Zuck in 2020: “FB going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale”<p><a href="https://www.protocol.com/mark-zuckerberg-remote-work-facebook" rel="nofollow">https://www.protocol.com/mark-zuckerberg-remote-work-faceboo...</a>
I think companies are trying to use the current economic environment as leverage to claw back some rights their workers have gained since 2020. It’s all about control, nothing to do with your output as an employee.
Meta needs its best engineers to be highly motivated in uncertain times. Otherwise innovation will be harder to come by.<p>All the best engineers I ever worked with so far all favor remote work because it increases code quality, throughput, and happiness.<p>Meta will be disrupted, seeing as whatever Meta tech they’re building isn’t even good enough for their own employees to dogfood for better remote work experience.
Suddenly all these layoffs from the tech industry now make sense. Companies view the WFH movement and the rights which the workers have gained over the past three years as a threat to their very existence. The layoffs combined with a mandatory return to office will discourage any sort of dissent.
Paywall blocking the article for me, but... I considered changing jobs to FB about a year ago. The recruiter was saying that they're remote-first and plan to stay that way.
This isn't as nefarious as everyone makes it out to be. There are articles that state Meta has hard data that people who start as Remote workers at Meta significantly underperform those that don't. In light of that data, they're pausing the experiment and working to understand what the data is saying.
As I had written a long time back as Facebook slowly dies, we will see the monster thrashing and causing destruction in its wake. Trying to lobby for banning TikTok, getting rid of remote, they will try everything now. The metaverse idea failed and now they are completely lost.
Arguably I'm not quite done mulling over this, but I've started to wonder if the insistence that work-from-home isn't working, isn't an indication of failed management.<p>While software developers and similar roles have rather easily adapted to working from home, some managers haven't been able to keep up. I suspect this is because many of them weren't great manager to begin with. They struggle to do project planing, follow ups on current tasks and keeping the job queues full. Forcing people back into the office is an attempt to revert to an environment that hides poor management skills, even if it's worse for everyone else.<p>The success of "work from home" seems to me to be very much dependent on the management and culture of a company and Facebook may simply not have a management layer that can deal with developers not being at the office or working at odd hours.
While it may be controversial, I like that some companies are trying Work from Office, for multiple reasons:<p>It forces companies to tap into a smaller talent pool locally, which can include more junior employees that may require training. This makes the company more inclusive and gives opportunities to those who might not otherwise have access to them.<p>Let's not forget that one of the most successful companies in the world, OpenAI, operates mostly from the office. For one, if there truly is an advantage to remote work, then companies that embrace it will naturally outperform those that don't. However, the fact that Meta and other companies are requiring employees to return to the office suggests that there may be benefits to in-person work that can't be replicated remotely.<p>My company choose an hybrid option that I find interesting. It is remotely only, but hires only locally.
Great job humans. Keep encouraging more daily commuters and contributing to greenhouse gases instead of making things better through technology. I am sure the next generations will thank us for this and not even showing the willpower to look at the issue objectively. /s
WFH may very well be a trap for companies to identify their "least loyal" employees. I've heard in business that if you're not at the table you're not involved. I can see a future where the same will be said about WFH: If you're not at the office you're not involved, a team player, or someone to keep.
I don't blame them. Were entering a bear market, they have disadvantaged themselves with metaverse (although their hand was forced when ad market was nuked).<p>It's a hectic market where job seekers and employers are about to get tight.
This goes to show that it doesn't take talent to be one of the worlds richest. It just takes luck. And Zuck has run away from what made him so lucky. He will fall.