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' 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.)
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’ 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 is hilarious that people think the second largest company on the planet, with a market cap over $5 trillion, spends even one second worry about the profit margins of commercial real estate companies, makes any decisions based on that, or is somehow cowed by their alleged political power despite being much, much, much smaller than Microsoft.
I always assume a different option, though (3) is likely part of it for Microsoft right now as well.
When leadership decides their velocity is too slow for whatever reason, they look for deck chairs to move. RTO is one big deck chair they can move and many will assume it will improve performance and velocity.
The problem is that I've never seen anyone actually prove that out for RTO with solid data. And that goes both ways, I haven't seen anything to prove that remote-first is universally better for performance.
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.
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.
One you miss is that if other companies in your industry are RTO, and you don't, the first quarter you under-perform your competitors, your shareholders and activist investors will blame the fact that you haven't RTO when all your competitors have ... !obviously! that is the key issue. Effectively, if everyone else is, you cannot afford not to.
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.
(2) Seems like a media narrative rather than truth. I don't think that would be anywhere remotely high on a CEO's priority list unless they were a commercial real estate company.
It's far more likely a mixture of (1) and actual results - in-person/hybrid teams produce better outcomes (even if why that's true hasn't been deeply evaluated or ultimately falls on management)
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 portion of people that don't do anything meaningful. Sure they'll waste time in the office as well, but at least they're somewhat more productive or available. They're not watching Netflix in their underwear. Every large organization I've been at had these people.
It's really that simple. The alternative is really conspiracy level stuff.
2 and 3 aren't real. Nobody gives a damn about their shareholders other investments, and no one company has the numbers to save them anyway. And nobody is dumb enough to do RTO as a layoff proxy because anybody with a brain knows you're going to lose the people with options, who are exactly the people you don't want to lose.
> (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
How is this not a net loss for them?
From their perspective, wouldn’t that just be moving money left to right, plus even more overhead?
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.
> Big corpo is a modern feodal state, where CEO is an emperor, c-suites are kings, managers are barons
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.
The funny thing is, I get more done at the office than at home. And if I’m dressed professionally, I get more done and I get better responses from others than when I’m wearing shorts and a tee shirt.
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.
My friend is CTO of a smaller company say ~250 people, and RTO constantly comes up in the C-suite.
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.
A big difference between feudalism and modern societies is that in feudalism, you expect to earn much less than the value of the land you inherit and pass on (or the custom or right of your family farming the land) whereas in modern societies most people will earn much more in lifetime earnings than they would inherit or pass on. This results in far more social mobility and much more freedom in praxis. I don’t think companies are like feudal societies.
I think it is a mix between power play and real-estate. During Covid and late-Covid, management had to let people wfh/remote, and companies were either mass-hiring or mass-layoffs. Insecure management felt like they had their "power" stripped away, and now between the uncertain economy and some being embolden due to the current potus admin, they want to "put workers in their place".
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.
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:
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
>studies show employees are willing to take a hit to bonuses, pay and promotions to keep that perk.
That doesn't seem surprising for software. If I can make 300k remote or 400k in the office, that 100k tbh has dimishing returns on my life satisfaction. And 300k total comp is a ton off money in the first place.
I know of a certain large company I will not name that is sending people back to office while also having a huge percentage of staff augmentation consultants living outside of the US. So you can find teams that have two people in the office, working side by side with another 10 people in the team that are remote, and interacting with teams that might be a 7, 8 timezones away.
You can imagine how well those people feel about RTO, and how it helps their collaboration.
C suites are committed to spending as much as possible on real estate
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.
Wasn't that one of the (many) dodgy things about wework under the original founder? Something about him buying the buildings and then having wework lease them from him?
How that guy didn't end up on the receiving end of a load of criminal charges...
Several years before the pandemic I was forced to move several states away after my local office was shutdown and the company was looking to force everyone to a few larger offices. It didn’t make any sense. Within my little 10 person team, we had people in 5 states and at least 2 counties, spanning multiple time zones. I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day. I saw very little point to being in the office. If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office. The whole thing was madness.
