Microsoft Forces Workers Back To the Office (nerds.xyz)
- Reference: 0179110806
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/09/09/177221/microsoft-forces-workers-back-to-the-office
- Source link: https://nerds.xyz/2025/09/microsoft-forces-workers-back-to-the-office-in-2025/
> Microsoft has decided it is time to rein in remote work. The company will soon require employees to [2]spend at least three days per week in the office , starting with those in the Puget Sound region by February 2026. From there, the policy will spread across the United States and eventually overseas.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~BrianFagioli
[2] https://nerds.xyz/2025/09/microsoft-forces-workers-back-to-the-office-in-2025/
Coffee Badging? (Score:2)
The article does not state if employees are required to come in at specific times or for a minimum duration. If employees can get away with coffee badging around lunch, at least they'll be able to avoid the rush hour crush on I-405 and SR-520.
But they'll still have to absorb the added costs of coming into work. And I highly doubt that Microsoft is adjusting compensation upward to make up for it. So these folks will be poorer and will have their lives disrupted for what exactly?
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They want to layoff workers without the headlines that they've laid off X,XXX employees or paying severance.
That's it. That's the rationale. Any other explanation given is bullshit.
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When tech companies lay people off, their stock price goes up. Why would they want to keep news that drives up the stock price a secret? Meta did actually use back to office mandates to increase attrition.
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It reads the same to most people not. RTO == RIF
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s/not/now/
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Did anyone take a pay cut when they were working from home instead of going into the office? I don't think so.
I can imagine that Microsoft maybe should compensate employees if they change the location of their office- but not if people are going back to the same general area. I mean if they tell an employee that their office is now in Indiana, instead of Seattle- sure.
I worked with a lot of people (non-Microsoft) who worked from home for the past couple of years. Honestly- they have all stopped progressi
Quiet Firing (Score:4, Insightful)
Back to Office (BTO) mandates are a tactic of quiet firing, when you want to create a negative work envirionment or choice which encourages employees to resign due to unwillingless or being incapable of relocating to a specific city. Many people ended up moving to other parts of the country for various reasons, including moving close to family.
Taking Office 365 a little too literally (Score:5, Funny)
Office 365 does not mean you have to be there all the days of the year.
ROT backfires (Score:3)
By demanding that employees return to the office will have the effect of making it easier for Microsoft's competitors to poach the best people. Offering people the opportunity to work from home is a lot cheaper than a bump in salary, options, and signing bonus to get them to jump ship. The mediocre employees, those who are one poor quarterly performance review away from a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan), will stick it out and start coming into the office. Someone need to tell management to look up the term "unintended consequence" on Wikipedia.
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Someone is pretty mad their skillset doesn't let them work from home.
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:D
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Productivity went up 291% where i work when they went full WFH.
Turns out not forcing everyone to commute an hour each way, sit in 7000k lighting, 60f ac, and loud convos all around, increases productive workload, while increasing morale and dedication to the work. You sound like someone pissed in your milk.
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Found the guy who can't work from home, and who's super fuckin' salty about it!
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Found the office building real estate investor. Or the sociopath from upper management.
The horror (Score:2)
Get back to work people those matcha lattes won't drink themselves
Of course Microsoft wants employees at the office (Score:5, Funny)
The alternative is working through Teams. And if anybody knows how effective that is, it's the very company that inflicts Teams for remote working to the rest of us...
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Teams is bad, but it is generally functional. I have fewer problems with it than Zoom, which doesn't even do all the things it does.
The performance of Teams is inexplicably bad even for what it is (a web site stuffed into an app) but it usually works. I did weirdly have to upgrade my webcam after the last update though, I went from an old XGA res Logitech cam which used to work (mine) to a newer 1080p Logitech cam (issued by work) and that works fine. This was even before the Windows 11 "upgrade".
Incidental
Puget Sound region (Score:2)
One gets the feeling that Seattle is taking away tax benefits to companies that aren't dragging enough employees into the city.
So no AI remote workers then ? (Score:2)
Sounds like MSFT is doubling down on good old fashioned face-to-face human colab needed for S/W dev - wonder how that reflects their internal level of success in using LLMs to write code ?
You Lose the Best Workers (Score:2)
The RTO mandates have two basic drivers:
1) The executives want to be able to summon their minions face-to-face on moment's notice.
