Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me.
If your employees cannot be trusted to fulfil their responsibilities (whether in an office, their home or a tent in a woodland) that is not a geographical issue. It is a mentality issue and you are always going to face productivity issue from that employee regardless of from where they work.
I’ve been told time and time again by an array of managers in a bunch of departments and companies that my productivity never changes. That is regardless of whether I am travelling or at home. This is including being in Sri Lanka during their worst economical crisis and facing power cuts of 8 - 12 hours everyday. As a responsible adult I prepared in advance. I bought power banks which could charge my laptop and ensured they were charged when the power worked. I bought SIM cards for all mobile networks and ensured I had data. It really is simply a matter of taking responsibility of one’s situation and having a sense of respect for, and from, your employer/employee.
Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them.
I fear that this is all simply a smokescreen for the authoritarian shift which has occurred throughout the globe. It started pre pandemic and was exasperated during it. Scary times lay ahead.
It's not about productivity at all. These same companies were commissioning studies during Covid that told their analysts "look how productive our employees are now that they are working from home!"
It's about crushing labor.
WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can apply for far more roles, work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc, apply for other jobs during work hours, etc. These companies know that white collar workers are not fungible. Their intellectual workers are genuinely very difficult to replace and produce a lot of value.
For talent that isn't fungible, it's RTO. For talent that is fungible, offshoring.
For your comment about the turn towards authoritarianism, yeah, there's a reason every DEI program at every large corporation was pulled back within a few months, and it's not because the C suite all reads the same Musk tweets on X.
Employees started making demands of management to actually look at some... structural issues. Those demands had teeth because employees acted and organized as a bloc. Only a matter of time before other lines of questioning besides race and sex were explored at work.
With DEI you had to care about the same "structural issues®". It wasn't exactly employee representation and much more of a HR tool to sanction mostly low level employees.
Usually I don't care about race and sex at work and I am not sad that DEI is gone. Creates room for issues much more relevant to work. Like working hours, salaries, holidays, health insurance and general work benefits. Stuff that matters.
That's because you are not impacted I assume. If you are from the DEI bucket then there is nothing more important. Every few years they come out with a study where all they do is change the name on resumes. Having a black sounding naming still, in modern day, greatly reduces your chances of getting an interview. Except, during the most current rendition of this study found that wasn't true at all at companies that had DEI policies. That is huge if people can determine your ethnicity based on your name.
All your "more important" issues are predicated on the idea that you can get a job. For those who are unfairly discriminated against, they don't even get to your point. Who cares about employer healthcare when you have no employer?
I am an ethnic minority, not visibly though and not from any DEI bucket. But that doesn't matter. Some DEI proponents perhaps meant well, but the way the went about was simply the wrong one. Criticism wasn't welcomed at all, even treating everybody the same regardless of sex or race was looked down upon. Words like racism were redefined and you had to adhere to certain dogmata.
The classic approach to treat everyone equally is still better, even if there is some prejudice left. And that doesn't preclude any program that helps those in need. And here the same thing is true: Race and sex are irrelevant.
Some proponents of DEI had their own problems with prejudice to solve in my experience. So perhaps the onus should be that everyone works on their own personal prejudices for now.
Some things will be unfair, but introducing more unfairness doesn't solve any problems. And here DEI simply failed in its approach. A bad job market doesn't mean we can discriminate those that might have been more lucky regardless of reasons. The task would be to fix the job market.
To propose two groups of minorities against some diffuse ethnic majority is simply childish, comes with multiple problems and it doesn't provide tangible benefits to anyone in the long run. I would argue it even entrenches prejudices and pits people against each other.
My experience of DEI was as ideological cover to offshore jobs to India.
While the executive team performed sweeping layoffs to push up the stock price and increase their own compensation, they paid lip service to DEI as if engaged in a karmic balancing act and that was their cheat code.
And the company culture degraded as a result. Far more inter-group fighting, more politicking, more backstabbing, less cooperation.
I’m not there anymore, but I hear they are trying to revert things back, slowly. Basically every project since then has been a failure and they’ve been coasting on their original success.
Good people don’t need three letter acronyms to treat others fairly, and if someone is selling you new holier-than-thou rules, it’s worth asking what moral cost they no longer feel they need to pay.
Applying those things equally to people regardless of skin colour, gender identity, sexuality or any other line along which people have historically been discriminated against isn't important?
DEI explicitly took ‘we don’t do that’ off the table, by proactively discriminating based on those factors.
And at first, when the pie is growing, that doesn’t threaten entrenched groups as much, so it mostly can happen.
In a zero (or negative) sum game world (layoffs, hiring freezes), what do you think is going to happen?
People with power will use the same tools to protect themselves or even acquire more power, and those without power will be ground under the same gears.
I’ve seen it happen in every major society - from India to Chile to Europe to the US.
In the US it’s getting particularly out of control (in both directions) for a number of factors - and very high publicity - but it’s way more blatant almost everywhere else in fact.
> WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can [...] work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc
Probably "working fewer hours" and "moonlight for multiple companies" has negative effects on productivity that employers would like to avoid.
I doubt it, productivity is an equation that's very complex for knowledge workers.
For example, is 80 hours of work a week more productive than 40? If you're working an assembly line, probably.
If you're a programmer, definitely not. You will write more bugs, make more mistakes, and churning out code doesn't mean much. Any monkey can write code, but writing maintainable code is hard, and reading that code and actually choosing to maintain it is harder.
Again, it depends. Maybe they have more pride in their job or despise their company less, who knows.
And I don't mean productivity per hour. Lol. No, I mean absolute.
An employee working like a dog will get less work done than one just working normally, probably. Because most of the work is negative, so it doesn't add to the work done pile, it chips away at it.
Eventually, I would think, you reach a point where an employee is less productive than no employee at all. Seems impossible to be working 100 hours a week and be getting less than nothing done, but if you're actively making the product worse or creating debt, that's how I would classify that.
I've already kind of made it clear here where I stand on this, but I gotta tell you, you really do sound a lot like management.
Do you really think your superstar programmers are well and truly doing intellectual work, the kind of work that produces business value, from the time they hit the coffee machine at 9AM to the time they grab their briefcase to go home at 5PM?
If you believe this, I think you might be interested in bringing the Bobs in to discuss making our T.P.S. reporting process more efficient. They have thoughts on coversheets.
In Deep Work, Cal Newport posits that even the most disciplined, high performers can do work that requires really focused attention for a max of four hours per day. He's a computer science professor, not exactly "management."
And these days, for a lot of knowledge workers there's a pretty strong case that anything which isn't this "deep work" can probably be automated.
So yeah if I'm paying you a full time salary I want those four hours. Without necessarily rendering judgment on what a moonlighting clause should or shouldn't look like, if I'm not getting those four hours, I don't want you on my payroll.
And you think you're more likely to get those four hours in an open office environment with distractions aplenty, as opposed to my effectively noise-proofed home office where I can actually focus?
It really depends. I believe and apply a lot of Cal Newport advice, and benefit greatly from it. But I also see in my daily life how just being close to people you work with, and (crucially) being a short walk away/floor from people in other groups, creates immense value by helping unclog processes and especially by creating new ideas and products that wouldn‘t otherwise exist.
Bullshit. When I'm in the office most of my time is spent on making sure it looks like I'm working and obsessing about if someone is standing/sitting behind me and looking at my screen or not, because I'm in a panopticum. There is no time for deep work.
First, nobody cares what you want. Second, do you pay for those 4 hours adequately, guess what if you don't? Even if you do, are you OK with 2 hours today and 6 hrs tomorrow? How about a year of 1 hour days and then a 24 hour period that fixes all the problems for last 2 years?
The Internet tough guy strikes again, as if employment is not a voluntary contract between two consenting adults. This militant attitude is always good for a laugh... hate management if you like, but if you think no employee ever worries about what their manager wants, sounds like you've never held a job.
Not really sure why I am even responding to this amazingly stupid line of discussion. I mean if you absolutely hate the idea of having a boss (I know I did) then there is a solution for that - start your own company! It's not as easy as being a badass on the Internet, sure, but you might have to look at both sides of the argument and you might even end up getting rid of that chip on your shoulder.
Let me quickly go count my years of experience, will have to use all my digits and extremities, might be a minute.
I don't think you got the point behind the comment. We do not have a good way to quantify effort, thus we ask for a fixed set of time in chairs, tickets closed, etc that's the best we can come up with.
I’ll attempt a steelman and say, no, employees are not doing deep work from 9–5, but I could see being in an office 9–5 setting the stage for a lot of deep work to be done. Moonlighting for another company I could especially see as detrimental to focus at work.
The nature of modern offices pretty much prevents deep work.
You're not going to get deep work when you pack people like sardines into neat rows of desks, where pretty much at any time someone within one row away is going to be in a meeting - conducted of course over teleconferencing software. Or some people will talk (honestly, being in the office mostly translated to chit-chat for me).
Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles.
The steel man is that in the office you get cross team pollination organically. Team lunches, talking about an idea with another team on how to do something better as in that moment the idea came up. This happens more often in person than remote.
Does it need 5 days a week in the office? Absolutely not. 1-2 is plenty.
> Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles.
Or doors.
25 years ago, Microsoft Redmond had a slogan: "Every dev a door".
In early 2000s, it began to be two devs per room. We all know what happened since. Open offices save facilities concrete money per seat. Productivity lost from lack of deep work is not a line item anyone knows how to track.
The "every dev a door" plus "pair programming" was shown by studies from groups like Pivotal Labs as being optimal for working code, but ... and a big but ...
Companies intentionally optimize for things other than working code. You get what you measure and they measure what's easy instead of measure what matters.
I don't expect someone to do deep focused work from 9am to 5pm.
But at the same time, I don't expect them to spend their 9-to-5 working for another company at the same time.
As a founder, who respects the 9-to-5 and supports WFH, if I'm paying for 8 hours of work, I want 8 hours of output. Not 4 hours of output, and then you working 4 hours for another job.
If multi-jobbing becomes a thing, then WFH becomes untenable because at least in the office you can be monitored.
To be fair, you're either paying for hours or for output, because I assure you you are not paying staff accurately for their output. You can of course sack someone who outputs notoriously little, but if you get output exceeding your average "8 hours of output", you shouldn't care if someone made it in 1 hour or 16, or at least you wouldn't be able to tell.
I'm using "output" as quoted in context, it's such a nebulous measure unless you're specifically buying a product.
To be clear I'm having a lot of fun being snarky here.
Like everything it's a mix.
In seriousness, I do find the labor perspective sorely and quite conspicuously lacking in these discussions, both discussions about remote work and about DEI backlash.
I’ve hired remote employees, made them come, offered stimulating work, 5% above their requested pay with mentions that I could double it in one year, but I could never get them to the smartness and clarity of analysis they had during the interview. After 6 months they were clearly winging it in <1hr a day and exhausting my team lead, who didn’t think they were moonlighting for several companies. I did: Their progress had entirely stalled and their performance was negative.
I fired both the employees and the manager. This “remote employees don’t moonlight” is a union trope.
Not enough to move the needle. 25% would move the needle.
> with mentions that I could double it in one year
They didn't believe you, or didn't after a short time working there. So it didn't move the needle.
More so if they're experienced. Similar mentions of prospects are common in interviews, and rarely followed through. You eventually learn to be skeptical of them, while rolling with it, just in case.
Also, if you might be willing to pay double their requested salary, they start realising their value on the open market is much higher than they'd previously thought, or could be with a little presentation and experience.
On the other hand, if you'd put it in the contract that their salary will double after 1 year, subject to well-defined criteria and a history of actually doing it with existing employees, then they'd believe you, and that would move the needle a lot.
From your story I speculate you were right to fire them, but you never figured our how to get the best out of them. In recent years it's possible you were subject to employment fraud, as clarity of analysis can disappear if it's a different person doing the work than the person answering interview questions.
Progress that's entirely stalled or negative can happen for many other reasons than moonlighting, and many other reasons than not putting enough time.
I've been fully remote for 5 years, partially remote for 15. Being remote removes many sources of stress for me. I don't moonlight.
The one thing that decreases my productivity, in some positions, is bad management. Of course, that was already the case when I was fully office-based.
Atlassian is a dumpster fire, they run shit engineering since about 3 years.
Give me the secret sauce to being productive with remote employees. Maybe some have found it, but apparently paying above the employee ask, offering to double the salary in case of success, sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them gives me the “evil employer” category on most forums.
Yeah, I know “Treat them even better!” is, again, the word of the union guy, but in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.
have you doubled anyone's salary? if not, it can come across as an empty promise you won't fulfill
>sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them
do they want and benefit from these things? or do they distract them from their productive work?
>in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.
not really, you were able to fire who you wanted to fire easily. it also seems that you didn't consider other factors for why the employee didn't work out. does your interview process poorly select for people who will do well in the role? are there other possible explanations for low productivity than the employee having a second job?
I don't know you and you aren't my current employer anyways but a good first step to requiring me to go back to the office would be actually giving me an office!!
Wild that anybody thinks simply being in the office makes employees work. I have a colleague who sits within 2m of me who keeps their (personal) phone on their desk all day. They literally prop it up against the bottom of their computer monitor. They're not even subtle about it.
They get distracted every 2-3 minutes and spend upwards or 2-3 hours on it. It distracts me when it vibrates 100+ times per day.
Boss walks in, phone is down.
Boss walks out, phone in hand.
Is it not likely that people are more motivated to collaborate, talk about their work, plan together, feel a sense of excitement about work, etc. when they are communing in person? The ol watercooler mindset or whatever.
I mean - there’s this popular topic of the issue of loneliness lately. People are less motivated to do things that would maybe normally bring them social joy and get them out of their own homes and bring them together with others in the flesh. You’d expect people to be motivated to do that kind of thing, maybe? But it’s hard. And it’s harder every day when there’s a zeitgeist of growing isolationism.
I certainly don’t think the inflexibility of a 5 day in person work week with a hellish, uncompensated commute is the answer to the loneliness issue, nor the lack of motivation to do good work. But maybe there is some middle ground that would serve as a kick in the pants of sorts, without making us all miserable little ants going to and fro once again, that could help people get back out there in a way that helps.
I mean, at least, it doesn’t seem like the metaverse or whatever else is filling that gap as the techno-seers foresaw… but maybe future generations will prove that to be more realistic than bringing people back out together in meatspace. Or maybe we just stoop deeper into this new reclusiveness without any real stand ins for grabbing lunch together at all.
Maybe if the office was not a hellscape? Not just the commute, the offices themselves.
I didn't work in a properly colocated team since 2017, and that was mostly by accident. The norm is zoom/teams calls, often taken from the desk (which is 3-4 in a row with rows densely packed) because there's never enough space for meeting rooms so it becomes norm to not give a fuck that nobody can concentrate because someone is talking loudly on a work meeting.
And the watercooler is either office politicking or discussing how much the place sucks
Exactly this, its great that the person next to me can stand and talk to someone 2 desks down, over my shoulder while I'm on a teams call with someone from the other side of the floor, as there are only 3 conference rooms, and managers have priority. If you want people back in the office, redesign the whole space to small working areas where people can actually focus. Open office environments are the worst office experience possible, but i guess it makes the C-suite feel powerful or something having all these people sitting outside their office.
Well yeah, and that's actually the point: if you don't like it, you're free to leave! Headcount reduction without severance payment and getting rid of an unmotivated employee, win-win! At least for federal employees they had the decency of spelling it out clearly: https://traumaawareamerica.org/2025/04/28/deliberate-strateg... - the rest of us have to keep listening to the "it's all for your best" BS...
Sure, if you feel lonely and want the company of your co-workers, you're free to come to the office as often as you want. It's being forced to come to the office 3/5/whatever days that is actually decreasing motivation...
...and being forced back to the office for first three and then five days (as Elon Musk said years ago, you can work from home all you want, you just have to work 40 hours per week in the office) is not really going to improve your motivation.
> Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me.
I don't think it is related to poor productivity. I think it is related to a combination of these 3 points:
1) perceived less of control from the management perspective. 10-15years ago companies were all in on "we need metrics on work being done". Let's face it, process induced metrics have often very little relevance to the success of your products. So without being able to pin point what is wrong from the metrics, upper management feel they are managing an invisible structure and they have no idea what they do. They don't have much more idea when they are at the office but they can see them peering at their screen or talking to their colleagues so they must be doing something right? It is reassuring for upper management.
2) Pretending to do something. This RTO decisions are ofen all about making changes for the sake of making changes. All my career I have seen upper management doing restructuration every 6 months to every 2 years with often very little change in the actual efficiency of the whole company or the quality of the products being done. More often than not they just throw shit at the wall and see hat sticks. Other times they just copy what competitors have just done. Once in a while they will maybe observe an improvement.
3) It also give a visible signal to the employees thast something is being done by the management so in a sense it can boost motivation a little bit even though major changes are often disruptive. If it wasn't for these kind of changes and announcement, most employees wouldn't even know/remember who their CEO is.
Having said that, I don't work at Meta/Instagram but I work in a company where the meeting culture is crazy and I think I can agree with him on that point.
The RTO decisions are about making changes to prove that you have power over your employees, and also about attrition: if you don't like the soul-crushing routine of having to come to the office three or five days a week when you could do your job just as well or better working from home, there's the door!
I wish more people working for these companies with short-sighted RTO mandates would explore suing their employer for promissory estoppel. There were real guarantees along the lines of “in-office work is never coming back” made verbally by CEOs when COVID began. If employees made financial/legal decisions based on these false promises, the company should be held liable.
In addition to your 1.) It's also a power demonstration as in: no matter how far you have to travel/commute, we're the ones paying, so you come when called. Since commutes are rarely paid for, that makes clear who's king. Same goes for open office spaces: the conditions and their effect on you don't really matter to the king.
There's a 4. in that these measures sometimes serve the purpose of reducing headcount without having to publicly announce layoffs.
It's a mistake to view this from the perspective of productivity and whether or not someone can do their job at home or not. Clearly they can. We kept these companies alive by WFH during the pandemic. But they simply don't care.
RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs. People have moved. People may not be able to come back. People may simply not want to. Some of those people will quit. And that's cheaper than a severance package.
We are in permanent layoff culture now. Why? To suppress wages and get more work for no extra compensation. 5% of the staff gets fired? The other 95% has to do their work for no extra money AND they're not demanding pay raises. Win win.
Over time profits have a tendency to shrink and the only way to maintain the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is, ultimately, by raising prices and cutting costs. I wish more people realized this is all that's going on.
There is a middle ground though between "employees can't be trusted" and "all is well". It's possible for there to be a genuine difference in affordances such that people are more productive in some places than others. I think many people would be less productive in a dank basement than in a pleasant office, but then again maybe you don't want it to be too cushy or productivity may go down. I don't think it's realistic to expect everyone to be equally productive in all environments.
That said, I share your fear that all such considerations are just a smokescreen. In a larger sense the entire issue of "productivity" is a smokescreen. We don't need "more productivity". What we need is for people to be happy, and potentially that may be achieved by reducing productivity in some ways.
that is irrelevant to company management - in so far as that happiness has negligible effect on productivity.
However, from anecdotal evidence i've gathered (only sample size of 5-7 or so), in office has been more productive, but they (with the exception of one, who lives 5 mins from their office) all dislike RTO and would've preferred WFH; but not enough to quit over it as it's not a 5 day mandate, but a 3-4 day mandate.
That's right, that's why a lot of company management needs to be smacked down and if necessary fined and jailed. That laser focus on productivity is a cancer on society.
The problem we have is precisely that we consider things like this "policy disagreements" even when they're happening on a massive scale and causing enormous harm to society. If we're talking about some small company where the manager decides to push a bit harder, okay. But when it comes to multibillion dollar companies shoving their profiteering mindset out on everyone, it's no longer just a matter of internal company policy. Poisoning society with a single-minded focus on money is in its way as bad as pollution, and it needs to be stopped.
Only a 100 years — the whole history before that was working in the vicinity of a home, it does feel natural to return to that. Instead of anvils, we hit keyboards and instead of swords produce alignment, but either way it brings food to the table and allows flexibility in work-life?
Not in tech but was a teacher for decades. My first teaching job in early 80s of the last century had a requirement that teachers live within 5 miles of the building.
In general; perhaps a return to guilds? Apprentices? In an area of my city that has a lot of small craft workshops (and, yes, a few have anvils) there are 'work-live' units being built that have workshops on the ground floor and living accommodation above.
Noisy open spaces with many people talking at the same time and people coming in sick with contagious respiratory infections is not really a recipe for productivity independently of commute.
"Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them."
They are forcing them back into the office, which was pretty much the norm pre-covid. Having hard to fire employees isn't a good thing for the company or the well-being of other employees, when dealing with a bad employee.
If you want to work from home forever, contract with a company, and put it in your contract. This is what I've done for over a decade now.
Who says I only have one client? It's also one of the reasons that it's so difficult to actually start a company in many of these countries, and the economic landscape consists of large multi-national corporations and the government.
It's also not illegal (at least in the US), if you have your own LLC/company.
This kind of thinking is why I've had steady work while working remotely for many years and we see articles like this crying about companies taking away remote work.
Congrats on your work ethic. But consider that this may simply not be the case for every working adult on earth, and may not even be true for every working adult in your company.
Not everyone is like you. I am, but I know people (some of whom are former and current coworkers) who are much more easily distracted, and are meaningfully less able to compete their work in a timely manner when they work from home.
I'll probably be downvoted, but I just don't think most of these execs are engaging in some larger "authoritarian" play with these moves (maybe some are, but I think incompetence is more likely than malice in most cases). But maybe I'm naive.
As one point, consider the case of Tokyo's "Manuscript Cafe" [0] where patrons intentionally visit to have a cafe owner "force" them to compete a task they may have been procrastinating on. I read this as: being in a "work" location surrounded by other working people is conducive to productivity for some people.
I think it's only a small portion of WFH advocates who say that everyone should be forced to work remotely. Most want each person to have the ability to work the way that's best for them.
The crux of this is the way everyone is at their best is different per person.
Work from office is the brute force solution - if it’s the hammer, flexible work is the scalple.
Not every org has managers capable of welding a scalpel instead of a hammer, or who have time to be surgical even if they have the ability. I accept this reality.
The reality is that middle managers are completely useless, but to justify their usefulness they have to force people to come to the office, to reprimand them if they don't strictly follow the schedule, to hold meetings to pretend they're useful by knowing what their team is doing, etc. They have to act as control agents: checking, monitoring, producing unnecessary reporting (a legacy of slavery) just to prove they exist in the organizational chart. The office is a theater where everyone pretends to be busy (especially them), but that's hard if the offices are empty. It's a system where we try to convince ourselves of their usefulness, which pushes them to fill the void in order to maintain a hierarchy that serves more to prevent people from working peacefully than to organize anything.
At work, we have the opportunity to choose. Many people are like you and find that going to the office helps their productivity and mental health. Most of us (including me) visit the office only a few times a year.
I think having the choice is great. Although it comes with its own challenges, it works really well when you establish the right culture.
Luckily that's what's happening here, just at a company level. Plenty of companies are remote only or remote friendly. Hopefully people who prefer remote work can leave here and find work at one of those companies, and maybe people who prefer in person work will find their way here.
I put this in the same bucket as the horrifying "996" trend, or even consultancies that require 80-100% travel. If you want to broadcast that you have a toxic work culture, all I can do is applaud your honesty and look elsewhere for work.
That’s what my company does, and none of the engineers ever come in. My manager comes in when he has meetings, and I’ll go in sometimes, but I’m usually alone. None of the benefits of collocation with all the of downsides of an office.
I find that office days work a lot better. Everyone comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays or something.
Your initial post was about there being choice. Now it appears that the upside of the office is the others being there.
I can understand that some people like the physical distinction between "work" and "home". My boss is like that, and he would actually go to the office during covid when no one else would be there. He lived alone in a comfortable apartment, so there wasn't even a question of loud kids / no space for a desk. It obviously never came up that we should also show up. He sometimes wants us to come in the office, all the at the same time, for some form of all-hands meetings, but he doesn't just drop them out of the blue: we plan these together, and they don't happen on a fixed, tight schedule.
The company has now moved to a "flex office" scheme. I was already not very happy having to go in, but you can imagine I now abhor it. Having to share desks with people who don't give a shit about office equipment, having to clean up the screens because they figure it's fine to stick their fingers on them and having to use shoddy peripherals... And it goes on and on, you've read it on every HN post on the subject.
Luckily for me, they don't really enforce this, and I can still spend most of my days WFH and still have a semi-dedicated desk.
But your post is the reason why many people are up in arms against this whole "the office is better". Apparently, it's only better if you force everybody back in. So it's not really about "choice", but about having one's preferences be the "right" ones.
Yes, offices have downsides, but they also have benefits. To get the benefits the majority of a team needs to be in the same office. Having tried both, I prefer working in an office with coworkers around. The growing consensus seems to be that large companies agree with me. Are you saying you know more about employee productivity than Meta and Amazon among others?
If you’re unhappy and want to work remotely feel free to quit and go work in a remote company.
And on your comment about your office being disgusting, your coworkers being terrible, and your commute being awful: that’s a skill issue friend. My office is great, always clean and stocked with snacks; my coworkers are awesome, very thoughtful people and i consider some of them to be my friends and we hang out outside of work; my commute is a 15 minute bicycle ride that gets my day started with some exercise. I might change jobs to somewhere that has more office days though.
I’m sure you can also find a company with a great office culture. I wouldn’t want to work from your company’s office either. That’s why I specifically look out for that when job hunting.
> If you’re unhappy and want to work remotely feel free to quit and go work in a remote company.
Couldn't this equally apply to you? Feel free to quit and go work in a fully office present company?
Your commute is a 15 minute bicycle ride, you want to force everyone else back to the office because you have a nice easy commute and you personally prefer it. And you're glad that this is now happening across the industry, again, because you prefer it.
Yes, I have quit a remote company because it wasn’t for me. I deliberately live somewhere with a good commute.
These are choices I made for myself. If you can’t make the same choices that’s fine, but don’t come in to every thread about RTO and start saying that I’m a lazy irresponsible disrespectful person because I prefer to work in an office.
I’m not saying every company needs to be like this, but that companies like this should be allowed to exist without you remote work zealots belittling everyone who works there. Go work somewhere else!
> I was already not very happy having to go in, but you can imagine I now abhor it. Having to share desks with people who don't give a shit about office equipment, having to clean up the screens because they figure it's fine to stick their fingers on them and having to use shoddy peripherals... And it goes on and on, you've read it on every HN post on the subject.
The company I work for has a reservation system for desks.
More than not the desks are disgusting. I'm talking about some suspicious matter that might be food or nose bigger on the greasy keyboard. Keyboard and mouse are flimsy office staple crapware and we have to use Citrix even though we are within the company network.
For fuck sake either go back to the old days where a person had their own desk they can personalize or let me work from my place.
I feel what you are proposing is the worst of both worlds.
The company still needs to pay a full office (decreasing chances that money will be used for home office benefit or raises), people are still forced to live somewhat close to the office, not realizing the biggest benefit of remote work: living where you want, close to the people you care and freeing up money and time.
If working together really helps, it's enough that those who think that coordinate and agree on days to go to the office. If nobody agrees, than maybe the benefits are only perceived or subjective?
I will be honest, I believe that lots of people go to the office because their 9-5 (+ commute) job made it impossible for them to maintain and cultivate social relationships outside work, which means they see the office as their attempt to escape loneliness.
I am not saying that's everyone, but that for many people is the case and that explains people non-stop interrupting, walking in on others, chatting etc., which is quite common in office environments.
That said, I think that remote work needs also a few key elements to succeed:
- a remote culture in the company (e.g., everyone understands flexibility in terms of working time, meetings are online-first, documentation and async work culture, etc.)
- a good space to work at home. I can't imagine working on a stool and a laptop like some people were forced to do during covid.
- discipline (e.g., not let work time bleed into personal time, blocking time etc.)
- good social relationships with friends/family. It can be very alienating otherwise.
It's snowing outside right now and I'm in the middle of a cubicle "bullpen" unable to see the outdoors. I bring up a camera view from home or one of the webcams around town. I hate it.
That’s only because you go to the office once in a blue moon. If it was your daily routine you’d get used to it and be productive there too, just maybe not as much as when you’re home.
Did you work in an office before covid? I’m sure your productivity wasn’t abysmal or you wouldn’t still be working in tech
My current job used to be fully in the office before covid. That was some 5 years, so yeah, I was pretty "used" to it. After covid, it stayed "flexible", where I mostly WFH. Before this job, I also used to work one where it was "flexible", with multiple WFH days.