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.
> I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO
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.
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 have either a WFH organization, or an in-person one, but the mixed cases appear to be a friction-filled mess.
> Instead, it seems like CEOs see RTO as a way of getting rid of 'slackers'
"Seems" is an interesting word, because if even you can't locate a rational motive, whilst attempting to apologise for RTO, and are just left making some guesses, then what am I supposed to infer except that this whole thing is based on suspicion, groupthink and anxiety?
"The data is clear", trumpets Microsoft in their internal email. Then why will they not divulge it?
It resembles the same kind of social contagion as the AI usage mandates we see - also completely meritless
> 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.
In this economy, you can't even make a company, let alone profess their benefits. This is all intentional.
If/when the economy recovers and funding is flowing around, I predict we will see this huge boom in WFH companies, especially with startups.
Unfortunately, larger corps are seeing "WFH" as yet another attempt to offshore as much labor as possible. I can't guarantee after this ebb that top tech companies will be begging for talent the same way they were last decade.
Yeah, WFH doesn't work because you can't smell each other over the network. We can transmit video and audio, but so far we can't replicate touch and smell over Zoom calls. Now, touch is obviously not needed, because touching your coworkers is against policy, but smell is really important. As the esteemed researcher Mya S. Smith has shown, people who work emit a specific pheromone, known as the "Busy Efficient Employee" pheromone, or BEE pheromone for short. When a person smells another person's BEE pheromone, that signals their brain to focus on work and they themselves start emitting BEE pheromones too. The end result is a hive of bustling BEEs, delivering productivity, synergy, collaboration, and making line go up! This is also why open-office plans are so important to maximise productivity - it is the easiest way to make sure BEE smell is dispersed to every corner of the office. BEE also makes employees very happy to stay late in the office and work overtime without asking for additional pay.
100% this. remote work is great for some people, but it's definitely taken advantage by a others. And those who take advantage ruin it for everybody. I literally have friends who have bragged about how good their mouse jiggler is.
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 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 they have nothing better to do and there's immediate social pressure to work (unlike in their homes which presumably have many more pleasant activities available).
This isn't obvious to people who are highly disciplined and intrinsically motivated, since they actually get more done in the quiet environment of their home. But some people need the structure and social pressure of an office to get them to work. Your strategy could be "only hire highly disciplined and intrinsically motivated people", but you'll have to compete with everyone else for them, and they're expensive and less common than the other type. It's also hard to test for in an interview.
If you're really exceptional, they'll quietly let you WFH anyway.
My employer is currently mandating a 2 day per-week RTO for all employees within 50 miles of a major office, but in my case, even if they wanted to, they'd be unable to force a return to a 5 day arrangement.
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).
Are they requiring VP approval for zoom meetings? Requiring zoom meetings to be restricted to office network IP addresses?
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.
Sounds like Dell. Michael Dell owns a lot of commercial real estate, especially around main campus hq. More employees in the office, better returns on his commercial real estate.
How does that make sense? "Now that my employees don't need to occupy the space all the time, rent out (possibly parts of) the office for even more $$$" would be how I'd think if I were in his shoes.
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.
Come join GM (formerly Cruise) ADAS org. We are hiring. Work is pretty cool at every level from kernel and drivers to userspace linux to frameworks, to ML. And, as long as you are >50 mi from detroit, you are going to be fully remote. Pay is good. People are good.
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 read things like this and wish that when I was doing my masters at OMSCS I had focused more on ML. What I wouldn't give to work in a shop that was actually building something cool.
> 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.
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.
And for each CEO, those shareholders are mostly the same people.
It's easy to get sucked into thinking this is just the way the world works but really we've just enshrined a local and temporal phenomenon. Layoffs aren't a physical law. There are places and times where this would not happen.
