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.
Usually I don't care about race and sex at work and I am not sad that DEI is gone. Creates room for issues much more relevant to work. Like working hours, salaries, holidays, health insurance and general work benefits. Stuff that matters.
All your "more important" issues are predicated on the idea that you can get a job. For those who are unfairly discriminated against, they don't even get to your point. Who cares about employer healthcare when you have no employer?
The classic approach to treat everyone equally is still better, even if there is some prejudice left. And that doesn't preclude any program that helps those in need. And here the same thing is true: Race and sex are irrelevant.
Some proponents of DEI had their own problems with prejudice to solve in my experience. So perhaps the onus should be that everyone works on their own personal prejudices for now.
Some things will be unfair, but introducing more unfairness doesn't solve any problems. And here DEI simply failed in its approach. A bad job market doesn't mean we can discriminate those that might have been more lucky regardless of reasons. The task would be to fix the job market.
To propose two groups of minorities against some diffuse ethnic majority is simply childish, comes with multiple problems and it doesn't provide tangible benefits to anyone in the long run. I would argue it even entrenches prejudices and pits people against each other.
While the executive team performed sweeping layoffs to push up the stock price and increase their own compensation, they paid lip service to DEI as if engaged in a karmic balancing act and that was their cheat code.
And the company culture degraded as a result. Far more inter-group fighting, more politicking, more backstabbing, less cooperation.
I’m not there anymore, but I hear they are trying to revert things back, slowly. Basically every project since then has been a failure and they’ve been coasting on their original success.
Good people don’t need three letter acronyms to treat others fairly, and if someone is selling you new holier-than-thou rules, it’s worth asking what moral cost they no longer feel they need to pay.
Which has been playing out for years now.
And DEI took the ‘we don’t go racist/sexist/etc’ off the table, as the various groups were being blatantly racist, sexist, etc.
So now it is being used against those groups.
And at first, when the pie is growing, that doesn’t threaten entrenched groups as much, so it mostly can happen.
In a zero (or negative) sum game world (layoffs, hiring freezes), what do you think is going to happen?
People with power will use the same tools to protect themselves or even acquire more power, and those without power will be ground under the same gears.
I’ve seen it happen in every major society - from India to Chile to Europe to the US.
In the US it’s getting particularly out of control (in both directions) for a number of factors - and very high publicity - but it’s way more blatant almost everywhere else in fact.
> WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can [...] work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc
Probably "working fewer hours" and "moonlight for multiple companies" has negative effects on productivity that employers would like to avoid.
For example, is 80 hours of work a week more productive than 40? If you're working an assembly line, probably.
If you're a programmer, definitely not. You will write more bugs, make more mistakes, and churning out code doesn't mean much. Any monkey can write code, but writing maintainable code is hard, and reading that code and actually choosing to maintain it is harder.
And I don't mean productivity per hour. Lol. No, I mean absolute.
An employee working like a dog will get less work done than one just working normally, probably. Because most of the work is negative, so it doesn't add to the work done pile, it chips away at it.
Eventually, I would think, you reach a point where an employee is less productive than no employee at all. Seems impossible to be working 100 hours a week and be getting less than nothing done, but if you're actively making the product worse or creating debt, that's how I would classify that.
Do you really think your superstar programmers are well and truly doing intellectual work, the kind of work that produces business value, from the time they hit the coffee machine at 9AM to the time they grab their briefcase to go home at 5PM?
If you believe this, I think you might be interested in bringing the Bobs in to discuss making our T.P.S. reporting process more efficient. They have thoughts on coversheets.
And these days, for a lot of knowledge workers there's a pretty strong case that anything which isn't this "deep work" can probably be automated.
So yeah if I'm paying you a full time salary I want those four hours. Without necessarily rendering judgment on what a moonlighting clause should or shouldn't look like, if I'm not getting those four hours, I don't want you on my payroll.
Not really sure why I am even responding to this amazingly stupid line of discussion. I mean if you absolutely hate the idea of having a boss (I know I did) then there is a solution for that - start your own company! It's not as easy as being a badass on the Internet, sure, but you might have to look at both sides of the argument and you might even end up getting rid of that chip on your shoulder.
I don't think you got the point behind the comment. We do not have a good way to quantify effort, thus we ask for a fixed set of time in chairs, tickets closed, etc that's the best we can come up with.
You're not going to get deep work when you pack people like sardines into neat rows of desks, where pretty much at any time someone within one row away is going to be in a meeting - conducted of course over teleconferencing software. Or some people will talk (honestly, being in the office mostly translated to chit-chat for me).
The steel man is that in the office you get cross team pollination organically. Team lunches, talking about an idea with another team on how to do something better as in that moment the idea came up. This happens more often in person than remote.
Does it need 5 days a week in the office? Absolutely not. 1-2 is plenty.
Or doors.
25 years ago, Microsoft Redmond had a slogan: "Every dev a door".
In early 2000s, it began to be two devs per room. We all know what happened since. Open offices save facilities concrete money per seat. Productivity lost from lack of deep work is not a line item anyone knows how to track.
The "every dev a door" plus "pair programming" was shown by studies from groups like Pivotal Labs as being optimal for working code, but ... and a big but ...
Companies intentionally optimize for things other than working code. You get what you measure and they measure what's easy instead of measure what matters.
// See https://lethain.com/measuring-engineering-organizations/ but also https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/
But at the same time, I don't expect them to spend their 9-to-5 working for another company at the same time.
As a founder, who respects the 9-to-5 and supports WFH, if I'm paying for 8 hours of work, I want 8 hours of output. Not 4 hours of output, and then you working 4 hours for another job.
If multi-jobbing becomes a thing, then WFH becomes untenable because at least in the office you can be monitored.
I'm using "output" as quoted in context, it's such a nebulous measure unless you're specifically buying a product.
It’s not your fault.
Like everything it's a mix.
In seriousness, I do find the labor perspective sorely and quite conspicuously lacking in these discussions, both discussions about remote work and about DEI backlash.
