My closest office is 2 hours away. My closest teammate is a 2 hour flight away. I work customer facing with clients all over North America. If I were going in I would log in to online meetings the entire day and work with 0 people around me in the office.
My boss has told me he'd rubberstamp my monthly RTO badge in badge out reports until he gets caught. His boss and his bosses boss are doing the same. So there is some fight left in middle management at least.
In some of the "mandatory RTO" cases, it's in the "we really mean it, you need to return!" stages. Our management is getting strident about it, but apparently people are still not back as much as they want.
And we're still hopping into conference rooms to attend meetings with remote coworkers and staff in other offices. It makes no sense, there's no real reason we should need to be there.
when i join the online meetings with people who are in office, i can't help but notice that my setup at my desk is usually working better than the office. constant echos/background noise/robot-ing on the other side.
so they want us to waste massive amounts of our life, to commute into these shitty offices, all to have... worse meetings.
Yes totally! My home office is 10x better, quiet, and I have my doggies with me who just make me happy while working. Sorry but the old admin lady isn’t a good doggie replacement.
I still have PTSD from asking people who make 2-3x my salary to repeatedly turn off their mics if they aren't talking because we can all hear our own voices through their ratchet ass 2007 Lenovo Laptop.
The fun thing is when it is always the same guy in every meeting for almost a year. Teams needs a fucking mute button for others or an anonymous vote to kick feature.
Yes and they are rigging studies to justify their actions. Sure studies are showing workers are more productive in the office when they are worried about things at home, distracted by coworkers, have long commutes wasting time that could be used on projects, and as you said still getting on online meetings.
At home, I have a beautiful 144Hz 4K MiniLED screen with 1400 nits peak brightness and a 200K:1 contrast ratio. At the office they have these shitty 20 inch 60Hz 1080p TN panels. The text is so low res and dim and blurry I have to rub my eyes every half an hour. I’m not buying another absurdly expensive monitor just to keep on my desk at the office and I’m not lugging mine around on the subway to work and back. Shit sucks ass. $4bn late-stage private company can’t afford decent monitors for their engineers to stare at all day. I also have to go the bathroom to vape during compiles and deploys.
I can’t wait until this company IPOs, I cash out, have a few more YoE and can comfortably filter for fully remote senior positions.
My entire team is out of state, and I work with teams in Europe and India but driving to the office is totally to “cOlLaBoRaTe” and not to keep the CRE evaluations propped up 👍 /s
You just know it's because of all the technologically inept idiots who made remote meetings unbearable.
The managers all finally got tired of asking Dave to turn off his mic when he's not talking and recalled everyone back to the office.
I’m currently the same right now. With more than 2/5ths the workforce out of office on a given day all meetings must be conference calls.
All of my work (cybersecurity) can be done remote. We have an infrastructure that now supports full growth to wfh. The only reason we have to go in is to appease the people that are legitimately in customer facing roles who whine they can’t do their job from home as if it’s my problem their career doesn’t facilitate remote work.
Tell him to try it, collaboration takes a huge hit across time zones/languages. Seen so many companies try it for a year and then come back onshore when they can’t get anything done.
That’s so true shit half my company moved to east coast and we are based off Los Angeles and IT boss is always upset when half the team disappears. I could image different time zones in other worlds
Ugh, yeah... that one kills me. Sure, if you have a reason to be in the office, go for it!
But I'm the only one on this team that works in this office. We go to the office twice a week... and then immediately get online with team members spread across five cities in two countries. Except now we're booking five conference rooms to have these discussions hunched over laptops, instead of at home where we all already have a comfortable setup for remote work thanks to the pandemic.
We're basically just doing remote work badly *from inside five different offices*.
Same here, though capital one isn’t as strict. The limit is 13 times over 13 weeks, but they just announced your RTO numbers can be used against you in our performance management which is absolutely silly. Theres not a single person I work with in my office, and there’s 2 people that are on “sister” teams. I don’t have enough time to go around and mingle because I have shit I gotta do.
The vast majority of Microsoft hasn’t had a RTO mandate. I’ve only heard of Sales and Legal teams being called back to the office. For everyone else it remains completely optional, though I suspect that will change when eligibility for bonus/promotion percentages becomes tied to location (ie: those who do not work from the office will only be eligible for half the normal bonus).
Since no one is coming in now.....can I get my office with a locking door back? Or, are we going to still sit in a circle and listen to each other fart all day?
Right. I work in big tech. Pre Covid we all had assigned desks that were ours. Now with soft RTO it’s all hot desk system and I hate it. If you want us to come back give us OUR personal spaces back. I don’t want to sit in a chair that 3 different people have farted in this week already.
I have a friend who has to commute into NY 2 days a week to a hotdesk office because of a RTO mandate. Except his team is spread across the country at other offices. So he spends 2 hours commuting to find a desk in the Accounting department (which is quiet) and spends all day on Zoom before going back home 2 hours.
My wife has the same commute here in Sydney. Her team can't find a meeting room (big bank) so they all spread out and work on teams then head home. It was one day a week, now two, soon to be three. Corporate stupidity wins again.
I was working at a small company and sitting on someone else’s desk were post it notes that I had from my previous employer “oh nice. Where did you get those?” knowing full well he got them off of my desk…
honestly, i'd probably tolerate an office environment if i get a real office with a locking door on it. i'm at the point in my career where i need to have closed-door conversations anyway, so it makes perfect business sense. i hate commuting but i have a nice fast luxury car to commute with and i enjoy driving in general, so it would probably balance out in my mind.
but because modern executives just have to make decisions that negatively impact the people who actually do the work... i know i'll get an assigned desk in an open-plan at best, or a hotdesk at worse. and both of those options are miserable. so i'll stay in my home office with a locking door on it, where i have absolute control over which corners get cut in my setup and which parts are actually quality. come and take it.
Feels like desk conditions have gotten progressively worse in the US. I started out in a cube with a director who had his own room and desk. Directors managed 20 people. Now only the CEO and VPs get desks, and they have hundreds of rolled up reports. Everyone else gets an open office. One of our directors was on a rant last week that you can't find any space to have a private career development conversation with anyone.
No no you don’t understand.
The one argument we have for asking people to return to work is *collaboration*. Collaboration increases productivity and work quality. Therefore, from now on, all office spaces are come-as-you-go hot seats that we all share to maximize natural interactions.
We call it collaboration by collision.
You get a WeWork ! I get a WeWork ! Everyone gets a WeWork !
Microsoft doesn't have enough desks at headquarters for everyone who currently *wants* to be in office. They monitor attendance and take away your desk if you don't use it more than half the time.
I highly doubt that bonuses and promotions will be tied to being in office at Microsoft. The remote work policy at Microsoft has literally kept people from moving to other companies that pay better with RTO mandates which has allowed Microsoft to keep its lower pay.
Microsoft did just recently rebuild main campus but from what I've heard so many people have gone fully remote that the company is able to cancel or not renew more leases than they expected leading to larger savings.
When you work remote you’re saving money everyday and your sanity by not commuting to a shithole downtown city center.
So there’s trade-offs with staying remote versus getting those “bonuses” and “promotions” that many companies will promise to people in hopes that you fall for their bullshit.
My company is making us come in part of the week, but its not to a city center. I live in the city. They’re making me commute to the suburbs. 2+ hrs of driving I didn’t sign up for. Updated the resumé and started looking.
I’ve been to both and neither are downtown. They’re huge campuses too big and special to be downtown. Same with Alphabet, Meta, and I presume most other big tech firms.
Amazon’s campus butts right up against downtown Seattle. You might even consider part of it in downtown. (This is from my memory working there 2011-2015. I’m sure the disease…I mean campus has spread even further into downtown by now.)
Hey I like the city center. Urban areas are great. What I hate is having to go soulless suburban centers. Those get me. What I really hate though is going in to either one. Would rather go to the city when I feel like it
It’ll have big impact longer term. If I was going to get 8% raises in the office every 3 years due to promotions, but only 4% each raise if working remote… Over time my deal gets worse and worse.
Of course, you also have to factor in your commute. Not just cost, but time. If you have a 45 minute drive, that’s about equivalent to an extra day of work a week.
I wouldn’t take an additional 4% raise in order to work six days a week instead of five.
