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Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026

• fHr 11mo ago
  Just a move to get rid of people, some people won't do the RTO and they can easily let them go.
• jawns 11mo ago
  The headline makes it seem like every role in the company needs to switch to full-time in-office. 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.
  • meowface 11mo ago
    I'm thankful I was "grandfathered in" by starting a remote role pre-COVID. Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if I'm more productive in an office (due to pressure to seem busy, which correlates somewhat with amount of time actually being busy) but I overwhelmingly prefer remote work.
    • keyle 11mo ago
      I'm one of the rare remote in an office where most are full time there and I'm there one day a week. 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.
    • SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago
      >Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if I'm more productive in an office (due to pressure to seem busy, which correlates somewhat with amount of time actually being busy) 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.”
      • interpol_p 11mo ago
        Depends what you see as “abusing” the system. By working from home, I can take a walk in the garden when I find it hard to think, it energises me. At my office I can (and do) take a walk in the car park, but inevitably I leave the office with a headache caused by constant noise and fluorescent lighting 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?
        • wiseowise 11mo ago
          You seriously think this clown cares about any of this? I don’t know a single person living comfortable life who woud speak like that, only some miserable sod living in a shoebox who hates everyone around them.
          • SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago
            > I don’t know a single person living comfortable life who woud speak like that, Ah, yes. I’m a clown because you live in a very curated bubble? I notice you offered no refutations, just ad hominem.
      • ribosometronome 11mo ago
        >As a hiring manager ... it’s a little too much “doth protest”. Have you considered evaluating your own beliefs with this perspective?
        • SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago
          That’s a fancy “no u” but it doesn’t make any sense. 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.
  • Arainach 11mo ago
    Exempt temporarily. Very temporarily. 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
    • simoncion 11mo ago
      Yep. I've been through almost exactly that, and know many other folks who have. If you're working in the US or other places that don't have really good labor regs, "RTO exemptions" are temporary, no matter what you're being told today. 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!
      • callc 11mo ago
        Same here. 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
• cowboyscott 11mo ago
  > the change applies to employees in US offices with assigned desks and is part of a broader push to make Instagram "more nimble and creative" as competition intensifies. 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.
  • trollbridge 11mo ago
    I’m actually grateful I don’t need to worry about marketing via Instagram anymore.
    • jrjeksjd8d 11mo ago
      I'm shutting down my retail business and being able to delete Instagram is a huge win.
  • RankingMember 11mo ago
    > I don't think RTO or fewer meetings is going to reverse or even slow Instagram's slide down the enshittification chute. 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.
    • sunaookami 11mo ago
      It's also impressive how fast Zuckerberg ruined Threads, does anyone still uses this? Does it still keep reverting to the algorithmic timeline?
      • 11mo ago
• kirykl 11mo ago
  The whole memo just reeks of not trusting your employees.
  • RankingMember 11mo ago
    These memos are always basically admissions of their own incompetence. If you distrust your employees this much and have created a culture where people aren't getting their work done without it being noticed, that's on you.
  • netsharc 11mo ago
    Isn't it a "we want to reduce our workforce but we don't want to pay redundancies, so we're hoping many of you leave 'voluntarily'.".
  • fullshark 11mo ago
    Well I don't trust my employer so...
  • BurningFrog 11mo ago
    A lot of the anti WFH wave comes from companies discovering that they actually can't trust some employees to do much work from home.
    • SoftTalker 11mo ago
      As others have stated, it’s the same people who didn’t do much work in the office either.
    • munksbeer 11mo ago
      > A lot of the anti WFH wave comes from companies discovering that they actually can't trust some employees to do much work from home. Personally, I think a lot of the anti WFH types thrive in an office environment because either charitably, they get energy from being around people and work better, or less charitably, it helps them build their careers because they're great at being noticed in that environment. In the charitable case, that's great for them, but could be harmful to WFH types, who thrive when they can work remotely and their focus times click more easily (for various reasons). In the less charitable case, (which I suspect is a lot of people who are passionately anti-WFH), well, this needs no real explanation. They're just being selfish for their own career.
