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' obsession with RTO... C suites are committed to spending as much as possible on real estate and geographically limiting their talent pool. Whilst making workers more tired and less productive.
I still have no idea where it comes from. My best guess is that nobody at that level wants to break ranks with the "collective wisdom" of "investors", which creates a kind of groupthink.
(An RTO mandate is also an excellent thing for a CEO to show investors they are doing, if they are not making money and lack better ideas.)
(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’ shareholders in sufficient numbers probably are, and so are the influential constituents of the politicians they want favors from, in a time of increasingly naked political corruption and cronyism.
(3) Backdoor layoffs. RTO is unpopular with large swathes of the work force, and people will quit because of it. That’s good for a firm likely to be cutting positions anyway; there’s no need for severance, regardles of scale there’s no WARN Act notice requirement, and if you still have to cut more positions afterwards, it makes it less likely that those cuts will hit WARN Act thresholds. And while the people that quit may not be the ones it would be your first choice to cut, they are the ones that would be most likely to quit in the kind of less-employee-friendly and financially leaner (in real terms) times likely to exist for a while after cuts.
It's a power play. To show regular folks their place. Big corpo is a modern feodal state, where CEO is an emperor, c-suites are kings, managers are barons, IC are peasants and external contractors are slaves(but leased from other owner).
It's not only RTO, it's also about timetable and dress code. Yes, I had a beef with IT manager about dress code in the development office of a bank. Just because he can show his power he tried to enforce dress code.
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 premium on being able to do so -- studies show employees are willing to take a hit to bonuses, pay and promotions to keep that perk.
So the current coordinated RTO push is basically a renegotiation of salaries to account for that perk, especially now that it is very much an employer's market... which, BTW, is also the outcome of another very coordinated effort across the industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192092
Edit, some recent studies:
- https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remot...
- https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/tech-workers-take-much-lowe...
You can imagine how well those people feel about RTO, and how it helps their collaboration.
Executives often own the real estate and lease it back to the company. From Steve Ballmer to the owner of the tiny 85 person company I last worked at, it’s not uncommon.
So, yeah, there’s often some financial incentive there.
I do see the value in meeting people face-to-face, but I also think they could be done with the occasional company event. I have to imagine having a few events where people can meeting and build some rapport is cheaper than maintaining offices year round.
same reason some people think "professionalism" is about wearing smart shoes. While these sorts will never admit it to themselves, you are there to make them feel important. What you actually do is secondary, which is why they pay more attention to bullshit like presenteeism, than they do your work.
Man, if I could get the same level of attention on my PRs over the course of my career as I do about being occasionally late, then that'd be great.
In any case, it makes sense to have either a WFH organization, or an in-person one, but the mixed cases appear to be a friction-filled mess.
My commute time has more than doubled since they closed and sold my office for a hefty sum of money. As a result of multiple offices converging to one, there are insufficient seats for the number of employees actually assigned to my office; hence, "hotdesking".
I'd wager that maybe a third of the total employees assigned to the office could be present at any one point in time, so unless they purchase some additional properties, we're at a stalemate with the twice a week RTO. Most days over 90% of the desks, sometimes over 99% are taken in the building, requiring reservation weeks in advance through a seat reservation app.
I have no direct teammates in the office and no two members of my 10 person team work in the same office (or state).
I’m the kind of employee that would comply, not answer my cell phone and require people to leave voicemails on my desk line, call out people who are multitasking, and actively call out managers who attend meetings via zoom.
RTO with back to back zoom meetings all day is a waste of everyone’s time and energy.
Make management show us the benefit of all this RTO collaboration.
Oh, and I’m done checking email and teams after hours. Not safe to do so while driving.
That’s my opinion anyway
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.
I think part of it is that you don't get to feel the power on Zoom meetings. People coming to your office, or lining up for you in conference room ... that's would feel nice and give you sense of importance.
That said, if I was a manager and spend all day on meetings, I'd probably like to be in office as well and see people in person (not necessarily because of feeling important but just that I don't really like online meeting in general). As an IC, I goto office and then do all my meetings online anyway, so feels kind of pointless.
Jobs are posted on GM's jobs site, or reach out to me, if you'd like, and i'll connect you to the right people.
I think of Jeffrey Pfeffer's "social contagion" arguments a lot — first with regards to layoffs[^1], but increasingly also to RTO policies and tracked AI use.
It seems very unlikely execs (esp. in small organizations) are taking the time to read and seriously evaluate research about RTO or AI and productivity. (Frankly, it seems much less likely than them doing serious modeling about layoffs.) At some point, the "contagion" becomes a matter of "best practices" — not just a way to show investors what you're doing, but part of the normal behavior shareholders expect.
