8 ms·

"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, yo

"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.
- no_wizard 11mo ago
  To what end? This achieves exactly what for teams?
  - SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
    As the memo says, it achieves "Building a Winning Culture"; Mosseri's judgment is that "we are more creative and collaborative when we are together in-person".
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- closeparen 11mo ago
  I doubt it. A company that is doing RTO is also a company that is aggressively offshoring and expecting you to spend your early mornings/late nights on IST friendly calls. It's just a general turn against US-based software engineers as belts tighten and the balance of power in the labor market shifts.
  - SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
    The vast majority of American software companies worked from the office in 2019. I understand and acknowledge that some people advocated for remote work even then, but I don't understand this idea that CEOs disagreeing can only be explained by belt tightening and disrespect for engineers.
    - closeparen 11mo ago
      Working from the office was of a completely different nature in 2019 when your coworkers were also there. By scattering headcount around the world, tech executives have fully committed to distributed teams that communicate by video call. The question now is whether you join video calls from home, or from a "hub" that hosts a minority (or perhaps none) of their other participants. There is no sign of a return to 2019 levels of Bay Area or even US share of headcount.
- easterncalculus 11mo ago
  This literally has never happened.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
dexwiz 11mo ago
I interviewed there in 2024. Said no because they said I would have to commute from SF to Menlo Park 4 days a week. They explicitly said I could not work from the SF office before I even asked.
- kvirani 11mo ago
  Do you think that was a hiring manager specific preference or an overall HR policy thing? Shitty nonetheless.
  - dexwiz 11mo ago
    It was before matching so I am guessing overall HR policy.
    - bradlys 11mo ago
      That doesn’t make sense. In 2024, you could choose any location while matching. You just wouldn’t get any matches if there was no one hiring in that location (or if your profile wasn’t suitable to any, etc.). Your recruiter was being stupid or failing to communicate effectively.
bradlys 11mo ago
A ton of teams are already distributed. The RTO makes no sense unless your team is already mostly in one office but that’s not how a lot of teams are. Tons of team are completely split up across multiple states/timezones. I think IG might be more local teams than distributed but I’m not sure.
- akudha 11mo ago
  One of the teams at my workplace has 5 members in 5 different offices. They’re still forced to come to office and attend calls via Microsoft Teams from their respective offices than from their homes. These are reasons I can think of - they want to prevent people from doing second job, they want to maintain commercial real estate prices (even if it is artificially propped up) or most likely, it is just the good old ego thing (“you work for me, I make you do things just because I can”).
  - bradlys 11mo ago
    Ego/pet project/appearance of doing something as an executive is probably the main driver. A lot of these decisions have very little quality data behind them.
paxys 11mo ago
Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office and have desks near each other. People collaborate via in-person meetings, hallway conversations and general proximity. During covid - hiring is mostly remote since companies figure they don't have to be constrained by geography anymore. Employees work at home and collaborate over Zoom meetings. It's difficult at first but everyone adjusts. Productivity is allegedly lower, partly due to the remote nature, partly because employees are slacking off. Now - employers start mandating return to office. Teams are still distributed, so rather than collaborating via physical proximity employees have to spend their day trying to find meeting rooms and sitting on Zoom, just in the office instead of their homes. Is the company actually more productive now? Some McKinsey consultant has a slide deck showing that it has gone up from 6.5 to 7.2, so the bosses all pat themselves on the back.
- kobieps 11mo ago
  I literally had a customer decline a meeting today with this as the reason: "Couldnt find a proper space to conduct the meeting"
  - toomuchtodo 11mo ago
    Literally doesn’t matter to the people making these decisions. It’s unfortunate.
    - wiseowise 11mo ago
      Why would it even matter to him? This fucking clown will be gone in a couple of years after collecting a fat check.
- dexwiz 11mo ago
  I work in a post Covid office and even with about 1 to 6 ratio of desks to rooms, along just as many fart pods, it can be a struggle to find space during peak hours.
  - 11mo ago
closeparen 11mo ago
It's mystifying, but pretty much the entire tech leadership class has a deep conviction that taking Zoom calls on Airpods from your desk or a random corner of the office is the ideal way of working.
- mso3i 11mo ago
  There is no tech leadership class. Things have to stay stable long enough for a leadership class to emerge. In tech that is not possible. They are just leaves in the wind.