I fired both the employees and the manager. This “remote employees don’t moonlight” is a union trope.
Not enough to move the needle. 25% would move the needle.
> with mentions that I could double it in one year
They didn't believe you, or didn't after a short time working there. So it didn't move the needle.
More so if they're experienced. Similar mentions of prospects are common in interviews, and rarely followed through. You eventually learn to be skeptical of them, while rolling with it, just in case.
Also, if you might be willing to pay double their requested salary, they start realising their value on the open market is much higher than they'd previously thought, or could be with a little presentation and experience.
On the other hand, if you'd put it in the contract that their salary will double after 1 year, subject to well-defined criteria and a history of actually doing it with existing employees, then they'd believe you, and that would move the needle a lot.
From your story I speculate you were right to fire them, but you never figured our how to get the best out of them. In recent years it's possible you were subject to employment fraud, as clarity of analysis can disappear if it's a different person doing the work than the person answering interview questions.
Progress that's entirely stalled or negative can happen for many other reasons than moonlighting, and many other reasons than not putting enough time.
The one thing that decreases my productivity, in some positions, is bad management. Of course, that was already the case when I was fully office-based.
Atlassian is a dumpster fire, they run shit engineering since about 3 years.
Give me the secret sauce to being productive with remote employees. Maybe some have found it, but apparently paying above the employee ask, offering to double the salary in case of success, sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them gives me the “evil employer” category on most forums.
Yeah, I know “Treat them even better!” is, again, the word of the union guy, but in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.
have you doubled anyone's salary? if not, it can come across as an empty promise you won't fulfill
>sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them
do they want and benefit from these things? or do they distract them from their productive work?
>in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.
not really, you were able to fire who you wanted to fire easily. it also seems that you didn't consider other factors for why the employee didn't work out. does your interview process poorly select for people who will do well in the role? are there other possible explanations for low productivity than the employee having a second job?
I don't 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.
If you care, it'll get done. If you don't, you'll find a way to slack off, even if you're at the office.
I 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 didn't work in a properly colocated team since 2017, and that was mostly by accident. The norm is zoom/teams calls, often taken from the desk (which is 3-4 in a row with rows densely packed) because there's never enough space for meeting rooms so it becomes norm to not give a fuck that nobody can concentrate because someone is talking loudly on a work meeting.
And the watercooler is either office politicking or discussing how much the place sucks
[1] If they get to call shit on workers with "quiet quitting" etc. they get the same back
That said, I share your fear that all such considerations are just a smokescreen. In a larger sense the entire issue of "productivity" is a smokescreen. We don't need "more productivity". What we need is for people to be happy, and potentially that may be achieved by reducing productivity in some ways.
that is irrelevant to company management - in so far as that happiness has negligible effect on productivity.
However, from anecdotal evidence i've gathered (only sample size of 5-7 or so), in office has been more productive, but they (with the exception of one, who lives 5 mins from their office) all dislike RTO and would've preferred WFH; but not enough to quit over it as it's not a 5 day mandate, but a 3-4 day mandate.
That's right, that's why a lot of company management needs to be smacked down and if necessary fined and jailed. That laser focus on productivity is a cancer on society.
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.
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
In general; perhaps a return to guilds? Apprentices? In an area of my city that has a lot of small craft workshops (and, yes, a few have anvils) there are 'work-live' units being built that have workshops on the ground floor and living accommodation above.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I put this in the same bucket as the horrifying "996" trend, or even consultancies that require 80-100% travel. If you want to broadcast that you have a toxic work culture, all I can do is applaud your honesty and look elsewhere for work.
That’s what my company does, and none of the engineers ever come in. My manager comes in when he has meetings, and I’ll go in sometimes, but I’m usually alone. None of the benefits of collocation with all the of downsides of an office.
I find that office days work a lot better. Everyone comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays or something.
I can understand that some people like the physical distinction between "work" and "home". My boss is like that, and he would actually go to the office during covid when no one else would be there. He lived alone in a comfortable apartment, so there wasn't even a question of loud kids / no space for a desk. It obviously never came up that we should also show up. He sometimes wants us to come in the office, all the at the same time, for some form of all-hands meetings, but he doesn't just drop them out of the blue: we plan these together, and they don't happen on a fixed, tight schedule.
The company has now moved to a "flex office" scheme. I was already not very happy having to go in, but you can imagine I now abhor it. Having to share desks with people who don't give a shit about office equipment, having to clean up the screens because they figure it's fine to stick their fingers on them and having to use shoddy peripherals... And it goes on and on, you've read it on every HN post on the subject.
Luckily for me, they don't really enforce this, and I can still spend most of my days WFH and still have a semi-dedicated desk.
But your post is the reason why many people are up in arms against this whole "the office is better". Apparently, it's only better if you force everybody back in. So it's not really about "choice", but about having one's preferences be the "right" ones.
The company I work for has a reservation system for desks.
More than not the desks are disgusting. I'm talking about some suspicious matter that might be food or nose bigger on the greasy keyboard. Keyboard and mouse are flimsy office staple crapware and we have to use Citrix even though we are within the company network.
For fuck sake either go back to the old days where a person had their own desk they can personalize or let me work from my place.
Yes, offices have downsides, but they also have benefits. To get the benefits the majority of a team needs to be in the same office. Having tried both, I prefer working in an office with coworkers around. The growing consensus seems to be that large companies agree with me. Are you saying you know more about employee productivity than Meta and Amazon among others?
If you’re unhappy and want to work remotely feel free to quit and go work in a remote company.
And on your comment about your office being disgusting, your coworkers being terrible, and your commute being awful: that’s a skill issue friend. My office is great, always clean and stocked with snacks; my coworkers are awesome, very thoughtful people and i consider some of them to be my friends and we hang out outside of work; my commute is a 15 minute bicycle ride that gets my day started with some exercise. I might change jobs to somewhere that has more office days though.
I’m sure you can also find a company with a great office culture. I wouldn’t want to work from your company’s office either. That’s why I specifically look out for that when job hunting.
