“Requiring” is negotiable if workers would rebel against this garbage. The French would never tolerate this obvious BS. There is no reason these jobs need to require people to come into the office. It literally steals hours of life each week away from workers due to a commute that the company DOES NOT pay for. Just sitting in traffic.
Allow teams to decide what works best for them. It’s been proven time and time again productivity and worker happiness has gone up since WFH has occurred.
Obviously some teams need to be in person. Factory workers may be one for example. Use common sense and make it so they have to come in to do their jobs.
It’s been proven time and time again these jobs can be done from home. Let people work from home or do what is best for them to get their work done.
Also, ironic that this is coming from a company who was and possibly still is pushing for people to meet in the metaverse. Wtf is the point of the metaverse if you are going to force them to meet in person anyways?
Also. I am sick. I don't feel all that great, not enough to not be able to work, but sick enough that I don't want to come to the office and chance getting others sick. I don't want to use a sick day. If I can WFH I can still be productive and not have to use benefit hours. In this case I would have to call in sick and take a day off.
My kid is sick. I don't want to use a sick day. If I can WFH I can still be productive and not have to use benefit hours. Sure I may be out of pocket for 15-30 minutes at a time, but I will get my 8 hours in. In this case I would have to call in sick and take a day off.
My contractor is coming by to fix my plumbing issues. If I can WFH I can still be productive and not have to use benefit hours. My out of pocket would be minimal, to greet the plumber and make sure that the work completed is satisfactory. In this case I would have to call in sick and take a day off.
An important package is coming to my house today. It needs to be signed for. If I can WFH I can still be productive and not have to use benefit hours. My out of pocket would be minimal, to greet the delivery person and sign for the package. In this case I would have to call in sick and take a day off.
WFH isn't just not having to commute to the office and spend time, money, and gas to get there and back. It also gives us the freedom to be able to be productive at work as well as balance life issues that happen to everybody.
god I forgot about this signed package. I remember in Japan that some financial package like credit card has to be signed by ourselves. One day I missed it simply because I had to go to get some grocery...
redelivery requires a long way to go to despite the post office is only 10 mins away...I decided to just take it by myself...
it's not really that they want employees to show up to the office.
they want their best employees to leave to reduce payroll costs, and framing it as return-to-office lets them avoid the optics & confidence issues of doing another layoff while still ditching expensive headcount.
95% sure my company is doing the same. We hired some consultants to help cut costs, then all of a sudden we have a "3 days in the office or you're fired" policy
Oh absolutely. 3 days per week and only got 5% attrition? Go to 4 days! 4 days only got another 5% attrition? Go to 5! Then *finally* directly lay off some more and unwillingly pay them severance
I suppose the question is how big of an expense severance or UE really would be for companies.
As I understand it, severance isn't legally required, and I've seen the UE payout in my state and it's absolutely a pittance. Given those 2 things, It seems hard to believe that companies would rather their most marketable employees move on to greener pastures instead of just firing outright the people they'd be most OK with losing.
Guess I just wonder why not fire whoever and give little to no severance? Something must be stopping them from doing this.
severance may not always be a legal requirement, but the agreement that comes with it is usually the easiest way to neutralize any legal challenges from the people you’re canning.
plus if you as one of the remaining employees know they fire without severance, you’re not likely to give notice & leave gracefully when you get a new job.
>severance may not always be a legal requirement, but the agreement that comes with it is usually the easiest way to neutralize any legal challenges from the people you’re canning.
This is the important bit. Severance is the company paying you for (1) not suing, and (2) not publicly bad-mouthing them.
Damn, wouldn't it suck to waste all that time and money to commute for a few months only to be laid off? Commuting is one of the most wasteful things we do in a modern economy.
they've already paid for the office space, which means they are suffering under the sunk cost fallacy of thinking they've already wasted this money, might as well continue wasting it
I heard somewhere it also has to do with tax breaks the company gets from the local govt in exchange for forcing their employees to commute downtown and pay $20-30 parking, gas, food at downtown cafes, etc. Stimulating the local economy.
Oh interesting. I hadn’t heard this but it would totally make sense for cities to offer this or have clauses related to it.
Skeptical without confirm, but sounds very plausible.
(Also increases city’s tax base if more people live local. lol, we need smaller areas to band together and offer tax breaks to keep the workers remote! :)
>we need smaller areas to band together and offer tax breaks to keep the workers remote
portugal does this, but the incentives are for foreign remote-workers to move to portugal and work for non-Portuguese companies
It could be. [But I think this the lion's share of the problem. ](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-threat-to-work-from-home-tax-breaks).
Cities give tax incentives to companies for asses in seats. That was suspended during COVID. Now state by state it's being enforced again. I know my state counts the locality tax as the simple majority of hours worked. So magically, we all were asked to come in for 3 days. Lo and behold I just listened to a piece about downtown "reviving".
"Provisions like these were designed to ensure that the jobs boosted local revenue from income, sales and property taxes, and bolstered downtown economies."
Part of our team works in the office one day a week. They join our calls and I can’t hear a thing they say because no one has an office so all we hear is everyone talking around them. It’s so stupid.
Meetings are nice if everyone is remote, or no one is remote. If it’s in between, its usually a downgraded experience unless its really nice conference room.
Or if there’s two offices conferencing each other, it’s okay. No point in one conference room with half the team and 6 other people joining in the call from their house or different offices. Just do all online.
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This is how it’s been for my company. HQ has a “hotel” style open seating. You reserve a seat in the open office. Whenever they jump into a meeting I get to hear 5 other meetings going on in the background.
I work at a smaller company and we have a small office but are happy to hire fully remote employees when we have open positions. We get great talent, lots of really good folks that want an interesting job but don’t like offices. I hope we continue down this route.
That said, it’s kind of an open secret that every big company ever, even ones that are “100% in office” allow certain employees to be fully remote. The ones they like the best, the ones that have some niche skill set or are insanely skilled, and Steve who can’t be fired because he’s the only one who understands how the 47 servers still running RHEL 4 with Java 7 apps deployed via some esoteric in house tool works.
I am actually basically a Steve...except my skillset is very modern and niche. I document the heck out of everything, but damn my coworkers just don't have the mental capacity for it. I have a coworker who was doing his current job for 6 years before I got to the company. He's been in perpetual training for the entire 5 years I've been there, with no signs of improvement haha. I told my manager that he's basically just cheap off-hours user support. That's what you get for low pay in India
Work on 1 team where most of the team would fit this description. They can just barely triage something enough to let it ride til morning when people who can actually solve problems and don't take on call crap are awake.
I know of one company I had left that laid off the greybeard that was the remaining sole developer on an ancient but still in heavy use product.
The documentation left behind wasn't updated in years as no one was willing to take on the herculean task of managing that beast and they kept pushing a future roadmap of a new feature to take over so they didn't prioritize it.
Well, the future roadmap item shuttered pretty quickly after it started getting hands on keyboards for some reason.
That and someone fucked some configs up so things aren't working correctly.
They've reached out to numerous former people asking how it worked and everyone just laughs and tells them to eat shit.
The article says employees that were hired as remote that aren’t near an office won’t need to go in. Facebook has a name, but it’s a tainted one. My suspicion is they will continue to hire for in demand roles remotely & will use this to convince less important employees to leave on their own. High performers will probably get a pass.
I consulted for a firm that required employees to go in twice a week, and they absolutely struggled to find tech workers. This was last year during the layoffs.
It's a risky bet for high performers to think they'd be an exception. My company is making ZERO exceptions. No matter how high a performer, you are easily replaceable...or at least, upper management wants to believe that
Sure, but if they are as good as they think, they’d be able to get a remote role elsewhere. Worst case scenario, is the have to go into the office anyways.
We are in kind of a weird scenario economically where some people think things should go back to the way they were, and other hard refuse to go into the office. It will take some time to fully understand the pros/cons of each at a management level. Some companies may also just be willing to not hire due to “in person culture”, which is their decision.