  - subulaz 11mo ago
    i understood that reference... and, like Wash, feel like i'm "flying" a stone at gravity's whim while i pretend to be in control. tech leadership at a lot of corps do the exact same thing most days. a good reason to find your tribe asap, get out of corp, and assert some control.
  - paxys 11mo ago
    Not true anymore. Every large tech company is now filled to the brim with career managers.
    - subulaz 11mo ago
      in case this is not sarcasm... tech managers != tech leaders. most are one, some are neither, and a small minority are both. i have works for more than 20 tech managers in 30+ years, have managed technologists (ops, app-dev, network, infra, etc.) multiple times, and have hired and fired tech managers. i can count the genuine tech leaders+managers i've met on one hand. fewer around than ever nowadays.
      - simoncion 11mo ago
        > in case this is not sarcasm... tech managers != tech leaders. I agree that being management doesn't make one a leader. Anyone who has been in the industry for five, ten years knows that a leader may or may not have a management title. However. It has been the fad for many, many years now for Management to call itself Leadership. [0] This makes it slightly ambiguous, but not at all incorrect to refer to the "management class" as the "leadership class". [0] I guess their little, tiny, incredibly fragile egos got overly bruised by the years of derogatory commentary aimed at clueless managers, and they -because of their tiny, inadequate brains- decided that A Big Rebrand would change the nature of reality.
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people? You'll cross-pollinate across functions. Or at least increase the chances of that happening. Not saying that's worth the tradeoff. But my time in the office often finds serendipitious value in random off-team conversations, not scheduled time.
- bigmattystyles 11mo ago
  I think you're going to get downvoted to oblivion but as far as I'm concerned, that's been my impression as well.
- wmeredith 11mo ago
  This is the huge benefit of in-person work. Personally I've not found it worth the tradeoffs, but it cannot be discounted.
- Aeolun 11mo ago
  I’ve had that happen like a grand total of 5 times in 15 years of work. In which kind of companies or offices do these things happen?
  - gedy 11mo ago
    For me it's been like 1-2 times in 25 years, if that
  - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
    > which kind of companies or offices do these things happen? Frankly, the ones that tend to play, goof off and shoot shit together. And it’s not necessarily companywide nor evenly distributed. But it’s something I value tremendously in work cultures, both because it’s productive and fun.
- dxxmxnd 11mo ago
  I am currently an engineer at Meta. No one in my office is cross pollinating among different teams. In fact most of us are not even talking to each other unless there’s a dedicated meeting time for it. This whole thing about collaborating is better in person has never been my experience, because the collaboration (at least for engineering) is most of the time better done in a document. There are, however, a few times when getting together and discussing something in person is valuable, but this is no more than maybe a couple times a month. I can definitely see this being different for other roles.
roadside_picnic 11mo ago
> What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people? The illusion of control? I mean we can pretend we don't know what this is about (well it's probably also about encouraging a reduction in force), but we do know right? By far the people who bemoaned working from home the most were people whose job doesn't typically involve any actual "work". Not saying that there weren't exceptions, but the vast majority of working engineers I knew rejoiced in finally getting heads down time, while everyone whose job is primarily "performance for leadership" hated how difficult it was to perform visible theatrics on a camera. Especially in large orgs "leadership" and "team success" are largely about optics. Being seen working in the office late is so much more important than getting any actual work done. It's only in small companies where actually shipping something has any value at all. What I don't understand is why we still pretend like this is a mystery. Recognizing this I've completely avoided working for large orgs, and continue to enjoy remote work we're I can be valued for the results of what I build (well there's always a little theater) over office productivity performativity.
- staplers 11mo ago
  What I don't understand is why we still pretend like this is a mystery. The theatrical ego has a chokehold on the world currently. No surprise it's seeping into corporate structures as well. Large grandiose parades and such.
LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
Sure, you're still effectively working remotely by being in two different offices, but The vibes are totally changed and the seats are warmer now with all those asses in them! And yes, yes your boss is working from some expensive resort in Tahiti and the CEO is in an undisclosed location on his yacht, but they're totally on board!
pbreit 11mo ago
How do you know they are random or noisy?
- Aeolun 11mo ago
