Employees given three months to return to Facebook office
techradar.com
techradar.com
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/facebook-delays-return-to-of...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/09/facebook-will-let-all-employ...
> The need to request formal permission also applies to employees offered pay cuts in return for staying at home in cases where the local cost of living is lower than around the office where they are usually based.
To start, this claim is unsourced.
I'm having a hard time interpreting this claim, but it seems like _maybe_ it's saying that FB is requesting individuals who were already approved for remote work to RTO. But it also seems like they're just describing the existing process, which is that if you want to remain remote beyond January 2022, you must be explicitly approved for remote work. Anyway, I can't speak for everyone, but as a remote approved FB employee, I've received no such request to RTO.
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10064865/Facebook-g...
The same people who own interest in commercial real estate and companies like Starbucks.
No idea why they would be so concerned with pushing their agenda.
Then I'm more inclined to believe you. (Hence my initial wording "this policy may have changed.")
If you're making a change where you're unsure if someone can perform a physical recovery, you're flying without a chute. It works most of the time until it doesn't.
(infra/physical colocation/hosting/sysadmin in a previous life for ~20 years)
EDIT: @mprovost (HN is throttling me, so I have to reply to your comment here):
Absolutely. It's a combination of experience, context, and wisdom. I myself have made changes that I believed were trivial but, because I lacked context, data loss or an outage occurred. These are painful lessons to learn. A culture of psychological safety and commitment to continual process improvement are key, with shared responsibility between contributors and the org. You are going to fail, but you shouldn't get cold sweats when you do as long as you did your best to derisk.
If you do the cost benefit of allowing people to work from home vs the cost of this one outage, I bet the outage is more expensive.
I mean if it happens naturally (say, meeting up after work for a drink) then sure but I don’t do it as a matter of course.
That said, I don't know what's so wrong with telephones.
Do you have all your coworkers' personal phone numbers?
My manager has my phone number, as does HR, and I imagine this is a standard situation at nearly every company.
The point was to make sure that, even if all of our infra including third-party IP comms and chat providers was hard down, we'd still be able to talk to one another and figure out what to do about it.
For an organization on Facebook's scale to overlook something so fundamental implies lots of things about the collective blind spots of its engineering and operational culture. None of those things make me less glad I so assiduously avoid even using any of its products, to say nothing of relying on them - at least to the extent that I'm able to avoid it, given their apparent ability to break half the anglophone Internet more or less at whim.
Mostly I was hoping to hear some amateur enthusiasm gloating about invisible light resilience.
Where I live there is a General Motors amateur radio club. The club is not owned or run by GM, but GM sponsors it by allowing repeater equipment on top of their building, and presumably monetary and other donations over the decade. Many of the members are current and former GM employees but you don't have to be affiliated with GM in any way (or even have an amateur radio license) in order to join.
There are lots of amateur radio clubs associated with a company for sponsorship/community outreach reasons, I assume the Facebook one is the same. (And I have to assume because they don't seem to have a website that I could find.)
To reply to another comment in this thread, you can break nearly all FCC rules if you need help in a life-threatening situation. Facebook being down was NOT a life-threatening event as defined by the FCC, even if their services being unavailable indirectly lead to loss of life.
https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=1a361a6eb3d1594e6a...
Part of a SOC2 audit is demonstrating that you have a good BCP, and part of a good BCP is demonstrating that you have fallback communication mechanisms available. So, either their BCP was out of date, or possibly they just ignored it during the moment of crisis.
And you know what's excellent for that ... literal word of mouth. I'm back in the office with 5 of my coworkers right now, and when we have issues we can just talk about them, zero technology needed.
It may also mean that you need more decentralization. They put all their eggs in one basket, so they took down Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp as well as Facebook, as well as their internal network, their building security, everything. Seems that they need to look at redesign to create more resiliency even if some efficiency is lost, so they don't lose everything again at some point.
I would expect the value of dogfooding to be massively larger than the cost of internal losses in cases like this. But it's good to remember to have a plan B.
To understand that the fix is a change to equipment in a data center, and on top of that what that change needs to be, how to make that change safely (though in this situation it's hard to imagine making things worse).
Everything else I’m reading says that January 2022 was always the planned return-to-office date ( https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/facebook-delays-return-to-of... )
The claim that this was related to the recent outage doesn’t match all of the pre-outage articles that also point to the January 2022 date.
Unless someone has evidence that this is a recent change, I think this is a case of heavy editorialization by a journalist eager to capitalize on the combined anger toward Facebook and return-to-office plans.
DNS hosted on your own registrar, within your own data center for a whole host of domains. Somehow integrating your office security so that it also depends on that same DNS and running BGP updates without an emergency "undo" plan?
I hate to over-simplify but Single point of failure is the first thing you ever learn about Business Continuity. We shouldn't need to learn these lessons from a big mistake, that's what college is for.
And even if someone thinks of the problem there's usually some kind of failsafe (an override key or angle grinder) in place.
The point I think that we have to keep in mind here is that it seems that Facebook overlooked many many points of failure and was very sure of their own ability at doing everything and doing it perfectly all the time.
Anecdote from my previous life: Large corporation you would all recognize and which I won't name for obvious reasons. They ran their own data center(s) and it wasn't a side hustle to do that. One morning I come to the office and I have lots of messages about a massive outage. One of the data centers is offline. Like completely offline. I'm a bit fuzzy on some details because it's been a while but the main story went something like:
External power goes out for whatever reason (don't remember)
Batteries take over
Diesel generators start up
Batteries keep draining
Diesels are spinning
All Servers shut down
I won't pretend to know the details of FB's infrastructure, and I'm sure there was a cascade of problems that made the outage harder to fix, but it sounds like years of separate teams building on top of other layers that were "guaranteed" to be online finally collapsed into a spectacular fireball.