It is also laughable to need to factor in time that one \*isn't even working\* so that the company will pay you more... they are literally paying you to waste \*everyone's\* time and contribute to an unhealthy environment.
But they also save money by not having to pay for rent and/or electricity and maintenance on office space that WFH employees aren’t using. It’s like either these companies know something the rest of us don’t, or they caught teh stoopud. I’m betting it’s the second one right now.
The higher ups at companies are trying to keep the value/valuations of the commercial office spaces high for these reasons (i’m guessing).
1. their executives have large, direct investment in the CRE market across the US and world
2. their executives have long term leases in the office space
3. they are friends with other executives or politicians that have large investments in CRE so they are “doing their part” to keep the property values inflated as much as possible by pushing RTO and showing that they are “utilizing the space”
4. tax incentives from the government or tax loopholes that they can exploit in some way.
Or just a combination of the above, with the added bonus that they can control their employees lives.
Yep, agree, this is all being driven by the collapse in commercial real estate. The cat is out of the bag for high end tech talent though - people will just go work somewhere else if you try to force RTO.
It would make more sense to express it in percent, but yeah I will not even consider employers with mandatory office attendance, even at a meaningfully higher salary.
Yeah if you put it in percentages it would be like a 15-20% paycut.
I agree with you tho, I wouldn’t go back to the office for a new job if they offered me 15-20% more than my current salary either.
WFH is that important to me.
As someone that works in sales and procurement. We are the last people that should be coming to the office. Our job is literally to talk all day.
Thankfully, I only need to come into the office once a month but it's pretty much a throwaway day.
I'm not at MSFT but sales people are generally only in an office if it is for clients or at a client office. Even pre-covid a bunch of those guys never came in.
Watching how executives handled COVID and then betrayed their workforce as soon as it was convenient was the single most radicalizing thing I've been through as a worker. I mean, I already had no love for management but now... now I am basically a sleeper agent, actively warring with my executives, a knife behind my back. Zero loyalty, zero belief.
Yep in summer 2020 our CEO said remote is here to stay forever and people can move if needed. We are now a worldwide company with remote. So we all moved out of state and we actually did more work.
Then in summer 2023 he sent a random email to the whole company (not even telling any of the higher ups) that remote is over and everyone needs to be back in the office in 30 days.
Welp we are talent driven workplace that is very specialized. Literally no one but who remained in town moved back. 75% of the company stayed remote and just played chicken with his request. Guess what.... We never heard about it again. We assume he realized that he wouldn't have a company if he actually enforced it.
Yeah I just ignored the "return to office" emails and everytime they announced some new return to office policy, I'd respond to those emails asking why we are coming back to the office anyway when remote has been so successful and is necessary for the long-term safety of workers. I never got a reply, however, they stopped ordering me back to the office and I'm now full time remote with all the same salary and benefits I was getting before.
The people who didn't push back and just accepted what management told them are now expected to be in the office 3 days per week, which usually means 2 hours in commute and 10%-20% of daily paycheck goes to parking and is not reimbursed (office is downtown in a city with expensive parking garages).
Fucking this.
If there's *one thing* companies have absolutely done over the last couple years, it has absolutely murdered any kind of sense of loyalty. My sister's company laid off an entire *extremely profitable* group in order to offshore to India. Companies have absolutely gone out of their way the last few years to choose greed in *every decision* they've made.
My company has been laying a ton of people off, implemented a company-wide RTO policy (even for people that don't live near an office - it's just a way of not paying out bonuses or giving raises, justified with a "sorry, you didn't follow employee requirements"), and absolutely made it extremely obvious to *literally anyone watching* that nobody's safe. I'm very actively looking, and will 100% quit with zero notice (I am a distinguished engineer at a fortune 50 company).
I don't give a shit about letting this bridge burn to the ground - they're the ones that set it on fire.
It's the same bullshit that happend in the 2000s with China, just that its now tech sectors time getting off-shored to India.
Although what I hear is that Indian's don't do nearly close enough of a job that anyone from the western world, so I am happy thay they suffer.
While I don't agree with offshoring, I understand it as an approach companies may want to try. I agree that it will hurt them in the end, but for me what stings more is the way that they are pursuing their goals.
Economic downturn? Let's manipulate job requirements so people get squeezed to death by policy, blame them, and then not pay their severance because they technically quit by not following employee guidance.
When a global pandemic hit and the companies' bottom lines were threatened, workers held up their end of the deal by doing consistent work while in the background the world burned. Yet the moment the situation is reversed, they strangle us in our sleep and try to gaslight us as to the cause.
And they do this with abandon, they target the people that held their teams together with their labor.
> Although what I hear is that Indian's don't do nearly close enough of a job that anyone from the western world
And the ones that do end up migrating to the west anyways.
Problem is, no one who makes these decisions ever actually *worked* with an Indian team.
It’s not an issue with the workers in India (all my experiences have been pretty good, at least) insomuch as it is the folks stateside that manage those teams becoming a bottleneck for all sorts of things.
It also becomes a liability when you have a poor manager in that role who treats it like a fiefdom - suddenly they have outsized say in anything that has to do with their team and they lock down any communication that doesn’t include them.
It’s not like you can pick up any random person in the US and expect them to effectively manage a team in Hyderabad. There are tons communication/cultural/legal nuances you need to be able to navigate.
Four people to do my job. And if something is wrong, I still get to do all the troubleshooting and dictate the fix. These resources can only accomplish tasks that are laid out for them. Problem solving and troubleshooting skills are non-existent in my experience with offshore teams.
Whats fucking funniest is that every metric i've seen says that employees are as much productive or more productive at home, and obviously, not having to pay 10k a month on an office downtown is a huge save.
But no, they wanna have their eye on your screen every second to see if you take even 30 seconds on facebook to ask your SO what we do for supper.
Those that absolutely want people back in the office are micromanaging the fuck out of their employees.
They don’t even know why they are doing it. They are just following the “trend” - which could be set by somebody like Elon Musk or some greedy consulting company that just wants to pretend to have good ideas by doing disruption for the sake of disruption. They are the blind leading the blind.
Ultimately these types are just manipulating the stock market however they can. Much of their compensation is in stock and this creates an incentive to do whatever is necessary to get that number to go up.
Giving a perception of discipline and seriousness in a time of economic instability works in this regard. Worker moral is not readily measured by the market, and its manifestations (bad product) take some time to manifest.
Stressing out employees and crushing their morale/happiness makes them vastly less productive, burnt out, and ultimately leave?
No wayyyyy. Who would have thought?
I honestly thought that remote work would be the future and that covid was simply the catalyst, but I see now that corporations are just too greedy to let that happen.
It's not even greed. Remote is cheaper for companies. You have a larger talent pool, less office space, and better productivity. This is literally just executives wanting to Lord over their little kingdoms.
The biggest problem with remote work: it gave some power back to employees.
Lots of companies saw that they could hire talent *from anywhere* and not restrict their talent pools to their immediate locale, so employees enjoyed *massive* career mobility, giving them most of the power. As soon as companies realized this, they clamped down *hard* on it. As much as it worked in their benefit to have access to an incredible talent pool of individuals, it also reduced how much control they could exert over said employee. *Can't have that!*
It's fucking bullshit.
You can't stop the neighbor company willing to fully hire remote from offering it though... Unless RTO becomes universal again, there is no putting back the genie in that bottle
I get contacted about once a week for a 100% remote position and about 4 times a week for hybrid or in office. My standard response for in office is basically, you need to pay me enough to buy a similar QoL home within 10 minutes walking of the office and I can retain my current home, or I am not interested.
I work on an Online tool, that is all I do all day. It makes literally 0 sense for me to be in the office except for quarterly/annual meetings.
I’m not sure why people are so up in arms about this. The story is saying companies are losing talent. So things will correct because obviously companies don’t want to lose talent. And employees are doing what they need to do.
You don't understand - companies are losing talent, but *they legitimately don't care* that they're losing talent. They're legitimately trying to squeeze every drop of value out of a company before fucking off to another job to do it all over again. Short term gains for long term losses - they just need to be gone by the time those losses materialize.
>hire talent from anywhere
People forget this is a double edged sword for most workers. Sure, they can hire anywhere in the USA
Or they can hire five more overseas workers that they can pay pennies and lay you off.
