Comment by SpicyLemonZest 2 days 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.
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.
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.