Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Rethinking return-to-office mandates and a ridiculous, ancient Windows bug.
1. WTH? Managers regret RTO
First up this week: How’s it going with forcing people back into the office? Survey says: Not good.
Analysis: Sunk cost fallacy
As we all suspected, the drive to pull staff back into the office was based on nothing more than a hunch—not data. And by managers feeling they’d look bad if they had to pay for unused office space.
Morgan Smith: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
“Turnover issues”
Some leaders lamented the challenge of measuring the success of in-office policies. … The sunk cost of unused office space has been a major factor in companies’ decisions.
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Yet the constant risk of losing top talent has been enough to make companies reconsider their strict RTO mandates. … Companies that put pressure on employees to return to the office are more likely to experience turnover issues than those that don’t.
Horse’s mouth? Envoy’s Larry Gadea and friends:
80% of executives say they would have approached their company’s return-to-office strategy differently if they had access to workplace data to inform their decision-making. … This is cause for concern—since individual biases and limited perspectives can turn out to be costly—nearly a quarter … of managers admit to trusting their gut to make decisions.
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It’s no wonder why some workplace managers … rely on their gut instinct to drive their decision-making. … Data fragmentation and guesswork have become the status quo.
Let’s not lose the truth hidden in plain sight. u/Prestigious_Carob745 points right at it:
Good to know RTO policies are based on little more than a logical fallacy: [The] sunk cost of unused office space. … We all knew it, but it’s good it’s getting called out by more than just the embittered workers.
All this makes troupe sound slightly cynical:
Funny that when people were required to be home, employers talked about what great productivity they were getting with people at home. Then, when it isn’t required anymore, they want everyone back in the office for—productivity.
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Most employers really have no way to measure if an employee is being productive … so managers are just reporting what makes them look good. And now we are back to where managers will look better with lots of people running around the office.
Only 80% regret it? Narcocide snarks it up:
The other 20% also regret it. But these aren’t the type of people known for being able to publicly admit when they know they made a mistake.
2. PSA: Disable Windows STS!
Since 2016, Windows Server has contained a ticking time bomb. Randomly, without warning, the Windows Time service will go crazy and change the date/time to a random value.
Analysis: Switch it off
This behavior, though well intentioned, will eventually cause impossible-to-debug problems. For your sanity, if you use Windows Server in your shop, disable Secure Time Seeding.
Dan Goodin: Windows Secure Time Seeding resets clocks months or years off the correct time
“Microsoft’s repeated refusal”
A few months ago, an engineer in a data center in Norway encountered some perplexing errors that caused a Windows server to suddenly reset its system clock to 55 days in the future. … The culprit was a little-known feature in Windows [that] Microsoft introduced … in 2016 as a way to ensure that system clocks were accurate. [He] reported the time resets to multiple groups at Microsoft [but] received no company response.
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[He] wasn’t the only person encountering wild and spontaneous fluctuations in Windows system clocks used in mission-critical environments. … Engineers and administrators had been reporting the same time resets since 2016. … “Microsoft hasn’t really been helpful in trying to track this. … I’ve sent over logs and information, but they haven’t really followed this up. They seem more interested in closing the case,” [one wrote].
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Microsoft’s repeated refusal to engage with customers experiencing these problems means that for the foreseeable future, Windows will by default continue to automatically reset system clocks based on values that remote third parties include in SSL handshakes. Further, it means that it will be incumbent on individual admins to manually turn off STS.
Blaming the victim, here’s Microsoft PR:
Secure Time Seeding … has been shown to function as intended in default configurations [but] customers often configure their machines to their particular needs. … In these isolated cases, the only course of action we can recommend is to disable this feature.
Hey kids, what time is it? Time for yetanotherloss:
I can’t imagine the sequence of horrible decisions that led to doing this. … If all available time sources are not trustable and none of the existing answers make sense, do not try to set the clock!
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Stop trying to come up with more complicated ways to use the untrustable connection and accept that there is no safe way to update time. [Or,] if it’s that critically important, embed a fixed signature for a set of known time sources and query those as a last resort. Microsoft certainly has the resources … to do this.
Taking us home, King_TJ has this neat summary:
This is pathetic. Microsoft has a bug in their code that can get the incorrect time/date, which has been in their server products since 2016.
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Production servers around the world have randomly suffered database corruption and other issues due to it. But … they’re not quite sure what’s wrong.
The Moral of the Story:
Be nice to people on the way up, because you may meet them on the way down
—Jimmy Durante
You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi, @richij or [email protected].
Image: Vitalii Khodzinskyi (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)
