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.
Why not extend the baseless paranoia and say it is because they want to see auto company profits go up? And also support petroleum companies?
Or is it just real estate that is boogeyman secretly running the country behind the scenes?
And I don't know the mechanisms over there, but over here in Europe, a lot of investment comes from pension funds, insurance companies and banks. For risk management reasons, they often can only invest less than some percentage in "risky" stocks and derivatives, and need to invest the rest in "non-risky" stuff like government bonds and (tadaaa) real estate. So the same big investors in your stock are also big investors in the building you are using.
All towers can be called phallic, my deranged friend.
This is the doing of Microsoft's own leadership, not Trump.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things you can justifiably call Trump. He just doesn't seem senile in any way similar to those in my life I've watched go down that road.
There's plenty to dislike about him, and he does seem to have health issues, but I just haven't seen signs of serious cognitive decline.
For quite a while. Even compared to the already generally incoherent speaking style of his first term, his speech has been unfocussed, his grasp of facts worse, etc., during his second term. Even before that, the cognitive test he bragged about passing his first term isn't sonething that is ever indicated without symptoms of cognitive impairment, his speaking style, grasp of facts, etc., in even his first term shows significant decline from his earlier public life, heck even his extreme forward leaning stance, while it can have other source, is a symptom of certain kinds of dementia.
Aside from fairly extreme media bias issues stemming from business and political interests of media owners that became undeniable with the public active intervention of a number of media owners late in the 2024 campaign, he gets a pass for this for a number of reasons, including the fact that critics generally have a lot of bigger fish to fry, some critics see pointing to cognitive dysfunction as mitigating arguments they want to make about conscious moral evil, incoherence and looseness with facts being a noted feature of his speaking style making people less likely to note changes that are changes in degree rather than kind for him, etc.
Can you imagine you have an entire room hanging on every truth coming out of your mouth and suddenly you blurt out, “And he’s also from Mars!”
Imagine the confused looks in the crowd as they realize they’re listening to someone who isn’t completely aligned with reality.
No spherical CEO in a vacuum, maybe.
That says nothing about why CEOs of thousands of private firms who have nothing to do with real estate firms would care about those other companies’ profits.
This commercial real estate take is so backwards you have to wonder if it's a plant to make the anti-RTO movement look like idiots.
https://www.phila.gov/2024-05-20-statement-from-mayor-cherel...
From a profit only perspective RTO makes sense only if the cities gave businesses tax breaks tied to business occupancy (the city’s math is they will get some of these taxes back when employees go and spend money in the city). And maybe cities are threatening to stop these taxes back until RTO.
In Microsoft’s case though people only spend some money at the cafeteria-because there is nothing else to spend money on their campus. How big could that tax break could be?
This RTO request from Microsoft does not make much sense.
Many are asking this!
AFAIK Microsoft mandated RTO only for employees that live within 50 miles of an office. So far Microsoft does not require employees to move to a city - and bolster the property taxes the city collects.
I still do not understand the logic behind RTO.
I'd also say, I've seen far more people just sandbag and slack off in WFH than in an actual office.
Now, I would imagine that there are quite a few in the top management who originally signed off on that expense. Probably the same people who were talking about replacing offices with cubicles since 2015, which means Satya and his inner circle. So now they've spent a lot of money, they have to do something to show to the board that it wasn't wasted. Which means filling those buildings with employees, whether they like it or not.
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
Just follow the money, it usually works very well. Sometimes, people are just dumb on their own and/or as a group but I don't think thats the case here. Tens of billions if not more in lucrative real estate is at stake.
These executives don't like looking dumb and these billions in useless investment are statues to them looking stupid otherwise.
1 is spot on.
Source left since so I don’t know how much productivity has improved.
Advice to new grads: get into the office 5 days a week for at least a few years.
Its like getting refused during interview process. Sharing actually why makes no sense for hiring people, no gain and potentially a lot to lose.
I don't like the situation overall or RTO at all since it markedly increases quality of my personal life (which makes me a happier employee too but nobody really cares about that) but we need to be realistic with various people's motivations.
That's a reason to publish any statistics they might have (at least internally)
> It's like getting refused during interview process
Not at all! Those rejected, disappear. But grumpy employees are still there, but less productive
The evidence that we have is that hybrid work is a net increase in productivity. Do note its hybrid, not remote.
Bueller?
He's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from a guy who knows a kid who's going with the girl who saw him pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I think it's serious.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that…
> And nobody is dumb enough to do RTO as a layoff proxy because anybody with a brain knows you're going to lose the people with options, who are exactly the people you don't want to lose.
