That’s exactly my situation too.

Half my team is out of state and still remote.

So now half of us are in the office, walking around, away from our computers and “collaborating” like management wants, to the absolute exclusion of the other half of the team. And we miss messages, we don’t see reminders, we are just AWAY on Teams to them. And our job is literally done 100% on a computer so all that time NOT on a computer is just wasted. And then when we go to a meeting, we have to walk to a room just to join a teams call and yell at the ceiling so the remote people can hear us. It’s the worse of both worlds. Not remote, not all in office, but mixed.

I could understand it if 100% of employees could be in the office. Then we wouldn’t have to waste time joining a teams call in a meeting room. We could just meet and chat. Fine. But this… This is so bad.

OMG right!?

I didn’t even mention it in my main post, but half my team is out of state and exempt from RTO.

So half of us commute into an overcrowded office and walk to a meeting room just to join a damn teams call. I hate being in person without a headset and having to yell at a room microphone and look at a smaller screen than I have at home.

Everything about it is inferior than what we had at home. It is harder to hear, harder to see, harder to communicate, takes longer to commute, longer to have to walk to meetings vs click join.

All the RTO seems like execs playing “everyone else is doing it, don’t want to be left behind” or something.

What’s crazy is, so did mine.

Sold multiple office buildings.

Told us all, WFH is here to stay!

And then they blindsided us with a RTO mandate. And we do not all fit in the buildings. There isn’t enough room by some thousand people and they don’t seem to care.

The part that’s even more insulting is that half my team live so far away (several US states away) they are exempt. So now half of us are forces to commute into a crowded building TO JOIN A TEAMS CALL! Ahhhhhh!

Oh that’s encouraging. Good to know I’m on a sinking ship. I sorta assumed as much already though. The RTO mandates so many companies are doing almost feels like a desperate attempt to stay afloat and relevant, but is actually going to hasten the sinking.

Rise up and take back the means of production!

We should steal The Declaration of Independence Microsoft Excel!

But yeah, execs have no idea what all daily work looks like, but because they siphon 99% of the profits that we creat away from us and no matter how wasteful or unproductive everyone is, enough gets done that they STILL make millions off of us. So they don’t care. We all suffer and get paid JUST enough to not riot, but they make millions and millions just by virtue of being the executive or owner.

I wonder how well a company would actually do if it was fully owned by all workers evenly.

Imagine Microsoft if every employee had the same % share in profits. Wonder what that would look like? I bet middle managers would stop wasting money left and right. I bet pointless projects would stop. Anything you do to make the company more efficient or profitable is celebrated and you actually get a share in that profit.

I also wonder if it would simply fail due to people wanting to coast and not pull their share.

I don’t know about you guys, but my company just mandated RTO a few months ago.

As expected, we now spend waste 8 hours: Commuting, Walking to and from meeting rooms, etc.

And the meetings, and the “collaboration”, which are basically non stop all day long now, are just us talking round and round about all the things we need to do and how to do them for the 8th time, without actually doing them. But we sure LOOK really productive and busy. And I guess that’s what management wants? Who knows.

With remote work I would do my job for 8+ hours per workday in pure focus mode. Knocking out solution after solution. You want XYZ to happen? Already done, here’s a link to it. Have a meeting? Click join Teams call 1 minute early, listen and talk, while continuing to working on XYZ. You think we should try ABC for the XYZ project? Ok, I’ll have it ready by tomorrow.

In office work is now spent walking from meeting to meeting, and you gotta leave 15 minutes before and it takes 15 minutes to get back and settled and you did not work on anything during. And they ask “so, how is project XYZ going?” “Good, good. Should be done in a few more weeks.” And you maybe work on XYZ for 30 minutes uninterrupted that entire day, decide to skip any testing or QC, skip those extra features, skip checking with other teams if it will impact them, you have to skip all that to get it done on time. And it takes 3 weeks to do a 5 minute task. And it’s inferior. And you talk about XYZ every meeting of every day, time after time, updates and statuses and comments on the ticket. And you finally announce you got XYZ completed and it’s “yay good job” and management asks how the RTO is going and everyone is terrified to say “this is stupid and a gigantic waste of everyone’s time and your money to put us in a giant expensive building just to not work on work, but to talk about working on work and we are getting only 10% done vs remote work”. So we say “oh, fine” and management puts a little golden star on their report they made for themselves and they feel all warm and fuzzy that work is going great.

And thus, project XYZ was finally completed. A task that would have taken 1 person a few hours to do remotely, has now taken 8 people, 3 weeks of in office meetings and status updates and endless interruptions and discussions over every aspect of the project over and over again to finally complete. But we all LOOKED super busy doing it. And that’s the important thing.

I’m personally, loving the RTO. I thought I would hate it, but I get to talk with friends all day and sit in meetings and daydream and the day flies by and I barely turned my brain on.

I’m happy to just do my job at home uninterrupted at my desk, but they sure don’t seem to want that, so fine. Hope that works out.