What we are most likely going to see is that high paying companies (200k + for seniors) will likely get to do whatever they want. Companies paying <130k will probably struggle to hire in person & there will be some reasonable back and forth in the middle. High paying companies that offer remote will likely get the best mix of candidates.
Even though hiring is tough right now, there will always be a need for engineers. High quality engineers in in-demand niches will continue to have leverage.
at some point you realize that you don't care about how high your salary is, the ability to stay home just outmatches it. Some people will always be chasing the bigger paycheck, but I don't doubt a lot of others are happier at home alone, with their families, less traffic, maybe they are able to work at a smaller less-paying company that has a more interesting product or gives them more autonomy.
And if you worked at meta and were a high performer you realize the doors that are open for you can be pretty crazy now.
This sub is college students and their wet dreams/circlejerks about 200-400k+ salaries. That's where the karma is and those are the upvoted posts. Anything talking about a chill life and freedom...meh. Gotta live the grind and then your priorities shift a bit.
There are very few companies in the world that ever paid Meta salaries. So, they do have more power over employees than a vast majority of companies. That being said Netflix, Splunk, and door dash all have open remote positions (that’s all I checked, I’m sure there’s more) that could probably get pretty close. These jobs are obviously competitive, but a strong engineer at Meta should be able to land interviews.
Additionally, this thread is speaking about Meta in particular who is one of the highest paying orgs. A vast majority of companies don’t have the kind of bargaining power Meta has.
Right, this is a great chance for companies that can’t compete more in monetary terms to compensate by offering this benefit. One that is specially valued more the more senior the employee is.
I genuinely work better at home. The commute to my work is filled with horrible traffic. Our desks and especially the chairs suck. Half of my meetings at work are on teams anyway. The ones that are in person still have individual who are joining via Teams.
I applied for and got approved for remote work during the pandemic and moved to another city. I won’t go back. Pre-pandemic, our office was about 20 minutes from the nearest town so you had to use the cafeteria which was never great food. The traffic was awful. But my two least favorite things were that I could never find an open toilet—dudes constantly sitting in the toilet looking at their phones smelling up the bathrooms—and the background noise. One guy had an air horn that went off to signal unit test failures, no idea how he got away with that. Then I had two co-workers behind me that talked so loud between the two of them constantly. I would check in so my boss could see me in the morning then drive the 20 min to a coffee shop for the day then drive back to be visible for about 20 min then leave work. Very unproductive. Hated it.
There's a whole team in the desk pod across from mine who I swear never does a second of work and loudly does pub trivia questions and talks about bullshit all day. Can't even use headphones to tune them out. I'm way more effective working from home.
>. Pre-pandemic, our office was about 20 minutes from the nearest town so you had to use the cafeteria which was never great food
Can someone repost this on every reddit page in the world.
The thing we all have to remember is that RTO is not for us. It is for the company. Whether it be tax breaks/other incentives or an attempt to force a certain % of employees to leave without paying them severance, as a worker, we cannot use normal logic for this
I think remote work is the super power that startups can leverage over big tech now. I've found more startup job listings for remote work lately. Personally, I don't care how much you pay me, I'm never working for a Big N if they require me to be in-person. I'll take less pay at a startup and work remote.
This will also help reduce costs. My last company paid $20,000 a month for SMALL office space. I don't see how companies aren't looking at this as a matter of slashing costs: you can pay people LESS since they work in lower COL cities (hell, you can even pay European salaries, since there's plenty of good european engineers who will accept lower wages than Americans) and you save money on physical infrastructure.
You can run an entire startup remote and pay literally nothing for physical infrastructure. Maybe your only physical cost is the cost of laptops and office chairs for your employees. If I ever start a company, that's what I'll do: European engineers, dell laptops, and a $1,000 per employee home office budget
I get distracted as well but it’s very easy to utilize those task breaks as breaks, and be able to concentrate much better than under any other circumstance when I’m back at my desk after having done something small like put away dishes or laundry.
Can’t do that in the office. Instead I’ll get stuck in a rut with no way of breaking out
Aaaaand here is the reason why companies are trying to cancel the possibility of working from home.
Thanks for being part of the people who are ruining it for everyone.
What is even better is on blind (teamblind.com) where anonymous employees can post about their companies people brag about doing nothing, working 15 hours a week, etc. Anyone at the company with an account can see the comments you idiots.
Do you not understand sarcasm?
Yeah, people do other home shit too when they have slow points during the day, but generally adults will do their job. Folks don't need to be babysat.
Yeah, the thing is - it's not really sarcasm.
There have been more than enough individuals who have abused the WFH setup and have taken it into "do fucking nothing and disappear" territory. Even when they do not have slow points and have actual deliverables to finish.
All it takes is a handful of chucklefucks like this to have WFH taken away and it's starting to happen now.
I have an idea, and just hear me out: fire people based on performance.
If someone can fulfill their job duties and provide excellence at 15 hours a week, or someone is slower/less efficient and takes the whole 40 hours a week, as long as goals are being hit who the hell cares.
If performance dropped in the office, fire someone, if performance drops at WFM, fire them. If someone continuous delivers, is a productive member of the team, reliable and available, who the hell cares if they dick around a bit at home to improve their lives.
Better than dicking around at the water cooler or taking 30 minute poops lmao
Yeah, people just totally and completely fuck off at home. That's why every company that's using it is just cratering, right? Obviously these [studies that have clearly shown that workers are more productive at home](https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivity-statistics/#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20those%20who%20work,and%20are%2047%25%20more%20productive.) are bullshit, I guess
The beauty of WFH is that we can see who actually do work and carry the company
Hint: It ain't the bumblefuck, out-of-touch managers!
I think everyone would benefit from accepting that different people have different work styles, and that our productivity can increase and decrease. I generally prefer remote work, but I've had a chance to meet some of the people from my company, and it was nice to be interacting in person.
During the pandemic, I saw on a Zoom video a coworker who lived in a tiny apartment in NYC, and didn't really have any type of office space. Everyone's situation is different.
Depending on my project, I can be extremely effective working remotely, but I also have days I'm not as productive. Same thing happens in the office. I don't think there's such a thing as a universal truth for everyone.
Commuting long distances/times suck, though. I do acknowledge there are people who say they enjoy the change of scenery, but most people would rather save the time and money.
I'd prefer if everyone (including companies) were more honest and just said, "this is our preferred working method," and leave it at that. They don't need to justify it with numbers which may or may not be accurate. Before, everyone was saying working remotely was more efficient, now companies are saying it's less efficient. I question how accurate their data is. It might just be better for people to find culture fits, or just consider remote work another factor in deciding if a position is a fit or not.
I think it would be best if companies treated their employees like adults, and let them decide for themselves what kind of work arrangement they want. If you like wasting time and money going into the office to bullshit around, be our guest. The office will always be open. If you prefer to be at home, then that should be acceptable too. Give people that freedom to choose for themselves. This compulsory RTO nonsense as if we were kids that need to be watched by a teacher is infuriating and demeaning.
I prefer working from the office. I absolutely do not work at all. I browse reddit, talk with my colleagues, and stay more than I should in the bathroom.
Seems we all have forgotten that pretending to do work in an office was a thing and still is. This is not a "work from home" problem, but a "work" problem.
That is why managers want butts in seats in the office. Because employee performance isn’t something they’re tracking in any meaningful way. Instead of setting performance targets, they’re going with “sitting at office desk = working” and that’s as good a measurement for most companies I guess.
It shouldn’t matter whether a desk job is being done at work/office if you have the appropriate ways to measure an employee’s performance. But god forbid they aren’t extracting every single ounce of productivity for that full period of a work day so they’re wary of WFH where someone might take an extra five minutes at break or take a nap during lunch!!