Let me put my investor hat on: hiring at the top and firing at the bottom is a predictable inefficiency and represents a CEO failing at their responsibilities. You don't get to be a CEO and claim ignorance of market cycles.
Just how software engineers are in the hacker news thought bubble you have the VC and CEO thought bubble. It roughly goes like this: Someone has some productivity or whatever problem and RTOs. That costs money, they lose people, so they can’t later admit it was a wash or a net negative. So they go on Twitter or LinkedIn and trumpet how great their hardcore 996 RTO is going. Now others see this and fomo kicks in. They start their own RTO which they are then again highly incentivized to report as successful. Rinse and repeat.
Well every company just happens to be undertaking RTO at the same time so it seems to be above the exec level. I’ve seen hypotheses on here that city councils are putting on pressure to boost their local economies and another that boards of directors are pushing this as the last chance to layoff->outsource before H-1Bs are banned. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t appear to stem from innovative or independent executive thought.
A previous company I worked at has a satellite office with one single employee, and mandates office 3 days a week.
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.
> I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO
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.
> trying to get people online was almost impossible. They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them
I don't understand why this is such a problem. I've even heard CEOs complain about this, about their direct reports. Child, if someone is AWOL on their job and they're blocking you, ring their boss. And if you're the boss, hold them to account. Why do so many orgs need a steamroller to level the flower beds.
Yeah there is this big lie that most people work the same amount when they have a ton of distractions and can slack off whenever. Not my experience at all. Nobody wants to lose their WFH so everyone pretends productivity didn't change. If what was true you'd never see this RTO push. Offices cost money!
I'd like to ask these CEOs, for people which are taking advantage of the system, why are they not let go? Could it be that management often have no clue how much value each employee brings to the team? Is RTO being mandated to avoid facing that uncomfortable truth?
Things which might be contributing to the RTO in my opinion:
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)
> ...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.
The executive class is entirely based on personal branding. If you're not changing anything, it's like being a TikTok influencer without posting any new videos. It doesn't matter what you post really, and often the more controversial you are the better. If you play your cards right, you're not an "idiot" for making the company worse, you're a "bold and innovative thought leader".
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 hate when people mention "watercooler chats" - not you, of course, but the clueless leadership/HR people that come up with this. Last time I heard it, it was: "the best ideas sometimes come from a watercooler chat, so we need to have people in the office".
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.
My employer has never allowed remote work and likely never will. They have private offices for all developers and insist on the unmeasurable value of in person work.
I don't love it, but I at least respect they are upfront about it and are consistent vs flip flopping and impacting people's lives unexpectedly.
My theory is it's just about exerting arbitrary control over employees.
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.
In our case we're still hybrid, but unlike before when everyone was in the office, your lunch hour all of a sudden counts against you. They want you in the building a full 8 hours, and despite otherwise being remote, you cannot make up any hours.
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.
Productivity tracker that tracks sport/fashion/travel chats for hours, dozens of smoke breaks and employees shitting every 16 minutes – very advanced tech.
It's because C-level people are extraverted and believe in torturing others to please themselves. As a concept it fits perfectly with the reasoning that you should earn ten times what another employee at your company does.
I don’t know how common this is generally, but I know at least one bigtech corporate campus that is surrounded by local businesses that, by and large, happen to be owned by the individuals in senior management at that company. So in that case it’s a classic vested interest.
“collective wisdom” is basically a polite euphemism for groupthink and given that c level folks are all taking the same mba/sigma/cthulu worship courses it’s not surprising.
It’s simple. It comes from the boards of these companies who have investments in corporate real estate. Got to keep the scam going at the expense of worker mental state, environment, and of course control.
This could be chicken or the egg, but I had a team member (that missed office time) for about 3 weeks, at the same time, they dramatically reduced the number of MRs merged and responsiveness on Slack.
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.
In office work is an artifact of the boomer generation and gen X. The world has changed its relationship to work and they can’t seem to come to terms with it.