Sure, I didn't do "nothing" while in the office, there was some productivity. I still manage to get stuff done when I go there. But the difference in productivity between when I'm home and when I'm in the office is abysmal.
I don't have to put up with my colleagues being on the phone all the time. I don't have to put up with a chair that gives me back pain, or with contorting myself to reduce the glare on my screens. I don't have to endure being squished in the metro for half an hour each way or get up at absurd hours to avoid that. I don't have to eat at random times or in front of my computer because the lunch corner is already full.
Could I "get used to that" all over again? I guess. People who need to take the local public transit "get used" to it being unreliable and a general PITA. Do they enjoy it? Would they be happier if they wouldn't have to put up with that? What do you think?
I think the general issue, as I alluded in an answer to another of your posts, is that there indeed are people with differing preferences. And we could have people do what they prefer. But problems arise when we each try to impose our approach to others. Want to go to the office because for some reason you prefer that? Enjoy! But then, don't turn around and say "yeah, but going at the office and being alone (presumably because the others hate going) is all downside without any upside, so everybody should come in".
I go to the office around one week out of every four, it's not that rare. Sure, there's some catching up, but not that much. Mostly it's the continuous interruptions that are never time boxed, the way they are when remote.
That’s odd, in my experience most engineers know to at least send a slack message first before talking to a fellow engineer in person, unless it’s an emergency.
> You would benefit from not assuming that everyone is the same as you.
I’m sorry if it came across that this was the point I was making. I was not. I acknowledge and understand everyone is different.
The point I was making was about trusting people to be responsible adults and do what is right for the productivity without dictating a binary decision.
People who are more productive at home should not be punished because others are not and likewise for the inverse.
I think this is a situation where you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Network effects mean that the more people are in the office the better. On the other hand, if even a single team member is remote then the entire team must adapt to that. If half the team is remote then I might as well stay home too.
I don’t want to have an office to go into. If that was the issue I could just get a shared office to work from.
I want to work at a company where most of my direct coworkers come to the office regularly.
I should get to have that. Not every company needs to be a remote or a flex company. If you don’t like RTO you can quit. Likewise for me, I’m not too happy with my current office situation, so I’m looking for a new job.
I disagree, and clearly most companies opting for some kind of RTO are on my side.
The biggest benefit of an office is collocation. People need to be forced to come to an office or they won’t do it, and team efficiency will go down.
Even if you think you’re performing well, the entire team suffers for it. Miscommunication happens. People get blocked for longer. Juniors can’t get the mentoring they need.
If you disagree that’s fine, go work for a remote company. But clearly the tide is turning against you with more and more companies enforcing RTOs.
The people that do the actual work dont want to be in the office surrounded by the slackers that for some reason 'require' other people around them to work. Theyre leaches. They drain energy me.
Then they are also not responsible enough to work at the office, you can't pay a nanny who sith with them and tells them to keep working 8 hours a day at the office anyway. Those people need to be let go because you can't trust them.
Actually, having people at the office often works like peer pressure in that people at least pretend to work around their co-workers. Something which doesn't exist at home.
A lot of people who prefer remote work have a superiority complex over their peers. They’re usually hard to work with and unreliable, and think that as long as they’re performing their individual tasks they’re allowed to be awful communicators.
I don’t know what you mean by today’s because most companies I’ve worked at have had pretty nice offices. Even the open space ones were quiet and spacious. The one exception was a startup at an incubator.
My last office job was in an old converted garment factory. Lots of space, we had our own desks. It was really nice. Sharing a table with someone is not as nice, and office mates are rarely tolerant of my model M keyboard.
Since I've been WFH for last 5 years I'm probably not the reason, although I get criticism on video conferences when I start typing without muting my microphone first.
My previous employer ran an experiment. They had us come in two days per week for six weeks and ran the numbers. We ended up going 100% wfh with a downsized office. We been planning to double our office capacity before the pan.
I’m convinced that more than half of orgs would see similar numbers if they cared to look. I bet a bunch of the ones mandating RTO see them but do it anyway.
The market will solve this problem eventually. In industries where WFH is more efficient, eventually the companies that go that route will outperform their peers. It’s inevitable really. It will take time because companies feel the need to use their offices while they have an ongoing lease, but when it comes time to renew the savings are difficult to ignore.
"We're also offering the option to transfer from the MPK to SF office for those people whose commute would be the same or better with that change."
So wait, you'll be able to switch offices even though your team might be in the second one?
What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?
>What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?
People have been asking that since companies started phasing out WFH after the pandemic.
I left my last company when they made me go to the office when I worked for a dispersed team, I was the only one in this office and the rest of the team was dispersed across multiple timezones. Every team meeting was literally a zoom meeting, and conference rooms were scarce so everyone just did zoom calls at their desk.
When I was WFH I didn't mind getting up in time for a 7:30am meeting to meet with the overseas team before they went home for the day, but I wasn't willing to leave the house at 6:30 to get to the office in time for that meeting, and I wasn't going to join a 7:30am meeting at home, then head to work after already putting in an hour of work.
My boss agreed it made no sense, but there were no exceptions to the rule -- I left before it became mandatory 5 days a week in the office.
The CEO made a big deal of going to the office every day so everyone should do it, but it didn't escape notice that the company literally opened an office just for the finance and executive team that happened to be in the same wealthy suburb that he and most of the other top execs lived. That would have turned a 45 - 60 minute commute into a 10 minute commute for him.
That timezone thing really threw one of my client's management for a loop. During covid they expanded some of their India and Philippians office presence and depending on what you're working on, you need to have regular communication with some of those folks. When they did full RTO they were trying to "make" some of the staff (engineering and management) come in at 5am so they could meet with the offshore staff before they went home but everyone bucked, as you'd expect. When folks were WFH they just went with it. Eventually executive staff just said "you guys figure it out". So they ended up changing the meetings from twice a week to once a month and now projects keep slipping deadlines, including one that went from approx on time to 2mo behind, and it's costing them serious revenue since they cant sell it yet.
You really love to see it. Its a wild waste but someone is going to eat crow eventually. You know I would like to see one of these trend followers literally eat a crow, wings and feathers all of it.
Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office and have desks near each other. People collaborate via in-person meetings, hallway conversations and general proximity.
During covid - hiring is mostly remote since companies figure they don't have to be constrained by geography anymore. Employees work at home and collaborate over Zoom meetings. It's difficult at first but everyone adjusts. Productivity is allegedly lower, partly due to the remote nature, partly because employees are slacking off.
Now - employers start mandating return to office. Teams are still distributed, so rather than collaborating via physical proximity employees have to spend their day trying to find meeting rooms and sitting on Zoom, just in the office instead of their homes.
Is the company actually more productive now? Some McKinsey consultant has a slide deck showing that it has gone up from 6.5 to 7.2, so the bosses all pat themselves on the back.
> Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office
Just a reminder that there were plenty of great distributed teams long before Covid. I had had only a few "in office" jobs in my pre-covid career (and generally found collaboration better on remote teams, though goofing off has a bit harder to organize).
I also find it funny that somehow software engineers completely forget about the existence of open source software which worked in a more extremely distributed fashion than any remote company I've worked for at a time when IRC and email where the only tools for remote communication. Most of the most used and most successful software was written by globally distributed teams that only met face to face every few years if ever.
This timeline you are presenting applies only to large corporate jobs, where my experience has been "work productivity" always takes a back seat to organizational theater.
Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast.
Hell, I had commit rights to a popular open source “AWS Solution” when I was there and it took so long to get something approved to be pushed into the mainline that I ended up forking it for individual customers (AWS ProServe) and then eventually getting most of it merged back in later.
Now that I’m not at AWS, even though I know the team there, I doubt I could get something approved to merge back in even though I was the third highest contributor to the project for awhile.
> Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast.
You want to actually compete for fast iteration? We'll happily take you on over at ardour.org ...
Yes, there are some FLOSS projects which may take a long time to approve PRs. Even in our case, that happens sometimes when someone proposes something we're not convinced by but also cannot reject immediately.
Meanwhile, it's not unusual for comments in our discourse server to lead to direct changes in the main branch within hours.
So while FLOSS may contain examples against distributed teams, it also contains very strong, and very numerous examples that argue in favor of it.
To be fair though. There was an AWS service that didn’t have Cloudformation support. It was faster for an SA at AWS to build out Terraform support for it and get it merged into the Terraform than it was for us to just wait on CD support.
Reading this made me wonder if I have an alt account that I forgot about, because this is exactly how I think about our current state.
Hey, remote work isn't productive, lets go into an office and push all our code to github and deploy to Linux (both largely developed by distributed teams, thankfully without Zoom).
But you are right, organizational and productivity theater dominate at many companies.
None of these executives are using data driven decisions. It’s said as much in the memo. It’s vibes based.
I suspect there’s more at play with this. Maybe they’re expecting attrition from this and that’s their actual goal. They never reveal their core intentions.
Many executive jobs are little more than “being in the office” - they have to “go to work”. This leads them to think presence = work being done - they don’t know what actual work or productivity is. If they don’t have people present to lord over then their job starts to be seen for what it really is… a suit and tie in an office and nodding while saying “hmm” at meetings.
My company's CEO comes from the sales world, and I imagine that's the case in many companies making these RTO decisions. His idea of getting work done is getting everyone in a room together, having some handshakes, sitting down, and talking something out. This is not what getting work done looks like to software engineers, and many other IC positions. The blanket RTO policies come from a lack of understanding how other people & roles work best.
This. The actual numbers show that remote workers are more productive and that fully remote companies generate outsized returns when compared to companies that RTO. Executives know this and chose to ignore it.
This is about the appearance of doing something, not actually doing something.
The real underlying reason is easy. You know how to really excel as a developer, you pretty much have to be in for love of the craft? Management's the same way, but instead of a focus on building software, it's a focus on fulfilling a sense of power. People who are motivated by the pursuit of power put more effort into achieving positions of power, until basically any position of power is filled by the power hungry. It's a fundamental failure of every hierarchy. Sometimes there are temporary exceptions, but over time everything reverts to the mean.
In office, managers get to look out over their little fiefdoms. It's a physical space, with physical people, and it's theirs. And their competitors (other managers) can see their domain, and understand where they stand in the pecking order. In WFH settings, the whole thing becomes far more abstract. The manager's desire for elevated position isn't met, and they become paranoid that their competition can't see their status.
Is it so hard for them to say, FU, office time now because I like it, or because we want to force attrition, or we bought all this RE and by god we are going to use it?
I mean, if they give the honest non vibe reasons, it would be the same, but at least honest.
Wall Street doesn't care as long as the stock goes up.
Customers don't care as long as they get the product.
And employees can't do anything other than vote with their feet.
I work in a post Covid office and even with about 1 to 6 ratio of desks to rooms, along just as many fart pods, it can be a struggle to find space during peak hours.
Do you really have one desk per six rooms? That's pretty sparse 8)
Now the real issue is: what on earth is a fart pod?
Anyway, my (quite literally mine as in I'm the MD) tiddly company still clings to the notion that remote working is a good thing, in general. Pre-pandemic I was a sceptic and post-pandemic: I'm happy that a lot more remote working happens.
There do need to be additional controls but not of the intrusive, automated variety. I deliberately ring people up and encourage using the dog and bone and frown on email for immediate requirements.
It is a fact of modern corporate life that people will use email as it was intended: a reliable store and forward communication mechanism. A side effect is that what should be sorted out now can be ... legitimately ... punted off into tomorrow.
Not the OP but I think they mean those little phone booth pods. For if you want to join a call but you're the only one from that office so taking up a meeting room makes no sense. In our place they're tiny and stuffy (probably to prevent people hoarding them all day!). And if you fart in them it will probably hang around a long time :)
A lot of us have worked remote for a long time - I did it 2004 - 2007, and 2015-present. Sometimes across many time zones. The issue is with (lack of) leadership, and specifically lack of accountability for leadership.
> Is the company actually more productive now? Some McKinsey consultant has a slide deck showing that it has gone up from 6.5 to 7.2, so the bosses all pat themselves on the back.
Any productivity increases come from the fact that some employees would rather quit than come back to the office. Which makes it seem like less people do the same amount of work. Until they get overworked and output plumments. But that will land outside of the measurement window.
My personal experience has been that teams were not in close physical contact since about 1994. Basically since the internet became ubiquitous. In 1999 I was working in an office in Silicon Valley and realized that I never sat across the table from any of the people I was working with. Some were in other buildings around the campus. Some were in France. Some were in the field. Some were down the hall on the same floor, but if you wandered over to talk to them chances were they weren't in their cube. So I decided to move to Montana. COVID occurred 21 years later.
> What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?
The illusion of control? I mean we can pretend we don't know what this is about (well it's probably also about encouraging a reduction in force), but we do know right?
By far the people who bemoaned working from home the most were people whose job doesn't typically involve any actual "work". Not saying that there weren't exceptions, but the vast majority of working engineers I knew rejoiced in finally getting heads down time, while everyone whose job is primarily "performance for leadership" hated how difficult it was to perform visible theatrics on a camera.
Especially in large orgs "leadership" and "team success" are largely about optics. Being seen working in the office late is so much more important than getting any actual work done. It's only in small companies where actually shipping something has any value at all.
What I don't understand is why we still pretend like this is a mystery. Recognizing this I've completely avoided working for large orgs, and continue to enjoy remote work we're I can be valued for the results of what I build (well there's always a little theater) over office productivity performativity.
It's mystifying, but pretty much the entire tech leadership class has a deep conviction that taking Zoom calls on Airpods from your desk or a random corner of the office is the ideal way of working.
in case this is not sarcasm... tech managers != tech leaders.
most are one, some are neither, and a small minority are both. i have works for more than 20 tech managers in 30+ years, have managed technologists (ops, app-dev, network, infra, etc.) multiple times, and have hired and fired tech managers. i can count the genuine tech leaders+managers i've met on one hand. fewer around than ever nowadays.
> in case this is not sarcasm... tech managers != tech leaders.
I agree that being management doesn't make one a leader. Anyone who has been in the industry for five, ten years knows that a leader may or may not have a management title.
However. It has been the fad for many, many years now for Management to call itself Leadership. [0] This makes it slightly ambiguous, but not at all incorrect to refer to the "management class" as the "leadership class".
[0] I guess their little, tiny, incredibly fragile egos got overly bruised by the years of derogatory commentary aimed at clueless managers, and they -because of their tiny, inadequate brains- decided that A Big Rebrand would change the nature of reality.
i understood that reference... and, like Wash, feel like i'm "flying" a stone at gravity's whim while i pretend to be in control. tech leadership at a lot of corps do the exact same thing most days. a good reason to find your tribe asap, get out of corp, and assert some control.
I interviewed there in 2024. Said no because they said I would have to commute from SF to Menlo Park 4 days a week. They explicitly said I could not work from the SF office before I even asked.
That doesn’t make sense. In 2024, you could choose any location while matching. You just wouldn’t get any matches if there was no one hiring in that location (or if your profile wasn’t suitable to any, etc.). Your recruiter was being stupid or failing to communicate effectively.
There is no benefit to you. That's the point. RTO is about your employer taking more from you and giving you less. Back in the school playground we used to squabble over who is "it" or had the biggest conker or something equally pointless. There is this belief that some day people grow up. Sadly, that day never actually comes.
One of the teams at my workplace has 5 members in 5 different offices. They’re still forced to come to office and attend calls via Microsoft Teams from their respective offices than from their homes.
These are reasons I can think of - they want to prevent people from doing second job, they want to maintain commercial real estate prices (even if it is artificially propped up) or most likely, it is just the good old ego thing (“you work for me, I make you do things just because I can”).
They most likely have a long-term plan to realign team boundaries with office locations, but want to minimize the short-term disruption for people who've moved around the Bay Area based on current working schedules.
I doubt it. A company that is doing RTO is also a company that is aggressively offshoring and expecting you to spend your early mornings/late nights on IST friendly calls. It's just a general turn against US-based software engineers as belts tighten and the balance of power in the labor market shifts.
The vast majority of American software companies worked from the office in 2019. I understand and acknowledge that some people advocated for remote work even then, but I don't understand this idea that CEOs disagreeing can only be explained by belt tightening and disrespect for engineers.
Working from the office was of a completely different nature in 2019 when your coworkers were also there. By scattering headcount around the world, tech executives have fully committed to distributed teams that communicate by video call. The question now is whether you join video calls from home, or from a "hub" that hosts a minority (or perhaps none) of their other participants.
There is no sign of a return to 2019 levels of Bay Area or even US share of headcount.
As the memo says, it achieves "Building a Winning Culture"; Mosseri's judgment is that "we are more creative and collaborative when we are together in-person".
Yeah, that might be the long-term idea, but most likely it will take multiple quarters of internal mobilities to achieve the final shape during which they're forcing people to come to the office and having all meetings and team interactions on a call.
Suboptimal decision in my opinion.
Isn't this the same story for every moderately large company that did RTO over the last few years? It's not about efficiency, it's about shaking out some people by forcing them back into an office.
Around 2023 I was working at a company that was, at the time, just threatening RTO, and when hiring we had to decide if it was worth it to hire someone who (might) report to a different office in a different time zone. Which was not an issue at all a month before, when the company was still committed to being fully remote. The hours talking about it were a waste of my life for what, in the end, didn't even matter because they laid off most of the team six months later.
The concern is reasonable, but I'm not sure there's a great way to make people act as though RTO is happening other than actually doing the RTO. A number of companies never said remote work was going to be long-term in the first place, yet still had employees moving around randomly based on an assumption that peak Covid norms were the new status quo.
Sure, you're still effectively working remotely by being in two different offices, but The vibes are totally changed and the seats are warmer now with all those asses in them! And yes, yes your boss is working from some expensive resort in Tahiti and the CEO is in an undisclosed location on his yacht, but they're totally on board!
It’s called soft launching. Obviously it would be better if everyone was in the same office, but some people might have moved in the remote years and now their commutes are longer. So you accommodate for those people by letting them go to another office. Going forward hiring for teams is going to be collocated, so this problem solves itself with time.
My RTO'd team of 13 is distributed across 3 office and not evenly distributed (8, 4, 1) so the probability of the person you need being in the same physical office is ~43% instead of the 0%. So overall it's better if you value in person and I say this as the 1
There's a 100% chance that you can't work in person with your full team, so if you think in-person work is important I'm not sure how overall it can be better value, since you won't get that.
Stap into any office? It’s full of random people, and it’s full of noise. I’ve not seen places where the knowledge work wasn’t set together with the noisemakers.
I feel a lot of the noise complaints are due to open plan offices.
I've worked at a cubicle farm before. Partitions were high enough to avoid being able to see people in a sitting position, but high enough that you can still stand up and ask your neighbor a question. The cubicles were spaceous, had ample desk space and didn't feel claustrophobic or "caged in" at all. If anything, it felt like I had my own little space that I was in control of.
The partitions had steel sheets in them to allow people to use magnets to hang up documents/whatever. My cubicle walls were covered in [documents and datasheets](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzIxZmIzYjEtZGMyZi00...). Some of my colleagues had extensively decorated their cubicles with photos and tchotchkes. Others had their entire desk space littered with PCBs and tools.
Managers got cubicles on the sides of the building with windows, theirs were larger and had higher partitions, with a window filling in that extra height.
The extra desk space was great. I worked as an embedded SWE and I often needed the space for tools and the devices I was working on. The few times I needed an oscilloscope, I could easily find room for it, no need to move my setup to a lab.
Cubicles get a bad rep. It's actually quite a nice way to work, if executed properly, that is.
That said, I did have noise issues before. But that was always the same colleague. She luckily only came in on Wednesdays. She totally lacked the concept of an indoor voice while on the telephone.
A cubicle had more space than I got in most jobs. In one I even ended up switching headphones because the sound leakage from my headphones was too loud for others
Dude you’re describing Initech from Office Space. Kudos for making it sound legit and vague enough that it did take me until the end to fully identify it. But there’s no mistaking “Nina speaking. Just a moment…”
I'm old enough to remember having an individual office (and, a bit later, two-person offices). Great for collaboration, because it had a whiteboard and enough space/furniture for a few people to huddle, and for focused individual work, and for meetings with remote people without disrupting anyone and without taking up a meeting room. Nowadays we have unforced poor conditions and outcomes, mostly for pretend savings on facilities.
And, of course, serendipitous collaboration rarely happens when everyone is sitting with noise cancelling headphones, focusing on hitting their ambitious individual goals for the quarter/half/year.
Booking.com had low-noise offices back in the late 2010s. Engineering, product, design. Nobody taking calls on their desk, that was rude. All meetings in well-isolated rooms, some well placed noise barriers. It was pretty quiet even in an open office floor with 400 people.
> What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?
You'll cross-pollinate across functions. Or at least increase the chances of that happening. Not saying that's worth the tradeoff. But my time in the office often finds serendipitious value in random off-team conversations, not scheduled time.
I am currently an engineer at Meta. No one in my office is cross pollinating among different teams. In fact most of us are not even talking to each other unless there’s a dedicated meeting time for it. This whole thing about collaborating is better in person has never been my experience, because the collaboration (at least for engineering) is most of the time better done in a document.
There are, however, a few times when getting together and discussing something in person is valuable, but this is no more than maybe a couple times a month. I can definitely see this being different for other roles.
> I am currently an engineer at Meta. No one in my office is cross pollinating among different teams. In fact most of us are not even talking to each other unless there’s a dedicated meeting time for it. This whole thing about collaborating is better in person has never been my experience, because the collaboration (at least for engineering) is most of the time better done in a document.
I worked at Meta nee Facebook from 2013-18, and back then there were no documents, and the only way to figure stuff out was either spelunk through the source code, or talk to people in person. So I was very surprised that they ever said they'd be doing remote, and entirely unsurprised that they are moving back towards the office.
That being said, there was no tracking of in office/remote days, it was just expected that you'd work from wherever worked best for you but (almost) everyone was based out of an office.
> most of us are not even talking to each other unless there’s a dedicated meeting time for it. This whole thing about collaborating is better in person has never been my experience
Obviously varies by culture. And while I've never worked for Meta, I've been at your Mountain View and New York campuses more times than I care to have been. Everything–including communal spaces–seems laid out for individual work. (This was true before the metamates nonsense, though that obviously accelerated it.)
Are the worker bees really cross polinating? I don't even get to choose what to work on, my manager and tech lead tells me what to do and all of that is approved by the director. The everything becomes an okr and it's a huge deal to pivot half way through the half. I'm told this is pretty typical.
> which kind of companies or offices do these things happen?
Frankly, the ones that tend to play, goof off and shoot shit together. And it’s not necessarily companywide nor evenly distributed. But it’s something I value tremendously in work cultures, both because it’s productive and fun.
I have quite literally never, not once, "cross-pollinated" ideas in office. I'm not saying it has never happened, but anecdotally even when my entire team is there, other teams are simply not working on the same scope of work that we would be at the time, so there's no cross pollination of any kind.
I mean, I've heard good ideas being discussed, but at the end of the day we all have our in-progress projects and tickets, and future projects already planned out, so those good ideas never make it to fruition because everyone is busy anyways and doesn't have the time or resources to do anything about it. So in reality, those "cross-pollination" talks become nothing more but socialization moments, which is fine, but to force everyone into a miserable commute just to achieve a bit of socializing is insanity to me.
And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week - kids to pick up from daycare, health issues to manage, a social life in the evenings, travel plans - basically the exact category that a company like Meta would want to replace with a younger, more exploitable bunch.
> And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week
Or senior people who have a dozen offers waiting in their inbox that they've neglected responding to because they're reasonably happy where they are...until the prospect of commuting.
That's not how the job market is right now. There's like 5 companies in the world that can compete on compensation while allowing remote work with meta.
I would take a lower comp for remote work and a better work environment. They will never pay me the amount that would make me choose 2h in traffic everyday instead of having enough time to cook breakfast to my family, take my kids to school, have lunch with my wife, etc.
I live in Utrecht and despite living very close to Utrecht Centraal, it still takes me 45 minutes to get to Amsterdam where my office is. Count late trains and general rush hour, so for me it can take 2h out of my day easily if I'm unlucky (thankfully where I work we count commute time into the work day, the very first time I saw my manager I saw him sprint out the door at 3PM on the dot because he had a lengthy commute lol)
Long commutes are not unique to the US. I'm spending 1.5 hours one way in the UK. It's depend on your personal circumstances. If you are young and single it's usually possible to rent a studio or a room with reasonable commute time. E. g. if you have a family and/or own a house then moving close to the office in response to RTO mandate may not be an option.
For tech hubs? Because tech hubs tend to be in some of the most traffic nightmare cities. I have worked in DC and Atlanta. My commute for all my jobs except 1 was an hour. The one exception was 20mins because it was a small weirdly placed company that just happened to be in the suburb one over from me.
For all other jobs, I had to commute to a business district I didn't live close to because business district and low price (when young) or great schools (when older) don't mix often.
Yeah, I know the median commute in these areas is low, but they are counting retail workers and teachers. I bet the median for tech workers is pretty high because of the reality of how they tend to be placed.
In a real tech hub, it's definitely going to be a longer commute. Nashville, for instance, is not a tech hub. Yet it has some of the worst commute times for people who have an office there.
Dozen offers to try to go through 5+ stages of recruitment process without any feedback and possibility to be ghosted after each person. How good senior people are with leetcode?
Yeah but RTO takes real time and money. Sure you can earn a paycheck, but if you're commuting 2 hours a day total, you're still losing those 2 hours until they fire you. And that kind of stinks. And that's assuming you don't need to move. Moving for a job you hate is the worst.
Reduce workload, get in a bit later and go home a bit earlier.
Avoid attending meetings involving people dialling in from a different office (that’s not in person collaboration, so it’s worthless work. Sorry, I don’t make the rules) and be present at the meeting (keeping the chair warm it’s all it counts after all) while browsing HN in the ones you really cannot get out of it.
There have never been "company hours" in tech. Until recently (before badge tracking became a thing) asking your manager what time you were expected to come in and leave would be met with blank stares. "We don't enforce set hours here, just get your work done". And conversely "I came to the office and worked 8 hours a day like you asked" is never going to be accepted as an excuse when you fail to meet your targets at the end of the quarter or miss a page in the middle of the night. Heck you can't even work on your own projects after hours or patent your own ideas because the knowledge in your head is company property. Simply put - they are hiring you for your skills and your output, not for warming a seat at an office for 8 hours a day. Tech companies have always treated employees like adults and expected adult behavior in return, and both sides have benefited greatly from this arrangement. Sadly it seems like the new crop of tech leadership seems adamant on making their companies more like a call center.
So you'd think right? Nobody would like anything better than to just get output without worrying about hours or location or anything like that. But if you were in a management position when WFH started, you would've seen velocity go through the floor and stay there. And to be fair, there are absolutely a limited set of employees who are perfectly capable of working remotely with no issues whatsoever. But for the majority.. the feedback we've gotten is there is too much temptation to just do the laundry or dishes or "my wife needs a hand with X", and output just continues to stay low. And while it would be great to separate employees into groups based on who can be trusted to WFH and who can't, it feels too discriminatory and would cause way too many headaches.
So, as I'm sure you've seen in the news stories over the last few years, basically every large organization everywhere has enacted some sort of RTO mandate. I'm sure there are a few smaller startups kicking around who want to keep trying things the other way, but for the most part, the industry has spoken. We can keep complaining about it but short of another pandemic it's unlikely covid-style work is going to make a comeback IMO.
> But if you were in a management position when WFH started, you would've seen velocity go through the floor and stay there.
I spoke with my manager about this. This wasn't true for our team, and it wasn't true for any other team in our (fairly sizable) division. I didn't give a shit about any other group, so I didn't ask.
If your employees are spending their days fucking around instead of working when they're working from their home office, I'm here to tell you that when they were in the corporate-leased office, they were browsing Reddit on their phone or off on yet another coffee break to "get the pulse of the office". Slackers and shirkers are gonna slack and shirk, no matter where they are.
The thing to do is to fire folks who aren't doing enough to justify their pay. That's something that hasn't ever changed.
The practice of an entire working population commuting from an hour+ away to a few buildings in the center of the city, sitting on their ass for 8 hours a day, eating a packed lunch, and commuting back home is at most a couple hundred years old. But sure, go on about your "hundreds-to-thousands of years of history".
Calling out every abrasive comment would take more effort than I'm willing to expend, and would itself be pretty abrasive. So I picked the comment where they called Covid (the event where many people died, had their businesses ruined, etc.) "fun" over the one that mentioned work-life balance.
