Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026
(businessinsider.com)303 points by mfiguiere 2 days ago
303 points by mfiguiere 2 days 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
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!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
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.
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.
>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.”
>As a hiring manager ... it’s a little too much “doth protest”.
Have you considered evaluating your own beliefs with this perspective?
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?
Yeah, people differ, and there are different forces that can increase and decrease productivity in an office and at home. If I'm honest with myself, being remote gives me more opportunity to slack off and do whatever I want, which often is not really working. But if I'm in an office I also am less able to get in a flow state.
An ideal working environment for me would probably be working from home, alone, perhaps with some stimulants (I have severe ADHD, or at least am diagnosed as having it and perceive myself as having), a close deadline, a lot of intrinsic motivation and interest in a task, and no distractions. In practice, most of the time I find working on a laptop at a library or cafe or on a laptop/desktop in an office does push me to do more work-related stuff more frequently on an average day, since I know people near me may notice I'm spending ages on Twitter or HN or whatever and that somewhat discourages me from doing non-work things.
I don't think you deserve to have been downvoted. I love having a work-from-home job and love that I was able to get one pre-pandemic, but I also don't necessarily blame higher-ups for wanting more people to work in an office. It's complicated.
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.
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.
Pay is relative because they have to live there too. Costs of living are much higher over there. Even just healthcare, here it's free (well, paid from taxes). In the US it's a big expense. Also they get much fewer holidays (I get more than a month's worth per year).
But I would not move to the US (especially now obviously) or be without job security for double the wage. Life for me isn't about making as much money as possible, it's about enjoying my life and money is just one of the means to do that. Time is another big one.
And like the other poster said, I don't know americans who work 20 years and retire. On the contrary most I know have a 200+k$ student loan pending back home or are shuffling debt from card to card to make it look like they are paying it off.
There are no Meta employees with $200k of student debt nor any shuffling debt from card to card, except those with addiction issues (addiction can consume any amount of money).
The thing about a social safety net is that it makes life better for poor people. That's good. Praiseworthy even. Laudable.
The negative impact on economic growth and wages for high earners means the American tech workers are just richer than European tech workers. Any other analysis is a combination of wishful thinking and pseudoscience, quite frankly. Economics is science, just like biology and mathematics and physics.
Fwiw, I know a bunch of American tech workers who worked 20 years and then retired. Pretty much every person who works for Meta can name ten people like that. Those people tend to retire in Europe, where they can enjoy free healthcare while living off the incredible amount of money they made when they were young.
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.
Well really most people don't where I work. They don't make a big deal of it because the office would be overloaded.
Except the people that are super socially oriented or want to escape the family at home (I don't have one anyway), they go more than required, and keep everyone else from their work with constant chatting.
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.
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?
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!
Employees are encouraged to decline meetings that interfere with focus time.
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.
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.
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.
As others have stated, it’s the same people who didn’t do much work in the office either.
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.
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
> 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?
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.
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
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.
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!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.
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.
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?
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
Executives will insist on AI robots to sit at the desks in their leased office space, typing in code on the computers?
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.
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.
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-...
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-ba10-11acea2e0...
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
> 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.
I’m actually grateful I don’t need to worry about marketing via Instagram anymore.
I'm shutting down my retail business and being able to delete Instagram is a huge win.
> 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.
It's also impressive how fast Zuckerberg ruined Threads, does anyone still uses this? Does it still keep reverting to the algorithmic timeline?
Ha, I completely forgot about it already- that's how quickly it became irrelevant.
It‘s still being pushed via… "ads“ in between stories or posts where you see a sneak peek of a Threads post you might like.
In Canada meta pushed back (by not letting you link to or summarize recognized free press news sites) due to laws designed to encourage sharing revenue with news organizations for copying their content and posting it without their consent. The result has been a total vacuum of truth, and the platform is literally a anti-vax, agarthan racists wet dream when you open it up as a new user. It's ripe for replacement. I can't believe it's lasted this long.
As much as I dislike Meta, these laws are trash - as I understand it the Canadian law was based on the one we have here in Australia, which explicitly defines publishing a link to an article on a news site as being exactly the same (for the purposes of the law) as copying and displaying an entire article.
Then the supporters of the law said Facebook was "using" the news content by linking to a news site, as if they were actually displaying whole articles! Meta generally sucks but these laws (and the people calling for them) sucked just as much.
> agarthan racists wet dream
That one slipped my by in recent years, I'm not keeping up with the rebranding of rocks the nazi bars keep hiding under.
~ https://felixonline.co.uk/articles/slurs-hatred-and-nazi-ufo...
I'm not sure the self description as "Light hearted, mostly satirical Nazi white supremacist content not to be taken seriously" really hides the moustache.
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.
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?
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.
Surely selling off office space and turning it back into family appartments would make it feel more "lived in"?
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”
I think Instagram has pink headings and Facebook has blue. So they’re practically different companies.
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.
Covid proved that wfh works, micromanagers think otherwise, jokes on us.
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.
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.
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.~
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure that Meta don't own most of their buildings, so this wouldn't apply to them.
But it probably applies to a lot of their shareholders, and they have big influence.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
My relationship is quite long-term, it can almost get its learner's permit, and we use Instagram all the time to, like, share cute animal videos from the Explore/Reels screens to each other, share stories to our friends of whatever we're doing together, or not together, and see our friends' stories.
idk if your partner is jealous of you using one of the top five social networking apps in the world that seems a little weird and maybe your relationship is not very healthy? it's instagram, not tinder or okcupid...
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.
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.
Instagram is pretty bland, not anywhere close to TikTok in the scale of societal malaise. It can be used as a plain photo sharing app, reels is still a secondary feature, and the only place you'll find both of those things. Stories is mostly snaps from your friends if you don't follow any 'influencers'. It has replaced Facebook as they way most people in their 20-50s connect, and a handle is better than giving away your phone number.
I wish we had better ways (coming with the DMA and chat interoperability? maybe), but it's tolerable.
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
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?
It didn't fall. Productivity went up after the initial scramble.
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.