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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

#901

Post by californical »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #716
anothernewdude wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't 3 actionable under employment law?

If you could discover an email where an executive admitted their RTO strategy was a layoff then maybe, in some jurisdictions. But it's hard to prove, most of the time they could just say their motivation was "culture" or similarly vague and unfalsifiable like that.

I think it depends how far you are. There are laws covering you against forced relocation, treating it essentially as a layoff if it’s >50 miles (not sure exact numbers, and it may be state specific)

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#902

Post by LtWorf »

titanomachy wrote: post #543
nickff wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this idea that there is a 'CEO RTO mania' to be absurd; if WFH was just as good for the company, and more attractive to employees, we should see a boom in WFH-first companies, which does not seem to be happening. Instead, it seems like CEOs see RTO as a way of getting rid of 'slackers', preventing people from multi-tasking while 'working', and in some cases increasing 'teamwork'. In any case, it makes sense to…

I think there are a large number of competent but mostly checked-out engineers who will consistently work just enough to not get fired. If you want more productivity, you could raise the bar and fire a lot of people, but this also sucks and it creates a "hunger games" culture like at Amazon or Meta. I think a lot of those people actually will do more work if you make them sit in an office for 8 hours a day, since the…

They can chit chat and do nothing in the office just as well. That's what I normally see when I do go to the office.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#903

Post by mvdtnz »

Thiez wrote: post #578
brg wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In at least one case it wasn’t released by management because it was absurdly embarrassing. Productivity compared between 2019 and 2023 had statistics similar to the following; average yearly CLs decreased from approximately 70 to under 10, significant revisions pushed in comparable products changed from 26 to 4, meeting time increased by a multiple, email volume decreased similarity. All this with significant increa…

What is a CL? What are "significant revisions pushed in comparable products" and what does it measure?

"CL" is a Google-ism for a code change ("change list"). What we'd normally refer to as a pull request I suppose. Googlers like to think the whole world is in on their lingo, but CL is a very unusual acronym outside the Googlosphere.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#904

Post by LtWorf »

nickff wrote: post #251
squigz wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that executives are all perfectly rational beings and so wouldn't do anything based on personal feeling or beliefs. Sadly, this is not true.

I don't think there have ever been many ‘perfectly rational’ business (or governmental) leaders; the successful ones are just ‘sufficiently rational’. In fact, some business leaders are probably instituting RTO for irrational reasons, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad move for most in-person-based businesses.

But you think it's a good move for irrational reasons and have no data to show it.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#905

Post by JustExAWS »

neilv wrote: post #341
Aurornis wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the company is possibly defaming the employees in a way that predictably adversely affects their ability to gain new employment. And there may be other potential problems that aren't apparent to me, since I'm not a lawyer. Why is it that the "I'm not a lawyer, but" comments are always giving the worst legal advice? There is no defamation case anywhere in this situation.

> There is no defamation case anywhere in this situation. They said they were terminating lots of people for poor performance, while terminating lots of people. And there's plausible reason to suspect, given the frenzy of headcount reductions going on, that it wasn't actually for poor performance. > Why is it that the "I'm not a lawyer, but" comments are always giving the worst legal advice? Why are a couple people o…

I literally just got let go from AWS two years ago in the midst of hundreds of layoffs. Absolutely no one cared why I wasn’t there anymore or even asked. I had four interviews and three offers within two weeks.

Even more relevant, one of my former coworkers at AWS who was now a director at a well known public non tech company knew I was going through the focus -> PIP process and encouraged me to stay until I made it through my next vest, got offered severance and said call him when it happens and if I’m interested he will either make a permanent position for me if possible or at least give me a very lucrative contract. He didn’t even care and he knew I was getting PIPd

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#906

Post by danaris »

saghm wrote: post #882
rob74 wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the key thing IMO; it's not "return to office" when quite a lot of the people never were in that office to start with. With the rate of turnover in most of these companies and the amount of time they were hiring for positions remotely, it's more "forced relocation, transfer, or 'voluntary' quitting without severance" for a large number of people. You can't return to a status quo that never existed for you.

I mean...you don't have to "voluntarily" quit without severance.

You can tell them, in writing, "I am willing and able to continue to perform the tasks I was hired for. If you insist that it be somewhere else, then you can fire me."

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#908

Post by ThrowawayB7 »

bilekas wrote: post #663
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’…

Backdoor layoffs. It's always backdoor layoffs. If they really appreciated and needed you at the company, they would cater for your needs when you're delivering your work.

Back in the real world, "Microsoft Layoffs Continue Into 5th Consecutive Month": https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-la...

There's no reason to covertly plot convoluted "backdoor layoff" schemes when they're openly doing layoffs on a regular basis. "Backdoor layoffs" is a silly meme loved only by the sort of people prone to falling for conspiracy theories.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#909

Post by PleasureBot »

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…

I think the real answer is that executives at large companies live in a completely different world than their employees.

For one the circles they run in are going to be full of like-minded people; i.e. people for whom work is the most important part of their life. People like that want RTO and don't understand those who oppose it. When those are your priorities and all of your pees share them, its going to produce an echo chamber where most executives want RTO.

Furthermore their lifestyle is completely different. Most are going to have chauffeurs so they can be productive to/from work. They are going to have aids that take care of the food shopping, laundry, picking kids up from school, cooking, helping with homework etc. RTO does not affect them nearly as much as their employees who still have to deal with all of this in addition to commuting time now.

Its really just as simple as that. They lead completely different lives than their employees, are surrounded by other executives in friend and professional groups who have similar lifestyles, and generally don't understand why someone wouldn't want to RTO.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#910

Post by pavel_lishin »

keeda wrote: post #425
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…

In addition to the other comments (yes, very much a powerplay) it is also likely that employers simply realized remote work is a huge perk they had not accounted for, and RTO is simply a means of renegotiating: https://www.tiktok.com/@keds_economist/video/746473188419558... The video presents a compelling theory that post-Covid employers realized that employees CAN be productive remotely, but also put a pretty high p…

I like that theory, but where's the actual negotiations? This is a "get back to the office or you're fired".
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