The person you're replying to asked if it was fun. Consider that my sarcasm was meant to be sort of tongue in cheek and not incredibly serious, which is a very different kind of tone from other comments in this chain.
Honestly, if the bus/delivery driver needed a mid-shift break to deal with some life stuff, yeah by all means, I personally think they should be able to do that kind of stuff (though maybe we start by giving them bathroom breaks?). The business hiring them should adapt.
Looks like you don't know how to properly manage your team.
I had a similar argument with a previous manager I had. Careerist dude started on some bullshit management-speak on measuring workers by ass-to-seat-hours while he had no idea I had a management degree from one of the most respected business colleges in my country. Had to rebuke him with Business Management 101.
Of course, this definitely contributed for him pushing me out afterwards, as small minds can't handle being wrong, and he even had the gall of trying and pushing me an unethical assignment. I got out with a nice severance package, and from the grapevine (it's a small community down here after all!) I hear every quarter somebody quits from his team or moves to a different one.
You think this is the tech job market to leave your job, and then what? Try and get in at someone else about to return to office? Freelance? IDK about anyone else, but I haven’t considered a contractor since AI Coding hit hard, I had poor experience with contractors anyhow, now I’m not sure I see the point of rolling those dice again.
It’s kind of a soft market unless you are working directly on AI models.
So, is this IG looking to cut fat by keeping what they considered the most committed employees? Maybe. Is it because most of us can admit that it takes the right people to work remotely and that isn’t a majority? That’s more my take.
We are observing the most valuable people leaving, because they easily can get a job at place where they care more about value you get to company than the bonus you will get as C-level after firing highly paid workers.
In the cases we know (I have a group of people working in different small and medium corps in Poland and Germany) - the people that are staying are either too lazy to change work or they are just not enough to get remote job.
If you’re the C-suite making this decision without realizing your best remote workers will quit even in this job market because they’re your best employees, you shouldn’t be the C.
If you do realize this, as you most definitely should since it is not rocket science in any way, your projections about short and long term value of institutional knowledge these folks take with them better be accurate.
On number one, sure, take all the risk yourself. It pays off sometimes. And when it comes to hiring people you need to work as hard as you do, you can tell them they can work from home.
It's unfortunate there wasn't more resistance by tech employees to RTO post-covid. It seemed like one of the very, very rare solutions to the systemic problems of housing and commuting in the US. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that WFH effectively doubles or even triples your total compensation when it means (a) actually affordable housing and (b) no time/money lost to commuting, especially if you have kids.
Because there's a five-letter scare word you're not allowed to say that would be required for tech workers to have any power over their managers, but that sort of collective action is dead on arrival in the current milieu. If you don't want to go back into the office, you have the power to enforce that, but you have to like... work together.
even though biden's already left I am still quite surprised how little views his pro union videos got https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZpUD9KgYc4 this video was on whitehouse's youtube channel
I recently took a union software job after I was laid off due to the CEO having a tummy ache one morning. Many of my new co-workers were explicitly interested in the company _because_ there was a union.
It's very imperfect but such is life. It's all new to me but here's what I've seen so far:
a) Employees have a voice. That doesn't mean that management is forced to do anything, but at least it's possible to be vocally opposed to eating a shit sandwich.
b) We are protected by a contract. If you are called into a police station, you ask for a lawyer for protection according to the law. If an employee finds themselves in an adverse meeting/situation with management, they can call in a steward to protect them according to the contract.
c) The union is us, the workers. We self-organize. It simply gives us a structural framework to work within. An entity for my employer to recognize. It's not ran by an authoritarian who waves a magic wand to make things happen.
That's it. There seems to be this weird idea that I can screw around for 40 hours a week and have the union protect my job. The union told us that we very much still have to do our jobs (duh).
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To go on a little side tangent. Some countries, such as Finland or Norway, have no minimum wage because unions are (a) everywhere and (b) (allowed to be) powerful enough to protect workers. Honestly it's the best of both worlds. Less government intervention but at the same time workers hugely benefit from collectivization. They don't need to beg their politicians to raise wages - they do it themselves because they are given the power to do so. In the US, we instead rely on the lizards in DC to protect our wages because unions have been so stripped of power.
I dunno where you live but in my part of the country getting into union work is the best way to prosper and succeed as just an average person. Maybe that isn't true for tech work at the moment, but union carpenters, plumbers, HVAC, pipe fitters, arborists, linemen, auto and factory workers, all make significantly more doing union work with better and safer work conditions.
This is a frustrating comment. Please elaborate with a real point! Just highlighting something that used to be the case, does not imply that it should always be the case, nor does it imply that it reflects the case now.
I think most engineers/developers/scientists would welcome, or at least be fine with, being a member of a guild like writers and actors. Their parent poster is suggesting that a traditional US union is the way, which I personally don't agree with and don't think I am unique in that regard.
To be honest, I'm not sure I know the difference. I got invited to SAG-AFTRA after doing a TV commercial and it seemed pretty union-y to me. Not that it's inherently a bad thing, and maybe I'm wrong in that there are differences but not aware of them.
Could you say more about the differences you see between a traditional US union and a modern day guild?
What I meant is that something like SAG-AFTRA provides some benefits and sets minimum standards for a work environment but does not limit your ability to negotiate a higher rate for your work, does not require promotion (whatever that would mean in this context) based on seniority, etc.
In the US, doctors, lawyers, and to some extent professional engineers and other licensed professions operate under a somewhat similar model in that they restrict supply of that class of labor through some sort of accreditation, apply minimum standards for the profession, and otherwise stay out of your business for the most part.
Yeah, speak for yourself. I'd love to work at a place where I can't be fired because my manager had a bad day and I didn't move the right Jira tickets around to his satisfaction, where I'm treated like a human being in stead of fungible cattle. I also don't want to go back into an office. Ever. But if people actually want to affect change at their workplace, instead of just kvetching, that's basically the only way to do it, short of praying to Money Jesus for another ZIRP boom like the 2010s (I'm not a praying man, but I wouldn't hold my breath).
I'm just saying, if workers want control over their working conditions, they have to recognize the power they have. It's up to them if they decide to wield it. You don't have to, and that's fine! Enjoy your long Bay Area commute.
Though yes, I'm not sure if that union still exists now. The point is that you do not have to prefer working at every company that has a union over every company that does not have a union. It's enough to prefer having a union over not having a union at any company you do work for.
No, seriously, literally what does Apple or Google have over Boeing as a company to work at? Compensation? If money is all that matters to you, then there are several Web3/AI/etc startups offering absurd cash comp that you can go and throw yourself at.
Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days.
> Better engineering culture.
Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days.
> Bosses with engineering chops.
Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days.
The rest of your list is just "money" written over and over and as I've already said, if that's all you care about, that's your prerogative but let's not pretend that makes somewhere a "good place to work".
So wait, your argument is that you actually think Boeing has a better engineering culture and smarter coworkers, than cream of the crop prestigious and high paying software companies.
You're just that certain that the vast majority of engineers don't care about money, and aren't competing to get in there? And instead work at Boeing. Where you think the engineering culture is better...even though their software has a reputation of being awful.
You must know a lot more than everyone here. You should really enligthen us. All those terrible products that all those people are using from Apple and Google.
On the contrary, I actually know that the median engineer at Boeing is working on much harder problems than the monumental amount of webslop that the median Google engineer is responsible for. And while the engineers at Boeing are not perfect on top of working under the constraints of the airline industry, I also have eyes to see the sheer enshittification of nearly everything that has come out of Apple and Google in the past decade. Google in particular - for goodness' sake just look at the state of YouTube web right now after their last "update", or the steady decline of Search, or the hatchet job they performed on apps like Fitbit after acquiring them - these are things we all know and bemoan even on here but sure, let's suddenly pretend that the company is a super bastion of quality. It's definitely not the name and the dollar signs flashing in front of the eyes.
As an aside, what I said is that if all you care about is money, then that's your prerogative. Plenty of us aren't slavering to work at The Empire Of Ads because they give free food. Apple at least has more dignity as a company, although outside of their silicon (which almost no software engineer is going to touch) they've been spinning the wheel for years papered over by vendor lock-in and their pricing strategy.
> All those terrible products that all those people are using from Apple and Google
If your argument is "well people use them", then I have some potentially really shocking news for you about Boeing products.
Now this is probably the part where you say a lot about MCAS without necessarily understanding what it is.
Not sure how it is in Nigeria, but in America people think much more highly of Apple products than recent Boeing planes. So by the logic of "Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days.", Boeing does much worse on that metric than Apple.
Not sure what countries are supposed to have to do with anything but if that's where we're taking it, America is full of people who think all sorts of nonsense that is barely rooted in reality. I don't really see how the opinion of a public that revels in ignorance and is easily led by the nose (and I'm aware that this applies on both sides of the Atlantic) is supposed to be relevant to an engineering discussion.
I guess at least you didn't bother trying to argue that Google is a bastion of high quality products
Because these mandates coincided with a recession and the worst tech job market in a couple decades, and saying no meant you'd potentially be unemployed for a very long time.
"coincided" is understating it; it is precisely the bad job market that leads to this sort of mandate, because employees have little choice but to go along. in a good job market companies are very willing to offer remote work as an incentive to join them rather than the competition.
Sad, because before COVID, no one at Meta cared where you worked as long as you were getting your shit done. There was never available meeting rooms, and the open floor plans were so loud, that people would spread out all over the campus and use single person VC rooms to communicate in.
Not directly but they do create an open and fair working environment for all.
Once you leave room for discrimination and bullying, everyone suffers because it makes company culture harder.
And it's not just about "quotas". That's an extreme-right talking point. Diversity done properly doesn't involve quotas. Those are just a way for companies that don't actually care about it to have an easy 'fix' to get their numbers to look ok but it's not actual diversity.
I'm part of a diversity team myself as a side role. In Europe luckily.
> And it's not just about "quotas". That's an extreme-right talking point. Diversity done properly doesn't involve quotas
At Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta, diversity programs were implemented as soft quotas. All this talk about "diversity done properly" is just so much noise when approximately all the largest companies aren't doing it that way.
Soft quotas are not great but at my work (also a huge multinational but headquartered in Europe) we just use stats as a guide. Obviously if a country has 30% people of a certain ethnicity and in your employ it's 2% you're doing something wrong. We use that to measure hoe effective we are at combating bias and prejudice, what works and what doesn't. I wonder if that's sometimes regarded as a 'soft quota' but it shouldn't be.
We don't fix this with hiring targets. We hit the root cause with training for HR and management (and also some for all employees in the yearly mandatory training package). Recognising hidden bias, challenging people to bconsider their reactions.
And then measure the performance with stats, but not just force them. That's lazy and only fixes the problem on paper. Window dressing. Diversity is more than the hiring process anyway, a huge part is discrimination on the work floor. Often not by managers but co-workers, so we give management skills to deal with that.
Maybe in US big tech this is common but those are all pretty immoral companies anyway. See how quickly they pivoted to sucking up to Trump. The world is much bigger than the US and big tech.
> Do you apply this to everything? Like say, a sports team?
No, at work where we have tens of thousands of people.
Sport is a voluntary thing, people just join it when they want (I guess, I'm not into sports, not watching nor playing).
> Anything impressive to show for it? Because it really seems like all this focus on diversity is your downfall not your strength.
Yes we have great quality of life. It's not all about money.
In fact I asked to move to a country where the wage levels are much lower, to have a better quality of life. Here around the Mediterranean the weather is better, people enjoy life more and take it slower. There's much more things to do in my free time that I enjoy. When I'm back in Holland I hate it, people are so materialistic. Always talking about their new car, how big their TV is lol. I don't even own any car or motor and my TV is tiny but I'm much happier here.
Also diversity is just a thing we do, we're not all about that. I am because I voluntarily spend part of my work time on it (LGBTIQ in particular). For most people in the company it's a message here or there, one little training per year and maybe a talk from one of us at the town hall meetings which are optional.
There's other similar programs in the company about sustainability and ethics.
They are merit based. Especially with DEI. It just aims to remove the common human bias to trust people more when they are more like us. With training and hiding names/photos during CV preselection. So it is only based on merit.
Tech companies spent a decade (since 2010), driving towards some belief that the entire world was going to go online and stay there. They also ammassed an insane amount of wealth in that time. Wealth that is now structurally tied to the stability of the entire financial system.
For whatever reason, investors get bored and want to move money around and so the tech companies, that built healthy, stable businesses, needed to keep that dopamine hit coming with new mega annoucements. What else is there to build? "Efficiency" is the current corporate white collar trend, because that's what investors are woo'd with. AI is the other new-new thing, but instead of a that next reason to reverse hiring trends, AI itself is built and sold as an employee replacement.
Anyway, the fact that there is an entire class of people in the US who feel and believe, it can't get any worse, are geniunely suffering in ways many of here on this forum can't even imagine. Definitely think it's unfair to put these two concerns in the same bucket.
Smells like management trying to recapture the glory days by brute force.
> "focus on building great products, not preparing for meetings"
That says it all. The intent is to try to spark the freewheeling, creative, startup days. Wouldn't be the first company that tries to reconnect with its startup roots. Won't be the last, either. Unfortunately, it never works, because those rockstar startup employees cashed out their stock and moved to the Napa Valley. Your workforce is now indistinguishable from IBM or Exxon Mobile. Good luck!
> Mosseri joined Facebook in 2008 as a designer and became Instagram's VP of product in 2018
OK, so... Employees are compelled to go into the office, so they can have better in-person collaboration. They are also encouraged not to go to meetings (aka in-person collaboration sessions), so they can have more focus time.
I haven't seen the Insta offices, but I would bet they don't have walls. In which case, you know where the best focus time is to be had? Out of the office.
Yeah those open floors are so terrible. When i started late 90s I had my own office when as an intern. Everyone just had a little office. You could close the door if you needed to focus and you could open it if you needed a chat.
Then came the terrible time of the cubicles and then the open floor which was even more horrible.
I really hate tech work these days. Also because it's not really tech anymore. I don't get to do the nuts and bolts, I just have to tick boxes in the crap cloud admin panels that Microsoft gives us. I wish I could do something totally different.
5 days is stupid. I am fully remote and I can see how face time is important. After a few years remote I am definitely feeling a little detached from the company. But 5 days makes no sense. I think 2 or 3 days in the office is perfect. You get the opportunity to talk to people and you have days where you can fully focus.
Most ridiculous is to have to come to the office and then talk to your distributed team members over Teams or Slack. Even more fun is to have them spread around the globe in different time zones .
5 days is just offensive babysitting level amount of butts in seats. People need room to run their lives, meet contractors, sign for a package, etc. 2-3 days in office is the perfect reasonable sweet spot.
Requiring 5 days in office is going to decrease their available talent pool to only get lesser talent who is desperate for any work and can't get any better offers.
Yep. I've been through almost exactly that, and know many other folks who have. If you're working in the US or other places that don't have really good labor regs, "RTO exemptions" are temporary, no matter what you're being told today.
Though, in my case bullet #1 was more like
No more remote hires. However, we will more than backfill the folks quitting or being laid off in the US and the EU with folks in India and China. We hope you enjoy the in-office synergy when communicating with your new teammates who are literally half a world away!
It’s amazing how much intense of a Scrooge McDuck vibes we’re getting from the MBA executive class.
Crank the screws, tighten the belt, offshore, increase profits at all costs. The next generations are going to have it rough since these elites have intentionally hoarded prosperity at the expense of their countrymen
I'm thankful I was "grandfathered in" by starting a remote role pre-COVID. Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if I'm more productive in an office (due to pressure to seem busy, which correlates somewhat with amount of time actually being busy) but I overwhelmingly prefer remote work.
I'm one of the rare remote in an office where most are full time there and I'm there one day a week.
I have no idea how they get anything done in there. I feel they only can focus before and after business hours.
So don't be so sure. Home has distraction when the mind is distracted. But once working I feel we are much more productive and capable due to long uninterrupted stints.
It does take discipline but that's what deadlines are for.
>Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if I'm more productive in an office (due to pressure to seem busy, which correlates somewhat with amount of time actually being busy)
As a hiring manager, I appreciate the honesty and nuance. There is so much bullshit about remote work from the people doing it that it’s a little too much “doth protest”.
“I get so much more work done and I cracked the code to productivity, and surely no one would abuse this system, especially not you ultra worker 5000. Anyone who disagrees with me is a threat to the oversightless system I have an I must try and protect this by attacking them.”
Depends what you see as “abusing” the system. By working from home, I can take a walk in the garden when I find it hard to think, it energises me. At my office I can (and do) take a walk in the car park, but inevitably I leave the office with a headache caused by constant noise and fluorescent lighting
At home, I can put my family first if needed. When I’m at the office and something comes up at the kids’ school that I need to deal with, it’s a mad dash to get away soon enough that I almost have to drop everything and run
The times working in the office has been good as a software engineer: when we are prototyping on physical hardware I do not have at home. That’s it
It’s great if people love to go to the office. That’s fine. It’s managers that enforce it who are the problem — the people who work for you aren’t children and if you feel like you can’t trust them to make the decision to work from home, why on earth would you trust them in your office?
You seriously think this clown cares about any of this? I don’t know a single person living comfortable life who woud speak like that, only some miserable sod living in a shoebox who hates everyone around them.
That’s a fancy “no u” but it doesn’t make any sense.
I have remote employees, and I have people I would never allow WFH because they can’t handle it.
I don’t care what you do. I’m explaining from the position of someone responsible for a team that MANY people who are strictest about WFH being absolute are the people abusing it. This shouldn’t even be remotely controversial… yet… all I see is more protest and digital foot stomping.
You're a hiring manager, obviously your perspective is warped. Naturally you want good little code monkeys who will sit at a desk and pump out code.
Nobody steps back and asks - wait, is that good? Is there a point where "productivity" becomes negative because we're pumping out shitty half-baked code from a workforce who despises everything the company stands for? Nobody asks, is it possible that employees who contemplate suicide every day might not make the best product.
?
No. They don't. It's work, work, work and the end result is a piece of software so unbelievably shitty and barely functional that you require a commission-based Salesforce of sleezebags to sell it to some poor soul who doesn't know the difference between Git and GitHub.
Ultimately, and I know this is very old-fashioned, your company IS your workforce. Keeping them happy makes a good product and keeps the profits flowing. Every company in the Golden Age of the American economy knew that. Few remember it.
Right, but if you didn't want code monkeys, you wouldn't be talking about productivity and getting your 8 hours worth.
The only people who think that engineers are actually doing a straight 8 hours of work are so delusional they're not worth mine, or anyone else's, breath.
Most of the time is spent thinking anyway. Coding is, like, 5% typing in a chair and 95% thinking about what to type. You don't need to optimize for the chair.
What's the fear with WFH? Your employees might not despise you? Your company might accidently create a culture that doesn't suck donkey dick? People might actually agree with your mission statement for once?
Is that really so bad? And all it takes is not intentionally fucking people up the ass. It's so easy, so accessible.
Yeah, people differ, and there are different forces that can increase and decrease productivity in an office and at home. If I'm honest with myself, being remote gives me more opportunity to slack off and do whatever I want, which often is not really working. But if I'm in an office I also am less able to get in a flow state.
An ideal working environment for me would probably be working from home, alone, perhaps with some stimulants (I have severe ADHD, or at least am diagnosed as having it and perceive myself as having), a close deadline, a lot of intrinsic motivation and interest in a task, and no distractions. In practice, most of the time I find working on a laptop at a library or cafe or on a laptop/desktop in an office does push me to do more work-related stuff more frequently on an average day, since I know people near me may notice I'm spending ages on Twitter or HN or whatever and that somewhat discourages me from doing non-work things.
I don't think you deserve to have been downvoted. I love having a work-from-home job and love that I was able to get one pre-pandemic, but I also don't necessarily blame higher-ups for wanting more people to work in an office. It's complicated.
1) A lot of informal (i.e., not in a scheduled meeting) chats are more valuable than meetings. They are much more rare when people WFH.
2) Many folks tend to be more distracted when WFH. TLs don't have a perfect vision into whether someone spent 4 hours on a bug (or a design doc) or 2 hours on the bug / design doc and 2 hours on online shopping / playing with kids.
It's quite confusing to me that none of the comments I saw in this thread don't discuss those factors (I'd be fine if people mentioned them and explained why they are not too important).
Obviously there are also factors in favor of WFH: commute costs, personal satisfaction (which may indirectly improve productivity and/or retention of the best people), noise in the workplace, lack of meeting rooms, etc. But it's far from obvious to me if, on balance, WFH or RTO works better for building a successful company.
I definitely agree with you about (1), though this can be somewhat mitigated by having a good culture of agreeing to hop into impromptu video calls.
(2) feels weird to me; if the work is getting done, is there an issue? Does it matter if I spend 4 hours or 2 hours on a design doc, if the result is a good design doc?
(2) At the office, it's harder to pretend that work took longer than it actually took. If you're done with the design doc in 2h, with colleagues sitting all around you, what can you do to pretend that it took you longer? Mess around with Confluence, pretending to work? You might as well move on to the next design doc, or find something useful to do meanwhile.
At home, you can just pick up the Xbox controller and say it took you 4 hours.
I like the comfort of WFH, and there are plenty of people (myself included) that are responsible enough to handle it, but the problem is that the average person isn't. And we all pay for it.
That's a very confident statement to make. My company is very much happy with remote working. 50% of my team aren't even in the country. Most other teams are the same. I don't feel like I'm paying any price for that.
Happy to hear that it's working out well for you, but there is always a cost. The less common successful remote work becomes across the industry, the more companies like yours stand out. And remote work goes back to being a premium, highly competitive perk, like it used to be in the past.
And I agree that remote work is perfectly possible with a good culture and responsible employees, but most companies don't really have the culture or hiring practices that optimize for that.
> The less common successful remote work becomes across the industry
You're presupposing your conclusion. I don't believe remote work is less successful. I think this is driven from angles such as:
* Managers who have made their career by visibility, struggling to adapt to a new normal
* A way to get rid of staff without paying severance
* Pressure from certain types of politician who have made up their mind (regardless of any evidence) that remote working is harmful
And others
It really is a shame that for once it felt like labour had something going their way, and somehow the leaders of capital have convinced us to fight each other on this, while they take it away again.
Have you not noticed management cracking the whip in this environment? 2 hours shopping could be 2 hours shipping code! Everyone has uniform maximum productivity every minute and anything short of 100% focus on work is time theft!
It's rather simple: You don't pay me to write code for 4/8/12 hours per day, you pay me to get a job done. If that job's worth $X to you, you pay me $X, everyone's happy. And that's exactly how it works in office, too. Ever notice that HN's busier during work hours than after?
If don't feel an employee's work output is worth their $X, tell them that. Then, if they suddenly improve, great. If they don't, fire them. It's really that simple. This is America, any obstacles to sacking incompetent employees are of your own design.
Oof my employer still lets us WFH 3 days. We actually signed a new contract for it just after the pandemic. They can't have everyone in the office anyway since they closed half the floors.
If they mandate this (not sure where they'd find the space!) I'll just refuse to sign the new contract. I'm in Europe so none of that "at will" stuff. If they want to let me go they'll have to give me a package for 15 years worked.
Ps I don't actually go twice a week right now ;) More like once. None of my team members are in my country anyway so what's the point.
That's nice but... These American Meta employees make twice or three times your salary (assume average Europe tech wages). The package you'll get for 15 years work will make up that difference for the past 6 to 12 months. I don't know many Americans who would half their salary to get your benefits.
Pay is relative because they have to live there too. Costs of living are much higher over there. Even just healthcare, here it's free (well, paid from taxes). In the US it's a big expense. Also they get much fewer holidays (I get more than a month's worth per year).
But I would not move to the US (especially now obviously) or be without job security for double the wage. Life for me isn't about making as much money as possible, it's about enjoying my life and money is just one of the means to do that. Time is another big one.
And like the other poster said, I don't know americans who work 20 years and retire. On the contrary most I know have a 200+k$ student loan pending back home or are shuffling debt from card to card to make it look like they are paying it off.
There are no Meta employees with $200k of student debt nor any shuffling debt from card to card, except those with addiction issues (addiction can consume any amount of money).
The thing about a social safety net is that it makes life better for poor people. That's good. Praiseworthy even. Laudable.
The negative impact on economic growth and wages for high earners means the American tech workers are just richer than European tech workers. Any other analysis is a combination of wishful thinking and pseudoscience, quite frankly. Economics is science, just like biology and mathematics and physics.
Fwiw, I know a bunch of American tech workers who worked 20 years and then retired. Pretty much every person who works for Meta can name ten people like that. Those people tend to retire in Europe, where they can enjoy free healthcare while living off the incredible amount of money they made when they were young.
this is such a weird response to me. Those American Meta employees may have more money, but it's not enough money to stop working and their lives are objectively worse. What's the point of money then?
Well... their lives are objectively better, so, I don't really know what to tell you. It's true that poor people in America live less well that poor people in Europe (though if European economies continue to lag, this may stop being true in my lifetime), but Meta employees in America have really good lives. They have massive houses, retire young with huge savings, and send their kids to elite private schools.
And perhaps most importantly - if they decide to switch to Europe life, they can, with extra money in the bank. While European tech workers can't afford to live the high life in America.
Tbh, I'm sure I'm going to get down voted to hell, but it's pretty amazing how many highly educated and otherwise intelligent Europeans just... don't believe in economics anymore when economics says their lives are worse than their peers in America. It's one of the major touch points of anti intellectualism in this forum.
What you are describing is only one way of living a comfortable life. It is not an "objectively better" life than someone who has enough money to meet their needs and finds balance and joy in other places. For example, more fulfilling work, more opportunities to vacation, more peace of mind in a more communal society, better access to nature. Money only "objectively improves" your life up to a certain point.
Another tendency I find anti-intellectual is appealing broadly to "science" or "economics" to make claims that neither field supports.
Is GDP per capita a good measure or individual wealth in a country? If you don't like GDP, is PPP a good measure? If not PPP, what measure do you like? How have those measures changed over the past 20 years? How much did America's value on that measure change in the past 20 years? How much did Europe's?
When I speak of "science", I'm only speaking about using numbers to measure and compare. As it turns out, it doesn't really matter which metric you use. GDP, PPP, you name it - America went up substantially more than Europe over the past 20 years. A continent that used to be an economic peer is now a few notches poorer. If the trend continues, by the time I'm old, Europe will be poor compared to America, full stop. Just another region full of third world countries.
You can read https://ecipe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ECI_24_PolicyBr... if you like or find your own sources. All the ones I've found say the same thing about the last 20 years. But if you can find some that say Europe is improving its economic standing compared to America, I'd be interested in reading them! I'm very open to having my mind changed by evidence!
I don't think you understand my point of view and also smokedetector1's with whom I wholeheartedly agree.
Economics and money is just numbers. It's not a measure of happiness in life. I just want to have enough money to not worry in life, I don't care about having much more than others. Doing a job I enjoy in a place I enjoy is worth much more to me. Would Elon Musk, the richest guy in the world be happier than me? I don't think he is, he's always angry about something. I wouldn't want to trade places with him. Having that kind of money is a burden, never being able to just walk around and discover a new town without a security detail, or partying until 6am without journalists capturing everything I do.
A big house doesn't make me (much) happier. A car definitely doesn't, driving really stresses me out (and I have a lot of driving experience having lived in many countries). We have great public transport here and that's enough for me because I live in the city.
And economics isn't really an exact science in my book. It's a social science, psychology based on human constructs. Which are different here in Europe anyway (more socialist). We chose to make the world work like this but it could be different too. More fair.
I moved to a lower wage country to have a better life and I'm a lot happier now. I will never be rich but I don't care. It's not a race to be the top, I want everyone to have a good life.
You can measure happiness with numbers. You can measure anything with numbers. I've welcomed you to provide your favorite happiness metric. But instead you insist that happiness cannot be measured in numbers. Anti-science attitude on display.
You cannot measure everything with numbers. Many things in life cannot even be ordered[0]. Lives are different. Yes, some are just worse/more challenging than others, but in general people and their experiences are wayyyyyyy too complex and multivaried to be projected onto the real line. Only by narrowing your understanding and experience of life to measurable phenomena like bank account balance can you actually do the comparison you're looking for. And then you've all but ruined your life.
To address your point, GDP per capita is not a good metric capturing happiness, for several reasons. Most trivially, because it does nothing to reflect the distribution of wealth. A country could (purely hypothetically ;) ) have massive GDP per capita but the benefits flow mainly to the top.