• eutropia 11mo ago
  Instagram chief orders quiet layoffs to please investors in 2026 fixed that title for you
  • SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago
    You think this is the tech job market to leave your job, and then what? Try and get in at someone else about to return to office? Freelance? IDK about anyone else, but I haven’t considered a contractor since AI Coding hit hard, I had poor experience with contractors anyhow, now I’m not sure I see the point of rolling those dice again. 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.
    • misiek08 11mo ago
      We are observing the most valuable people leaving, because they easily can get a job at place where they care more about value you get to company than the bonus you will get as C-level after firing highly paid workers. 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.
      • SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago
        Ok, sweet deal if you are one of the most valuable employees in big tech. Sounds like a perk that many people would seek out. 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
        • baq 11mo ago
          If you’re the C-suite making this decision without realizing your best remote workers will quit even in this job market because they’re your best employees, you shouldn’t be the C. 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.
• kkolybacz 11mo ago
  "We're also offering the option to transfer from the MPK to SF office for those people whose commute would be the same or better with that change." 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?
  • SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
    They most likely have a long-term plan to realign team boundaries with office locations, but want to minimize the short-term disruption for people who've moved around the Bay Area based on current working schedules.
    • kkolybacz 11mo ago
      Yeah, that might be the long-term idea, but most likely it will take multiple quarters of internal mobilities to achieve the final shape during which they're forcing people to come to the office and having all meetings and team interactions on a call. Suboptimal decision in my opinion.
      • threetonesun 11mo ago
        Isn't this the same story for every moderately large company that did RTO over the last few years? It's not about efficiency, it's about shaking out some people by forcing them back into an office. 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.
      • SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
        The concern is reasonable, but I'm not sure there's a great way to make people act as though RTO is happening other than actually doing the RTO. A number of companies never said remote work was going to be long-term in the first place, yet still had employees moving around randomly based on an assumption that peak Covid norms were the new status quo.
• fHr 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  • m_a_g 11mo ago
    The comment initially confused me, but after reading it twice, I completely agree with you. 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.
    • saos 11mo ago
      > I would love to delete the app, but Instagram has really become the norm for dating and connecting with people Really??
      • seanmcau 11mo ago
        No, this is not true.
      • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
        News to me. But I just left my 20's so maybe I'm late off the boat. I'm not installing anything Meta for any potential date. maybe Twitter but that's already pushing it.
        • saos 11mo ago
          Likewise, just left 20s. I'd be shocked if anyone I'm dating red flags me for not having social media . Well I do have Linkedin if that counts
      • m_a_g 11mo ago
        In my social circles, at least, the answer is yes. I live in a major city with many people from diverse backgrounds. It might be different in areas where tech people make up the majority. 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.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• xnx 11mo ago
  How independently does Instagram operate from Meta?
  • laweijfmvo 11mo ago
    other divisions within Meta have recently made similar changes —- more time in office, less meetings. i’m guessing the orders are coming from the top but they’re allowing each org to roll out the changes “independently”
  • fijiaarone 11mo ago
    I think Instagram has pink headings and Facebook has blue. So they’re practically different companies.
• saos 11mo ago
  Basically soft layoff
  • Vaslo 11mo ago
    Yep - my company did the same thing in addition to a few other nasty cuts. The problem is that instead of dumping dead weight employees, we are losing excellent ones.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• KaiserPro 11mo ago
  Another winning call from Mosseri 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
  • decimalenough 11mo ago
    > 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?
    • jjulius 11mo ago
      https://www.npr.org/2021/09/27/1040857033/instagram-kids-pausing-plan-develop-platform-criticism https://www.npr.org/2021/09/27/1040857033/instagram-kids-pau...
      • alex1138 11mo ago
        And by the way, this is as an outsider, I have no insider knowledge, but it's from the same company that sent women (teenagers) ads of beauty products after they had deleted a selfie 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
      • KaiserPro 11mo ago
        Yeah this was the thing. 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.
• acheron 11mo ago
  They mean the office in the Metaverse, right?
• wrs 11mo ago
  OK, so... Employees are compelled to go into the office, so they can have better in-person collaboration. They are also encouraged not to go to meetings (aka in-person collaboration sessions), so they can have more focus time. 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.