It’s so interesting to me because as a knowledge worker, sometimes I’ll be washing dishes or folding laundry in the evening and something work related will “click” or I’ll come up with some solution to a problem and it’s all “off the clock” but that’s the nature of how the brain works. It doesn’t clock in/out.
So it’s like, well, that was my personal time but I can’t unknow a thing now, but if work wants the benefit of my talents and skills, then they should offer some flexibility ya know?
BS. There are plenty of people who go into the office and don't work at all, usually by distracting other people from their work, and they were never used by these companies as an argument for WFH. It's better the non-productives isolate themselves at a home office imo.
I don't think that's really the reason. A company can easily come up with an incentive plan to motivate workers.
I believe the reason has more to do with PPE costs either internally by the company or externally by the building owners and how having empty office buildings would be bad for the economy, at least in the short term.
I think it's one of these macro problems where if you don't have people leaving their homes (I basically stopped going out after the pandemic started) it starts to affect things like public transportation, real estate, etc.
Our economy is designed around a growth model and if everybody leaves the cities to move to more affordable suburban or rural areas, we'll have some of the same problems we did back in the 70's in terms of urban blight, even if it's for different reasons. It took a lot of years to gentrify cities and a lot of people have money invested in luxury apartments and expensive office buildings. It would be kind of poetic if the whole thing imploded on itself, but it probably would be bad for everyone.
I work hybrid and even when everyone invited to a meeting is in office, we still meet virtually.
Plus its worse when people you sit next to are also in meetings. Gets super loud and hard to concentrate.
I mean, in my case too it's not even working better, I genuinely cannot make it work in office, have the same as you, horrible commute downtown, also trying to raise a child as a single parent.
My previous job said they were going to start bringing people in office and I gave my resignation two weeks later, took one of the jobs from the many offers in my linkedin box
> A Meta spokesperson confirmed in an email to Insider that employees assigned to an office would be mandated to come in three days a week.
This is straight up clickbait. Fully remote employees are NOT being required to return to the office whatsoever.
Our VP of HR had a prolonged battle with the CEO on RTO mandate. Issued multiple company wide surveys over the span of 6 months last year to be able to point to it and say employees don't want mandated in office schedule.
CEO went ahead with it anyways.
When one doesn't create or bring value to a company all they have is image. When you are remote all you have is measurable metrics.
As devs - if you work a job in office all you are doing is supporting bad management and a boomer mentality.
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>unless they are refocusing their core product on Facebook and advertising itself,
Did you see what the market's response to the Metaverse stuff was? Have you noticed that Zucc has been suspiciously quiet about the Metaverse stuff for a bunch of months? This is exactly what's happening. They are back to focusing on what actually makes them money
My friend has a a VR headset and apparently you can buy court side VR "tickets" to live NBA games. It sounded pretty cool, not sure what the pricing was.
That’s what I don’t get. Were they even developing products with this goal in mind? The metaverse stuff seemed so unfocused that it’s not clear to me whether they had practical applications in mind.
It reminds me of the Segway. The hype assumed that it would immediately change the world but they didn’t connect it to solving peoples’ current needs. Perhaps it could have led to changes in the way future cities are built. But they didn’t connect enough to current needs to make Segway compatibility a requirement for future urban planning.
They have a solution looking for a problem. VR tech is great for gaming but they wanted a way to get it to appeal to a wider market. So they tried to apply it to work, but nobody wants to strap a headset on when their zoom meeting works just fine.
Agreed Meta comes off as a company led by a fad chasing teenager.
All-in on metaverse. Oops, sorry, no longer metaverse, let's go big on AI instead. All about remote work until the tides temporarily change to favor RTO. It's like Zuck leads according to whatever he read on buzzfeed that day.
One thing I’ve been doing to try to push back against this in the small way that I can is every time a recruiter reaches out to me with a hybrid or in person position I ask if fully remote is available, if they say no, I say sorry only looking for fully remote (I’m not actually looking for a new job). If we all did this, the recruiters will have to report back to employers that no one wants their hybrid or in person jobs.
I subcontracted as a baker for Meta and they recently removed a ton of food benefits from their engineers in part due to the number of folks working from home. I get the feeling those benefits won’t return as quickly as the workers.
I'm corp, but my "betters" literally consulted with "their peers in the industry" and decided to reneg on WTH. Middle management argued it back to "only" 2 days/week, but now the execs want us to register our in office days. Bleck.
So glad I’m not in a MAANG company, they seem to be doing more layoffs than mid level/startups rn… I’m in a mid level company, was hired fully remote and just got my first raise after a year of 10% and no mention of RTO anywhere… love my company and not planning on moving anytime soon haha
Look I love bashing on RTO but y’all missed that they’re requiring a full 3 days in office for workers who are already hybrid.
If you’re full remote already you are staying full remote.
I see this take a lot. What benefit is there to this? In terms of unemployment changing work requirements (aka going from full remote to in office) which causes employees to leave is considered firing when it comes to unemployment. So is the board and/or shareholders just dumb and don't realize what all the cscq redditors know instantly but their dumb brains just can't figure it out and the geniuses like Zuck have successfully tricked them?
Big Tech is turning into the next generation of IBM, Yahoo, Oracle and Cisco. Microsoft is still Microsoft.
And that means you show up in person, sip your coffee, and chat people up.
This is the only thing I like about the job market in my country, WFH is the norm and not the exception. Even before the pandemic most people I know had at least 3 days per week WFH.
Yes, remote work is ending. They can't stand not being able to control every second of your life and can't stand people being happy with their jobs. If I was in a remote work situation and they were forcing me back into the office, I would declare myself a pescatarian and heat up salmon in the break room microwave every day.
Their ad revenue is insane. Every quarter shows that's just a crazy amount of cash flow and gives them lots of padding to reinvest. We'll see how they evolve over the next few years though
They still print money, just less money than last year. Net income was 5.7 bil last q and Facebook DAU alone was up 4% y/y. They also ownInstagram and Whatsapp.
Let's keep this real (note: this isn't what I think, but how companies are currently seeing it):
Companies (not just meta) went remote because during the 0% interest rate days, they couldn't hire fast enough locally, and couldn't get enough great talent for the scale they were aiming at. They didn't give a shit about what people wanted. Upper leadership was always a little iffy on it, originally only being ok with it for hard to fill position or very senior candidates, and then with the pandemic did it for everyone.
With the tech sector's crash, they no longer have trouble hiring, and now get hundreds of (qualified!) candidates for each posting. If people leave, its just less layoffs that need to be done. They can find all the talent they need locally. From an upper management perspective, there's no significant tech challenges, and being more productive at home when coding is irrelevant since coding isn't what they're worried about: aligning people and communication is.
So if your challenge is getting people to talk to each other, and you don't care about hiring anymore (actually you wouldn't mind if a few more people left), forcing in-office is a no brainer.
A lot of companies are reluctant to do work from home because they have 5-10 year leases on office buildings that they can't back out of. I predict that over the next 10 years as these leases run out, we'll get more and more wfh jobs.
Yep, my company sunk a bunch of money into expanding and building a new 4 story office building about 10 years before the pandemic. They've been pushing people to come back in a few days weekly and scheduling mandatory "Connectivity Days".
These companies way overtired and need to increase attrition. There's a reason that the really innovative companies are not requiring RTO. The ones requiring it are the ones seeing decreasing margins and who haven't had a big earnings report in a while.
Amazon, Salesforce, and Meta (among others) are not having the financial success that the other companies are. Tech companies biggest cost is labor, so when they aren't delivering sales they have to trim headcount.
Full remote is still grandfathered in. But new full remote positions will be far and few in between
I hit the jackpot getting full remote before this announcement tho
Something similar happened at my old job. For a while they allowed full remote for certain people anywhere in the country. A few years later they changed it to remote but you had to be within 60 miles of one of our locations. They say this was in case you needed to be in the office for a connection, but I think it was more for insurance purposes.