Bleak if true!
[^1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/12/explains-recent-te...
The excuse is that “people in bigger offices will feel bad if we open an exception”, so they’re spending a few thousand a month on real estate to make some poor sod miserable.
It's because although many people do work well in RTO, the vast majority don't. And the various TikTok videos showing "Day in the life of a remote worker" didn't help the cause either. I worked at a fully remote company during the pandemic and trying to get people online was almost impossible. They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them and it was one of the most frustrating experiences in my career.
I love working in the office, mainly for the social aspect and free food, but I need to find remote work for personal reasons. And I'm about 2 years too late because almost no one in Big Tech is allowing remote work anymore.
1. Showing up. Practically speaking, when you're at home, you can do whatever you want (sleep, watch TV, work sometimes), while delivering stellar result for the company, but 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.
2. Some leaders thrive in the presence of others. This is how they get their energy, receiving compliments about how awesome they are, noticing how people are respecting them while they walk around the office and so on. If one of them asks their team to return to the office, similar leaders might envy them when they boast about how much cooler their meetings feel now with five people in the room and sharing their meetings on the LinkedIn.
3. Work style of leadership. If you have noticed VP+ and C levels usually try to get to know each other on a personal level, they attend each others personal events. They work in this way, and they expect to see those same people in the office, because for them, their current network for work and life is same. So they like to see their 'friends' in the office as much as possible. Then naturally, these leaders translate mandate to their reports without context (e.g. their reports don't attend their personal life events, and they are not in their friend network)
i was chatting with HR boss last week. he's 100% sure these kind of mandates are reductions in force (layoffs) masked as return to office.
You often see the same thing from ambitious managers. Aka, "managers gonna manage".
The other part of the equation is pure politics and PR, which at least does provide some real value to the company (if only temporarily, and at long-term net negative). Amazon made it pretty clear that their RTO was all about maintaining their relationship with politicians.
I've worked in offices for decades. While every now and then I'd see watercooler chats that were related to work instead of sports/bitching/weather, they never remotely compared to "ad-hoc whiteboarding chats" or "team area chats". Most Engineers I know, myself included, need focus and a space for impromptu conversations with a group of Engineers, preferably away from PMs and salespeople.
If the people advocating "watercooler chats" really wanted to make Engineers productive, they would kill open floor offices and give Engineers privacy for long spontaneous technical conversations with other Engineers.
I personally can buy that there are limited productivity benefits to working in person together, but a) we don't see the benefit of that productivity, and b) it comes at enormous personal cost to employees.
I miss when before COVID firms were fine with flexing hours, now it seems they want to be draconian.
I was drastically more productive as a remote software engineer. I have severe insomnia and for some ungodly reason the later hours are my most productive. You wont get that productivity from me if I'm in an office a full 8 hours, I'm NOT working overtime.
A not so small group of people being over-employed or never available or just not pulling their weight tainted the whole thing.
Also honestly once a % of us were back in the office having to talk to remote people over a video call and waiting for the lag and having them speak over you because of the lag or get confused because they can't hear the chat we can all hear in the room builds animosity towards them.
Can probably list 2 people I'm happy to work with remote but the number I worked with who took the piss with it is in the double digits.
I work at a company that tracks productivity in many ways and even the screentime of each employee.
I'm quite sure remote employees or even hybrid employees on their WFH days, spend less time on the screen or doing things productivity trackers track compared to in office colleagues.
I don’t know if her being in the office would have dampened their lack of engagement or if the office was making it worse.
There’s a shit-ton of people working multiple jobs and outsourcing themselves. Everything is SaaS now, so that creates a liability for many larger companies with .gov or healthcare contracts.
Now I suspect the C-suite has noticed the discrepancy between attendance and occupancy, and I fully expect that their solution in this job market to be a 5-days, monitored attendance RTO soon. We are regressing at an alarming rate.
If your office does try to make things stricter, it's another layoff attempt. I don't think it will work, because at this point we're in a "sticky" job market; those out of work are facing some of the stiffest markets in decades, those in work are holding on for deal life.
The solution is to downsize your physical plant.
My company has a ton of faults, but every time one of these stories hits the HN front page, I thank God that my company remains committed to work from home. So much so that it recently sold its last building, and the few dozen employees whose roles require them to be physically present have been relocated to a much smaller building on a train line.
The work-from-home policy comes very heavily from the top. I suspect it's due to two things:
1. We have no shareholders. So the C-levels don't feel the need to engage in performative monkey-see-monkey-do antics so they have something to talk about during investor calls.