Even putting that aside, a culture with massive GDP but where the citizens don't have the time, peace, values, and social structures to enjoy life is not a happy society.
> Tbh, I'm sure I'm going to get down voted to hell, but it's pretty amazing how many highly educated and otherwise intelligent Europeans just... don't believe in economics anymore when economics says their lives are worse than their peers in America. It's one of the major touch points of anti intellectualism in this forum.
Immigrant from a developing nation, living in the UK here. I very much notice this attitude on hn, and elsewhere. Europeans (I include the UK obviously) are extremely protective of the idea that the welfare state here automatically makes everything better than life in the US. It's a bit easier to be objective when you live here but you're not actually from here.
I love the UK. It has been my home for over 20 years. I love the fact that there is a safety net that mostly, sort of, works. But I also know people from my original country who have moved elsewhere. Some who actually lived in the UK, then moved elsewhere. Some of those to the US, where they have really accelerated their earnings and their comfort and in some respects, quality of life.
I think there is no doubt that the material comforts that most people enjoy out of life will be improved just by working the same job in the US. Obviously there are non-tangibles such as living in a society where people can't carry guns, one of the things I appreciate about the UK compared to the US. Or also knowing that poorer people living just a few streets away from you can enjoy the same facilities I do (to a large extent), and are mostly going to be ok in life. I like living in Europe, where we're exposed to so much culturally. Etc.
So I can see both sides of this, but I am definitely on your side of the fence with regard material quality of life. My salary is high in the UK, I'm in the top percentile of earners, but without any family money, I'm never going to lead an extravagant life here. I'm going to struggle to retire early like my US peers would be able to.
how are they better? we're talking about them being forced to go into the office and despite having money having no power. The very thing that this thread was about is what is worse about their lives.
I don't know that a massive house is enough to make up for it.
Well really most people don't where I work. They don't make a big deal of it because the office would be overloaded.
Except the people that are super socially oriented or want to escape the family at home (I don't have one anyway), they go more than required, and keep everyone else from their work with constant chatting.
I have found that at many companies with these kind of policies are selectively enforced. If you don’t show up, nothing will happen to you, until someday they need some kind of reason to fire you. This ensures you have a steady pool of employees you can drop at a moments notice, if for instance some major market crash forces you to quickly dump people in order for the company to survive.
These memos are always basically admissions of their own incompetence. If you distrust your employees this much and have created a culture where people aren't getting their work done without it being noticed, that's on you.
> A lot of the anti WFH wave comes from companies discovering that they actually can't trust some employees to do much work from home.
Personally, I think a lot of the anti WFH types thrive in an office environment because either charitably, they get energy from being around people and work better, or less charitably, it helps them build their careers because they're great at being noticed in that environment.
In the charitable case, that's great for them, but could be harmful to WFH types, who thrive when they can work remotely and their focus times click more easily (for various reasons).
In the less charitable case, (which I suspect is a lot of people who are passionately anti-WFH), well, this needs no real explanation. They're just being selfish for their own career.
I have a job where I'm 5 days a week. The biggest problem isn't the juniors which are all happy to leave their small apartments to go into the office. Its the senior guys with big houses out in the suburbs that have the long commute. Unfortunately the new grads are having fun hanging out together but aren't getting the face time from the seniors.
I mean companies can either locate where people can afford to live, or pay people enough to live near the office. (Same thing really). Hasn't happened to me in my career yet!
After shitcanning the london office because he wanted to move back home(800 people gone) hes now doing the RTO, because as we know all the cool kids love working in the office.
The problem with instagram is not where people are working, its the culture of piss poor direction setting and no user experience advocates. Well none that are being listened to.
There are too many grand initiatives, which are poorly run, never really prototyped and just yeeted into years long slog that fuckup repeatedly (shops I'm looking at you)
Then to get a promotion you need to move a metric somehow. That means doing stupid user hostile stuff, like instantly shoving tits in your face.
Don't get me started on the horror that was instagram for kids
And by the way, this is as an outsider, I have no insider knowledge, but it's from the same company that sent women (teenagers) ads of beauty products after they had deleted a selfie
I was all gung-ho for "You don't need regulation (imprisonment) for something that's just a mirror held up to society" before realizing Facebinstapp literally does things like this
Basically there are four tribes in meta: Product, Advertising, Infra & other.
Facebook had the most comprehensive onboarding I've ever had at a place, literally 5 weeks of learning. We had actual lessons on data laws, rules that facebook has and why they are there. Lots of talk about how to speak up for the user and that kind of stuff. Loads of do the right thing, if in doubt choose the user, long term growth over short term gain, that sort of shit.
And where I worked, that was kinda the experience, We had reasonable debates about user experience and the like. The data storage system is setup so that you don't really need to think about storing data securely or privately because thats the default.
But
I was in the "other" tribe so I didn't have the same pressure. My "impact" that I had to deliver wasn't to do with moving metrics, or making money.
The real problem is that to get promoted, you need to, every 6 months, deliver something that has impact. And a good way to get impact is to move a metric, or get more cash.
combine that with naivety, and you get the scandals that we see.
Instgram kids USP was basically that it would an app that was tailored to kids, and there would be some parent tools to help shame the algorithm. There wasn't any budget to spend on proper moderation, so there would be loads of content that was be designed to warp/groom/fuckup young minds. I think the main concession was that DMs would be turned off. It would have been a walled garden, but with no real controls. Perhaps there might have been algorithm tweaks to avoid promoting certain topics.
That was the rumour at least.
Anyway, it would have been a shit show, so there was a concerted effort to leak it to the press, because the "product council" were like "fuck yeah, tiktok does it, lets do it too, we're fucking gods who made reels a thing, what the fuck do you know?"
but the real sketchy shit is in advertising, and where it crosses into product. They know that some of these metric boosting changes are bad, but because they make money, they allow it. Thats where the rules are deliberately bent or broken. The rest of the time is just naivety, by idealistic shelters young colleges types.
Lastly, Facebook can't really do new products. So if your app or thing cant easily be added to instagram/facebook, and needs its own standalone app/site, you're probably fine.
I know better than to think I might have anything useful to add to the WFH debate, but buried further in the memo:
”More demos, less [sic] decks”
I love it, but I’m surprised that an org of that caliber needs to say it out loud. Even the top tier people get bogged down in PowerPoint limbo, I guess?
Nothing is more compelling than, as they say in show business (ie that Bill O’Reilly meme), than saying “f*** it…”:
Really sad to see the WFH era ending, it's such a better way to work - especially as these companies embrace distributed teams so you now get the worst of both worlds with RTO.
Also, Instaface doesn’t need developers. Their product was completed at least a dozen years ago. And it was created by a team of a dozen or so engineers.
White collar office society can barely cope with the relatively minor friction that technology brings from allowing work from anywhere and we're expected to believe it, it can deal with somewhat unaccountable and unknowable AI smoothly? Hard to think anything else than that we're in for a wild couple of years imo
In general having a chief "order" employees sounds like a red flag to me. Isn't ordering a bit authoritarian and used in leau of being able to change things in a more civil manner? If you aren't able to get people to work more at the office through more civil manners, maybe you should reflect on why?
Surely this is just to get people to quit without needing to give them expensive severance packages, that seems pretty common nowadays?
I’ve always thought of this like being at University and studying for finals or doing labs. You could basically do them wherever you wanted for the most part.
Some people thrived in an actual lab. Some people worked from their dorm/apartment. Some would go to the library. Some to a coffee shop.
Seems this trend of not having a one size fits all best continues in industry.
Where have I heard this before, wait at every job I have ever worked at. Every time it is said, meeting time increases.
Where I worked, Friday was the only day real work got done. Why, everyone was at home, but that was my go to office day. Thursdays was my WFH day because that whole day was nothing but meetings.
I enjoyed working on campus for a bit - because I also lived there, sleeping, eating, showering etc. and saved a lot of money! Of course, you have to hide that and they eventually caught me...
Yep - my company did the same thing in addition to a few other nasty cuts. The problem is that instead of dumping dead weight employees, we are losing excellent ones.
I've worked remotely most of my career, long before Covid.
Last few months I've been in the office almost every single day.
And I get what they're saying, there are definite advantages to having everybody in the same room. I don't think pretending otherwise is going to help us much.
There are definite advantages that go the other way as well.
The goal has to be to find a good compromise, you can never go back.
I realized this morning, while talking to a coworker. That when we are in person we complain about shit more than we fix it. But when were remote we voice our concerns in the major channels and shit gets fixed.
I'm convinced by keeping people in person less shit will get fixed.
> the change applies to employees in US offices with assigned desks and is part of a broader push to make Instagram "more nimble and creative" as competition intensifies.
I don't think RTO or fewer meetings is going to reverse or even slow Instagram's slide down the enshittification chute. I recently returned to the app to connect with some friends and local communities, but the density of ads and dark patterns is pushing me away. IMO Instagram and Facebook in their twilight (which will still last another decade or so), where the path forward has more to due with extracting the remaining value from their existing users rather than outcompeting the alternatives.
> I don't think RTO or fewer meetings is going to reverse or even slow Instagram's slide down the enshittification chute.
In my view it's been well down that chute since shortly after its acquisition by Facebook. Facebook bought them as a hedge as young people left the FB platform and, for a time, it's worked to keep users under the Meta umbrella, but as with everything Zucc touches, the end-user experience has been in a state of steady degradation.
I’d like a retrospective on “if you don’t like what Twitter is doing, you can build your own”… because it seems network effects are real, despite Facebook money.
It seems they did like what Twitter was doing, because it's the same thing with the same problems. No wonder nobody uses it, why use a knockoff when the real thing is free?
In Canada meta pushed back (by not letting you link to or summarize recognized free press news sites) due to laws designed to encourage sharing revenue with news organizations for copying their content and posting it without their consent. The result has been a total vacuum of truth, and the platform is literally a anti-vax, agarthan racists wet dream when you open it up as a new user. It's ripe for replacement. I can't believe it's lasted this long.
> laws designed to encourage sharing revenue with news organizations for copying their content
By “encourage” and “copying,” you mean “require” and “linking” respectively. These second order effects were entirely predictable before the legislation was passed.
As much as I dislike Meta, these laws are trash - as I understand it the Canadian law was based on the one we have here in Australia, which explicitly defines publishing a link to an article on a news site as being exactly the same (for the purposes of the law) as copying and displaying an entire article.
Then the supporters of the law said Facebook was "using" the news content by linking to a news site, as if they were actually displaying whole articles! Meta generally sucks but these laws (and the people calling for them) sucked just as much.
I'm not sure the self description as "Light hearted, mostly satirical Nazi white supremacist content not to be taken seriously" really hides the moustache.
"back to office" is a modern strategy to easily and covertly shed employees to cut costs and improve the short term bottom line to get higher performance bonuses for management.
I don’t think it’s hard to imagine that people work better together when they are in the same office. It’s also not hard to imagine people work harder when there’s more social control. From the perspective of the business owner, this makes total sense. Yes, some people work harder and better at home, but, in general WFH is net negative for a company I think.
If you trust your employees so little, why even bother employing them in the first place though? And for what it's worth, I'm equally capable of slacking both in-office and at home and I'm definitely not alone in that one, it's just that the slacking is more often in the form of socializing, eating snacks, taking toilet and smoke breaks etc.
We have a choice thankfully, so no one really slacks in person or remotely because surprise surprise, when you treat your employees like human beings and not cogs in the machine they're actually motivated to do good work, who'd'a thunk it?
Given we have agents that give 10x productivity gains do we also need to meet in person to get much more gains?
What this seems to be suggesting is that productivity gains due to agents are meaningless because 99% effort goes in non coding tasks which will get sped up by meeting in person
other divisions within Meta have recently made similar changes —- more time in office, less meetings. i’m guessing the orders are coming from the top but they’re allowing each org to roll out the changes “independently”
Was the work from home ever presented as only temporary? Initially it was for sure because of health.
Seems like many companies and government agencies thought it permanent and sold their office spaces. Perhaps we will see them buying more offices to house their valuable workers once again.
1) Mosseri himself will still continue to enjoy the benefits of a flexible / remote enabled work / life balance that he is now denying his employees. Standard rules for thee not for me type BS that is typical of "Executives." I've worked for a couple larger corporations / organizations, and at both it was painfully obvious that the rules for us rank and file types categorically did not apply to the senior leadership. We were expected to "Tighten our belts" and "Do more with less" while the executives were flying around the world in their corporate jets going to "Conferences" and "Galas" or whatever, while spending the companies money lavishly on their own personal comfort. It's the same with remote work, executives love it for themselves, but deny it to the regular employees who actually make their lifestyles possible.
2) Mosseri himself, and members of Instagram's board and / or major shareholders have significant investments in commercials real estate.
The bottom line for me is this whole "Back to the office" nonsense is 100% driven by the wealthy capitalist class being heavily invested in commercial real estate. I, though no fault of my own have known a couple billionaires reasonably well in the past (Both from the same family), and they were both heavily invested in commercial real estate. The CEOs and their investors who keep prattling on with their BS about "Productivity" or "Collaboration" are the same people who own most of the commercial real estate, and all they actually care about is protecting the value of their investments, as if everyone starts working remotely, there wouldn't be much need for all these fancy corporate campuses and office parks, and the value of their investments would decline as result.
I think its okay for there to be jobs that require you to be in a specific place, especially so if you were hired under such an arrangement originally. If there is a significant advantage for companies that are remote, then they will have a significant advantage on talent.
What's going to happen when all the remote first companies re-neg on their commitments? Will it be an intentional way to force layoffs and resignations?
When I worked from home I did about 10 hours of work per week. I am in a niche field and good enough at my job that my managers didn't realize. When I'm at the office, I can't do much else, so I work full days. I can't believe I'm very unique in this regard. Plenty of people will slack off as much as they possibly can while staying above the PIP line, and it's easier to do that at home.
We tried building with 3 founders across 3 timezones. On a good day it felt magical. On a bad day it felt like the kind of lag you remember from SC BW, CS 1.6, or classic WoW raids where one spike wipes the whole run just so everyone has to start over.
Async is great for shipping, but not when you are moving fast on hard problems where alignment is the whole game. The drag shows up slowly and you learn zero to one needs tight loops, high trust, and shared tempo. You cannot patch that with calls or docs.
Some teams crush remote. We did sometimes but not often enough and learned that the hard way. The work decides the model. For us it was about momentum and getting the fastest feedback loop possible. Ideas die in latency. Execution dies in drift.
At the end of the day it is not ideology. It is just whatever keeps the product moving as a startup, aiming high to become better, faster, cheaper than the status quo.
You can't bring people in the same office from three different timezones. Most probably your setup was the problem, not the productivity of the people working remotely. Remote people working in the same timezone are usually very effective in their job.
I am here to repeat my sort-of non-but-almost conspiracy theory: It's not about the work, it's about the value of the Listed Property Trust (LPT), as a construct, if the entire central business district price model behind buildings tanks.
Every company of this scale is in LPT. They have shitloads of money tied up in the declared value of the office space either they invested, or they leveraged. If it tanks in value, they are on call for the decline in value related to that.
Thank you for reading my almost but not quite tinfoil hat conspiracy theory.
This isn't even a conspiracy theory, it's just true. I mean, some of it is definitely induced attrition (you always want the expensive people to quit, in the Milton Friedman cinematic universe), but the rest is that the commercial real estate market would collapse tomorrow if businesses couldn't justify their 10- or 15-year commercial leases. Not for nothing did endless headlines about how "going into the office is super cool, actually" run in our most august financial publications, like WSJ and the Economist, right around the time RTO mandates started showing up.
Nobody except Mark Zuckerberg matters for Meta. He has majority control of the board voting rights.
It seems much more likely that this is driven by the fact that Facebook culture has always been very much around in-person 1:1 contacts between people. This frustrated me a lot when I was there, but it did seem to work for a relatively long time.
Boards have a finance subcommittee and review income on investments. Meta does not invest 100% of its worth inside Meta, it will have billions of dollars invested through merchant banks who in turn balance in private equity, shares, and property. The property component will be reporting risk on lower future returns if the building declines in value as an asset. His fund manager will be advising him that signals to increase occupancy reduces his risk.
This isn't a conspiracy theory it is just a fact. They already invested in the offices and the people who own everything have a lot of money in commercial real estate.
The comment initially confused me, but after reading it twice, I completely agree with you.
I would love to delete the app, but Instagram has really become the norm for dating and connecting with people. The opportunity cost of not using it in your 20s is significant. I hope to delete it once I’m fully settled, but that might not happen anytime soon given the modern dating culture.
By some irony, I only created an instagram account so that I could get some cookies to pass to yt-dlp to download some videos from a wedding shoot my wife and I did.
My relationship is quite long-term, it can almost get its learner's permit, and we use Instagram all the time to, like, share cute animal videos from the Explore/Reels screens to each other, share stories to our friends of whatever we're doing together, or not together, and see our friends' stories.
idk if your partner is jealous of you using one of the top five social networking apps in the world that seems a little weird and maybe your relationship is not very healthy? it's instagram, not tinder or okcupid...
As long as you stay on a happy path, it's only like 5% thirst traps. But many people don't like it when those things are popping up in their SO's feed, so Instagram isn't good for those relationships.
I avoid it now mainly because I don't need infinite scrolling of anything. But a side benefit is that it can't provoke any jealousy.
> As long as you stay on a happy path, it's only like 5% thirst traps.
I’m an infrequent facebook user, but every couple months I’ll visit the website for something on fb marketplace or an event I’ve been invited to and 100% of the reels that are shoved at me are softcore pornography. My only interaction with them has been to click the “hide this item” (or whatever it’s called) on every reel I’ve ever seen.
In my social circles, at least, the answer is yes. I live in a major city with many people from diverse backgrounds. It might be different in areas where tech people make up the majority.
I know for a fact that I wouldn't have been invited to some parties or met some really fun people if I didn't have Instagram. You don't have to post or be very active; you just need to have an account.
Instagram is pretty bland, not anywhere close to TikTok in the scale of societal malaise. It can be used as a plain photo sharing app, reels is still a secondary feature, and the only place you'll find both of those things. Stories is mostly snaps from your friends if you don't follow any 'influencers'. It has replaced Facebook as they way most people in their 20-50s connect, and a handle is better than giving away your phone number.
I wish we had better ways (coming with the DMA and chat interoperability? maybe), but it's tolerable.
the owners; actual owners no doubt have their finger in the commercial real estate pie too. And they are obviously not ready to get a haircut on that portfolio so here it goes. COVID-19 hasn't disappeared yet, so all this is going to do is accelerate infection and churn through more people quicker. ASHRAE did update and release ASHRAE 241 but I really doubt building managers are eager to implement that costly compliance standard especially still shell shocked from WFH
Why stop there? Mandate pink dildo, like online camsites use, to track seating position. God fucking forbid you move 5 minutes from your seat – productivity suffers!
When the productivity fell in covid days due to communications overheads and people just suddenly finding it easy to execute "lazy", did the ever so efficient corporate machinery pick this up in a jiffy and propose salary cuts to match? Or were they just too nice to do that?
Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me.
If your employees cannot be trusted to fulfil their responsibilities (whether in an office, their home or a tent in a woodland) that is not a geographical issue. It is a mentality issue and you are always going to face productivity issue from that employee regardless of from where they work.
I’ve been told time and time again by an array of managers in a bunch of departments and companies that my productivity never changes. That is regardless of whether I am travelling or at home. This is including being in Sri Lanka during their worst economical crisis and facing power cuts of 8 - 12 hours everyday. As a responsible adult I prepared in advance. I bought power banks which could charge my laptop and ensured they were charged when the power worked. I bought SIM cards for all mobile networks and ensured I had data. It really is simply a matter of taking responsibility of one’s situation and having a sense of respect for, and from, your employer/employee.
Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them.
I fear that this is all simply a smokescreen for the authoritarian shift which has occurred throughout the globe. It started pre pandemic and was exasperated during it. Scary times lay ahead.
It's not about productivity at all. These same companies were commissioning studies during Covid that told their analysts "look how productive our employees are now that they are working from home!"
It's about crushing labor.
WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can apply for far more roles, work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc, apply for other jobs during work hours, etc. These companies know that white collar workers are not fungible. Their intellectual workers are genuinely very difficult to replace and produce a lot of value.
For talent that isn't fungible, it's RTO. For talent that is fungible, offshoring.
For your comment about the turn towards authoritarianism, yeah, there's a reason every DEI program at every large corporation was pulled back within a few months, and it's not because the C suite all reads the same Musk tweets on X.
Employees started making demands of management to actually look at some... structural issues. Those demands had teeth because employees acted and organized as a bloc. Only a matter of time before other lines of questioning besides race and sex were explored at work.
Yeah.
With DEI you had to care about the same "structural issues®". It wasn't exactly employee representation and much more of a HR tool to sanction mostly low level employees.
Usually I don't care about race and sex at work and I am not sad that DEI is gone. Creates room for issues much more relevant to work. Like working hours, salaries, holidays, health insurance and general work benefits. Stuff that matters.
That's because you are not impacted I assume. If you are from the DEI bucket then there is nothing more important. Every few years they come out with a study where all they do is change the name on resumes. Having a black sounding naming still, in modern day, greatly reduces your chances of getting an interview. Except, during the most current rendition of this study found that wasn't true at all at companies that had DEI policies. That is huge if people can determine your ethnicity based on your name.
All your "more important" issues are predicated on the idea that you can get a job. For those who are unfairly discriminated against, they don't even get to your point. Who cares about employer healthcare when you have no employer?
I am an ethnic minority, not visibly though and not from any DEI bucket. But that doesn't matter. Some DEI proponents perhaps meant well, but the way the went about was simply the wrong one. Criticism wasn't welcomed at all, even treating everybody the same regardless of sex or race was looked down upon. Words like racism were redefined and you had to adhere to certain dogmata.
The classic approach to treat everyone equally is still better, even if there is some prejudice left. And that doesn't preclude any program that helps those in need. And here the same thing is true: Race and sex are irrelevant.
Some proponents of DEI had their own problems with prejudice to solve in my experience. So perhaps the onus should be that everyone works on their own personal prejudices for now.
Some things will be unfair, but introducing more unfairness doesn't solve any problems. And here DEI simply failed in its approach. A bad job market doesn't mean we can discriminate those that might have been more lucky regardless of reasons. The task would be to fix the job market.
To propose two groups of minorities against some diffuse ethnic majority is simply childish, comes with multiple problems and it doesn't provide tangible benefits to anyone in the long run. I would argue it even entrenches prejudices and pits people against each other.
My experience of DEI was as ideological cover to offshore jobs to India.
While the executive team performed sweeping layoffs to push up the stock price and increase their own compensation, they paid lip service to DEI as if engaged in a karmic balancing act and that was their cheat code.
And the company culture degraded as a result. Far more inter-group fighting, more politicking, more backstabbing, less cooperation.
I’m not there anymore, but I hear they are trying to revert things back, slowly. Basically every project since then has been a failure and they’ve been coasting on their original success.
Good people don’t need three letter acronyms to treat others fairly, and if someone is selling you new holier-than-thou rules, it’s worth asking what moral cost they no longer feel they need to pay.
Sure. And those with power will protect their groups first - or lose that power.
Which has been playing out for years now.
And DEI took the ‘we don’t go racist/sexist/etc’ off the table, as the various groups were being blatantly racist, sexist, etc.
So now it is being used against those groups.
Applying those things equally to people regardless of skin colour, gender identity, sexuality or any other line along which people have historically been discriminated against isn't important?
DEI explicitly took ‘we don’t do that’ off the table, by proactively discriminating based on those factors.
And at first, when the pie is growing, that doesn’t threaten entrenched groups as much, so it mostly can happen.
In a zero (or negative) sum game world (layoffs, hiring freezes), what do you think is going to happen?
People with power will use the same tools to protect themselves or even acquire more power, and those without power will be ground under the same gears.
I’ve seen it happen in every major society - from India to Chile to Europe to the US.
In the US it’s getting particularly out of control (in both directions) for a number of factors - and very high publicity - but it’s way more blatant almost everywhere else in fact.
> It's not about productivity at all.
> WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can [...] work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc
Probably "working fewer hours" and "moonlight for multiple companies" has negative effects on productivity that employers would like to avoid.
I doubt it, productivity is an equation that's very complex for knowledge workers.
For example, is 80 hours of work a week more productive than 40? If you're working an assembly line, probably.
If you're a programmer, definitely not. You will write more bugs, make more mistakes, and churning out code doesn't mean much. Any monkey can write code, but writing maintainable code is hard, and reading that code and actually choosing to maintain it is harder.
It's definitely not more productive per hour than 40. And if you're moonlighting another 30 hrs that'll definitely decrease your productivity at work.
Again, it depends. Maybe they have more pride in their job or despise their company less, who knows.
And I don't mean productivity per hour. Lol. No, I mean absolute.
An employee working like a dog will get less work done than one just working normally, probably. Because most of the work is negative, so it doesn't add to the work done pile, it chips away at it.
Eventually, I would think, you reach a point where an employee is less productive than no employee at all. Seems impossible to be working 100 hours a week and be getting less than nothing done, but if you're actively making the product worse or creating debt, that's how I would classify that.
true for many creative and intellectual jobs too.
I've already kind of made it clear here where I stand on this, but I gotta tell you, you really do sound a lot like management.
Do you really think your superstar programmers are well and truly doing intellectual work, the kind of work that produces business value, from the time they hit the coffee machine at 9AM to the time they grab their briefcase to go home at 5PM?
If you believe this, I think you might be interested in bringing the Bobs in to discuss making our T.P.S. reporting process more efficient. They have thoughts on coversheets.
In Deep Work, Cal Newport posits that even the most disciplined, high performers can do work that requires really focused attention for a max of four hours per day. He's a computer science professor, not exactly "management."
And these days, for a lot of knowledge workers there's a pretty strong case that anything which isn't this "deep work" can probably be automated.
So yeah if I'm paying you a full time salary I want those four hours. Without necessarily rendering judgment on what a moonlighting clause should or shouldn't look like, if I'm not getting those four hours, I don't want you on my payroll.
And you think you're more likely to get those four hours in an open office environment with distractions aplenty, as opposed to my effectively noise-proofed home office where I can actually focus?
It really depends. I believe and apply a lot of Cal Newport advice, and benefit greatly from it. But I also see in my daily life how just being close to people you work with, and (crucially) being a short walk away/floor from people in other groups, creates immense value by helping unclog processes and especially by creating new ideas and products that wouldn‘t otherwise exist.
Yup, short walt to my colleagues who are all spread across the world. /$
I don't think we read the same Deep Work book.
Bullshit. When I'm in the office most of my time is spent on making sure it looks like I'm working and obsessing about if someone is standing/sitting behind me and looking at my screen or not, because I'm in a panopticum. There is no time for deep work.
I'm on record many times saying that I think open office plans are a bad idea, so I'm not sure where you got that straw man
First, nobody cares what you want. Second, do you pay for those 4 hours adequately, guess what if you don't? Even if you do, are you OK with 2 hours today and 6 hrs tomorrow? How about a year of 1 hour days and then a 24 hour period that fixes all the problems for last 2 years?
The Internet tough guy strikes again, as if employment is not a voluntary contract between two consenting adults. This militant attitude is always good for a laugh... hate management if you like, but if you think no employee ever worries about what their manager wants, sounds like you've never held a job.
Not really sure why I am even responding to this amazingly stupid line of discussion. I mean if you absolutely hate the idea of having a boss (I know I did) then there is a solution for that - start your own company! It's not as easy as being a badass on the Internet, sure, but you might have to look at both sides of the argument and you might even end up getting rid of that chip on your shoulder.
Let me quickly go count my years of experience, will have to use all my digits and extremities, might be a minute.
I don't think you got the point behind the comment. We do not have a good way to quantify effort, thus we ask for a fixed set of time in chairs, tickets closed, etc that's the best we can come up with.
I’ll attempt a steelman and say, no, employees are not doing deep work from 9–5, but I could see being in an office 9–5 setting the stage for a lot of deep work to be done. Moonlighting for another company I could especially see as detrimental to focus at work.
The nature of modern offices pretty much prevents deep work.
You're not going to get deep work when you pack people like sardines into neat rows of desks, where pretty much at any time someone within one row away is going to be in a meeting - conducted of course over teleconferencing software. Or some people will talk (honestly, being in the office mostly translated to chit-chat for me).
This is exactly my experience too.
Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles.
The steel man is that in the office you get cross team pollination organically. Team lunches, talking about an idea with another team on how to do something better as in that moment the idea came up. This happens more often in person than remote.
