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I just have to point out the irony that a company which believes so much in virtual work that they renamed themselves after the "metaverse" is now thinking to r
by aestetix 4y ago
I just have to point out the irony that a company which believes so much in virtual work that they renamed themselves after the "metaverse" is now thinking to require employees to return to the office.
- gonzo41 4y ago[flagged]
- twelve40 4y agowhat hr person? the dude himself said he wants this
- paxys 4y agoThey built an entire metaverse office with little conference rooms full of avatars. It was comical.
- alwayslikethis 4y agoWho doesn't like bringing everything terrible about the real world into the virtual one? Next thing you see they'll be having virtual commutes with virtual cars waiting 40 minutes just to go to your virtual office. But hey it's all metaverse, which means it's awesome and shiny, right?
- doctor_eval 4y agoThis makes me think of Futurama. There are still traffic jams, but now they’re in the sky!
- bigDinosaur 4y agoFuturama had every single problem of the 20th century, just translated forward a millennium.
- IntelMiner 4y agoI suspect that's what is known as a "joke"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- XorNot 4y agoMy core mystery about the metaverse is just how boring everything they show about it is. "Bold new VR technology, what should we do with it? I know! Let's recreate brutalist grey concrete meeting rooms".
- reisse 4y agoI think it was somewhat common trope in sci-fi novels of 80s and 90s to justify virtual commute as a camouflage for loading time. Back when fastest Internet was 56k, it made sense.
- Balgair 4y agoPet Theory: It's because of Zuck's security detail/planning. I remember hearing that his house has 2 foot thick RPG-proof windows, that it's a fortress. He literally has a large degree of optical distortion looking through his windows every morning. Let alone all the crazy stuff, real or imagined, that his security team is telling him. So, he longs for even simple things like a boring meeting. Like when Michael Jackson closed down a supermarket just so he could go shopping like a normal person would. Same pathos here.
- swyx 4y agothere is irony, but it also doesnt have to be a binary all office/no office situation. even 10% of time spent meeting people in "the metaverse" would be a huge shift (i say this as a metaverse skeptic)
- emodendroket 4y agoBut why would people do this if they're coming to the office?
- nostromo 4y agoThe other deep irony is that many tech companies ruined the office by forcing open office designs. It was no secret that employees found them difficult places to be productive. And now they wonder why nobody wants to go there.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoOne counter argument to this take is: If cube farms or offices with doors are so much better, where are the companies without open-offices and outsized performance financials. I suspect most employees just aren't that productive for it to matter much. There is probably some small percentage who are more productive, and even fewer who are much more productive, but their needs are overwhelming by larger business decisions, and fads in management and design.
- radicaldreamer 4y agoApple
- pjmlp 4y agoThe company rescued from insolvency with Microsoft money and reversed buy from NeXT, and only managed to get out of red thanks to the iPod and what came later, regardless of the office structure.
- KyeRussell 4y agoHow is anyone meant to respond to that? Can’t you apply this thinking to any company?
- pjmlp 4y agoOffice structure doesn't affect what products people are willing to pay for.
- 4y ago
- _8j50 4y agoMy contention is that if their metrics had actual bottom-line in mind they would have been more transparent about it. For example, do you measure if a project is completed on time and the amount of bugs/regressions from it or do you measure how efficient contributors were by looking at loc, how much they are available,etc... because if things are getting done on time and with good quality but A lot if "unproductivity" then you have a metric problem not a productivity problem.
- ipaddr 4y agoIf the company who creates the metaverse can't make it work for them the entire metaverse workplace is doomed to the zune trash bin
- charcircuit 4y agoI don't see that as ironic. It in fact reinforces the importance of the metaverse. If there is a benefit to being in person, but not everyone can physically be in person being virtually present would be the next best thing.If presence wasn't shown to be valuable it would mean that the metaverse wouldn't be valuable for work purposes. Remote work is here to stay in society so finding ways to improve it will be valuable.
- jeffreygoesto 4y agoMetaverse and anything reachable is so much not "in person" that it is comical.
- JohnFen 4y ago> If presence wasn't shown to be valuable it would mean that the metaverse wouldn't be valuable for work purposes. Outside of some very specific circumstances, I have a hard time seeing the value of VR meeting for work purposes that regular old video chat doesn't already have.
- charcircuit 4y agoRegular video chat doesn't have the same social cues and falls apart once you go above more than 2 people in a call. Group calls with presence is a much more natural experience.
