12 ms·

Meta threatens to fire workers for return-to-office infractions in leaked memo

99 points by npalli 3y ago

musicale 3y ago
> Meta Head of People Lori Goler reportedly told employees that their managers would receive their badge data and that repeated violations of the new three-day-a-week requirement could cause workers to lose their jobs. Tracking the people who write the code to track people seems very Meta.
- scrum-treats 3y ago
  Agree. On brand.
- FFP999 3y ago
  Props for the best pun I've seen in a long time.
PebblesHD 3y ago
> If remote employees consistently come into the office more than four times every two months outside major events, they’ll be shifted to the three-day-a-week plan. If anyone gets fired as a result of this, or suffers performance penalties for not attending team events in fear if this, that would be a slam dunk constructive dismissal case no? This seems so absurd that any employment professional would draft and approve this.
- notyourwork 3y ago
  I’m also having trouble parsing the logic behind that specific language.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    It makes sense that they don't want to maintain office space and amenities for people who drop in whenever, so people can either be 3/5 in person or full remote. But if you are full remote, you cannot drop in whenever you fell like it.
    - sydbarrett74 3y ago
      I'm 100% remote. I live in VA, and the company I'm contracted to is based in OH. So my chances of dropping in ad hoc are precisely 0%. I imagine most 100% remote workers would be in the same boat.
      - HWR_14 3y ago
        So the rule of "if you drop in more than 4 times ad hoc in a two month period, not counting major company events" works to separate you from a non-true 100% remote person.
      - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
        Many Meta employees are “remote” but live in the same city as an office (I think it’s over half).
        notyourwork 3y ago
        And that's a side effect of the pandemic, not because Meta actually wanted them to be remote.
    - n4r9 3y ago
      It makes sense not to give those remote workers assigned desks and PCs. But why not allow them to come in occasionally and hot-desk if they want to? Meta is surely not so strapped for resources that it can't put aside a space for hot-desking. It comes across as a manipulative ploy to disincentivise remote work.
      - HWR_14 3y ago
        Why does Person A get to show up whenever they want and Person B has to be in 3 days a week. All the people in Person B's position will be annoyed that they don't have the same freedom, which will cause issues. Meanwhile, why does the manager have to go through the added work of managing a remote worker who is there most of the time just so they can do their 1/month a year of work from a beach at their discretion?
- MattHeard 3y ago
  "If you're physically capable of coming in 5 times over the course of two months you must therefore also be physically capable of coming in 26 times over the course of two months." (Sarcasm, of course.)
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    "Sorry boss, I can't make it in this week, that would change the conditions of my employment."
metadat 3y ago
Was the drone picture in the top of TFA taken legally? I'm confident the FB sign is less than 5 miles from Palo Alto airport. I checked and it's 4.3 miles by car, probably more like 3 or 3.5 miles as the crow flies, making this flight a violation of Federal law.
- histriosum 3y ago
  Maybe I'm missing it, but what in the photo are you basing your assumption that the photo was from a drone? It could easily have been taken from a helicopter, for example, and the general lack of resolution reinforces that thought to me. Also, it's definitely possible to get an airspace waiver to fly within 5 miles of an airport, so that's another possibility of doing it legally. Those airspace authorizations for low level flights aren't particularly difficult though get, as I understand it (I'm a pilot, but not a drone pilot, though I know a few)
  - rhuru 3y ago
    You can check this photo on Getty and notice the other similar looking photos that are likely taken at the same time (by same photographer) and it does not look to be a helicopter, if it was then the photographer would have provided even higher elevation photos.
    - blitzar 3y ago
      Object name: dji_0321 Strongly suggests a drone - No other metadata on the image/getty images however.
      - rhuru 3y ago
        Search the photographer's name. You will see a lot of photos of the same location from him. But the elevation range indicates a drone not a heli.
- placatedmayhem 3y ago
  I just checked a LAANC interface (Aloft Air Control) for 1 Hacker Way. Flights up to 250 ft AGL can be authorized in there. It's just inside KPAO controlled space, but that does not mean flights can't be authorized -- authorizations are the whole reason LAANC exists. Why do you think they'd be prohibited by federal law?
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
> "CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge in May 2020 that his firm would become “the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale” and speculated that half the company could be permanently remote within a decade." seems like he just says whatever is best for the stock price at any given time.
- southwesterly 3y ago
  I guess as CEO that’s literally his job.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  If he meant "we'll fire half and rehire them as contractors, but the other half must work at the office" then they are on track. They did fire 20k of 80k, 20k more and the promise is fulfilled even if there is no remote among FTEs.
  - 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