Not sure Gen X are in love with office work, the X'ers I know (and I am one) loooove working from home. We're at the stage in life where we've settled, got spacious-enough houses where we can dedicate some office space, and working from home gives us space to do stuff like a little home improvement in our lunch breaks, or be home for deliveries and tradespeople. Big win for me not having to commute several hours a day. I'm lucky enough to work for a place where there isn't an office to commute to, and I know I've got it good!
As usual though, I'm sure I'm not representative. I was sure it was my generation that was going to put an end to the pointless war on drugs and other such stupid bullshit, yet here we are at peak influence (ages 45-60 approx) and it turns out the people in power in my generation are no different to those who came before. The problem is the kind of people who climb the greasy poles of politics and business.
tl;dr - it ain't generational. Arseholes in charge are always the arseholes in charge.
Collaboration, Water cooler chats it's all bullshit. Cut through the fat and you find C-Suites need to justify the millions being spent on Real estate.
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.
Maybe some positions are or feel worthy only when performed in physically social context. Jobs dealing with human problems have this tendency more often than those dealing more with non-human problems.
I work in a large company that mandated 4-day RTO last year. Even taking a completely objetive point of view on the situation leads to the conclusion that something else is needed. We spend our days at our desks, on Zoom calls. People won’t get up to join in person - mostly because the conference rooms are all blocked by “special projects”, but mostly due to the offshoring of positions and distributed workforce post-pandemic. We are all spending valuable time on commutes to do what was possible from home.
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.
We should know by now that all these RTO initiatives are not grounded in any reasonable logistics nor financial reasoning. Right now all of tech is in cut mode, and RTO's are a great way to do layoffs without calling them layoffs. Note that when Google got "too many" people RTO'ing, they did layoffs anyway.
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.
This theory is often-quoted but doesn't make much sense. Big tech including Microsoft already did multiple rounds of layoffs. Why not just do another round?
I suspect the C-suite has noticed the discrepancy between attendance and occupancy
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.
If I returned to the office I'd be working with teammates in India, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, and Delaware and none of them would be in my office. I'd be essentially working remote from an office that I commute to. The worst of all worlds.
Funny/sad story, my friend works for the government making maps for watersheds. Elon comes along and forces people to go back to office. She’d been remote since she was hired 3+ years ago. So suddenly she’s assigned to the closest gov office near her, which is an ICE OFFICE in SF, about an hour commute from where she lives (each way). She’s massively against the goings-on at ICE and asks for an alternate spot. She now has to commute 1:15 each way to an animal holding office in SFO. She is currently zooming into work each day from an office full of transient animals and no humans related to anything she does, all in the name of government efficiency. Needless to say, her work efficiency has diminished greatly.
This is exactly the problem with a lot of the RTO push..
We are more geographically spread out than ever, and companies usually have, at best, 1/2 the conferences rooms required to actually collaborate properly.
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.
It's worse now, but complaints about offices as working spaces were constant pre-pandemic too. Complaining about it then made you seem a bit... wet.
But now the highest levels have brought the productivity benefits of RTO into their wheelhouse. So making the offices suitable also shouldn't be a responsibility punted to a relatively minor position.
Same thing happened where I worked, though that was mostly from what I heard from coworkers since I maintained my WFH status. It's all CEO theater designed to layoff folks while also forcing people who RTO to take an effective pay cut. People need to recognize that and demand more from where they work, whether it's in the form of unionizing or otherwise.
There is always an answer to unionizing and other demands: hiring freeze plus offshoring overseas. Eventually even unionized people will be replaced with offshore buddies.
This is why I stay at a company that’s 100% remote even though I’m sacrificing many thousands of dollars a year in additional income. I just can’t go back for so many reasons. But the most frustrating one in my opinion is exactly what you said, that all of this can be done remotely.
Executives have done all manner of things which reduced productivity. Hoteling alone must have cost billions in lost focus.
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.
