Comment by kkolybacz 2 days 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?
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.
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.
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.
> Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office
Just a reminder that there were plenty of great distributed teams long before Covid. I had had only a few "in office" jobs in my pre-covid career (and generally found collaboration better on remote teams, though goofing off has a bit harder to organize).
I also find it funny that somehow software engineers completely forget about the existence of open source software which worked in a more extremely distributed fashion than any remote company I've worked for at a time when IRC and email where the only tools for remote communication. Most of the most used and most successful software was written by globally distributed teams that only met face to face every few years if ever.
This timeline you are presenting applies only to large corporate jobs, where my experience has been "work productivity" always takes a back seat to organizational theater.
Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast.
Hell, I had commit rights to a popular open source “AWS Solution” when I was there and it took so long to get something approved to be pushed into the mainline that I ended up forking it for individual customers (AWS ProServe) and then eventually getting most of it merged back in later.
Now that I’m not at AWS, even though I know the team there, I doubt I could get something approved to merge back in even though I was the third highest contributor to the project for awhile.
> Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast.
You want to actually compete for fast iteration? We'll happily take you on over at ardour.org ...
Yes, there are some FLOSS projects which may take a long time to approve PRs. Even in our case, that happens sometimes when someone proposes something we're not convinced by but also cannot reject immediately.
Meanwhile, it's not unusual for comments in our discourse server to lead to direct changes in the main branch within hours.
So while FLOSS may contain examples against distributed teams, it also contains very strong, and very numerous examples that argue in favor of it.
To be fair though. There was an AWS service that didn’t have Cloudformation support. It was faster for an SA at AWS to build out Terraform support for it and get it merged into the Terraform than it was for us to just wait on CD support.
Reading this made me wonder if I have an alt account that I forgot about, because this is exactly how I think about our current state.
Hey, remote work isn't productive, lets go into an office and push all our code to github and deploy to Linux (both largely developed by distributed teams, thankfully without Zoom).
But you are right, organizational and productivity theater dominate at many companies.
Do you really have one desk per six rooms? That's pretty sparse 8)
Now the real issue is: what on earth is a fart pod?
Anyway, my (quite literally mine as in I'm the MD) tiddly company still clings to the notion that remote working is a good thing, in general. Pre-pandemic I was a sceptic and post-pandemic: I'm happy that a lot more remote working happens.
There do need to be additional controls but not of the intrusive, automated variety. I deliberately ring people up and encourage using the dog and bone and frown on email for immediate requirements.
It is a fact of modern corporate life that people will use email as it was intended: a reliable store and forward communication mechanism. A side effect is that what should be sorted out now can be ... legitimately ... punted off into tomorrow.
Not the OP but I think they mean those little phone booth pods. For if you want to join a call but you're the only one from that office so taking up a meeting room makes no sense. In our place they're tiny and stuffy (probably to prevent people hoarding them all day!). And if you fart in them it will probably hang around a long time :)
None of these executives are using data driven decisions. It’s said as much in the memo. It’s vibes based.
I suspect there’s more at play with this. Maybe they’re expecting attrition from this and that’s their actual goal. They never reveal their core intentions.
Many executive jobs are little more than “being in the office” - they have to “go to work”. This leads them to think presence = work being done - they don’t know what actual work or productivity is. If they don’t have people present to lord over then their job starts to be seen for what it really is… a suit and tie in an office and nodding while saying “hmm” at meetings.
My company's CEO comes from the sales world, and I imagine that's the case in many companies making these RTO decisions. His idea of getting work done is getting everyone in a room together, having some handshakes, sitting down, and talking something out. This is not what getting work done looks like to software engineers, and many other IC positions. The blanket RTO policies come from a lack of understanding how other people & roles work best.
This. The actual numbers show that remote workers are more productive and that fully remote companies generate outsized returns when compared to companies that RTO. Executives know this and chose to ignore it.
This is about the appearance of doing something, not actually doing something.
> They never reveal their core intentions.
Is it so hard for them to say, FU, office time now because I like it, or because we want to force attrition, or we bought all this RE and by god we are going to use it?
