I was very clear, I thought, when I said “RTO mandates are about...”, that I was not saying “All of these factors are relevant to Microsoft”.

With Microsoft its probably mostly (3), with maybe some degree of (2), with (1) maybe, especially in the political salience, being a plus in the eyes of some decision-makers but not really driving the decision.

There are firms (and public agencies) where the relationship between those factors is very different in driving RTO mandates.

Consider the networks of friends and acquaintances the top-level decision makers are likely to be part of. Talking about how they're divesting big corporate dollars from the real estate market probably wouldn't make them more popular at cocktail parties.

You're right that it probably doesn't apply to Microsoft, but some companies were granted tax breaks by the local city, but on the condition they brought a certain number of jobs to the city.

Microsoft owns a lot of commercial real estate. The people who manage the commercial real estate within Microsoft certainly care about the value of those investments.

They care insofar as the collapse of commercial real estate is cited as a social harm of WFH by the elite classes outside the business that push RTO.

It's not an explicit decision making factor, just something that's in the background that has contributed to the overall idea that "RTO = good"

These decisions are all being made by vibes, after all, not by a cold rational analysis

These executives, though, also made billions in investments themselves in Microsoft's Redmond Campus, which mostly otherwise will stand empty.

These executives don't like looking dumb and these billions in useless investment are statues to them looking stupid otherwise.

Nit: current market cap is ~$3.7T

I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a significant impact on performance for the kind of work people on HN do. I do my work every day. When I'm done doing my work at the office, I browse HN. After I finish my work at home, I do the dishes. But I do roughly the same amount of work either way.

> 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.

I’d agree that “do-something-ism” is a factor, both on its own and as an accelerant for any pre-existing bias in that direction that packed an impetus or pretext without bad results.

If it's layoffs aren't there a very real risk that the most talented people, who enjoy working from home will simply leave, while the less talented returns to the office because they'll have a harder time finding new jobs?

So you're doing backdoor layoffs, but you're laying off the people you'd most likely want to keep, leaving the company with the less experienced/talented people.

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

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

8h on zoom is far more desirable than 8 hours in person shuffling from meeting room to meeting room for me.

I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. I can wear comfortable pants. I can throw laundry into the wash in the couple minute gap between meetings. And when the last meeting ends, I close the laptop and I'm already home, no miserable drive in rush-hour traffic.

Of course, there is something worse than in-person meetings. Which is meetings that are hybrid, with a groups calling into zoom from two different conference rooms in different locations. Those manage to be far worse than just everyone individually joining the zoom. And ironically, that's the type of meeting that becomes common when you force your distributed workforce back to offices split across a dozen locations.

I spent 7 months on a contract job last year like that... I'm in Phoenix (as well as half the employees involved) but the meetings were East Coast centered, so starting at 5am local. Roughly 38 hours of meetings a week, and in a position where I had to pay attention... It SUCKED so hard... I never got used to being up early and it just burned me up.

At least with actual people, in person there's more to the communication... I miss lunch with coworkers. I now pretty much have to work from home (vision decline, so I cannot drive), I wish it weren't the case.

But here is the thing-almost all meetings are on Temas. Because Microsoft campus is so spread out managers do not have time to go from building to building to meet other managers. Azure for example is spread out over 10 building just 8n Redmond. Never mind connecting with teams in Bay Area, Atlanta and India. All of these mangers spend their meetings on Teams.

Again I do not have a good explanation for RTO.

What's also not mentioned is that in multinational companies, especially since remote working became more widespread and attracting talent more difficult, teams are often made up of people from different locations anyway. So you won't have an in-person team, you'll just be joining Zoom (or in M$'s case, probably Teams) calls from the office rather than from home.

Its a possibility, but I've never come across data that supports either approach reliably outperforming the other.

I've also never seen a company that actually tracked that well enough to make a decision like RTO based on their own data.

It’s not mentioned as a possibility because nobody has ever been able to substantiate that claim.

All else being equal, this is almost certainly true.

All else is nowhere near equal, of course. That's the real rub.

It's pretty funny to watch e.g. some little FOSS console game system emulator—an actual toy, or at least, a project in service of a toy and of game-playing, to a large extent, but also technically more challenging than a lot of corporate work—or maybe some FOSS MMO server re-implementation coordinate development across continents with nothing but IRC, email, and Github (if that, LOL) and do it efficiently with little friction and volunteers working in their spare time and zero people with a dedicated "project manager" title, while companies pretend they need this whole fucking edifice of communication systems and people sitting in cubicles in particular places just to shuffle a few gigabytes of spreadsheet data around with Python or whatever.

Yeah. No you don't. You're, somehow, a fraction as competent and professional as some teens and 20-somethings making toys in their spare time, if you do. Definitely deserve seven-plus figure salaries for that.

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

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

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

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

> They're not watching Netflix in their underwear.

I'm sure leaders believe this, I'm even sure it happens. Yet despite how obviously and deleteriously widespread this phenomenon is, isn't it amazing that we still can't seem to quantify notable efficiency and effectiveness gains from RTO mandates? And that's setting aside whether any hypothesized (at best) productivity gains are sufficiently high enough to justify the expense of office space rentals and office maintenance.

