(1) Executives with emotional attachment to certain leadership styles that are enabled by physical presence,

(2) Interest in the investor class for the commercial real estate market. The business impacted may not be invested in it, but the businesses’ shareholders in sufficient numbers probably are, and so are the influential constituents of the politicians they want favors from, in a time of increasingly naked political corruption and cronyism.

(3) Backdoor layoffs. RTO is unpopular with large swathes of the work force, and people will quit because of it. That’s good for a firm likely to be cutting positions anyway; there’s no need for severance, regardles of scale there’s no WARN Act notice requirement, and if you still have to cut more positions afterwards, it makes it less likely that those cuts will hit WARN Act thresholds. And while the people that quit may not be the ones it would be your first choice to cut, they are the ones that would be most likely to quit in the kind of less-employee-friendly and financially leaner (in real terms) times likely to exist for a while after cuts.

It's a power play. To show regular folks their place. Big corpo is a modern feodal state, where CEO is an emperor, c-suites are kings, managers are barons, IC are peasants and external contractors are slaves(but leased from other owner).

It's not only RTO, it's also about timetable and dress code. Yes, I had a beef with IT manager about dress code in the development office of a bank. Just because he can show his power he tried to enforce dress code.

https://www.tiktok.com/@keds_economist/video/746473188419558...

The video presents a compelling theory that post-Covid employers realized that employees CAN be productive remotely, but also put a pretty high premium on being able to do so -- studies show employees are willing to take a hit to bonuses, pay and promotions to keep that perk.

So the current coordinated RTO push is basically a renegotiation of salaries to account for that perk, especially now that it is very much an employer's market... which, BTW, is also the outcome of another very coordinated effort across the industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192092

Edit, some recent studies:

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

- https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/tech-workers-take-much-lowe...

You can imagine how well those people feel about RTO, and how it helps their collaboration.

Executives often own the real estate and lease it back to the company. From Steve Ballmer to the owner of the tiny 85 person company I last worked at, it’s not uncommon.

So, yeah, there’s often some financial incentive there.

I do see the value in meeting people face-to-face, but I also think they could be done with the occasional company event. I have to imagine having a few events where people can meeting and build some rapport is cheaper than maintaining offices year round.

same reason some people think "professionalism" is about wearing smart shoes. While these sorts will never admit it to themselves, you are there to make them feel important. What you actually do is secondary, which is why they pay more attention to bullshit like presenteeism, than they do your work.

Man, if I could get the same level of attention on my PRs over the course of my career as I do about being occasionally late, then that'd be great.

1. Showing up. Practically speaking, when you're at home, you can do whatever you want (sleep, watch TV, work sometimes), while delivering stellar result for the company, but when you're in the office there is a chance you will deliver your stellar results and additionally contribute more, because you literally can't watch TV and take a nap.

2. Some leaders thrive in the presence of others. This is how they get their energy, receiving compliments about how awesome they are, noticing how people are respecting them while they walk around the office and so on. If one of them asks their team to return to the office, similar leaders might envy them when they boast about how much cooler their meetings feel now with five people in the room and sharing their meetings on the LinkedIn.

3. Work style of leadership. If you have noticed VP+ and C levels usually try to get to know each other on a personal level, they attend each others personal events. They work in this way, and they expect to see those same people in the office, because for them, their current network for work and life is same. So they like to see their 'friends' in the office as much as possible. Then naturally, these leaders translate mandate to their reports without context (e.g. their reports don't attend their personal life events, and they are not in their friend network)

My commute time has more than doubled since they closed and sold my office for a hefty sum of money. As a result of multiple offices converging to one, there are insufficient seats for the number of employees actually assigned to my office; hence, "hotdesking".

I'd wager that maybe a third of the total employees assigned to the office could be present at any one point in time, so unless they purchase some additional properties, we're at a stalemate with the twice a week RTO. Most days over 90% of the desks, sometimes over 99% are taken in the building, requiring reservation weeks in advance through a seat reservation app.

I have no direct teammates in the office and no two members of my 10 person team work in the same office (or state).

A not so small group of people being over-employed or never available or just not pulling their weight tainted the whole thing.

Also honestly once a % of us were back in the office having to talk to remote people over a video call and waiting for the lag and having them speak over you because of the lag or get confused because they can't hear the chat we can all hear in the room builds animosity towards them.

Can probably list 2 people I'm happy to work with remote but the number I worked with who took the piss with it is in the double digits.

