Microsoft is letting employees work from home permanently

The really interesting thing here is the possibility of part-time work. I recently switched from full-time work to independent contracting, and have a single part-time contract while looking for a second. Honestly, part-time contracting work is really, really nice. The pay is more than enough to live on and I have a ton of free time which I am devoting to rock climbing, finally writing a bunch of blog posts, and learning physics. Plus, honestly, I doubt I was doing more than four hours of &quot;real&quot; work a day while full time.<p>If I could be fully remote and work part time, I would consider eventually rejoining Microsoft. There is a lot of hand-wringing over how fully remote workers get left behind but I&#x27;ve never been interested in moving beyond an IC level.

IMHO companies need to either embrace WFH fully or not at all.<p>This current <i>&quot;we&#x27;re kinda mostly WFH but not really sometimes&quot;</i> is the worst, as you have archaic processes still in place from pre WFH days that are still enforced, and most importantly, if management is in the office and you&#x27;re not, over time, the colleagues who will be in the office will seem to get really lucky in regards to promotions and opportunities for some reason and you&#x27;ll be left out because you&#x27;ll miss the coffee&#x2F;water cooler&#x2F;cigarette chit-chat where future projects&#x2F;directions are discussed casually and off the record without you.<p>Example: I once ran into my boss talking to a colleague at a coffee break about a potential project with a new customer and volunteered to work on it as I liked the tech. Months later, I got it. If I would have been remote that day I would have never heard about it as stuff like new projects and new customers is pretty hush-hush until the ink dries on the contract so they&#x27;re never written about in public slack channels until then, but then it&#x27;s usually too late to call dibs as the pieces are already in motion.<p>Not to mention, you can&#x27;t really move far away from the office either since you could at any time be expected to show up in the office for $IMPORTANT_MEETING.

Buried in the article they also talk about cutting the pay of people who move away from big cities based on their &quot;geopay&quot; scale, a new trend that I have a hard time seeing as anything other than corporate greed we should vigorously oppose. I understand not every company can afford to do Basecamp&#x27;s &quot;pay everyone SF wages&quot; thing, but any company can afford to set uniform pay grades at some level and one would think that the equal pay for equal work principle should apply here. One should neither receive a big city subsidy nor have their pay cut for choosing to live somewhere else.

The nuance you might not get from just the title: &quot;Microsoft will now allow employees to work from home freely for less than 50 percent of their working week, or for managers to approve permanent remote work. &quot;<p>In order for true relocation to be an option, that &#x27;manager approval&#x27; must be unequivocal, unrevocable and transferable, when, as happens very frequently at Microsoft, the worker gets a new manager.

What I&#x27;d like to see happen when the pandemic ends is this: if I return to a company&#x27;s office, I should be able to return to an equivalent of my home office. My home office is a small room in my home, but it has a large window providing natural light and top of the line office furniture including a couch and a really big desk. Most importantly I am the only one that works in this office.<p>Having a setup like this in a company&#x27;s office would remove any incentive I have to work from home. I wonder how many developers want to work from home just to escape the shitshow of open offices.

The geopay stuff seems unstable as a norm... if that&#x27;s the way we&#x27;re going.<p>It makes sense atm, maybe, for tech companies.<p>The tech companies, currently, are extremely flush with cash. They don&#x27;t need to be all that ruthless. This takes off a lot of pressure. But as things go on, &quot;geopay&quot; is going to become an optimizable cost structure. There will be uncomfortable conversations as people move to higher geopay places. False addresses. Optimisations on all sides.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m wrong, but this seems like a mess, as the games play out.

I like globalism, I think it&#x27;s good for most humans. However I can&#x27;t help to think that quickly US workers will be replaced with our lower cost English speaking alternatives.<p>The only advantage that US workers have, is that up until now, programmers and Engineers have been managing&#x2F;teaching&#x2F;leading their counterparts. This is the skill employers are paying the big $$ for.<p>However, this stops now, no new generation of US leadership. Why hire a junior US engineer? They have never been a leader.

This article seems much more nuanced than the title. Looks like it&#x27;s mostly part time WFH, modulo specific authorization from one&#x27;s manager.