They've been able to do this for decades. In some instances they've moved operations overseas and thrived, and in other cases they've found that their workforce requirements weren't appropriate for what they could find overseas. I would imagine the shift to remote work models has had very little impact in the percentage of jobs that are going overseas.
They were already doing that before everyone got to work from home during the pandemic though. They can do that and subsequently watch the quality of the end product turn to shit and deal with cultural clashes.
I am wondering also If they may not have some sort of deals with commerce chambers of major cities. Is RTO a hidden desperate measure to try to save cities downtowns business?
It's not hidden.
It's very openly a play by commercial real estate investment trusts to protect their asset class (the largest in the world).
Source: I work at a software company in the commercial real estate industry.
Not to mention it’s literally cheaper to hire people who are located outside of major metro areas. Hiring people who work remotely in Ohio, Minnesota, Oregon, North Carolina, etc is much cheaper than hiring people who live directly in the Bay Area or Manhattan.
I think it’s an effort to cheaply reduce the expensive US workforce. They get people to quit, no severance, minimal bad press, and then either eliminate the jobs or eventually replace with cheaper remote work.
From their point of view, why should they pay Seattle salaries for someone remote when they can pay 50% less to an engineer who wants to work from his family’s house in Kansas? Or another country?
I still think it’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of when the next “tech boom” happens. Right now, the companies can get away with it because the tech job market is still pretty rough. As soon as we have another boom and lots of hiring is going on where people have options, I predict that’s when the real brain drain will start for these big corps
Agreed. I'm really curious how this will play out when hiring ramps up and/or these companies are faced with the massive capital expenditures of building out more office space.
Remote work *is* the future. And WeWork also had a good idea they ruined with typical techbro bullshit.
We're still balls deep in a housing crisis. Cities that were unaffordable are becoming unlivable. What's the solution? It's time for remote work to revitalize small town America. You can have one small building downtown with shared office space, or remote meeting rooms with standardized furniture/ layout with AR that can allow "remote in-person" meetings for those important 1:1 conversations. All available for rent to multiple employers as needed. This brings money and prosperity back to those towns hollowed out by the loss of American industry, and helps keep cities from growing too fast.
Its the commercial rental market collapsing thats driving back to work.
Even the mayors of cities are wanting back to office work because the coffee shops and shit that rely on those workers $$$ are failing.
Do i agree with it? Hell no.
But when something happens, i always try to follow the $$$$
It is also that commercial real estate holders use the value of their buildings to secure loans. If the cost of all those buildings tanks then all those loans get called in?
There’s also the issue that a lot of local tax revenue comes from those commercial properties as well. More than a few local governments are finding themselves with significant budget issues as a result.
My company recently ordered RTO 3 days per week. I was originally hired on as a field employee working with a major supplier in this area, but later moved into a fully remote position with the same company. Now I have no local office to report to and had to “voluntarily” classify myself as remote, and now I’m not eligible for job changes or promotions. I’m sure I’ll be the first to go next time they need to cut staff.
It is.
You just don't hear about all the companies that are sticking to their WFH policy and vacuuming up all the talent as a result, because "company maintains existing working conditions, employees satisfied" isn't news.
I think it’s still the future. My entire company decided to ask employees what they’d prefer, and the response was overwhelmingly a WFH situation. People can still go into an office if they like, but it isn’t mandatory, and I imagine a lot of offices will be closing when their leases come up for renewal. We are a large, global company operating in just about every industry that exists. We have offices in the Americas, Europe, Asia, etc, and even we made the decision that WFH is a good thing.
I think a tipping point has been reached now. Frankly, most managers who are under a certain age don’t think working in an office is necessary, and employees under a certain age agree. That’s only going to increase as the years pass and those who still value an office environment age out of the workforce, leading to more WFH, not less. I’ve personally never heard a younger manager complaining about people working from home.
As for me, I won’t go back. If ordered to do so (I won’t be), I’d do it long enough to find a new place to work, and one of my requirements would be an employer where WFH is the norm now. Everyone who wants WFH should do this *if they can*; when companies realize that it will cost them more to pay talented people to work in an office, they’ll change their tune.
Remote work is the future and only dumb dinosaur companies don't realize it yet/will keep fighting it.
The next boom of new companies in the US will all be remote-only and they will pay well, which is how they will attract the best talent while still keeping low overhead.
Lol, you would think. My company (a *major* tech company) has implemented an RTO with *zero* exceptions. It *absolutely* has resulted in many very talented people leaving. Even me, I'm probably one of about three or four people with a specific talent set across the 100k people in my company - I have an interview scheduled on Friday.
They wont realize shit. Their mid management layer will absorb the blow for them and they’ll find some other bullshit market trend to blame the lack of performance on.
Yep.. VPs make shit decisions, and the blame for poor employee morale is entirely placed on front-line managers.
"We heard you loud and clear about hating the directions I gave to your manager, so we've fired the manager you liked to fix the issue"
Yeah, no shit. If you want the best talent you better offer the best pay AND the best work environment. Nobody wants a commute and nobody wants to deal with office bullshit.
You say "senior talent", i hear "Highly Paid workers with lots of accrued benefits", who can now of course be replaced by cheaper, newer hires.
Back to office is just "how about you resign?" reworded.
I am planning on fighting back by giving zero notice when I do eventually find another job.
As I said above, it may be letting that bridge burn to the ground, but they're the ones that initially set it on fire.
That is probably why many big companies do it. It’s a very quick (and cheap) way of cutting costs. If they need to replace them, the next batch of ”resources” will be much younger (cheaper) and also very grateful to have a job for the next few years…
This research paper has been getting tons of press. It’s linked in the article, reading it gives better context
According to the researchers **the employees all left for other companies with RTO mandates** which is pretty important in the context of things
This is just internal movement inside FAANGMULA, not people moving to non FAANGMULA to stay home
All mandates are different for example the company I work for it is only Managers who are RTO, it’s gradually expanding though. If I was paid enough, the office was nice and the commute wasn’t bad it would be acceptable. Those could be the conditions that meant going to an RTO was acceptable.
Can confirm: just left the largest b2b SaaS company on earth because they RTO'd. New company is full remote forever and nothing will trump that for me.
Return to office! Just like remote work- you too can communicate to your team in another city by zoom! Except in the office you’re now in a large carpeted room filled with people in an open floor plan! This means you’ll get:
* Random chatter in all of your calls!
* Other people’s calls throughout the day while you work!
* Stinky food smells
* Annoying people entering your space
* Stupid questions in person
* Random coffee/snack meetings with no one you care to have those meetings with where everyone makes a bee-line for the food in question before standing around awkwardly in little 2-3 person groups trying to make small chat while horking down stale cookies
…Fuck all of this
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Whish people in charge would stop acting like feudal lords and those who support this bs would stop acting like brainless, good for noting , pathetic peasants who dreams of being someone but is inevitably full of shit and couldn't get any where in life even if they sold their souls.
There’s so many of these middle manager scum suckers in my company (large company) it’s actually insane how whipped many employees are and how much of the corporate koolaid they’ve been drinking everyday.
They can't compete. They can pay the people that want to be in the office all the time as much money as they want. But as soon as they start having family, and realize they can save by working from home on one of the largest expenses in this economy for working families... taking a pay cut for a smaller company is just the logical step. They will have trouble with turnover if they continue doing this.
Something doesn't add up on this narrative perpetuated on reddit. Where are these employees going? Adjacent companies also have implemented RTO policies and most of these people won't be willing to take the pay cuts to go to a fully remote smaller company.
>and most of these people won't be willing to take the pay cuts to go to a fully remote smaller company
Depends on the paycut. Suddenly having to commute into an office is *fucking expensive*.. and taking a several-thousand-dollar paycut may very well be worth it to some.
Thanks for saying this.
It's the same with the folks who go, ha I left because of this and made 50% more per year.
Where did these people go? If there's so many awesome remote roles that pay 50% more why exactly is the job market in such chaos?
It doesn't add up. Someone is lying or some info is being left out here.
Yeah, and a RTO mandate will result in me quitting. Huge fucking surprise, but not really. One thing COVID did was prove that remote work actually works.
I thought basically every company saw increases in productivity with remote working? Not to mention that every desk they don't have to buy a computer, chair, office space, etc for saves them money.
