2w ago

Microsoft mandates a return to office, 3 days per week

blogs.microsoft.com Flexible work update - The Official Microsoft Blog

Amy Coleman, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer, shared the below communication with Microsoft employees this morning. How we work has forever changed. I remember starting at Microsoft in the late ‘90s, always in the office, no laptops, and primarily working with the people right down...

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37155283

80 comments

Companies keep doing this to shed workers and don't seem to realise the "rockstar" workers you want to keep are the ones who walk because they have options
All you're doing is retaining the trapped and shit skilled
- It's an epidemic of "how do we cut staff by 15-20% without paying millions in severance" with no regard to what it means for the company beyond the next four fiscal quarters.
  
  you wanna stop that shit, you cut CEO bonuses.
  
  “Sure I can come in, I’ll just be constantly late”
  They’re gunna pay that fuckin’ severence.
  
  Ah yes. The Intel Strategy.
- This is pure cope. They can afford to lose talent.
  
  I doubt microsoft has any talent left. If anything, whatever talent they may have, it cannot and will not be able to change things for the better. Their products are absolutely shit.
  
  Talent at Microsoft? The only thing they've done the past decade is make their product worse.

To where? To Microsoft Office?
- Sorry I’ve switched to libreoffice
- Literally never heard of it. Are you talking about Microsoft 365 Copilot, formerly known as Microsoft 365, formerly known as Office 365?
- “Did you say we will all benefit from an OpenOffice plan?”

- Unironically, this was exactly how the announcement at my old company went. Literally, someone getting paid millions of dollars a year basically saying "Yeah we made this decision on vibes alone"
  
  "Vibe Executing" is apparently how alot of CEO's do their jobs. They didn't know how to gauge productivity before the pandemic and they still don't. They just pull whatever sounds good out of their asses at any given moment.
  
  Same here, this exact conversation happened.
  In every meeting where feedback is requested since then, there is a permanent note that says “please no questions about RTO”.
  
  My DM’s work did this. Not enough desks, no good plan, and a demand that every needs to be in the office on the Friday before a long weekend(or Thursday, if it’s the Friday that’s the holiday).

My office just did the same thing. And the backlash is enormous. No one wants it. No one likes it.
- Mine did it for about 1 month. Management was patting themselves on the back. Then they literally went on vacation...and we all just did hybrid/remote like we did before.
  The individual who was pushing for remote work got their optics and now we are all back to what we were before. Win/win!
  
  In our case, there are enough upper management folks who are opposed to it that I doubt it will last or ever be enforced. For people like me, it really doesn't make any sense to enforce it in the first place, because all of my teammates are in other states and countries.
  Making me go to the office just means you can't schedule early meetings with me, because I'll be commuting during that time.
- Just silently grumping about it isn’t backlash. Backlash is a whole team just walking off, or a picket line around campus. Backlash is their precious stock price tanking because the whole on-call team called their bluff and the service is offline. They know no one will do that in this fascist hellscape of an economy, so they don’t care.
  Though I’m not sure it’s ’everyone’. I personally, vastly prefer in person work to remote, but I understand my views aren’t universal, or even common.
  
  It's about what you support rather than what you currently are comfortable with. Do you support flexibility and future proofing your job against your personal life circumstances? Probably yes. Then you support flexibility of workplace.
- My favorite was when I was at Amazon watching leadership do the mental gymnastics to justify the move. At some point they just said it’s happening and we’re not listening to you.
  
  it’s happening and we’re not listening to you.
  This would be the walking out point for me.
  
  At some point they just said it’s happening and we’re not listening to you.
  Which at this point is a more honest answer than the mental gymnastics they are pulling out.

We’ve looked at how our teams work best, and the data is clear: when people work together in person more often, they thrive — they are more energized, empowered, and they deliver stronger results.
Would be interested in seeing that data.
- Well you see, it's ✨magical✨ data that only executives can interpret. Us ~~lowly employees~~ ungrateful peons just wouldn't understand it.
  
  They must be really special. I bet the next thing they'll do with this power is create a new religion in Utah.
- It's a little like my council saying "research shows you'll recycle more if we collect your rubbish bins only once in 3 weeks.
  Wtf, no way the data shows that
- data = vibes
  Translation: when there is no one to harass we can't look busy.
  Better translation: we are just lonely and used to being able to pay people to be our friends,

I have a video recording of the ceo in a company wide meeting saying he will not enforce rto as that ship already sailed and wr will stay remote. Then 2 months later, enforces rto in email selectively to people that are within 25 miles of an office. I then asked him and gave him the video asking him about why he lied and have a screenshot of his dumbass resppnse about things shifting and blah blah. Took him 10 minutes to write his 6 sentence long paragraph. God what a twat.
- My company did the same thing. We called the president out on it too with the same result. After a year, they went back to remote work. You and your coworkers should keep bringing it up.
  
  Well since i didnt go in every single day after the rto i was let go due to company "restructuring" fuck em. I should post the video and screenshot now that i have a new job elsewhere.
- Wow, that's insanely unfair (25 miles), never heard of that. Either there is value that everyone is in, or not.
  Im waiting on my Co to pull this trigger too, jokes on them I'll just pop in for breakfast and then leave again
  
  Yeah i wanted to do that too but to drive the 21 miles to work, one way, is 35-45 minutes with "normal" traffic and leaving at slow traffic times. So literally wasting 1 to 1.5 hours driving for chilling in office for a few minutes seems ridiculous. So if i drove in i would stay at least 2-3 hours.
  