I’m the kind of employee that would comply, not answer my cell phone and require people to leave voicemails on my desk line, call out people who are multitasking, and actively call out managers who attend meetings via zoom.

RTO with back to back zoom meetings all day is a waste of everyone’s time and energy.

Make management show us the benefit of all this RTO collaboration.

Oh, and I’m done checking email and teams after hours. Not safe to do so while driving.

In any case, it makes sense to have either a WFH organization, or an in-person one, but the mixed cases appear to be a friction-filled mess.

The excuse is that “people in bigger offices will feel bad if we open an exception”, so they’re spending a few thousand a month on real estate to make some poor sod miserable.

That’s my opinion anyway

I think part of it is that you don't get to feel the power on Zoom meetings. People coming to your office, or lining up for you in conference room ... that's would feel nice and give you sense of importance.

That said, if I was a manager and spend all day on meetings, I'd probably like to be in office as well and see people in person (not necessarily because of feeling important but just that I don't really like online meeting in general). As an IC, I goto office and then do all my meetings online anyway, so feels kind of pointless.

I think of Jeffrey Pfeffer's "social contagion" arguments a lot — first with regards to layoffs[^1], but increasingly also to RTO policies and tracked AI use.

It seems very unlikely execs (esp. in small organizations) are taking the time to read and seriously evaluate research about RTO or AI and productivity. (Frankly, it seems much less likely than them doing serious modeling about layoffs.) At some point, the "contagion" becomes a matter of "best practices" — not just a way to show investors what you're doing, but part of the normal behavior shareholders expect.

Bleak if true!

[^1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/12/explains-recent-te...

It's because although many people do work well in RTO, the vast majority don't. And the various TikTok videos showing "Day in the life of a remote worker" didn't help the cause either. I worked at a fully remote company during the pandemic and trying to get people online was almost impossible. They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them and it was one of the most frustrating experiences in my career.

I love working in the office, mainly for the social aspect and free food, but I need to find remote work for personal reasons. And I'm about 2 years too late because almost no one in Big Tech is allowing remote work anymore.

I've worked in offices for decades. While every now and then I'd see watercooler chats that were related to work instead of sports/bitching/weather, they never remotely compared to "ad-hoc whiteboarding chats" or "team area chats". Most Engineers I know, myself included, need focus and a space for impromptu conversations with a group of Engineers, preferably away from PMs and salespeople.

If the people advocating "watercooler chats" really wanted to make Engineers productive, they would kill open floor offices and give Engineers privacy for long spontaneous technical conversations with other Engineers.

Jobs are posted on GM's jobs site, or reach out to me, if you'd like, and i'll connect you to the right people.

i was chatting with HR boss last week. he's 100% sure these kind of mandates are reductions in force (layoffs) masked as return to office.

I don’t know if her being in the office would have dampened their lack of engagement or if the office was making it worse.

I work at a company that tracks productivity in many ways and even the screentime of each employee.

I'm quite sure remote employees or even hybrid employees on their WFH days, spend less time on the screen or doing things productivity trackers track compared to in office colleagues.

I personally can buy that there are limited productivity benefits to working in person together, but a) we don't see the benefit of that productivity, and b) it comes at enormous personal cost to employees.

There’s a shit-ton of people working multiple jobs and outsourcing themselves. Everything is SaaS now, so that creates a liability for many larger companies with .gov or healthcare contracts.

If your office does try to make things stricter, it's another layoff attempt. I don't think it will work, because at this point we're in a "sticky" job market; those out of work are facing some of the stiffest markets in decades, those in work are holding on for deal life.

So in-office days are spent sitting in a big noisy open floor plan, wearing noise cancelling headphones trying to get work done.. in between producing lots of noise yourself on zoom.

The other having-it-both-ways I see from employers is that in the last 5.5 years of COVID most people I know have expanded their work days to take calls earlier and later for timezone alignment purposes. This was tenable to expand your work day 1-2 hours when you had no commute. Now they think they can get the extra hours out and force a commute.

My wife spends many of her in-office days dialing into 7:30/8am calls, heading into the office late enough to have tons of train delays, and rushing to meet the deadline to get the swipe in so it counts.

The solution is to downsize your physical plant.

My company has a ton of faults, but every time one of these stories hits the HN front page, I thank God that my company remains committed to work from home. So much so that it recently sold its last building, and the few dozen employees whose roles require them to be physically present have been relocated to a much smaller building on a train line.