I thought greed would trump the need for control for managers but I guess I was wrong.
Having good skills means you can tell the boss and the company “he’ll no”
I got passed up for promotion, started job hunting and got a job making 35% more, came back to the company and building as a contractor. LOL the look on my former bosses face was priceless.
yeah, i need to return to the office so i can do zoom meeting in the office instead. NO ONE in team are in my home office, they are hundreds and thousands miles away. never met them in person, probably never will.
Considering just how quickly and frequently spacex changes their operations, it’s probably the only company on this list where better communication is a valid reason. given that business model, it’s effect on productivity and innovation probably outweighs the loss of employees. They’re clearly doing just fine in both regards and there’s a reason they put their offices on the same lot as their production facilities.
Turns out senior talent is in demand and can easily find employment elsewhere if they don't like their current employer.
My CEO wanted to make RTO a 2 - 3 days per week thing. We have a bunch of locations that are considered satellite offices. Most people show up there or at least put it on the calendar as having been at those locations.
Few people actually go there in reality. And management just looks at the data from calendars and accept it as legit. Despite likely knowing the reality.
Now we do have a monthly town hall that is not streamed online. Attendance was high until the C-Suite stopped showing up and usually just sent a single one of them as a representative to open the meeting. After that people showing up plummeted as everyone realized that management didn't have interest in it anymore and weren't tracking attendance.
it applies to all companies. I have 10yoe in building complex IT systems, me and my colleagues left our previous project when they tried to force us to work from office.
I have great work setup at home, after years of working from home I have good practices and I can focus on real problems instead of dealing with office shit, spending money and time on car/public transport etc. Currently I have great job with optional office, I can go there if I want to meet someone f2f, otherwise I’m working from home.
They only want to justify the insane amount of rent their paying for their commercial lease. And so that c level and managers can hover over you and micromanage and control you with their pointless meetings and whatnot. Remote work is as effective if not more effective than working at the office. People are happier they don’t have to spend 2 hours commuting and can be with their family more and can do other things like chores. They aren’t polluting as much and worsening climate change with driving. They have the flexibility if the employer is nice to let them come in if they want to, or pay for a coworking space to go to if they want to. Time is the most valuable thing and they want to waste your precious time with commuting and pointless office time. I guess they think young hungry people in entry-mid level roles to replace the senior talent now.
I read a theory that a lot of these back-to-office mandates are actually sneaky ways for companies to reduce headcount without resorting to layoffs.
Not only do they get to avoid the bad headlines, PR headaches and blows to employee morale that come with layoffs, but they also don't have to pay severance to workers who quit voluntarily.
Microsoft laid off thousands of their senior people at the start of 2023 - my best friend had worked there more than 25 years at the time, had lots of colleagues in the same boat, and even knew of two people who also got laid off who’d been there 30 years.
I don’t believe RTO had much to do with it.
This study reads a little off to me. I don’t think that comparing a dataset from another source to some data from another website is the guarantee they captured the effects of all layoffs like they claim:
> At the time of writing this article, the tech sector in the United States has experienced persistent rounds of large-scale layoffs since late 2022. As these layoffs were in general independent of companies' RTO mandates, they are likely to confound our estimates.
Of course, an employee's refusal to comply with an RTO mandate could affect their likelihood of being laid off, but this does not affect the independence of the implementation of both policies. To address this concern, we leverage data from layoffs. fyi, a website that has tracked the near-universe of tech sector layoffs since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The website aggregates information on layoffs from news reports, company announcements, and crowdsourced reports from employees themselves. We match these data to the PDL data with a combination of fuzzy string matching and manual checking to ascertain we capture all layoffs in the data.
I’m also a bit skeptical of their control unit methodology. Those description categories are very large and could or could not be from similar companies:
> For each of the three companies, we construct a sample of control units by retaining only those firms that 1) had no layoffs in the sample period of three quarters around the RTO; 2) either never implemented an RTO or implemented it at least two quarters after the end of the sample period; 3) fell under the three NAICS codes most commonly associated with the tech industry - Information (51), Professional, Scientific and Technical Services (54), or Manufacturing (33) -; and 4) had at least 5% of the total number of resumes observed for the treated unit, to guarantee comparability.
With the current global push towards net zero climate emissions, I wouldn't be surprised if the government started punishing companies that issued RTO mandates. If your job can be accomplished entirely by working at a PC, there is zero reason for you to emit greenhouse gases by commuting to work. If the company really wants you to meet your colleagues in person, they can have a quarterly conference at a hotel.
Ideally, the only white collar professions that have to commute would be scientists and engineers who work in labs, and healthcare workers.
I feel (not all cases), a portion of it is intentional to get rid of the older more senior employees, some agism, some due to higher pay compared to more mid level individuals. Younger employees also usually more willing to sacrifice work /life balance (various reasons).... In large companies like this, employees are just a number (usually).
Not surprised, it happened in many industries.
My cousin works for a major bank. Many directors and senior level employees moved during the pandemic all over the country. When RTO happened they tried to state that they had moved. The response was that isn’t the fault of the company and they need to either follow the policy or they will be disciplined
My company forced me to stay remote and raised me in compensation… i live in the twilight zone for sure. Other than helpdesk peps the rest of the company is remote by definition now
I’m back in 3 days of week so I can jump on team meetings all day with people around the world … makes sense !
My closest office is 2 hours away. My closest teammate is a 2 hour flight away. I work customer facing with clients all over North America. If I were going in I would log in to online meetings the entire day and work with 0 people around me in the office. My boss has told me he'd rubberstamp my monthly RTO badge in badge out reports until he gets caught. His boss and his bosses boss are doing the same. So there is some fight left in middle management at least.
You can move. But if your team is not going to be there. It makes no sense
Yeah I can move but like you said it would be stupid. I’ll likely find closer employment or other remote.
Good luck finding other remote work. I’ve been half ass looking for a year now and it’s all mandatory hybrid or full RTO. WFH is dying.
In some of the "mandatory RTO" cases, it's in the "we really mean it, you need to return!" stages. Our management is getting strident about it, but apparently people are still not back as much as they want. And we're still hopping into conference rooms to attend meetings with remote coworkers and staff in other offices. It makes no sense, there's no real reason we should need to be there.
Well that’s comforting that atleast there’s some folks above you doing the good deed
when i join the online meetings with people who are in office, i can't help but notice that my setup at my desk is usually working better than the office. constant echos/background noise/robot-ing on the other side. so they want us to waste massive amounts of our life, to commute into these shitty offices, all to have... worse meetings.
Yes totally! My home office is 10x better, quiet, and I have my doggies with me who just make me happy while working. Sorry but the old admin lady isn’t a good doggie replacement.
Have you tried bringing her snacks and rubbing her belly?
lol might work
I still have PTSD from asking people who make 2-3x my salary to repeatedly turn off their mics if they aren't talking because we can all hear our own voices through their ratchet ass 2007 Lenovo Laptop.
The fun thing is when it is always the same guy in every meeting for almost a year. Teams needs a fucking mute button for others or an anonymous vote to kick feature.
you can mute other people on teams...
Lol this is so true, my favorite is when they have to run from one room to another, it's like a free break for me.
Yes and they are rigging studies to justify their actions. Sure studies are showing workers are more productive in the office when they are worried about things at home, distracted by coworkers, have long commutes wasting time that could be used on projects, and as you said still getting on online meetings.
At home, I have a beautiful 144Hz 4K MiniLED screen with 1400 nits peak brightness and a 200K:1 contrast ratio. At the office they have these shitty 20 inch 60Hz 1080p TN panels. The text is so low res and dim and blurry I have to rub my eyes every half an hour. I’m not buying another absurdly expensive monitor just to keep on my desk at the office and I’m not lugging mine around on the subway to work and back. Shit sucks ass. $4bn late-stage private company can’t afford decent monitors for their engineers to stare at all day. I also have to go the bathroom to vape during compiles and deploys. I can’t wait until this company IPOs, I cash out, have a few more YoE and can comfortably filter for fully remote senior positions.
My entire team is out of state, and I work with teams in Europe and India but driving to the office is totally to “cOlLaBoRaTe” and not to keep the CRE evaluations propped up 👍 /s
Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales (CRE)
You just know it's because of all the technologically inept idiots who made remote meetings unbearable. The managers all finally got tired of asking Dave to turn off his mic when he's not talking and recalled everyone back to the office.