Here is what our CEO told me once: layoffs always mean you loose more people then those you just fired. That is unavoidable and can amount to additional 30%. And obviously those will be those with options. He said that you can not avoid nor control this factor, there is no point in overly fretting about it. From his point of view, people always have agency to leave and layoffs and surrounding chaos always annoy people and weaken their ties.
These arguments based on "we do not want to loose good people in layoffs" are off mark. Company will loose good people in layoffs.
Your comment is really quite out of touch of how layoffs actually affect people.
I’ve been through a few rounds now. Morale is essentially destroyed in the short term. Your team suddenly has a lot more work with no additional support or even acknowledgement that people are now slammed.
It’s not inconvenience. It’s a significantly negative change in the work environment, and a sign that maybe your company’s long-term prospects aren’t great. Of course good people leave in these situations.
Having a bunch of people leave due to RTO is different than having seemingly random colleagues laid off.
Both are not nice, RTO is more voluntarily and more avoidable since you can sometimes bargain for remote work to be a part of your contract and not just an oral agreement.
It's morally questionable to call for RTO only to get rid of people without technically having layoffs, but in countries like the US getting laid off is probably worse than having working conditions degrade to where you just find another job of your own volition since there's less urgency.
It is always just pure wishful thinking that "all the people you will loose when you alienate someone like me" are totally the best people out there.
https://fortune.com/2024/07/24/return-to-office-mandates-lay... https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/its-offi... https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/12/why-rto-mandates-are-layoffs...
You are very ignorant of the real world.
No, quarterly earnings. In this case, retained earnings, but they want to show profits in a situation with high inflation, stagnant employment, and other issues where customers are not as spendy as they once were.
I think a large part of it is that they want people physically and culturally close to themselves for projects they care about. Piles of companies have tried outsourcing core development and in my experience whatever minimal home team thats left keeps growing and growing and the oversess guys get pushed to the least desirable jobs. It's almost always a failure in the end, or at least the overseas team ends up being given limited scope, simple tasks while complex work finds it's way back home. I say this having worked with many talented overseas colleagues; I think this is a management level effect, not individual developer
Which is what the on site team does, besides firefighting, handling the cultural interface.
For many businesses even if it looks a failure from engineering point of view, as long as it is within the budget, many businesses see it as a success, versus having paid a whole team onsite.
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.
The money is there so that things that are desired happen mostly on time.
"That's what the money is for."
You are flipping this around: "companies pretend they need this whole fucking edifice", but they'd need to pick the winners first. those people need no management for them to do what they are motivated to do, but corporation have some people they are asking to do something they might not care much about - the same results aren't guaranteed.
I'm surprised this was not mentioned as a possibility.
My wife works at a multinational which has also decided to push RTO. Her closest team member works in an office 200 miles away from her office (in a different country), the vast majority of the rest of team are located between 3000 and 6000 miles away, on a different continent.
A friend of mine at AMZN has the same issue, his team is literally scattered around the globe.
You can tell them, in writing, "I am willing and able to continue to perform the tasks I was hired for. If you insist that it be somewhere else, then you can fire me."
I've also never seen a company that actually tracked that well enough to make a decision like RTO based on their own data.
They can't all love commercial real estate that much right? Not all executives invests in office buildings.
All else is nowhere near equal, of course. That's the real rub.
Unless you think all RTO is a conspiracy.
Surely if they're presented with solid evidence that WFH increases productivity, they'd keep it. Execs make millions in bonuses if the performance of the company hits certain goals. It's baffling that people here still talk about real estate conspiracy theories.
The evidence is that there have been more RTO calls than companies switching to pure WFH post-Covid.
No.
> can see productivity metrics that aren't available to the public
I am an employee of a company claiming my productivity is higher in the office. Nobody has ever shown me anything even remotely resembling a productivity metric. They haven’t even tried.
Productivity metrics are a holy grail. If any company created one that works they’d be bragging about it endlessly to shareholders and correlating it with the enormous profits they’d be generating.
If they have one that works I’d like to see it so I can use it to measure changes in my daily habits and further increase my productivity.
Since they can’t articulate this metric at all I can only conclude that it doesn’t exist.
With how contentious RTO has been why haven’t the advocates published data on how big of a boost it has been to their KPIs?
> Unless you think all RTO is a conspiracy.
It’s possible RTO is just regular old incompetence. No need for conspiracy theories.
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.
a.k.a Dead Sea effect
The corporate structure is not created around talented people, but around mediocrity. In Dilbert land you have no use for brainiacs.