2. The management is extremely female-heavy. If I had to guess, I'd say it's 4:1 female:male. And the biggest beneficiaries of work from home are caregivers, who are statistically more likely to be women.
While I believe that 90% of the "work-life balance" speeches that come out of our HR department are a bunch of bullshit, I also believe that when it comes to work-from-home, management loves it not just for the massive cost savings they say it's provided.
So in-office days are spent sitting in a big noisy open floor plan, wearing noise cancelling headphones trying to get work done.. in between producing lots of noise yourself on zoom.
The other having-it-both-ways I see from employers is that in the last 5.5 years of COVID most people I know have expanded their work days to take calls earlier and later for timezone alignment purposes. This was tenable to expand your work day 1-2 hours when you had no commute. Now they think they can get the extra hours out and force a commute.
My wife spends many of her in-office days dialing into 7:30/8am calls, heading into the office late enough to have tons of train delays, and rushing to meet the deadline to get the swipe in so it counts.
They’re suspicious of work from home because employees like it. If they were concerned about productivity they’d make deals where you can work from home but have to work 10% more hours or something to make up for whatever imagined productivity was lost.
Claims who? These also sound like typical sketchy headcount reduction tactics.
Also, it's throwing employees under the bus, because the company is tarring them as low performers, at the same time as the company dumps them onto a hostile job market. Those employees should talk to lawyers.
> > Importantly, this update is not about reducing headcount.
MS had to mention that in the memo, because that's what everyone reading it was thinking?
MS likely consulted with their army of lawyers before pulling this.
Actions might be crappy but not illegal. Not a lawyer but employers are usually allowed to dictate the terms of the employment agreements and requiring someone to go into an office to work can be one of them. Even changing from permanent remote to onsite at a later time seems like another relatively protected decision.
Unless someone somewhere higher up is on the record saying something like “Oh yeah let’s make them come into the office to actually make it really crappy for them so they leave on their own” I doubt any reasonably reliable legal case can be made.
If I'm reading this right, it only applies to people who already live within 50 miles of the office. Remote-remote employees are exempt.
It's not reducing headcount if they hire just as many people overseas.
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 NO way I would relocate for a new job. Maybe it is my age (44), or maybe I am even in a privileged position financially; but at this moment in my life I would rather quit my job if they made me return to office (even for one day a week, as it would mean having to move to wherever the office is). Fortunately I am in a position where I can go several months without a paycheck, and I have some passive income.
> 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 salary. Someone who currently earns a huge number can afford to give up a higher percentage than someone who earns barely enough to make ends meet.
The question becomes a proxy for the person's financial situation and current salary, not their remote work preferences.
This is also a question where people's claims don't match their actions. Similar to every election season when a lot of people declare they're going to move to a different country if their party loses, but the number of people who actually do it is much smaller.
I’ve said no to opportunities that would have paid $250K - 280K that would have required me to relocate and be in an office. I can honestly say there is no amount of money that would convince me to go to an office.
See the story of the Mexican Fisherman
https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...
My wife and I already travel extensively, I “retired her” at 44 years old in 2020. We have done the digital nomad thing for a year since then and we are planning to spend a couple of months in Costa Rica next year and be away from home during much of the summer.
I have the freedom to spend a week with my parents and work from there and fly to another city to see my friends and adult sons.
Why do I need more money? I’ve had the big house in the burbs built twice and we sold and downsized from the second one.
I also have a year savings in the bank outside of retirement savings
The financial savings come from 3 things: downsizing to one car and elimination of transport costs; dramatically reduced lunch and coffee expenses; not buying a bunch of stuff to cope with the emotional toll (by far the biggest component).
The savings are even more dramatic if I factor in the opportunity costs of commute time. After accounting for the two way commute time, gas station line time, and vehicle maintenance time, my effective hourly rate working in-office was probably lower than working remote.
~$250k, ~50% of potential day gig comp.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37094928
(remote 10+ years, I'll retire before I go back to an office, I want more time and quality of life, not more money)
I'd go back to the office a bicycle ride away without issue. I like a nice office, and it's nice being able to separate the work space from the home, it's like I gained a room of my home back. I'd probably require a lot of benefits or a good bit more pay to take a job with a long highway commute.
I don't own a car. I have no plans to buy one. If I "needed" one for a job, that would be brought up at the salary negotiation. Sorry, I'm not going to pay for a car I don't otherwise need and lose $15K a year for something decent. What a scam!
On the time, well, it just depends on what they're going to pay me. Divide by work hours per year. Add 2 hours a day. Add that to the offer. I don't work for free. I don't travel for free. When I need to fly somewhere I get free ground transport, free meals, free flights, free hotel, but because we put "we're forcing you to travel 10 miles a day for no reason" in a little special box called "expected" we can force you to spend your own salary on it. *Scam*. It's all a big scam. They're subsidizing their bottom line with your time, your money, and your air.