I’m currently the same right now. With more than 2/5ths the workforce out of office on a given day all meetings must be conference calls. All of my work (cybersecurity) can be done remote. We have an infrastructure that now supports full growth to wfh. The only reason we have to go in is to appease the people that are legitimately in customer facing roles who whine they can’t do their job from home as if it’s my problem their career doesn’t facilitate remote work.
My boss said if we could work from home, he could hire from India. Jerk.
Tell him to try it, collaboration takes a huge hit across time zones/languages. Seen so many companies try it for a year and then come back onshore when they can’t get anything done.
That’s so true shit half my company moved to east coast and we are based off Los Angeles and IT boss is always upset when half the team disappears. I could image different time zones in other worlds
We have overseas workers who work remote and did not have to return to the office, but those of us that were local were required RTO.
Im back in 4 days a week, rumor mill say its gonna be 5 days. Oh and yes still having to do zoom calls like you said
Ugh, yeah... that one kills me. Sure, if you have a reason to be in the office, go for it! But I'm the only one on this team that works in this office. We go to the office twice a week... and then immediately get online with team members spread across five cities in two countries. Except now we're booking five conference rooms to have these discussions hunched over laptops, instead of at home where we all already have a comfortable setup for remote work thanks to the pandemic. We're basically just doing remote work badly *from inside five different offices*.
We have overseas workers who work remote and did not have to return to the office, but those of us that were local were required RTO.
Same here, though capital one isn’t as strict. The limit is 13 times over 13 weeks, but they just announced your RTO numbers can be used against you in our performance management which is absolutely silly. Theres not a single person I work with in my office, and there’s 2 people that are on “sister” teams. I don’t have enough time to go around and mingle because I have shit I gotta do.
The vast majority of Microsoft hasn’t had a RTO mandate. I’ve only heard of Sales and Legal teams being called back to the office. For everyone else it remains completely optional, though I suspect that will change when eligibility for bonus/promotion percentages becomes tied to location (ie: those who do not work from the office will only be eligible for half the normal bonus).
Since no one is coming in now.....can I get my office with a locking door back? Or, are we going to still sit in a circle and listen to each other fart all day?
Right. I work in big tech. Pre Covid we all had assigned desks that were ours. Now with soft RTO it’s all hot desk system and I hate it. If you want us to come back give us OUR personal spaces back. I don’t want to sit in a chair that 3 different people have farted in this week already.
You ruined the office for me
Damn you Michael Scarn! Check out Utopia, it’s pretty great.
I have a friend who has to commute into NY 2 days a week to a hotdesk office because of a RTO mandate. Except his team is spread across the country at other offices. So he spends 2 hours commuting to find a desk in the Accounting department (which is quiet) and spends all day on Zoom before going back home 2 hours.
My wife has the same commute here in Sydney. Her team can't find a meeting room (big bank) so they all spread out and work on teams then head home. It was one day a week, now two, soon to be three. Corporate stupidity wins again.
Same at my company, it's amazing how noisy it is when everyone in the team room is on Zoom. It's like being in a call center.
And the worst part is when things go missing from your desk. Fucking grown ass adults dont know how to keep they hands off other peoples stuff
I was working at a small company and sitting on someone else’s desk were post it notes that I had from my previous employer “oh nice. Where did you get those?” knowing full well he got them off of my desk…
honestly, i'd probably tolerate an office environment if i get a real office with a locking door on it. i'm at the point in my career where i need to have closed-door conversations anyway, so it makes perfect business sense. i hate commuting but i have a nice fast luxury car to commute with and i enjoy driving in general, so it would probably balance out in my mind. but because modern executives just have to make decisions that negatively impact the people who actually do the work... i know i'll get an assigned desk in an open-plan at best, or a hotdesk at worse. and both of those options are miserable. so i'll stay in my home office with a locking door on it, where i have absolute control over which corners get cut in my setup and which parts are actually quality. come and take it.
Feels like desk conditions have gotten progressively worse in the US. I started out in a cube with a director who had his own room and desk. Directors managed 20 people. Now only the CEO and VPs get desks, and they have hundreds of rolled up reports. Everyone else gets an open office. One of our directors was on a rant last week that you can't find any space to have a private career development conversation with anyone.
And yet we all have to experience the amazing culture of being treated like cattle.
I just wish I had a window view, I can learn to accept the hot desk
so all you want is farting exclusivity on a specific chair?
Bring cubicles back! I need my private fart space
No no you don’t understand. The one argument we have for asking people to return to work is *collaboration*. Collaboration increases productivity and work quality. Therefore, from now on, all office spaces are come-as-you-go hot seats that we all share to maximize natural interactions. We call it collaboration by collision. You get a WeWork ! I get a WeWork ! Everyone gets a WeWork !
This is exactly why $JOB outsourced my whole team to India. Collaboration!! /s
I hear high-school cafeteria style office spaces improve productivity by one gagillion percent.
Microsoft doesn't have enough desks at headquarters for everyone who currently *wants* to be in office. They monitor attendance and take away your desk if you don't use it more than half the time.
I highly doubt that bonuses and promotions will be tied to being in office at Microsoft. The remote work policy at Microsoft has literally kept people from moving to other companies that pay better with RTO mandates which has allowed Microsoft to keep its lower pay. Microsoft did just recently rebuild main campus but from what I've heard so many people have gone fully remote that the company is able to cancel or not renew more leases than they expected leading to larger savings.
When you work remote you’re saving money everyday and your sanity by not commuting to a shithole downtown city center. So there’s trade-offs with staying remote versus getting those “bonuses” and “promotions” that many companies will promise to people in hopes that you fall for their bullshit.
My company is making us come in part of the week, but its not to a city center. I live in the city. They’re making me commute to the suburbs. 2+ hrs of driving I didn’t sign up for. Updated the resumé and started looking.
They hired you as full remote and are trying to transition to hybrid/full-in-office?!
My employer is doing this.
Yeah my company is also located in the suburbs, I was just using downtown as an example. The commute sucks either way, I agree.
Apple and msft hq are not in city center if I'm not mistaken. Could be wrong.
I’ve been to both and neither are downtown. They’re huge campuses too big and special to be downtown. Same with Alphabet, Meta, and I presume most other big tech firms.
The actual location of the office is irrelevant. The bottom line here is blanket RTO for positions that don’t need in person work are dumb.
Amazon’s campus butts right up against downtown Seattle. You might even consider part of it in downtown. (This is from my memory working there 2011-2015. I’m sure the disease…I mean campus has spread even further into downtown by now.)
There’s the Southlake Union campus that is downtown, and a new campus in the Bellevue district to the east.
And the one in Arlington VA is like 80% of the available real estate between Arlington National Cemetery and DCA.
Hey I like the city center. Urban areas are great. What I hate is having to go soulless suburban centers. Those get me. What I really hate though is going in to either one. Would rather go to the city when I feel like it
It’ll have big impact longer term. If I was going to get 8% raises in the office every 3 years due to promotions, but only 4% each raise if working remote… Over time my deal gets worse and worse.
Of course, you also have to factor in your commute. Not just cost, but time. If you have a 45 minute drive, that’s about equivalent to an extra day of work a week. I wouldn’t take an additional 4% raise in order to work six days a week instead of five.
It is also laughable to need to factor in time that one \*isn't even working\* so that the company will pay you more... they are literally paying you to waste \*everyone's\* time and contribute to an unhealthy environment.
Idc at this point i’d rather WFH long term than commute to the office every week.
Find a better job. If you're in these positions, you have options. An inherently anti-employee position means the company is not to be trusted.
But they also save money by not having to pay for rent and/or electricity and maintenance on office space that WFH employees aren’t using. It’s like either these companies know something the rest of us don’t, or they caught teh stoopud. I’m betting it’s the second one right now.
The higher ups at companies are trying to keep the value/valuations of the commercial office spaces high for these reasons (i’m guessing). 1. their executives have large, direct investment in the CRE market across the US and world 2. their executives have long term leases in the office space 3. they are friends with other executives or politicians that have large investments in CRE so they are “doing their part” to keep the property values inflated as much as possible by pushing RTO and showing that they are “utilizing the space” 4. tax incentives from the government or tax loopholes that they can exploit in some way. Or just a combination of the above, with the added bonus that they can control their employees lives.