Let's also remember that the typical RTO experience is one where members of a geographically distributed team are RTO'd so they can remain geographically distributed, just working out of company owned or rented spaces instead of their homes.

Two things about backdoor layoffs. Mostly its about who. When its corporate dictat, those most likely to leave are those with other options, ie the best talent. So sure a business might save on severances in aggregate, but it doesn't get to decide on who, but simple statistics show it will be the best who move on. So a demoralised and increasingly mediocre workforce is then faced with a much tougher hiring environment with unfillable positions and the downward cycle continues, destroying customer value and reputation to a far greater degree than any temporary layoff savings. All for what exactly, control? Its the C-suites that should be being marched out the door.

3 is very real. Sometimes even openly so, as in an executive telling it out loud.

> 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.

Here is what our CEO told me once: layoffs always mean you loose more people then those you just fired. That is unavoidable and can amount to additional 30%. And obviously those will be those with options. He said that you can not avoid nor control this factor, there is no point in overly fretting about it. From his point of view, people always have agency to leave and layoffs and surrounding chaos always annoy people and weaken their ties.

These arguments based on "we do not want to loose good people in layoffs" are off mark. Company will loose good people in layoffs.

3 is real, this is what was behind Amazon’s RTO mandates. Its designed to ensure that people decide to quit.

I disagree. Corpo finance doesn’t see names and value, they see cost. Talent can be purchased. They can’t purchase cost reductions

You couldn't be more wrong, no evidence supports your assertions.

https://fortune.com/2024/07/24/return-to-office-mandates-lay... https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/its-offi... https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/12/why-rto-mandates-are-layoffs...

You are very ignorant of the real world.

> nobody is dumb enough to do RTO as a layoff proxy

I wouldn’t be so sure of that…

Commercial real estate crashing would have a huge impact on the economy. Many of these companies are invested heavily in it, too.

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

>> Why do people forget about board members and shareholders

Board members do not have powers over daily business of the company.

I would add the board to the feodal model as a Church. The head of the board is the Pope.

Because board members are all emperors too, and they have a stated interest in keeping emperors in power. Look at how many board members are C-suite in other companies.

Well, then show the evidence.

If this is a shareholder action, of a publicly-traded company, then (IIUC) shouldn't that be publicly-available information somewhere?

I do not understand the real estate investor conspiracy theory. Why would it be better for vanguard if Microsoft paid rent to a real estate firm that managed office space, earned an X% profit margin, and then got taxed on the earnings before they were attributed to shareholders?

It makes much more sense to take a bath on the office investments and have Microsoft pay the difference in dividends or buybacks. The net amount to vanguard is higher than paying insurance, building and grounds maintainence, janitors, utilities, management fees, and property+ income tax before seeing your first dollar.

Okay, great. You can work from the office.

Don't dictate to the rest of us that we have to work the way you work best

So pay me enough to afford a home nearby so I can work in the office. Hell, I'll wear a suit too. Oh, I can only get enough to commute in from an exurb 1+ hour commute each way? Buzz off.

Been working since the 80s, and no company has ever paid me enough to buy anything nearby. So I gave up 15 yrs ago and now work full remote where I could afford something.

>>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.

Priorities matter.

I worked for a India IT services firm that mandated neck ties. They would even enforce it with fines.

Eventually we saw the whole company had been reduced to these cosmetic pedantry about neck ties, badge-in/out times etc.

Nobody every got anything done, because this was all that was left of their ideas to make the company win.

I think it depends on the task. If I need to figure out a problem someone is having, being present, seeing them work, talking face to face, huge help.

When I have some engineering work to do where I know all the requirements and need to be left alone, staying home is a productivity win.

There's value in the flexibility but employers often do not trust their employees to make the best decision for the organization.

>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.

Are you a butler? No offense.

No one in tech would give two f...s about what you're wearing when you push git commits.

> 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

This also explains other things, not only RTO. Like when the mass layoffs started about three years ago. Overstaffed big-tech fired a few thousand allegedly idle employees and (not surprisingly) saw no impacts on output. That was enough for many smaller companies, some of them understaffed, to go on and do the same, surely encouraged by their investors. I have friends in a half dozen companies complaining about permanent overtime and severe project delays after the layoffs. Yet, referred companies are either not hiring, or doing it in a very leisurely pace.

> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it

I read it as the feeling that they know somehow that the employees are not putting in 100% of their attention at home on the work assigned.

And i do believe it to be true - lots of people claim that WFH means they can "do the laundry" and/or go to the post office.

The fact is that there's very few self-starters and intrinsically motivated employees. Most are just there for the pay cheque, and will do the minimum work that is required of them - esp. if not under strict supervision.

Not to mention the fact that it is indeed much harder to have collaborative discussions that are spontaneous and unplanned in a WFH setting, compared to the office.

> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it

omg that explains so many things!