  Stap into any office? It’s full of random people, and it’s full of noise. I’ve not seen places where the knowledge work wasn’t set together with the noisemakers.
  - wkat4242 11mo ago
    Yes!!! Before the pandemic we had an it floor that was quiet. Now we sit next to loudmouth sales goons barking into the phone all day. Ugh
  - ricardobeat 11mo ago
    Booking.com had low-noise offices back in the late 2010s. Engineering, product, design. Nobody taking calls on their desk, that was rude. All meetings in well-isolated rooms, some well placed noise barriers. It was pretty quiet even in an open office floor with 400 people.
  - torton 11mo ago
    I'm old enough to remember having an individual office (and, a bit later, two-person offices). Great for collaboration, because it had a whiteboard and enough space/furniture for a few people to huddle, and for focused individual work, and for meetings with remote people without disrupting anyone and without taking up a meeting room. Nowadays we have unforced poor conditions and outcomes, mostly for pretend savings on facilities. And, of course, serendipitous collaboration rarely happens when everyone is sitting with noise cancelling headphones, focusing on hitting their ambitious individual goals for the quarter/half/year.
  - pbreit 11mo ago
    Beens stepping into various offices most of the past 25 years and have not noticed that.
  - yuye 11mo ago
crooked-v 11mo ago
The benefit is that people quit and then Instagram can claim "AI efficiency" to juice the stock.
arthurjj 11mo ago
My RTO'd team of 13 is distributed across 3 office and not evenly distributed (8, 4, 1) so the probability of the person you need being in the same physical office is ~43% instead of the 0%. So overall it's better if you value in person and I say this as the 1
- rendaw 11mo ago
  There's a 100% chance that you can't work in person with your full team, so if you think in-person work is important I'm not sure how overall it can be better value, since you won't get that.
  - arthurjj 11mo ago
    You still get in person for 1-1s, small team whiteboarding and pair programming.
nobodyandproud 11mo ago
It makes over-employment more difficult; it also makes unexpected North Korean employees less likely to slip in.
Johnny555 11mo ago
>What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people? People have been asking that since companies started phasing out WFH after the pandemic. I left my last company when they made me go to the office when I worked for a dispersed team, I was the only one in this office and the rest of the team was dispersed across multiple timezones. Every team meeting was literally a zoom meeting, and conference rooms were scarce so everyone just did zoom calls at their desk. When I was WFH I didn't mind getting up in time for a 7:30am meeting to meet with the overseas team before they went home for the day, but I wasn't willing to leave the house at 6:30 to get to the office in time for that meeting, and I wasn't going to join a 7:30am meeting at home, then head to work after already putting in an hour of work. My boss agreed it made no sense, but there were no exceptions to the rule -- I left before it became mandatory 5 days a week in the office. The CEO made a big deal of going to the office every day so everyone should do it, but it didn't escape notice that the company literally opened an office just for the finance and executive team that happened to be in the same wealthy suburb that he and most of the other top execs lived. That would have turned a 45 - 60 minute commute into a 10 minute commute for him.
- RoyTyrell 11mo ago
  That timezone thing really threw one of my client's management for a loop. During covid they expanded some of their India and Philippians office presence and depending on what you're working on, you need to have regular communication with some of those folks. When they did full RTO they were trying to "make" some of the staff (engineering and management) come in at 5am so they could meet with the offshore staff before they went home but everyone bucked, as you'd expect. When folks were WFH they just went with it. Eventually executive staff just said "you guys figure it out". So they ended up changing the meetings from twice a week to once a month and now projects keep slipping deadlines, including one that went from approx on time to 2mo behind, and it's costing them serious revenue since they cant sell it yet.
  - franktankbank 11mo ago
    You really love to see it. Its a wild waste but someone is going to eat crow eventually. You know I would like to see one of these trend followers literally eat a crow, wings and feathers all of it.
amrocha 11mo ago
It’s called soft launching. Obviously it would be better if everyone was in the same office, but some people might have moved in the remote years and now their commutes are longer. So you accommodate for those people by letting them go to another office. Going forward hiring for teams is going to be collocated, so this problem solves itself with time.
globular-toast 11mo ago
There is no benefit to you. That's the point. RTO is about your employer taking more from you and giving you less. Back in the school playground we used to squabble over who is "it" or had the biggest conker or something equally pointless. There is this belief that some day people grow up. Sadly, that day never actually comes.

