Microsoft Is Officially Sending Employees Back to the Office

I think they’re realizing that there is no meaningful competition for these gigantic corporations. They’re worth 4 trillion. They saw Google got away without any consequence on the Chrome anti trust issue. They know they can keep bundling products, building new dark patterns, throwing up walled gardens, loss leading competitors (like Teams did with Slack), and all of that. And I’m sure Satya is currying favor with Trump like the rest of them to keep things that way. When you have such a situation, your company can get away with anything. If there was competition, workers and customers could go elsewhere.

AWS SDEs are way more competent than Azure SDEs.

Folks at Amazon at least earn more.

More likely they have decided popularity is irrelevant since they are so entrenched, so may as well try to find the cheapest possible maintenance engineer to manage the value extraction.

MS Teams for video teleconferencing...good. On a Windows PC, and using MS365, by far the easiest to set up (or change) a meeting and fewest issues with cameras across multiple devices. (Webex and Zoom are close seconds, Google Meet is a distant last due to constant camera issues.)

MS Teams for IM...okay. Too much white space and too hard to find conversations that I know I've had recently. Very much prefer Slack.

MS Teams for any of that other stuff...rage inducing. Especially the file sharing and other "team" features which break with every minor update. Somehow, even worse than using Sharepoint directly. Went back to email and using network drives to share/store team documents.

Spoken like someone who hasn't witnessed 3 coworkers sitting a few feet apart do a teams meeting with each other (and no one else).

No need for Teams, this was a Covid thing. Now all bets on Copilot. Bit with all that capex actual souls must leave the machine to make more space gor ai chips.

This also filters for subservience.

Particularly the older people who have settled and can't relocate. It's like age discrimination without all the annoying legal drawbacks.

It's clearly a combination of stealth layoffs and "because we can" attitude by a lot of C-suite right now.

Labor market is soft, so they will take as much as they can while they can, on the status quo bias of "in-office must be more productive, especially if employees don't like it".

It's the dumbest form of stealth layoffs as it's random untargetted regarding the company's actual department/role staffing needs.

> Microsoft updates flexible work expectations to three days a week in the office

Of all the "voices" I'd like to be able to do, corporate shitspeak is definitely the top one.

I assume that any GitHub employee within 50 miles of a Microsoft office will be expected to commute.

Hubber here. This didn’t affect us.

Github is exempt and will be remote first

> my bet is that folks will leave to other companies given that the main leverage like WFH is gone.

Where though? I thought the current jobs market for tech wasn't in a nice spot for devs.

It’s a common thing here on HN to believe that remote is superior for productivity, and I’m always reminded of Richard Hammond’s observations about open door vs closed door coworkers. He noticed over time that the closed door workers were more productive. He also noticed that the closed door workers were less impactful in their fields years later. His were observations in R&D settings, but I suspect they can be extrapolated. People who are interrupted get less done. This seems largely indisputable, but what is the other takeaway? People who don’t interract with peers don’t course correct enough, seems to be solid advice based on what we know about the OODA loop. People who don’t interact with coworkers don’t get enough time saving advice? I know I’ve saved lots of effort by having coworkers who know things I didn’t about related problems.

What complicated things, is return to work will cause all the best to rethink their employment. I’ve seen HBR surveys that suggest the top talent is ending up places that allow them to stay remote. I think this leaves businesses in a tight place. I have every reason to believe that companies with lots of employee interactions have better acceleration/trajetory than fully remote, but it’s a big hit to lose top talent. And remote may have so much velocity from gaining this talent that they don’t care about the acceleration tradeoff.

Further, concentration of talent in a region also cannot be discounted. Certain things can’t happen without the exchange of ideas (partly why I think cities/counties should ban non competes). I don’t know how much a given company can control this concentration of talent, but I know that Seattle wouldn’t be what it is without Boeing, and then Microsoft attracting very smart people.

Anecdotally, I'm at a larger multinational corporation and our site has been mandating a new RTO policy and have not been granting exceptions based solely on seniority. In my personal opinion I believe it's mostly a soft layoff, so they can approve exceptions on a case-by-case basis.

I don't think I'd call it meaningless; this sets the new default for the many orgs who haven't set a mandate already, and it seems to indicate that exceptions will now be harder to get.

And yet here you are, perpetuating the “crabs in a bucket” mentality that continues to be a blight on our industry.

Interesting. I've been remote for 5 years across three different companies, and if anything I've had the opposite experience: my remote coworkers are far more responsive than my on-site coworkers, who are always in meetings, in transit, having in-person chit chat, or taking a break.

I have a more nuanced take here. For low performing or junior employees, remote work was generally a terrible thing that led to less productivity (and more managerial overhead). For strongly performing employees with obligations at home, there were many who preferred working at home.

I fall more into the latter camp (at least I hope so) and, given I've only worked in nice offices with catered lunches, gyms, video games, offsites, etc, I enjoy a 3 day hybrid schedule works best for me.

I'm very pro remote working, but I think people like me need to realize that this is a real issue. It happens in the office too, but it's a bit harder to get away with, and it's really a performance management issue which brings us nicely to your second point.