If you are so miserable, are you looking for a new job that will allow WFH? I think that is the solution. Also, did you ask your line manager if you can WFH more often? That is a first step. If they say no, they go and find a new job.
If the company enforces RTO at least stop using zoom for meetings. If that means offshored employees can't participate then so be it. Let them come to the office.
Office space / real estate owners don't care. It's their plot to increase profits and companies are colluded with them on it. There is no other obvious reason besides may be Big Brother monitoring mentality.
> Microsoft's new approach is the latest sign of the company increasing performance pressure on employees. It has fired thousands of employees deemed low performers this year and introduced a new performance improvement plan meant to exit low performers more quickly.
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?
While sketchy and total crap move on MS. What recourse do employees really have?
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.
I don't know. When a company uses RTO to reduce headcount they usually include all employees, with the expectation that those who live far away from the office will resign instead of relocate.
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.
Just out of curiosity, how much compensation would people be willing to leave on the table in lieu of "Remote" work? (this is different to, how much would you ASK to go from remote to a new in-office job). 10%, 25%, 50%?
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.
This question isn't very revealing because it almost entirely depends on this one variable:
> 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.
>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.
Maybe this is the way companies rid themselves of older workers who push back on things. The FIRE movement is huge in tech, and I imagine a not insignificant number of people have RTO as the last straw where they pull the ripcord. Personally, for me? There's no going back. The only way you could get me into the office on a regular basis is if you let me work on rovers at JPL or something.
For myself, I'd love nothing more if I could code part time in retirement, for the rest of my life, but I won't RTO to do it. If I have to leave development behind? So be it.
You got the underlying reason for my question almost in passing:
I've been involved in hiring Software devs from US and LatAm for several years in different management positions. I wondered how feasible would be for say, a company in Mexico to compete on hiring a dev in the USA at a lower cost (normally, a Mexico dev is between 1/3 to 1/2 the price of a US one), by leveraging the value of [allowing] working Remote.
EDIT: Which actually made me think of a crazy idea: A job board called something like "Work for Less", where small companies or companies from overseas offer jobs that have compensations more focused on Quality of Living vs compensation. So for example, a job opening might have "We offer: 70% of your last salary. 3 day weekends, remote work". Or if it is say, a Mexican company, "We offer: 80% of your last salary. Comprehensive relocation help to live/work in a Mexican beach for 4 months a year. Medical Tourism coverage (don't know what this is called, but basically, help in say, taking people to high quality medical places)".
Maybe it is a stupid idea, but at the end of the day, Remote Work is one of several "Levers" for Quality of Life, and although historically the US has focused on monetary compensation, maybe newer generations value other aspects more.
There is also the unknown future. How stable is this remote-pay-discount bargain opportunity? If the company goes bust and you need to RTO, you need to live in a market with employment options.
I’ll give some real world numbers. Right now I make a little over $200K. I am 51, never struck it rich in tech and make the same as former intern I mentored when I was in BigTech between 2020-2023 and when they got back. They got promoted to an L5 (mid level) earlier this year at 25. We both worked in the Professional Services department.
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.
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
I left an on-site job for a fully remote job, taking about a 35% cut to do so. Literally every aspect of my life improved, including financially.
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.
> Just out of curiosity, how much compensation would people be willing to leave on the table in lieu of "Remote" work? (this is different to, how much would you ASK to go from remote to a new in-office job). 10%, 25%, 50%?
Where's the office? The bike ride through some parks like my last? A ten minute drive in surface streets? A 20 minute rail ride away? A half hour drive on crowded highways?
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'd have to do the math on what the commute would cost me in time and financial cost.
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.
Enough to win the competition for the fixed number of available homes in good neighborhoods convenient to the office. Which is effectively an infinite amount, if every employer in the area is trying to throw money at the problem.
Based upon the recruiters messaging me, if I gave up my remote job for one that required in-office attendance I would get an immediate 30% pay bump.
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.
