Now I suspect the C-suite has noticed the discrepancy between attendance and occupancy, and I fully expect that their solution in this job market to be a 5-days, monitored attendance RTO soon. We are regressing at an alarming rate.

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

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

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.

Every outsourcing effort I have seen at some of these massive companies has been pretty tragic, where the best that can be said is now there is a shit but cheap option to be used where the quality doesn't matter.

This gets repeated across all the entrenched players simultaneously, while the product quality stagnates or declines (but the stock goes up).

With pure offshoring, you do have control over who you pick, what their mode of work is, whom to fire, etc.

With outsourcing to offshore, the local company hires people, usually on the cheap, to only just fullfill your contract and no more. If people underperform, you may complain, and maybe they'll be moved to a less prominent and visible role, or maybe they'll be shuffled to the next customer of theirs. So things will be bad, because it is not in the interest of the local company to do one iota more than necessary. And you'll still have to have your own QA, architects, etc., to make sure you at least get what you paid for.

Is it? If it is a disaster , why there are millions of IT folks employed in offshoring locations?

Only the cheapest offshoring ends in disaster. Cheap contractors from TCS will fail you. Open your own dev center, hire few thousands engineer there - a road to success. And yes, no one will actively complain about RTO policies there.

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.

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.

If you need to fine cut a few particular teams then poking it with an RTO is better than giving them a severance package. This is all conjecture, but that's probably what those up top are considering with every move.

    > 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.

Maybe they don't have to but there's sufficient murkiness that it's probably cheaper to just give the severance than go to court.

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

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

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

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

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.

My company did this, then pulled 3 different departments into a 3d/w RTO they didn't even have the space for. Whoops!

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.

1) Mandating RTO is a compliance check that allows you to fire people with cause and avoid other more costly downsizing efforts.

2) Justifying a lease.

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.

But now the highest levels have brought the productivity benefits of RTO into their wheelhouse. So making the offices suitable also shouldn't be a responsibility punted to a relatively minor position.

VS Code (Monaco at the time) was developed by a small team largely in secret to keep it safe from other MS departments so it’s really not like other MS software. It has been safe from meddling for a while there is a chance it’ll be a victim of its own success.

SPOL is even worse a tirefire than, say, even Lotus Notes. And it's in Electron on top of that, so its 10x slower than a real non-browser application.

Ive only rarely seen Microsoft put out actual good software. The last time was Windows 2000. Now, that was some quality software.

No wonder they just tossed Skype in the trash. This explains so much.

> SPOL is even worse a tirefire than, say, even Lotus Notes.

To be fair, Lotus Notes is what we had back in the mid 90's. There really wasn't much else like it. But comparing that today... (checks notes) ...oh. It's still a thing?!

So, neither Lotus Notes (now "HCL Notes" apparently?) or SharePoint have any excuse being as bad as they are. There are a dozen other far more capable examples of this kind of technology. I'm routinely amazed at how bad MS' user experience continues to be, even with all the money and engineers at their disposal.

It was good, but IIS had some faults, can't remember what, they wanted to replace it quickly with 2003. There isn't much wrong with Windows XP, objectively speaking.

You had to use powershell iis commandlet to change per site.

The newest IIS finally fixed that.

All of this has integrations into each other. Somehow a slack bot can show me calendar entries. Why I would even need such a broken UI/experience is unclear to me. I can't see when people usually work. Meet chats disappear once the meeting is over.

At Teams/Outlook you have a million other issues, but all things considered, I preferred it.

- some large enough customer had a workflow depending on that existing and it was built to sell them

- someone wanted a visible feature to justify being promoted

And in most cases, at least one of those is true.

Thankfully it no longer crashes Chrome all the time, but everything else is meh. I still can't tag people in Japanese. The security settings are a trap for poor quality system admins and checkbox checkers. The meetings crash, the screen sharing only allows one way (so no easy pair programming), etc..

I much prefer working with slack and google meet like I did at my last job.

That's news to me; I use Teams on Firefox every work day and I see no issues (other than it being one of the very few sites which need third-party cookies to work, but recently Firefox has made it easier to add an exception for a single site like Teams).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs

I haven't read that since it came out, I wonder if it still holds up. I read Generation X recently and I didn't like it as much as my first read when that came out.

(I worked at Microsoft from 2004 - 2013)

It was just one example of a long tradition of collective nicknames for employees of computer and software companies. For instance, Digital Equipment Corporation employees were "digits", Wang employees were "wankers", and so on.

Google == Chocolate Factory, Intel == Chipzilla, Cisco == Borg Collective (pretty sure Broadcom deserves that title these days)

Otherwise it's hard to take you seriously.

I would be very sad if their tone ever changed. Fortunately, that won't happen.

In this case replace politician with the company they’re reporting on.

Citation needed or this is just more vibe-xecutive decree.

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.

2. I think making it proportional to the length of the commute is an interesting idea. And even for those who don't like the office... two days a week with a short commute isn't terrible.

2. Yeah, and all they're doing is taking badge reports. Going in for a Town Hall meeting or a team meeting meets these requirements. You're not required to be in the office a set number of hours - just be there. I've been told its a kind of reverse psychology trick. The more time you spend around your coworkers, grabbing lunch, collabing on little stuff, it will morph into a desire to want to be there more often and thus, the decision will then be yours that you want to be there - not some mandate coming from on high.

I think in a lot of ways its working. Last year, I'd go in for some tech support thing and the building was a ghost town. Barely anybody. This year? Totally different. The ramp is full, people are bustlin about, the cafeteria is packed. Its being around that atmosphere I think is what they want people to be more involved in. I've already had several team lunches on campus and instead of going home, we unpack our laptops and hammer out a few things, then head out. None of us are really there for more than a few hours, but it just feels like really productive face-time with your team.

I just think its cool how the company is just letting the employees figure out without a heavy handed approach and from what I can see, its working.

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

It would be very interesting to see their rational.

That is, at best, very weak evidence supporting your conclusion.

I agree, by the way, that humans do work better together. That doesn't mean, however, that humans work better in an office environment. There are huge drawbacks to that environment that may very well exceed the benefit of physical proximity.

"Humans work better together" is a very different assertion than "humans work better in offices".

Please see the definition of "assume" to help you interpret what I wrote in a way that's closer to what I wrote/was trying to communicate.

Please also see the last sentence, that you missed entirely:

> It would be very interesting to see their rational.

This sentence strongly implies, nearly directly states, that I, in fact, do NOT know their rational.

What's your opinion? Why do you think they're all converging on the same policies? Do you think they're acting irrationally in opposition of data, or without data?

Is that why we invented machines and AI that will replace humans?

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.

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