Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nit: current market cap is ~$3.7T

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

> When leadership decides their velocity is too slow for whatever reason, they look for deck chairs to move. RTO is one big deck chair they can move and many will assume it will improve performance and velocity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again I do not have a good explanation for RTO.

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

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

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

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

All else being equal, this is almost certainly true.

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

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

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

>> Why do people forget about board members and shareholders

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

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

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

Well, then show the evidence.

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

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

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

Okay, great. You can work from the office.

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

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

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

>>Be glad you didn’t work in the development office of a bank in the 1990s, you’d be expected to wear a suit and tie to work.

Priorities matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

>And if I’m dressed professionally, I get more done and I get better responses from others than when I’m wearing shorts and a tee shirt.

Are you a butler? No offense.

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

> Likewise many companies in my slice of the industry point to one of the big leaders RTO policies as the reason to do the same

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

omg that explains so many things!

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

Chef's kiss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There may be other mechanisms at play too.

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

Are they though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such collaboration, such synergy, much wow.

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

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

There definitely bad apples that spoil it for the bunch.

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

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

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

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

JFC! People will say anything. LOL!

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

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

> mouse jiggler

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

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

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

If you quit (because of, say, RTO) then you quit. It's a fairly standard deal between you and your employer.

If you get laid-off, employer has to give you a severance package for any number of reasons (local labor laws, agreement with the union, corporate PR). This is not a standard deal and is, simply put, more expensive than if the employee just quit of their own accord.

In both cases, employer gets the benefit of reduced head count.

Layoffs are expensive and destroy morale of those that remain (to say nothing of those that have to leave). When people suspect layoffs are coming, all work comes to a screeching halt around the event.

Getting people to quit is much cheaper (no severance if that exists, and your unemployment insurance costs don't go up).

You could express this view without breaking the guidelines or dragging down the standard of discourse here. The guidelines address this specifically:

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When I was a teenager I played World of Warcraft for 5 years. During that time we did "raids" where 40 people have to pay attention and communicate, sometimes for longer than 8 hours, with people from around the globe.

If teenagers can do it, adults can do it. Period. And if they can't, skill issue I guess.

If you have facts to show the class that haven't already been seen, otherwise...

I have a more moderate view on RTO elsewhere in this post, so I'm not someone who things WFH is always the best approach. But for now, I have yet to see any study suggest that RTO is more productive across the board all the time.

Citation needed period

Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025

https://www.moreno.senate.gov/press-releases/new-moreno-bill...

https://www.moreno.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/The...

Offshoring always ends in disaster, companies have tried this time and time again but the end result is an awful product that requires more money to fix than they needed to make it in the first place.

And that also doesn't solve the problem of dealing with institutional knowledge loss if you decide to aggressively cull employees trying to unionize. In either scenario the solution is for union workers to become even more aggressive with their demands and force companies to acquiesce.

Constructive Dismissal has been brought up in every RTO thread for years, but I've never heard of a case where it worked.

The key to constructive dismissal is that a reasonable person would have to find the new conditions intolerable and it has to constitute some form of discrimination (e.g. not a change in company policy, but a targeted attack that discriminates against you). So given that most people commute to work, you couldn't argue that it was intolerable to be asked to commute to work.

If you wake up one day to an e-mail from your employer that you, and you alone, need to relocate to their new office in a small town in Alaska for no good reason, you'd have a good case for constructive dismissal.

However if the company changes their policy and applies it equally to everyone requiring employees within 50 miles of an office come in (the case with this RTO move) then you don't have a valid case for a constructive dismissal lawsuit.

And?

As long as it isn’t discriminatory, since 49 of the 50 states are at will employment, you can be let go at anytime for any reason or no reason.

It might come into play with unemployment insurance but the weekly amount is so low it’s laughable.

50 miles is a US government defined "commutable distance" (I was just talking about this at work with a human resources person, but unfortunately I can't recall what agency defined it as such).

If it is really two hours by a reasonable route then you likely have a case that the commute is unreasonable and you would not have taken the job without them paying moving expenses if it offered that way. Therefore they need to offer moving expenses. I'd ask the boss first as they may have contacts in hr that can handle this.

If they won't offer moving expenses odds are you can convince an unemployment judge this is an unreasonable change in working conditions and so you can collect unemployment. (A lawyer can give more detail)

There are large offices is nearly every major city in the world. On my team, two are in Canada, one is in Singapore, and another in India. All fully remote.

Redmond only

This study found the opposite.

https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remot...

Workless

Will work.

More money would do absolutely nothing for me if I had to exchange it for remote work except make my life worse in every way.

I couldn’t spend the time with my 81 and 83 year old parents, I wouldn’t have nearly the amount of time with wife, I couldn’t spend months away from home.

Depends of your company, I personally meet my team roughly every 3 months and I push back any task on the calendar because I know the days in the office aren't even half the productivity of the usual remote days. I even avoid big deployments during these days.

Remote is usually all focused work and the office time is mostly coffee chats and random interruptions of unrelated subjects because on how much easier it is to ping people.

So on my case it's the opposite, I'm a bit skeptical you can achieve the level of focus you have in a remote team in a standard open space, that would require some discipline that not everybody has.

