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.
> 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.
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.
...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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
Measured for a year, my team overall shipped 60% of issues WFH than when in office. WFH was nice for some colleagues but clearly not working for the team. We promptly change back to in office when able.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Readit News
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a 4. in that these measures sometimes serve the purpose of reducing headcount without having to publicly announce layoffs.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
I think having the choice is great. Although it comes with its own challenges, it works really well when you establish the right culture.
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 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.
But forcing people to come to the office when they hate it, is counter-productive.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"Couldnt find a proper space to conduct the meeting"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”).
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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.
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 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.
fixed that title for you
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.
If leadership needs to manage folks out make them do the work and collect a paycheck while it happens.
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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.
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.
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.
Basically, everyone trusted everyone.
This is 100% just a soft layoff.
No more diversity programs, work life balance no longer promoted, that kinda stuff. This fits in with that trend.
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.
> "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!
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.
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.
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 .
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.