  • wkat4242 11mo ago
    Yeah those open floors are so terrible. When i started late 90s I had my own office when as an intern. Everyone just had a little office. You could close the door if you needed to focus and you could open it if you needed a chat. 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.
• vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago
  5 days is stupid. I am fully remote and I can see how face time is important. After a few years remote I am definitely feeling a little detached from the company. But 5 days makes no sense. I think 2 or 3 days in the office is perfect. You get the opportunity to talk to people and you have days where you can fully focus. 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 .
  • randycupertino 11mo ago
    5 days is just offensive babysitting level amount of butts in seats. People need room to run their lives, meet contractors, sign for a package, etc. 2-3 days in office is the perfect reasonable sweet spot. 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.
• gorgoiler 11mo ago
  I know better than to think I might have anything useful to add to the WFH debate, but buried further in the memo: ”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!
• GiorgioG 11mo ago
  Layoffs by another name.
• OGEnthusiast 11mo ago
  It's unfortunate there wasn't more resistance by tech employees to RTO post-covid. It seemed like one of the very, very rare solutions to the systemic problems of housing and commuting in the US. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that WFH effectively doubles or even triples your total compensation when it means (a) actually affordable housing and (b) no time/money lost to commuting, especially if you have kids.
  • paxys 11mo ago
    Because these mandates coincided with a recession and the worst tech job market in a couple decades, and saying no meant you'd potentially be unemployed for a very long time.
    • zem 11mo ago
      "coincided" is understating it; it is precisely the bad job market that leads to this sort of mandate, because employees have little choice but to go along. in a good job market companies are very willing to offer remote work as an incentive to join them rather than the competition.
    • OGEnthusiast 11mo ago
      Yes, it would require a lot more coordinated organizing and some level of pain, though I think the payoff would be worth it.
  • venturecruelty 11mo ago
    Because there's a five-letter scare word you're not allowed to say that would be required for tech workers to have any power over their managers, but that sort of collective action is dead on arrival in the current milieu. If you don't want to go back into the office, you have the power to enforce that, but you have to like... work together.
    • alliao 11mo ago
      even though biden's already left I am still quite surprised how little views his pro union videos got https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZpUD9KgYc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZpUD9KgYc4 this video was on whitehouse's youtube channel
• wilg 11mo ago
  I think its okay for there to be jobs that require you to be in a specific place, especially so if you were hired under such an arrangement originally. If there is a significant advantage for companies that are remote, then they will have a significant advantage on talent.
• AnnaPali 11mo ago
  I enjoyed working on campus for a bit - because I also lived there, sleeping, eating, showering etc. and saved a lot of money! Of course, you have to hide that and they eventually caught me...
• jarjoura 11mo ago
  Sad, because before COVID, no one at Meta cared where you worked as long as you were getting your shit done. There was never available meeting rooms, and the open floor plans were so loud, that people would spread out all over the campus and use single person VC rooms to communicate in. Basically, everyone trusted everyone. This is 100% just a soft layoff.
  • wkat4242 11mo ago
    I notice US tech companies have also become really tough on white collar workers in order to suck up to Trump and his country goons. No more diversity programs, work life balance no longer promoted, that kinda stuff. This fits in with that trend.
    • JuniperMesos 11mo ago
      Diversity programs do not universally benefit white collar workers.
      • wkat4242 11mo ago
        Not directly but they do create an open and fair working environment for all. 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.
        • will4274 11mo ago
          > And it's not just about "quotas". That's an extreme-right talking point. Diversity done properly doesn't involve quotas 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.
• cal_dent 11mo ago
  White collar office society can barely cope with the relatively minor friction that technology brings from allowing work from anywhere and we're expected to believe it, it can deal with somewhat unaccountable and unknowable AI smoothly? Hard to think anything else than that we're in for a wild couple of years imo
  • SoftTalker 11mo ago
    Executives will insist on AI robots to sit at the desks in their leased office space, typing in code on the computers?