I worked a terrible job in high school because I could walk there. There was no point in going someplace else that paid more because I would've burned all the extra money up in gas.
https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remot...
https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/tech-workers-take-much-lowe...
Just left a comment elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192176), but it's likely this RTO push is partially to renegotiate to account for this perk.
That would however, demand an hour and half commute each way and that would impact my ability to take my children to school and be involved with family meals. Back when I did have a hour commute each way it was costing me £2,800 a year in fuel, plus £2,220 in parking fees, plus about the same again for lunch out with colleagues.
So yeah, i'd get a 30-40% pay bump, but a large percentage would be consumed by additional costs with no benefit to my performance.
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.
I hate fully remote working.
You think? I was so sure that anyone who can get by without working would immediately rush to upend their life and suffer the many annoyances of working in an office! /s
If it wasn't obvious, a lot people don't have a choice. They can always leave, but this RTO thing is everywhere and it's not so easy working remotely nowadays.
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 twice less productive at remote (when it was mandated by anti-COVID measures of my Government) and I've happily returned to office as soon as I was allowed to.
For me, there are multitude of reasons to want to go to office, including endless number of shelves I need to mount at home (it is easy to procrastinate when you have OTHER real things to do, like home improvement, and not only meme-scrolling), mental resource to prepare one more meal each day (I have canteen at the office and lunch becomes no-brainer and takes 15-20 minutes instead of additional shopping & cooking at home), etc.
But main and most important reason is, personal meetings and, yes, this proverbial cooler chats. I'm 10x more effective in communication in person than all these videocalls. I dread planned calls, I cannot «read» counterparts well via videocall and it takes me much more time to explain ideas, problems and opinions via any remote communication. Also, a lot of «small» questions are postponed indefinitely because there is no this cooler, when you can ask somebody opinion or bounce off half-backed ideas against your colleague without scheduling yet another meeting and WITHOUT throwing your colleague out of the flow (because you know that he leaved flow to drink some tea already!).
I'm glad, that I can visit office every day, but also I'm glad that I can WFH for one day if I needed to (for example, when I need to meet plumber or alike).
Yes, there is commuting, but my commute is 15-20 minutes one way :-)
Like many above like to call managers 'managers' I like to call developers/devopsengineers/* 'IT people'. Office is not a 'manager' or 'c-suite' thing. Put it differently: not going to office is an 'IT people' thing.
Being productive is not only the number of lines of code you crank out. Being productive is cranking out the right lines of code. You need to communicate for that. Casually joining a few colleagues talking about work delivers so much value. Maybe make a few decisions without planning a meeting. That is productive!
It is also not only about being productive, It is also about having fun with my team or colleagues. But I also like to sense how my team members are behaving, are people super tired? Are they happy? Etc etc.
Oh and the good old whiteboard sessions, I love them and I miss them.
If I tell my non 'it people' friends my colleagues only want to go to office max 1 time a week... or not at all, most friends call it crazy.
Tomorrow to the office again, yes! 45 minute lunch walk through the city... Close the door at 17:00 and call it a day! Love it!
So while it’s great that the office works for you, dismissing WFH as “less productive” ignores the fact that for many people, it’s the only way they can actually be productive, stay healthy, and remain in the workforce at all.
I think the challenge is that leadership isn’t coherent when it comes to RTO:
1. Leadership has largely abandoned the notion of geography when hiring or building teams. Building geographic centers of excellence where all team members with the same function working closely together used to be a thing. Leadership wants the flexibility to pick the best talent, at the best prices, on short notice but also wants ad-hoc collaboration. Workers are rightly confused when every meeting they have in an office is on Zoom. 2. Leadership has largely abandoned the notion of timezone alignment and structured working days. Leadership wants to hire talent across the globe which requires more cross-timezone collaboration and non-standard-work hour meetings. That wasn’t possible when at 5PM to 7PM everyone was commuting. It also isn’t reasonable to expect people to hold a rigid 8AM to 5PM in-office schedule and then take 2 hours of meetings from 6PM to 8PM. 3. Leadership is complains that office space is both essential to productivity AND too expensive to spend money on. Employees home setups in terms of working space, noise isolation, connectivity and configuration are now more productive than what is offered in-office. When leadership took people from dedicated offices, to cubicles, to open seating and then to “hot desking” it was justified that commercial real estate was scarce, expensive and required the sacrifice of productivity to manage costs. Now that it is plentiful and cheap? Leadership is saying that RTO is needed for productivity AND that they will continue to reduce spending on office space per employee.