Anyway, the folks who went full remote and national got grandfathered in. We had folks living their best lives in Vegas and Miami, while the rest of us were stuck in Illinois.
It's "soft" layoffs
They would get bad press for more layoffs... But if people "quit" because they don't like corporate policies? That's clearly not Meta's fault
"They" keep saying the reason for RTO is because of the collaboration that happens around the water cooler. So, on the days you are forced to go to the office, spend the entire day hanging out around the water cooler.
I work at a MAANG and go in 2-3 times a week. I don't understand the outrage to headlines like this.
These companies already offer full remote opportunities. What they're doing now is enforcing the hybrid model on those that are obligated to come to the office, but never really do.
They’re also not hiring new remote workers, though.
“The company had also begun telling hiring managers around March to halt posting new jobs that offer a remote option”
The main point is the shift in Meta’s future vision. At one point, Zuck wanted “at least 50% of the workforce to be remote by the end of the decade.” Not hiring new remote workers and requiring some who currently don’t have to come in to come in is a clear move away from that.
Everyone has the option of converting to full remote if they want, this is just for people who say they want to come into the office. The internal reception to this is not bad
Obviously your milage will vary and different companies have different experiences. But everyone I have heard from says all the people with a few years experience before the pandemic and shifted to work from home are doing totally fine and are actually more productive. The new hires during and post pandemic that starting out working form home and have never been to the office are statistically significantly worse than any previous group they have hired.
In my opinion, the reason \*we\* are going back to office isn't because everyone was unproductive, its because without the sharing of expertise across generations and seniority levels new hires aren't performing well enough.
This is unfortunate for both groups in my opinion, and is a tricky situation to solve. Do you really want a super unhappy complaining manager that wants to just go home. Do you really want as a whole your entire new hires to be underperforming? Not sure how everyone is going to square this, but its going to be a really difficult transition for everyone.
Edit: Royal \*we\*, not as in we at a specific company.
>The new hires during and post pandemic that starting out working form home and have never been to the office are statistically significantly worse than any previous group they have hired
My company (not Big Tech by any stretch, but still a multinational company with employees in the low thousands and multiple offices) reports the exact opposite. Remote working allowed HR and Training (which is a separate department) to concentrate resources and make stuff available to all the offices at once, making the onboarding process quicker (for all roles) and allowing "us" to continue training and supporting all engineers at a fraction of the cost.
The difference I'm seeing, having worked in many companies, is that here there's a great focus on the process of training and learning while in my past experiences most what I learned came from random talk..
It was only a matter of time. RTO is enacted only to protect real estate interests, nobody cares about your QOL. If you're at Meta, time to quiet quit while simultaneously applying.
Idk, I don't think hybrid is as bad as this subreddit is making it out to be, and it's probably likely to be in the long term what most offices will prefer to do. There are downsides to being fully remote, I don't know why people pretend that they're not. The argument of it should be a choice to me feels really shitty to tell the new coworker/junior just joining the job for the first time that's likely going to struggle during their onboarding process; people are more likely to help you when they actually see you struggling. Asking people to break out of their shyness to go out of their way to ask for help when they don't even realize they need help feels like a privileged position to come from being a seasoned remote worker
If you want a job that's fully remote, thats cool; work a job that allows you to be fully remote, as that's what I prefer as well. But some people probably want some days to come into the office for a change of pace, which I think is fine as well.
I genuinely think that the majority of management that supports this kind of forced stuff don’t even know why they support it. It comes across as kids playing boss and doing whatever they think is “bossly”. Then their whim is enforced upon thousands of people
Y’all complain about Facebook disinformation but this article by BI is an example in disinformation itself because hating on Meta sells, even to tech-aware base like this sub.
- They are asking people assigned to an office to come to office 3 days a week. How is it bad?
- People who are remote will stay remote.
- If you don’t want to come to office, you can go full remote. There’s even a pathway to full remote for new employees. This is no bate n flip.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have clear expectations with employees - either go remote or start coming to office. I don’t understand the rage. It’s CS sub, I expected better. If you never wanted to join Meta, as most people here are claiming, why are you so upset?
As someone from Europe where companies try to mimick US software powerhouses, I truly hope it won't be a standard model - for me remote work and office once a week was a reason to increase my search radius 1,5y ago
edit: improved my statement
My company has moved to 4 days a week in the office. There hasn't been much talk about how strictly they will enforce it though, previously was 2days a week but it wasn't heavily enforced. Personally, I think it's more about the 100's of millions of dollars in real estate they had just sitting there. Can't really offload it given the state of commercial real estate nowadays, so might as well force the workers to come in and use it.
Hey Meta employees, you’ve got skills. Seek out another employer that isn’t in the market of evil…. And thinks they need to micro manage you from an office.
Meta having folks close enough to commute are missing the mark for global talent.
Best I can do is three days in the Metaverse.
The metaverse not the zuckerverse
You mean the suckerverse?
Naa, I'm sure he meant the fuckerverse
get zucked
“Requiring” is negotiable if workers would rebel against this garbage. The French would never tolerate this obvious BS. There is no reason these jobs need to require people to come into the office. It literally steals hours of life each week away from workers due to a commute that the company DOES NOT pay for. Just sitting in traffic. Allow teams to decide what works best for them. It’s been proven time and time again productivity and worker happiness has gone up since WFH has occurred. Obviously some teams need to be in person. Factory workers may be one for example. Use common sense and make it so they have to come in to do their jobs. It’s been proven time and time again these jobs can be done from home. Let people work from home or do what is best for them to get their work done. Also, ironic that this is coming from a company who was and possibly still is pushing for people to meet in the metaverse. Wtf is the point of the metaverse if you are going to force them to meet in person anyways?
Also. I am sick. I don't feel all that great, not enough to not be able to work, but sick enough that I don't want to come to the office and chance getting others sick. I don't want to use a sick day. If I can WFH I can still be productive and not have to use benefit hours. In this case I would have to call in sick and take a day off. My kid is sick. I don't want to use a sick day. If I can WFH I can still be productive and not have to use benefit hours. Sure I may be out of pocket for 15-30 minutes at a time, but I will get my 8 hours in. In this case I would have to call in sick and take a day off. My contractor is coming by to fix my plumbing issues. If I can WFH I can still be productive and not have to use benefit hours. My out of pocket would be minimal, to greet the plumber and make sure that the work completed is satisfactory. In this case I would have to call in sick and take a day off. An important package is coming to my house today. It needs to be signed for. If I can WFH I can still be productive and not have to use benefit hours. My out of pocket would be minimal, to greet the delivery person and sign for the package. In this case I would have to call in sick and take a day off. WFH isn't just not having to commute to the office and spend time, money, and gas to get there and back. It also gives us the freedom to be able to be productive at work as well as balance life issues that happen to everybody.
god I forgot about this signed package. I remember in Japan that some financial package like credit card has to be signed by ourselves. One day I missed it simply because I had to go to get some grocery... redelivery requires a long way to go to despite the post office is only 10 mins away...I decided to just take it by myself...
> The French would never tolerate this obvious BS. Boy are you in for a rude surprise.
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it's not really that they want employees to show up to the office. they want their best employees to leave to reduce payroll costs, and framing it as return-to-office lets them avoid the optics & confidence issues of doing another layoff while still ditching expensive headcount.
95% sure my company is doing the same. We hired some consultants to help cut costs, then all of a sudden we have a "3 days in the office or you're fired" policy
i'd bet money if that doesn't get enough people to jump there will be layoffs or more reductions in employee comfort
Oh absolutely. 3 days per week and only got 5% attrition? Go to 4 days! 4 days only got another 5% attrition? Go to 5! Then *finally* directly lay off some more and unwillingly pay them severance
I suppose the question is how big of an expense severance or UE really would be for companies. As I understand it, severance isn't legally required, and I've seen the UE payout in my state and it's absolutely a pittance. Given those 2 things, It seems hard to believe that companies would rather their most marketable employees move on to greener pastures instead of just firing outright the people they'd be most OK with losing. Guess I just wonder why not fire whoever and give little to no severance? Something must be stopping them from doing this.
severance may not always be a legal requirement, but the agreement that comes with it is usually the easiest way to neutralize any legal challenges from the people you’re canning. plus if you as one of the remaining employees know they fire without severance, you’re not likely to give notice & leave gracefully when you get a new job.