• dzonga 11mo ago
  ins't this the same guy who moved to london [0], just because he could control things better ? 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-to-relocate-to-london.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/02/instagram-boss-adam-mosseri-...
  • wrxd 11mo ago
    It worked so well that after a few months they moved the majority of the staff to New York https://www.ft.com/content/c0678622-975b-4e0a-ba10-11acea2e043d https://www.ft.com/content/c0678622-975b-4e0a-ba10-11acea2e0...
• deadbabe 11mo ago
  I have found that at many companies with these kind of policies are selectively enforced. If you don’t show up, nothing will happen to you, until someday they need some kind of reason to fire you. This ensures you have a steady pool of employees you can drop at a moments notice, if for instance some major market crash forces you to quickly dump people in order for the company to survive.
• alex1138 11mo ago
  You of course need a team of at least 8 people to develop the "Fuck you, log in to view any photos" pop-up box
• ggm 11mo ago
  I am here to repeat my sort-of non-but-almost conspiracy theory: It's not about the work, it's about the value of the Listed Property Trust (LPT), as a construct, if the entire central business district price model behind buildings tanks. 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.
  • venturecruelty 11mo ago
    This isn't even a conspiracy theory, it's just true. I mean, some of it is definitely induced attrition (you always want the expensive people to quit, in the Milton Friedman cinematic universe), but the rest is that the commercial real estate market would collapse tomorrow if businesses couldn't justify their 10- or 15-year commercial leases. Not for nothing did endless headlines about how "going into the office is super cool, actually" run in our most august financial publications, like WSJ and the Economist, right around the time RTO mandates started showing up.
    • disgruntledphd2 11mo ago
      I'm pretty sure that Meta don't own most of their buildings, so this wouldn't apply to them.
      • array_key_first 11mo ago
        But it probably applies to a lot of their shareholders, and they have big influence.
        • disgruntledphd2 11mo ago
          Nobody except Mark Zuckerberg matters for Meta. He has majority control of the board voting rights. 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.
• chanux 11mo ago
  I have a question for anyone who knows. 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?
  • bongodongobob 11mo ago
    It didn't fall. Productivity went up after the initial scramble.
• wkat4242 11mo ago
  Oof my employer still lets us WFH 3 days. We actually signed a new contract for it just after the pandemic. They can't have everyone in the office anyway since they closed half the floors. 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.
  • will4274 11mo ago
    That's nice but... These American Meta employees make twice or three times your salary (assume average Europe tech wages). The package you'll get for 15 years work will make up that difference for the past 6 to 12 months. I don't know many Americans who would half their salary to get your benefits.
    • footy 11mo ago
      this is such a weird response to me. Those American Meta employees may have more money, but it's not enough money to stop working and their lives are objectively worse. What's the point of money then?
      • will4274 11mo ago
        Well... their lives are objectively better, so, I don't really know what to tell you. It's true that poor people in America live less well that poor people in Europe (though if European economies continue to lag, this may stop being true in my lifetime), but Meta employees in America have really good lives. They have massive houses, retire young with huge savings, and send their kids to elite private schools. 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.
• rr808 11mo ago
  I have a job where I'm 5 days a week. The biggest problem isn't the juniors which are all happy to leave their small apartments to go into the office. Its the senior guys with big houses out in the suburbs that have the long commute. Unfortunately the new grads are having fun hanging out together but aren't getting the face time from the seniors.
  • gedy 11mo ago
    I mean companies can either locate where people can afford to live, or pay people enough to live near the office. (Same thing really). Hasn't happened to me in my career yet!
• honkycat 11mo ago
  I would honestly not mind 2-3 days a week but PDX is dead for tech jobs, and the pay is trash. 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.
• jmclnx 11mo ago
  >Additional changes include fewer meetings 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.
• alliao 11mo ago
  the owners; actual owners no doubt have their finger in the commercial real estate pie too. And they are obviously not ready to get a haircut on that portfolio so here it goes. COVID-19 hasn't disappeared yet, so all this is going to do is accelerate infection and churn through more people quicker. ASHRAE did update and release ASHRAE 241 but I really doubt building managers are eager to implement that costly compliance standard especially still shell shocked from WFH
• diogenescynic 11mo ago
  What's going to happen when all the remote first companies re-neg on their commitments? Will it be an intentional way to force layoffs and resignations?