The only way to mentally reconcile that is to either assume that leadership is incompetent or that they want to return to 18th century sweat shops and envy China’s 9x9x6 culture. I can see why mid-level management is struggling getting compliance which is why they are relying on badge swipes.
Verge: Microsoft Mandates a Return to Office https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184017
Geekwire: Microsoft sets new RTO policy, requiring employees in the office 3 days per week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184032
Of all the "voices" I'd like to be able to do, corporate shitspeak is definitely the top one.
Why Microsoft Has Accepted Unions, Unlike Its Rivals - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/business/economy/microsof... | | https://archive.today/ES3SF - February 28th, 2024
It was a privilege, people abused it, and now it's over. And managers were the worst offenders.
I fall more into the latter camp (at least I hope so) and, given I've only worked in nice offices with catered lunches, gyms, video games, offsites, etc, I enjoy a 3 day hybrid schedule works best for me.
I agree, managers are always the worst offenders when it comes to this sort of thing. But they do the same in the office by disappearing into meeting rooms for the entire day. I'd love to know how you can effectively manage a team by constantly being in meetings with other managers.
I don't really care about unproductive people, I care about myself.
Worst offenders are people who say things like: Hey, how are you doing?
And then ... nothing.
Or maybe people are actually working on something. And your 2 minute question might cause them to lose 30 minutes.
This is why it is important to have multiple work-streams going when doing remote work, so that you don't sit around and wait until you have your answer.
IME, managers do this in the office just as much as remote.
Look at the typical manager's schedule. It's completely full of meetings - most of which are bullshit "busy" meetings, and they never respond to anything timely.
Hardly. It was COVID. It forced companies to do the most logical thing they could in a world of high speed internet. Many of them refused to read the writing on the wall and assumed it would return to normal one day. They made no efforts to internally reorient themselves around this new work strategy.
> people abused it
Other than your anecdote what evidence is there that this is true? Has the economy faltered? Is there any second source for the data which shows _any_ impact _at all_?
How/can we "montessori-fy"?
Like, how stupid do you have to be to kill your golden goose of life work balance?
I like the routines and processes that I adhere to more when I have a separate work location; I find it more difficult to adhere to those same processes when I can roll out of bed and walk to my computer half asleep and zone in on work.
For example, I find it much more likely I’ll consistently shower, get dressed, eat breakfast etc, when I go into the office than when I work from home.
Additionally, when working remote, I find that there’s often more of a bias towards threads or messages starting off related to something work related; I do try to ask about colleagues weekends occasionally for example, but when remote it often feels more like you’re consuming their bandwidth or attention vs just minor conversation in passing.
Sometimes things take time to compile, or conversations over text-mediums are difficult; having a manager nearby that can sense when things are difficult and more effectively help is great. I’ve had many times where I’ve sighed about something and my coworker heard and asked what got me flustered and explaining it helped lead to resolution.
What I would suggest is that perhaps some teams should be remote and some local if possible to facilitate different types of employees.
I totally get working remote, I’d probably do it if I was back in a relationship and/or had kids.
Still, even if there is some sort of justification (moreso if the company chooses to locate themselves away from residential/affordable areas), I'm not sure how you would avoid abuse. Maybe just pay employees a fixed amount for each day they are required to drive to the office ?
Salary means you're paid a fixed amount per pay period, regardless of hours worked.
So including commute in your hours worked wouldn't change your salary, which is by definition a fixed amount.
Did you mean that commute time should be paid hourly at an additional rate?
Yes, rent 5 minutes from the office is likely very high, and it's much cheaper two hours away, and that's why most people live far away. But that is already a factor in salaries. If the office is in a high-cost-of-living area they have to offer higher salaries to get an equal caliber of workers.
This would have made sense when the company was all at one site, but over the last 5 years my company (and microsoft) have massively expanded.
So now I drive to the office and video call my colleagues in other sites. Brilliant.
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.
To stay employed at Microsoft. After all many may want that some may not.
It says a lot about a team when they win, and instead of rewarding the players that got them the win, they do shit like this.
This drove me nuts during all the hullabaloo about DOGE. People would confidently state that the Federal government is inefficient – while data showed the opposite! Federal workforce has remained largely the same since 1950, while administering more services, for more people, with a much larger budget. As measured, the government workforce is more productive than ever.
Microsoft is a huge company with a lot of momentum and so many products that you can't reasonably conclude anything about remote work from this stat alone. Worse, you don't even account for inflation (!).
What about revenue per employee before covid? What if I chose any arbitrary time period in the last 20 years? Lastly, maybe revenue per employee could've grown significantly more during 2020-2024 if everyone was in the office?