    yes. all driven by shareholders demands imo. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-investor-calls-on-google-owner-to-aggressively-cut-staff-and-pay https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-inv...
    - angoragoats 3y ago
      Are you aware that this link is about Alphabet, that we are talking about Meta here, and that Alphabet is not Meta? Zuckerberg owns a special class of stock in his company that gives him total control, despite the existence of other institutional shareholders. The buck stops with him and therefore blame for any bad business decisions can be squarely placed on his shoulders.
      - throwaway290 3y ago
        I think the point may have been that shareholders can put pressure and sell off stock and shareholder motivations are probably similar among big tech companies
hurrrr 3y ago
I work remotely and I'am a big remote work enthusiast and I think that Meta is right on this one. They are (at least at the moment) one of the most remote friendly company among the big tech ones and I think that they are following the plan that Zuck draw. He never said that Meta would become a fully remote company overnight. In fact in may 2020 he said the he expects half of the company to work remotely in 5 to 10 years[1]. Around 25% of the Meta workforce is remote and this figure could increase. They are also the only company that admitted that onboarding is harder remotely. This can happen for a number of reasons (for example, processes not optimized for remote workers and not for an inherently inferiority of remote work) and the fact that they also said that engineers that switch from office/hybrid to remote performs the same as the ones in offices suggests that they are not done with remote work. I guess we'll see how it will end, but I don't think that a cautios approach to remote work must necessarily be considered negative. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/zuckerberg-50percent-of-facebook-employees-could-be-working-remotely.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/zuckerberg-50percent-of-face...
- nytesky 3y ago
  Is the requirement 8 hours on RTO day? Core hours? Majority of workday?
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    This is actually an important question for me. I'm currently interviewing with Meta. If I get the job, I'll have a long commute on a train with limited runs each day. Being able to use train time for work could be the difference between a sane and untenable lifestyle.
    - angoragoats 3y ago
      Please don't work for Meta. You'd be helping further the largest privacy-violating data collection scheme in the world. There are also plenty of other companies that offer fully remote arrangements, many of whom haven't sunk untold millions of dollars into commercial real estate and need to be able to justify their investment.
NKosmatos 3y ago
An important point that shouldn’t be looked over: “ …a quarter are allowed to stay fully remote.” This means that around 25% of workers are still fully remote. Companies (and us) have to realize that remote is not suitable for everyone and for all positions. I’m one of the lucky few working fully remote in my company, but I think that a good “healthy” distribution for software related companies would be: 20-30% on site, 20-30% remote and the rest 40-60% hybrid.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  I have a really hard time understanding why fully remote would be "less healthy" for anything software related (I'm at a company now that switched to 100% remote and pretty much everything works more smoothly than I ever experienced in my 25 years of "office career" before). Our teams do (voluntary) "office days/weeks" and smaller team events from time to time, but inevitably those office days are much less productive (which is intended and expected though, they are mainly for socializing). Everything that needs to be done is possible on laptops nowadays, and the big server machine that used to hum in the dedicated "server room/closet" is now "in the cloud" instead). I can contact a fellow team member faster now than walking over to their desk, and I can also see immediately whether they are busy or otherwise not available.
LatteLazy 3y ago
I come in 5 days a week, because I choose to. It happens to suit my lifestyle, responsibilities and psychology. I wonder when I will be getting my bonus since I am clearly more productive (or whatever) than others? I hear very little on this from employers...
- Gigachad 3y ago
  It comes in the form of all the top paying companies like Apple and Google being in office.
francisofascii 3y ago
> employees averaged 2.2 days a week in the office I wonder how that breaks down. People working 5 and others working 0? Or most working 2-3. My firm's average is about 1.5, and we have a new mandatory, but not enforced, 3 day a week rule.
- Jabrov 3y ago
  This is exactly why I hate when people over rely on averages. What's the median? The percentiles?
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  It's nice to delay the enforcement phase of a mandatory 3 days a week. It gives people that don't want to go to the office notice that it's time to leave without dismissing them. Some won't take the hint and that'll be a learning moment for them. Still, speaks well of your employer.
1letterunixname 3y ago
No one actually wants to work at Meta anymore. There are too many dicks and morale is too low. The only people who want to come to the office are those who sit around the office and socialize because they're non-engineers with non-jobs. There's no other reason to because the microkitchens declined, the good food went away, and assigned desks became shared desks. The goal now is brinkmanship of misery to encourage people to leave so they don't have to feel as guilty when they do yet another round of layoffs.

