Zuck: Engineers who joined Meta in-person perform better than joined remotely

Step 1: Hire >20k people using cheap money Step 2: Don't actually have them work on meaningful projects or revenue producing units Step 3: Fed says free money is gone, whole mark goes down, stocks pull back, realize that none of those projects are doing anything or making money Step 4: Lay them all off, claim that it's due to WFH not being effective, not for example the fact they were never working on products that make money or ones that even got to market.

Garbage in/Garbage out, but sure it is WFH and not the metaverse

I am single and live alone. I have a great social life and see family often. Even so, work is a vital social outlet for me. Joining a company remotely as I’ve done twice now is so much harder than joining a company where my direct teammates are in person.

There is so much less communication when not in person. Company culture is felt far smaller.

I think wfh is great for those who have been at a company for a few years, have formed relationships with their peers, and who may have personal responsibilities that are easier to manage when wfh.

New employees however miss out on so much. You don’t learn the culture (zoom/slack etiquette, company processes, who’s in charge of what, who knows what, company goals, direction, values, bets etc), you get far less mentorship (and are able to give far less when you switch to that side) and communication is severely negatively impacted (far more misunderstandings, lack of shared context, etc).

I appreciate all the wonderful benefits of wfh/hybrid. I don’t see us ever going back to in office 100%. An open floor plans with everyone talking is not a productive environment.

But we have lost a substantial amount of value in not going into the office. Making friends at work takes multiples of time longer. Forming good relationships across the company is significantly harder.

I still go in 3-4 days a week. I don’t ask anyone else to and I’m not saying it’s 100% what everyone should be doing.

But it’s something to acknowledge that I don’t feel we have.

1. The unmentioned reality is that they almost doubled in size during the WFH time. Facebook was known for hiring absolutely top talent years ago. You can’t expand indefinitely without “diluting” that top talent (same with Google fwiw). They can still be great workers, and I’m not intending to malign anyone but the top 1% of workers is different quality then top 10%. This quality affect is likely compounded by their declining reputation, making recruitment harder. I think this is something cultural that needs to be considered.

3. Younger employees perform worse than more tenured employees. WFH-only employees probably skew younger (in age and tenure). In my experience, the older you are the more likely it is you’ve worked in office the last few years even if your team doesn’t.

2. WFH may genuinely be less productive in the long run. We didn’t see an affect throughout 2020 because the world was on fire and we were all used to our office-mates already. As more new people onboard, and they don’t build the same relationships with coworkers, something could slowly be lost. When I changed jobs in 2022, my new team had known each other pre-pandemic. They worked like a well oiled machine and I was just in the background trying to help. I was far less productive, despite a welcoming “onboarding” process. WFH can be far less productive, not because remote is intrinsically worse but because it’s harder to do right at scale. Or it could just be worse, but the outcome is the same if the company can’t successfully manage it.

4. 1k of Silicon Valley’s top talent is not the same as a 100k person multinational company. The high income-per-employee world of making an app and throwing a few ads on it may be over. The world is more complicated and regulated. You need audit logs and you need AB testing and you need failovers and legal review and all sorts of things that make a big company slower than a startup. Measuring “productivity” the same way doesn’t work.

5. It can’t be forgotten that this is a post from a company about bad news where someone needs to be blamed. The blame is WFH and middle management. They need to make up something they can fix.

Add cubicles and get everyone to go back to the office and be done with it.