I would never take less pay to work from home. Im good with working in office or at home. Also, Im doing the same job either way, so I'm not sure why I'd be paid differently one way or the other. If anything, I'd think it's more expensive (insignificantly) for the company to give me a desk.
In 2008 I was given 2 offers from a company: WFH or paid relocation to work in-office. I chose the former, which came with a 26% lower salary, and have been remote ever since. Just comparing the salaries in that case is a little disingenuous, however, since the relocation was from a low cost of living city to a high cost of living city.
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.
> Maybe it is my age (44), or maybe I am even in a privileged position financially
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.
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 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 :-)
I think the simple and boring answer is it really depends. As you say, your commute is short, but also I think there's just a personality element to it. Some people absolutely thrive and are way more productive remotely (and I think HN skews towards that type of person), and other people are the opposite, losing their minds if they don't have colleagues beside them to talk and collaborate with.
> I think the simple and boring answer is it really depends
Yep, people are different.
> are way more productive remotely
Is this measured, or they are feel more productive? (I think, answer is the same: there is full spectrum here and somebody is less productive but feels more productive and somebody is really more productive and, maybe, feels the same :-))
But my previous team (where I worked at the peak of COVID) was less productive for sure (I can compare release notes between product release and see as they are shrinking from release to release at COVID time!), though we have some team members who thought that they become more productive!.
Also, long time ago I worked in distributed team (St.Petersburg, Russia / Boston, USA / Santa Clara, USA) and we had twice-a-year week-long whole-team in-person meetings in Boston office (I was from St.Petersburg). These were two hyper-productive weeks, when we solved a lot of problems which accumulated between these meeting, fast and efficient. It was before video-conferencing, so all other meetings was phone-calls (only audio), but still.
I understand, that it is not statistics, it is anecdotal, but I'm very skeptical about broad claims that distributed / remote teams (!) can be as efficient (or even more) as local ones. Personal contributors — sure, all people are different, but whole teams — I'm in doubt. We are social animals, and all these video calls are still conversation with pixels, not people.
Oh, I agree fully. I enjoy going to office. I also enjoy WFH. But after two days of WFH I am so bored.
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!
I'm a big believer in empowerment. 90% of employees will usually do the right thing for themselves and the business IF YOU JUST LET THEM. For example, mandating 5 day RTO only to have your sales engineers take a full meeting room by themselves to sit on sales calls all day is idiotic for everybody.
You’re speaking from a very privileged position. A 15–20 minute commute and an office with a canteen is not the reality for most workers. Many spend 1–3 hours daily stuck in traffic or on crowded trains, which is pure wasted time. Add in rising transport costs, pollution, and the fact that not everyone can afford to live near their workplace, and commuting becomes one of the biggest drains on productivity and well-being.
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.
Commute is very location-specific and will be very different between USA and Europe, and different even between different locations in USA and different countries in Europe, you are right.
But when we speaking about Microsoft, Google, FaceBook, etc., workers, I think canteen is a norm, not reality for most workers.
And many workers outside IT cannot WFH at all. You cannot be salesman or welder or teacher or plumber WFH... We all are very privileged, no matter how long is our commute.
You’re not alone. I absolutely love going to office every day but also love the flexibility to occasionally wfh if needed. I just feel like when I enter the office and put on my “unreachable” focus mode on I’m in the zone and very productive. At home there’s endless distractions (my cats make sure to check in with me every time get too focused). Also I do like interacting with colleagues. I think I started liking going to office even more once I broke up with my gf that was living with me for 4 years. Something about working the entire day from my apartment completely alone is… not appealing to my social side of the brain.
It’s completely fine to prefer the office, that’s your choice and it works for you. The problem isn’t people going in, it’s when companies force everyone to go. Reading your post, it almost sounds like you want others dragged back just to fill the gap left in your own private life. That’s not a good reason to mandate office work for everyone.
People have different preferences, some people are going to be more productive at home and some less. Some people simply can’t work from home.
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.