• phendrenad2 11mo ago
  Smells like management trying to recapture the glory days by brute force. > "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!
• makingstuffs 11mo ago
  Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me. 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.
  • rubenvanwyk 11mo ago
    The core issue is like you said - responsibility.
    • alsetmusic 11mo ago
      My previous employer ran an experiment. They had us come in two days per week for six weeks and ran the numbers. We ended up going 100% wfh with a downsized office. We been planning to double our office capacity before the pan. 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.
      • solumunus 11mo ago
        The market will solve this problem eventually. In industries where WFH is more efficient, eventually the companies that go that route will outperform their peers. It’s inevitable really. It will take time because companies feel the need to use their offices while they have an ongoing lease, but when it comes time to renew the savings are difficult to ignore.
• silexia 11mo ago
  Once employees accept tools like Time Doctor with screenshots and webcam shots, employers will accept work from home
  • wiseowise 11mo ago
    Why stop there? Mandate pink dildo, like online camsites use, to track seating position. God fucking forbid you move 5 minutes from your seat – productivity suffers!
• whatever1 11mo ago
  Folks it’s very simple. They want to reduce labor for free. 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.
  • fijiaarone 11mo ago
    Also, Instaface doesn’t need developers. Their product was completed at least a dozen years ago. And it was created by a team of a dozen or so engineers.
• 3eb7988a1663 11mo ago
  Employees are encouraged to decline meetings that interfere with focus time. That deep focus time that comes from being in an open office environment.
• siliconc0w 11mo ago
  Really sad to see the WFH era ending, it's such a better way to work - especially as these companies embrace distributed teams so you now get the worst of both worlds with RTO.
• chrisweekly 11mo ago
  STUPID. STUPID. STUPID.
• antman 11mo ago
  Obviously the resgnation is the cheapest way to layoffs, so shy not make it seven days?
• ulfw 11mo ago
  So Adam Mosseri wants to fire more people? This sounds like step 1 before voluntary leaves and then firings. The same Mosseri who lived many time zones away in London until relatively recently until most people from instagram there got laid off...
• letmetweakit 11mo ago
  I don’t think it’s hard to imagine that people work better together when they are in the same office. It’s also not hard to imagine people work harder when there’s more social control. From the perspective of the business owner, this makes total sense. Yes, some people work harder and better at home, but, in general WFH is net negative for a company I think.
  • lolidiots 11mo ago
    [dead]
  • sensanaty 11mo ago
    If you trust your employees so little, why even bother employing them in the first place though? And for what it's worth, I'm equally capable of slacking both in-office and at home and I'm definitely not alone in that one, it's just that the slacking is more often in the form of socializing, eating snacks, taking toilet and smoke breaks etc. 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?
• johnxie 11mo ago
  Remote is awesome until you hit the limits of it. 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.~
  • everymathis42 11mo ago
    [dead]
  • rester324 11mo ago
    You can't bring people in the same office from three different timezones. Most probably your setup was the problem, not the productivity of the people working remotely. Remote people working in the same timezone are usually very effective in their job.
• dev_l1x_be 11mo ago
  Covid proved that wfh works, micromanagers think otherwise, jokes on us.
• andrewstuart 11mo ago
  If you want people to be in the office, structure their pay such that everyone gets an “8 hours in office” bonus daily. If you prove you’re in the office you get extra money.
• gsky 11mo ago
  Since covid all my competent friends refuse to take non WFH jobs.
• thinkingemote 11mo ago
  Was the work from home ever presented as only temporary? Initially it was for sure because of health. 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.
  • sharperguy 11mo ago
    Surely selling off office space and turning it back into family appartments would make it feel more "lived in"?
• petterroea 11mo ago
  In general having a chief "order" employees sounds like a red flag to me. Isn't ordering a bit authoritarian and used in leau of being able to change things in a more civil manner? If you aren't able to get people to work more at the office through more civil manners, maybe you should reflect on why? Surely this is just to get people to quit without needing to give them expensive severance packages, that seems pretty common nowadays?