Couldn't this equally apply to you? Feel free to quit and go work in a fully office present company?
Your commute is a 15 minute bicycle ride, you want to force everyone else back to the office because you have a nice easy commute and you personally prefer it. And you're glad that this is now happening across the industry, again, because you prefer it.
Yeah, that's completely selfish.
These are choices I made for myself. If you can’t make the same choices that’s fine, but don’t come in to every thread about RTO and start saying that I’m a lazy irresponsible disrespectful person because I prefer to work in an office.
I’m not saying every company needs to be like this, but that companies like this should be allowed to exist without you remote work zealots belittling everyone who works there. Go work somewhere else!
The company still needs to pay a full office (decreasing chances that money will be used for home office benefit or raises), people are still forced to live somewhat close to the office, not realizing the biggest benefit of remote work: living where you want, close to the people you care and freeing up money and time.
If working together really helps, it's enough that those who think that coordinate and agree on days to go to the office. If nobody agrees, than maybe the benefits are only perceived or subjective?
I will be honest, I believe that lots of people go to the office because their 9-5 (+ commute) job made it impossible for them to maintain and cultivate social relationships outside work, which means they see the office as their attempt to escape loneliness. I am not saying that's everyone, but that for many people is the case and that explains people non-stop interrupting, walking in on others, chatting etc., which is quite common in office environments.
That said, I think that remote work needs also a few key elements to succeed:
- a remote culture in the company (e.g., everyone understands flexibility in terms of working time, meetings are online-first, documentation and async work culture, etc.) - a good space to work at home. I can't imagine working on a stool and a laptop like some people were forced to do during covid. - discipline (e.g., not let work time bleed into personal time, blocking time etc.) - good social relationships with friends/family. It can be very alienating otherwise.
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 just explained my experience. Funny that you perceive that as an attack on yourself. What does that say about you?
Did you work in an office before covid? I’m sure your productivity wasn’t abysmal or you wouldn’t still be working in tech
Sure, I didn't do "nothing" while in the office, there was some productivity. I still manage to get stuff done when I go there. But the difference in productivity between when I'm home and when I'm in the office is abysmal.
I don't have to put up with my colleagues being on the phone all the time. I don't have to put up with a chair that gives me back pain, or with contorting myself to reduce the glare on my screens. I don't have to endure being squished in the metro for half an hour each way or get up at absurd hours to avoid that. I don't have to eat at random times or in front of my computer because the lunch corner is already full.
Could I "get used to that" all over again? I guess. People who need to take the local public transit "get used" to it being unreliable and a general PITA. Do they enjoy it? Would they be happier if they wouldn't have to put up with that? What do you think?
I think the general issue, as I alluded in an answer to another of your posts, is that there indeed are people with differing preferences. And we could have people do what they prefer. But problems arise when we each try to impose our approach to others. Want to go to the office because for some reason you prefer that? Enjoy! But then, don't turn around and say "yeah, but going at the office and being alone (presumably because the others hate going) is all downside without any upside, so everybody should come in".
I’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.
Network effects mean that the more people are in the office the better. On the other hand, if even a single team member is remote then the entire team must adapt to that. If half the team is remote then I might as well stay home too.
I don’t want to have an office to go into. If that was the issue I could just get a shared office to work from.
I want to work at a company where most of my direct coworkers come to the office regularly.
I should get to have that. Not every company needs to be a remote or a flex company. If you don’t like RTO you can quit. Likewise for me, I’m not too happy with my current office situation, so I’m looking for a new job.
But forcing people to come to the office when they hate it, is counter-productive.
A lot of people who prefer remote work have a superiority complex over their peers. They’re usually hard to work with and unreliable, and think that as long as they’re performing their individual tasks they’re allowed to be awful communicators.
The biggest benefit of an office is collocation. People need to be forced to come to an office or they won’t do it, and team efficiency will go down.
Even if you think you’re performing well, the entire team suffers for it. Miscommunication happens. People get blocked for longer. Juniors can’t get the mentoring they need.
If you disagree that’s fine, go work for a remote company. But clearly the tide is turning against you with more and more companies enforcing RTOs.
Hope you can find something that suits you!
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.
Hell, I had commit rights to a popular open source “AWS Solution” when I was there and it took so long to get something approved to be pushed into the mainline that I ended up forking it for individual customers (AWS ProServe) and then eventually getting most of it merged back in later.
Now that I’m not at AWS, even though I know the team there, I doubt I could get something approved to merge back in even though I was the third highest contributor to the project for awhile.
You want to actually compete for fast iteration? We'll happily take you on over at ardour.org ...
Yes, there are some FLOSS projects which may take a long time to approve PRs. Even in our case, that happens sometimes when someone proposes something we're not convinced by but also cannot reject immediately.
Meanwhile, it's not unusual for comments in our discourse server to lead to direct changes in the main branch within hours.
So while FLOSS may contain examples against distributed teams, it also contains very strong, and very numerous examples that argue in favor of it.
Hey, remote work isn't productive, lets go into an office and push all our code to github and deploy to Linux (both largely developed by distributed teams, thankfully without Zoom).
But you are right, organizational and productivity theater dominate at many companies.
"Couldnt find a proper space to conduct the meeting"
You mean phone coffins?
Now the real issue is: what on earth is a fart pod?
Anyway, my (quite literally mine as in I'm the MD) tiddly company still clings to the notion that remote working is a good thing, in general. Pre-pandemic I was a sceptic and post-pandemic: I'm happy that a lot more remote working happens.
There do need to be additional controls but not of the intrusive, automated variety. I deliberately ring people up and encourage using the dog and bone and frown on email for immediate requirements.
It is a fact of modern corporate life that people will use email as it was intended: a reliable store and forward communication mechanism. A side effect is that what should be sorted out now can be ... legitimately ... punted off into tomorrow.
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.
This is about the appearance of doing something, not actually doing something.
Is it so hard for them to say, FU, office time now because I like it, or because we want to force attrition, or we bought all this RE and by god we are going to use it?
I mean, if they give the honest non vibe reasons, it would be the same, but at least honest.