> unspecific vibes that it must be bad if employees like it

Chef's kiss.

A West Coast software engineering career is barely worth the land underneath a house from which you could reasonably commute to it. We're getting there.

There was no market in land, so land could not have a monetary value in feudalism proper.

Good point. I think a couple things are possible here:

1. They can't outright tell employees "we just realized you were getting a better deal than we bargained for, so now we are re-negotiating." Kind of like they couldn't tell us "you had too much of a good run during Covid and ZIRP, so now sit down," and instead did the layoffs. So they have to couch it in other terms like collaboration and watercoolers. I suspect most RTO policies will have some flexible language to the effect of "existing remote employees can figure it out with their managers," and part of that would be a renegotiation.

This is not without precedence: a similar thing that happened during the height of post-Covid remote work was that employees moved to very low-cost locations, so most BigTech (and other) companies then instituted pay bands that depended on your location. To be fair, they were still very generous salaries for the locations in question, but the reasoning they used was "our pay is competitive relative to the market, and your market just changed." Those must have been some fun conversations for managers but they happened and most employees accepted.

BTW a common argument then was "how does my location matter as long as my output provides the same value." Employers interpreted that as "Hmm, location doesn't really matter, so why not pay somebody across the world who can provide the same value at a fraction of the cost."

2. They are not interested in direct renegotiations and the RTO wave is still part of a "silent" layoff, which also has the side-effect of depressing salaries. Those who remain will be less likely to ask for raises, or be more willing to renegotiate to get back their remote perks. Those looking for new jobs will naturally enter a negotiation phase if they get an offer.

There may be other mechanisms at play too.

Not short sighted if _that_ is the goal. Maybe it's just to cut off people they have overhired during the pandemic. Maybe they just need fresh faces without costly layoffs

Are they though?

Do you see any legitimate opposition to the big tech companies forming from recently laid off employees?

If there's no alternative for people to work for then if the job market improves people are just going to go back to the same companies.

So, are these people who feel spurned by the big tech companies getting together and starting competitors to bring them down?

Sounds like my company. Sounds like Dell. Sounds like too many companies to guess which one OP is talking about.

I’m sure geographic consolidation is the end state, we’re just taking incremental steps.

If by "on the phone" we mean "in a voice and/or video call", I was in a similar situation to the OP. I'm a programmer.

RTO made no sense for our very geographically distributed team, but the mandate came down anyway. Most of us were staring down the barrel of a multi-hour commute to hot-desk in a notably overcrowded office with underprovisioned Internet service to execute the task of being on the phone all day, every day with a very geographically diverse set of colleagues.

Such collaboration, such synergy, much wow.

Software engineer, who was often also filling the role of product owner and scrum master as well.

You seem to be demanding some proof of the RTO side, which is a reversion to the mean, while providing none for your own side. I see and hear people talking about all the non-work things they due while being paid, and am unsurprised that their managers suspect a negative impact on productivity.

There definitely bad apples that spoil it for the bunch.

If WFH is a good deal for both sides (in a particular industry), I would expect new entrants to use it as a competitive advantage against existing businesses (likely hiring away talented staff). I agree that web-tech business formation seems depressed, but WFH should eventually win the day if it is all that advocates say.

I expect WFH will expect, while remaining relatively niche, much like worker co-operatives.

Economy will not recover to hire people. Tech companies will not be begging as all jobs will be in India and China.

If a manager can’t tell if an employee is doing their job or not, they deserve to get bilked by an overemployed person. I can’t care at all about what some other person is doing or not doing unless it directly affects my ability to do my job.

Should we also ban sick leave because a few people call in sick when they gasp are not actually sick?

> mouse jiggler

Are they really collecting stats on mouse movements? If they were they'd surely detect these predictable movements

Don't laugh, but in my org we have a bi-annual "Hive Week" where all Product/Tech (two sub-orgs) bring all the 'bees' home to Office Central for a week of, um, collaboration?

JFC! People will say anything. LOL!

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

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

A large insurer with an inexplicable bird mascot

What?

Around Dell campus in Austin is a Home Depot, a hotel, a Chili’s, a strip mall with various shopping outlets and what not. You can walk there from the front door. The idea is that all the employees can walk there for lunch, they will buy things on the way home, it’s just extending economic foot traffic to the tenants of Michael Dell’s commercial properties. Now they won’t go out of business! More money for Mr Dell!

This is my theory at least. The foot traffic has increased greatly since the RTO mandate

Board members run scams on stakeholders all the time.

I know of a CEO who is CEO of multiple companies and tells employees of one company (big one with many stakeholders) to work on stuff from his other smaller companies.

It's basically just a scam to the stakeholders.

There is plenty of non-ML work to do. Drivers do not write themselves, bringup does not do itself, scripts that glue it all together do not write themselves, schematics do not review themselves :)

Kernel and drivers currently, hoping to move lower level to MCUs soon (i like that world more). My contact info is in my profile here, feel free to email. GM does not (as far as i know) have referral bonuses so i have no reason to oversell it :)