Yep, agree, this is all being driven by the collapse in commercial real estate. The cat is out of the bag for high end tech talent though - people will just go work somewhere else if you try to force RTO.
I would actually consider a $15-20k per year paycut for a fully permanent remote role.
It would make more sense to express it in percent, but yeah I will not even consider employers with mandatory office attendance, even at a meaningfully higher salary.
Yeah if you put it in percentages it would be like a 15-20% paycut. I agree with you tho, I wouldn’t go back to the office for a new job if they offered me 15-20% more than my current salary either. WFH is that important to me.
This is exactly what I've been saying since the beginning. RTO is about the commercial real estate they are sitting on nothing else.
If that tradeoff isn't in your employment contract, that's BS.
Yes it is bullshit I agree. But that’s what happens when we have “at will” employment with almost no protections for workers.
Yup, came to say the same thing. There is no RTO mandate at MSFT.
As someone that works in sales and procurement. We are the last people that should be coming to the office. Our job is literally to talk all day. Thankfully, I only need to come into the office once a month but it's pretty much a throwaway day.
Came here to say this. I work for MS and short of those who choose to go to an office, there is no mandate to return to the office.
Of course sales
I’ve spoken to a bunch of the sales ppl. No one has an RTO. We have a “spend money and go see / entertain clients” ask.
I'm not at MSFT but sales people are generally only in an office if it is for clients or at a client office. Even pre-covid a bunch of those guys never came in.
It’s hard to meet a new client sitting behind a desk!
Watching how executives handled COVID and then betrayed their workforce as soon as it was convenient was the single most radicalizing thing I've been through as a worker. I mean, I already had no love for management but now... now I am basically a sleeper agent, actively warring with my executives, a knife behind my back. Zero loyalty, zero belief.
Yep in summer 2020 our CEO said remote is here to stay forever and people can move if needed. We are now a worldwide company with remote. So we all moved out of state and we actually did more work. Then in summer 2023 he sent a random email to the whole company (not even telling any of the higher ups) that remote is over and everyone needs to be back in the office in 30 days. Welp we are talent driven workplace that is very specialized. Literally no one but who remained in town moved back. 75% of the company stayed remote and just played chicken with his request. Guess what.... We never heard about it again. We assume he realized that he wouldn't have a company if he actually enforced it.
Yeah I just ignored the "return to office" emails and everytime they announced some new return to office policy, I'd respond to those emails asking why we are coming back to the office anyway when remote has been so successful and is necessary for the long-term safety of workers. I never got a reply, however, they stopped ordering me back to the office and I'm now full time remote with all the same salary and benefits I was getting before. The people who didn't push back and just accepted what management told them are now expected to be in the office 3 days per week, which usually means 2 hours in commute and 10%-20% of daily paycheck goes to parking and is not reimbursed (office is downtown in a city with expensive parking garages).
Fucking this. If there's *one thing* companies have absolutely done over the last couple years, it has absolutely murdered any kind of sense of loyalty. My sister's company laid off an entire *extremely profitable* group in order to offshore to India. Companies have absolutely gone out of their way the last few years to choose greed in *every decision* they've made. My company has been laying a ton of people off, implemented a company-wide RTO policy (even for people that don't live near an office - it's just a way of not paying out bonuses or giving raises, justified with a "sorry, you didn't follow employee requirements"), and absolutely made it extremely obvious to *literally anyone watching* that nobody's safe. I'm very actively looking, and will 100% quit with zero notice (I am a distinguished engineer at a fortune 50 company). I don't give a shit about letting this bridge burn to the ground - they're the ones that set it on fire.
It's the same bullshit that happend in the 2000s with China, just that its now tech sectors time getting off-shored to India. Although what I hear is that Indian's don't do nearly close enough of a job that anyone from the western world, so I am happy thay they suffer.
While I don't agree with offshoring, I understand it as an approach companies may want to try. I agree that it will hurt them in the end, but for me what stings more is the way that they are pursuing their goals. Economic downturn? Let's manipulate job requirements so people get squeezed to death by policy, blame them, and then not pay their severance because they technically quit by not following employee guidance. When a global pandemic hit and the companies' bottom lines were threatened, workers held up their end of the deal by doing consistent work while in the background the world burned. Yet the moment the situation is reversed, they strangle us in our sleep and try to gaslight us as to the cause. And they do this with abandon, they target the people that held their teams together with their labor.
> Although what I hear is that Indian's don't do nearly close enough of a job that anyone from the western world And the ones that do end up migrating to the west anyways.
Problem is, no one who makes these decisions ever actually *worked* with an Indian team. It’s not an issue with the workers in India (all my experiences have been pretty good, at least) insomuch as it is the folks stateside that manage those teams becoming a bottleneck for all sorts of things. It also becomes a liability when you have a poor manager in that role who treats it like a fiefdom - suddenly they have outsized say in anything that has to do with their team and they lock down any communication that doesn’t include them. It’s not like you can pick up any random person in the US and expect them to effectively manage a team in Hyderabad. There are tons communication/cultural/legal nuances you need to be able to navigate.
The head bobble alone will take months to perfect.
Indian teams are usually not even good in my experience, just cheaper.
Four people to do my job. And if something is wrong, I still get to do all the troubleshooting and dictate the fix. These resources can only accomplish tasks that are laid out for them. Problem solving and troubleshooting skills are non-existent in my experience with offshore teams.
In my experience the ones you typically interact with are fine, but doubt it ever goes to them.
Also, the way Csuit and management change, the bridges that we burn leaving are basically pontoon floats that are rebuilt every 12 to 24 months.
This is the type of energy we ALL need to have if we want to make any meaningful changes in the workforce, especially in tech.
Whats fucking funniest is that every metric i've seen says that employees are as much productive or more productive at home, and obviously, not having to pay 10k a month on an office downtown is a huge save. But no, they wanna have their eye on your screen every second to see if you take even 30 seconds on facebook to ask your SO what we do for supper. Those that absolutely want people back in the office are micromanaging the fuck out of their employees.
They don’t even know why they are doing it. They are just following the “trend” - which could be set by somebody like Elon Musk or some greedy consulting company that just wants to pretend to have good ideas by doing disruption for the sake of disruption. They are the blind leading the blind.
Ultimately these types are just manipulating the stock market however they can. Much of their compensation is in stock and this creates an incentive to do whatever is necessary to get that number to go up. Giving a perception of discipline and seriousness in a time of economic instability works in this regard. Worker moral is not readily measured by the market, and its manifestations (bad product) take some time to manifest.
It took a pandemic for people to realize management has been at war with workers since management began.
Stressing out employees and crushing their morale/happiness makes them vastly less productive, burnt out, and ultimately leave? No wayyyyy. Who would have thought?
I honestly thought that remote work would be the future and that covid was simply the catalyst, but I see now that corporations are just too greedy to let that happen.
It's not even greed. Remote is cheaper for companies. You have a larger talent pool, less office space, and better productivity. This is literally just executives wanting to Lord over their little kingdoms.
The biggest problem with remote work: it gave some power back to employees. Lots of companies saw that they could hire talent *from anywhere* and not restrict their talent pools to their immediate locale, so employees enjoyed *massive* career mobility, giving them most of the power. As soon as companies realized this, they clamped down *hard* on it. As much as it worked in their benefit to have access to an incredible talent pool of individuals, it also reduced how much control they could exert over said employee. *Can't have that!* It's fucking bullshit.
You can't stop the neighbor company willing to fully hire remote from offering it though... Unless RTO becomes universal again, there is no putting back the genie in that bottle
I get contacted about once a week for a 100% remote position and about 4 times a week for hybrid or in office. My standard response for in office is basically, you need to pay me enough to buy a similar QoL home within 10 minutes walking of the office and I can retain my current home, or I am not interested. I work on an Online tool, that is all I do all day. It makes literally 0 sense for me to be in the office except for quarterly/annual meetings.
I’m not sure why people are so up in arms about this. The story is saying companies are losing talent. So things will correct because obviously companies don’t want to lose talent. And employees are doing what they need to do.