It's not like there were twenty different network engineers that typed the exact same command across their network. Ultimately it was one person who typed "enter" and submitted the bad change. And the problem wasn't even necessarily the change -- mistakes should be expected. The problem was the lack of a back-out strategy in case this happened.
But, more seriously, nobody plans for BGP failures, BGP is a single system, with a distributed database across the internet, so there's no redundancy for it, and to add it up, it's nearly completely invisible, most people don't even know it's there.
It's technically correct, but the article doesn't actually say that the the end of the WFH forever is _because_ of the outage, just that they are going back.
It's obvious that the first mentality was a bit reckless and only optimized growth at all costs. At some point you have to pay for that debt.
Not going to say the company name (though you might be able to figure it out based on my post history, I ask that you don't paste it here if you figure it out), but I was working for a bigass megacorporation where management told me upon being hired "we don't play the blame game here, things are going to break". That sounded cool, and about three months later, I committed some "risky" code (which passed the PR review process evidently), and it broke production for about two hours. I then got VoIP call with that same manager who yelled at me telling me that I need to be more careful because this is unacceptable.
Presumably this manager was frustrated and just needed someone to blame, so fair enough, but it's not something I ever really forgave if I'm being honest.
Many recruiter emails I have received are pushing "100% remote" - for how long I can't say as I don't answer them, but it feels like RTO is becoming more in the minority.
Of course announcing a policy change now is closing barn doors behind horses.
The whole idea of piling everyone into a "war room" doesn't really scale anyway.
The bigger problem here was just no out of band comms.
"Some reports claimed company keycards were also knocked offline, meaning employees were unable to gain access to the offices or the server rooms - with some claiming employees were forced to, quite literally, break in."
Well that would work well for people working from an office.
Does this mean that people who were approved for remote work will be forced to come back into the office? Or that people who are supposed to come into the office Jan 2022 will continue to have to come into the office in Jan 2022 (i.e., no change).
I’m no Facebook fan, but is there actual evidence of “Facebook pointing the finger at remote working”?
The subset of people that could fix the issue that caused the outage was probably .1% of the engineers at FB.
Was FB looking for an excuse to end those rules?
Anything that is simply a current policy at a company basically has to be ignored. It's a nice to have but if you "can't live without that", go look for another job or adjust otherwise.
And even stuff that _is_ in your contract is not a full on guarantee either as contracts can be amended. Which you still have to sign but they will make it very hard for you not to sign those amendments. But at least it gives you some warning when that happens. I.e. you can refuse to sign and then you have time to look for another job while they figure out how to get you fired.
Technically you're correct. If only a handful of employees migrated, they could probably be let go pretty easily. No skin off Facebook's back.
Now if hundreds or thousands of employees migrated, Facebook needs to make a decision whether enforcing the RTO or not will hurt them more. Regardless of technicalities, demanding a non-significant percentage of your workforce to uproot their lives is not an easy ask (or great look).
The article may be misleading, but if employees who were told they could WFH forever now are told to come back that is a change of policy that WILL affect employees. I don't care if you are saying that no one should have moved, there will be people that left. Hell, I work for a much smaller company that didn't state WFH forever (WFH until we tell you to come back, no idea when that will be) and we have had hundreds of people relocate that have stated they will deal with that problem when they ask us to come back.
Of course you can still move away (or do whatever else depending on what other type of policy we're talking about) but you have to be prepared to deal with the consequences.
E.g. if you work for FAANG and you base your life off of a FAANG type salary but now you move to a flyover state, the option of saying "well if you want me in the office, I quite!" is suddenly way less attractive. Unless you were prepared for that. Personally I wouldn't be but I also don't want to work for FAANG in the first place.
You have a relatively low base salary but they wave a bonus of 30% in front of you? Great! Just don't go buy a house with that bonus money (or be ready to deal with the consequences). Some of my dad's colleagues did that in the 80s. They lost their houses when the bonus was reduced/not paid any longer.
Many of us believe there are expectations of companies, contracts whether written or social that should be followed. Even if Facebook reverts their position on this to "back in office" we have the right to complain and/or leave the company (while lamenting that this significantly affects people's lives).
I'm just saying that you shouldn't have too many expectations of companies. If they really meant it, they'd put it in writing. Employment contracts in many many places are written to favour the employer in all aspects.
Another example we could use are the notice periods. You will be hard pressed to find a North American company where the notice period in the contract is longer than 2 weeks, if even mentioned explicitly at all. Never mind states that have no minimums by law. Yet there seems to be a weird "social contract" that expects employees to give a longer notice period in many cases. If you want me to give you ample notice, give me a contract that requires the same of you.
What's preventing Facebook from continuing to offer WFH to many/most employees, with a minority of critical staff required to be on-site and compensated for it if necessary?
If they wanted some on site employees to handle these kind of outages, they could just pay their top 1% to come to office or move within 15 minutes of the office or something.
(context: https://mobile.twitter.com/sheeraf/status/144509915031650305... )
A test positivity rate below 2.5%, where contact tracing definitively works.
According to the April 16, 2020 3 Phase Reopening Plan for the United States, each state should follow, "14 days of declining cases[/positivity rate] per phase and hospital capacity that exists in case you have a rebound" were the criteria for each phase; The 8 worst states for Delta variant have declining positivity rates starting about 3 weeks ago.
The virus is never going away and will spread epidemically again in the future.
At some point the population has enough T-cells though that the infection fatality rate and infection hospitalization rate is that of influenza or colds, and even though it spreads people don't wind up in the hospital that much more than usual for cold and flu season.
And we're still probably going to have vaccine stragglers for years winding up finally getting their Herman Cain Awards at some level so it'll never be zero.