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.
no_wizard 11mo ago
To what end? This achieves exactly what for teams?
- SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
  As the memo says, it achieves "Building a Winning Culture"; Mosseri's judgment is that "we are more creative and collaborative when we are together in-person".
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
closeparen 11mo ago
I doubt it. A company that is doing RTO is also a company that is aggressively offshoring and expecting you to spend your early mornings/late nights on IST friendly calls. It's just a general turn against US-based software engineers as belts tighten and the balance of power in the labor market shifts.
- SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
  The vast majority of American software companies worked from the office in 2019. I understand and acknowledge that some people advocated for remote work even then, but I don't understand this idea that CEOs disagreeing can only be explained by belt tightening and disrespect for engineers.
  - closeparen 11mo ago
    Working from the office was of a completely different nature in 2019 when your coworkers were also there. By scattering headcount around the world, tech executives have fully committed to distributed teams that communicate by video call. The question now is whether you join video calls from home, or from a "hub" that hosts a minority (or perhaps none) of their other participants. There is no sign of a return to 2019 levels of Bay Area or even US share of headcount.
easterncalculus 11mo ago
This literally has never happened.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

dexwiz 11mo ago

I interviewed there in 2024. Said no because they said I would have to commute from SF to Menlo Park 4 days a week. They explicitly said I could not work from the SF office before I even asked.

kvirani 11mo ago
Do you think that was a hiring manager specific preference or an overall HR policy thing? Shitty nonetheless.
- dexwiz 11mo ago
  It was before matching so I am guessing overall HR policy.
  - bradlys 11mo ago
    That doesn’t make sense. In 2024, you could choose any location while matching. You just wouldn’t get any matches if there was no one hiring in that location (or if your profile wasn’t suitable to any, etc.). Your recruiter was being stupid or failing to communicate effectively.

bradlys 11mo ago

A ton of teams are already distributed. The RTO makes no sense unless your team is already mostly in one office but that’s not how a lot of teams are. Tons of team are completely split up across multiple states/timezones. I think IG might be more local teams than distributed but I’m not sure.

akudha 11mo ago
One of the teams at my workplace has 5 members in 5 different offices. They’re still forced to come to office and attend calls via Microsoft Teams from their respective offices than from their homes. These are reasons I can think of - they want to prevent people from doing second job, they want to maintain commercial real estate prices (even if it is artificially propped up) or most likely, it is just the good old ego thing (“you work for me, I make you do things just because I can”).
- bradlys 11mo ago
  Ego/pet project/appearance of doing something as an executive is probably the main driver. A lot of these decisions have very little quality data behind them.

paxys 11mo ago

Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office and have desks near each other. People collaborate via in-person meetings, hallway conversations and general proximity. During covid - hiring is mostly remote since companies figure they don't have to be constrained by geography anymore. Employees work at home and collaborate over Zoom meetings. It's difficult at first but everyone adjusts. Productivity is allegedly lower, partly due to the remote nature, partly because employees are slacking off. Now - employers start mandating return to office. Teams are still distributed, so rather than collaborating via physical proximity employees have to spend their day trying to find meeting rooms and sitting on Zoom, just in the office instead of their homes. Is the company actually more productive now? Some McKinsey consultant has a slide deck showing that it has gone up from 6.5 to 7.2, so the bosses all pat themselves on the back.

kobieps 11mo ago
I literally had a customer decline a meeting today with this as the reason: "Couldnt find a proper space to conduct the meeting"
- toomuchtodo 11mo ago
  Literally doesn’t matter to the people making these decisions. It’s unfortunate.
  - wiseowise 11mo ago
    Why would it even matter to him? This fucking clown will be gone in a couple of years after collecting a fat check.
dexwiz 11mo ago
I work in a post Covid office and even with about 1 to 6 ratio of desks to rooms, along just as many fart pods, it can be a struggle to find space during peak hours.
- 11mo ago

closeparen 11mo ago

It's mystifying, but pretty much the entire tech leadership class has a deep conviction that taking Zoom calls on Airpods from your desk or a random corner of the office is the ideal way of working.

