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.

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logifail 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> teams are often made up of people from different locations anyway

My wife works at a multinational which has also decided to push RTO. Her closest team member works in an office 200 miles away from her office (in a different country), the vast majority of the rest of team are located between 3000 and 6000 miles away, on a different continent.

A friend of mine at AMZN has the same issue, his team is literally scattered around the globe.

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InsideOutSanta 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is also a situation where RTO has clear negative effects. If you have distributed teams, and everybody works from home, communication necessarily moves online. However, when parts of distributed teams are located in shared offices, they create islands of knowledge and personal relationships within the team, leading to all kinds of problems.

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lucumo 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My org went for RTO two or three years ago. This year they've also started cutting locations from teams that are too distributed: you can either move or you can leave. There will still be a lot of people living on Teams, but a lot less, and mostly just management layers.

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saghm 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's the key thing IMO; it's not "return to office" when quite a lot of the people never were in that office to start with. With the rate of turnover in most of these companies and the amount of time they were hiring for positions remotely, it's more "forced relocation, transfer, or 'voluntary' quitting without severance" for a large number of people. You can't return to a status quo that never existed for you.

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danaris 4 days ago | parent [-]

I mean...you don't have to "voluntarily" quit without severance.

You can tell them, in writing, "I am willing and able to continue to perform the tasks I was hired for. If you insist that it be somewhere else, then you can fire me."

	▲	saghm 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		You could, and then presumably still not be paid severance despite being fired, and then have to decide whether it's worth trying to fight them legally. I don't pretend to know the right choice for everyone, but when presented with this exact choice, I pretty quickly realized that it wasn't going to be worth the effort. It sucks, but given the option to spend energy on fighting this battle or saving it to put towards finding a new job to support myself and my family (or trying to do both and likely burning myself out from trying to take on more than I could reasonably handle), it wasn't much of a choice. Sometimes being right doesn't mean that you don't lose.