Wall Street doesn't care as long as the stock goes up.
Customers don't care as long as they get the product.
And employees can't do anything other than vote with their feet.
So what's the downside of being honest?
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.
What I don't understand is why we still pretend like this is a mystery.
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.
most are one, some are neither, and a small minority are both. i have works for more than 20 tech managers in 30+ years, have managed technologists (ops, app-dev, network, infra, etc.) multiple times, and have hired and fired tech managers. i can count the genuine tech leaders+managers i've met on one hand. fewer around than ever nowadays.
I agree that being management doesn't make one a leader. Anyone who has been in the industry for five, ten years knows that a leader may or may not have a management title.
However. It has been the fad for many, many years now for Management to call itself Leadership. [0] This makes it slightly ambiguous, but not at all incorrect to refer to the "management class" as the "leadership class".
[0] I guess their little, tiny, incredibly fragile egos got overly bruised by the years of derogatory commentary aimed at clueless managers, and they -because of their tiny, inadequate brains- decided that A Big Rebrand would change the nature of reality.
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”).
A lot of these decisions have very little quality data behind them.
I've worked at a cubicle farm before. Partitions were high enough to avoid being able to see people in a sitting position, but high enough that you can still stand up and ask your neighbor a question. The cubicles were spaceous, had ample desk space and didn't feel claustrophobic or "caged in" at all. If anything, it felt like I had my own little space that I was in control of.
The partitions had steel sheets in them to allow people to use magnets to hang up documents/whatever. My cubicle walls were covered in [documents and datasheets](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzIxZmIzYjEtZGMyZi00...). Some of my colleagues had extensively decorated their cubicles with photos and tchotchkes. Others had their entire desk space littered with PCBs and tools.
Managers got cubicles on the sides of the building with windows, theirs were larger and had higher partitions, with a window filling in that extra height.
The extra desk space was great. I worked as an embedded SWE and I often needed the space for tools and the devices I was working on. The few times I needed an oscilloscope, I could easily find room for it, no need to move my setup to a lab.
Cubicles get a bad rep. It's actually quite a nice way to work, if executed properly, that is.
That said, I did have noise issues before. But that was always the same colleague. She luckily only came in on Wednesdays. She totally lacked the concept of an indoor voice while on the telephone.
A proper execution of a cubicle office is actually quite decent.
But for a good workplace you also need to have good colleagues, including managers. That's universal, whether open plan or cubes.
And, of course, serendipitous collaboration rarely happens when everyone is sitting with noise cancelling headphones, focusing on hitting their ambitious individual goals for the quarter/half/year.
There is no sign of a return to 2019 levels of Bay Area or even US share of headcount.
Around 2023 I was working at a company that was, at the time, just threatening RTO, and when hiring we had to decide if it was worth it to hire someone who (might) report to a different office in a different time zone. Which was not an issue at all a month before, when the company was still committed to being fully remote. The hours talking about it were a waste of my life for what, in the end, didn't even matter because they laid off most of the team six months later.
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 worked at Meta nee Facebook from 2013-18, and back then there were no documents, and the only way to figure stuff out was either spelunk through the source code, or talk to people in person. So I was very surprised that they ever said they'd be doing remote, and entirely unsurprised that they are moving back towards the office.
That being said, there was no tracking of in office/remote days, it was just expected that you'd work from wherever worked best for you but (almost) everyone was based out of an office.
Obviously varies by culture. And while I've never worked for Meta, I've been at your Mountain View and New York campuses more times than I care to have been. Everything–including communal spaces–seems laid out for individual work. (This was true before the metamates nonsense, though that obviously accelerated it.)
Frankly, the ones that tend to play, goof off and shoot shit together. And it’s not necessarily companywide nor evenly distributed. But it’s something I value tremendously in work cultures, both because it’s productive and fun.
I 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.
How is your infrastructure so inadequate for... living?
For all other jobs, I had to commute to a business district I didn't live close to because business district and low price (when young) or great schools (when older) don't mix often.
Yeah, I know the median commute in these areas is low, but they are counting retail workers and teachers. I bet the median for tech workers is pretty high because of the reality of how they tend to be placed.
If leadership needs to manage folks out make them do the work and collect a paycheck while it happens.
Letting them fire you means at worst you end up with the same outcome, at best you call their bluff and get paid a few months more (or forever).
Avoid attending meetings involving people dialling in from a different office (that’s not in person collaboration, so it’s worthless work. Sorry, I don’t make the rules) and be present at the meeting (keeping the chair warm it’s all it counts after all) while browsing HN in the ones you really cannot get out of it.
So, as I'm sure you've seen in the news stories over the last few years, basically every large organization everywhere has enacted some sort of RTO mandate. I'm sure there are a few smaller startups kicking around who want to keep trying things the other way, but for the most part, the industry has spoken. We can keep complaining about it but short of another pandemic it's unlikely covid-style work is going to make a comeback IMO.
Comp has also gone through the floor thanks to inflation and stayed there. You get what you pay for I guess?
Is this “velocity” in the room with us right now?
I spoke with my manager about this. This wasn't true for our team, and it wasn't true for any other team in our (fairly sizable) division. I didn't give a shit about any other group, so I didn't ask.
If your employees are spending their days fucking around instead of working when they're working from their home office, I'm here to tell you that when they were in the corporate-leased office, they were browsing Reddit on their phone or off on yet another coffee break to "get the pulse of the office". Slackers and shirkers are gonna slack and shirk, no matter where they are.
The thing to do is to fire folks who aren't doing enough to justify their pay. That's something that hasn't ever changed.
I don't understand what you gain from trying to be super abrasive on a forum. Is it fun?
You might want to brush up on your anthropology a bit.
This seems like a self defeating argument.
Don’t act like that’s an apples to apples comparison
Why? What happened?
We need to make sure we have shoes on the shelves! Bob had a nightmare there are no more shoes left!
I Had a manager that would go and drink beers in his car durring breaks.
I had Coworkers that would leave the office to pick up their kids pre covid.