mso3i 11mo ago
There is no tech leadership class. Things have to stay stable long enough for a leadership class to emerge. In tech that is not possible. They are just leaves in the wind.
- subulaz 11mo ago
  i understood that reference... and, like Wash, feel like i'm "flying" a stone at gravity's whim while i pretend to be in control. tech leadership at a lot of corps do the exact same thing most days. a good reason to find your tribe asap, get out of corp, and assert some control.
- paxys 11mo ago
  Not true anymore. Every large tech company is now filled to the brim with career managers.
  - subulaz 11mo ago
    in case this is not sarcasm... tech managers != tech leaders. most are one, some are neither, and a small minority are both. i have works for more than 20 tech managers in 30+ years, have managed technologists (ops, app-dev, network, infra, etc.) multiple times, and have hired and fired tech managers. i can count the genuine tech leaders+managers i've met on one hand. fewer around than ever nowadays.
    - simoncion 11mo ago
      > in case this is not sarcasm... tech managers != tech leaders. I agree that being management doesn't make one a leader. Anyone who has been in the industry for five, ten years knows that a leader may or may not have a management title. However. It has been the fad for many, many years now for Management to call itself Leadership. [0] This makes it slightly ambiguous, but not at all incorrect to refer to the "management class" as the "leadership class". [0] I guess their little, tiny, incredibly fragile egos got overly bruised by the years of derogatory commentary aimed at clueless managers, and they -because of their tiny, inadequate brains- decided that A Big Rebrand would change the nature of reality.

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

> What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people? You'll cross-pollinate across functions. Or at least increase the chances of that happening. Not saying that's worth the tradeoff. But my time in the office often finds serendipitious value in random off-team conversations, not scheduled time.

bigmattystyles 11mo ago
I think you're going to get downvoted to oblivion but as far as I'm concerned, that's been my impression as well.
wmeredith 11mo ago
This is the huge benefit of in-person work. Personally I've not found it worth the tradeoffs, but it cannot be discounted.
Aeolun 11mo ago
I’ve had that happen like a grand total of 5 times in 15 years of work. In which kind of companies or offices do these things happen?
- gedy 11mo ago
  For me it's been like 1-2 times in 25 years, if that
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > which kind of companies or offices do these things happen? Frankly, the ones that tend to play, goof off and shoot shit together. And it’s not necessarily companywide nor evenly distributed. But it’s something I value tremendously in work cultures, both because it’s productive and fun.
dxxmxnd 11mo ago
I am currently an engineer at Meta. No one in my office is cross pollinating among different teams. In fact most of us are not even talking to each other unless there’s a dedicated meeting time for it. This whole thing about collaborating is better in person has never been my experience, because the collaboration (at least for engineering) is most of the time better done in a document. There are, however, a few times when getting together and discussing something in person is valuable, but this is no more than maybe a couple times a month. I can definitely see this being different for other roles.

roadside_picnic 11mo ago

> What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people? The illusion of control? I mean we can pretend we don't know what this is about (well it's probably also about encouraging a reduction in force), but we do know right? By far the people who bemoaned working from home the most were people whose job doesn't typically involve any actual "work". Not saying that there weren't exceptions, but the vast majority of working engineers I knew rejoiced in finally getting heads down time, while everyone whose job is primarily "performance for leadership" hated how difficult it was to perform visible theatrics on a camera. Especially in large orgs "leadership" and "team success" are largely about optics. Being seen working in the office late is so much more important than getting any actual work done. It's only in small companies where actually shipping something has any value at all. What I don't understand is why we still pretend like this is a mystery. Recognizing this I've completely avoided working for large orgs, and continue to enjoy remote work we're I can be valued for the results of what I build (well there's always a little theater) over office productivity performativity.

staplers 11mo ago
What I don't understand is why we still pretend like this is a mystery. The theatrical ego has a chokehold on the world currently. No surprise it's seeping into corporate structures as well. Large grandiose parades and such.

LogicFailsMe 11mo ago

Sure, you're still effectively working remotely by being in two different offices, but The vibes are totally changed and the seats are warmer now with all those asses in them! And yes, yes your boss is working from some expensive resort in Tahiti and the CEO is in an undisclosed location on his yacht, but they're totally on board!

pbreit 11mo ago

How do you know they are random or noisy?