Does it need 5 days a week in the office? Absolutely not. 1-2 is plenty.
> Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles.
Or doors.
25 years ago, Microsoft Redmond had a slogan: "Every dev a door".
In early 2000s, it began to be two devs per room. We all know what happened since. Open offices save facilities concrete money per seat. Productivity lost from lack of deep work is not a line item anyone knows how to track.
The "every dev a door" plus "pair programming" was shown by studies from groups like Pivotal Labs as being optimal for working code, but ... and a big but ...
Companies intentionally optimize for things other than working code. You get what you measure and they measure what's easy instead of measure what matters.
// See https://lethain.com/measuring-engineering-organizations/ but also https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/
I don't expect someone to do deep focused work from 9am to 5pm.
But at the same time, I don't expect them to spend their 9-to-5 working for another company at the same time.
As a founder, who respects the 9-to-5 and supports WFH, if I'm paying for 8 hours of work, I want 8 hours of output. Not 4 hours of output, and then you working 4 hours for another job.
If multi-jobbing becomes a thing, then WFH becomes untenable because at least in the office you can be monitored.
To be fair, you're either paying for hours or for output, because I assure you you are not paying staff accurately for their output. You can of course sack someone who outputs notoriously little, but if you get output exceeding your average "8 hours of output", you shouldn't care if someone made it in 1 hour or 16, or at least you wouldn't be able to tell.
I'm using "output" as quoted in context, it's such a nebulous measure unless you're specifically buying a product.
Do you pay your programmers hourly or on salary?
How do you measure whether some output corresponds to 8 hours of work, and not 4 or 16 hours?
He doesn't known what he is talking about. Bunch of wannabe founders waxing BS. If you want 8 hours of guaranteed output use a bot
8 hours of output? I get it but poor phrasing.
I’m sorry management hurt you.
It’s not your fault.
To be clear I'm having a lot of fun being snarky here.
Like everything it's a mix.
In seriousness, I do find the labor perspective sorely and quite conspicuously lacking in these discussions, both discussions about remote work and about DEI backlash.
Because they're essentially always dictations, not discussions.
I’ve hired remote employees, made them come, offered stimulating work, 5% above their requested pay with mentions that I could double it in one year, but I could never get them to the smartness and clarity of analysis they had during the interview. After 6 months they were clearly winging it in <1hr a day and exhausting my team lead, who didn’t think they were moonlighting for several companies. I did: Their progress had entirely stalled and their performance was negative.
I fired both the employees and the manager. This “remote employees don’t moonlight” is a union trope.
> 5% above their requested pay with
Not enough to move the needle. 25% would move the needle.
> with mentions that I could double it in one year
They didn't believe you, or didn't after a short time working there. So it didn't move the needle.
More so if they're experienced. Similar mentions of prospects are common in interviews, and rarely followed through. You eventually learn to be skeptical of them, while rolling with it, just in case.
Also, if you might be willing to pay double their requested salary, they start realising their value on the open market is much higher than they'd previously thought, or could be with a little presentation and experience.
On the other hand, if you'd put it in the contract that their salary will double after 1 year, subject to well-defined criteria and a history of actually doing it with existing employees, then they'd believe you, and that would move the needle a lot.
From your story I speculate you were right to fire them, but you never figured our how to get the best out of them. In recent years it's possible you were subject to employment fraud, as clarity of analysis can disappear if it's a different person doing the work than the person answering interview questions.
Progress that's entirely stalled or negative can happen for many other reasons than moonlighting, and many other reasons than not putting enough time.
I've been fully remote for 5 years, partially remote for 15. Being remote removes many sources of stress for me. I don't moonlight.
The one thing that decreases my productivity, in some positions, is bad management. Of course, that was already the case when I was fully office-based.
You do know there are several productive companies that are entirely remote, right?
Instagram ragequits remote working.
Atlassian is a dumpster fire, they run shit engineering since about 3 years.
Give me the secret sauce to being productive with remote employees. Maybe some have found it, but apparently paying above the employee ask, offering to double the salary in case of success, sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them gives me the “evil employer” category on most forums.
Yeah, I know “Treat them even better!” is, again, the word of the union guy, but in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.
>offering to double the salary in case of success
have you doubled anyone's salary? if not, it can come across as an empty promise you won't fulfill
>sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them
do they want and benefit from these things? or do they distract them from their productive work?
>in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.
not really, you were able to fire who you wanted to fire easily. it also seems that you didn't consider other factors for why the employee didn't work out. does your interview process poorly select for people who will do well in the role? are there other possible explanations for low productivity than the employee having a second job?
I don't think I can give you answers if you look at your one employee and extrapolate from there.
I don't know you and you aren't my current employer anyways but a good first step to requiring me to go back to the office would be actually giving me an office!!
As Office Space says: it is a question of motivation.
If you care, it'll get done. If you don't, you'll find a way to slack off, even if you're at the office.
I value remote work but undoubtedly people are more capable of silently slacking at home.
Wild that anybody thinks simply being in the office makes employees work. I have a colleague who sits within 2m of me who keeps their (personal) phone on their desk all day. They literally prop it up against the bottom of their computer monitor. They're not even subtle about it.
They get distracted every 2-3 minutes and spend upwards or 2-3 hours on it. It distracts me when it vibrates 100+ times per day.
Boss walks in, phone is down. Boss walks out, phone in hand.
Is it not likely that people are more motivated to collaborate, talk about their work, plan together, feel a sense of excitement about work, etc. when they are communing in person? The ol watercooler mindset or whatever.
I mean - there’s this popular topic of the issue of loneliness lately. People are less motivated to do things that would maybe normally bring them social joy and get them out of their own homes and bring them together with others in the flesh. You’d expect people to be motivated to do that kind of thing, maybe? But it’s hard. And it’s harder every day when there’s a zeitgeist of growing isolationism.
I certainly don’t think the inflexibility of a 5 day in person work week with a hellish, uncompensated commute is the answer to the loneliness issue, nor the lack of motivation to do good work. But maybe there is some middle ground that would serve as a kick in the pants of sorts, without making us all miserable little ants going to and fro once again, that could help people get back out there in a way that helps.
I mean, at least, it doesn’t seem like the metaverse or whatever else is filling that gap as the techno-seers foresaw… but maybe future generations will prove that to be more realistic than bringing people back out together in meatspace. Or maybe we just stoop deeper into this new reclusiveness without any real stand ins for grabbing lunch together at all.
Maybe if the office was not a hellscape? Not just the commute, the offices themselves.
I didn't work in a properly colocated team since 2017, and that was mostly by accident. The norm is zoom/teams calls, often taken from the desk (which is 3-4 in a row with rows densely packed) because there's never enough space for meeting rooms so it becomes norm to not give a fuck that nobody can concentrate because someone is talking loudly on a work meeting.
And the watercooler is either office politicking or discussing how much the place sucks
Exactly this, its great that the person next to me can stand and talk to someone 2 desks down, over my shoulder while I'm on a teams call with someone from the other side of the floor, as there are only 3 conference rooms, and managers have priority. If you want people back in the office, redesign the whole space to small working areas where people can actually focus. Open office environments are the worst office experience possible, but i guess it makes the C-suite feel powerful or something having all these people sitting outside their office.
Well yeah, and that's actually the point: if you don't like it, you're free to leave! Headcount reduction without severance payment and getting rid of an unmotivated employee, win-win! At least for federal employees they had the decency of spelling it out clearly: https://traumaawareamerica.org/2025/04/28/deliberate-strateg... - the rest of us have to keep listening to the "it's all for your best" BS...
Sometimes the "quiet layoff" [1] aspect of RTO leaks publicly though.
[1] If they get to call shit on workers with "quiet quitting" etc. they get the same back
Sure, if you feel lonely and want the company of your co-workers, you're free to come to the office as often as you want. It's being forced to come to the office 3/5/whatever days that is actually decreasing motivation...
...and being forced back to the office for first three and then five days (as Elon Musk said years ago, you can work from home all you want, you just have to work 40 hours per week in the office) is not really going to improve your motivation.
> Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me.
I don't think it is related to poor productivity. I think it is related to a combination of these 3 points:
1) perceived less of control from the management perspective. 10-15years ago companies were all in on "we need metrics on work being done". Let's face it, process induced metrics have often very little relevance to the success of your products. So without being able to pin point what is wrong from the metrics, upper management feel they are managing an invisible structure and they have no idea what they do. They don't have much more idea when they are at the office but they can see them peering at their screen or talking to their colleagues so they must be doing something right? It is reassuring for upper management.
2) Pretending to do something. This RTO decisions are ofen all about making changes for the sake of making changes. All my career I have seen upper management doing restructuration every 6 months to every 2 years with often very little change in the actual efficiency of the whole company or the quality of the products being done. More often than not they just throw shit at the wall and see hat sticks. Other times they just copy what competitors have just done. Once in a while they will maybe observe an improvement.
3) It also give a visible signal to the employees thast something is being done by the management so in a sense it can boost motivation a little bit even though major changes are often disruptive. If it wasn't for these kind of changes and announcement, most employees wouldn't even know/remember who their CEO is.
Having said that, I don't work at Meta/Instagram but I work in a company where the meeting culture is crazy and I think I can agree with him on that point.
The RTO decisions are about making changes to prove that you have power over your employees, and also about attrition: if you don't like the soul-crushing routine of having to come to the office three or five days a week when you could do your job just as well or better working from home, there's the door!
I wish more people working for these companies with short-sighted RTO mandates would explore suing their employer for promissory estoppel. There were real guarantees along the lines of “in-office work is never coming back” made verbally by CEOs when COVID began. If employees made financial/legal decisions based on these false promises, the company should be held liable.
In addition to your 1.) It's also a power demonstration as in: no matter how far you have to travel/commute, we're the ones paying, so you come when called. Since commutes are rarely paid for, that makes clear who's king. Same goes for open office spaces: the conditions and their effect on you don't really matter to the king.
There's a 4. in that these measures sometimes serve the purpose of reducing headcount without having to publicly announce layoffs.
It's a mistake to view this from the perspective of productivity and whether or not someone can do their job at home or not. Clearly they can. We kept these companies alive by WFH during the pandemic. But they simply don't care.
RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs. People have moved. People may not be able to come back. People may simply not want to. Some of those people will quit. And that's cheaper than a severance package.
We are in permanent layoff culture now. Why? To suppress wages and get more work for no extra compensation. 5% of the staff gets fired? The other 95% has to do their work for no extra money AND they're not demanding pay raises. Win win.
Over time profits have a tendency to shrink and the only way to maintain the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is, ultimately, by raising prices and cutting costs. I wish more people realized this is all that's going on.
There is a middle ground though between "employees can't be trusted" and "all is well". It's possible for there to be a genuine difference in affordances such that people are more productive in some places than others. I think many people would be less productive in a dank basement than in a pleasant office, but then again maybe you don't want it to be too cushy or productivity may go down. I don't think it's realistic to expect everyone to be equally productive in all environments.
That said, I share your fear that all such considerations are just a smokescreen. In a larger sense the entire issue of "productivity" is a smokescreen. We don't need "more productivity". What we need is for people to be happy, and potentially that may be achieved by reducing productivity in some ways.
> What we need is for people to be happy
that is irrelevant to company management - in so far as that happiness has negligible effect on productivity.
However, from anecdotal evidence i've gathered (only sample size of 5-7 or so), in office has been more productive, but they (with the exception of one, who lives 5 mins from their office) all dislike RTO and would've preferred WFH; but not enough to quit over it as it's not a 5 day mandate, but a 3-4 day mandate.
> that is irrelevant to company management
That's right, that's why a lot of company management needs to be smacked down and if necessary fined and jailed. That laser focus on productivity is a cancer on society.
So policy disagreements now deserve jail time. And this is why modern discourse is in the toilet.
The problem we have is precisely that we consider things like this "policy disagreements" even when they're happening on a massive scale and causing enormous harm to society. If we're talking about some small company where the manager decides to push a bit harder, okay. But when it comes to multibillion dollar companies shoving their profiteering mindset out on everyone, it's no longer just a matter of internal company policy. Poisoning society with a single-minded focus on money is in its way as bad as pollution, and it needs to be stopped.
I am pretty sure that 99% of the anti rto is exclusively due to the god awful soul crushing commute.
5 days a week an hour each way 10 hours of death each week.
There is no authoritarian “shift” this has been business as usual for the last 100 years. Stupid business but business nonetheless
Only a 100 years — the whole history before that was working in the vicinity of a home, it does feel natural to return to that. Instead of anvils, we hit keyboards and instead of swords produce alignment, but either way it brings food to the table and allows flexibility in work-life?
Not in tech but was a teacher for decades. My first teaching job in early 80s of the last century had a requirement that teachers live within 5 miles of the building.
In general; perhaps a return to guilds? Apprentices? In an area of my city that has a lot of small craft workshops (and, yes, a few have anvils) there are 'work-live' units being built that have workshops on the ground floor and living accommodation above.
What the heck does “produce alignment” mean? I don’t produce alignment, I produce software which solves problems for people.
Noisy open spaces with many people talking at the same time and people coming in sick with contagious respiratory infections is not really a recipe for productivity independently of commute.
"Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them."
They are forcing them back into the office, which was pretty much the norm pre-covid. Having hard to fire employees isn't a good thing for the company or the well-being of other employees, when dealing with a bad employee.
If you want to work from home forever, contract with a company, and put it in your contract. This is what I've done for over a decade now.
Being a one person company with one client is circumventing employment laws. Sensibly illegal in many countries.
Who says I only have one client? It's also one of the reasons that it's so difficult to actually start a company in many of these countries, and the economic landscape consists of large multi-national corporations and the government.
It's also not illegal (at least in the US), if you have your own LLC/company.
This kind of thinking is why I've had steady work while working remotely for many years and we see articles like this crying about companies taking away remote work.
Congrats on your work ethic. But consider that this may simply not be the case for every working adult on earth, and may not even be true for every working adult in your company.
Not everyone is like you. I am, but I know people (some of whom are former and current coworkers) who are much more easily distracted, and are meaningfully less able to compete their work in a timely manner when they work from home.
I'll probably be downvoted, but I just don't think most of these execs are engaging in some larger "authoritarian" play with these moves (maybe some are, but I think incompetence is more likely than malice in most cases). But maybe I'm naive.
As one point, consider the case of Tokyo's "Manuscript Cafe" [0] where patrons intentionally visit to have a cafe owner "force" them to compete a task they may have been procrastinating on. I read this as: being in a "work" location surrounded by other working people is conducive to productivity for some people.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/manuscript-cafe-japan-remote...
I think it's only a small portion of WFH advocates who say that everyone should be forced to work remotely. Most want each person to have the ability to work the way that's best for them.
Body doubling is a thing!
The crux of this is the way everyone is at their best is different per person.
Work from office is the brute force solution - if it’s the hammer, flexible work is the scalple.
Not every org has managers capable of welding a scalpel instead of a hammer, or who have time to be surgical even if they have the ability. I accept this reality.
You raise an interesting point. No downvote from me, although I'm firmly in the WFH camp.
The reality is that middle managers are completely useless, but to justify their usefulness they have to force people to come to the office, to reprimand them if they don't strictly follow the schedule, to hold meetings to pretend they're useful by knowing what their team is doing, etc. They have to act as control agents: checking, monitoring, producing unnecessary reporting (a legacy of slavery) just to prove they exist in the organizational chart. The office is a theater where everyone pretends to be busy (especially them), but that's hard if the offices are empty. It's a system where we try to convince ourselves of their usefulness, which pushes them to fill the void in order to maintain a hierarchy that serves more to prevent people from working peacefully than to organize anything.
Good thing for you that you’re productive anywhere.
I’m not. I much prefer working from an office. I’m way more efficient and happy in an office than working from home.
It’s not a matter of mentality. It’s a matter of being in an environment conducive to work.
You would benefit from not assuming that everyone is the same as you.
At work, we have the opportunity to choose. Many people are like you and find that going to the office helps their productivity and mental health. Most of us (including me) visit the office only a few times a year.
I think having the choice is great. Although it comes with its own challenges, it works really well when you establish the right culture.
Luckily that's what's happening here, just at a company level. Plenty of companies are remote only or remote friendly. Hopefully people who prefer remote work can leave here and find work at one of those companies, and maybe people who prefer in person work will find their way here.
I put this in the same bucket as the horrifying "996" trend, or even consultancies that require 80-100% travel. If you want to broadcast that you have a toxic work culture, all I can do is applaud your honesty and look elsewhere for work.
imo that’s the worst of both worlds.
That’s what my company does, and none of the engineers ever come in. My manager comes in when he has meetings, and I’ll go in sometimes, but I’m usually alone. None of the benefits of collocation with all the of downsides of an office.
I find that office days work a lot better. Everyone comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays or something.
Your initial post was about there being choice. Now it appears that the upside of the office is the others being there.
I can understand that some people like the physical distinction between "work" and "home". My boss is like that, and he would actually go to the office during covid when no one else would be there. He lived alone in a comfortable apartment, so there wasn't even a question of loud kids / no space for a desk. It obviously never came up that we should also show up. He sometimes wants us to come in the office, all the at the same time, for some form of all-hands meetings, but he doesn't just drop them out of the blue: we plan these together, and they don't happen on a fixed, tight schedule.
The company has now moved to a "flex office" scheme. I was already not very happy having to go in, but you can imagine I now abhor it. Having to share desks with people who don't give a shit about office equipment, having to clean up the screens because they figure it's fine to stick their fingers on them and having to use shoddy peripherals... And it goes on and on, you've read it on every HN post on the subject.
Luckily for me, they don't really enforce this, and I can still spend most of my days WFH and still have a semi-dedicated desk.
But your post is the reason why many people are up in arms against this whole "the office is better". Apparently, it's only better if you force everybody back in. So it's not really about "choice", but about having one's preferences be the "right" ones.
No, it was never about choice, you misunderstood.
Yes, offices have downsides, but they also have benefits. To get the benefits the majority of a team needs to be in the same office. Having tried both, I prefer working in an office with coworkers around. The growing consensus seems to be that large companies agree with me. Are you saying you know more about employee productivity than Meta and Amazon among others?
If you’re unhappy and want to work remotely feel free to quit and go work in a remote company.
And on your comment about your office being disgusting, your coworkers being terrible, and your commute being awful: that’s a skill issue friend. My office is great, always clean and stocked with snacks; my coworkers are awesome, very thoughtful people and i consider some of them to be my friends and we hang out outside of work; my commute is a 15 minute bicycle ride that gets my day started with some exercise. I might change jobs to somewhere that has more office days though.
I’m sure you can also find a company with a great office culture. I wouldn’t want to work from your company’s office either. That’s why I specifically look out for that when job hunting.
> If you’re unhappy and want to work remotely feel free to quit and go work in a remote company.
Couldn't this equally apply to you? Feel free to quit and go work in a fully office present company?
Your commute is a 15 minute bicycle ride, you want to force everyone else back to the office because you have a nice easy commute and you personally prefer it. And you're glad that this is now happening across the industry, again, because you prefer it.
Yeah, that's completely selfish.
Yes, I have quit a remote company because it wasn’t for me. I deliberately live somewhere with a good commute.
These are choices I made for myself. If you can’t make the same choices that’s fine, but don’t come in to every thread about RTO and start saying that I’m a lazy irresponsible disrespectful person because I prefer to work in an office.
I’m not saying every company needs to be like this, but that companies like this should be allowed to exist without you remote work zealots belittling everyone who works there. Go work somewhere else!
> I was already not very happy having to go in, but you can imagine I now abhor it. Having to share desks with people who don't give a shit about office equipment, having to clean up the screens because they figure it's fine to stick their fingers on them and having to use shoddy peripherals... And it goes on and on, you've read it on every HN post on the subject.
The company I work for has a reservation system for desks.
More than not the desks are disgusting. I'm talking about some suspicious matter that might be food or nose bigger on the greasy keyboard. Keyboard and mouse are flimsy office staple crapware and we have to use Citrix even though we are within the company network.
For fuck sake either go back to the old days where a person had their own desk they can personalize or let me work from my place.
I feel what you are proposing is the worst of both worlds.
The company still needs to pay a full office (decreasing chances that money will be used for home office benefit or raises), people are still forced to live somewhat close to the office, not realizing the biggest benefit of remote work: living where you want, close to the people you care and freeing up money and time.
If working together really helps, it's enough that those who think that coordinate and agree on days to go to the office. If nobody agrees, than maybe the benefits are only perceived or subjective?
I will be honest, I believe that lots of people go to the office because their 9-5 (+ commute) job made it impossible for them to maintain and cultivate social relationships outside work, which means they see the office as their attempt to escape loneliness. I am not saying that's everyone, but that for many people is the case and that explains people non-stop interrupting, walking in on others, chatting etc., which is quite common in office environments.
That said, I think that remote work needs also a few key elements to succeed:
- a remote culture in the company (e.g., everyone understands flexibility in terms of working time, meetings are online-first, documentation and async work culture, etc.) - a good space to work at home. I can't imagine working on a stool and a laptop like some people were forced to do during covid. - discipline (e.g., not let work time bleed into personal time, blocking time etc.) - good social relationships with friends/family. It can be very alienating otherwise.
> You would benefit from not assuming that everyone is the same as you.
So would you. A typical office is not an "environment conductive to work" for everyone.
Noise, recirculated air, lifeless rows of desks, bad company and a 2h total commute? No thanks.
I’m not the one saying people who prefer working from home are lazy, irresponsible slackers though, am I?
I just explained my experience. Funny that you perceive that as an attack on yourself. What does that say about you?
It's snowing outside right now and I'm in the middle of a cubicle "bullpen" unable to see the outdoors. I bring up a camera view from home or one of the webcams around town. I hate it.
Whenever I'm in the office, I get zero work done. It's great for socialising and catching up with colleagues, but abysmal for productivity.
That’s only because you go to the office once in a blue moon. If it was your daily routine you’d get used to it and be productive there too, just maybe not as much as when you’re home.
Did you work in an office before covid? I’m sure your productivity wasn’t abysmal or you wouldn’t still be working in tech
My current job used to be fully in the office before covid. That was some 5 years, so yeah, I was pretty "used" to it. After covid, it stayed "flexible", where I mostly WFH. Before this job, I also used to work one where it was "flexible", with multiple WFH days.
Sure, I didn't do "nothing" while in the office, there was some productivity. I still manage to get stuff done when I go there. But the difference in productivity between when I'm home and when I'm in the office is abysmal.
I don't have to put up with my colleagues being on the phone all the time. I don't have to put up with a chair that gives me back pain, or with contorting myself to reduce the glare on my screens. I don't have to endure being squished in the metro for half an hour each way or get up at absurd hours to avoid that. I don't have to eat at random times or in front of my computer because the lunch corner is already full.
Could I "get used to that" all over again? I guess. People who need to take the local public transit "get used" to it being unreliable and a general PITA. Do they enjoy it? Would they be happier if they wouldn't have to put up with that? What do you think?
I think the general issue, as I alluded in an answer to another of your posts, is that there indeed are people with differing preferences. And we could have people do what they prefer. But problems arise when we each try to impose our approach to others. Want to go to the office because for some reason you prefer that? Enjoy! But then, don't turn around and say "yeah, but going at the office and being alone (presumably because the others hate going) is all downside without any upside, so everybody should come in".
I go to the office around one week out of every four, it's not that rare. Sure, there's some catching up, but not that much. Mostly it's the continuous interruptions that are never time boxed, the way they are when remote.
That’s odd, in my experience most engineers know to at least send a slack message first before talking to a fellow engineer in person, unless it’s an emergency.
I guess it's very culture-dependent, we don't have many engineers in the office so I don't know.
> You would benefit from not assuming that everyone is the same as you.
I’m sorry if it came across that this was the point I was making. I was not. I acknowledge and understand everyone is different.
The point I was making was about trusting people to be responsible adults and do what is right for the productivity without dictating a binary decision.
People who are more productive at home should not be punished because others are not and likewise for the inverse.
I think this is a situation where you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Network effects mean that the more people are in the office the better. On the other hand, if even a single team member is remote then the entire team must adapt to that. If half the team is remote then I might as well stay home too.
I don’t want to have an office to go into. If that was the issue I could just get a shared office to work from.
I want to work at a company where most of my direct coworkers come to the office regularly.
I should get to have that. Not every company needs to be a remote or a flex company. If you don’t like RTO you can quit. Likewise for me, I’m not too happy with my current office situation, so I’m looking for a new job.
Nobody was ever prohibited from coming to the office. If you like it, do it.
But forcing people to come to the office when they hate it, is counter-productive.
I disagree, and clearly most companies opting for some kind of RTO are on my side.
The biggest benefit of an office is collocation. People need to be forced to come to an office or they won’t do it, and team efficiency will go down.
Even if you think you’re performing well, the entire team suffers for it. Miscommunication happens. People get blocked for longer. Juniors can’t get the mentoring they need.
If you disagree that’s fine, go work for a remote company. But clearly the tide is turning against you with more and more companies enforcing RTOs.
The people that do the actual work dont want to be in the office surrounded by the slackers that for some reason 'require' other people around them to work. Theyre leaches. They drain energy me.
Do you make it a habit of calling your coworkers “slackers” and “leeches”?
Maybe that’s why your coworkers are so bad. If everywhere you go smells like shit maybe check your shoes.
A lot of people are not responsible enough to work well remotely.
Then they are also not responsible enough to work at the office, you can't pay a nanny who sith with them and tells them to keep working 8 hours a day at the office anyway. Those people need to be let go because you can't trust them.
Actually, having people at the office often works like peer pressure in that people at least pretend to work around their co-workers. Something which doesn't exist at home.
I can make unfair generalizations too.
A lot of people who prefer remote work have a superiority complex over their peers. They’re usually hard to work with and unreliable, and think that as long as they’re performing their individual tasks they’re allowed to be awful communicators.
You forgot the IMHO.
No, in my professional experience.
There are offices where I definitely feel productive. Today’s tight open offices just are not those places.
I don’t know what you mean by today’s because most companies I’ve worked at have had pretty nice offices. Even the open space ones were quiet and spacious. The one exception was a startup at an incubator.
My last office job was in an old converted garment factory. Lots of space, we had our own desks. It was really nice. Sharing a table with someone is not as nice, and office mates are rarely tolerant of my model M keyboard.
So you’re the reason the office is noisy hahaha
Hope you can find something that suits you!
Since I've been WFH for last 5 years I'm probably not the reason, although I get criticism on video conferences when I start typing without muting my microphone first.
It's the middle managers. They're the unproductive ones in a remote setup.
The core issue is like you said - responsibility.
My previous employer ran an experiment. They had us come in two days per week for six weeks and ran the numbers. We ended up going 100% wfh with a downsized office. We been planning to double our office capacity before the pan.
I’m convinced that more than half of orgs would see similar numbers if they cared to look. I bet a bunch of the ones mandating RTO see them but do it anyway.
The market will solve this problem eventually. In industries where WFH is more efficient, eventually the companies that go that route will outperform their peers. It’s inevitable really. It will take time because companies feel the need to use their offices while they have an ongoing lease, but when it comes time to renew the savings are difficult to ignore.
Ah, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, applied to labor.
That doesn’t seem correct to me. Explain?
"We're also offering the option to transfer from the MPK to SF office for those people whose commute would be the same or better with that change."
So wait, you'll be able to switch offices even though your team might be in the second one? What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?
>What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?
People have been asking that since companies started phasing out WFH after the pandemic.
I left my last company when they made me go to the office when I worked for a dispersed team, I was the only one in this office and the rest of the team was dispersed across multiple timezones. Every team meeting was literally a zoom meeting, and conference rooms were scarce so everyone just did zoom calls at their desk.
When I was WFH I didn't mind getting up in time for a 7:30am meeting to meet with the overseas team before they went home for the day, but I wasn't willing to leave the house at 6:30 to get to the office in time for that meeting, and I wasn't going to join a 7:30am meeting at home, then head to work after already putting in an hour of work.
My boss agreed it made no sense, but there were no exceptions to the rule -- I left before it became mandatory 5 days a week in the office.
The CEO made a big deal of going to the office every day so everyone should do it, but it didn't escape notice that the company literally opened an office just for the finance and executive team that happened to be in the same wealthy suburb that he and most of the other top execs lived. That would have turned a 45 - 60 minute commute into a 10 minute commute for him.