I agree, managers are always the worst offenders when it comes to this sort of thing. But they do the same in the office by disappearing into meeting rooms for the entire day. I'd love to know how you can effectively manage a team by constantly being in meetings with other managers.

At our company some people outright admitted on a survey sent out to employees that they would go out and run errands during work hours.

Like, how stupid do you have to be to kill your golden goose of life work balance?

> It was a privilege, people abused it, and now it's over. And managers were the worst offenders.

IME, managers do this in the office just as much as remote.

Look at the typical manager's schedule. It's completely full of meetings - most of which are bullshit "busy" meetings, and they never respond to anything timely.

Abused it in which way? Don't touch the money-makers. And if you're in the office, don't daydream about 'improvements' you could make that touch the money-makers in a vain attempt to quell your anxiety about not appearing to do anything of value.

That seems like an issue of company leadership and culture. There are many remote companies where this isn’t true. I’ve seen comments from Amazon workers talking about they were much more productive in a remote work situation, even though their leader (Andy Jassy) chose to make the company go back to the office 5 days a week with invasive monitoring of how people badge in and out.

I abuse the WFH thing because my manager promised me a raise if I complete a project and then sabotaged it, then put the blame on me, and finally changed the raise requirements. Really can't stay motivated in such an environment. If the game is "who fucks harder the other party" then don't be surprised that I watch porn during WFH and then try to convince other employees to do the same.

This is the issue. Too many people take the absolute piss with it. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have people who don't switch off and put in a lot of extra hours essentially picking up the slack. I'm finding a lot more people (both at work and amongst friends) who are desperate to avoid speaking on calls or turning their video on because it makes them nervous. Probably healthier for everyone to just be in the office.

Reading this comment I can't help but imagine a high school student using the same pattern to respond to an "open period" being changed to "study hall" with mandatory in-library presence; which is not to dig on you, just to raise the idea that maybe k-12 education really is a conspiracy to train people to sit in factories.

How/can we "montessori-fy"?

I've experienced it both ways. The least available and responsive workers were remote, but the most available and responsive workers were also remote.

I will forever fight this with saying that chat is an async medium. If you need a response right now, pick up the phone.

Worst offenders are people who say things like: Hey, how are you doing?

And then ... nothing.

Or maybe people are actually working on something. And your 2 minute question might cause them to lose 30 minutes.

This is why it is important to have multiple work-streams going when doing remote work, so that you don't sit around and wait until you have your answer.

It always seems weird to me how people complain about such things. Just do your thing and don't care about others. If others are blocking you, just say so in the daily or to your manager. Easy.

I don't really care about unproductive people, I care about myself.

> It was a privilege

Hardly. It was COVID. It forced companies to do the most logical thing they could in a world of high speed internet. Many of them refused to read the writing on the wall and assumed it would return to normal one day. They made no efforts to internally reorient themselves around this new work strategy.

> people abused it

Other than your anecdote what evidence is there that this is true? Has the economy faltered? Is there any second source for the data which shows _any_ impact _at all_?

Remote work means traffic congestion gets better and also helps solves the affordable housing crisis, as people can then choose to live in areas with a lower cost of living but further away from the inner city.

> issues with safety on public transportation

Do you know the stats on what percentage of transit rides result in some sort of assault or theft? It’s always felt pretty safe to me, although you certainly do end up sharing space with some very disadvantaged people.

My issue with US transit is mostly speed and convenience. Even with the traffic it usually takes 3x as long to get somewhere by transit, unless my destination lines up perfectly with the routes.

I worked at Microsoft pre and post-pandemic. Microsoft has an extensive shuttle network, but the public transit (Sound Transit) to the office was nicer in many ways. It ran more frequently and the seats reclined!

Isn’t most Microsoft presence in the Seattle area on the east side? I haven’t heard of the kinds of public transit safety issues that happen in the city happening there. Traffic still applies though.

I would challenge you to find statistics that show that any public transit system in the U.S. is more dangerous than driving.

Oh, no, no...its not "mulching"...we don't dare mulch our employees! We simply streamline their corporeal shell in an effort to improve their ways of working. Its actually part of our new health care offering. In the past these would be called "diets"...but, no, no, we like to call it bodily optimization! And, hey, we hope that all employees participate in the mulching, er, um, i meant bodily optimization...Because, hey, someone needs to be fed to the AI...er, i meant someone needs to provide inputs to the ever-godly AI. ;-) /s

Our company recently started RTO.

The first 10-15 minutes of every meeting for the first month were people complaining about it. The first 10-15 minutes of every meeting for the second month were supervisors reminding people everyone they need to do it.

The third month, people started coming in, and now everyone complains about how there's no parking, no open hotel desks, no open meeting rooms, and teams are scattered across offices and there's no meeting rooms so all the meetings are still on Teams.

I don't think this is what you're saying but when I've seen debates over choice the pattern I've sen is:

1) The people who feel more engaged at home can stay home, those who feel more engaged at work can go there 2) The latter group fails to feel engaged at work due to everyone being home. They complain.

In other words, they weren't missing being in the office. They were missing being in the office *with others*. Which requires everyone else to either want to work in the office.