Lots of people are messing around
I had a similar argument with a previous manager I had. Careerist dude started on some bullshit management-speak on measuring workers by ass-to-seat-hours while he had no idea I had a management degree from one of the most respected business colleges in my country. Had to rebuke him with Business Management 101.
Of course, this definitely contributed for him pushing me out afterwards, as small minds can't handle being wrong, and he even had the gall of trying and pushing me an unethical assignment. I got out with a nice severance package, and from the grapevine (it's a small community down here after all!) I hear every quarter somebody quits from his team or moves to a different one.
So yeah, bad managers got to career.
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.
Are you?
If yes, cool. If no, well, seems like you have rationalized that not everyone will get WFH regardless on your feelings about it
If you do realize this, as you most definitely should since it is not rocket science in any way, your projections about short and long term value of institutional knowledge these folks take with them better be accurate.
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.
Your choice to leave makes it a certainty. A soft market mean uncertainty.
I recently took a union software job after I was laid off due to the CEO having a tummy ache one morning. Many of my new co-workers were explicitly interested in the company _because_ there was a union.
It's very imperfect but such is life. It's all new to me but here's what I've seen so far:
a) Employees have a voice. That doesn't mean that management is forced to do anything, but at least it's possible to be vocally opposed to eating a shit sandwich.
b) We are protected by a contract. If you are called into a police station, you ask for a lawyer for protection according to the law. If an employee finds themselves in an adverse meeting/situation with management, they can call in a steward to protect them according to the contract.
c) The union is us, the workers. We self-organize. It simply gives us a structural framework to work within. An entity for my employer to recognize. It's not ran by an authoritarian who waves a magic wand to make things happen.
That's it. There seems to be this weird idea that I can screw around for 40 hours a week and have the union protect my job. The union told us that we very much still have to do our jobs (duh).
---
To go on a little side tangent. Some countries, such as Finland or Norway, have no minimum wage because unions are (a) everywhere and (b) (allowed to be) powerful enough to protect workers. Honestly it's the best of both worlds. Less government intervention but at the same time workers hugely benefit from collectivization. They don't need to beg their politicians to raise wages - they do it themselves because they are given the power to do so. In the US, we instead rely on the lizards in DC to protect our wages because unions have been so stripped of power.
Of course, simultaneously, they treat us as completely fungible. Every engineer is like any other in their eyes.
Such a perfect contradiction should surely spark introspection in employees... you would think.
I'm just saying, if workers want control over their working conditions, they have to recognize the power they have. It's up to them if they decide to wield it. You don't have to, and that's fine! Enjoy your long Bay Area commute.
No, seriously, literally what does Apple or Google have over Boeing as a company to work at? Compensation? If money is all that matters to you, then there are several Web3/AI/etc startups offering absurd cash comp that you can go and throw yourself at.
literally what does Apple or Google have over Boeing as a company to work at
Better engineering culture.
Better benefits.
More time off.
Bosses with engineering chops.
More flexible schedules.
Less likely to get laid off.
Perks like free food/massages/events.
Equity so as the company grows your pay increases automatically.
Large bonuses.
Are you actually serious you'd rather work at Boeing?
Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days.
> Better engineering culture.
Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days.
> Bosses with engineering chops.
Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days.
The rest of your list is just "money" written over and over and as I've already said, if that's all you care about, that's your prerogative but let's not pretend that makes somewhere a "good place to work".
You're just that certain that the vast majority of engineers don't care about money, and aren't competing to get in there? And instead work at Boeing. Where you think the engineering culture is better...even though their software has a reputation of being awful.
You must know a lot more than everyone here. You should really enligthen us. All those terrible products that all those people are using from Apple and Google.
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.
Once you leave room for discrimination and bullying, everyone suffers because it makes company culture harder.
And it's not just about "quotas". That's an extreme-right talking point. Diversity done properly doesn't involve quotas. Those are just a way for companies that don't actually care about it to have an easy 'fix' to get their numbers to look ok but it's not actual diversity.
I'm part of a diversity team myself as a side role. In Europe luckily.
No, they do not. They just discriminate against groups you are cool with discriminating against. Jobs should be merit based, period. We're back to sane times thankfully, but it will take a long time to undo the rot caused by DEI.
At Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta, diversity programs were implemented as soft quotas. All this talk about "diversity done properly" is just so much noise when approximately all the largest companies aren't doing it that way.
We don't fix this with hiring targets. We hit the root cause with training for HR and management (and also some for all employees in the yearly mandatory training package). Recognising hidden bias, challenging people to bconsider their reactions.
And then measure the performance with stats, but not just force them. That's lazy and only fixes the problem on paper. Window dressing. Diversity is more than the hiring process anyway, a huge part is discrimination on the work floor. Often not by managers but co-workers, so we give management skills to deal with that.
Maybe in US big tech this is common but those are all pretty immoral companies anyway. See how quickly they pivoted to sucking up to Trump. The world is much bigger than the US and big tech.
Do you apply this to everything? Like say, a sports team?
>The world is much bigger than the US and big tech.
Anything impressive to show for it? Because it really seems like all this focus on diversity is your downfall not your strength.
No, at work where we have tens of thousands of people.
Sport is a voluntary thing, people just join it when they want (I guess, I'm not into sports, not watching nor playing).
> Anything impressive to show for it? Because it really seems like all this focus on diversity is your downfall not your strength.
Yes we have great quality of life. It's not all about money.
In fact I asked to move to a country where the wage levels are much lower, to have a better quality of life. Here around the Mediterranean the weather is better, people enjoy life more and take it slower. There's much more things to do in my free time that I enjoy. When I'm back in Holland I hate it, people are so materialistic. Always talking about their new car, how big their TV is lol. I don't even own any car or motor and my TV is tiny but I'm much happier here.
Also diversity is just a thing we do, we're not all about that. I am because I voluntarily spend part of my work time on it (LGBTIQ in particular). For most people in the company it's a message here or there, one little training per year and maybe a talk from one of us at the town hall meetings which are optional.