In my current environment one line bugfix takes 3-4 workdays to release. Does it matter one bit if you will do the fix in 10 or 100 minutes if it will be overshadowed by the time THE PROCESS consumes.
There is no way for somebody like Nadella to have an understanding of most employees' performance, and the chain of management is so long that he doesn't trust anyone else's ability to ascertain individual performance. This leads to the introduction of "objective measurements" of performance, which further undermines trust, as everyone now starts trying to manipulate the numbers.
I think at some point, it's just inevitable that C-level management takes decisions based on the assumption that people are replaceable and that the difference between a great performer and a poor performer is essentially irrelevant.
Maybe, but I find it hard to believe that someone who has spent their entire career in the tech industry actually believes this.
The "backdoor layoffs" theory seems suspect to me more generally. It's not like they're particularly averse to doing layoffs the normal way. Especially now where the signal from big tech company doing layoffs is "we're really good at AI".
https://fortune.com/2025/09/05/paramount-skydance-ceo-david-...
A 10 day notice requiring agreement to full 5 day RTO or take a voluntary package. This from a CEO talking bout 'efficiency' and cost cutting, where I know people who have been 100% remote for 5 years.
What are the odds those voluntary packages are worse than whatever contract & law specific in the case of layoffs. And I am sure the (very X/Musk/extreme hardcore coded) agreement employees sign agreeing to RTO means if they are fired later for office attendance its for-cause.
Roughly zero, if the scale as a layoff would be sub-WARN Act level, because it is unlikely that the impacted employees had any contractual severance guarantee or any legal entitlement to any notice of termination of employment or pay in lieu (they might be less than the firm’s historical practice for similar roles, and having an excuse to characterize it as voluntary provides a bit of PR cover for that, but that's not a legal or contractual guarantee.) At-will employment is the rule, rather than the exception, for private, non-uniom employment in the US.
Would imply they are probably planning WARN-act-level layoffs, and trying to get under that with "volunteers"?
company will probably write exceptions for those people into their contracts; my neighbor, a talented senior dev lead at BigTechCo, has it in his contract that he can WFH regardless of RTO calls
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.
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.
The problem is that I've never seen anyone actually prove that out for RTO with solid data. And that goes both ways, I haven't seen anything to prove that remote-first is universally better for performance.
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.
How is this not a net loss for them?
From their perspective, wouldn’t that just be moving money left to right, plus even more overhead?
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.
This works great when you are one of a dozen anonymous people on a zoom call. less so when you are the senior person in the meeting who everyone is actually talking to and expecting you to make a decision.
But this response kind of proves my point. If you are the principal in a meeting, the fact that everyone else in the meeting is zoned out and doing something else is not great.
Again I do not have a good explanation for RTO.
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.
I think a more reasonable answer is they think employees are more productive and a large swath of employees don't do anything. I wouldn't believe it unless I've seen it myself. At a large org, there is a significant portion of people that don't do anything meaningful. Sure they'll waste time in the office as well, but at least they're somewhat more productive or available. They're not watching Netflix in their underwear. Every large organization I've been at had these people.
It's really that simple. The alternative is really conspiracy level stuff.
I'm sure leaders believe this, I'm even sure it happens. Yet despite how obviously and deleteriously widespread this phenomenon is, isn't it amazing that we still can't seem to quantify notable efficiency and effectiveness gains from RTO mandates? And that's setting aside whether any hypothesized (at best) productivity gains are sufficiently high enough to justify the expense of office space rentals and office maintenance.
Let's also remember that the typical RTO experience is one where members of a geographically distributed team are RTO'd so they can remain geographically distributed, just working out of company owned or rented spaces instead of their homes.
For one the circles they run in are going to be full of like-minded people; i.e. people for whom work is the most important part of their life. People like that want RTO and don't understand those who oppose it. When those are your priorities and all of your pees share them, its going to produce an echo chamber where most executives want RTO.
Furthermore their lifestyle is completely different. Most are going to have chauffeurs so they can be productive to/from work. They are going to have aids that take care of the food shopping, laundry, picking kids up from school, cooking, helping with homework etc. RTO does not affect them nearly as much as their employees who still have to deal with all of this in addition to commuting time now.
Its really just as simple as that. They lead completely different lives than their employees, are surrounded by other executives in friend and professional groups who have similar lifestyles, and generally don't understand why someone wouldn't want to RTO.
It's far more likely a mixture of (1) and actual results - in-person/hybrid teams produce better outcomes (even if why that's true hasn't been deeply evaluated or ultimately falls on management)
(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.