Thanks for being honest. I cannot imagine trying to work from home and I think it is a shared charade we are all caught up in. Be thankful you have a job to go into work to, that may not always be the case for everyone…
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.
Readit News
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.
When leadership decides their velocity is too slow for whatever reason, they look for deck chairs to move. RTO is one big deck chair they can move and many will assume it will improve performance and velocity.
The problem is that I've never seen anyone actually prove that out for RTO with solid data. And that goes both ways, I haven't seen anything to prove that remote-first is universally better for performance.
I'm surprised this was not mentioned as a possibility.
It's far more likely a mixture of (1) and actual results - in-person/hybrid teams produce better outcomes (even if why that's true hasn't been deeply evaluated or ultimately falls on management)
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 portion of people that don't do anything meaningful. Sure they'll waste time in the office as well, but at least they're somewhat more productive or available. They're not watching Netflix in their underwear. Every large organization I've been at had these people.
It's really that simple. The alternative is really conspiracy level stuff.
1 is spot on.
How is this not a net loss for them?
From their perspective, wouldn’t that just be moving money left to right, plus even more overhead?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
That doesn't seem surprising for software. If I can make 300k remote or 400k in the office, that 100k tbh has dimishing returns on my life satisfaction. And 300k total comp is a ton off money in the first place.
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.
How that guy didn't end up on the receiving end of a load of criminal charges...
I know managers that were let go because it appeared like their only job was being host to that one stand up meeting everyday, and nothing else.
I guess they just want people to return to save their own jobs.
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.
As far as I can tell this is what apple does, and it actually makes a lot more sense than "you must be in some office but we don't care where".
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.
"Seems" is an interesting word, because if even you can't locate a rational motive, whilst attempting to apologise for RTO, and are just left making some guesses, then what am I supposed to infer except that this whole thing is based on suspicion, groupthink and anxiety?
"The data is clear", trumpets Microsoft in their internal email. Then why will they not divulge it?
It resembles the same kind of social contagion as the AI usage mandates we see - also completely meritless
In this economy, you can't even make a company, let alone profess their benefits. This is all intentional.
If/when the economy recovers and funding is flowing around, I predict we will see this huge boom in WFH companies, especially with startups.
Unfortunately, larger corps are seeing "WFH" as yet another attempt to offshore as much labor as possible. I can't guarantee after this ebb that top tech companies will be begging for talent the same way they were last decade.
This isn't obvious to people who are highly disciplined and intrinsically motivated, since they actually get more done in the quiet environment of their home. But some people need the structure and social pressure of an office to get them to work. Your strategy could be "only hire highly disciplined and intrinsically motivated people", but you'll have to compete with everyone else for them, and they're expensive and less common than the other type. It's also hard to test for in an interview.
If you're really exceptional, they'll quietly let you WFH anyway.
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.
Fellow ex-Googler, looking for an interesting systems programming role.
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...
And for each CEO, those shareholders are mostly the same people.
It's easy to get sucked into thinking this is just the way the world works but really we've just enshrined a local and temporal phenomenon. Layoffs aren't a physical law. There are places and times where this would not happen.
Let me put my investor hat on: hiring at the top and firing at the bottom is a predictable inefficiency and represents a CEO failing at their responsibilities. You don't get to be a CEO and claim ignorance of market cycles.
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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.
I don't understand why this is such a problem. I've even heard CEOs complain about this, about their direct reports. Child, if someone is AWOL on their job and they're blocking you, ring their boss. And if you're the boss, hold them to account. Why do so many orgs need a steamroller to level the flower beds.
If you’re being blocked by someone online, you’d be blocked offline too.
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 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.
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 don't love it, but I at least respect they are upfront about it and are consistent vs flip flopping and impacting people's lives unexpectedly.
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.
As usual though, I'm sure I'm not representative. I was sure it was my generation that was going to put an end to the pointless war on drugs and other such stupid bullshit, yet here we are at peak influence (ages 45-60 approx) and it turns out the people in power in my generation are no different to those who came before. The problem is the kind of people who climb the greasy poles of politics and business.
tl;dr - it ain't generational. Arseholes in charge are always the arseholes in charge.