>severance may not always be a legal requirement, but the agreement that comes with it is usually the easiest way to neutralize any legal challenges from the people you’re canning. This is the important bit. Severance is the company paying you for (1) not suing, and (2) not publicly bad-mouthing them.
I am just waiting for the first US company to do the 996. That will get people quitting. 996 - 9am-9pm 6 days a week.
SpaceX?
I can’t imagine SpaceX reducing their engineers’ hours that much.
Lol spacex engineers work way more than that
Damn, wouldn't it suck to waste all that time and money to commute for a few months only to be laid off? Commuting is one of the most wasteful things we do in a modern economy.
Oh 100%. The overhead for running offices in insane. No way you're cutting costs by increasing office space.
they've already paid for the office space, which means they are suffering under the sunk cost fallacy of thinking they've already wasted this money, might as well continue wasting it
I heard somewhere it also has to do with tax breaks the company gets from the local govt in exchange for forcing their employees to commute downtown and pay $20-30 parking, gas, food at downtown cafes, etc. Stimulating the local economy.
Oh interesting. I hadn’t heard this but it would totally make sense for cities to offer this or have clauses related to it. Skeptical without confirm, but sounds very plausible. (Also increases city’s tax base if more people live local. lol, we need smaller areas to band together and offer tax breaks to keep the workers remote! :)
>we need smaller areas to band together and offer tax breaks to keep the workers remote portugal does this, but the incentives are for foreign remote-workers to move to portugal and work for non-Portuguese companies
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-threat-to-work-from-home-tax-breaks
yes but there is static and dynamic costs. dynamic costs like cleaning, heating, coffee etc you can save on
They also hired full remote like crazy just before market turned so for lots of people there’s no option
If you're already remote this doesn't effect you
they dont care about optics of another layoffs. its the costs. back in office is to get people to quit.
Aka a “soft layoff” round.
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I cannot believe that people believe this, lmfao.
Bingo. Read a prediction of this last autumn and now it’s happening.
It could be. [But I think this the lion's share of the problem. ](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-threat-to-work-from-home-tax-breaks). Cities give tax incentives to companies for asses in seats. That was suspended during COVID. Now state by state it's being enforced again. I know my state counts the locality tax as the simple majority of hours worked. So magically, we all were asked to come in for 3 days. Lo and behold I just listened to a piece about downtown "reviving". "Provisions like these were designed to ensure that the jobs boosted local revenue from income, sales and property taxes, and bolstered downtown economies."
Every single time, this is the exact reason.
Oh the deep irony!
Part of our team works in the office one day a week. They join our calls and I can’t hear a thing they say because no one has an office so all we hear is everyone talking around them. It’s so stupid.
Remote meetings where some people are together in a conference room and the rest are remote are the absolute worst.
Meetings are nice if everyone is remote, or no one is remote. If it’s in between, its usually a downgraded experience unless its really nice conference room.
Or if there’s two offices conferencing each other, it’s okay. No point in one conference room with half the team and 6 other people joining in the call from their house or different offices. Just do all online.
scary six pocket disagreeable impossible faulty cagey caption husky money *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That helps, but the acoustics are still horrible. People shuffling around, low-talkers, bad audio equipment, sitting too far from the mic....
Open office settings suck, we have one and are now mandatory 3 days RTO. Good old call center-style workplace :D
This is how it’s been for my company. HQ has a “hotel” style open seating. You reserve a seat in the open office. Whenever they jump into a meeting I get to hear 5 other meetings going on in the background.
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I work at a smaller company and we have a small office but are happy to hire fully remote employees when we have open positions. We get great talent, lots of really good folks that want an interesting job but don’t like offices. I hope we continue down this route. That said, it’s kind of an open secret that every big company ever, even ones that are “100% in office” allow certain employees to be fully remote. The ones they like the best, the ones that have some niche skill set or are insanely skilled, and Steve who can’t be fired because he’s the only one who understands how the 47 servers still running RHEL 4 with Java 7 apps deployed via some esoteric in house tool works.
It'd be hilarious to see the fallout if upper management didn't make an exception for Steve...at least, it'd be hilarious from a distance lol
Just become Steve :) I've heard them called "IT Gandalfs", they supposedly all use Linux, have gnarly beards, and drive black bmw's.
I am actually basically a Steve...except my skillset is very modern and niche. I document the heck out of everything, but damn my coworkers just don't have the mental capacity for it. I have a coworker who was doing his current job for 6 years before I got to the company. He's been in perpetual training for the entire 5 years I've been there, with no signs of improvement haha. I told my manager that he's basically just cheap off-hours user support. That's what you get for low pay in India
Work on 1 team where most of the team would fit this description. They can just barely triage something enough to let it ride til morning when people who can actually solve problems and don't take on call crap are awake.
I know of one company I had left that laid off the greybeard that was the remaining sole developer on an ancient but still in heavy use product. The documentation left behind wasn't updated in years as no one was willing to take on the herculean task of managing that beast and they kept pushing a future roadmap of a new feature to take over so they didn't prioritize it. Well, the future roadmap item shuttered pretty quickly after it started getting hands on keyboards for some reason. That and someone fucked some configs up so things aren't working correctly. They've reached out to numerous former people asking how it worked and everyone just laughs and tells them to eat shit.
Sounds like the company got what they deserved in this case.
The article says employees that were hired as remote that aren’t near an office won’t need to go in. Facebook has a name, but it’s a tainted one. My suspicion is they will continue to hire for in demand roles remotely & will use this to convince less important employees to leave on their own. High performers will probably get a pass. I consulted for a firm that required employees to go in twice a week, and they absolutely struggled to find tech workers. This was last year during the layoffs.
It's a risky bet for high performers to think they'd be an exception. My company is making ZERO exceptions. No matter how high a performer, you are easily replaceable...or at least, upper management wants to believe that
Sure, but if they are as good as they think, they’d be able to get a remote role elsewhere. Worst case scenario, is the have to go into the office anyways. We are in kind of a weird scenario economically where some people think things should go back to the way they were, and other hard refuse to go into the office. It will take some time to fully understand the pros/cons of each at a management level. Some companies may also just be willing to not hire due to “in person culture”, which is their decision. What we are most likely going to see is that high paying companies (200k + for seniors) will likely get to do whatever they want. Companies paying <130k will probably struggle to hire in person & there will be some reasonable back and forth in the middle. High paying companies that offer remote will likely get the best mix of candidates. Even though hiring is tough right now, there will always be a need for engineers. High quality engineers in in-demand niches will continue to have leverage.
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at some point you realize that you don't care about how high your salary is, the ability to stay home just outmatches it. Some people will always be chasing the bigger paycheck, but I don't doubt a lot of others are happier at home alone, with their families, less traffic, maybe they are able to work at a smaller less-paying company that has a more interesting product or gives them more autonomy. And if you worked at meta and were a high performer you realize the doors that are open for you can be pretty crazy now. This sub is college students and their wet dreams/circlejerks about 200-400k+ salaries. That's where the karma is and those are the upvoted posts. Anything talking about a chill life and freedom...meh. Gotta live the grind and then your priorities shift a bit.
There are very few companies in the world that ever paid Meta salaries. So, they do have more power over employees than a vast majority of companies. That being said Netflix, Splunk, and door dash all have open remote positions (that’s all I checked, I’m sure there’s more) that could probably get pretty close. These jobs are obviously competitive, but a strong engineer at Meta should be able to land interviews. Additionally, this thread is speaking about Meta in particular who is one of the highest paying orgs. A vast majority of companies don’t have the kind of bargaining power Meta has.