- rtpg 4y agoThe classic bit was that Slack was "no remote" pre-2020 (I'm sure nobody was counting the number of days that the C-suite and other executives deciding that were AWOL though)
- zmmmmm 4y agoit's a shame to see shallow responses to what was actually quite a nuanced point. The paragraph ended with: > we’re focusing on understanding this further and finding ways to make sure people build the necessary connections to work effectively. In the meantime, I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person So this is not in the least requiring employees to return to the office. In fact a reasonable reading of it is that it's actually supporting remote work by specifically articulating what is necessary for it to work well and then planning to facilitate that. It's a far more intelligent approach than the blunt option of "let's just force everyone back to the office 3 days a week".
- cidergal 4y agoI think you're wrong here. Reread it, as it implies that remote work is not working "effectively"
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y agoit just shows that the management don't have a clue what they're doing. they just fomo into trends.
- ChatGTP 4y agoprobably pretty likely to happen when you've built a company that basically spread misinformation for a profit, things will get pretty confusing.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoPass the popcorn.
- cidergal 4y agoThe term is "cargo cult". But yes this indicates that Meta leadership has no idea what it is doing.
- simula67 4y agoRemote work is very valuable. It makes the economy more efficient by reducing transportation costs, reducing carbon emissions etc. It allows companies to hire from locations that they previously thought were unviable. It helps employees spend less time in traffic and more time with their loved ones. There may be some negative side-effects, such as making it harder to provide guidance to new hires, holding unmotivated employees accountable etc. But I think these problems should be manageable. Some ways to manage them would be: building more on-boarding resources (videos, documents, etc.), having regular virtual meetings with new hires and status meetings with unmotivated employees etc. It may be a good idea to pair new hires with each other on some projects or require new hires to come to office once in a while. Ideally, companies should work around the problems with virtual work because remote work has certainly demonstrated its benefits. Let's hope that they will find those ways and improve the work-life situation for many of us.
- usrusr 4y agoWhat do we do with all that productivity gain though? Back in the days of "swap money for product" capitalism the answer was "more product, yay", but now a considerable part of the economy is completely disconnected from that mechanism and is only competing in the zero sum game of visibility as a service. If Facebook employees magically got 48h per work day all we would get were steeper walls in the dopamine traps we already have. And given the resource constrained nature of life in a gravity well, even the old "more product, yay" isn't quite as yay as we used to think. Edit: sorry, I completely lost myself on a sidetrack Actually I believe that your assessment is spot on, only that I would weigh the drawbacks a little different, in particular everything that involves new hires, even more in particular those new hires who are new to the field. This is a long term cost that is very difficult to predict: how will "second generation" remotes work? Is there hidden knowledge implicitly present in those who started in person that can diffuse from formerly present to pure remotes, but not from one pure remote to another?
- glass3 4y agoRegarding you sidetrack: When you swap money for products, you don't need time. If the economy shifts to visibility and attention, instant transactions are not possible anymore. Whatever people produce, somebody needs time to consume it. So all the productivity gains will be used to create more audience.
- makeitdouble 4y agoI don't give Meta much of my empathy, but could imagine a company with the same goal needing most of their staff in office. To put it short, it's the same way early Swift engineers were spending most of their time in C++. They had to to build the new language. Same way I could see a metaverse company needing engineer physically present not just to get access to the newest hardware but also work around the limitations of their own products until it's actually ready to be used 24/7. Now I'd still see whole classes of engineers not bound by those issues (e.g. backend engineers etc.).
- wunderland 4y agoZuckerberg seems to lack perspective on all of the stuff he’s appropriated. For instance, basically every cyberpunk novel with a metaverse depicts it as a dystopian nightmare.
- XorNot 4y agoI don't think I'd agree with that: usually it's an alternate space which is the only place still free of corporations. At the very least, there control there is less then absolute compared to meatspace. Neuromancer's plot motivation is the guy who desperately wants his cyberdeck to work again, such that he takes on the big mission to do so.
- blitzar 4y agoZuckerberg seems to lack ... something.
- JohnFen 4y agoI suspect that what most people consider "dystopian", Zuckerberg (and Musk, etc) think of as utopian.
- simplotek 4y ago> (...) a company which believes so much in virtual work that they renamed themselves after the "metaverse" is now thinking to require employees to return to the office. This is not ironic. It sounds like a disingenuous ploy to force employees out of the company without having to pay them what they owe or deal with the fallback. Amazon seems to be pulling the same stunt. The coincidence between mass layoffs and forced return to office starts to look like a massive wave of workplace bullying, and I'd be surprised if it wasn't breaking laws.
- ryandvm 4y agoSame with Amazon. The entire business was predicated on the idea of doing a thing online instead of requiring bricks and mortar.