Aeolun 11mo ago
Stap into any office? It’s full of random people, and it’s full of noise. I’ve not seen places where the knowledge work wasn’t set together with the noisemakers.
- wkat4242 11mo ago
  Yes!!! Before the pandemic we had an it floor that was quiet. Now we sit next to loudmouth sales goons barking into the phone all day. Ugh
- ricardobeat 11mo ago
  Booking.com had low-noise offices back in the late 2010s. Engineering, product, design. Nobody taking calls on their desk, that was rude. All meetings in well-isolated rooms, some well placed noise barriers. It was pretty quiet even in an open office floor with 400 people.
- torton 11mo ago
  I'm old enough to remember having an individual office (and, a bit later, two-person offices). Great for collaboration, because it had a whiteboard and enough space/furniture for a few people to huddle, and for focused individual work, and for meetings with remote people without disrupting anyone and without taking up a meeting room. Nowadays we have unforced poor conditions and outcomes, mostly for pretend savings on facilities. And, of course, serendipitous collaboration rarely happens when everyone is sitting with noise cancelling headphones, focusing on hitting their ambitious individual goals for the quarter/half/year.
- pbreit 11mo ago
  Beens stepping into various offices most of the past 25 years and have not noticed that.
- yuye 11mo ago

crooked-v 11mo ago

The benefit is that people quit and then Instagram can claim "AI efficiency" to juice the stock.

arthurjj 11mo ago

My RTO'd team of 13 is distributed across 3 office and not evenly distributed (8, 4, 1) so the probability of the person you need being in the same physical office is ~43% instead of the 0%. So overall it's better if you value in person and I say this as the 1

rendaw 11mo ago
There's a 100% chance that you can't work in person with your full team, so if you think in-person work is important I'm not sure how overall it can be better value, since you won't get that.
- arthurjj 11mo ago
  You still get in person for 1-1s, small team whiteboarding and pair programming.

nobodyandproud 11mo ago

It makes over-employment more difficult; it also makes unexpected North Korean employees less likely to slip in.

Johnny555 11mo ago

>What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people? People have been asking that since companies started phasing out WFH after the pandemic. I left my last company when they made me go to the office when I worked for a dispersed team, I was the only one in this office and the rest of the team was dispersed across multiple timezones. Every team meeting was literally a zoom meeting, and conference rooms were scarce so everyone just did zoom calls at their desk. When I was WFH I didn't mind getting up in time for a 7:30am meeting to meet with the overseas team before they went home for the day, but I wasn't willing to leave the house at 6:30 to get to the office in time for that meeting, and I wasn't going to join a 7:30am meeting at home, then head to work after already putting in an hour of work. My boss agreed it made no sense, but there were no exceptions to the rule -- I left before it became mandatory 5 days a week in the office. The CEO made a big deal of going to the office every day so everyone should do it, but it didn't escape notice that the company literally opened an office just for the finance and executive team that happened to be in the same wealthy suburb that he and most of the other top execs lived. That would have turned a 45 - 60 minute commute into a 10 minute commute for him.

RoyTyrell 11mo ago
That timezone thing really threw one of my client's management for a loop. During covid they expanded some of their India and Philippians office presence and depending on what you're working on, you need to have regular communication with some of those folks. When they did full RTO they were trying to "make" some of the staff (engineering and management) come in at 5am so they could meet with the offshore staff before they went home but everyone bucked, as you'd expect. When folks were WFH they just went with it. Eventually executive staff just said "you guys figure it out". So they ended up changing the meetings from twice a week to once a month and now projects keep slipping deadlines, including one that went from approx on time to 2mo behind, and it's costing them serious revenue since they cant sell it yet.
- franktankbank 11mo ago
  You really love to see it. Its a wild waste but someone is going to eat crow eventually. You know I would like to see one of these trend followers literally eat a crow, wings and feathers all of it.

amrocha 11mo ago

It’s called soft launching. Obviously it would be better if everyone was in the same office, but some people might have moved in the remote years and now their commutes are longer. So you accommodate for those people by letting them go to another office. Going forward hiring for teams is going to be collocated, so this problem solves itself with time.

globular-toast 11mo ago

There is no benefit to you. That's the point. RTO is about your employer taking more from you and giving you less. Back in the school playground we used to squabble over who is "it" or had the biggest conker or something equally pointless. There is this belief that some day people grow up. Sadly, that day never actually comes.