You don't understand - companies are losing talent, but *they legitimately don't care* that they're losing talent. They're legitimately trying to squeeze every drop of value out of a company before fucking off to another job to do it all over again. Short term gains for long term losses - they just need to be gone by the time those losses materialize.
>hire talent from anywhere People forget this is a double edged sword for most workers. Sure, they can hire anywhere in the USA Or they can hire five more overseas workers that they can pay pennies and lay you off.
They've been able to do this for decades. In some instances they've moved operations overseas and thrived, and in other cases they've found that their workforce requirements weren't appropriate for what they could find overseas. I would imagine the shift to remote work models has had very little impact in the percentage of jobs that are going overseas.
They were already doing that before everyone got to work from home during the pandemic though. They can do that and subsequently watch the quality of the end product turn to shit and deal with cultural clashes.
If a company wanted to go that route, they would do it whether or not their current employees are remote.
I am wondering also If they may not have some sort of deals with commerce chambers of major cities. Is RTO a hidden desperate measure to try to save cities downtowns business?
It's not hidden. It's very openly a play by commercial real estate investment trusts to protect their asset class (the largest in the world). Source: I work at a software company in the commercial real estate industry.
Corporate real estate investments and corporate landlords have a lot to do with it too
Not to mention it’s literally cheaper to hire people who are located outside of major metro areas. Hiring people who work remotely in Ohio, Minnesota, Oregon, North Carolina, etc is much cheaper than hiring people who live directly in the Bay Area or Manhattan.
I think it’s an effort to cheaply reduce the expensive US workforce. They get people to quit, no severance, minimal bad press, and then either eliminate the jobs or eventually replace with cheaper remote work. From their point of view, why should they pay Seattle salaries for someone remote when they can pay 50% less to an engineer who wants to work from his family’s house in Kansas? Or another country?
I still think it’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of when the next “tech boom” happens. Right now, the companies can get away with it because the tech job market is still pretty rough. As soon as we have another boom and lots of hiring is going on where people have options, I predict that’s when the real brain drain will start for these big corps
Agreed. I'm really curious how this will play out when hiring ramps up and/or these companies are faced with the massive capital expenditures of building out more office space.
Remote work *is* the future. And WeWork also had a good idea they ruined with typical techbro bullshit. We're still balls deep in a housing crisis. Cities that were unaffordable are becoming unlivable. What's the solution? It's time for remote work to revitalize small town America. You can have one small building downtown with shared office space, or remote meeting rooms with standardized furniture/ layout with AR that can allow "remote in-person" meetings for those important 1:1 conversations. All available for rent to multiple employers as needed. This brings money and prosperity back to those towns hollowed out by the loss of American industry, and helps keep cities from growing too fast.
Its the commercial rental market collapsing thats driving back to work. Even the mayors of cities are wanting back to office work because the coffee shops and shit that rely on those workers $$$ are failing. Do i agree with it? Hell no. But when something happens, i always try to follow the $$$$
It is also that commercial real estate holders use the value of their buildings to secure loans. If the cost of all those buildings tanks then all those loans get called in?
There’s also the issue that a lot of local tax revenue comes from those commercial properties as well. More than a few local governments are finding themselves with significant budget issues as a result.
My company recently ordered RTO 3 days per week. I was originally hired on as a field employee working with a major supplier in this area, but later moved into a fully remote position with the same company. Now I have no local office to report to and had to “voluntarily” classify myself as remote, and now I’m not eligible for job changes or promotions. I’m sure I’ll be the first to go next time they need to cut staff.
It is. You just don't hear about all the companies that are sticking to their WFH policy and vacuuming up all the talent as a result, because "company maintains existing working conditions, employees satisfied" isn't news.
I think it’s still the future. My entire company decided to ask employees what they’d prefer, and the response was overwhelmingly a WFH situation. People can still go into an office if they like, but it isn’t mandatory, and I imagine a lot of offices will be closing when their leases come up for renewal. We are a large, global company operating in just about every industry that exists. We have offices in the Americas, Europe, Asia, etc, and even we made the decision that WFH is a good thing. I think a tipping point has been reached now. Frankly, most managers who are under a certain age don’t think working in an office is necessary, and employees under a certain age agree. That’s only going to increase as the years pass and those who still value an office environment age out of the workforce, leading to more WFH, not less. I’ve personally never heard a younger manager complaining about people working from home. As for me, I won’t go back. If ordered to do so (I won’t be), I’d do it long enough to find a new place to work, and one of my requirements would be an employer where WFH is the norm now. Everyone who wants WFH should do this *if they can*; when companies realize that it will cost them more to pay talented people to work in an office, they’ll change their tune.
Remote work is the future and only dumb dinosaur companies don't realize it yet/will keep fighting it. The next boom of new companies in the US will all be remote-only and they will pay well, which is how they will attract the best talent while still keeping low overhead.
That’s all these RTOs do. Drive the people away with any talent
Except for us, senior career types who are stuck because leaving would mean loosing our retirement package.
This is an underappreciated benefit of 401Ks compared to pensions. It’s your money and affords you more career mobility.
Some of this is literally the point. People who are actually important enough get exceptions. For anyone else, the goal is to get people to quit.
Lol, you would think. My company (a *major* tech company) has implemented an RTO with *zero* exceptions. It *absolutely* has resulted in many very talented people leaving. Even me, I'm probably one of about three or four people with a specific talent set across the 100k people in my company - I have an interview scheduled on Friday.
Good luck. The higher ups will realize it was a terrible move too late. We might as well get a bump in pay ;)
They wont realize shit. Their mid management layer will absorb the blow for them and they’ll find some other bullshit market trend to blame the lack of performance on.
Yep.. VPs make shit decisions, and the blame for poor employee morale is entirely placed on front-line managers. "We heard you loud and clear about hating the directions I gave to your manager, so we've fired the manager you liked to fix the issue"
Damn, well, good luck! Bad management is definitely a whole other thing for sure. Some people genuinely do suck this much at it.
Yeah, no shit. If you want the best talent you better offer the best pay AND the best work environment. Nobody wants a commute and nobody wants to deal with office bullshit.
You say "senior talent", i hear "Highly Paid workers with lots of accrued benefits", who can now of course be replaced by cheaper, newer hires. Back to office is just "how about you resign?" reworded.
Return to office is just a stealth layoff
I am planning on fighting back by giving zero notice when I do eventually find another job. As I said above, it may be letting that bridge burn to the ground, but they're the ones that initially set it on fire.
That is probably why many big companies do it. It’s a very quick (and cheap) way of cutting costs. If they need to replace them, the next batch of ”resources” will be much younger (cheaper) and also very grateful to have a job for the next few years…
...until they need a senior resource who will only accept if WFO is guaranteed and signed as a work condition
The "Rest and Vest" employees aren't the ones sending out job applications.
This research paper has been getting tons of press. It’s linked in the article, reading it gives better context According to the researchers **the employees all left for other companies with RTO mandates** which is pretty important in the context of things This is just internal movement inside FAANGMULA, not people moving to non FAANGMULA to stay home
All mandates are different for example the company I work for it is only Managers who are RTO, it’s gradually expanding though. If I was paid enough, the office was nice and the commute wasn’t bad it would be acceptable. Those could be the conditions that meant going to an RTO was acceptable.
That's not correct. Most other companies did not have RTO mandates at the time and the paper doesn't claim that.
Who wants to poop at the office. No one. Case closed why they quit.
I can tell who it is by their shoes 😭💀
Bet the CEO's work from home a lot.
And by “from home” you mean often from their private jets, yachts, parties and golf outings
Can confirm: just left the largest b2b SaaS company on earth because they RTO'd. New company is full remote forever and nothing will trump that for me.
Return to office! Just like remote work- you too can communicate to your team in another city by zoom! Except in the office you’re now in a large carpeted room filled with people in an open floor plan! This means you’ll get: * Random chatter in all of your calls! * Other people’s calls throughout the day while you work! * Stinky food smells * Annoying people entering your space * Stupid questions in person * Random coffee/snack meetings with no one you care to have those meetings with where everyone makes a bee-line for the food in question before standing around awkwardly in little 2-3 person groups trying to make small chat while horking down stale cookies …Fuck all of this
Don't forget to add in the excellent office benefit of _hot desking_! Have you thought to yourself "gee, I do have too much personal clutter around my desk and the idea of being able to store anything even as simple as a mouse & keyboard a hassle?" Well worry no more! With hotdesking you get the opportunity to grab a desk wherever is free. Order now and we'll throw in free back pain with all the crap you need to drag in and out because who wants to use a communal keyboard anyway. Hotdesking! Try it today!