The work-from-home policy comes very heavily from the top. I suspect it's due to two things:

1. We have no shareholders. So the C-levels don't feel the need to engage in performative monkey-see-monkey-do antics so they have something to talk about during investor calls.

2. The management is extremely female-heavy. If I had to guess, I'd say it's 4:1 female:male. And the biggest beneficiaries of work from home are caregivers, who are statistically more likely to be women.

While I believe that 90% of the "work-life balance" speeches that come out of our HR department are a bunch of bullshit, I also believe that when it comes to work-from-home, management loves it not just for the massive cost savings they say it's provided.

They’re suspicious of work from home because employees like it. If they were concerned about productivity they’d make deals where you can work from home but have to work 10% more hours or something to make up for whatever imagined productivity was lost.

MS likely consulted with their army of lawyers before pulling this.

Actions might be crappy but not illegal. Not a lawyer but employers are usually allowed to dictate the terms of the employment agreements and requiring someone to go into an office to work can be one of them. Even changing from permanent remote to onsite at a later time seems like another relatively protected decision.

Unless someone somewhere higher up is on the record saying something like “Oh yeah let’s make them come into the office to actually make it really crappy for them so they leave on their own” I doubt any reasonably reliable legal case can be made.

If I'm reading this right, it only applies to people who already live within 50 miles of the office. Remote-remote employees are exempt.

It's not reducing headcount if they hire just as many people overseas.

> maybe I am even in a privileged position financially; but at this moment in my life I would rather quit my job

Someone closer to retirement with a lot of savings and low expenses will have a completely different answer than a younger person with low savings and a family.

The second variable it depends on is their current salary. Someone who currently earns a huge number can afford to give up a higher percentage than someone who earns barely enough to make ends meet.

The question becomes a proxy for the person's financial situation and current salary, not their remote work preferences.

This is also a question where people's claims don't match their actions. Similar to every election season when a lot of people declare they're going to move to a different country if their party loses, but the number of people who actually do it is much smaller.

The financial savings come from 3 things: downsizing to one car and elimination of transport costs; dramatically reduced lunch and coffee expenses; not buying a bunch of stuff to cope with the emotional toll (by far the biggest component).

The savings are even more dramatic if I factor in the opportunity costs of commute time. After accounting for the two way commute time, gas station line time, and vehicle maintenance time, my effective hourly rate working in-office was probably lower than working remote.

~$250k, ~50% of potential day gig comp.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37094928

(remote 10+ years, I'll retire before I go back to an office, I want more time and quality of life, not more money)

That would however, demand an hour and half commute each way and that would impact my ability to take my children to school and be involved with family meals. Back when I did have a hour commute each way it was costing me £2,800 a year in fuel, plus £2,220 in parking fees, plus about the same again for lunch out with colleagues.

So yeah, i'd get a 30-40% pay bump, but a large percentage would be consumed by additional costs with no benefit to my performance.

I don't own a car. I have no plans to buy one. If I "needed" one for a job, that would be brought up at the salary negotiation. Sorry, I'm not going to pay for a car I don't otherwise need and lose $15K a year for something decent. What a scam!

On the time, well, it just depends on what they're going to pay me. Divide by work hours per year. Add 2 hours a day. Add that to the offer. I don't work for free. I don't travel for free. When I need to fly somewhere I get free ground transport, free meals, free flights, free hotel, but because we put "we're forcing you to travel 10 miles a day for no reason" in a little special box called "expected" we can force you to spend your own salary on it. *Scam*. It's all a big scam. They're subsidizing their bottom line with your time, your money, and your air.

I worked a terrible job in high school because I could walk there. There was no point in going someplace else that paid more because I would've burned all the extra money up in gas.

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

https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/tech-workers-take-much-lowe...

Just left a comment elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192176), but it's likely this RTO push is partially to renegotiate to account for this perk.

I hate fully remote working.

I’ve said no to opportunities that would have paid $250K - 280K that would have required me to relocate and be in an office. I can honestly say there is no amount of money that would convince me to go to an office.

See the story of the Mexican Fisherman

https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...

My wife and I already travel extensively, I “retired her” at 44 years old in 2020. We have done the digital nomad thing for a year since then and we are planning to spend a couple of months in Costa Rica next year and be away from home during much of the summer.

I have the freedom to spend a week with my parents and work from there and fly to another city to see my friends and adult sons.

Why do I need more money? I’ve had the big house in the burbs built twice and we sold and downsized from the second one.