99 points by npalli 3y ago

> Meta Head of People Lori Goler reportedly told employees that their managers would receive their badge data and that repeated violations of the new three-day-a-week requirement could cause workers to lose their jobs. Tracking the people who write the code to track people seems very Meta.

scrum-treats 3y ago
Agree. On brand.
FFP999 3y ago
Props for the best pun I've seen in a long time.

PebblesHD 3y ago

> If remote employees consistently come into the office more than four times every two months outside major events, they’ll be shifted to the three-day-a-week plan. If anyone gets fired as a result of this, or suffers performance penalties for not attending team events in fear if this, that would be a slam dunk constructive dismissal case no? This seems so absurd that any employment professional would draft and approve this.

notyourwork 3y ago
I’m also having trouble parsing the logic behind that specific language.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  It makes sense that they don't want to maintain office space and amenities for people who drop in whenever, so people can either be 3/5 in person or full remote. But if you are full remote, you cannot drop in whenever you fell like it.
  - sydbarrett74 3y ago
    I'm 100% remote. I live in VA, and the company I'm contracted to is based in OH. So my chances of dropping in ad hoc are precisely 0%. I imagine most 100% remote workers would be in the same boat.
    - HWR_14 3y ago
      So the rule of "if you drop in more than 4 times ad hoc in a two month period, not counting major company events" works to separate you from a non-true 100% remote person.
    - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
      Many Meta employees are “remote” but live in the same city as an office (I think it’s over half).
      - notyourwork 3y ago
        And that's a side effect of the pandemic, not because Meta actually wanted them to be remote.
  - n4r9 3y ago
    It makes sense not to give those remote workers assigned desks and PCs. But why not allow them to come in occasionally and hot-desk if they want to? Meta is surely not so strapped for resources that it can't put aside a space for hot-desking. It comes across as a manipulative ploy to disincentivise remote work.
    - HWR_14 3y ago
      Why does Person A get to show up whenever they want and Person B has to be in 3 days a week. All the people in Person B's position will be annoyed that they don't have the same freedom, which will cause issues. Meanwhile, why does the manager have to go through the added work of managing a remote worker who is there most of the time just so they can do their 1/month a year of work from a beach at their discretion?
MattHeard 3y ago
"If you're physically capable of coming in 5 times over the course of two months you must therefore also be physically capable of coming in 26 times over the course of two months." (Sarcasm, of course.)
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  "Sorry boss, I can't make it in this week, that would change the conditions of my employment."

metadat 3y ago

Was the drone picture in the top of TFA taken legally? I'm confident the FB sign is less than 5 miles from Palo Alto airport. I checked and it's 4.3 miles by car, probably more like 3 or 3.5 miles as the crow flies, making this flight a violation of Federal law.

histriosum 3y ago
Maybe I'm missing it, but what in the photo are you basing your assumption that the photo was from a drone? It could easily have been taken from a helicopter, for example, and the general lack of resolution reinforces that thought to me. Also, it's definitely possible to get an airspace waiver to fly within 5 miles of an airport, so that's another possibility of doing it legally. Those airspace authorizations for low level flights aren't particularly difficult though get, as I understand it (I'm a pilot, but not a drone pilot, though I know a few)
- rhuru 3y ago
  You can check this photo on Getty and notice the other similar looking photos that are likely taken at the same time (by same photographer) and it does not look to be a helicopter, if it was then the photographer would have provided even higher elevation photos.
  - blitzar 3y ago
    Object name: dji_0321 Strongly suggests a drone - No other metadata on the image/getty images however.
    - rhuru 3y ago
      Search the photographer's name. You will see a lot of photos of the same location from him. But the elevation range indicates a drone not a heli.
placatedmayhem 3y ago
I just checked a LAANC interface (Aloft Air Control) for 1 Hacker Way. Flights up to 250 ft AGL can be authorized in there. It's just inside KPAO controlled space, but that does not mean flights can't be authorized -- authorizations are the whole reason LAANC exists. Why do you think they'd be prohibited by federal law?