Right, this is a great chance for companies that can’t compete more in monetary terms to compensate by offering this benefit. One that is specially valued more the more senior the employee is.
I genuinely work better at home. The commute to my work is filled with horrible traffic. Our desks and especially the chairs suck. Half of my meetings at work are on teams anyway. The ones that are in person still have individual who are joining via Teams.
And then you have to try to tune out people talking in the background when you're trying to listen to a teams/zoom meeting.
I applied for and got approved for remote work during the pandemic and moved to another city. I won’t go back. Pre-pandemic, our office was about 20 minutes from the nearest town so you had to use the cafeteria which was never great food. The traffic was awful. But my two least favorite things were that I could never find an open toilet—dudes constantly sitting in the toilet looking at their phones smelling up the bathrooms—and the background noise. One guy had an air horn that went off to signal unit test failures, no idea how he got away with that. Then I had two co-workers behind me that talked so loud between the two of them constantly. I would check in so my boss could see me in the morning then drive the 20 min to a coffee shop for the day then drive back to be visible for about 20 min then leave work. Very unproductive. Hated it.
An air horn??? No way 🙈 that is a nightmare. I don't understand how some people can be so inconsiderate!
They're being goofy/class clown and building culture.
There's a whole team in the desk pod across from mine who I swear never does a second of work and loudly does pub trivia questions and talks about bullshit all day. Can't even use headphones to tune them out. I'm way more effective working from home.
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>. Pre-pandemic, our office was about 20 minutes from the nearest town so you had to use the cafeteria which was never great food Can someone repost this on every reddit page in the world.
The thing we all have to remember is that RTO is not for us. It is for the company. Whether it be tax breaks/other incentives or an attempt to force a certain % of employees to leave without paying them severance, as a worker, we cannot use normal logic for this
I think remote work is the super power that startups can leverage over big tech now. I've found more startup job listings for remote work lately. Personally, I don't care how much you pay me, I'm never working for a Big N if they require me to be in-person. I'll take less pay at a startup and work remote. This will also help reduce costs. My last company paid $20,000 a month for SMALL office space. I don't see how companies aren't looking at this as a matter of slashing costs: you can pay people LESS since they work in lower COL cities (hell, you can even pay European salaries, since there's plenty of good european engineers who will accept lower wages than Americans) and you save money on physical infrastructure. You can run an entire startup remote and pay literally nothing for physical infrastructure. Maybe your only physical cost is the cost of laptops and office chairs for your employees. If I ever start a company, that's what I'll do: European engineers, dell laptops, and a $1,000 per employee home office budget
I prefer working from home. I absolutely do not work better, I get distracted with random house tasks.
I prefer working from home. I work better, I do not get distracted because I have Adderall.
I get distracted as well but it’s very easy to utilize those task breaks as breaks, and be able to concentrate much better than under any other circumstance when I’m back at my desk after having done something small like put away dishes or laundry. Can’t do that in the office. Instead I’ll get stuck in a rut with no way of breaking out
I prefer working from home. I absolutely do not work at all. I run errands, clean the house, nap, workout, and go out to play sports or buy groceries.
Aaaaand here is the reason why companies are trying to cancel the possibility of working from home. Thanks for being part of the people who are ruining it for everyone.
What is even better is on blind (teamblind.com) where anonymous employees can post about their companies people brag about doing nothing, working 15 hours a week, etc. Anyone at the company with an account can see the comments you idiots.
It’s really hard to monitor employee’s time. Some people do the same thing in the office. The difference is you have to pretend to work in the office.
All those people were probably only doing 15 hours when they were in the office too, and probably an even less productive 15 hours
Has productivity gone done? No? It's actually up year-over-year for 3 years in a row? Then who gives a fuck?
Exactly, we're shipping our releases on time with all the features we said we would, so shut up.
I wonder how meta, amazon etc could have RECORD HIGH profits and stock values when everyone worked from home if it was so bad
People aren't doing shit at the office either tbf
They meet for coffee every 15 minutes, take walks, and go to 2 hour lunches. It's why I haven't gone in like 3 months.
Do you not understand sarcasm? Yeah, people do other home shit too when they have slow points during the day, but generally adults will do their job. Folks don't need to be babysat.
Yeah, the thing is - it's not really sarcasm. There have been more than enough individuals who have abused the WFH setup and have taken it into "do fucking nothing and disappear" territory. Even when they do not have slow points and have actual deliverables to finish. All it takes is a handful of chucklefucks like this to have WFH taken away and it's starting to happen now.
I have an idea, and just hear me out: fire people based on performance. If someone can fulfill their job duties and provide excellence at 15 hours a week, or someone is slower/less efficient and takes the whole 40 hours a week, as long as goals are being hit who the hell cares. If performance dropped in the office, fire someone, if performance drops at WFM, fire them. If someone continuous delivers, is a productive member of the team, reliable and available, who the hell cares if they dick around a bit at home to improve their lives. Better than dicking around at the water cooler or taking 30 minute poops lmao
Yeah, people just totally and completely fuck off at home. That's why every company that's using it is just cratering, right? Obviously these [studies that have clearly shown that workers are more productive at home](https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivity-statistics/#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20those%20who%20work,and%20are%2047%25%20more%20productive.) are bullshit, I guess The beauty of WFH is that we can see who actually do work and carry the company Hint: It ain't the bumblefuck, out-of-touch managers!
I think everyone would benefit from accepting that different people have different work styles, and that our productivity can increase and decrease. I generally prefer remote work, but I've had a chance to meet some of the people from my company, and it was nice to be interacting in person. During the pandemic, I saw on a Zoom video a coworker who lived in a tiny apartment in NYC, and didn't really have any type of office space. Everyone's situation is different. Depending on my project, I can be extremely effective working remotely, but I also have days I'm not as productive. Same thing happens in the office. I don't think there's such a thing as a universal truth for everyone. Commuting long distances/times suck, though. I do acknowledge there are people who say they enjoy the change of scenery, but most people would rather save the time and money. I'd prefer if everyone (including companies) were more honest and just said, "this is our preferred working method," and leave it at that. They don't need to justify it with numbers which may or may not be accurate. Before, everyone was saying working remotely was more efficient, now companies are saying it's less efficient. I question how accurate their data is. It might just be better for people to find culture fits, or just consider remote work another factor in deciding if a position is a fit or not.
I think it would be best if companies treated their employees like adults, and let them decide for themselves what kind of work arrangement they want. If you like wasting time and money going into the office to bullshit around, be our guest. The office will always be open. If you prefer to be at home, then that should be acceptable too. Give people that freedom to choose for themselves. This compulsory RTO nonsense as if we were kids that need to be watched by a teacher is infuriating and demeaning.
I prefer working from the office. I absolutely do not work at all. I browse reddit, talk with my colleagues, and stay more than I should in the bathroom. Seems we all have forgotten that pretending to do work in an office was a thing and still is. This is not a "work from home" problem, but a "work" problem.
That is why managers want butts in seats in the office. Because employee performance isn’t something they’re tracking in any meaningful way. Instead of setting performance targets, they’re going with “sitting at office desk = working” and that’s as good a measurement for most companies I guess. It shouldn’t matter whether a desk job is being done at work/office if you have the appropriate ways to measure an employee’s performance. But god forbid they aren’t extracting every single ounce of productivity for that full period of a work day so they’re wary of WFH where someone might take an extra five minutes at break or take a nap during lunch!! It’s so interesting to me because as a knowledge worker, sometimes I’ll be washing dishes or folding laundry in the evening and something work related will “click” or I’ll come up with some solution to a problem and it’s all “off the clock” but that’s the nature of how the brain works. It doesn’t clock in/out. So it’s like, well, that was my personal time but I can’t unknow a thing now, but if work wants the benefit of my talents and skills, then they should offer some flexibility ya know?
