Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings(businessinsider.com) |
Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings(businessinsider.com) |
has he stopped believing in the transformative power of the metaverse then?
I don't know why Meta exists at this point other than the momentum of a large business with loads of assets and meaningful no product.
https://www.protocol.com/mark-zuckerberg-remote-work-faceboo...
All the best engineers I ever worked with so far all favor remote work because it increases code quality, throughput, and happiness.
Meta will be disrupted, seeing as whatever Meta tech they’re building isn’t even good enough for their own employees to dogfood for better remote work experience.
Trust me: the problems with outsourcing have almost no overlap with the challenges of remote, on-shore work.
Think: timezones, talent quality, language barriers, cultural differences, just to name a few.
Many of the best you can find from cheaper countries already moved to US or EU, or are willing to move.
Also, while I'm all for remote work, time zones different are a mess to manage.
Is there anyone who still wants to work at facebook at this point? The company that is laying off thousands, that has wasted billions on a metaverse that no one wants, not to mention one that has helped rip apart the fabric of society? And now doesn’t want you working from home? Is it really worth the money at this point?
Maybe this means the Metaverse is being abandoned.
Until they do so, I remain deeply skeptical. It’s all too easy to engineer measurements or interpret data to support the outcomes you already want.
If the data is truly so revealing, show it to the world.
Meta is a private company that can do whatever it wants and Zuck doesn't need to justify anything. He's also not being too egregious here. He's stopped hiring new remote, but hasn't forced any current remote people back into the office. What right do we have to demand more from them?
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.
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.
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.
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.
My company choose an hybrid option that I find interesting. It is remotely only, but hires only locally.
Oh, the worst of both worlds. The talent pool of one city and reasonable commutes, combined with the great communication and innovation of video calls looking up someone's nose.
But this is meta we’re talking about who are deeply embedded in the one place on earth every software developer wants to go to get the best job opportunities.
They might deny it on “moral grounds” but, yeah…
How are you measuring success?
Since working from home, I drive around the suburbs almost daily Monday to Friday for lunch/errands to get out of the house.
People make weird assumptions.
I don't want to be kept. Even if they wanted to keep me, they most likely wouldn't make it anyway.
It's a hectic market where job seekers and employers are about to get tight.
But maybe they're going the HPE route and trying to cut staff via attrition. When I was at HP in 2014, Meg closed all satellite offices and got rid of most WFH- this lead to overly cramped offices as an abundance of employees were dragged back in.
A lot of employees quit or simply took early retirement as a result.
Once they know what they want to do to remain a business they will hire good people for that new product.
I suspect though that "good people" for someone like Meta are usually head hunted and will be offered bespoke contracts from day 1.
All tinfoil hat speculation on my part to be honest.
* As an IC, remote is amazing. It gives me distraction free space to focus and be productive. With moderate process, I'm able to be extremely productive and unblock myself.
* As a manager, remote can be challenging when trying to drive cross-team/cross-org impact - especially on ambiguous projects. It's far more challenging to drive outcomes when you can't simply walk into someone's office for a quick conversation . Good process can help with this, but most companies don't reward for this.
However, given that there are far more staff employees, wouldn’t it make sense to optimize for their output?
I can only assume the huge companies like Meta are wanting to reduce HR overhead of dealing with different countries and states employment laws, taxes etc.
Smaller companies have to use something like Deel.
That hypothesis doesn't sound that convincing - especially since multiple Americans I know who wanted to join big companies pre-pandemic did so because of the access to living in different places outside of America.
Ultimately, companies are looking for outcomes (e.g. financial return). Outputs are an important part of outcomes, but not the goal in of itself. Outputs also need to be working towards valuable goals. Without value, outputs are worthless.
This creates a conundrum where you need to find a proper balance between the large quantity of people who need to make the outputs and the fewer number of people who need to guide the value.
I loved that phase as well. Their culture changed drastically post 2016 elections and they grew too fast and too broad during Covid.
The difference with remote-only is _everyone_ is in the hard bucket. That includes the people who you work most closely with.
While it's not insurmountable, it can add friction.
For ICs, I agree, distributed teams can face coordination challenges due to increased friction, poorer communication practices (if they haven't adapted well to remote communication patterns), etc. Personally, my ideal world is teams that are geographically co-located but working remotely. That minimizes things like timezone challenges while also giving the team the option to meet face-to-face when they find it makes sense.
But management does not (or should not) require that level of highly engaged, coordinated work. Hell, pre-pandemic, the vast majority of my interactions were already remote because, outside of my direct reports (with whom my relationship is largely about providing strategic direction and then delegating responsibility so they can get the real work done), the people I work with represent a cross-section of the company's functions, and thus the company's offices.
But hey, maybe what remote is doing is exposing those micromanagers, or organizations, that rely on heavy-handed top-down hierarchy who are finding it difficult to adapt.
In which case I say good riddance.
My opinion as someone who's never been a megacorp exec: WFH should work, but they long ago set themselves up around some kind of over-collaboration with too many cooks in the kitchen, then with WFH they just introduced a big latency factor to it without fundamentally changing how they work (which would've been too risky).
And this is just one scenario. There are so many things that seem to just grind to a halt when you can't just go talk to someone. You have to instead try to book a meeting which is so much friction that you avoid doing it if at all possible.
3700 km / 80 kph > 50h one way
You understand he spends 100h commuting every week?
Of course not, he uses the transporter.
I know my team has had the talk that Teams is an async communication method, and that we'll get back to each-other when we have spare brain cycles. The message is instant, but there's no expectation the response will be.
The downside is that a junior teammate was probably less effective than they could have been because of a lack of in-person mentoring -- their learning was slower than I would have expected in-office, but, then, that could be this particular person rather than remote work.
I don't doubt your experience, to be clear -- I just mean to say that I think the situation is more complex than "people are less productive" or "people are more productive."