I also have a year savings in the bank outside of retirement savings

I'd go back to the office a bicycle ride away without issue. I like a nice office, and it's nice being able to separate the work space from the home, it's like I gained a room of my home back. I'd probably require a lot of benefits or a good bit more pay to take a job with a long highway commute.

During the 3 days I wfh, I get the most work done. I can focus and organize my day around executing a plan.

During the 2 days I'm in the office, I can get answers from people much quicker. Some people (new hires in particular) don't know how to describe their problem, or they're just really bad at it. My solution to endless teams convos is to just say "I'll head over to your desk" and then we work it out in person.

I think working with people in person can be very powerful. Is it essential though? No. Most corps don't even bother though. And most managers are bad at management. Working entirely wfh requires good managers with actual project management skills. Most corps are unwilling to train or prioritize hiring for that.

Have you ever had to "now click on the left... no, up a bit. No go back you were just there. It's the third one from th... I'll just paste the link in chat" when you were standing next to someone's desk? No.

The only benefits of working from home are:

1. No commute.

2. Can do life stuff (we finally have a solution to the dumb problem that shops etc. are only open when people are at work).

3. The company doesn't need to spend money on offices.

The first two are huge bonuses for employees, but the company doesn't give a shit about them. At best they care about paying for offices, but that's pretty minor (especially when they've already paid for them and they're sitting there empty).

Good office jobs can feel fun, building something with like minded people and building a social relationship at the same time with them.

Many people are not looking for that, many people just want a job that makes money and let's them log off at a set time. I personally don't enjoy that type of job and feel it's not sustainable over decades. I need some fun in my job.

1. Onboarding and growing junior employees.

2. Managing/coordinating people

3. Doing/coming up with something innovative

4. Making sure an employee is not working another job in parallel

With RTO, companies try go get back the ability to do these things, at the expense of employees’ commute time

Executives seem to (mostly) universally want people to RTO. Why would they?

They obviously have lots of data. If it was bad for productivity, why would they do it?

Answers seem to be things like “power trip” or “need to justify real estate”. I’m pretty sure most companies would save money by giving up their leases. Maybe they are all having power trips, but irrational behavior from leaders won’t win out in the long run.

My observation from my time is that, likely: some people are really good at getting stuff done at home. But most probably get less done. And I suspect the leaders find this in their data.

Of all the "voices" I'd like to be able to do, corporate shitspeak is definitely the top one.

I fall more into the latter camp (at least I hope so) and, given I've only worked in nice offices with catered lunches, gyms, video games, offsites, etc, I enjoy a 3 day hybrid schedule works best for me.

I don't really care about unproductive people, I care about myself.

Hardly. It was COVID. It forced companies to do the most logical thing they could in a world of high speed internet. Many of them refused to read the writing on the wall and assumed it would return to normal one day. They made no efforts to internally reorient themselves around this new work strategy.

> people abused it

Other than your anecdote what evidence is there that this is true? Has the economy faltered? Is there any second source for the data which shows _any_ impact _at all_?

Worst offenders are people who say things like: Hey, how are you doing?

And then ... nothing.

Or maybe people are actually working on something. And your 2 minute question might cause them to lose 30 minutes.

This is why it is important to have multiple work-streams going when doing remote work, so that you don't sit around and wait until you have your answer.

IME, managers do this in the office just as much as remote.

Look at the typical manager's schedule. It's completely full of meetings - most of which are bullshit "busy" meetings, and they never respond to anything timely.

I agree, managers are always the worst offenders when it comes to this sort of thing. But they do the same in the office by disappearing into meeting rooms for the entire day. I'd love to know how you can effectively manage a team by constantly being in meetings with other managers.

How/can we "montessori-fy"?

Like, how stupid do you have to be to kill your golden goose of life work balance?

Still, even if there is some sort of justification (moreso if the company chooses to locate themselves away from residential/affordable areas), I'm not sure how you would avoid abuse. Maybe just pay employees a fixed amount for each day they are required to drive to the office ?

Salary means you're paid a fixed amount per pay period, regardless of hours worked.

So including commute in your hours worked wouldn't change your salary, which is by definition a fixed amount.

Did you mean that commute time should be paid hourly at an additional rate?

Yes, rent 5 minutes from the office is likely very high, and it's much cheaper two hours away, and that's why most people live far away. But that is already a factor in salaries. If the office is in a high-cost-of-living area they have to offer higher salaries to get an equal caliber of workers.

To stay employed at Microsoft. After all many may want that some may not.

