Microsoft mandates a return to office, 3 days per week

We’re seriously citing a population of 900 people on the Olympic Peninsula as somehow central to the RTO order?

I said “for a pathological example”

if you don’t know what that term means, you can look it up.

For what it’s worth, there are a lot of people across the sound who either work remotely or commute everyday (mostly to Seattle). 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.

I don’t know if things are different at Microsoft or across the pond in general, but from people I’ve spoken to who’ve been given similar “mandates”, they’re not as compulsory as they first sound. If you’re reasonably good at your job and your manager is keen to keep you then you can get away with just ignoring these rules. More what you’d call “guidelines” and all that.

I know quite well what that word means. It’s just not the right one for this use case. My best guess is that you were going for “hypothetical.”

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?

As other’s mentioned, probably more a way to fire a bunch of people without having to do so explicitly.

Microsoft seems to be on a warpath this year regarding layoffs. I wonder if maybe they’re trying to compensate for some giant black hole in their budget. Like, keep the costs looking stable even as some specific department balloons out of control without providing commensurate revenue. Wonder what that could possibly be?

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.

the free coffee for employees, probably.

I was in Bremerton for a time, actually right by the Navy yard, so like, a 10-minute walk to the ferry. So much easier to just leave the car at home and take the bus to my destination.

My best guess is that you were going for “hypothetical.”

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:

In computer science, pathological has a slightly different sense with regard to the study of algorithms. Here, an input (or set of inputs) is said to be pathological if it causes atypical behavior from the algorithm, such as a violation of its average case complexity, or even its correctness.

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.

Which makes it work really well for stealth layoffs. If you don’t have a manager willing to bend the rules for you, you either have to show up or the company has a reason for firing you.

And if you do have a manager willing to bend the rules for you, they now have the ability to recind that offer if performance drops.

Which of their product lines could turn dev time into money?

Capriciously applied rules is a terrible system. We hold up ideals like “rule of law” and “democracy” but as soon as capital is involved it’s right back to “I am the law” and tyranny.

Workers should unite and tell management to get fucked.