• icar 11mo ago
  Faster prototypes? The whole app feels like a constant prototype. There are numerous bugs that never get fixed, and if they do, new ones appear.
• scotty79 11mo ago
  "back to office" is a modern strategy to easily and covertly shed employees to cut costs and improve the short term bottom line to get higher performance bonuses for management.
• codr7 11mo ago
  I've worked remotely most of my career, long before Covid. 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.
• _cs2017_ 11mo ago
  I noticed: 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.
  • pavel_lishin 11mo ago
    I definitely agree with you about (1), though this can be somewhat mitigated by having a good culture of agreeing to hop into impromptu video calls. (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?
    • SauciestGNU 11mo ago
      Have you not noticed management cracking the whip in this environment? 2 hours shopping could be 2 hours shipping code! Everyone has uniform maximum productivity every minute and anything short of 100% focus on work is time theft!
    • dreis_sw 11mo ago
      (2) At the office, it's harder to pretend that work took longer than it actually took. If you're done with the design doc in 2h, with colleagues sitting all around you, what can you do to pretend that it took you longer? Mess around with Confluence, pretending to work? You might as well move on to the next design doc, or find something useful to do meanwhile. At home, you can just pick up the Xbox controller and say it took you 4 hours. I like the comfort of WFH, and there are plenty of people (myself included) that are responsible enough to handle it, but the problem is that the average person isn't. And we all pay for it.
• eudamoniac 11mo ago
  When I worked from home I did about 10 hours of work per week. I am in a niche field and good enough at my job that my managers didn't realize. When I'm at the office, I can't do much else, so I work full days. I can't believe I'm very unique in this regard. Plenty of people will slack off as much as they possibly can while staying above the PIP line, and it's easier to do that at home.
• millzlane 11mo ago
  I realized this morning, while talking to a coworker. That when we are in person we complain about shit more than we fix it. But when were remote we voice our concerns in the major channels and shit gets fixed. I'm convinced by keeping people in person less shit will get fixed.
• srcport56445 11mo ago
  Given we have agents that give 10x productivity gains do we also need to meet in person to get much more gains? 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
• QuiEgo 11mo ago
  I’ve always thought of this like being at University and studying for finals or doing labs. You could basically do them wherever you wanted for the most part. 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.
• nokya 11mo ago
  Instead of focusing on sabotaging his employees life outside work for the sake of "prototypes", he should focus on fixing bugs in his apps.
• kylehotchkiss 11mo ago
  all hands on deck for reels-first UX and dumping the photo experience that helped us win so many hearts into the trash can forever.
• rfwhyte 11mo ago
  I'd wager two things: 1) Mosseri himself will still continue to enjoy the benefits of a flexible / remote enabled work / life balance that he is now denying his employees. Standard rules for thee not for me type BS that is typical of "Executives." I've worked for a couple larger corporations / organizations, and at both it was painfully obvious that the rules for us rank and file types categorically did not apply to the senior leadership. We were expected to "Tighten our belts" and "Do more with less" while the executives were flying around the world in their corporate jets going to "Conferences" and "Galas" or whatever, while spending the companies money lavishly on their own personal comfort. It's the same with remote work, executives love it for themselves, but deny it to the regular employees who actually make their lifestyles possible. 2) Mosseri himself, and members of Instagram's board and / or major shareholders have significant investments in commercials real estate. The bottom line for me is this whole "Back to the office" nonsense is 100% driven by the wealthy capitalist class being heavily invested in commercial real estate. I, though no fault of my own have known a couple billionaires reasonably well in the past (Both from the same family), and they were both heavily invested in commercial real estate. The CEOs and their investors who keep prattling on with their BS about "Productivity" or "Collaboration" are the same people who own most of the commercial real estate, and all they actually care about is protecting the value of their investments, as if everyone starts working remotely, there wouldn't be much need for all these fancy corporate campuses and office parks, and the value of their investments would decline as result.
• johndoh42 11mo ago
  That might explain the onslaught of instagram engineer CVs in my Inbox.