What complicated things, is return to work will cause all the best to rethink their employment. I’ve seen HBR surveys that suggest the top talent is ending up places that allow them to stay remote. I think this leaves businesses in a tight place. I have every reason to believe that companies with lots of employee interactions have better acceleration/trajetory than fully remote, but it’s a big hit to lose top talent. And remote may have so much velocity from gaining this talent that they don’t care about the acceleration tradeoff.

Further, concentration of talent in a region also cannot be discounted. Certain things can’t happen without the exchange of ideas (partly why I think cities/counties should ban non competes). I don’t know how much a given company can control this concentration of talent, but I know that Seattle wouldn’t be what it is without Boeing, and then Microsoft attracting very smart people.

Where though? I thought the current jobs market for tech wasn't in a nice spot for devs.

MS Teams for IM...okay. Too much white space and too hard to find conversations that I know I've had recently. Very much prefer Slack.

MS Teams for any of that other stuff...rage inducing. Especially the file sharing and other "team" features which break with every minor update. Somehow, even worse than using Sharepoint directly. Went back to email and using network drives to share/store team documents.

/unpopular opinion

I like this phrasing because that really feels like how the employer looks at it ultimately.

"Why, it's as irresponsible as calling in sick!"

Labor market is soft, so they will take as much as they can while they can, on the status quo bias of "in-office must be more productive, especially if employees don't like it".

It's the dumbest form of stealth layoffs as it's random untargetted regarding the company's actual department/role staffing needs.

1) The people who feel more engaged at home can stay home, those who feel more engaged at work can go there 2) The latter group fails to feel engaged at work due to everyone being home. They complain.

In other words, they weren't missing being in the office. They were missing being in the office *with others*. Which requires everyone else to either want to work in the office.

The first 10-15 minutes of every meeting for the first month were people complaining about it. The first 10-15 minutes of every meeting for the second month were supervisors reminding people everyone they need to do it.

The third month, people started coming in, and now everyone complains about how there's no parking, no open hotel desks, no open meeting rooms, and teams are scattered across offices and there's no meeting rooms so all the meetings are still on Teams.

Latterly if I went into another company's Boston office it was about the same.

This drove me nuts during all the hullabaloo about DOGE. People would confidently state that the Federal government is inefficient – while data showed the opposite! Federal workforce has remained largely the same since 1950, while administering more services, for more people, with a much larger budget. As measured, the government workforce is more productive than ever.

Of course, in many situations, it's unavoidable. I'm probably not going to hop on an international trip at the drop of a hat--though I certainly attended events.

But there's some subset of people that just don't want to travel or go into an office at all and IMO they're mostly mis-guided.

and that is when Office does not hinder productivity through lack of team space, meeting rooms and open office non sense or seting up equipment.

The elites that rule those companies always had WFH as a benefit for as long as I remember. They find it very icky that the underclasses have now a benefit that was exclusive to them. That's the only data there is.

Work at a fortune 200 company. We spent COVID all 100% remote WFH. After several quarters of their entire workforce working remotely, they were gushing about how productivity increased, satisfaction scores went through the roof and the company recorded several record breaking quarters in revenue during a time they expected the exact opposite to happen.

This inevitably lead them to having one helluva hard time trying to get people back into the office since they owned about a dozen buildings where the majority of their employees were supposed to be working. After a year and several attempts, they instead sold most of their real estate holdings and have since consolidated everybody into just a few buildings. The new rule is that if you are less than 30 mins from the office, you need to come in at least twice a week. Not a huge hurdle and so far, has been met with little if any resistance.

I have to give them credit. They tried ordering people back in, and ultimately pivoted and sold their real estate instead.

It makes you wonder if it's a fundamental part of our evolution, or something. ;)

It would be very interesting to see their rational.

How much of a pay cut? They could (and probably do) claim that WFH employees are not doing anything so they are worthless.

Do you know the stats on what percentage of transit rides result in some sort of assault or theft? It’s always felt pretty safe to me, although you certainly do end up sharing space with some very disadvantaged people.

My issue with US transit is mostly speed and convenience. Even with the traffic it usually takes 3x as long to get somewhere by transit, unless my destination lines up perfectly with the routes.

And I suspect that’s a *LOT* more people than you’re giving credit.

To be very clear, I’m in that group, and probably so. Several engineers I’ve worked with are in that group, as well. I suspect it’s actually quite common in software.

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Just this time they're extinguishing their less profitable projects.