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.