[Mobius01]

I work in a large company that mandated 4-day RTO last year. Even taking a completely objetive point of view on the situation leads to the conclusion that something else is needed. We spend our days at our desks, on Zoom calls. People won’t get up to join in person - mostly because the conference rooms are all blocked by “special projects”, but mostly due to the offshoring of positions and distributed workforce post-pandemic. We are all spending valuable time on commutes to do what was possible from home.

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.

[johnnyanmac]

We should know by now that all these RTO initiatives are not grounded in any reasonable logistics nor financial reasoning. Right now all of tech is in cut mode, and RTO's are a great way to do layoffs without calling them layoffs. Note that when Google got "too many" people RTO'ing, they did layoffs anyway.

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.

[aeternum]

This theory is often-quoted but doesn't make much sense. Big tech including Microsoft already did multiple rounds of layoffs. Why not just do another round?

[yallpendantools]

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.

[itake]

Yes… but they are asking why now? Why did Microsoft start with traditional layoffs and then transition into RTO layoffs years later?

[johnnyanmac]

Hard to say. Different regions will have different "tools" to use. For a large round, it's probably because they need to cut a lot of staff ASAP or because they have the offshoring ready to replace them. Paying them off is best in those situations.

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.

[novok]

Market dynamics. Everyone is doing some form of RTO now. If you're the only RTO place, then hiring and retaining the people you want will be more difficult. It's a big game of chicken.

[fastily]

It’s just another tool in the downsizing toolbox. Also traditional layoffs and RTO “layoffs” don’t have to be mutually exclusive, both can easily occur at the same time

[itake]

you're still avoiding the question. Why does Microsoft decide RTO "layoffs" are the right tool for 2025, but not 2022-2024? Many companies used both tools at the same time. Why did Microsoft wait until 2025?

[throwaway2037]

    > 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.

I don't think this is true in the US. And severance packages are cheaper than you think. Most people only get a couple of months of pay.

[aeternum]

Pretty much every big tech company was still providing severance for those who decline RTO.

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.

[int_19h]

Which big tech companies provide severance for those who decide to leave because of RTO? It's not normally framed as "declining", either - you're simply expected to be there starting at a specific date, and if you're not then you're basically not performing your assigned work duties. You don't get to "decline".

[scarface_74]

There are absolutely no labor laws in the US where an employer has to give severance.

[hylaride]

But you tend to lose your most capable employees when you create a bad/undesirable/etc work environment. I think people are attributing malice where the intent is merely...not incompetence, but it's what everybody else is doing. People forget that business goes through fashionable phases just like everything else. Microsoft fell victim to idiotic trends (stack-ranking, AI, etc) just like everybody else has.

[dghlsakjg]

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).

[reaperducer]

I suspect the C-suite has noticed the discrepancy between attendance and occupancy

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.

[wpm]

>The solution is to downsize your physical plant.

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

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

If I returned to the office I'd be working with teammates in India, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, and Delaware and none of them would be in my office. I'd be essentially working remote from an office that I commute to. The worst of all worlds.

[willio58]

Funny/sad story, my friend works for the government making maps for watersheds. Elon comes along and forces people to go back to office. She’d been remote since she was hired 3+ years ago. So suddenly she’s assigned to the closest gov office near her, which is an ICE OFFICE in SF, about an hour commute from where she lives (each way). She’s massively against the goings-on at ICE and asks for an alternate spot. She now has to commute 1:15 each way to an animal holding office in SFO. She is currently zooming into work each day from an office full of transient animals and no humans related to anything she does, all in the name of government efficiency. Needless to say, her work efficiency has diminished greatly.

[steveBK123]

This is exactly the problem with a lot of the RTO push.. We are more geographically spread out than ever, and companies usually have, at best, 1/2 the conferences rooms required to actually collaborate properly.

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.

[devnullbrain]

It's worse now, but complaints about offices as working spaces were constant pre-pandemic too. Complaining about it then made you seem a bit... wet.

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.

[fzeroracer]

Same thing happened where I worked, though that was mostly from what I heard from coworkers since I maintained my WFH status. It's all CEO theater designed to layoff folks while also forcing people who RTO to take an effective pay cut. People need to recognize that and demand more from where they work, whether it's in the form of unionizing or otherwise.

[ponector]

There is always an answer to unionizing and other demands: hiring freeze plus offshoring overseas. Eventually even unionized people will be replaced with offshore buddies.

[toomuchtodo]

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...

[EricDeb]

This would be very helpful for American jobs.

[toomuchtodo]

Call your Congressional reps, ask them to cosponsor.

[fzeroracer]

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.

[ThrowawayR2]

Offshoring might frequently be a disaster. On the other hand, Microsoft and the rest of FAANG and other large tech companies have had overseas development centers staffed by full fledged FTEs for many years now with, as far as anyone can tell, success. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any reason they couldn't expand those.

[holowoodman]

I'm guessing that there is a difference between "offshoring, while still having the offshore people picked and employed by you" (let's call it "pure offshoring") and "offshoring and outsourcing to a local company" (let's call it "outsourcing to offshore").

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.

[typewithrhythm]

I'm not sure if it actually is working out, or if the companies outsourcing are just absorbing the inefficiency.

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).

[bluGill]

when most of the people offshore are employees it can work. The biggest thing is you need to start with good managers there who hire good people. In india good engineers are paid more than their peers in germany, but that is the price you pay for the quality you need for good people. If you don't hire good people you can get plenty of terrible people for really cheap, but the results will be poor quality. Take your pick.

[wkat4242]

Yeah that's why it's called a multinational. Offices everywhere. And yes it's a success.

[ponector]

>>> Offshoring always ends in disaster,

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.

[hylaride]

Offshoring can be a success, but because most companies do it for cost reasons, they focus on cost over everything. Outsourcing to India can be cheaper than setting up shop in the western world for relatively equivalent results, but most companies will head to the cheapest outsourcers in India AND not set up the relatively expensive process to deal with quality control, timezone issues, etc. In other words, it's usually driven by bean counters and not engineers.

[willio58]

This is why I stay at a company that’s 100% remote even though I’m sacrificing many thousands of dollars a year in additional income. I just can’t go back for so many reasons. But the most frustrating one in my opinion is exactly what you said, that all of this can be done remotely.

[Consultant32452]

Executives have done all manner of things which reduced productivity. Hoteling alone must have cost billions in lost focus.

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.

[cptskippy]

That feels like a made up reason because you don't want to accept the two obvious explanations:

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.

[throwaway2037]

If you are so miserable, are you looking for a new job that will allow WFH? I think that is the solution. Also, did you ask your line manager if you can WFH more often? That is a first step. If they say no, they go and find a new job.

[bingabingabinga]

If the company enforces RTO at least stop using zoom for meetings. If that means offshored employees can't participate then so be it. Let them come to the office.

[shmerl]

Office space / real estate owners don't care. It's their plot to increase profits and companies are colluded with them on it. There is no other obvious reason besides may be Big Brother monitoring mentality.