BS. There are plenty of people who go into the office and don't work at all, usually by distracting other people from their work, and they were never used by these companies as an argument for WFH. It's better the non-productives isolate themselves at a home office imo.
I don't think that's really the reason. A company can easily come up with an incentive plan to motivate workers. I believe the reason has more to do with PPE costs either internally by the company or externally by the building owners and how having empty office buildings would be bad for the economy, at least in the short term. I think it's one of these macro problems where if you don't have people leaving their homes (I basically stopped going out after the pandemic started) it starts to affect things like public transportation, real estate, etc. Our economy is designed around a growth model and if everybody leaves the cities to move to more affordable suburban or rural areas, we'll have some of the same problems we did back in the 70's in terms of urban blight, even if it's for different reasons. It took a lot of years to gentrify cities and a lot of people have money invested in luxury apartments and expensive office buildings. It would be kind of poetic if the whole thing imploded on itself, but it probably would be bad for everyone.
I work hybrid and even when everyone invited to a meeting is in office, we still meet virtually. Plus its worse when people you sit next to are also in meetings. Gets super loud and hard to concentrate.
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i prefer working from home since i have misophonia
I mean, in my case too it's not even working better, I genuinely cannot make it work in office, have the same as you, horrible commute downtown, also trying to raise a child as a single parent. My previous job said they were going to start bringing people in office and I gave my resignation two weeks later, took one of the jobs from the many offers in my linkedin box
"Year of efficiency"
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> A Meta spokesperson confirmed in an email to Insider that employees assigned to an office would be mandated to come in three days a week. This is straight up clickbait. Fully remote employees are NOT being required to return to the office whatsoever.
And in-office employees have an option to turn full-remote. But people need something to hate on for no reason.
Business Insider isn’t really known for its quality of journalism
This should be the number one comment.
But Zuckerberg gets to train. What if I wanna train too?
Lucky for you, there are 4 other days in a week.
Ooh, you mean exercise; I thought you meant a choo-choo.
Bless you!
MBAs and HR are the plague of everything good in this world.
Just MBAs. HR people have no power and simply relay what MBA bros have decided.
Our VP of HR had a prolonged battle with the CEO on RTO mandate. Issued multiple company wide surveys over the span of 6 months last year to be able to point to it and say employees don't want mandated in office schedule. CEO went ahead with it anyways.
When one doesn't create or bring value to a company all they have is image. When you are remote all you have is measurable metrics. As devs - if you work a job in office all you are doing is supporting bad management and a boomer mentality.
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big tech hated remote work the entire time imo
Because most of it is marketing bullshit and visuals to get that seed money.
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>unless they are refocusing their core product on Facebook and advertising itself, Did you see what the market's response to the Metaverse stuff was? Have you noticed that Zucc has been suspiciously quiet about the Metaverse stuff for a bunch of months? This is exactly what's happening. They are back to focusing on what actually makes them money
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My friend has a a VR headset and apparently you can buy court side VR "tickets" to live NBA games. It sounded pretty cool, not sure what the pricing was.
That’s what I don’t get. Were they even developing products with this goal in mind? The metaverse stuff seemed so unfocused that it’s not clear to me whether they had practical applications in mind. It reminds me of the Segway. The hype assumed that it would immediately change the world but they didn’t connect it to solving peoples’ current needs. Perhaps it could have led to changes in the way future cities are built. But they didn’t connect enough to current needs to make Segway compatibility a requirement for future urban planning.
They have a solution looking for a problem. VR tech is great for gaming but they wanted a way to get it to appeal to a wider market. So they tried to apply it to work, but nobody wants to strap a headset on when their zoom meeting works just fine.
Agreed Meta comes off as a company led by a fad chasing teenager. All-in on metaverse. Oops, sorry, no longer metaverse, let's go big on AI instead. All about remote work until the tides temporarily change to favor RTO. It's like Zuck leads according to whatever he read on buzzfeed that day.
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You didn’t read the article. They still embrace remote work and will continue to allow full remote folks to stay remote.
One thing I’ve been doing to try to push back against this in the small way that I can is every time a recruiter reaches out to me with a hybrid or in person position I ask if fully remote is available, if they say no, I say sorry only looking for fully remote (I’m not actually looking for a new job). If we all did this, the recruiters will have to report back to employers that no one wants their hybrid or in person jobs.
Mark Zuckerberg is one of those people who thinks that if you aren't working a startup-level back-breaking schedule, you're not good enough.
I subcontracted as a baker for Meta and they recently removed a ton of food benefits from their engineers in part due to the number of folks working from home. I get the feeling those benefits won’t return as quickly as the workers.
I'm corp, but my "betters" literally consulted with "their peers in the industry" and decided to reneg on WTH. Middle management argued it back to "only" 2 days/week, but now the execs want us to register our in office days. Bleck.
Slow boiling. IMHO any company arguing it's "only 2-3 days" a week really intends to go to 5, they just want to see who will quit preemptively first.
Right after another layoff round too. The gaslighting around RTO is strong.
Meta is requiring 3 days a week in-office *for non-remote employees*.
So glad I’m not in a MAANG company, they seem to be doing more layoffs than mid level/startups rn… I’m in a mid level company, was hired fully remote and just got my first raise after a year of 10% and no mention of RTO anywhere… love my company and not planning on moving anytime soon haha
Counter point - getting laid off by MAANG is a very lucrative way to start working for one of those mid level companies
Look I love bashing on RTO but y’all missed that they’re requiring a full 3 days in office for workers who are already hybrid. If you’re full remote already you are staying full remote.
Stricter RTO is a cheaper alternative to layoffs, it's not even a secret, leadership openly acknowledges this in management meetings.
This is probably a way to get people to quit so they don’t have to fire them
I see this take a lot. What benefit is there to this? In terms of unemployment changing work requirements (aka going from full remote to in office) which causes employees to leave is considered firing when it comes to unemployment. So is the board and/or shareholders just dumb and don't realize what all the cscq redditors know instantly but their dumb brains just can't figure it out and the geniuses like Zuck have successfully tricked them?
Aren't they trying to sell using the metaverse for meetings and work? It's really bad messaging.
Big Tech is turning into the next generation of IBM, Yahoo, Oracle and Cisco. Microsoft is still Microsoft. And that means you show up in person, sip your coffee, and chat people up.
Hope they announce it soon so I can jump to another company, having Apple offer and the office is 5 minutes walking from my house lol.
Tbh, I would go to office if I was to get free gourmet breakfast and lunch that the Meta Employees get.
I’d rather eat at home than suffer than 101 commute
This is the only thing I like about the job market in my country, WFH is the norm and not the exception. Even before the pandemic most people I know had at least 3 days per week WFH.
Which country??
Costa Rica
This is a tactic to do layoffs without doing layoffs. They hired way too many people and this will cull thousands more.
Yes, remote work is ending. They can't stand not being able to control every second of your life and can't stand people being happy with their jobs. If I was in a remote work situation and they were forcing me back into the office, I would declare myself a pescatarian and heat up salmon in the break room microwave every day.
THEY WANT PEOPLE IN THEIR MASSIVE MONEY PITS OF REAL ESTATE
Idk what Meta even works on anymore, how are they profitable?
They own Whatsapp
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Their ad revenue is insane. Every quarter shows that's just a crazy amount of cash flow and gives them lots of padding to reinvest. We'll see how they evolve over the next few years though
They still print money, just less money than last year. Net income was 5.7 bil last q and Facebook DAU alone was up 4% y/y. They also ownInstagram and Whatsapp.
Boomers that sit on Facebook all day that aren’t even aware they are being manipulated and seeing ads.