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.
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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.
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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.
My company did this, then pulled 3 different departments into a 3d/w RTO they didn't even have the space for. Whoops!
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.
But now the highest levels have brought the productivity benefits of RTO into their wheelhouse. So making the offices suitable also shouldn't be a responsibility punted to a relatively minor position.
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.
1) Mandating RTO is a compliance check that allows you to fire people with cause and avoid other more costly downsizing efforts.
2) Justifying a lease.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal
If I've heard of this angle, I assume that lawyers know many angles that may apply.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe this is the way companies rid themselves of older workers who push back on things. The FIRE movement is huge in tech, and I imagine a not insignificant number of people have RTO as the last straw where they pull the ripcord. Personally, for me? There's no going back. The only way you could get me into the office on a regular basis is if you let me work on rovers at JPL or something.
For myself, I'd love nothing more if I could code part time in retirement, for the rest of my life, but I won't RTO to do it. If I have to leave development behind? So be it.
I've been involved in hiring Software devs from US and LatAm for several years in different management positions. I wondered how feasible would be for say, a company in Mexico to compete on hiring a dev in the USA at a lower cost (normally, a Mexico dev is between 1/3 to 1/2 the price of a US one), by leveraging the value of [allowing] working Remote.
EDIT: Which actually made me think of a crazy idea: A job board called something like "Work for Less", where small companies or companies from overseas offer jobs that have compensations more focused on Quality of Living vs compensation. So for example, a job opening might have "We offer: 70% of your last salary. 3 day weekends, remote work". Or if it is say, a Mexican company, "We offer: 80% of your last salary. Comprehensive relocation help to live/work in a Mexican beach for 4 months a year. Medical Tourism coverage (don't know what this is called, but basically, help in say, taking people to high quality medical places)".
Maybe it is a stupid idea, but at the end of the day, Remote Work is one of several "Levers" for Quality of Life, and although historically the US has focused on monetary compensation, maybe newer generations value other aspects more.
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
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...
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.
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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 :-)
Yep, people are different.
> are way more productive remotely
Is this measured, or they are feel more productive? (I think, answer is the same: there is full spectrum here and somebody is less productive but feels more productive and somebody is really more productive and, maybe, feels the same :-))
But my previous team (where I worked at the peak of COVID) was less productive for sure (I can compare release notes between product release and see as they are shrinking from release to release at COVID time!), though we have some team members who thought that they become more productive!.
Also, long time ago I worked in distributed team (St.Petersburg, Russia / Boston, USA / Santa Clara, USA) and we had twice-a-year week-long whole-team in-person meetings in Boston office (I was from St.Petersburg). These were two hyper-productive weeks, when we solved a lot of problems which accumulated between these meeting, fast and efficient. It was before video-conferencing, so all other meetings was phone-calls (only audio), but still.
I understand, that it is not statistics, it is anecdotal, but I'm very skeptical about broad claims that distributed / remote teams (!) can be as efficient (or even more) as local ones. Personal contributors — sure, all people are different, but whole teams — I'm in doubt. We are social animals, and all these video calls are still conversation with pixels, not people.
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!
I'm a big believer in empowerment. 90% of employees will usually do the right thing for themselves and the business IF YOU JUST LET THEM. For example, mandating 5 day RTO only to have your sales engineers take a full meeting room by themselves to sit on sales calls all day is idiotic for everybody.
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.
But when we speaking about Microsoft, Google, FaceBook, etc., workers, I think canteen is a norm, not reality for most workers.
And many workers outside IT cannot WFH at all. You cannot be salesman or welder or teacher or plumber WFH... We all are very privileged, no matter how long is our commute.
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.
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.
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.
and
https://www.bullshitgenerator.com/
can help out for practice!
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_unions
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