Comment on Microsoft mandates a return to office, 3 days per week
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 2 days ago
Puget Sound-area employees: If you live within 50 miles of a Microsoft office, you’ll be expected to work onsite three days a week by the end of February 2026.
“return to office” mandates are always, always, always a form of stealth layoff.
people structure their lives around their commute (or lack thereof). if you can work from home and don’t have to go to the office like it’s 2019, it opens up a bunch of places to live that wouldn’t be feasible otherwise.
this will force a bunch of employees into godawful commutes, or require them to move to be closer to the office. that’ll be relatively easy for younger employees who most likely rent an apartment and don’t have kids, but much harder for older / more experienced people who own houses, have kids, a partner with their own job, etc. lots of people will just quit instead - constructive dismissal.
also, I suspect many people who aren’t familiar with the Seattle area will read “50 miles” and think “about an hour’s drive”…lmao. 50 miles as the crow flies, in Seattle’s geography, can be a multi-hour drive, possibly including a ferry ride, before considering traffic delays. for a pathological example, Brinnon to Redmond is 35 miles in a straight line, but 130 miles driving distance, or 75 miles driving distance if you take a ferry. (and there can be a multi-hour wait just to drive on to the ferry during peak times)
even if you constrain it to 50 miles driving distance - Tacoma to Redmond is 43 miles driving distance according to Google. if you ask it for driving directions and specify “arrive at 9:30am” you get an estimate of “typically 1 hr to 2 hr 30 min”. public transit takes 2 hours, and that’s assuming you’re leaving directly from downtown Tacoma.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 days ago
Brinnon is a weird example. I had to look it up, having lived in and covered Seattle, Skagit County and the Kitsap Peninsula. Per Wikipedia:
We’re seriously citing a population of 900 people on the Olympic Peninsula as somehow central to the RTO order? Like, look I have rather intricate if outdated knowledge about traffic patterns in Puget Sound, WSF delays, the whole nine yards. Just getting from the U-District to West Seattle can be an hour slog.
So why Brinnon?
TehPers@beehaw.org 2 days ago
For what it’s worth, there are a lot of people across the sound who either work remotely or commute everyday. The ferry, in travel time alone, is ~45m (from start of boarding to end of getting off, assuming you take the car you’ll need with this commute). This is of course assuming you make the ferry and don’t end up waiting for the next ferry or two due to traffic (each ferry carries only so many cars), and assuming no issues with their schedule (they are behind all the time).
Brinnon is a weird example, but an example involving the ferry isn’t too far fetched. I have a friend at a big company who lives on that side, and I considered it myself (and would have, had I been able to afford the home I wanted anyway).
Without traffic, Bainbridge Island to Redmond is ~1.5h. With traffic? Not happening.
Good news about MS specifically is that it does have the connector (their commute busses). It doesn’t go everywhere, and definitely not across the sound, but does help with some commutes if you happen to be close to a stop.
Anyway, RTO has historically been a terrible policy designed to shrink the workforce without layoffs and has resulted consistently in worse outcomes for companies.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 days ago
You have to be a masochist to live on Bainbridge and choose to commute to the fucking eastside. You want an expensive island to live on? Mercer comes to mind, and you’re already halfway across the lake on I-90.
Does MS’s commuter service extend to, like, Ballard, or is it Kirkland to Renton and points slightly east?
TehPers@beehaw.org 2 days ago
Friend lives further than Bainbridge, but works in Seattle. Ask me why I know the ferry commute lol. He got his home for pretty cheap due to the distance.
There are some maps online of the connector routes, and what you said seems to align with them. Based on those maps, seems like lots of focus on Seattle and surrounding communities, with some extension north and south from Redmond.
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 2 days ago
I said “for a pathological example”
if you don’t know what that term means, you can look it up.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 days ago
I know quite well what that word means. It’s just not the right one for this use case.
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 2 days ago
no, if I meant hypothetical I would have said hypothetical. notice that I gave two hypotheticals - Brinnon-Redmond and Tacoma-Redmond. only the Brinnon one was pathological.
let’s go back to 9th grade Advanced English and diagram out my comment. that sentence is in a paragraph, the topic of which is “some shit about Seattle’s geography that people who’ve never lived here probably don’t know”. notice I’m talking about geography. I wasn’t saying anything about Brinnon’s population, or the likelihood of its residents working at Microsoft. that was entirely words you put into my mouth and then decided you disagreed with.
if you think pathological is the wrong word choice there, then no I don’t think you actually understand what it means, at least not in the context I was using it. from wikipedia:
there’s crow-flies distance and there’s driving distance, and obviously driving distance is always longer, but usually not that much longer. playing around with Google Maps again, Seattle-Tacoma is 25 miles crow-flies but 37 miles driving, for a ratio of 1.5. that seems likely to be about average. the Brinnon-Redmond distance, without the ferry, gives you a ~3.7 ratio. that’s an input that causes significantly worse performance than the average case. it’s pathological.
the closest synonym to pathological in this context would be “worst-case”, but that would be subtly incorrect, because then I would be claiming that Brinnon is the longest driving distance out of all possible commutes to Redmond within a 50 miles crow-flies bubble. you’d need some fancy GIS software to find that, not just me poking around for a few minutes in Google Maps.
(and this is the technology sub-lemmy, in a thread about something that will mostly affect software engineers, and planning out a driving commute is a classic example of a pathfinding algorithm…using “pathological” from the computer science context here is actually an extremely cromulent word choice)
there seems to be a recurring pattern of you responding to me, making up shit I didn’t actually say, and then nitpicking about it. recently you accused me of “trying to both-sides Nazis”. please stop doing that.