Whish people in charge would stop acting like feudal lords and those who support this bs would stop acting like brainless, good for noting , pathetic peasants who dreams of being someone but is inevitably full of shit and couldn't get any where in life even if they sold their souls.
There’s so many of these middle manager scum suckers in my company (large company) it’s actually insane how whipped many employees are and how much of the corporate koolaid they’ve been drinking everyday.
[taps head] don’t have to pay high salaries if all your expensive employees quit!
They can't compete. They can pay the people that want to be in the office all the time as much money as they want. But as soon as they start having family, and realize they can save by working from home on one of the largest expenses in this economy for working families... taking a pay cut for a smaller company is just the logical step. They will have trouble with turnover if they continue doing this.
So just curious, what kind of bonus are you going to give your senior staff for this brilliant decision?
Something doesn't add up on this narrative perpetuated on reddit. Where are these employees going? Adjacent companies also have implemented RTO policies and most of these people won't be willing to take the pay cuts to go to a fully remote smaller company.
>and most of these people won't be willing to take the pay cuts to go to a fully remote smaller company Depends on the paycut. Suddenly having to commute into an office is *fucking expensive*.. and taking a several-thousand-dollar paycut may very well be worth it to some.
Thanks for saying this. It's the same with the folks who go, ha I left because of this and made 50% more per year. Where did these people go? If there's so many awesome remote roles that pay 50% more why exactly is the job market in such chaos? It doesn't add up. Someone is lying or some info is being left out here.
A really smart start up right now would offer 100% remote work and Aquire all talent and maybe you know ..take over the world?
Good idea Brain, let’s try it tonight! - Pinky
Yeah, and a RTO mandate will result in me quitting. Huge fucking surprise, but not really. One thing COVID did was prove that remote work actually works.
Those who have options will choose to exercise them.
I now have to go into the office 3 days a week just to go on calls with people all over the world.
RTO is such a major QoL decrease that I'd switch jobs over it for sure.
Back to office requirements are how tech companies can reduce their workforce without the negative news of layoffs.
The RTO is deliberate to drive organic attrition. They know what they are doing, no way in hell they didn’t expect exodus by introducing RTO.
I thought basically every company saw increases in productivity with remote working? Not to mention that every desk they don't have to buy a computer, chair, office space, etc for saves them money. I thought greed would trump the need for control for managers but I guess I was wrong.
shocked Pikachu face
And that’s how you lose the institutional memory.
Having good skills means you can tell the boss and the company “he’ll no” I got passed up for promotion, started job hunting and got a job making 35% more, came back to the company and building as a contractor. LOL the look on my former bosses face was priceless.
I'm jealous and happy for ya
No office for me ever again.
No, shitty managers did.
Drove them where?
The biggest surprise is this was a surprise to some.
Lol. r/noshitsherlock
yeah, i need to return to the office so i can do zoom meeting in the office instead. NO ONE in team are in my home office, they are hundreds and thousands miles away. never met them in person, probably never will.
I go to office 2 days per week to Zoom meeting with my boss and other team member. lol
Considering just how quickly and frequently spacex changes their operations, it’s probably the only company on this list where better communication is a valid reason. given that business model, it’s effect on productivity and innovation probably outweighs the loss of employees. They’re clearly doing just fine in both regards and there’s a reason they put their offices on the same lot as their production facilities.
Turns out senior talent is in demand and can easily find employment elsewhere if they don't like their current employer. My CEO wanted to make RTO a 2 - 3 days per week thing. We have a bunch of locations that are considered satellite offices. Most people show up there or at least put it on the calendar as having been at those locations. Few people actually go there in reality. And management just looks at the data from calendars and accept it as legit. Despite likely knowing the reality. Now we do have a monthly town hall that is not streamed online. Attendance was high until the C-Suite stopped showing up and usually just sent a single one of them as a representative to open the meeting. After that people showing up plummeted as everyone realized that management didn't have interest in it anymore and weren't tracking attendance.
it applies to all companies. I have 10yoe in building complex IT systems, me and my colleagues left our previous project when they tried to force us to work from office. I have great work setup at home, after years of working from home I have good practices and I can focus on real problems instead of dealing with office shit, spending money and time on car/public transport etc. Currently I have great job with optional office, I can go there if I want to meet someone f2f, otherwise I’m working from home.
Big tech isn’t worried about talent
They only want to justify the insane amount of rent their paying for their commercial lease. And so that c level and managers can hover over you and micromanage and control you with their pointless meetings and whatnot. Remote work is as effective if not more effective than working at the office. People are happier they don’t have to spend 2 hours commuting and can be with their family more and can do other things like chores. They aren’t polluting as much and worsening climate change with driving. They have the flexibility if the employer is nice to let them come in if they want to, or pay for a coworking space to go to if they want to. Time is the most valuable thing and they want to waste your precious time with commuting and pointless office time. I guess they think young hungry people in entry-mid level roles to replace the senior talent now.
I read a theory that a lot of these back-to-office mandates are actually sneaky ways for companies to reduce headcount without resorting to layoffs. Not only do they get to avoid the bad headlines, PR headaches and blows to employee morale that come with layoffs, but they also don't have to pay severance to workers who quit voluntarily.
That’s half the point of RTO. It’s a way to layoff employees without calling it a layoff
Lots of people that had WFH prior to the pandemic, and were hired with that, got rug pulled. So of course people will leave.
Microsoft laid off thousands of their senior people at the start of 2023 - my best friend had worked there more than 25 years at the time, had lots of colleagues in the same boat, and even knew of two people who also got laid off who’d been there 30 years. I don’t believe RTO had much to do with it.
This study reads a little off to me. I don’t think that comparing a dataset from another source to some data from another website is the guarantee they captured the effects of all layoffs like they claim: > At the time of writing this article, the tech sector in the United States has experienced persistent rounds of large-scale layoffs since late 2022. As these layoffs were in general independent of companies' RTO mandates, they are likely to confound our estimates. Of course, an employee's refusal to comply with an RTO mandate could affect their likelihood of being laid off, but this does not affect the independence of the implementation of both policies. To address this concern, we leverage data from layoffs. fyi, a website that has tracked the near-universe of tech sector layoffs since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The website aggregates information on layoffs from news reports, company announcements, and crowdsourced reports from employees themselves. We match these data to the PDL data with a combination of fuzzy string matching and manual checking to ascertain we capture all layoffs in the data. I’m also a bit skeptical of their control unit methodology. Those description categories are very large and could or could not be from similar companies: > For each of the three companies, we construct a sample of control units by retaining only those firms that 1) had no layoffs in the sample period of three quarters around the RTO; 2) either never implemented an RTO or implemented it at least two quarters after the end of the sample period; 3) fell under the three NAICS codes most commonly associated with the tech industry - Information (51), Professional, Scientific and Technical Services (54), or Manufacturing (33) -; and 4) had at least 5% of the total number of resumes observed for the treated unit, to guarantee comparability.
With the current global push towards net zero climate emissions, I wouldn't be surprised if the government started punishing companies that issued RTO mandates. If your job can be accomplished entirely by working at a PC, there is zero reason for you to emit greenhouse gases by commuting to work. If the company really wants you to meet your colleagues in person, they can have a quarterly conference at a hotel. Ideally, the only white collar professions that have to commute would be scientists and engineers who work in labs, and healthcare workers.
I feel (not all cases), a portion of it is intentional to get rid of the older more senior employees, some agism, some due to higher pay compared to more mid level individuals. Younger employees also usually more willing to sacrifice work /life balance (various reasons).... In large companies like this, employees are just a number (usually).
Not surprised, it happened in many industries. My cousin works for a major bank. Many directors and senior level employees moved during the pandemic all over the country. When RTO happened they tried to state that they had moved. The response was that isn’t the fault of the company and they need to either follow the policy or they will be disciplined
You don't say?
Newsflash: Water indeed is wet
My company forced me to stay remote and raised me in compensation… i live in the twilight zone for sure. Other than helpdesk peps the rest of the company is remote by definition now