That timezone thing really threw one of my client's management for a loop. During covid they expanded some of their India and Philippians office presence and depending on what you're working on, you need to have regular communication with some of those folks. When they did full RTO they were trying to "make" some of the staff (engineering and management) come in at 5am so they could meet with the offshore staff before they went home but everyone bucked, as you'd expect. When folks were WFH they just went with it. Eventually executive staff just said "you guys figure it out". So they ended up changing the meetings from twice a week to once a month and now projects keep slipping deadlines, including one that went from approx on time to 2mo behind, and it's costing them serious revenue since they cant sell it yet.
You really love to see it. Its a wild waste but someone is going to eat crow eventually. You know I would like to see one of these trend followers literally eat a crow, wings and feathers all of it.
Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office and have desks near each other. People collaborate via in-person meetings, hallway conversations and general proximity.
During covid - hiring is mostly remote since companies figure they don't have to be constrained by geography anymore. Employees work at home and collaborate over Zoom meetings. It's difficult at first but everyone adjusts. Productivity is allegedly lower, partly due to the remote nature, partly because employees are slacking off.
Now - employers start mandating return to office. Teams are still distributed, so rather than collaborating via physical proximity employees have to spend their day trying to find meeting rooms and sitting on Zoom, just in the office instead of their homes.
Is the company actually more productive now? Some McKinsey consultant has a slide deck showing that it has gone up from 6.5 to 7.2, so the bosses all pat themselves on the back.
> Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office
Just a reminder that there were plenty of great distributed teams long before Covid. I had had only a few "in office" jobs in my pre-covid career (and generally found collaboration better on remote teams, though goofing off has a bit harder to organize).
I also find it funny that somehow software engineers completely forget about the existence of open source software which worked in a more extremely distributed fashion than any remote company I've worked for at a time when IRC and email where the only tools for remote communication. Most of the most used and most successful software was written by globally distributed teams that only met face to face every few years if ever.
This timeline you are presenting applies only to large corporate jobs, where my experience has been "work productivity" always takes a back seat to organizational theater.
Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast.
Hell, I had commit rights to a popular open source “AWS Solution” when I was there and it took so long to get something approved to be pushed into the mainline that I ended up forking it for individual customers (AWS ProServe) and then eventually getting most of it merged back in later.
Now that I’m not at AWS, even though I know the team there, I doubt I could get something approved to merge back in even though I was the third highest contributor to the project for awhile.
> Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast.
You want to actually compete for fast iteration? We'll happily take you on over at ardour.org ...
Yes, there are some FLOSS projects which may take a long time to approve PRs. Even in our case, that happens sometimes when someone proposes something we're not convinced by but also cannot reject immediately.
Meanwhile, it's not unusual for comments in our discourse server to lead to direct changes in the main branch within hours.
So while FLOSS may contain examples against distributed teams, it also contains very strong, and very numerous examples that argue in favor of it.
Most open source projects I’ve worked on could move faster than any of the large companies I’ve been at.
To be fair though. There was an AWS service that didn’t have Cloudformation support. It was faster for an SA at AWS to build out Terraform support for it and get it merged into the Terraform than it was for us to just wait on CD support.
Reading this made me wonder if I have an alt account that I forgot about, because this is exactly how I think about our current state.
Hey, remote work isn't productive, lets go into an office and push all our code to github and deploy to Linux (both largely developed by distributed teams, thankfully without Zoom).
But you are right, organizational and productivity theater dominate at many companies.
I literally had a customer decline a meeting today with this as the reason:
"Couldnt find a proper space to conduct the meeting"
Literally doesn’t matter to the people making these decisions. It’s unfortunate.
Why would it even matter to him? This fucking clown will be gone in a couple of years after collecting a fat check.
None of these executives are using data driven decisions. It’s said as much in the memo. It’s vibes based.
I suspect there’s more at play with this. Maybe they’re expecting attrition from this and that’s their actual goal. They never reveal their core intentions.
Many executive jobs are little more than “being in the office” - they have to “go to work”. This leads them to think presence = work being done - they don’t know what actual work or productivity is. If they don’t have people present to lord over then their job starts to be seen for what it really is… a suit and tie in an office and nodding while saying “hmm” at meetings.
My company's CEO comes from the sales world, and I imagine that's the case in many companies making these RTO decisions. His idea of getting work done is getting everyone in a room together, having some handshakes, sitting down, and talking something out. This is not what getting work done looks like to software engineers, and many other IC positions. The blanket RTO policies come from a lack of understanding how other people & roles work best.
This. The actual numbers show that remote workers are more productive and that fully remote companies generate outsized returns when compared to companies that RTO. Executives know this and chose to ignore it.
This is about the appearance of doing something, not actually doing something.
The real underlying reason is easy. You know how to really excel as a developer, you pretty much have to be in for love of the craft? Management's the same way, but instead of a focus on building software, it's a focus on fulfilling a sense of power. People who are motivated by the pursuit of power put more effort into achieving positions of power, until basically any position of power is filled by the power hungry. It's a fundamental failure of every hierarchy. Sometimes there are temporary exceptions, but over time everything reverts to the mean.
In office, managers get to look out over their little fiefdoms. It's a physical space, with physical people, and it's theirs. And their competitors (other managers) can see their domain, and understand where they stand in the pecking order. In WFH settings, the whole thing becomes far more abstract. The manager's desire for elevated position isn't met, and they become paranoid that their competition can't see their status.
> They never reveal their core intentions.
Is it so hard for them to say, FU, office time now because I like it, or because we want to force attrition, or we bought all this RE and by god we are going to use it?
I mean, if they give the honest non vibe reasons, it would be the same, but at least honest.
Wall Street doesn't care as long as the stock goes up.
Customers don't care as long as they get the product.
And employees can't do anything other than vote with their feet.
So what's the downside of being honest?
I work in a post Covid office and even with about 1 to 6 ratio of desks to rooms, along just as many fart pods, it can be a struggle to find space during peak hours.
>along just as many fart pods
You mean phone coffins?
Fart pods seem like a more accurate nomenclature to me.
You mean rack mounts for humans?
Do you really have one desk per six rooms? That's pretty sparse 8)
Now the real issue is: what on earth is a fart pod?
Anyway, my (quite literally mine as in I'm the MD) tiddly company still clings to the notion that remote working is a good thing, in general. Pre-pandemic I was a sceptic and post-pandemic: I'm happy that a lot more remote working happens.
There do need to be additional controls but not of the intrusive, automated variety. I deliberately ring people up and encourage using the dog and bone and frown on email for immediate requirements.
It is a fact of modern corporate life that people will use email as it was intended: a reliable store and forward communication mechanism. A side effect is that what should be sorted out now can be ... legitimately ... punted off into tomorrow.
Not the OP but I think they mean those little phone booth pods. For if you want to join a call but you're the only one from that office so taking up a meeting room makes no sense. In our place they're tiny and stuffy (probably to prevent people hoarding them all day!). And if you fart in them it will probably hang around a long time :)
I thought the stairwells were the designated fart location
A lot of us have worked remote for a long time - I did it 2004 - 2007, and 2015-present. Sometimes across many time zones. The issue is with (lack of) leadership, and specifically lack of accountability for leadership.
> Is the company actually more productive now? Some McKinsey consultant has a slide deck showing that it has gone up from 6.5 to 7.2, so the bosses all pat themselves on the back.
Any productivity increases come from the fact that some employees would rather quit than come back to the office. Which makes it seem like less people do the same amount of work. Until they get overworked and output plumments. But that will land outside of the measurement window.
My personal experience has been that teams were not in close physical contact since about 1994. Basically since the internet became ubiquitous. In 1999 I was working in an office in Silicon Valley and realized that I never sat across the table from any of the people I was working with. Some were in other buildings around the campus. Some were in France. Some were in the field. Some were down the hall on the same floor, but if you wandered over to talk to them chances were they weren't in their cube. So I decided to move to Montana. COVID occurred 21 years later.
> What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?
The illusion of control? I mean we can pretend we don't know what this is about (well it's probably also about encouraging a reduction in force), but we do know right?
By far the people who bemoaned working from home the most were people whose job doesn't typically involve any actual "work". Not saying that there weren't exceptions, but the vast majority of working engineers I knew rejoiced in finally getting heads down time, while everyone whose job is primarily "performance for leadership" hated how difficult it was to perform visible theatrics on a camera.
Especially in large orgs "leadership" and "team success" are largely about optics. Being seen working in the office late is so much more important than getting any actual work done. It's only in small companies where actually shipping something has any value at all.
What I don't understand is why we still pretend like this is a mystery. Recognizing this I've completely avoided working for large orgs, and continue to enjoy remote work we're I can be valued for the results of what I build (well there's always a little theater) over office productivity performativity.
Large grandiose parades and such.
It's mystifying, but pretty much the entire tech leadership class has a deep conviction that taking Zoom calls on Airpods from your desk or a random corner of the office is the ideal way of working.
There is no tech leadership class.
Things have to stay stable long enough for a leadership class to emerge. In tech that is not possible. They are just leaves in the wind.
Not true anymore. Every large tech company is now filled to the brim with career managers.
in case this is not sarcasm... tech managers != tech leaders.
most are one, some are neither, and a small minority are both. i have works for more than 20 tech managers in 30+ years, have managed technologists (ops, app-dev, network, infra, etc.) multiple times, and have hired and fired tech managers. i can count the genuine tech leaders+managers i've met on one hand. fewer around than ever nowadays.
> in case this is not sarcasm... tech managers != tech leaders.
I agree that being management doesn't make one a leader. Anyone who has been in the industry for five, ten years knows that a leader may or may not have a management title.
However. It has been the fad for many, many years now for Management to call itself Leadership. [0] This makes it slightly ambiguous, but not at all incorrect to refer to the "management class" as the "leadership class".
[0] I guess their little, tiny, incredibly fragile egos got overly bruised by the years of derogatory commentary aimed at clueless managers, and they -because of their tiny, inadequate brains- decided that A Big Rebrand would change the nature of reality.
i understood that reference... and, like Wash, feel like i'm "flying" a stone at gravity's whim while i pretend to be in control. tech leadership at a lot of corps do the exact same thing most days. a good reason to find your tribe asap, get out of corp, and assert some control.
I interviewed there in 2024. Said no because they said I would have to commute from SF to Menlo Park 4 days a week. They explicitly said I could not work from the SF office before I even asked.
Do you think that was a hiring manager specific preference or an overall HR policy thing? Shitty nonetheless.
It was before matching so I am guessing overall HR policy.
That doesn’t make sense. In 2024, you could choose any location while matching. You just wouldn’t get any matches if there was no one hiring in that location (or if your profile wasn’t suitable to any, etc.). Your recruiter was being stupid or failing to communicate effectively.
The benefit is that people quit and then Instagram can claim "AI efficiency" to juice the stock.
There is no benefit to you. That's the point. RTO is about your employer taking more from you and giving you less. Back in the school playground we used to squabble over who is "it" or had the biggest conker or something equally pointless. There is this belief that some day people grow up. Sadly, that day never actually comes.
A ton of teams are already distributed. The RTO makes no sense unless your team is already mostly in one office but that’s not how a lot of teams are.
Tons of team are completely split up across multiple states/timezones.
I think IG might be more local teams than distributed but I’m not sure.
One of the teams at my workplace has 5 members in 5 different offices. They’re still forced to come to office and attend calls via Microsoft Teams from their respective offices than from their homes.
These are reasons I can think of - they want to prevent people from doing second job, they want to maintain commercial real estate prices (even if it is artificially propped up) or most likely, it is just the good old ego thing (“you work for me, I make you do things just because I can”).
Ego/pet project/appearance of doing something as an executive is probably the main driver.
A lot of these decisions have very little quality data behind them.
They most likely have a long-term plan to realign team boundaries with office locations, but want to minimize the short-term disruption for people who've moved around the Bay Area based on current working schedules.
I doubt it. A company that is doing RTO is also a company that is aggressively offshoring and expecting you to spend your early mornings/late nights on IST friendly calls. It's just a general turn against US-based software engineers as belts tighten and the balance of power in the labor market shifts.
The vast majority of American software companies worked from the office in 2019. I understand and acknowledge that some people advocated for remote work even then, but I don't understand this idea that CEOs disagreeing can only be explained by belt tightening and disrespect for engineers.
Working from the office was of a completely different nature in 2019 when your coworkers were also there. By scattering headcount around the world, tech executives have fully committed to distributed teams that communicate by video call. The question now is whether you join video calls from home, or from a "hub" that hosts a minority (or perhaps none) of their other participants.
There is no sign of a return to 2019 levels of Bay Area or even US share of headcount.
To what end? This achieves exactly what for teams?
As the memo says, it achieves "Building a Winning Culture"; Mosseri's judgment is that "we are more creative and collaborative when we are together in-person".
Yeah, that might be the long-term idea, but most likely it will take multiple quarters of internal mobilities to achieve the final shape during which they're forcing people to come to the office and having all meetings and team interactions on a call. Suboptimal decision in my opinion.
Isn't this the same story for every moderately large company that did RTO over the last few years? It's not about efficiency, it's about shaking out some people by forcing them back into an office.
Around 2023 I was working at a company that was, at the time, just threatening RTO, and when hiring we had to decide if it was worth it to hire someone who (might) report to a different office in a different time zone. Which was not an issue at all a month before, when the company was still committed to being fully remote. The hours talking about it were a waste of my life for what, in the end, didn't even matter because they laid off most of the team six months later.
The concern is reasonable, but I'm not sure there's a great way to make people act as though RTO is happening other than actually doing the RTO. A number of companies never said remote work was going to be long-term in the first place, yet still had employees moving around randomly based on an assumption that peak Covid norms were the new status quo.
This literally has never happened.
Sure, you're still effectively working remotely by being in two different offices, but The vibes are totally changed and the seats are warmer now with all those asses in them! And yes, yes your boss is working from some expensive resort in Tahiti and the CEO is in an undisclosed location on his yacht, but they're totally on board!
It’s called soft launching. Obviously it would be better if everyone was in the same office, but some people might have moved in the remote years and now their commutes are longer. So you accommodate for those people by letting them go to another office. Going forward hiring for teams is going to be collocated, so this problem solves itself with time.
It makes over-employment more difficult; it also makes unexpected North Korean employees less likely to slip in.
My RTO'd team of 13 is distributed across 3 office and not evenly distributed (8, 4, 1) so the probability of the person you need being in the same physical office is ~43% instead of the 0%. So overall it's better if you value in person and I say this as the 1
There's a 100% chance that you can't work in person with your full team, so if you think in-person work is important I'm not sure how overall it can be better value, since you won't get that.
You still get in person for 1-1s, small team whiteboarding and pair programming.
How do you know they are random or noisy?
Stap into any office? It’s full of random people, and it’s full of noise. I’ve not seen places where the knowledge work wasn’t set together with the noisemakers.
I feel a lot of the noise complaints are due to open plan offices.
I've worked at a cubicle farm before. Partitions were high enough to avoid being able to see people in a sitting position, but high enough that you can still stand up and ask your neighbor a question. The cubicles were spaceous, had ample desk space and didn't feel claustrophobic or "caged in" at all. If anything, it felt like I had my own little space that I was in control of.
The partitions had steel sheets in them to allow people to use magnets to hang up documents/whatever. My cubicle walls were covered in [documents and datasheets](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzIxZmIzYjEtZGMyZi00...). Some of my colleagues had extensively decorated their cubicles with photos and tchotchkes. Others had their entire desk space littered with PCBs and tools.
Managers got cubicles on the sides of the building with windows, theirs were larger and had higher partitions, with a window filling in that extra height.
The extra desk space was great. I worked as an embedded SWE and I often needed the space for tools and the devices I was working on. The few times I needed an oscilloscope, I could easily find room for it, no need to move my setup to a lab.
Cubicles get a bad rep. It's actually quite a nice way to work, if executed properly, that is.
That said, I did have noise issues before. But that was always the same colleague. She luckily only came in on Wednesdays. She totally lacked the concept of an indoor voice while on the telephone.
A cubicle had more space than I got in most jobs. In one I even ended up switching headphones because the sound leakage from my headphones was too loud for others
Dude you’re describing Initech from Office Space. Kudos for making it sound legit and vague enough that it did take me until the end to fully identify it. But there’s no mistaking “Nina speaking. Just a moment…”
I'm serious, lol
A proper execution of a cubicle office is actually quite decent.
But for a good workplace you also need to have good colleagues, including managers. That's universal, whether open plan or cubes.
I'm old enough to remember having an individual office (and, a bit later, two-person offices). Great for collaboration, because it had a whiteboard and enough space/furniture for a few people to huddle, and for focused individual work, and for meetings with remote people without disrupting anyone and without taking up a meeting room. Nowadays we have unforced poor conditions and outcomes, mostly for pretend savings on facilities.
And, of course, serendipitous collaboration rarely happens when everyone is sitting with noise cancelling headphones, focusing on hitting their ambitious individual goals for the quarter/half/year.
Booking.com had low-noise offices back in the late 2010s. Engineering, product, design. Nobody taking calls on their desk, that was rude. All meetings in well-isolated rooms, some well placed noise barriers. It was pretty quiet even in an open office floor with 400 people.
Yes!!! Before the pandemic we had an it floor that was quiet. Now we sit next to loudmouth sales goons barking into the phone all day. Ugh
Beens stepping into various offices most of the past 25 years and have not noticed that.
You sound like a parody of a librarian.
> What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?
You'll cross-pollinate across functions. Or at least increase the chances of that happening. Not saying that's worth the tradeoff. But my time in the office often finds serendipitious value in random off-team conversations, not scheduled time.
I am currently an engineer at Meta. No one in my office is cross pollinating among different teams. In fact most of us are not even talking to each other unless there’s a dedicated meeting time for it. This whole thing about collaborating is better in person has never been my experience, because the collaboration (at least for engineering) is most of the time better done in a document.
There are, however, a few times when getting together and discussing something in person is valuable, but this is no more than maybe a couple times a month. I can definitely see this being different for other roles.
> I am currently an engineer at Meta. No one in my office is cross pollinating among different teams. In fact most of us are not even talking to each other unless there’s a dedicated meeting time for it. This whole thing about collaborating is better in person has never been my experience, because the collaboration (at least for engineering) is most of the time better done in a document.
I worked at Meta nee Facebook from 2013-18, and back then there were no documents, and the only way to figure stuff out was either spelunk through the source code, or talk to people in person. So I was very surprised that they ever said they'd be doing remote, and entirely unsurprised that they are moving back towards the office.
That being said, there was no tracking of in office/remote days, it was just expected that you'd work from wherever worked best for you but (almost) everyone was based out of an office.
> most of us are not even talking to each other unless there’s a dedicated meeting time for it. This whole thing about collaborating is better in person has never been my experience
Obviously varies by culture. And while I've never worked for Meta, I've been at your Mountain View and New York campuses more times than I care to have been. Everything–including communal spaces–seems laid out for individual work. (This was true before the metamates nonsense, though that obviously accelerated it.)
Are the worker bees really cross polinating? I don't even get to choose what to work on, my manager and tech lead tells me what to do and all of that is approved by the director. The everything becomes an okr and it's a huge deal to pivot half way through the half. I'm told this is pretty typical.
I’ve had that happen like a grand total of 5 times in 15 years of work. In which kind of companies or offices do these things happen?
For me it's been like 1-2 times in 25 years, if that
> which kind of companies or offices do these things happen?
Frankly, the ones that tend to play, goof off and shoot shit together. And it’s not necessarily companywide nor evenly distributed. But it’s something I value tremendously in work cultures, both because it’s productive and fun.
This is the huge benefit of in-person work. Personally I've not found it worth the tradeoffs, but it cannot be discounted.
I have quite literally never, not once, "cross-pollinated" ideas in office. I'm not saying it has never happened, but anecdotally even when my entire team is there, other teams are simply not working on the same scope of work that we would be at the time, so there's no cross pollination of any kind.
I mean, I've heard good ideas being discussed, but at the end of the day we all have our in-progress projects and tickets, and future projects already planned out, so those good ideas never make it to fruition because everyone is busy anyways and doesn't have the time or resources to do anything about it. So in reality, those "cross-pollination" talks become nothing more but socialization moments, which is fine, but to force everyone into a miserable commute just to achieve a bit of socializing is insanity to me.
I think you're going to get downvoted to oblivion but as far as I'm concerned, that's been my impression as well.
Instagram chief orders quiet layoffs to please investors in 2026
fixed that title for you
And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week - kids to pick up from daycare, health issues to manage, a social life in the evenings, travel plans - basically the exact category that a company like Meta would want to replace with a younger, more exploitable bunch.
> And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week
Or senior people who have a dozen offers waiting in their inbox that they've neglected responding to because they're reasonably happy where they are...until the prospect of commuting.
That's not how the job market is right now. There's like 5 companies in the world that can compete on compensation while allowing remote work with meta.
I would take a lower comp for remote work and a better work environment. They will never pay me the amount that would make me choose 2h in traffic everyday instead of having enough time to cook breakfast to my family, take my kids to school, have lunch with my wife, etc.
Every time I hear U.S. commute times, I keep thinking they must be grossly overstated.
How is your infrastructure so inadequate for... living?
I live in Utrecht and despite living very close to Utrecht Centraal, it still takes me 45 minutes to get to Amsterdam where my office is. Count late trains and general rush hour, so for me it can take 2h out of my day easily if I'm unlucky (thankfully where I work we count commute time into the work day, the very first time I saw my manager I saw him sprint out the door at 3PM on the dot because he had a lengthy commute lol)
I think if you counted commute time as billable hours in the U.S. workforce, there would be much less complaining.
Long commutes are not unique to the US. I'm spending 1.5 hours one way in the UK. It's depend on your personal circumstances. If you are young and single it's usually possible to rent a studio or a room with reasonable commute time. E. g. if you have a family and/or own a house then moving close to the office in response to RTO mandate may not be an option.
They're overstated. The median commute time in the USA is about 27 minutes each way. NYC is the highest at 33 min.
For tech hubs? Because tech hubs tend to be in some of the most traffic nightmare cities. I have worked in DC and Atlanta. My commute for all my jobs except 1 was an hour. The one exception was 20mins because it was a small weirdly placed company that just happened to be in the suburb one over from me.
For all other jobs, I had to commute to a business district I didn't live close to because business district and low price (when young) or great schools (when older) don't mix often.
Yeah, I know the median commute in these areas is low, but they are counting retail workers and teachers. I bet the median for tech workers is pretty high because of the reality of how they tend to be placed.
In a real tech hub, it's definitely going to be a longer commute. Nashville, for instance, is not a tech hub. Yet it has some of the worst commute times for people who have an office there.
Most cities on earth have mixed-zoning, with office and living spaces mixed together. There, this does not occur.
Is that one way?
> 27 minutes each way
And guess which of your employees can take that option.
Dozen offers to try to go through 5+ stages of recruitment process without any feedback and possibility to be ghosted after each person. How good senior people are with leetcode?
No point in quitting, reduce workload.
If leadership needs to manage folks out make them do the work and collect a paycheck while it happens.
Yeah I don't get people who quit when RTO or unreasonable changes are made. Quitting makes it easy for them and means they stop paying you now.
Letting them fire you means at worst you end up with the same outcome, at best you call their bluff and get paid a few months more (or forever).
Yeah but RTO takes real time and money. Sure you can earn a paycheck, but if you're commuting 2 hours a day total, you're still losing those 2 hours until they fire you. And that kind of stinks. And that's assuming you don't need to move. Moving for a job you hate is the worst.
I think the suggestion is just ignoring the RTO mandate and continuing to work remote, until they fire you for insubordination.
Reduce workload, get in a bit later and go home a bit earlier.
Avoid attending meetings involving people dialling in from a different office (that’s not in person collaboration, so it’s worthless work. Sorry, I don’t make the rules) and be present at the meeting (keeping the chair warm it’s all it counts after all) while browsing HN in the ones you really cannot get out of it.
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There have never been "company hours" in tech. Until recently (before badge tracking became a thing) asking your manager what time you were expected to come in and leave would be met with blank stares. "We don't enforce set hours here, just get your work done". And conversely "I came to the office and worked 8 hours a day like you asked" is never going to be accepted as an excuse when you fail to meet your targets at the end of the quarter or miss a page in the middle of the night. Heck you can't even work on your own projects after hours or patent your own ideas because the knowledge in your head is company property. Simply put - they are hiring you for your skills and your output, not for warming a seat at an office for 8 hours a day. Tech companies have always treated employees like adults and expected adult behavior in return, and both sides have benefited greatly from this arrangement. Sadly it seems like the new crop of tech leadership seems adamant on making their companies more like a call center.
So you'd think right? Nobody would like anything better than to just get output without worrying about hours or location or anything like that. But if you were in a management position when WFH started, you would've seen velocity go through the floor and stay there. And to be fair, there are absolutely a limited set of employees who are perfectly capable of working remotely with no issues whatsoever. But for the majority.. the feedback we've gotten is there is too much temptation to just do the laundry or dishes or "my wife needs a hand with X", and output just continues to stay low. And while it would be great to separate employees into groups based on who can be trusted to WFH and who can't, it feels too discriminatory and would cause way too many headaches.
So, as I'm sure you've seen in the news stories over the last few years, basically every large organization everywhere has enacted some sort of RTO mandate. I'm sure there are a few smaller startups kicking around who want to keep trying things the other way, but for the most part, the industry has spoken. We can keep complaining about it but short of another pandemic it's unlikely covid-style work is going to make a comeback IMO.
> But if you were in a management position when WFH started, you would've seen velocity go through the floor and stay there.
I spoke with my manager about this. This wasn't true for our team, and it wasn't true for any other team in our (fairly sizable) division. I didn't give a shit about any other group, so I didn't ask.
If your employees are spending their days fucking around instead of working when they're working from their home office, I'm here to tell you that when they were in the corporate-leased office, they were browsing Reddit on their phone or off on yet another coffee break to "get the pulse of the office". Slackers and shirkers are gonna slack and shirk, no matter where they are.
The thing to do is to fire folks who aren't doing enough to justify their pay. That's something that hasn't ever changed.
> if you were in a management position when WFH started, you would've seen velocity go through the floor and stay there
Comp has also gone through the floor thanks to inflation and stayed there. You get what you pay for I guess?
> you would've seen velocity go through the floor and stay there
Is this “velocity” in the room with us right now?
Or, just maybe I'm doing the daycare and social life and whatever in the spare time I have from no longer commuting (~2 hours extra a day for me).
Where does GP say that this is done on company time?
It's called a work-life balance. I know, crazy idea.
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The practice of an entire working population commuting from an hour+ away to a few buildings in the center of the city, sitting on their ass for 8 hours a day, eating a packed lunch, and commuting back home is at most a couple hundred years old. But sure, go on about your "hundreds-to-thousands of years of history".
>Covid was fun, I get it, but that was a long time ago man.
I don't understand what you gain from trying to be super abrasive on a forum. Is it fun?
The "I know, crazy idea." from the parent comment is even more abrasive.
Calling out every abrasive comment would take more effort than I'm willing to expend, and would itself be pretty abrasive. So I picked the comment where they called Covid (the event where many people died, had their businesses ruined, etc.) "fun" over the one that mentioned work-life balance.
The person you're replying to asked if it was fun. Consider that my sarcasm was meant to be sort of tongue in cheek and not incredibly serious, which is a very different kind of tone from other comments in this chain.
> Throughout hundreds-to-thousands of years of history your options have been
You might want to brush up on your anthropology a bit.
>Throughout hundreds-to-thousands of years of history ... but that was a long time ago man.
This seems like a self defeating argument.
Honestly, if the bus/delivery driver needed a mid-shift break to deal with some life stuff, yeah by all means, I personally think they should be able to do that kind of stuff (though maybe we start by giving them bathroom breaks?). The business hiring them should adapt.
99% of the working class doesn’t have the expectation of answering a page at 2 am, or working long hours without extra pay to make a deadline.
Don’t act like that’s an apples to apples comparison
Al, Wake up! It's 3AM and we need you to come in urgently!
Why? What happened?
We need to make sure we have shoes on the shelves! Bob had a nightmare there are no more shoes left!
People did this, I used to do jiu-jitsu with a ups guy that would stop and join the class mid day, then go back on his route.
I Had a manager that would go and drink beers in his car durring breaks.
I had Coworkers that would leave the office to pick up their kids pre covid.
Lots of people are messing around
Looks like you don't know how to properly manage your team.
I had a similar argument with a previous manager I had. Careerist dude started on some bullshit management-speak on measuring workers by ass-to-seat-hours while he had no idea I had a management degree from one of the most respected business colleges in my country. Had to rebuke him with Business Management 101.