I mean, if they give the honest non vibe reasons, it would be the same, but at least honest.
Wall Street doesn't care as long as the stock goes up.
Customers don't care as long as they get the product.
And employees can't do anything other than vote with their feet.
So what's the downside of being honest?
> 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.
Any productivity increases come from the fact that some employees would rather quit than come back to the office. Which makes it seem like less people do the same amount of work. Until they get overworked and output plumments. But that will land outside of the measurement window.
My personal experience has been that teams were not in close physical contact since about 1994. Basically since the internet became ubiquitous. In 1999 I was working in an office in Silicon Valley and realized that I never sat across the table from any of the people I was working with. Some were in other buildings around the campus. Some were in France. Some were in the field. Some were down the hall on the same floor, but if you wandered over to talk to them chances were they weren't in their cube. So I decided to move to Montana. COVID occurred 21 years later.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
It makes over-employment more difficult; it also makes unexpected North Korean employees less likely to slip in.
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
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.
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.
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”).
I feel a lot of the noise complaints are due to open plan offices.
I've worked at a cubicle farm before. Partitions were high enough to avoid being able to see people in a sitting position, but high enough that you can still stand up and ask your neighbor a question. The cubicles were spaceous, had ample desk space and didn't feel claustrophobic or "caged in" at all. If anything, it felt like I had my own little space that I was in control of.
The partitions had steel sheets in them to allow people to use magnets to hang up documents/whatever. My cubicle walls were covered in [documents and datasheets](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzIxZmIzYjEtZGMyZi00...). Some of my colleagues had extensively decorated their cubicles with photos and tchotchkes. Others had their entire desk space littered with PCBs and tools.
Managers got cubicles on the sides of the building with windows, theirs were larger and had higher partitions, with a window filling in that extra height.
The extra desk space was great. I worked as an embedded SWE and I often needed the space for tools and the devices I was working on. The few times I needed an oscilloscope, I could easily find room for it, no need to move my setup to a lab.
Cubicles get a bad rep. It's actually quite a nice way to work, if executed properly, that is.
That said, I did have noise issues before. But that was always the same colleague. She luckily only came in on Wednesdays. She totally lacked the concept of an indoor voice while on the telephone.
Dude you’re describing Initech from Office Space. Kudos for making it sound legit and vague enough that it did take me until the end to fully identify it. But there’s no mistaking “Nina speaking. Just a moment…”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I worked at Meta nee Facebook from 2013-18, and back then there were no documents, and the only way to figure stuff out was either spelunk through the source code, or talk to people in person. So I was very surprised that they ever said they'd be doing remote, and entirely unsurprised that they are moving back towards the office.
That being said, there was no tracking of in office/remote days, it was just expected that you'd work from wherever worked best for you but (almost) everyone was based out of an office.
> 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
Obviously varies by culture. And while I've never worked for Meta, I've been at your Mountain View and New York campuses more times than I care to have been. Everything–including communal spaces–seems laid out for individual work. (This was true before the metamates nonsense, though that obviously accelerated it.)
> 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.
Are the worker bees really cross polinating? I don't even get to choose what to work on, my manager and tech lead tells me what to do and all of that is approved by the director. The everything becomes an okr and it's a huge deal to pivot half way through the half. I'm told this is pretty typical.
I have quite literally never, not once, "cross-pollinated" ideas in office. I'm not saying it has never happened, but anecdotally even when my entire team is there, other teams are simply not working on the same scope of work that we would be at the time, so there's no cross pollination of any kind.
I mean, I've heard good ideas being discussed, but at the end of the day we all have our in-progress projects and tickets, and future projects already planned out, so those good ideas never make it to fruition because everyone is busy anyways and doesn't have the time or resources to do anything about it. So in reality, those "cross-pollination" talks become nothing more but socialization moments, which is fine, but to force everyone into a miserable commute just to achieve a bit of socializing is insanity to me.
I think you're going to get downvoted to oblivion but as far as I'm concerned, that's been my impression as well.
>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.