At the office there where those who clearly wanted to minimize human interactions and people who thrived and performed better when interacting with others.
And then there is liminal spaces (Severance) the place where hope and creativity comes to die.
"There must be someway out of here."
Given that MS does not have top salaries, my bet is that folks will leave to other companies given that the main leverage like WFH is gone.
What complicated things, is return to work will cause all the best to rethink their employment. I’ve seen HBR surveys that suggest the top talent is ending up places that allow them to stay remote. I think this leaves businesses in a tight place. I have every reason to believe that companies with lots of employee interactions have better acceleration/trajetory than fully remote, but it’s a big hit to lose top talent. And remote may have so much velocity from gaining this talent that they don’t care about the acceleration tradeoff.
Further, concentration of talent in a region also cannot be discounted. Certain things can’t happen without the exchange of ideas (partly why I think cities/counties should ban non competes). I don’t know how much a given company can control this concentration of talent, but I know that Seattle wouldn’t be what it is without Boeing, and then Microsoft attracting very smart people.
Where though? I thought the current jobs market for tech wasn't in a nice spot for devs.
Ah the data is clear, without reference to the data collected or metrics used.
What I would really like to see is arguments from the other side. Can someone steelman RTO. Preferably with evidence, anecdotal or otherwise.
Have you ever had to "now click on the left... no, up a bit. No go back you were just there. It's the third one from th... I'll just paste the link in chat" when you were standing next to someone's desk? No.
The only benefits of working from home are:
1. No commute.
2. Can do life stuff (we finally have a solution to the dumb problem that shops etc. are only open when people are at work).
3. The company doesn't need to spend money on offices.
The first two are huge bonuses for employees, but the company doesn't give a shit about them. At best they care about paying for offices, but that's pretty minor (especially when they've already paid for them and they're sitting there empty).
During the 3 days I wfh, I get the most work done. I can focus and organize my day around executing a plan.
During the 2 days I'm in the office, I can get answers from people much quicker. Some people (new hires in particular) don't know how to describe their problem, or they're just really bad at it. My solution to endless teams convos is to just say "I'll head over to your desk" and then we work it out in person.
I think working with people in person can be very powerful. Is it essential though? No. Most corps don't even bother though. And most managers are bad at management. Working entirely wfh requires good managers with actual project management skills. Most corps are unwilling to train or prioritize hiring for that.
Executives seem to (mostly) universally want people to RTO. Why would they?
They obviously have lots of data. If it was bad for productivity, why would they do it?
Answers seem to be things like “power trip” or “need to justify real estate”. I’m pretty sure most companies would save money by giving up their leases. Maybe they are all having power trips, but irrational behavior from leaders won’t win out in the long run.
My observation from my time is that, likely: some people are really good at getting stuff done at home. But most probably get less done. And I suspect the leaders find this in their data.
Sorry, can't do that. But my take is:
There is a part of the population that are opportunistic freeloaders. People who don't have intrinsic motivation to do their work but do it to avoid the consequences.
I think it's a pretty big part of the population! And I also think that, while managers are likely to have encountered them, reaching a software development role (and then choosing to spend your spare time commenting on HN) filters out a lot of them. So there is a mismatch where managers want to defend against the freeloaders while the employees commenting here can't accept the lack of trust inherent in the mandate and won't countenance the micro-management needed to prove that trust would be earned.
I think it also partly explains why we've failed to see remote companies gain a competitive advantage in hiring. They have adverse selection for active freeloaders.
1. Onboarding and growing junior employees.
2. Managing/coordinating people
3. Doing/coming up with something innovative
4. Making sure an employee is not working another job in parallel
With RTO, companies try go get back the ability to do these things, at the expense of employees’ commute time
Good office jobs can feel fun, building something with like minded people and building a social relationship at the same time with them.
Many people are not looking for that, many people just want a job that makes money and let's them log off at a set time. I personally don't enjoy that type of job and feel it's not sustainable over decades. I need some fun in my job.
"Collaboration" and "communication" are definitely issues, as employers state openly, but not for the reasons you think.
I worked in a fully remote company for the last three years, I selected people who I knew would be independently motivated and who knew how to communicate effectively in an async manner.
Yet, there were issues still in communication that would have been solved with being able to hear someones tone and body language. Little issues spiralled out of control- and lack of trust crept in when people were quietly doing work that had very small visibility (but was important).
I'm not saying remote work was the reason, but remote work exacerbated certain particular issues in this dimension- eventually the founders (who had lost trust) started laying off people they perceived as not important, despite them being fundamental to any future in which the project would be successful.