Of course, this definitely contributed for him pushing me out afterwards, as small minds can't handle being wrong, and he even had the gall of trying and pushing me an unethical assignment. I got out with a nice severance package, and from the grapevine (it's a small community down here after all!) I hear every quarter somebody quits from his team or moves to a different one.
So yeah, bad managers got to career.
Aw, come on, shed a tear for the commercial real estate industry.
You think this is the tech job market to leave your job, and then what? Try and get in at someone else about to return to office? Freelance? IDK about anyone else, but I haven’t considered a contractor since AI Coding hit hard, I had poor experience with contractors anyhow, now I’m not sure I see the point of rolling those dice again.
It’s kind of a soft market unless you are working directly on AI models.
So, is this IG looking to cut fat by keeping what they considered the most committed employees? Maybe. Is it because most of us can admit that it takes the right people to work remotely and that isn’t a majority? That’s more my take.
We are observing the most valuable people leaving, because they easily can get a job at place where they care more about value you get to company than the bonus you will get as C-level after firing highly paid workers.
In the cases we know (I have a group of people working in different small and medium corps in Poland and Germany) - the people that are staying are either too lazy to change work or they are just not enough to get remote job.
Ok, sweet deal if you are one of the most valuable employees in big tech. Sounds like a perk that many people would seek out.
Are you?
If yes, cool. If no, well, seems like you have rationalized that not everyone will get WFH regardless on your feelings about it
If you’re the C-suite making this decision without realizing your best remote workers will quit even in this job market because they’re your best employees, you shouldn’t be the C.
If you do realize this, as you most definitely should since it is not rocket science in any way, your projections about short and long term value of institutional knowledge these folks take with them better be accurate.
>You think this is the tech job market to leave your job, and then what?
1. take that time to startup that business you've been thinking of doing
2. Coast on the months of savings and years of stock until things get better. Perhaps you even have enough for a soft retirement.
3. try to rapidly interview and hope you have a ship to jump to before the hammer comes down.
4. interview anyway because you know this means a layoff round is coming even if you wanted to move because not enough people quit on their own.
> is this IG looking to cut fat by keeping what they considered the most committed employees
If by "committed" you mean "most compensated", then yes.
>Is it because most of us can admit that it takes the right people to work remotely and that isn’t a majority? That’s more my take.
Sure, maybe. But Meta knows that isn't the reason. They lost the BOTD since 2017 in my eyes.
On number one, sure, take all the risk yourself. It pays off sometimes. And when it comes to hiring people you need to work as hard as you do, you can tell them they can work from home.
I will, because it's cheaper for me and more productive for them to work from home.
This is the exact tech job market to start looking and have interviews/offers scheduled so you're not screwed when layoffs happen.
Ok, fair, but roundabout reasoning.
Your choice to leave makes it a certainty. A soft market mean uncertainty.
It's unfortunate there wasn't more resistance by tech employees to RTO post-covid. It seemed like one of the very, very rare solutions to the systemic problems of housing and commuting in the US. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that WFH effectively doubles or even triples your total compensation when it means (a) actually affordable housing and (b) no time/money lost to commuting, especially if you have kids.
Because there's a five-letter scare word you're not allowed to say that would be required for tech workers to have any power over their managers, but that sort of collective action is dead on arrival in the current milieu. If you don't want to go back into the office, you have the power to enforce that, but you have to like... work together.
even though biden's already left I am still quite surprised how little views his pro union videos got https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZpUD9KgYc4 this video was on whitehouse's youtube channel
no one wants to work at shops that actually have unions compared to other places. it's just silly to actually suggest it makes things better.
> no one
I recently took a union software job after I was laid off due to the CEO having a tummy ache one morning. Many of my new co-workers were explicitly interested in the company _because_ there was a union.
It's very imperfect but such is life. It's all new to me but here's what I've seen so far:
a) Employees have a voice. That doesn't mean that management is forced to do anything, but at least it's possible to be vocally opposed to eating a shit sandwich.
b) We are protected by a contract. If you are called into a police station, you ask for a lawyer for protection according to the law. If an employee finds themselves in an adverse meeting/situation with management, they can call in a steward to protect them according to the contract.
c) The union is us, the workers. We self-organize. It simply gives us a structural framework to work within. An entity for my employer to recognize. It's not ran by an authoritarian who waves a magic wand to make things happen.
That's it. There seems to be this weird idea that I can screw around for 40 hours a week and have the union protect my job. The union told us that we very much still have to do our jobs (duh).
---
To go on a little side tangent. Some countries, such as Finland or Norway, have no minimum wage because unions are (a) everywhere and (b) (allowed to be) powerful enough to protect workers. Honestly it's the best of both worlds. Less government intervention but at the same time workers hugely benefit from collectivization. They don't need to beg their politicians to raise wages - they do it themselves because they are given the power to do so. In the US, we instead rely on the lizards in DC to protect our wages because unions have been so stripped of power.
I dunno where you live but in my part of the country getting into union work is the best way to prosper and succeed as just an average person. Maybe that isn't true for tech work at the moment, but union carpenters, plumbers, HVAC, pipe fitters, arborists, linemen, auto and factory workers, all make significantly more doing union work with better and safer work conditions.
Tech workers used to not be average people.
This is a frustrating comment. Please elaborate with a real point! Just highlighting something that used to be the case, does not imply that it should always be the case, nor does it imply that it reflects the case now.
The film industry has a lot of unions as well, including for their "above average" people (writers, actors, etc.)
I think most engineers/developers/scientists would welcome, or at least be fine with, being a member of a guild like writers and actors. Their parent poster is suggesting that a traditional US union is the way, which I personally don't agree with and don't think I am unique in that regard.
To be honest, I'm not sure I know the difference. I got invited to SAG-AFTRA after doing a TV commercial and it seemed pretty union-y to me. Not that it's inherently a bad thing, and maybe I'm wrong in that there are differences but not aware of them.
Could you say more about the differences you see between a traditional US union and a modern day guild?
What I meant is that something like SAG-AFTRA provides some benefits and sets minimum standards for a work environment but does not limit your ability to negotiate a higher rate for your work, does not require promotion (whatever that would mean in this context) based on seniority, etc.
In the US, doctors, lawyers, and to some extent professional engineers and other licensed professions operate under a somewhat similar model in that they restrict supply of that class of labor through some sort of accreditation, apply minimum standards for the profession, and otherwise stay out of your business for the most part.
This is the propaganda they used to keep us from organizing in our best interest.
Right, they want you to believe that each of us is a special little snowflake so we can crab bucket each other.
Of course, simultaneously, they treat us as completely fungible. Every engineer is like any other in their eyes.
Such a perfect contradiction should surely spark introspection in employees... you would think.
"The enemy is simultaneously strong and weak" - one of the warning signs of fascism
https://kickstarterunited.org/
Yeah, speak for yourself. I'd love to work at a place where I can't be fired because my manager had a bad day and I didn't move the right Jira tickets around to his satisfaction, where I'm treated like a human being in stead of fungible cattle. I also don't want to go back into an office. Ever. But if people actually want to affect change at their workplace, instead of just kvetching, that's basically the only way to do it, short of praying to Money Jesus for another ZIRP boom like the 2010s (I'm not a praying man, but I wouldn't hold my breath).
I'm just saying, if workers want control over their working conditions, they have to recognize the power they have. It's up to them if they decide to wield it. You don't have to, and that's fine! Enjoy your long Bay Area commute.
There are companies in the US that have engineering unions. Boeing is one. You're going to tell me you'd rather work at Boeing over Apple or Google?
Looks like you don't have to choose between Boeing and Google! https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/25/22243138/google-union-alp...
Though yes, I'm not sure if that union still exists now. The point is that you do not have to prefer working at every company that has a union over every company that does not have a union. It's enough to prefer having a union over not having a union at any company you do work for.
...yes? Is that supposed to be a hard question?
No, seriously, literally what does Apple or Google have over Boeing as a company to work at? Compensation? If money is all that matters to you, then there are several Web3/AI/etc startups offering absurd cash comp that you can go and throw yourself at.
Better engineering culture.
Better benefits.
More time off.
Bosses with engineering chops.
More flexible schedules.
Less likely to get laid off.
Perks like free food/massages/events.
Equity so as the company grows your pay increases automatically.
Large bonuses.
Are you actually serious you'd rather work at Boeing?
> Smarter coworkers.
Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days.
> Better engineering culture.
Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days.
> Bosses with engineering chops.
Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days.
The rest of your list is just "money" written over and over and as I've already said, if that's all you care about, that's your prerogative but let's not pretend that makes somewhere a "good place to work".
So wait, your argument is that you actually think Boeing has a better engineering culture and smarter coworkers, than cream of the crop prestigious and high paying software companies.
You're just that certain that the vast majority of engineers don't care about money, and aren't competing to get in there? And instead work at Boeing. Where you think the engineering culture is better...even though their software has a reputation of being awful.
You must know a lot more than everyone here. You should really enligthen us. All those terrible products that all those people are using from Apple and Google.
On the contrary, I actually know that the median engineer at Boeing is working on much harder problems than the monumental amount of webslop that the median Google engineer is responsible for. And while the engineers at Boeing are not perfect on top of working under the constraints of the airline industry, I also have eyes to see the sheer enshittification of nearly everything that has come out of Apple and Google in the past decade. Google in particular - for goodness' sake just look at the state of YouTube web right now after their last "update", or the steady decline of Search, or the hatchet job they performed on apps like Fitbit after acquiring them - these are things we all know and bemoan even on here but sure, let's suddenly pretend that the company is a super bastion of quality. It's definitely not the name and the dollar signs flashing in front of the eyes.
As an aside, what I said is that if all you care about is money, then that's your prerogative. Plenty of us aren't slavering to work at The Empire Of Ads because they give free food. Apple at least has more dignity as a company, although outside of their silicon (which almost no software engineer is going to touch) they've been spinning the wheel for years papered over by vendor lock-in and their pricing strategy.
> All those terrible products that all those people are using from Apple and Google
If your argument is "well people use them", then I have some potentially really shocking news for you about Boeing products.
Now this is probably the part where you say a lot about MCAS without necessarily understanding what it is.
Not sure how it is in Nigeria, but in America people think much more highly of Apple products than recent Boeing planes. So by the logic of "Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days.", Boeing does much worse on that metric than Apple.
Not sure what countries are supposed to have to do with anything but if that's where we're taking it, America is full of people who think all sorts of nonsense that is barely rooted in reality. I don't really see how the opinion of a public that revels in ignorance and is easily led by the nose (and I'm aware that this applies on both sides of the Atlantic) is supposed to be relevant to an engineering discussion.
I guess at least you didn't bother trying to argue that Google is a bastion of high quality products
Then you will forever be at the whims of the bosses.
[citation needed]
Because these mandates coincided with a recession and the worst tech job market in a couple decades, and saying no meant you'd potentially be unemployed for a very long time.
"coincided" is understating it; it is precisely the bad job market that leads to this sort of mandate, because employees have little choice but to go along. in a good job market companies are very willing to offer remote work as an incentive to join them rather than the competition.
Yes, it would require a lot more coordinated organizing and some level of pain, though I think the payoff would be worth it.
Sad, because before COVID, no one at Meta cared where you worked as long as you were getting your shit done. There was never available meeting rooms, and the open floor plans were so loud, that people would spread out all over the campus and use single person VC rooms to communicate in.
Basically, everyone trusted everyone.
This is 100% just a soft layoff.
I notice US tech companies have also become really tough on white collar workers in order to suck up to Trump and his country goons.
No more diversity programs, work life balance no longer promoted, that kinda stuff. This fits in with that trend.
Diversity programs do not universally benefit white collar workers.
Not directly but they do create an open and fair working environment for all.
Once you leave room for discrimination and bullying, everyone suffers because it makes company culture harder.
And it's not just about "quotas". That's an extreme-right talking point. Diversity done properly doesn't involve quotas. Those are just a way for companies that don't actually care about it to have an easy 'fix' to get their numbers to look ok but it's not actual diversity.
I'm part of a diversity team myself as a side role. In Europe luckily.
> And it's not just about "quotas". That's an extreme-right talking point. Diversity done properly doesn't involve quotas
At Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta, diversity programs were implemented as soft quotas. All this talk about "diversity done properly" is just so much noise when approximately all the largest companies aren't doing it that way.
Soft quotas are not great but at my work (also a huge multinational but headquartered in Europe) we just use stats as a guide. Obviously if a country has 30% people of a certain ethnicity and in your employ it's 2% you're doing something wrong. We use that to measure hoe effective we are at combating bias and prejudice, what works and what doesn't. I wonder if that's sometimes regarded as a 'soft quota' but it shouldn't be.
We don't fix this with hiring targets. We hit the root cause with training for HR and management (and also some for all employees in the yearly mandatory training package). Recognising hidden bias, challenging people to bconsider their reactions.
And then measure the performance with stats, but not just force them. That's lazy and only fixes the problem on paper. Window dressing. Diversity is more than the hiring process anyway, a huge part is discrimination on the work floor. Often not by managers but co-workers, so we give management skills to deal with that.
Maybe in US big tech this is common but those are all pretty immoral companies anyway. See how quickly they pivoted to sucking up to Trump. The world is much bigger than the US and big tech.
>Obviously if a country has 30% people of a certain ethnicity and in your employ it's 2% you're doing something wrong.
Do you apply this to everything? Like say, a sports team?
>The world is much bigger than the US and big tech.
Anything impressive to show for it? Because it really seems like all this focus on diversity is your downfall not your strength.
> Do you apply this to everything? Like say, a sports team?
No, at work where we have tens of thousands of people.
Sport is a voluntary thing, people just join it when they want (I guess, I'm not into sports, not watching nor playing).
> Anything impressive to show for it? Because it really seems like all this focus on diversity is your downfall not your strength.
Yes we have great quality of life. It's not all about money.
In fact I asked to move to a country where the wage levels are much lower, to have a better quality of life. Here around the Mediterranean the weather is better, people enjoy life more and take it slower. There's much more things to do in my free time that I enjoy. When I'm back in Holland I hate it, people are so materialistic. Always talking about their new car, how big their TV is lol. I don't even own any car or motor and my TV is tiny but I'm much happier here.
Also diversity is just a thing we do, we're not all about that. I am because I voluntarily spend part of my work time on it (LGBTIQ in particular). For most people in the company it's a message here or there, one little training per year and maybe a talk from one of us at the town hall meetings which are optional.
There's other similar programs in the company about sustainability and ethics.
> Sport is a voluntary thing, people just join it when they want (I guess, I'm not into sports, not watching nor playing).
Sports are one of the highest paying jobs in the world. Professional athletes in popular sports leagues are in the 0.01%.
[flagged]
They are merit based. Especially with DEI. It just aims to remove the common human bias to trust people more when they are more like us. With training and hiding names/photos during CV preselection. So it is only based on merit.
> We're back to sane times thankfully, but it will take a long time to undo the rot caused by DEI.
Don't be counting your chickens too soon. Once the current clown show is voted out, we can hopefully get back to a more reality-based situation.
So that a different clown show can take over, great, cool way to run a country.
People are never going to tolerate the nonsense that followed 2020 again, mark my words.
As clown shows go, the current admin will be hard to beat.
meh, you're just conflating two different things.
Tech companies spent a decade (since 2010), driving towards some belief that the entire world was going to go online and stay there. They also ammassed an insane amount of wealth in that time. Wealth that is now structurally tied to the stability of the entire financial system.
For whatever reason, investors get bored and want to move money around and so the tech companies, that built healthy, stable businesses, needed to keep that dopamine hit coming with new mega annoucements. What else is there to build? "Efficiency" is the current corporate white collar trend, because that's what investors are woo'd with. AI is the other new-new thing, but instead of a that next reason to reverse hiring trends, AI itself is built and sold as an employee replacement.
Anyway, the fact that there is an entire class of people in the US who feel and believe, it can't get any worse, are geniunely suffering in ways many of here on this forum can't even imagine. Definitely think it's unfair to put these two concerns in the same bucket.
Smells like management trying to recapture the glory days by brute force.
> "focus on building great products, not preparing for meetings"
That says it all. The intent is to try to spark the freewheeling, creative, startup days. Wouldn't be the first company that tries to reconnect with its startup roots. Won't be the last, either. Unfortunately, it never works, because those rockstar startup employees cashed out their stock and moved to the Napa Valley. Your workforce is now indistinguishable from IBM or Exxon Mobile. Good luck!
> Mosseri joined Facebook in 2008 as a designer and became Instagram's VP of product in 2018
Bingo. Old dog, new tricks. Good luck!
OK, so... Employees are compelled to go into the office, so they can have better in-person collaboration. They are also encouraged not to go to meetings (aka in-person collaboration sessions), so they can have more focus time.
I haven't seen the Insta offices, but I would bet they don't have walls. In which case, you know where the best focus time is to be had? Out of the office.
Yeah those open floors are so terrible. When i started late 90s I had my own office when as an intern. Everyone just had a little office. You could close the door if you needed to focus and you could open it if you needed a chat.
Then came the terrible time of the cubicles and then the open floor which was even more horrible.
I really hate tech work these days. Also because it's not really tech anymore. I don't get to do the nuts and bolts, I just have to tick boxes in the crap cloud admin panels that Microsoft gives us. I wish I could do something totally different.
5 days is stupid. I am fully remote and I can see how face time is important. After a few years remote I am definitely feeling a little detached from the company. But 5 days makes no sense. I think 2 or 3 days in the office is perfect. You get the opportunity to talk to people and you have days where you can fully focus.
Most ridiculous is to have to come to the office and then talk to your distributed team members over Teams or Slack. Even more fun is to have them spread around the globe in different time zones .
5 days is just offensive babysitting level amount of butts in seats. People need room to run their lives, meet contractors, sign for a package, etc. 2-3 days in office is the perfect reasonable sweet spot.
Requiring 5 days in office is going to decrease their available talent pool to only get lesser talent who is desperate for any work and can't get any better offers.
The headline makes it seem like every role in the company needs to switch to full-time in-office.
But anyone who was hired in a remote role is exempt.
This order only applies to in-office workers with assigned desks.
He's basically saying that they can't expect to have a hybrid work schedule, although not so strict that they can't ever work from home.
Exempt temporarily. Very temporarily.
This is a standard boiling the frog playbook:
* No more remote hires
* Mandate non-remote employees into office (Instagram is here)
* Mandate remote employees who live within X miles of office return to office (significant chunks of Alphabet, etc. are here)
etc. - this will get ramped up and very soon
Yep. I've been through almost exactly that, and know many other folks who have. If you're working in the US or other places that don't have really good labor regs, "RTO exemptions" are temporary, no matter what you're being told today.
Though, in my case bullet #1 was more like
Same here.
It’s amazing how much intense of a Scrooge McDuck vibes we’re getting from the MBA executive class.
Crank the screws, tighten the belt, offshore, increase profits at all costs. The next generations are going to have it rough since these elites have intentionally hoarded prosperity at the expense of their countrymen
I'm thankful I was "grandfathered in" by starting a remote role pre-COVID. Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if I'm more productive in an office (due to pressure to seem busy, which correlates somewhat with amount of time actually being busy) but I overwhelmingly prefer remote work.
I'm one of the rare remote in an office where most are full time there and I'm there one day a week.
I have no idea how they get anything done in there. I feel they only can focus before and after business hours.
So don't be so sure. Home has distraction when the mind is distracted. But once working I feel we are much more productive and capable due to long uninterrupted stints.
It does take discipline but that's what deadlines are for.
>Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if I'm more productive in an office (due to pressure to seem busy, which correlates somewhat with amount of time actually being busy)
As a hiring manager, I appreciate the honesty and nuance. There is so much bullshit about remote work from the people doing it that it’s a little too much “doth protest”.
“I get so much more work done and I cracked the code to productivity, and surely no one would abuse this system, especially not you ultra worker 5000. Anyone who disagrees with me is a threat to the oversightless system I have an I must try and protect this by attacking them.”
Depends what you see as “abusing” the system. By working from home, I can take a walk in the garden when I find it hard to think, it energises me. At my office I can (and do) take a walk in the car park, but inevitably I leave the office with a headache caused by constant noise and fluorescent lighting
At home, I can put my family first if needed. When I’m at the office and something comes up at the kids’ school that I need to deal with, it’s a mad dash to get away soon enough that I almost have to drop everything and run
The times working in the office has been good as a software engineer: when we are prototyping on physical hardware I do not have at home. That’s it
It’s great if people love to go to the office. That’s fine. It’s managers that enforce it who are the problem — the people who work for you aren’t children and if you feel like you can’t trust them to make the decision to work from home, why on earth would you trust them in your office?
You seriously think this clown cares about any of this? I don’t know a single person living comfortable life who woud speak like that, only some miserable sod living in a shoebox who hates everyone around them.
> I don’t know a single person living comfortable life who woud speak like that,
Ah, yes. I’m a clown because you live in a very curated bubble?
I notice you offered no refutations, just ad hominem.
>As a hiring manager ... it’s a little too much “doth protest”.
Have you considered evaluating your own beliefs with this perspective?
That’s a fancy “no u” but it doesn’t make any sense.
I have remote employees, and I have people I would never allow WFH because they can’t handle it.
I don’t care what you do. I’m explaining from the position of someone responsible for a team that MANY people who are strictest about WFH being absolute are the people abusing it. This shouldn’t even be remotely controversial… yet… all I see is more protest and digital foot stomping.
You're a hiring manager, obviously your perspective is warped. Naturally you want good little code monkeys who will sit at a desk and pump out code.
Nobody steps back and asks - wait, is that good? Is there a point where "productivity" becomes negative because we're pumping out shitty half-baked code from a workforce who despises everything the company stands for? Nobody asks, is it possible that employees who contemplate suicide every day might not make the best product. ?
No. They don't. It's work, work, work and the end result is a piece of software so unbelievably shitty and barely functional that you require a commission-based Salesforce of sleezebags to sell it to some poor soul who doesn't know the difference between Git and GitHub.
Ultimately, and I know this is very old-fashioned, your company IS your workforce. Keeping them happy makes a good product and keeps the profits flowing. Every company in the Golden Age of the American economy knew that. Few remember it.
> You're a hiring manager, obviously your perspective is warped. Naturally you want good little code monkeys who will sit at a desk and pump out code.
I’m not sure you could be any more wrong.
I’m C suite and part owner. I have remote employees too.
Make more incorrect guesses. It strengthens your points greatly.
Right, but if you didn't want code monkeys, you wouldn't be talking about productivity and getting your 8 hours worth.
The only people who think that engineers are actually doing a straight 8 hours of work are so delusional they're not worth mine, or anyone else's, breath.
Most of the time is spent thinking anyway. Coding is, like, 5% typing in a chair and 95% thinking about what to type. You don't need to optimize for the chair.
What's the fear with WFH? Your employees might not despise you? Your company might accidently create a culture that doesn't suck donkey dick? People might actually agree with your mission statement for once?
Is that really so bad? And all it takes is not intentionally fucking people up the ass. It's so easy, so accessible.
Yeah, people differ, and there are different forces that can increase and decrease productivity in an office and at home. If I'm honest with myself, being remote gives me more opportunity to slack off and do whatever I want, which often is not really working. But if I'm in an office I also am less able to get in a flow state.
An ideal working environment for me would probably be working from home, alone, perhaps with some stimulants (I have severe ADHD, or at least am diagnosed as having it and perceive myself as having), a close deadline, a lot of intrinsic motivation and interest in a task, and no distractions. In practice, most of the time I find working on a laptop at a library or cafe or on a laptop/desktop in an office does push me to do more work-related stuff more frequently on an average day, since I know people near me may notice I'm spending ages on Twitter or HN or whatever and that somewhat discourages me from doing non-work things.
I don't think you deserve to have been downvoted. I love having a work-from-home job and love that I was able to get one pre-pandemic, but I also don't necessarily blame higher-ups for wanting more people to work in an office. It's complicated.
I noticed:
1) A lot of informal (i.e., not in a scheduled meeting) chats are more valuable than meetings. They are much more rare when people WFH.
2) Many folks tend to be more distracted when WFH. TLs don't have a perfect vision into whether someone spent 4 hours on a bug (or a design doc) or 2 hours on the bug / design doc and 2 hours on online shopping / playing with kids.
It's quite confusing to me that none of the comments I saw in this thread don't discuss those factors (I'd be fine if people mentioned them and explained why they are not too important).
Obviously there are also factors in favor of WFH: commute costs, personal satisfaction (which may indirectly improve productivity and/or retention of the best people), noise in the workplace, lack of meeting rooms, etc. But it's far from obvious to me if, on balance, WFH or RTO works better for building a successful company.
I definitely agree with you about (1), though this can be somewhat mitigated by having a good culture of agreeing to hop into impromptu video calls.
(2) feels weird to me; if the work is getting done, is there an issue? Does it matter if I spend 4 hours or 2 hours on a design doc, if the result is a good design doc?
(2) At the office, it's harder to pretend that work took longer than it actually took. If you're done with the design doc in 2h, with colleagues sitting all around you, what can you do to pretend that it took you longer? Mess around with Confluence, pretending to work? You might as well move on to the next design doc, or find something useful to do meanwhile.
At home, you can just pick up the Xbox controller and say it took you 4 hours.
I like the comfort of WFH, and there are plenty of people (myself included) that are responsible enough to handle it, but the problem is that the average person isn't. And we all pay for it.
> And we all pay for it.
That's a very confident statement to make. My company is very much happy with remote working. 50% of my team aren't even in the country. Most other teams are the same. I don't feel like I'm paying any price for that.
Happy to hear that it's working out well for you, but there is always a cost. The less common successful remote work becomes across the industry, the more companies like yours stand out. And remote work goes back to being a premium, highly competitive perk, like it used to be in the past.
And I agree that remote work is perfectly possible with a good culture and responsible employees, but most companies don't really have the culture or hiring practices that optimize for that.
> The less common successful remote work becomes across the industry
You're presupposing your conclusion. I don't believe remote work is less successful. I think this is driven from angles such as:
* Managers who have made their career by visibility, struggling to adapt to a new normal
* A way to get rid of staff without paying severance
* Pressure from certain types of politician who have made up their mind (regardless of any evidence) that remote working is harmful
And others
It really is a shame that for once it felt like labour had something going their way, and somehow the leaders of capital have convinced us to fight each other on this, while they take it away again.
Have you not noticed management cracking the whip in this environment? 2 hours shopping could be 2 hours shipping code! Everyone has uniform maximum productivity every minute and anything short of 100% focus on work is time theft!
It's rather simple: You don't pay me to write code for 4/8/12 hours per day, you pay me to get a job done. If that job's worth $X to you, you pay me $X, everyone's happy. And that's exactly how it works in office, too. Ever notice that HN's busier during work hours than after?
If don't feel an employee's work output is worth their $X, tell them that. Then, if they suddenly improve, great. If they don't, fire them. It's really that simple. This is America, any obstacles to sacking incompetent employees are of your own design.
Oof my employer still lets us WFH 3 days. We actually signed a new contract for it just after the pandemic. They can't have everyone in the office anyway since they closed half the floors.
If they mandate this (not sure where they'd find the space!) I'll just refuse to sign the new contract. I'm in Europe so none of that "at will" stuff. If they want to let me go they'll have to give me a package for 15 years worked.
Ps I don't actually go twice a week right now ;) More like once. None of my team members are in my country anyway so what's the point.
That's nice but... These American Meta employees make twice or three times your salary (assume average Europe tech wages). The package you'll get for 15 years work will make up that difference for the past 6 to 12 months. I don't know many Americans who would half their salary to get your benefits.
Pay is relative because they have to live there too. Costs of living are much higher over there. Even just healthcare, here it's free (well, paid from taxes). In the US it's a big expense. Also they get much fewer holidays (I get more than a month's worth per year).
But I would not move to the US (especially now obviously) or be without job security for double the wage. Life for me isn't about making as much money as possible, it's about enjoying my life and money is just one of the means to do that. Time is another big one.
And like the other poster said, I don't know americans who work 20 years and retire. On the contrary most I know have a 200+k$ student loan pending back home or are shuffling debt from card to card to make it look like they are paying it off.
There are no Meta employees with $200k of student debt nor any shuffling debt from card to card, except those with addiction issues (addiction can consume any amount of money).
The thing about a social safety net is that it makes life better for poor people. That's good. Praiseworthy even. Laudable.
The negative impact on economic growth and wages for high earners means the American tech workers are just richer than European tech workers. Any other analysis is a combination of wishful thinking and pseudoscience, quite frankly. Economics is science, just like biology and mathematics and physics.
