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.
Why do people forget about board members and shareholders?
There's a lot of overlap among the rich. I doubt Satya "wants" to RTO. I would suspect board members / shareholders with real estate interests are forcing the policy. (eg Vanguard holds 10%, with Blackrock close behind).
Big corpo is a feudal state, in the sense of complex incestuous power dynamics. It's oversimplifying to call CEOs emperors.
Board members do not have powers over daily business of the company.
I would add the board to the feodal model as a Church. The head of the board is the Pope.
If this is a shareholder action, of a publicly-traded company, then (IIUC) shouldn't that be publicly-available information somewhere?
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/09/01/office-cmbs-delinquency-ra...
It makes much more sense to take a bath on the office investments and have Microsoft pay the difference in dividends or buybacks. The net amount to vanguard is higher than paying insurance, building and grounds maintainence, janitors, utilities, management fees, and property+ income tax before seeing your first dollar.
I've seen companies do some weird shit for those "X workers at location Y at least Z hours per year" tax incentives. I'd believe it's a major motivator for RTO (though probably somewhat behind the layoffs motivation)
Microsoft is almost certainly a special case in a number of ways, but the incentives are absolutely there for commercial landlords to try to force their tenants' hands.
You are missing the point that Microsoft might be the loss leader, setting an example or simply ensuring that commercial estate gains in value and the gains are greater than the losses.
It's a fact, you can maintain empty offices only for so long and billions invested can potentially vanish.
I’d prefer to work from home wearing pajamas but I can sympathize with why my employer wants me in the office and may even have a dress code.
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.
Don't dictate to the rest of us that we have to work the way you work best
Been working since the 80s, and no company has ever paid me enough to buy anything nearby. So I gave up 15 yrs ago and now work full remote where I could afford something.
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 that was left of their ideas to make the company win.
When I have some engineering work to do where I know all the requirements and need to be left alone, staying home is a productivity win.
There's value in the flexibility but employers often do not trust their employees to make the best decision for the organization.
Are you a butler? No offense.
No one in tech would give two f...s about what you're wearing when you push git commits.
The first casual Friday I was struck now how energized I felt as soon as I walked in (and I didn’t participate, I wore slacks and a blazer that day).
Reflecting on that, I realized that I actually associate jeans and such with “professional office that gets shit done”. Because that’s how it’d been everywhere else I’d worked.
The “professional” dress code was having exactly the opposite effect on me, from what it was supposed to.
He is only able to fend it off by pointing out that they do not pay as well as their larger competitors, so the remote flexibility is a recruiting advantage.
He describes the push for RTO from the rest of the C-suite as basically a combination of unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it, and of course.. because they can. Just like many rules at companies.
Likewise many companies in my slice of the industry point to one of the big leaders RTO policies as the reason to do the same, as a sort of cargo cult. However, what the big leader actually does that differentiates is paying 30% premium to have their pick of talent at every level of the org.
This also explains other things, not only RTO. Like when the mass layoffs started about three years ago. Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output. That was enough for many smaller companies, some of them understaffed, to go on and do the same, surely encouraged by their investors. I have friends in a half dozen companies complaining about permanent overtime and severe project delays after the layoffs. Yet, referred companies are either not hiring, or doing it in a very leisurely pace.
The part that's always glossed over in this narrative is that the remaining workers were forced to pick up the slack to keep up the output ("do more with less") which resulted in toxic work cultures. Ask any employees across BigTech companies and they'll tell you of this happening everywhere all at once -- formerly collaborative environments suddenly becoming cut-throat and competitive; high pressure and unreasonable goals for delivery; hiring being scaled back (except in offshore teams!) and new candidates being severely downleveled compared to their experience.
This was not a coincidence; Sure, there were slackers scattered everywhere, but the waves of layoffs were completely disproportional to that. The real intention was to bring the labor market, overheated during Covid and ZIRP, back under control (a power play, as other comments indicate.) And who better than Elon to signal that change with his shenanigans at Twitter.
If it seems surprising that output was not impacted (although I would argue a close look at Twitter shows the opposite) one just needs to look at the record levels of burnout being reported:
https://leaddev.com/culture/engineering-burnout-rising-2025-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2025/02/08/job-bu...
https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/workplace-burnout-in-2025-...
https://thehill.com/lobbying/5325471-burnout-erupts-among-pr...
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 just there for the pay cheque, and will do the minimum work that is required of them - esp. if not under strict supervision.
Not to mention the fact that it is indeed much harder to have collaborative discussions that are spontaneous and unplanned in a WFH setting, compared to the office.
Maybe these c suites and other employee hating assholes are projecting their own lazyness. Or maybe they think they are so superior compared to ”common” people that the ”common” people must be lazy trash.
I don’t know, but it is weird to assume most people won’t do their job without ”strict supervision”. Like super weird.
(Btw, anecdotally, most people I know work more efficiently from home with fewer breaks)
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 in the shower or just before sleeping? Because you can think about work (and so for most office jobs, working) even when not on your computer.
> lots of people claim that WFH means they can "do the laundry" and/or go to the post office
If middle management can't figure it out for remote or in-office employees, they need a new line of work.
The people that are slackers at home have low output in the office and are probably the annoying gabber distracting the rest of the team in-office.
Collective punishment isn't a solution, and the best will walk.
> Most are just there for the pay cheque, and will do the minimum work that is required of them
That's just capitalism? Every player is supposed to optimise.
This is a culture thing that is easily fixed by mandating cameras on, buying everyone good microphones, and a consensus that you can ping someone with a question, go back and forth, and know that you aren't imposing by throwing a /zoom into the Slack DM and saying "let's just meet about this".
My team is small, sure, but we are cameras on 100%, we know to pause a sec after someone stops talking for latency, and have a spoken agreement "fuck slack just open a room i'll hop in". We have met in person numerous times and each time it feels identical to work in person as we do remote.
When I meet with other teams, people are in their fucking cars driving, cameras off the whole time (but chewing into the mic), can't figure out how to share their screen (still!), like, no shit that isn't productive, you're putting no effort into it!
omg that explains so many things!
Therefore with the current job market we don’t need to be generous with it.
Related - JPMorgan is opening a new HQ with a big nice gym, and plan to charge employees to use it, lol. Thanks I’ll just leave the building Jamie.
Chef's kiss.
Don't get me wrong, that's still way too expensive; but your exaggeration is _way_ off the mark.
One of my coworkers is a contractor for a local IT/engineering firm, and another client recently lost one of their principle engineers due to him refusing to RTO and quit. Now the VPs he reported under are bad-mouthing him, saying he was "never any good", "screwed everything up", and "not a team player" - which everyone else knows is BS. The employees are just keeping their heads down trying not to get noticed - morale is bad. Management has even noticed and reversed their recent more formal dress code for a Jeans (and a Food Truck once a month) Friday. Needless to say no one is impressed.