  My company’s policy is 90 miles. I know people who have to drive 1.5 hours to work each way.
- How's the company doing financially right now? I suspect that all of these RTO mandates are just thinly veiled layoffs.
  
  Idk. Planet DDS

The company making money from technology that allows people to work from home is telling people to return to the office.
- I've gone out of my way to avoid giving Microsoft money over their continual hypocrisy on almost virtually any issue I care about. Really, a shitty company that gets away with way too much.

So Microsoft's is casting about for something new because AI is not worth the money they spent on it, and management are all out of ideas? Better get the grunts back in their cubicles. Perhaps that will magically fix it. A managerial cargo cult move.
- As per the Dead Sea Effect, they're looking to shed people without actually making them redundant.
  As per the Dead Sea Effect, they're not going to shed the dead weight.
  
  Not heard of that phrase before but 100% this is what will happen in my Co; the talent will leave so they'll make their redundancy savings but at the cost of retaining all the life's that put no effort in.
  p.s. I'm the salt in this analogy. :)
- Are it my management decisions that are wrong? No, it must be those lazy employees.

Layoff time.
- They laid me off 2 months ago. I didn't even work for MS

No one can handle More than 3 days of Microsoft teams anyway.
- Ice Cube begs to differ.

Microsoft says AI is more productive than workers. Microsoft says workers are more productive in the office.
AI is not in the office.
So do we bring AI into the office to make it more productive?

What I just read ? They return to office because thanks to AI they can move faster ?
I want the same drugs.

Fucking scumbags

Oh look! Another navel-gazer unable to feel validated without seeing people's asses in chairs. That's gonna be awesome for the introverted type who take the most pride in really great code.
And this unhealthy preoccupation with asses is a bit of a red flag.

365 subs for all
- Except for Microsoft Teams, because they don't need that now, right?

Wait didn't that happen as soon as covid ended?
- Microsoft actually poached a lot of good employees when we decided to start pretending that Covid was over because they didn't do RTO. Now, they'll probably lose them.
- Covid ended?
  
  As soon as the vaccine rolled out so many just started pretending it was completely gone. Or used it as a reason to remove anything done to prevent it. Some states even then outlawed basic things like putting up screens
  
  Yes, the pandemic/global health emergency ended years ago.

My wife does two days in the office and that sounds ideal to me. Really strange that lemmy generally sees zero benefits to the office.
For example, I went in to met a coworker and fix her laptop. While I was there the devs in front of me were discussing a thing that my team was working on. I didn't know they needed that thing and they didn't know we were working on it. I took new information back to my group.
While bullshitting with the tech support manager I learned some things about their policies and procedures. Found out I had made incorrect assumptions and learning about those helped me in my role.
We're social animals y'all.
- It’s not about having zero benefits in the office, it’s about giving people the choice to do what works for them. Some people like working in the office, then go ahead. Some people prefer to work at home, let them. The problem is companies forcing everyone to do one thing when everyone works differently.
  I’m fully remote but I voluntarily go to the office once a week (as much as possible) primarily to socialize with coworkers and maybe do some in-person meetings if the timing is right. I would hate it if I was mandated to go once a week, because I prefer the flexibility.
- What you just described was a horribly inefficient use of resources. You gained insight through idle banter. While everyone is in office that's what middle managers would tend to handle. All this time they thought they were herding cats, turns out the cats just wanted to be home. Now people don't know who to go to because the "yes" person isn't in a cubicle you can just waltz over to. Middle management needs a massive paradigm shift if they want to stay relevant in a WFH situation. And that seems increasingly likely to be the direction businesses will go once they cut staff with these asinine RTO policies.
  
  I like to think that genuine connection and collaborations aren’t… resources. I’m not some chit to be moved from one column to the next. The stuff you are talking about is part of being a human being. Could I maybe technically crap out 10% more lines of code if I’m a hermit working in a dank closet in my tiny apartment? Maybe. Is the newbie next time who doesn’t know what to do going to have any chance to grow and learn just from being part of things that happen organically? No.
- It depends on the industry, sure.
  I work in software development and unless we’re working with hardware I work better at home and don’t get much out of sitting next to someone.
  If I’m working on something that’s hands on then sure.
  If I need people to be in an office to have them engaged then my team blows already
- For example, I went in to met a coworker and fix her laptop. While I was there the devs in front of me were discussing a thing that my team was working on. I didn’t know they needed that thing and they didn’t know we were working on it. I took new information back to my group.
  Ok, but that just demostrate that you have no communication between teams. You get the information by sheer luck. have you been there 10 minutes earlier/later you would have missed it.
  While bullshitting with the tech support manager I learned some things about their policies and procedures. Found out I had made incorrect assumptions and learning about those helped me in my role.
  Again, non clear communication between teams and again you got the information by sheer luck.
  True, it has happened because you both were in the office but in a sane environment you would have knows these thing because they would have been documented.
- I could give you great stories about the benefits of working from home too.
  I agree we are social animals but we are also in varying life stages, we have different needs and wants, we are diverse as a species. Flexibility is the answer, not one size fits all now and forever.
- I 100% agree with you (even though it will get the both of us downvoted into oblivion). The important part is that it only works if everyone is in the office at basically the same time.otherwise you’re just the lone guy sitting in there for no benefit.
  I will 100% choose a company or team that is in the office over one that isn’t. Half remote is THE WORST. Trying to have an in person meeting, and then the remote people whining they aren’t included in decisions, or they don’t know the details. Every meeting is a half robotic nightmare as everyone in the room fumes that you have to spend 20 minutes getting all the remote people on the screen and dealing with mic issues when this could have be a 5 minute hallway chat.

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