Absolute BS with misleading title<p>There is general policy that is passed to each organization and then organizations decide by themselves, overriding policy. Most of them block any country change, which means maybe you change state in US, but anything else is refused<p>In policy written it is vague with mention of exceptions but verbally communicated by management you understand how forbidden it is<p>Microsoft is still holding on to idea of employee in sight is better managed

My wife and I were about to buy a 1.4M house in Redmond but for the past two weeks we&#x27;ve been considering a completely different rural area with beautiful new houses and lots of land

If this works, it would be Indians, Chinese and Eastern European coders who would make up the majority of Microsoft rank and file in a few years. Killing the H1B visa was not going to save American jobs, the corporations are always a step ahead. We are looking at a Microsoft with a truly global workforce. Why pay $150k to a dev when it would buy 5 Romanians instead who are just as good.

I wonder how many of these “permanent” WFH positions will be made to return to the office after Covid.<p>It’s nice to say that now when you don’t have the choice anyway. But when the tide turns, it will be easy to force people to return &#x2F; fire them &#x2F; make it unattractive for them to avoid the office.

Microsoft is essentially already a distributed company and has the technology for it. Why not hire remotely?

For some value of &#x27;permanently&#x27;?<p>They made this change in policy; they can make others, later. So who knows.

It&#x27;s great to see Microsoft jumping on board. I think the reason that Microsoft was hesitant to do this initially was because they have enjoyed high productivity increases over the past few years (especially on the software development side thanks to awesome tools like TypeScript) and so they didn&#x27;t want to risk losing that momentum. Thankfully it appears that Microsoft employees have been able to adapt to remote work and were able to maintain similar productivity levels.<p>I think it speaks to the high quality of project managers who work at Microsoft. Project managers are the foundation of any solid tech business.

As with Twitter&#x27;s announcement back in May for allowing their employees to WFH permanently, this puts pressure on other big software companies to adopt similar policies. Microsoft being as big as they are really pushes other similar-sized companies like Google.<p>We&#x27;ve seen Facebook follow suit to shift their workforce in a similar manner. It makes you wonder when we&#x27;ll hear something similar from Google, Apple, and even a reverse course for Netflix. If they don&#x27;t, then recruiting might suffer as a candidate would likely pick the more WFH-flexible company.

Interesting, I just interviewed with them last year and ended up not moving forward because they wanted me to move to Washington.<p>Same with Google, except they wanted me to move to New York.<p>I was pretty surprised at both company&#x27;s unwillingness to be flexible on that point.

I read few months ago after pandemic started, Microsoft studied productivity of its employees. Wonder this policy is a logical conclusion from the results of that study or they simply want to attract talent like few other ones or both

If my wife didn&#x27;t work for a traditional company who&#x27;s heavily pushing their tech workers back into the office, I&#x27;d be living in a mansion in the woods by now instead of this tiny apartment.

Time to install a VPN gateway wherever the top of the geopay scale is!

Working remotely WITH MANAGER approval. This is something that was already in place but the new policy open it up so this is more commonly accepted.

Taking aside all the deaths (I&#x27;m still afraid that my parents and parents-in-law will catch COVID).<p>The pandemic is doing a really great work on shifting minds of a lot of WFH-awerse companies&#x2F;managers, and is doing an interesting shifts in economies (e.g. at my country a lot, and I mean a lot of people started doing online purchases for things that were normally bought offline - e.g. I was surprised how much I can save of diapers alone).<p>Some services thrive (all online) but others are declining (restaurants, pubs), interesting times.

A lot of info is missed here as well. Sales orgs (quite a large part of Microsoft) must still work from the office (with exceptions) and cannot relocate as they need to meet customers - including the technical sales. Even though they&#x27;ve worked fine from home and were in fact MORE productive. So a lot of nuance is missed, and the application of this isn&#x27;t as broad as it is suggested.

I have a nefarious theory. Geopay will act like as an assumed filter. Top go getter types who are the future leaders will (in theory) come to the office and get the high pay. The less ambitious but still capable workers will move to cheaper places and earn less and be more easily replaceable.