There's other similar programs in the company about sustainability and ethics.
Sports are one of the highest paying jobs in the world. Professional athletes in popular sports leagues are in the 0.01%.
> "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.
But anyone who was hired in a remote role is exempt.
This order only applies to in-office workers with assigned desks.
He's basically saying that they can't expect to have a hybrid work schedule, although not so strict that they can't ever work from home.
This is a standard boiling the frog playbook:
* No more remote hires
* Mandate non-remote employees into office (Instagram is here)
* Mandate remote employees who live within X miles of office return to office (significant chunks of Alphabet, etc. are here)
etc. - this will get ramped up and very soon
Though, in my case bullet #1 was more like
No more remote hires. However, we will more than backfill the folks quitting or being laid off in the US and the EU with folks in India and China. We hope you enjoy the in-office synergy when communicating with your new teammates who are literally half a world away!It’s amazing how much intense of a Scrooge McDuck vibes we’re getting from the MBA executive class.
Crank the screws, tighten the belt, offshore, increase profits at all costs. The next generations are going to have it rough since these elites have intentionally hoarded prosperity at the expense of their countrymen
I have no idea how they get anything done in there. I feel they only can focus before and after business hours.
So don't be so sure. Home has distraction when the mind is distracted. But once working I feel we are much more productive and capable due to long uninterrupted stints.
It does take discipline but that's what deadlines are for.
As a hiring manager, I appreciate the honesty and nuance. There is so much bullshit about remote work from the people doing it that it’s a little too much “doth protest”.
“I get so much more work done and I cracked the code to productivity, and surely no one would abuse this system, especially not you ultra worker 5000. Anyone who disagrees with me is a threat to the oversightless system I have an I must try and protect this by attacking them.”
Have you considered evaluating your own beliefs with this perspective?
I have remote employees, and I have people I would never allow WFH because they can’t handle it.
I don’t care what you do. I’m explaining from the position of someone responsible for a team that MANY people who are strictest about WFH being absolute are the people abusing it. This shouldn’t even be remotely controversial… yet… all I see is more protest and digital foot stomping.
Nobody steps back and asks - wait, is that good? Is there a point where "productivity" becomes negative because we're pumping out shitty half-baked code from a workforce who despises everything the company stands for? Nobody asks, is it possible that employees who contemplate suicide every day might not make the best product. ?
No. They don't. It's work, work, work and the end result is a piece of software so unbelievably shitty and barely functional that you require a commission-based Salesforce of sleezebags to sell it to some poor soul who doesn't know the difference between Git and GitHub.
Ultimately, and I know this is very old-fashioned, your company IS your workforce. Keeping them happy makes a good product and keeps the profits flowing. Every company in the Golden Age of the American economy knew that. Few remember it.
I’m not sure you could be any more wrong.
I’m C suite and part owner. I have remote employees too.
Make more incorrect guesses. It strengthens your points greatly.
The only people who think that engineers are actually doing a straight 8 hours of work are so delusional they're not worth mine, or anyone else's, breath.
Most of the time is spent thinking anyway. Coding is, like, 5% typing in a chair and 95% thinking about what to type. You don't need to optimize for the chair.
What's the fear with WFH? Your employees might not despise you? Your company might accidently create a culture that doesn't suck donkey dick? People might actually agree with your mission statement for once?
Is that really so bad? And all it takes is not intentionally fucking people up the ass. It's so easy, so accessible.
At home, I can put my family first if needed. When I’m at the office and something comes up at the kids’ school that I need to deal with, it’s a mad dash to get away soon enough that I almost have to drop everything and run
The times working in the office has been good as a software engineer: when we are prototyping on physical hardware I do not have at home. That’s it
It’s great if people love to go to the office. That’s fine. It’s managers that enforce it who are the problem — the people who work for you aren’t children and if you feel like you can’t trust them to make the decision to work from home, why on earth would you trust them in your office?
Ah, yes. I’m a clown because you live in a very curated bubble?
I notice you offered no refutations, just ad hominem.
An ideal working environment for me would probably be working from home, alone, perhaps with some stimulants (I have severe ADHD, or at least am diagnosed as having it and perceive myself as having), a close deadline, a lot of intrinsic motivation and interest in a task, and no distractions. In practice, most of the time I find working on a laptop at a library or cafe or on a laptop/desktop in an office does push me to do more work-related stuff more frequently on an average day, since I know people near me may notice I'm spending ages on Twitter or HN or whatever and that somewhat discourages me from doing non-work things.
I don't think you deserve to have been downvoted. I love having a work-from-home job and love that I was able to get one pre-pandemic, but I also don't necessarily blame higher-ups for wanting more people to work in an office. It's complicated.
1) A lot of informal (i.e., not in a scheduled meeting) chats are more valuable than meetings. They are much more rare when people WFH.
2) Many folks tend to be more distracted when WFH. TLs don't have a perfect vision into whether someone spent 4 hours on a bug (or a design doc) or 2 hours on the bug / design doc and 2 hours on online shopping / playing with kids.
It's quite confusing to me that none of the comments I saw in this thread don't discuss those factors (I'd be fine if people mentioned them and explained why they are not too important).
Obviously there are also factors in favor of WFH: commute costs, personal satisfaction (which may indirectly improve productivity and/or retention of the best people), noise in the workplace, lack of meeting rooms, etc. But it's far from obvious to me if, on balance, WFH or RTO works better for building a successful company.
(2) feels weird to me; if the work is getting done, is there an issue? Does it matter if I spend 4 hours or 2 hours on a design doc, if the result is a good design doc?
If they mandate this (not sure where they'd find the space!) I'll just refuse to sign the new contract. I'm in Europe so none of that "at will" stuff. If they want to let me go they'll have to give me a package for 15 years worked.
Ps I don't actually go twice a week right now ;) More like once. None of my team members are in my country anyway so what's the point.
But I would not move to the US (especially now obviously) or be without job security for double the wage. Life for me isn't about making as much money as possible, it's about enjoying my life and money is just one of the means to do that. Time is another big one.