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

> "CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge in May 2020 that his firm would become “the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale” and speculated that half the company could be permanently remote within a decade." seems like he just says whatever is best for the stock price at any given time.

southwesterly 3y ago
I guess as CEO that’s literally his job.
throwaway290 3y ago
If he meant "we'll fire half and rehire them as contractors, but the other half must work at the office" then they are on track. They did fire 20k of 80k, 20k more and the promise is fulfilled even if there is no remote among FTEs.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  yes. all driven by shareholders demands imo. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-investor-calls-on-google-owner-to-aggressively-cut-staff-and-pay https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-inv...
  - angoragoats 3y ago
    Are you aware that this link is about Alphabet, that we are talking about Meta here, and that Alphabet is not Meta? Zuckerberg owns a special class of stock in his company that gives him total control, despite the existence of other institutional shareholders. The buck stops with him and therefore blame for any bad business decisions can be squarely placed on his shoulders.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      I think the point may have been that shareholders can put pressure and sell off stock and shareholder motivations are probably similar among big tech companies

hurrrr 3y ago

I work remotely and I'am a big remote work enthusiast and I think that Meta is right on this one. They are (at least at the moment) one of the most remote friendly company among the big tech ones and I think that they are following the plan that Zuck draw. He never said that Meta would become a fully remote company overnight. In fact in may 2020 he said the he expects half of the company to work remotely in 5 to 10 years[1]. Around 25% of the Meta workforce is remote and this figure could increase. They are also the only company that admitted that onboarding is harder remotely. This can happen for a number of reasons (for example, processes not optimized for remote workers and not for an inherently inferiority of remote work) and the fact that they also said that engineers that switch from office/hybrid to remote performs the same as the ones in offices suggests that they are not done with remote work. I guess we'll see how it will end, but I don't think that a cautios approach to remote work must necessarily be considered negative. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/zuckerberg-50percent-of-facebook-employees-could-be-working-remotely.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/zuckerberg-50percent-of-face...

nytesky 3y ago
Is the requirement 8 hours on RTO day? Core hours? Majority of workday?
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  This is actually an important question for me. I'm currently interviewing with Meta. If I get the job, I'll have a long commute on a train with limited runs each day. Being able to use train time for work could be the difference between a sane and untenable lifestyle.
  - angoragoats 3y ago
    Please don't work for Meta. You'd be helping further the largest privacy-violating data collection scheme in the world. There are also plenty of other companies that offer fully remote arrangements, many of whom haven't sunk untold millions of dollars into commercial real estate and need to be able to justify their investment.

NKosmatos 3y ago

An important point that shouldn’t be looked over: “ …a quarter are allowed to stay fully remote.” This means that around 25% of workers are still fully remote. Companies (and us) have to realize that remote is not suitable for everyone and for all positions. I’m one of the lucky few working fully remote in my company, but I think that a good “healthy” distribution for software related companies would be: 20-30% on site, 20-30% remote and the rest 40-60% hybrid.

flohofwoe 3y ago
I have a really hard time understanding why fully remote would be "less healthy" for anything software related (I'm at a company now that switched to 100% remote and pretty much everything works more smoothly than I ever experienced in my 25 years of "office career" before). Our teams do (voluntary) "office days/weeks" and smaller team events from time to time, but inevitably those office days are much less productive (which is intended and expected though, they are mainly for socializing). Everything that needs to be done is possible on laptops nowadays, and the big server machine that used to hum in the dedicated "server room/closet" is now "in the cloud" instead). I can contact a fellow team member faster now than walking over to their desk, and I can also see immediately whether they are busy or otherwise not available.

LatteLazy 3y ago

I come in 5 days a week, because I choose to. It happens to suit my lifestyle, responsibilities and psychology. I wonder when I will be getting my bonus since I am clearly more productive (or whatever) than others? I hear very little on this from employers...

Gigachad 3y ago
It comes in the form of all the top paying companies like Apple and Google being in office.

francisofascii 3y ago

> employees averaged 2.2 days a week in the office I wonder how that breaks down. People working 5 and others working 0? Or most working 2-3. My firm's average is about 1.5, and we have a new mandatory, but not enforced, 3 day a week rule.

Jabrov 3y ago
This is exactly why I hate when people over rely on averages. What's the median? The percentiles?
JonChesterfield 3y ago
It's nice to delay the enforcement phase of a mandatory 3 days a week. It gives people that don't want to go to the office notice that it's time to leave without dismissing them. Some won't take the hint and that'll be a learning moment for them. Still, speaks well of your employer.

1letterunixname 3y ago

No one actually wants to work at Meta anymore. There are too many dicks and morale is too low. The only people who want to come to the office are those who sit around the office and socialize because they're non-engineers with non-jobs. There's no other reason to because the microkitchens declined, the good food went away, and assigned desks became shared desks. The goal now is brinkmanship of misery to encourage people to leave so they don't have to feel as guilty when they do yet another round of layoffs.