2) They want to drive attrition without having to pay severance or the bad press of layoffs.
The problem is that these policies don't drive out the worst workers, they drive out the best workers- the ones companies spend a lot of money to retain and attract. The best workers tend to have options outside your company. The worst are going to have bad resumes and limited options.
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Microsoft has never been known for their incredible work environment. I believe they used to do a a layoff of the bottom 10% of people after performance reviews, which created an annual churn.
Insider Secrets? (Score:2)
Are you being forced into an office when it doesn't make sense for your job? Want to get back at the tyrants ruining your life? Lets chat, microsoftinsider@protonmail.com , only reach out from a new email address, preferably another protonmail account. DO NOT USE YOUR CORPORATE LAPTOP TO COMMUNICATE.
Directive name: (Score:2)
> Microsoft Forces Workers Back To the Office
Microsoft Office 260.
American workplaces are essentially unregulated (Score:2)
Except for a few things like child labor and discrimination, the American workplace is essentially unregulated.
American companies bleat that it has to be this way because we need to be able to react quickly when business conditions change.
That's the main reason why we have "Employment At Will". The company (and the employee) can say "adios" at any time. Additionally, the deal can be "Altered" (Apologies to Darth Vader, Star Wars, and Disney) at any time by either party and it becomes "Take it or leave it" e
WFH is a tariff my employer pays (Score:2)
WFH might make me slightly less productive.
That is a tariff I expect my employer to pay.
If they won't pay it, I work somewhere that will.
Too bad (Score:3)
Yeah, it's too bad Microsoft doesn't have any decent tools for remote collaboration.
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I'm not at Microsoft but I have been told I have to start working from the office more regularly soon.
The rest of the team I work with are at least 300 miles away so I'll literally be driving into the office through the snow at 40 below zero to make Teams calls.
This is why I presume it's either just a new management fad going around or an attempt to make people quit.
Bad idea (Score:2)
We did this 2 months ago. The next day, productivity tanked. Everyone is doing "just enough" not to get fired. But no one is going above and beyond. Projects that used to take weeks to get done are taking months. People that used to stay logged in till 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM, or hop on in the evening to do a bit of work now shut down their laptops at 4:30 and refuse to turn them back on, unless directly ordered to by their manager. Otherwise, it waits until business hours. And since all managers also hate this,
More passive layoffs (Score:5, Insightful)
Increase misery to get rid of staff so they don't have to pay severance. Unfortunately, they're giving themselves a brain drain colonic too.
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I like stealth instead of passive. More insidious sounding so it captures what they're doing better.
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I don't think Microsoft will suffer as much harm from this brain drain as we would like to believe they will. We don't like work-from-office mandates so it pleases us to think that those who make us suffer will naturally suffer because of it. Poetic irony, and all that. But really, Microsoft is too big and too rich to suffer from that. They can still find a way of retaining top tier talent, and abusing it too.
It is also natural for the higher-ups to distrust remote workers. They think it is fine for th
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At this time, I doubt Microsoft has any "top tier talent" left. Or if they do, these people do not have much influence. MS products are bad and getting worse, and they are doing that at a time when pressure from attackers and increased reliability requirements are getting stronger. That does not indicate sanity or insight on their side. And all that money? Will not help one bit when it all comes crashing down because they were just a bit too greedy in some place.
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I work at Micrsoft (Xbox controllers), and everybody I work with is much more talented, smarter, and friendlier than I am. So they have a lot of "top tier talent" left. The layoffs mostly got rid of middle managers; we lost a program manager that probably wasn't top tier. We used to have program managers that were MIT grads; I'd agree that the quality of Microsoft program managers has gone down.
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> I work at Micrsoft (Xbox controllers), and everybody I work with is much more talented, smarter, and friendlier than I am.
That says a lot more about you than MSFT.
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MS products have been horrible since before Bill Gates stepped down. They survive on brand recognition, compatibility, treachery, and having the greatest marketing team in the world.
And, that's clearly sufficient.
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Having just setup a Windows 11 PC because Microsoft say my existing hardware which works perfectly fine won't be allowed to run it, Microsoft's current plan appears to be:
1. Force everyone to have a Microsoft account.
2. Steal everyone's data by pushing people to upload to to The Cloud.
3. Push "AI" into Notepad.
4. ?