And like the other poster said, I don't know americans who work 20 years and retire. On the contrary most I know have a 200+k$ student loan pending back home or are shuffling debt from card to card to make it look like they are paying it off.
The thing about a social safety net is that it makes life better for poor people. That's good. Praiseworthy even. Laudable.
The negative impact on economic growth and wages for high earners means the American tech workers are just richer than European tech workers. Any other analysis is a combination of wishful thinking and pseudoscience, quite frankly. Economics is science, just like biology and mathematics and physics.
Fwiw, I know a bunch of American tech workers who worked 20 years and then retired. Pretty much every person who works for Meta can name ten people like that. Those people tend to retire in Europe, where they can enjoy free healthcare while living off the incredible amount of money they made when they were young.
And perhaps most importantly - if they decide to switch to Europe life, they can, with extra money in the bank. While European tech workers can't afford to live the high life in America.
Tbh, I'm sure I'm going to get down voted to hell, but it's pretty amazing how many highly educated and otherwise intelligent Europeans just... don't believe in economics anymore when economics says their lives are worse than their peers in America. It's one of the major touch points of anti intellectualism in this forum.
Another tendency I find anti-intellectual is appealing broadly to "science" or "economics" to make claims that neither field supports.
When I speak of "science", I'm only speaking about using numbers to measure and compare. As it turns out, it doesn't really matter which metric you use. GDP, PPP, you name it - America went up substantially more than Europe over the past 20 years. A continent that used to be an economic peer is now a few notches poorer. If the trend continues, by the time I'm old, Europe will be poor compared to America, full stop. Just another region full of third world countries.
You can read https://ecipe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ECI_24_PolicyBr... if you like or find your own sources. All the ones I've found say the same thing about the last 20 years. But if you can find some that say Europe is improving its economic standing compared to America, I'd be interested in reading them! I'm very open to having my mind changed by evidence!
Economics and money is just numbers. It's not a measure of happiness in life. I just want to have enough money to not worry in life, I don't care about having much more than others. Doing a job I enjoy in a place I enjoy is worth much more to me. Would Elon Musk, the richest guy in the world be happier than me? I don't think he is, he's always angry about something. I wouldn't want to trade places with him. Having that kind of money is a burden, never being able to just walk around and discover a new town without a security detail, or partying until 6am without journalists capturing everything I do.
A big house doesn't make me (much) happier. A car definitely doesn't, driving really stresses me out (and I have a lot of driving experience having lived in many countries). We have great public transport here and that's enough for me because I live in the city.
And economics isn't really an exact science in my book. It's a social science, psychology based on human constructs. Which are different here in Europe anyway (more socialist). We chose to make the world work like this but it could be different too. More fair.
I moved to a lower wage country to have a better life and I'm a lot happier now. I will never be rich but I don't care. It's not a race to be the top, I want everyone to have a good life.
Except the people that are super socially oriented or want to escape the family at home (I don't have one anyway), they go more than required, and keep everyone else from their work with constant chatting.
Some people thrived in an actual lab. Some people worked from their dorm/apartment. Some would go to the library. Some to a coffee shop.
Seems this trend of not having a one size fits all best continues in industry.
Employees are encouraged to decline meetings that interfere with focus time.
After shitcanning the london office because he wanted to move back home(800 people gone) hes now doing the RTO, because as we know all the cool kids love working in the office.
The problem with instagram is not where people are working, its the culture of piss poor direction setting and no user experience advocates. Well none that are being listened to.
There are too many grand initiatives, which are poorly run, never really prototyped and just yeeted into years long slog that fuckup repeatedly (shops I'm looking at you)
Then to get a promotion you need to move a metric somehow. That means doing stupid user hostile stuff, like instantly shoving tits in your face.
Don't get me started on the horror that was instagram for kids
Please do get started. Is this an actual thing they/you were building?
Basically there are four tribes in meta: Product, Advertising, Infra & other.
Facebook had the most comprehensive onboarding I've ever had at a place, literally 5 weeks of learning. We had actual lessons on data laws, rules that facebook has and why they are there. Lots of talk about how to speak up for the user and that kind of stuff. Loads of do the right thing, if in doubt choose the user, long term growth over short term gain, that sort of shit.
And where I worked, that was kinda the experience, We had reasonable debates about user experience and the like. The data storage system is setup so that you don't really need to think about storing data securely or privately because thats the default.
But
I was in the "other" tribe so I didn't have the same pressure. My "impact" that I had to deliver wasn't to do with moving metrics, or making money.
The real problem is that to get promoted, you need to, every 6 months, deliver something that has impact. And a good way to get impact is to move a metric, or get more cash.
combine that with naivety, and you get the scandals that we see.
Instgram kids USP was basically that it would an app that was tailored to kids, and there would be some parent tools to help shame the algorithm. There wasn't any budget to spend on proper moderation, so there would be loads of content that was be designed to warp/groom/fuckup young minds. I think the main concession was that DMs would be turned off. It would have been a walled garden, but with no real controls. Perhaps there might have been algorithm tweaks to avoid promoting certain topics.
That was the rumour at least.
Anyway, it would have been a shit show, so there was a concerted effort to leak it to the press, because the "product council" were like "fuck yeah, tiktok does it, lets do it too, we're fucking gods who made reels a thing, what the fuck do you know?"
but the real sketchy shit is in advertising, and where it crosses into product. They know that some of these metric boosting changes are bad, but because they make money, they allow it. Thats where the rules are deliberately bent or broken. The rest of the time is just naivety, by idealistic shelters young colleges types.
Lastly, Facebook can't really do new products. So if your app or thing cant easily be added to instagram/facebook, and needs its own standalone app/site, you're probably fine.
I was all gung-ho for "You don't need regulation (imprisonment) for something that's just a mirror held up to society" before realizing Facebinstapp literally does things like this
Why? Because no company can afford the bills for LLM infra.
These companies are spending 100s of billions on building infra. Most countries have less GDP than this. The numbers are insane!