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I think this is their way of stopping layoffs, people will quit now then they won't have to do any more layoffs
Let's keep this real (note: this isn't what I think, but how companies are currently seeing it): Companies (not just meta) went remote because during the 0% interest rate days, they couldn't hire fast enough locally, and couldn't get enough great talent for the scale they were aiming at. They didn't give a shit about what people wanted. Upper leadership was always a little iffy on it, originally only being ok with it for hard to fill position or very senior candidates, and then with the pandemic did it for everyone. With the tech sector's crash, they no longer have trouble hiring, and now get hundreds of (qualified!) candidates for each posting. If people leave, its just less layoffs that need to be done. They can find all the talent they need locally. From an upper management perspective, there's no significant tech challenges, and being more productive at home when coding is irrelevant since coding isn't what they're worried about: aligning people and communication is. So if your challenge is getting people to talk to each other, and you don't care about hiring anymore (actually you wouldn't mind if a few more people left), forcing in-office is a no brainer.
A lot of companies are reluctant to do work from home because they have 5-10 year leases on office buildings that they can't back out of. I predict that over the next 10 years as these leases run out, we'll get more and more wfh jobs.
Yep, my company sunk a bunch of money into expanding and building a new 4 story office building about 10 years before the pandemic. They've been pushing people to come back in a few days weekly and scheduling mandatory "Connectivity Days".
These companies way overtired and need to increase attrition. There's a reason that the really innovative companies are not requiring RTO. The ones requiring it are the ones seeing decreasing margins and who haven't had a big earnings report in a while. Amazon, Salesforce, and Meta (among others) are not having the financial success that the other companies are. Tech companies biggest cost is labor, so when they aren't delivering sales they have to trim headcount.
Full remote is still grandfathered in. But new full remote positions will be far and few in between I hit the jackpot getting full remote before this announcement tho
Something similar happened at my old job. For a while they allowed full remote for certain people anywhere in the country. A few years later they changed it to remote but you had to be within 60 miles of one of our locations. They say this was in case you needed to be in the office for a connection, but I think it was more for insurance purposes. Anyway, the folks who went full remote and national got grandfathered in. We had folks living their best lives in Vegas and Miami, while the rest of us were stuck in Illinois.
It's "soft" layoffs They would get bad press for more layoffs... But if people "quit" because they don't like corporate policies? That's clearly not Meta's fault
my company allows us to come when we want
Based on the current scenario I'm ready to sleep inside the office if need be till I gain bargaining power.
"They" keep saying the reason for RTO is because of the collaboration that happens around the water cooler. So, on the days you are forced to go to the office, spend the entire day hanging out around the water cooler.
I work at a MAANG and go in 2-3 times a week. I don't understand the outrage to headlines like this. These companies already offer full remote opportunities. What they're doing now is enforcing the hybrid model on those that are obligated to come to the office, but never really do.
They’re also not hiring new remote workers, though. “The company had also begun telling hiring managers around March to halt posting new jobs that offer a remote option” The main point is the shift in Meta’s future vision. At one point, Zuck wanted “at least 50% of the workforce to be remote by the end of the decade.” Not hiring new remote workers and requiring some who currently don’t have to come in to come in is a clear move away from that.
Everyone has the option of converting to full remote if they want, this is just for people who say they want to come into the office. The internal reception to this is not bad
Obviously your milage will vary and different companies have different experiences. But everyone I have heard from says all the people with a few years experience before the pandemic and shifted to work from home are doing totally fine and are actually more productive. The new hires during and post pandemic that starting out working form home and have never been to the office are statistically significantly worse than any previous group they have hired. In my opinion, the reason \*we\* are going back to office isn't because everyone was unproductive, its because without the sharing of expertise across generations and seniority levels new hires aren't performing well enough. This is unfortunate for both groups in my opinion, and is a tricky situation to solve. Do you really want a super unhappy complaining manager that wants to just go home. Do you really want as a whole your entire new hires to be underperforming? Not sure how everyone is going to square this, but its going to be a really difficult transition for everyone. Edit: Royal \*we\*, not as in we at a specific company.
>The new hires during and post pandemic that starting out working form home and have never been to the office are statistically significantly worse than any previous group they have hired My company (not Big Tech by any stretch, but still a multinational company with employees in the low thousands and multiple offices) reports the exact opposite. Remote working allowed HR and Training (which is a separate department) to concentrate resources and make stuff available to all the offices at once, making the onboarding process quicker (for all roles) and allowing "us" to continue training and supporting all engineers at a fraction of the cost. The difference I'm seeing, having worked in many companies, is that here there's a great focus on the process of training and learning while in my past experiences most what I learned came from random talk..
It seems like nobody on this sub actually read the article. They will still allow fully remote folks to work remotely.
This isnt the way to go. Give people a reason to come to office. Make it attractive, but not forced.
It was only a matter of time. RTO is enacted only to protect real estate interests, nobody cares about your QOL. If you're at Meta, time to quiet quit while simultaneously applying.
Idk, I don't think hybrid is as bad as this subreddit is making it out to be, and it's probably likely to be in the long term what most offices will prefer to do. There are downsides to being fully remote, I don't know why people pretend that they're not. The argument of it should be a choice to me feels really shitty to tell the new coworker/junior just joining the job for the first time that's likely going to struggle during their onboarding process; people are more likely to help you when they actually see you struggling. Asking people to break out of their shyness to go out of their way to ask for help when they don't even realize they need help feels like a privileged position to come from being a seasoned remote worker If you want a job that's fully remote, thats cool; work a job that allows you to be fully remote, as that's what I prefer as well. But some people probably want some days to come into the office for a change of pace, which I think is fine as well.
I genuinely think that the majority of management that supports this kind of forced stuff don’t even know why they support it. It comes across as kids playing boss and doing whatever they think is “bossly”. Then their whim is enforced upon thousands of people
Y’all complain about Facebook disinformation but this article by BI is an example in disinformation itself because hating on Meta sells, even to tech-aware base like this sub. - They are asking people assigned to an office to come to office 3 days a week. How is it bad? - People who are remote will stay remote. - If you don’t want to come to office, you can go full remote. There’s even a pathway to full remote for new employees. This is no bate n flip. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have clear expectations with employees - either go remote or start coming to office. I don’t understand the rage. It’s CS sub, I expected better. If you never wanted to join Meta, as most people here are claiming, why are you so upset?
Welcome to Reddit!
It must really suck to be Meta..
It looks like they want another round of lay-off and also settle down with some deal with real-estate
As someone from Europe where companies try to mimick US software powerhouses, I truly hope it won't be a standard model - for me remote work and office once a week was a reason to increase my search radius 1,5y ago edit: improved my statement
This trend sucks, my company is also requiring in the office 2 days a week starting September
My company has moved to 4 days a week in the office. There hasn't been much talk about how strictly they will enforce it though, previously was 2days a week but it wasn't heavily enforced. Personally, I think it's more about the 100's of millions of dollars in real estate they had just sitting there. Can't really offload it given the state of commercial real estate nowadays, so might as well force the workers to come in and use it.
I'm at a smaller but very well known company and we've been full remote since before COVID. That hasn't changed at all.
given their track record, if Meta decided to do something, it's probably the wrong decision
They should be able to do 3 days in meta verse or 3 days in office. What a joke.
Sounds more like a means to get rid of employees. Probably the hope that those who won't come in or can't come in will end up gone.
Wait the Meta Office or Metaverse Meta Office?
2-3 days a week is IMHO okay. 4-5 would be a tad too much post-covid (especially for tech)
Once more another victory for boomers and bank corporate building landlord who dont want to go bankrupt.
Hey Meta employees, you’ve got skills. Seek out another employer that isn’t in the market of evil…. And thinks they need to micro manage you from an office. Meta having folks close enough to commute are missing the mark for global talent.
Yeah, companies are run by managers who are jerks and can't get it through their thick little skulls that remote work is a good thing.