You'll also notice that the companies that care the most about RTO do not invest in communication in other ways, they'll probably use awful communication software like Teams, WebEx - or in marginally better cases: Zoom.. and since people don't like to interface with these tools (and they're poor even when you do): there can be a feeling of being out of the loop from upper management as they don't know what's going on.. they just see radio silence.
MS Teams for IM...okay. Too much white space and too hard to find conversations that I know I've had recently. Very much prefer Slack.
MS Teams for any of that other stuff...rage inducing. Especially the file sharing and other "team" features which break with every minor update. Somehow, even worse than using Sharepoint directly. Went back to email and using network drives to share/store team documents.
- There are times when in-person collaboration is invaluable.
- There are times when having quiet focus time alone is invaluable.
- Every team and job is different. Sitting on Zoom all day in an open office full of strangers doesn't make sense. Getting blocked because I bricked my proto board and I need a tech to rework it but I'm wfh and the tech is wfh and now we have to do a mail dance and burn a week for something that used to take a 5 min walk down the hall to deal with doesn't make sense. YMMV.
- The industry seems to be converging to hybrid. I feel like this is kind of like the debates over being mandated to use AI in dev - love it or hate it, it's happening, and there's no point trying to swim against a rip current.
/unpopular opinion
Labor market is soft, so they will take as much as they can while they can, on the status quo bias of "in-office must be more productive, especially if employees don't like it".
It's the dumbest form of stealth layoffs as it's random untargetted regarding the company's actual department/role staffing needs.
I like this phrasing because that really feels like how the employer looks at it ultimately.
"Why, it's as irresponsible as calling in sick!"
It feels less about actual performance and more about a need for control. Some of these companies even invested in remote tooling during the pandemic, and now they’re choosing to ignore it. You start to wonder if they’re really looking at output, or just want people back in seats so things look like they’re under control.
1) The people who feel more engaged at home can stay home, those who feel more engaged at work can go there 2) The latter group fails to feel engaged at work due to everyone being home. They complain.
In other words, they weren't missing being in the office. They were missing being in the office *with others*. Which requires everyone else to either want to work in the office.
1) until the fed lowers interest rates (and thus makes it easier for small to mid size companies to bring on more employees), hriing will be nowhere near the peak of 2022? where employees had all of the leverage
2) trump tarrif's are probably limiting the ability of the fed to do serious interest rate cuts needed to spur hiring
3) on top of this, AI is imo undoubtedly reducing demand in tech hires (esp. software engineers, but soon most white collar fields imo), something that wasn't the case just a couple of years ago.
4) the latest US revision just showed a downward revision of 1 million less employed than previously posted over the last year or so, last month(?) was revised to job losses and the msot recent job month was basically flat as well.
5) an arguement can be made that RTO, while crappy, greatly benefits cities by forcing a lot of highly paid tech workers to commute downtown, helping restaurant workers, cleaners (sorry the proper term escapes me at the moment), and other workers in support roles for offices keep their jobs (the spike in SF homeless during covid was caused by a big spike in high earning tech workers suddently working remotely causing layoff in these office reliant industries).
The long short of it is that the remote workers become alienated, while the office gang has a good chance of becomes a good ol' boys club.
This is what it becomes anyway whether I’m in office or not.
1) For experienced high performers, remote work definitely increases productivity. They're much likely to work longer hours and get more done when they're not in the office.
2) For people who are on the low end or need more guidance, it's more likely for them to slip or get left behind with remote work.
3) It takes longer to onboard new hires working remotely.
4) There's more barriers to cross-team collaboration working remotely. You don't have that natural bumping into each other in the office and unintentional communication that you do on Slack or Teams.
5) Remote work allows you to pull from a much greater talent pool, and you don't have to spend money on office space. This is really beneficial for startups.
6) For larger companies, remote work is excellent for teams that need to support a live product 24/7 since you can pull from many different time zones.
7) For managers and senior leadership, your meetings are all on zoom. And they're all back to back. The natural food or bathroom breaks you get working in an office don't exist. And they're more likely to exist later into the night.
This all leads to high performers picking up a lot more of the team's slack. They tend to thrive. Meanwhile, there's a certain percentage of staff that aren't doing a lot or are struggling. Managers are totally overloaded with meetings and don't have much time to give direct support. And because these are the decision makers, they're more likely to be in favor of RTO.
What I expect to happen with RTO is that junior staff and new hires will pick up more work (hopefully), the meeting burden on managers will be me more reasonable, and there will be better collaboration. But the high performers who teams rely on will be unhappy, will get less done, and are more likely to leave. Productivity will dip at first, and there might be a brain drain. It might be a good decision longer term. But there are tradeoffs any way you do it.