And Nvidia demands payments in cash today. Not amortized in 5 years. Every employee slashed is extra compute the hyperscalers can buy today.
”More demos, less [sic] decks”
I love it, but I’m surprised that an org of that caliber needs to say it out loud. Even the top tier people get bogged down in PowerPoint limbo, I guess?
Nothing is more compelling than, as they say in show business (ie that Bill O’Reilly meme), than saying “f*** it…”:
(╯°□°)╯
┳━━━━┳ WE’LL DO
IT LIVE!I'm convinced by keeping people in person less shit will get fixed.
Surely this is just to get people to quit without needing to give them expensive severance packages, that seems pretty common nowadays?
Last few months I've been in the office almost every single day.
And I get what they're saying, there are definite advantages to having everybody in the same room. I don't think pretending otherwise is going to help us much.
There are definite advantages that go the other way as well.
The goal has to be to find a good compromise, you can never go back.
or maybe the tide has changed from remote working so again the minions are pushed around!
[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/02/instagram-boss-adam-mosseri-...
https://www.ft.com/content/c0678622-975b-4e0a-ba10-11acea2e0...
What this seems to be suggesting is that productivity gains due to agents are meaningless because 99% effort goes in non coding tasks which will get sped up by meeting in person
We have a choice thankfully, so no one really slacks in person or remotely because surprise surprise, when you treat your employees like human beings and not cogs in the machine they're actually motivated to do good work, who'd'a thunk it?
Seems like many companies and government agencies thought it permanent and sold their office spaces. Perhaps we will see them buying more offices to house their valuable workers once again.
Perhaps our cities will feel more lived in again.
I don't think RTO or fewer meetings is going to reverse or even slow Instagram's slide down the enshittification chute. I recently returned to the app to connect with some friends and local communities, but the density of ads and dark patterns is pushing me away. IMO Instagram and Facebook in their twilight (which will still last another decade or so), where the path forward has more to due with extracting the remaining value from their existing users rather than outcompeting the alternatives.
In practice it makes more sense if you always assume the intended purpose is to thinly veil constructive dismissal.
In my view it's been well down that chute since shortly after its acquisition by Facebook. Facebook bought them as a hedge as young people left the FB platform and, for a time, it's worked to keep users under the Meta umbrella, but as with everything Zucc touches, the end-user experience has been in a state of steady degradation.
By “encourage” and “copying,” you mean “require” and “linking” respectively. These second order effects were entirely predictable before the legislation was passed.
Then the supporters of the law said Facebook was "using" the news content by linking to a news site, as if they were actually displaying whole articles! Meta generally sucks but these laws (and the people calling for them) sucked just as much.
That one slipped my by in recent years, I'm not keeping up with the rebranding of rocks the nazi bars keep hiding under.
~ https://felixonline.co.uk/articles/slurs-hatred-and-nazi-ufo...
I'm not sure the self description as "Light hearted, mostly satirical Nazi white supremacist content not to be taken seriously" really hides the moustache.
We tried building with 3 founders across 3 timezones. On a good day it felt magical. On a bad day it felt like the kind of lag you remember from SC BW, CS 1.6, or classic WoW raids where one spike wipes the whole run just so everyone has to start over.
Async is great for shipping, but not when you are moving fast on hard problems where alignment is the whole game. The drag shows up slowly and you learn zero to one needs tight loops, high trust, and shared tempo. You cannot patch that with calls or docs.
Some teams crush remote. We did sometimes but not often enough and learned that the hard way. The work decides the model. For us it was about momentum and getting the fastest feedback loop possible. Ideas die in latency. Execution dies in drift.
At the end of the day it is not ideology. It is just whatever keeps the product moving as a startup, aiming high to become better, faster, cheaper than the status quo.
Just my 2c.~
Every company of this scale is in LPT. They have shitloads of money tied up in the declared value of the office space either they invested, or they leveraged. If it tanks in value, they are on call for the decline in value related to that.
Thank you for reading my almost but not quite tinfoil hat conspiracy theory.
It seems much more likely that this is driven by the fact that Facebook culture has always been very much around in-person 1:1 contacts between people. This frustrated me a lot when I was there, but it did seem to work for a relatively long time.
Where have I heard this before, wait at every job I have ever worked at. Every time it is said, meeting time increases.
Where I worked, Friday was the only day real work got done. Why, everyone was at home, but that was my go to office day. Thursdays was my WFH day because that whole day was nothing but meetings.
Can't wait to have to move to SF and pay 5k for a shoebox so I can work in an overcrowded office in a boring, crappy part of town.
If you prove you’re in the office you get extra money.
The same Mosseri who lived many time zones away in London until relatively recently until most people from instagram there got laid off...
I would love to delete the app, but Instagram has really become the norm for dating and connecting with people. The opportunity cost of not using it in your 20s is significant. I hope to delete it once I’m fully settled, but that might not happen anytime soon given the modern dating culture.
Sometimes, I wish I could live like the Amish.
idk if your partner is jealous of you using one of the top five social networking apps in the world that seems a little weird and maybe your relationship is not very healthy? it's instagram, not tinder or okcupid...
I avoid it now mainly because I don't need infinite scrolling of anything. But a side benefit is that it can't provoke any jealousy.
I’m an infrequent facebook user, but every couple months I’ll visit the website for something on fb marketplace or an event I’ve been invited to and 100% of the reels that are shoved at me are softcore pornography. My only interaction with them has been to click the “hide this item” (or whatever it’s called) on every reel I’ve ever seen.
Really??
I know for a fact that I wouldn't have been invited to some parties or met some really fun people if I didn't have Instagram. You don't have to post or be very active; you just need to have an account.
I'm not installing anything Meta for any potential date. maybe Twitter but that's already pushing it.
I wish we had better ways (coming with the DMA and chat interoperability? maybe), but it's tolerable.
When the productivity fell in covid days due to communications overheads and people just suddenly finding it easy to execute "lazy", did the ever so efficient corporate machinery pick this up in a jiffy and propose salary cuts to match? Or were they just too nice to do that?