Fwiw, I know a bunch of American tech workers who worked 20 years and then retired. Pretty much every person who works for Meta can name ten people like that. Those people tend to retire in Europe, where they can enjoy free healthcare while living off the incredible amount of money they made when they were young.
this is such a weird response to me. Those American Meta employees may have more money, but it's not enough money to stop working and their lives are objectively worse. What's the point of money then?
Well... their lives are objectively better, so, I don't really know what to tell you. It's true that poor people in America live less well that poor people in Europe (though if European economies continue to lag, this may stop being true in my lifetime), but Meta employees in America have really good lives. They have massive houses, retire young with huge savings, and send their kids to elite private schools.
And perhaps most importantly - if they decide to switch to Europe life, they can, with extra money in the bank. While European tech workers can't afford to live the high life in America.
Tbh, I'm sure I'm going to get down voted to hell, but it's pretty amazing how many highly educated and otherwise intelligent Europeans just... don't believe in economics anymore when economics says their lives are worse than their peers in America. It's one of the major touch points of anti intellectualism in this forum.
What you are describing is only one way of living a comfortable life. It is not an "objectively better" life than someone who has enough money to meet their needs and finds balance and joy in other places. For example, more fulfilling work, more opportunities to vacation, more peace of mind in a more communal society, better access to nature. Money only "objectively improves" your life up to a certain point.
Another tendency I find anti-intellectual is appealing broadly to "science" or "economics" to make claims that neither field supports.
Is GDP per capita a good measure or individual wealth in a country? If you don't like GDP, is PPP a good measure? If not PPP, what measure do you like? How have those measures changed over the past 20 years? How much did America's value on that measure change in the past 20 years? How much did Europe's?
When I speak of "science", I'm only speaking about using numbers to measure and compare. As it turns out, it doesn't really matter which metric you use. GDP, PPP, you name it - America went up substantially more than Europe over the past 20 years. A continent that used to be an economic peer is now a few notches poorer. If the trend continues, by the time I'm old, Europe will be poor compared to America, full stop. Just another region full of third world countries.
You can read https://ecipe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ECI_24_PolicyBr... if you like or find your own sources. All the ones I've found say the same thing about the last 20 years. But if you can find some that say Europe is improving its economic standing compared to America, I'd be interested in reading them! I'm very open to having my mind changed by evidence!
I don't think you understand my point of view and also smokedetector1's with whom I wholeheartedly agree.
Economics and money is just numbers. It's not a measure of happiness in life. I just want to have enough money to not worry in life, I don't care about having much more than others. Doing a job I enjoy in a place I enjoy is worth much more to me. Would Elon Musk, the richest guy in the world be happier than me? I don't think he is, he's always angry about something. I wouldn't want to trade places with him. Having that kind of money is a burden, never being able to just walk around and discover a new town without a security detail, or partying until 6am without journalists capturing everything I do.
A big house doesn't make me (much) happier. A car definitely doesn't, driving really stresses me out (and I have a lot of driving experience having lived in many countries). We have great public transport here and that's enough for me because I live in the city.
And economics isn't really an exact science in my book. It's a social science, psychology based on human constructs. Which are different here in Europe anyway (more socialist). We chose to make the world work like this but it could be different too. More fair.
I moved to a lower wage country to have a better life and I'm a lot happier now. I will never be rich but I don't care. It's not a race to be the top, I want everyone to have a good life.
You can measure happiness with numbers. You can measure anything with numbers. I've welcomed you to provide your favorite happiness metric. But instead you insist that happiness cannot be measured in numbers. Anti-science attitude on display.
You cannot measure everything with numbers. Many things in life cannot even be ordered[0]. Lives are different. Yes, some are just worse/more challenging than others, but in general people and their experiences are wayyyyyyy too complex and multivaried to be projected onto the real line. Only by narrowing your understanding and experience of life to measurable phenomena like bank account balance can you actually do the comparison you're looking for. And then you've all but ruined your life.
To address your point, GDP per capita is not a good metric capturing happiness, for several reasons. Most trivially, because it does nothing to reflect the distribution of wealth. A country could (purely hypothetically ;) ) have massive GDP per capita but the benefits flow mainly to the top.
Even putting that aside, a culture with massive GDP but where the citizens don't have the time, peace, values, and social structures to enjoy life is not a happy society.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_order
The inverse of the Gini coefficient is a good measure.
In a country where everybody is dead, the inverse of the Gini coefficient is infinity.
> Tbh, I'm sure I'm going to get down voted to hell, but it's pretty amazing how many highly educated and otherwise intelligent Europeans just... don't believe in economics anymore when economics says their lives are worse than their peers in America. It's one of the major touch points of anti intellectualism in this forum.
Immigrant from a developing nation, living in the UK here. I very much notice this attitude on hn, and elsewhere. Europeans (I include the UK obviously) are extremely protective of the idea that the welfare state here automatically makes everything better than life in the US. It's a bit easier to be objective when you live here but you're not actually from here.
I love the UK. It has been my home for over 20 years. I love the fact that there is a safety net that mostly, sort of, works. But I also know people from my original country who have moved elsewhere. Some who actually lived in the UK, then moved elsewhere. Some of those to the US, where they have really accelerated their earnings and their comfort and in some respects, quality of life.
I think there is no doubt that the material comforts that most people enjoy out of life will be improved just by working the same job in the US. Obviously there are non-tangibles such as living in a society where people can't carry guns, one of the things I appreciate about the UK compared to the US. Or also knowing that poorer people living just a few streets away from you can enjoy the same facilities I do (to a large extent), and are mostly going to be ok in life. I like living in Europe, where we're exposed to so much culturally. Etc.
So I can see both sides of this, but I am definitely on your side of the fence with regard material quality of life. My salary is high in the UK, I'm in the top percentile of earners, but without any family money, I'm never going to lead an extravagant life here. I'm going to struggle to retire early like my US peers would be able to.
how are they better? we're talking about them being forced to go into the office and despite having money having no power. The very thing that this thread was about is what is worse about their lives.
I don't know that a massive house is enough to make up for it.
“I signed a cushy RTO contract, and I’m still not following its terms”
Well really most people don't where I work. They don't make a big deal of it because the office would be overloaded.
Except the people that are super socially oriented or want to escape the family at home (I don't have one anyway), they go more than required, and keep everyone else from their work with constant chatting.
I have found that at many companies with these kind of policies are selectively enforced. If you don’t show up, nothing will happen to you, until someday they need some kind of reason to fire you. This ensures you have a steady pool of employees you can drop at a moments notice, if for instance some major market crash forces you to quickly dump people in order for the company to survive.
The whole memo just reeks of not trusting your employees.
These memos are always basically admissions of their own incompetence. If you distrust your employees this much and have created a culture where people aren't getting their work done without it being noticed, that's on you.
Isn't it a "we want to reduce our workforce but we don't want to pay redundancies, so we're hoping many of you leave 'voluntarily'.".
A lot of the anti WFH wave comes from companies discovering that they actually can't trust some employees to do much work from home.
> A lot of the anti WFH wave comes from companies discovering that they actually can't trust some employees to do much work from home.
Personally, I think a lot of the anti WFH types thrive in an office environment because either charitably, they get energy from being around people and work better, or less charitably, it helps them build their careers because they're great at being noticed in that environment.
In the charitable case, that's great for them, but could be harmful to WFH types, who thrive when they can work remotely and their focus times click more easily (for various reasons).
In the less charitable case, (which I suspect is a lot of people who are passionately anti-WFH), well, this needs no real explanation. They're just being selfish for their own career.
As others have stated, it’s the same people who didn’t do much work in the office either.
Well I don't trust my employer so...
That might explain the onslaught of instagram engineer CVs in my Inbox.
I have a job where I'm 5 days a week. The biggest problem isn't the juniors which are all happy to leave their small apartments to go into the office. Its the senior guys with big houses out in the suburbs that have the long commute. Unfortunately the new grads are having fun hanging out together but aren't getting the face time from the seniors.
I mean companies can either locate where people can afford to live, or pay people enough to live near the office. (Same thing really). Hasn't happened to me in my career yet!
Another winning call from Mosseri
After shitcanning the london office because he wanted to move back home(800 people gone) hes now doing the RTO, because as we know all the cool kids love working in the office.
The problem with instagram is not where people are working, its the culture of piss poor direction setting and no user experience advocates. Well none that are being listened to.
There are too many grand initiatives, which are poorly run, never really prototyped and just yeeted into years long slog that fuckup repeatedly (shops I'm looking at you)
Then to get a promotion you need to move a metric somehow. That means doing stupid user hostile stuff, like instantly shoving tits in your face.
Don't get me started on the horror that was instagram for kids
> Don't get me started on the horror that was instagram for kids
Please do get started. Is this an actual thing they/you were building?
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/27/1040857033/instagram-kids-pau...
And by the way, this is as an outsider, I have no insider knowledge, but it's from the same company that sent women (teenagers) ads of beauty products after they had deleted a selfie
I was all gung-ho for "You don't need regulation (imprisonment) for something that's just a mirror held up to society" before realizing Facebinstapp literally does things like this
Yeah this was the thing.
Basically there are four tribes in meta: Product, Advertising, Infra & other.
Facebook had the most comprehensive onboarding I've ever had at a place, literally 5 weeks of learning. We had actual lessons on data laws, rules that facebook has and why they are there. Lots of talk about how to speak up for the user and that kind of stuff. Loads of do the right thing, if in doubt choose the user, long term growth over short term gain, that sort of shit.
And where I worked, that was kinda the experience, We had reasonable debates about user experience and the like. The data storage system is setup so that you don't really need to think about storing data securely or privately because thats the default.
But
I was in the "other" tribe so I didn't have the same pressure. My "impact" that I had to deliver wasn't to do with moving metrics, or making money.
The real problem is that to get promoted, you need to, every 6 months, deliver something that has impact. And a good way to get impact is to move a metric, or get more cash.
combine that with naivety, and you get the scandals that we see.
Instgram kids USP was basically that it would an app that was tailored to kids, and there would be some parent tools to help shame the algorithm. There wasn't any budget to spend on proper moderation, so there would be loads of content that was be designed to warp/groom/fuckup young minds. I think the main concession was that DMs would be turned off. It would have been a walled garden, but with no real controls. Perhaps there might have been algorithm tweaks to avoid promoting certain topics.
That was the rumour at least.
Anyway, it would have been a shit show, so there was a concerted effort to leak it to the press, because the "product council" were like "fuck yeah, tiktok does it, lets do it too, we're fucking gods who made reels a thing, what the fuck do you know?"
but the real sketchy shit is in advertising, and where it crosses into product. They know that some of these metric boosting changes are bad, but because they make money, they allow it. Thats where the rules are deliberately bent or broken. The rest of the time is just naivety, by idealistic shelters young colleges types.
Lastly, Facebook can't really do new products. So if your app or thing cant easily be added to instagram/facebook, and needs its own standalone app/site, you're probably fine.
I know better than to think I might have anything useful to add to the WFH debate, but buried further in the memo:
”More demos, less [sic] decks”
I love it, but I’m surprised that an org of that caliber needs to say it out loud. Even the top tier people get bogged down in PowerPoint limbo, I guess?
Nothing is more compelling than, as they say in show business (ie that Bill O’Reilly meme), than saying “f*** it…”:
Really sad to see the WFH era ending, it's such a better way to work - especially as these companies embrace distributed teams so you now get the worst of both worlds with RTO.
Folks it’s very simple. They want to reduce labor for free.
Why? Because no company can afford the bills for LLM infra.
These companies are spending 100s of billions on building infra. Most countries have less GDP than this. The numbers are insane!
And Nvidia demands payments in cash today. Not amortized in 5 years. Every employee slashed is extra compute the hyperscalers can buy today.
Also, Instaface doesn’t need developers. Their product was completed at least a dozen years ago. And it was created by a team of a dozen or so engineers.
White collar office society can barely cope with the relatively minor friction that technology brings from allowing work from anywhere and we're expected to believe it, it can deal with somewhat unaccountable and unknowable AI smoothly? Hard to think anything else than that we're in for a wild couple of years imo
Executives will insist on AI robots to sit at the desks in their leased office space, typing in code on the computers?
In general having a chief "order" employees sounds like a red flag to me. Isn't ordering a bit authoritarian and used in leau of being able to change things in a more civil manner? If you aren't able to get people to work more at the office through more civil manners, maybe you should reflect on why?
Surely this is just to get people to quit without needing to give them expensive severance packages, that seems pretty common nowadays?
I’ve always thought of this like being at University and studying for finals or doing labs. You could basically do them wherever you wanted for the most part.
Some people thrived in an actual lab. Some people worked from their dorm/apartment. Some would go to the library. Some to a coffee shop.
Seems this trend of not having a one size fits all best continues in industry.
Just a move to get rid of people, some people won't do the RTO and they can easily let them go.
>Additional changes include fewer meetings
Where have I heard this before, wait at every job I have ever worked at. Every time it is said, meeting time increases.
Where I worked, Friday was the only day real work got done. Why, everyone was at home, but that was my go to office day. Thursdays was my WFH day because that whole day was nothing but meetings.
I enjoyed working on campus for a bit - because I also lived there, sleeping, eating, showering etc. and saved a lot of money! Of course, you have to hide that and they eventually caught me...
Basically soft layoff
Yep - my company did the same thing in addition to a few other nasty cuts. The problem is that instead of dumping dead weight employees, we are losing excellent ones.
I've worked remotely most of my career, long before Covid.
Last few months I've been in the office almost every single day.
And I get what they're saying, there are definite advantages to having everybody in the same room. I don't think pretending otherwise is going to help us much.
There are definite advantages that go the other way as well.
The goal has to be to find a good compromise, you can never go back.
ins't this the same guy who moved to london [0], just because he could control things better ?
or maybe the tide has changed from remote working so again the minions are pushed around!
[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/02/instagram-boss-adam-mosseri-...
It worked so well that after a few months they moved the majority of the staff to New York
https://www.ft.com/content/c0678622-975b-4e0a-ba10-11acea2e0...
I realized this morning, while talking to a coworker. That when we are in person we complain about shit more than we fix it. But when were remote we voice our concerns in the major channels and shit gets fixed.
I'm convinced by keeping people in person less shit will get fixed.
They mean the office in the Metaverse, right?
> the change applies to employees in US offices with assigned desks and is part of a broader push to make Instagram "more nimble and creative" as competition intensifies.
I don't think RTO or fewer meetings is going to reverse or even slow Instagram's slide down the enshittification chute. I recently returned to the app to connect with some friends and local communities, but the density of ads and dark patterns is pushing me away. IMO Instagram and Facebook in their twilight (which will still last another decade or so), where the path forward has more to due with extracting the remaining value from their existing users rather than outcompeting the alternatives.
I’m actually grateful I don’t need to worry about marketing via Instagram anymore.
I'm shutting down my retail business and being able to delete Instagram is a huge win.
The stated purpose of RTO may be more-nimble-whatever.
In practice it makes more sense if you always assume the intended purpose is to thinly veil constructive dismissal.
> I don't think RTO or fewer meetings is going to reverse or even slow Instagram's slide down the enshittification chute.
In my view it's been well down that chute since shortly after its acquisition by Facebook. Facebook bought them as a hedge as young people left the FB platform and, for a time, it's worked to keep users under the Meta umbrella, but as with everything Zucc touches, the end-user experience has been in a state of steady degradation.
It's also impressive how fast Zuckerberg ruined Threads, does anyone still uses this? Does it still keep reverting to the algorithmic timeline?
It‘s still being pushed via… "ads“ in between stories or posts where you see a sneak peek of a Threads post you might like.
Ha, I completely forgot about it already- that's how quickly it became irrelevant.
I’d like a retrospective on “if you don’t like what Twitter is doing, you can build your own”… because it seems network effects are real, despite Facebook money.
It seems they did like what Twitter was doing, because it's the same thing with the same problems. No wonder nobody uses it, why use a knockoff when the real thing is free?
Is Facebook/Threads still censoring conservatives and Covid policy and vaccine skeptics at the request of the Biden Admin?
The only reason I don't forget it is because they advertise on Instagram.
In Canada meta pushed back (by not letting you link to or summarize recognized free press news sites) due to laws designed to encourage sharing revenue with news organizations for copying their content and posting it without their consent. The result has been a total vacuum of truth, and the platform is literally a anti-vax, agarthan racists wet dream when you open it up as a new user. It's ripe for replacement. I can't believe it's lasted this long.
> laws designed to encourage sharing revenue with news organizations for copying their content
By “encourage” and “copying,” you mean “require” and “linking” respectively. These second order effects were entirely predictable before the legislation was passed.
Is meta less of a cesspool in other countries?
As much as I dislike Meta, these laws are trash - as I understand it the Canadian law was based on the one we have here in Australia, which explicitly defines publishing a link to an article on a news site as being exactly the same (for the purposes of the law) as copying and displaying an entire article.
Then the supporters of the law said Facebook was "using" the news content by linking to a news site, as if they were actually displaying whole articles! Meta generally sucks but these laws (and the people calling for them) sucked just as much.
> agarthan racists wet dream
That one slipped my by in recent years, I'm not keeping up with the rebranding of rocks the nazi bars keep hiding under.
~ https://felixonline.co.uk/articles/slurs-hatred-and-nazi-ufo...
I'm not sure the self description as "Light hearted, mostly satirical Nazi white supremacist content not to be taken seriously" really hides the moustache.
"back to office" is a modern strategy to easily and covertly shed employees to cut costs and improve the short term bottom line to get higher performance bonuses for management.
If you want people to be in the office, structure their pay such that everyone gets an “8 hours in office” bonus daily.
If you prove you’re in the office you get extra money.
I don’t think it’s hard to imagine that people work better together when they are in the same office. It’s also not hard to imagine people work harder when there’s more social control. From the perspective of the business owner, this makes total sense. Yes, some people work harder and better at home, but, in general WFH is net negative for a company I think.
If you trust your employees so little, why even bother employing them in the first place though? And for what it's worth, I'm equally capable of slacking both in-office and at home and I'm definitely not alone in that one, it's just that the slacking is more often in the form of socializing, eating snacks, taking toilet and smoke breaks etc.
We have a choice thankfully, so no one really slacks in person or remotely because surprise surprise, when you treat your employees like human beings and not cogs in the machine they're actually motivated to do good work, who'd'a thunk it?
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I would honestly not mind 2-3 days a week but PDX is dead for tech jobs, and the pay is trash.
Can't wait to have to move to SF and pay 5k for a shoebox so I can work in an overcrowded office in a boring, crappy part of town.
Given we have agents that give 10x productivity gains do we also need to meet in person to get much more gains?
What this seems to be suggesting is that productivity gains due to agents are meaningless because 99% effort goes in non coding tasks which will get sped up by meeting in person
How independently does Instagram operate from Meta?
other divisions within Meta have recently made similar changes —- more time in office, less meetings. i’m guessing the orders are coming from the top but they’re allowing each org to roll out the changes “independently”
I think Instagram has pink headings and Facebook has blue. So they’re practically different companies.
Was the work from home ever presented as only temporary? Initially it was for sure because of health.
Seems like many companies and government agencies thought it permanent and sold their office spaces. Perhaps we will see them buying more offices to house their valuable workers once again.
Perhaps our cities will feel more lived in again.
Surely selling off office space and turning it back into family appartments would make it feel more "lived in"?
I'd wager two things:
1) Mosseri himself will still continue to enjoy the benefits of a flexible / remote enabled work / life balance that he is now denying his employees. Standard rules for thee not for me type BS that is typical of "Executives." I've worked for a couple larger corporations / organizations, and at both it was painfully obvious that the rules for us rank and file types categorically did not apply to the senior leadership. We were expected to "Tighten our belts" and "Do more with less" while the executives were flying around the world in their corporate jets going to "Conferences" and "Galas" or whatever, while spending the companies money lavishly on their own personal comfort. It's the same with remote work, executives love it for themselves, but deny it to the regular employees who actually make their lifestyles possible.
2) Mosseri himself, and members of Instagram's board and / or major shareholders have significant investments in commercials real estate.
The bottom line for me is this whole "Back to the office" nonsense is 100% driven by the wealthy capitalist class being heavily invested in commercial real estate. I, though no fault of my own have known a couple billionaires reasonably well in the past (Both from the same family), and they were both heavily invested in commercial real estate. The CEOs and their investors who keep prattling on with their BS about "Productivity" or "Collaboration" are the same people who own most of the commercial real estate, and all they actually care about is protecting the value of their investments, as if everyone starts working remotely, there wouldn't be much need for all these fancy corporate campuses and office parks, and the value of their investments would decline as result.
I think its okay for there to be jobs that require you to be in a specific place, especially so if you were hired under such an arrangement originally. If there is a significant advantage for companies that are remote, then they will have a significant advantage on talent.
Instead of focusing on sabotaging his employees life outside work for the sake of "prototypes", he should focus on fixing bugs in his apps.
Covid proved that wfh works, micromanagers think otherwise, jokes on us.
So Adam Mosseri wants to fire more people? This sounds like step 1 before voluntary leaves and then firings.
The same Mosseri who lived many time zones away in London until relatively recently until most people from instagram there got laid off...
Faster prototypes? The whole app feels like a constant prototype. There are numerous bugs that never get fixed, and if they do, new ones appear.
What's going to happen when all the remote first companies re-neg on their commitments? Will it be an intentional way to force layoffs and resignations?
When I worked from home I did about 10 hours of work per week. I am in a niche field and good enough at my job that my managers didn't realize. When I'm at the office, I can't do much else, so I work full days. I can't believe I'm very unique in this regard. Plenty of people will slack off as much as they possibly can while staying above the PIP line, and it's easier to do that at home.
Remote is awesome until you hit the limits of it.
We tried building with 3 founders across 3 timezones. On a good day it felt magical. On a bad day it felt like the kind of lag you remember from SC BW, CS 1.6, or classic WoW raids where one spike wipes the whole run just so everyone has to start over.
Async is great for shipping, but not when you are moving fast on hard problems where alignment is the whole game. The drag shows up slowly and you learn zero to one needs tight loops, high trust, and shared tempo. You cannot patch that with calls or docs.
Some teams crush remote. We did sometimes but not often enough and learned that the hard way. The work decides the model. For us it was about momentum and getting the fastest feedback loop possible. Ideas die in latency. Execution dies in drift.
At the end of the day it is not ideology. It is just whatever keeps the product moving as a startup, aiming high to become better, faster, cheaper than the status quo.
Just my 2c.~
You can't bring people in the same office from three different timezones. Most probably your setup was the problem, not the productivity of the people working remotely. Remote people working in the same timezone are usually very effective in their job.
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You of course need a team of at least 8 people to develop the "Fuck you, log in to view any photos" pop-up box
Obviously the resgnation is the cheapest way to layoffs, so shy not make it seven days?
I am here to repeat my sort-of non-but-almost conspiracy theory: It's not about the work, it's about the value of the Listed Property Trust (LPT), as a construct, if the entire central business district price model behind buildings tanks.
Every company of this scale is in LPT. They have shitloads of money tied up in the declared value of the office space either they invested, or they leveraged. If it tanks in value, they are on call for the decline in value related to that.
Thank you for reading my almost but not quite tinfoil hat conspiracy theory.
This isn't even a conspiracy theory, it's just true. I mean, some of it is definitely induced attrition (you always want the expensive people to quit, in the Milton Friedman cinematic universe), but the rest is that the commercial real estate market would collapse tomorrow if businesses couldn't justify their 10- or 15-year commercial leases. Not for nothing did endless headlines about how "going into the office is super cool, actually" run in our most august financial publications, like WSJ and the Economist, right around the time RTO mandates started showing up.
I'm pretty sure that Meta don't own most of their buildings, so this wouldn't apply to them.
But it probably applies to a lot of their shareholders, and they have big influence.
Nobody except Mark Zuckerberg matters for Meta. He has majority control of the board voting rights.
It seems much more likely that this is driven by the fact that Facebook culture has always been very much around in-person 1:1 contacts between people. This frustrated me a lot when I was there, but it did seem to work for a relatively long time.
Boards have a finance subcommittee and review income on investments. Meta does not invest 100% of its worth inside Meta, it will have billions of dollars invested through merchant banks who in turn balance in private equity, shares, and property. The property component will be reporting risk on lower future returns if the building declines in value as an asset. His fund manager will be advising him that signals to increase occupancy reduces his risk.
That he wants to do it, is an added bonus.
This is the man who changed the name of his company to focus on the Metaverse.
I find it very unlikely that he's listening to his bankers on strategy.
Don't get me wrong, I think the property value thing is a part of RTO, I just don't think it matters in this particular case.
This isn't a conspiracy theory it is just a fact. They already invested in the offices and the people who own everything have a lot of money in commercial real estate.
Since covid all my competent friends refuse to take non WFH jobs.
all hands on deck for reels-first UX and dumping the photo experience that helped us win so many hearts into the trash can forever.
Layoffs by another name.
STUPID. STUPID. STUPID.
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The comment initially confused me, but after reading it twice, I completely agree with you.
I would love to delete the app, but Instagram has really become the norm for dating and connecting with people. The opportunity cost of not using it in your 20s is significant. I hope to delete it once I’m fully settled, but that might not happen anytime soon given the modern dating culture.
Sometimes, I wish I could live like the Amish.
By some irony, I only created an instagram account so that I could get some cookies to pass to yt-dlp to download some videos from a wedding shoot my wife and I did.
When you have a real LTR they become jealous of you being on it.
My relationship is quite long-term, it can almost get its learner's permit, and we use Instagram all the time to, like, share cute animal videos from the Explore/Reels screens to each other, share stories to our friends of whatever we're doing together, or not together, and see our friends' stories.
idk if your partner is jealous of you using one of the top five social networking apps in the world that seems a little weird and maybe your relationship is not very healthy? it's instagram, not tinder or okcupid...
As long as you stay on a happy path, it's only like 5% thirst traps. But many people don't like it when those things are popping up in their SO's feed, so Instagram isn't good for those relationships.
I avoid it now mainly because I don't need infinite scrolling of anything. But a side benefit is that it can't provoke any jealousy.
> As long as you stay on a happy path, it's only like 5% thirst traps.
I’m an infrequent facebook user, but every couple months I’ll visit the website for something on fb marketplace or an event I’ve been invited to and 100% of the reels that are shoved at me are softcore pornography. My only interaction with them has been to click the “hide this item” (or whatever it’s called) on every reel I’ve ever seen.
I gotta be honest if my partner was sharing cute animal videos more often than every great once in a while, I’d probably end the relationship.
> I would love to delete the app, but Instagram has really become the norm for dating and connecting with people
Really??
In my social circles, at least, the answer is yes. I live in a major city with many people from diverse backgrounds. It might be different in areas where tech people make up the majority.
I know for a fact that I wouldn't have been invited to some parties or met some really fun people if I didn't have Instagram. You don't have to post or be very active; you just need to have an account.
No, this is not true.
News to me. But I just left my 20's so maybe I'm late off the boat.
I'm not installing anything Meta for any potential date. maybe Twitter but that's already pushing it.
Likewise, just left 20s. I'd be shocked if anyone I'm dating red flags me for not having social media . Well I do have Linkedin if that counts
Instagram is pretty bland, not anywhere close to TikTok in the scale of societal malaise. It can be used as a plain photo sharing app, reels is still a secondary feature, and the only place you'll find both of those things. Stories is mostly snaps from your friends if you don't follow any 'influencers'. It has replaced Facebook as they way most people in their 20-50s connect, and a handle is better than giving away your phone number.
I wish we had better ways (coming with the DMA and chat interoperability? maybe), but it's tolerable.
the owners; actual owners no doubt have their finger in the commercial real estate pie too. And they are obviously not ready to get a haircut on that portfolio so here it goes. COVID-19 hasn't disappeared yet, so all this is going to do is accelerate infection and churn through more people quicker. ASHRAE did update and release ASHRAE 241 but I really doubt building managers are eager to implement that costly compliance standard especially still shell shocked from WFH
Once employees accept tools like Time Doctor with screenshots and webcam shots, employers will accept work from home
Why stop there? Mandate pink dildo, like online camsites use, to track seating position. God fucking forbid you move 5 minutes from your seat – productivity suffers!
I have a question for anyone who knows.
When the productivity fell in covid days due to communications overheads and people just suddenly finding it easy to execute "lazy", did the ever so efficient corporate machinery pick this up in a jiffy and propose salary cuts to match? Or were they just too nice to do that?
It didn't fall. Productivity went up after the initial scramble.