5. Profit.
We only have the Windows PC because my girlfriend needs to run some specialized Windows software and I don't want to be responsible for it not working on Wine. But if I could legitimatel
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> We only have the Windows PC because my girlfriend needs to run some specialized Windows software and I don't want to be responsible for it not working on Wine. But if I could legitimately get rid of Windows I would at this point.
Have you considered upgrading the girlfriend?
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Unfortunately that would cost a lot more.
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Funny thing on (1.): I will upgrade my teaching laptop to Win11 and may do so for my gaming machine. (Rest is Linux or will go to Linux). It takes a bit of doing, but installing Win11 without an MS account is still quite doable. And on (2.): They cannot do that in Europe without massive fines incoming. I guess for the US, they will do exactly that though.
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Yeah, I had to do a web search to find the magic key combination and command-line command to set up Windows 11 without creating a Windows account. But I'm sure updates will try to force me to do it later on.
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> MS products have been horrible since before Bill Gates stepped down. They survive on brand recognition, compatibility, treachery, and having the greatest marketing team in the world.
> And, that's clearly sufficient.
I do not disagree, except the thing is I think this being sufficient is slowly stopping at this time. Eventually peddlers of crap (like MS) find that times have passed them by. With a quasi-monopoly, it just takes longer.
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> MS products have been horrible since before Bill Gates stepped down. They survive on brand recognition, compatibility, treachery, and having the greatest marketing team in the world.
> And, that's clearly sufficient.
That's been their whole business plan since day 1.
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Windows 95 gave a usable GUI for a small fraction of the cost of a Unix workstation. Crap but much cheaper often wins in the business market.
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I believe the notion behind the brain drain idea is that the people who leave are confident in their ability to find employment elsewhere, and since brains is a large part of the basis for employment, then the people who leave have the brains to market to the next employer. However, it occurs to me that more than people with the freedom to move, the people who leave are people who, encountering an unpleasant situation, take action to improve their lives. So, if the company values not having the boat rocked
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It's also really 3 days. Sure it will go up later, but most RTO mandates are full 5 days. 3 days hybrid isn't a disaster and likely the best employment a lot of people can get.
Most people will be happy with 2-3 days hybrid - once you start getting to 4 days then things get a bit hectic. And with the economy the way it is, employers hold the cards so going for 3 days is still a lot better than everywhere else demanding 5 days.
Re:More passive layoffs (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, MS products have gotten worse and worse over the last 10 years or so. They are clearly heading for a cliff, but they do not see it. I am not sure there is much "brain" left to drain at Microsoft.
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I think Microsoft has finally figured out they don't make any money on hardware, so they are backing away from the hardware business (which is basically what Microsoft Surface division does). There appears to be a current corporate hallucination that AI will be the next big thing for them. Time will tell, but I wouldn't bet money on them ever actually making a profit off selling AI.
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Their hardware business contains the two products they make that don't suck.
Say what you will about their software, but IMHO, they make a damned fine keyboard and mouse.
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> Say what you will about their software, but IMHO, they make a damned fine keyboard and mouse.
They used to. These days, you can get better from a lot of sources.
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> There appears to be a current corporate hallucination that AI will be the next big thing for them. Time will tell, but I wouldn't bet money on them ever actually making a profit off selling AI.
Same here. I expect they will not even recover the cost.
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> They are clearly heading for a cliff, but they do not see it.
What's there to see? They've set record revenue numbers year on year. Their Azure and 365 business is seeing record growth numbers and makes up 2/3 of their revenue. Show me where in the trends the cliff is and do so without invoking your feelings, base it on just the raw numbers.
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It's a good way of laying off the people who are good enough at what they do that they can find other jobs.
Re: More passive layoffs (Score:2)
Where is everyone going to go, that can match those salaries? Other places that also require in office work?
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The 20% who do 80% of the work will find work-from-home jobs elsewhere. They may even be willing to take a pay cut in return for working from home.
My guess is a lot of people can live better working from home with less pay than having to pay the cost of living in Seattle and commuting every day.
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I don't know if misery is the right word. Some people love going to the office so their voice can be louder than anyone else's. What they don't realise if they're hurting their pocket through fuel costs. Microsoft still wins as it's effectively a pay cut, so people will leave.
Is the AI leg of the business the last part that will be effected? I guess everyone's fed up being forced to use Teams and not Zoom.