Ancedotally, someone close to me who works at Meta has cited several outrageous examples of WLB'ers doing almost no work. Perhaps a few bad apples spoiled the bunch.
I think companies are trying to use the current economic environment as leverage to claw back some rights their workers have gained since 2020. It’s all about control, nothing to do with your output as an employee.
This is kind of an odd way to frame this. The increase of remote work, at Meta at least, was not a result of some kind of workers vs. management struggle in which workers temporarily gained an upper hand. It was the result of an exogenous event (the pandemic) forcing an on-the-fly experiment.
It was forced by the pandemic. Workers had to stay home, as required by governments, and companies had no choice but to adapt. In that time workers gained a right that only a small number of them could convince employers to give them before. It’s got to the point where a large number of people would quit their job rather than work in an office and now that that’s a risky proposition, companies can take the opportunity to remove that right from workers with less risk they’ll quit.
Meta needs its best engineers to be highly motivated in uncertain times. Otherwise innovation will be harder to come by.
All the best engineers I ever worked with so far all favor remote work because it increases code quality, throughput, and happiness.
Meta will be disrupted, seeing as whatever Meta tech they’re building isn’t even good enough for their own employees to dogfood for better remote work experience.
I'm a big advocate of remote work, but my role has changed it's value significantly:
* As an IC, remote is amazing. It gives me distraction free space to focus and be productive. With moderate process, I'm able to be extremely productive and unblock myself.
* As a manager, remote can be challenging when trying to drive cross-team/cross-org impact - especially on ambiguous projects. It's far more challenging to drive outcomes when you can't simply walk into someone's office for a quick conversation . Good process can help with this, but most companies don't reward for this.
As a senior manager who's job is entirely cross-team/cross-org change management, I can assure you remote hasn't made things much harder. Orgs have always been geographically diverse (show me an org that doesn't have to coordinate across multiple sites and I'll show you an org that isn't big enough to have these issues in the first place) and managing change in remote parts of the org was always hard and always necessary.
The place I work for hasn't fully embraced remote for in house staff, since lockdowns it's now 2 days a month in the office but we have hired an agency to help with an app rebuild. We've got 5-6 people from the agency working from Spain, Hungary, Poland and the UK and they're brilliant. Really knowledgable about our specific niche with loads of experience in related areas. I have no idea how we'd find people this good in the UK let alone ones tied to commute distance of the office.
I can only assume the huge companies like Meta are wanting to reduce HR overhead of dealing with different countries and states employment laws, taxes etc.
Larger companies have economies of scale that enable dealing with these laws easier.
Smaller companies have to use something like Deel.
That hypothesis doesn't sound that convincing - especially since multiple Americans I know who wanted to join big companies pre-pandemic did so because of the access to living in different places outside of America.
Suddenly all these layoffs from the tech industry now make sense. Companies view the WFH movement and the rights which the workers have gained over the past three years as a threat to their very existence. The layoffs combined with a mandatory return to office will discourage any sort of dissent.
Do they though? I see the WFH movement as a threat to the existence of my job. If the entire IT department works from home, what's stopping the company from moving it to India, Bangladesh or Pakistan? If you live in North America or Europe then I feel like you should fight against WFH, since a lot of smart people in the world would gladly do your job for half the salary.
If that was true, why don't Meta and all the others simply hire people from those countries, like they offshored production? In some cases they even set up physical offices there to try to do exactly as you say. Yet they keep coming back to more expensive workers.
To what "rights", specifically, are you referring? How were they "gained over the past 3 years"? There is a weird strain of thinking in this thread that tries to frame this as some kind of Marxian labor-capital power struggle. But that framing doesn't really fit the facts.
Paywall blocking the article for me, but... I considered changing jobs to FB about a year ago. The recruiter was saying that they're remote-first and plan to stay that way.
Recruiters are there to get you hired, not to tell the truth. I imagine the messaging internally for recruiting teams has changed drastically.
Is there anyone who still wants to work at facebook at this point? The company that is laying off thousands, that has wasted billions on a metaverse that no one wants, not to mention one that has helped rip apart the fabric of society? And now doesn’t want you working from home? Is it really worth the money at this point?
As long as they pay top dollar, many people would. For many, works is not a question of morals, principles, or company values. It's a question of collecting tokens into their bank account at the highest velocity possible. Meta is still one of the top payers in the market, so people will keep lining up to work there.
I doubt the recruiter would have known anything different. A lot of these sudden RTO initiatives appear to be top-down things, not something recruiters would have known about a year in advance.
Remote work was supposed to be part of the long-term vision straight from the CEO, tied together with the Metaverse stuff. Said the recruiter. Other companies said much vaguer things. I'd expect recruiters saying they support WFH without mentioning the risk of that going away, but Facebook recruiting was making bolder claims (which ofc I took with a grain of salt).
Maybe this means the Metaverse is being abandoned.
This isn't as nefarious as everyone makes it out to be. There are articles that state Meta has hard data that people who start as Remote workers at Meta significantly underperform those that don't. In light of that data, they're pausing the experiment and working to understand what the data is saying.
I'd love to see it too, but don't you think the sentiment is a little entitled?
Meta is a private company that can do whatever it wants and Zuck doesn't need to justify anything. He's also not being too egregious here. He's stopped hiring new remote, but hasn't forced any current remote people back into the office. What right do we have to demand more from them?
Readit News
has he stopped believing in the transformative power of the metaverse then?
I don't know why Meta exists at this point other than the momentum of a large business with loads of assets and meaningful no product.
https://www.protocol.com/mark-zuckerberg-remote-work-faceboo...
All the best engineers I ever worked with so far all favor remote work because it increases code quality, throughput, and happiness.
Meta will be disrupted, seeing as whatever Meta tech they’re building isn’t even good enough for their own employees to dogfood for better remote work experience.
* As an IC, remote is amazing. It gives me distraction free space to focus and be productive. With moderate process, I'm able to be extremely productive and unblock myself.
* As a manager, remote can be challenging when trying to drive cross-team/cross-org impact - especially on ambiguous projects. It's far more challenging to drive outcomes when you can't simply walk into someone's office for a quick conversation . Good process can help with this, but most companies don't reward for this.
However, given that there are far more staff employees, wouldn’t it make sense to optimize for their output?
I can only assume the huge companies like Meta are wanting to reduce HR overhead of dealing with different countries and states employment laws, taxes etc.
Smaller companies have to use something like Deel.
That hypothesis doesn't sound that convincing - especially since multiple Americans I know who wanted to join big companies pre-pandemic did so because of the access to living in different places outside of America.
Trust me: the problems with outsourcing have almost no overlap with the challenges of remote, on-shore work.
Think: timezones, talent quality, language barriers, cultural differences, just to name a few.
Many of the best you can find from cheaper countries already moved to US or EU, or are willing to move.
Also, while I'm all for remote work, time zones different are a mess to manage.
Is there anyone who still wants to work at facebook at this point? The company that is laying off thousands, that has wasted billions on a metaverse that no one wants, not to mention one that has helped rip apart the fabric of society? And now doesn’t want you working from home? Is it really worth the money at this point?
Maybe this means the Metaverse is being abandoned.
Until they do so, I remain deeply skeptical. It’s all too easy to engineer measurements or interpret data to support the outcomes you already want.
If the data is truly so revealing, show it to the world.
Meta is a private company that can do whatever it wants and Zuck doesn't need to justify anything. He's also not being too egregious here. He's stopped hiring new remote, but hasn't forced any current remote people back into the office. What right do we have to demand more from them?