#879

Post by ghaff »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #756
ghaff wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my contractors have generally had a general service area. And, if you're out of it, they're probably not interested. Now, mind you, I often don't have a super-itemized bill. But I'm not sure I've seen a commute time/cost line item.

Yeah, I can't recall anyone ever putting it down explicitly as a line item, but a number of them will tell on the phone you there's a minimum charge for coming out. For some reason locksmiths seem to always do this.

I expect a lot of jobs that locksmiths do are pretty quick and easy for them. I went down a file cabinet lockpicking hole a couple of months back and ended up just drilling out the lock. I expect a locksmith could have handled it in a few minutes (if that) but if they had to drive 30 minutes to my house they have to collect for that somehow.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#880

Post by intended »

randomfool wrote: post #571
intended wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 is real, this is what was behind Amazon’s RTO mandates. Its designed to ensure that people decide to quit.

From a source closely involved with this- Amazon tracks many productivity metrics of employees and was seeing very significant differences between in-person and remote people, which drove the decision. Source left since so I don’t know how much productivity has improved. Advice to new grads: get into the office 5 days a week for at least a few years.

This would be impressive. since it complete contradicts what reports we do have of hybrid work (hybrid, not remote)
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