This mandate is not at all surprising given MS invested heavily in new, revamped offices, which they had started before the pandemic. How did folks who relocated to other areas not see this coming.
The first 10-15 minutes of every meeting for the first month were people complaining about it. The first 10-15 minutes of every meeting for the second month were supervisors reminding people everyone they need to do it.
The third month, people started coming in, and now everyone complains about how there's no parking, no open hotel desks, no open meeting rooms, and teams are scattered across offices and there's no meeting rooms so all the meetings are still on Teams.
That is the real threat, someone might notice how utterly useless these bozos are and finally cut them off. Especially in software development, where focus and silence are everything, this mandate is beyond ridiculous.
> If needed, you can request an exception by Friday, September 19.
Often the exceptions to this sort of policy override the rule.
Oh the irony! double facepalm emojis
A company where most employees work digitally with people across the world is requiring people to sit at a desk in a physical location. The irony is blinding & shows an utter lack of transparency by leadership.
Most of them have dedicated their lives to getting that sweet corner office with the mahogany L-desk. Then theres that sweet nameplate.
I don’t think there’s any reliable data on RTO vs Remote productivity.
Citation needed or this is just more vibe-xecutive decree.
If anyone here is Microsoft employee living in Ukraine, I'd love to heat your take
>With that in mind, we’re updating our flexible work expectations to three days a week in the office.
He pulled his people back into the office because he said he "felt" like they were not working. Despite graduating from Harvard and from Harvard Business School he could not offer any qualitative or quantitative data to back up his "feelings." He lets his people WFH on Friday's but says he schedules video calls on that day to make sure they are working.
He said, "When they are working from home, I do not know if they are walking their dog for an hour but if they are in the office, I know they aren't."
What made this conversation laughable was that he and I were at a country club having lunch and bullshitting for half the day, on a weekday, while our kids (who had the day off from school) were playing a sport together. He stepped away more than once for "meetings" that he took from his cell phone.
It was laughable.
OTOH, I've noticed the "disruptors" of yesteryears are now full-on right-wing jerks whose mission is to preserve wealth instead of create wealth by doing new and disruptive things. This tells me one important message if nothing else: There is no shortage of talent for the perceived wealth-creating opportunities. The gold rush is over.
I fear this is less about ZIRP and more about complacency (in general) and would-be investors and VC's not having faith in the possibility of high ROI investments.
Interesting. Everyone here is an employee.
It's a standard McKinsey & Co. playbook that is going around the various tech companies as a way to reduce headcount.
And, productivity is going to tank. If you force me to RTO, I will show up exactly at 8am, take my 1 hour lunch away from the office, and leave exactly at 5pm. And, when I do leave the office at 5pm, my work phone gets turned off and I will not do anything work related until 8am the next morning.
You would think these tech companies would do something innovative. A f*cking monkey can cut costs by firing people. How about you stop over hiring? How about you stop leasing building space and use the products you create that enable remote collaboration?
You can essentially divide IC employees into three categories. First, those who are about as productive from home as they are from the office, but are on average happier working remotely (no commute, etc). That's probably circa 80%. Second, those who are well-intentioned but fall behind over time, because they are less proactive about maintaining soft skills - communications, cross-functional relationship management, etc. That's the bulk of the rest. And third, there are people who actively exploit the situation in ways that the company is going to have an allergic reaction work (outsource their work to a dude in India, half-ass three jobs at competing companies, etc). That's typically <1%, but it's obviously a weird / scary new thing.
Further complicating this picture is the fact that line managers are not perfect either; there is an "out of sight, out of mind" aspect to it, and if a WFH worker is underperforming, it will on average take longer to address the problem, which has some ripple effects.
And on some level, the exec perspective is that the intangible gains in the happiness of the 80% that was previously willing to work for you in the office is not worth the horrors on the bottom end. So there is something resembling a credible argument for RTO.
At the same time, there is a degree of lazy thinking / bad faith on the exec side because the problems can be solved in other ways. You can retrain managers, you can improve performance management, you can monitor for certain types of grift, and you can accept some degree of added risk. In fact, you probably should if it keeps your top performers happier. But the overwhelming preference is for the easy choice of RTO.
This is it folks. Corp screws you when they can. Welcome to the machine.
For most working people, showing up at the office (or place of work) is the absolute minimum requirement.
People here seem to talk about what legal right a company has to let people go just because they didnt want to shop up at work, at the office
If you go to a restaurant, do you worry about how many hours the waiter, the chef, etc had to travel in the morning to put food in your face?
It is not for you like. It is doing what your employer requires.