> > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.

This is meaningless without knowing how productivity is being measured. It's very possible that said metric inherently favors in-person collaboration over remote collaboration - which would then skew the results of any further analysis of that metric.

This is also meaningless without knowing exactly what's being compared. I wouldn't be surprised if 3 in-person days a week was indeed more productive than 0, but what about 2? 1? 1/2? 1/30? 1/365.24? There's a lot of numbers between 0 and 3, and coming to any conclusions without understanding the actual shape of that graph is folly.

This is also meaningless without information on the wide range of in-person cultures or the wide range of remote cultures. These preliminary results could readily come about from having a remote culture that's more dysfunctional than other remote cultures and/or an in-person culture that's less dysfunctional than other in-person cultures. I've personally experienced both ranges more-or-less in full over the course of my career - as well as varying combinations of the two in hybrid environments.