Not to mention the abomination of the open space with no reserved desk so you aren't even guaranteed to sit close to your team, removing the only potential useful advantage of being on-site.

If a portion of the team is remote, then the whole "remote team" apparatus and culture are necessary. Same with hybrid offices in which the WFH days are random instead of set for everyone.

I fully understand that this is a polarized personal preference issue. I don't think there's a way to make both work in the same company.

I think remote work gets increasingly hard to manage the larger a company gets.

My parents both worked for the same Fortune 500 company when COVID hit and the thousands of employees in their branch had to abruptly transition to WFH. Something like 10% of employees just disappeared, never to be heard from again. Lots of people who had been perfectly fine employees in the office ended up getting fired because with WFH they couldn't manage to stay at their desk and get their work done. That division of the company was seriously crippled for about six months.

My own job is with a small business that has been remote-only since before COVID and it's all been great. They've never even needed to "prune" anyone who abused remote work. I guess they're good at determining how reliable someone will be during interviews. We're all adults and there's a high level of trust that we're all doing our jobs, but the team is small enough that it would take a maximum of a single day to notice if someone is slacking.

But when the company gets really large, they sometimes have to manage to the lowest common denominator, and "we're all adults" becomes an increasingly shaky assumption. So I kind of understand where the anti-WFH CEOs are coming from if they were at the helm of a massive company and saw all kinds of chaos during COVID. But I also think small, geographically distributed teams can massively outperform if you hire the right people.

There are plenty of books that explain that you can have a Hollywood actor boyfriend too. How many people does this actually happen to successfully?

For some people and some kinds of work, talking to other people is important.

And talking in person is much higher bandwidth for reasons we don’t completely understand.

You mean you don’t love the horrible office politics? Where people treat each other terribly to get ahead by any means necessary? Where being “cool” is rewarded instead of actual results?

> particularly regarding managers who are in the office for the day. They are not spending much time at their desk

I mean, that's the point of RTO: These companies want people meeting face to face more and sitting alone at their computers less.

I argue that this means it makes more sense for managers and leaders than ICs as a result.

> 3. Having in person chit-chat - working

Having done years in both settings, random non-work related discussions were always more prevalent in office type atmospheres.

Only semi-related but in office at a cubicle is the least productive environment I've ever seen for companies. I cannot personally take a leadership team serious if they care about productivity & fiscal responsibility when they have cubicle farms of more than 10 people in an area.

Unfortunately this is a strawman. They said remote workers were more available than in-office workers. Not that in-office workers weren't working when they were unavailable.

I'm sorry to take a belligerent tone, but this is total revisionism. People have always slacked off and bringing them into the office doesn't change that.

Maybe I'm an old greybeard as someone with more than five years experience in the workforce, but don't you remember before COVID? People screwed around all the time! On coffee breaks or smoke breaks or extended meetings or late lunches or ping-pong tables or just browsing Facebook on their desks.

> play video games and jackin' off during work hours.

Most of the hardest working remote people I've known, and I've worked remote at over 5 companies across two decades, often don't work standard hours. I honestly don't see the problem with someone gaming at 2pm if they're also making sure shit gets deployed at midnight.

I also have found that anytime I show up in an actual office it's hilarious how little work actually happens.

The people who get nothing done remote, also tend to get nothing done in an office they just create the illusion of it.

If you talk to a teacher the rule of thumb is that 2 problem children in a classroom of 25-30 can be handled, but 3 ruins the whole class.

Seems like a similar situation here.

If people are slacking off at home, they’re gonna slack off at work too. This notion that a low performing employee will suddenly perform better in the office is a myth that needs to die.

> and people getting doctor's notes claiming they're autistic and can't be around people and that's why they can't ever see the inside of an office.

Continue, I’m all ears.

> get paid to stay home and play video games and jackin' off during work hours.

Funny that I see the same things from people in toilet stall for 30 minutes at the office. (At least video games and videos..)

The only non-management/leadership people that like going into an office post-COVID are boomers.

[flagged]

Times are changing. A couple of years back people would not only work from home but angrily demand that employers need to share all that office cost saving with employees who are working remotely.

Tell us about insightful conversations that you had with shareholders that keep the whole company running.

All of what you mentioned is quantifiable.

At most tech companies, you can work 5 hours per week or 100 and your salary remains the same.

If they see you working 5 hours per week and don't think you're productive enough, they can fire you, but you aren't paid any more for working more hours. That's what "salaried" means. It's why you've never heard someone getting paid "time and a half" for working weekends in tech.

I think my contractors have generally had a general service area. And, if you're out of it, they're probably not interested. Now, mind you, I often don't have a super-itemized bill. But I'm not sure I've seen a commute time/cost line item.

Most of which you would have anyway. I never cared about incremental costs for internet, electricity, etc. if any. I could have probably collected double-digit dollars per month during COVID but I wasn't even officially remote anyway.

The jurisdiction is Redmond, WA

Companies that underpay compared to cost of living exist everywhere, even in the cheap places. They usually end up with the people who can't get or don't want a better paying job.

And yes, companies should be paying salary increases for RTO if they hired on the promise of remote work. Not doing that will just means you now offer worse compensation compared to job conditions and are going to lose some people to greener pastures. Which might be a factor in Microsoft's timing: less job mobility right now