Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings | Hacker News Reader

Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

businessinsider.com

55 pointscodesuela99 comments

> Mark Zuckerberg pushes the benefits of coming to the office

has he stopped believing in the transformative power of the metaverse then?

Metaverse was a last ditch effort when ad market was killed by anti tracking initiatives.

I don't know why Meta exists at this point other than the momentum of a large business with loads of assets and meaningful no product.

He lives in Hawaii lol

As I understand it, he hydrofoils over to the SF office 3 days/week. #DisruptByExample

Why lie?

3700 km / 80 kph > 50h one way

You understand he spends 100h commuting every week?

As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to determine the tone or intent behind the comment without additional context. However, based on the information presented in the comment, it is possible that it could be intended as a joke or a sarcastic remark, as traveling by hydrofoil from Hawaii to San Francisco three days a week would be a highly impractical and unlikely mode of transportation. It is also worth noting that there is no public record of Mark Zuckerberg regularly commuting from Hawaii to San Francisco using a hydrofoil or any other mode of transportation.

Next level satire over here!

> or any other mode of transportation.

Of course not, he uses the transporter.

This reply is 2HN4HN. Surely you don't think it was a serious?

I am serious — and don't call me Shirley.

I thought he transcended meatspace /s

No, he just moves in and out of it like Neo.

Zuck in 2020: “FB going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale”

https://www.protocol.com/mark-zuckerberg-remote-work-faceboo...

i really wish we could see some of the data that has made him change his mind so drastically.

Ancedotally, someone close to me who works at Meta has cited several outrageous examples of WLB'ers doing almost no work. Perhaps a few bad apples spoiled the bunch.

It's just as possible to do no work while sitting in an office all day, we've all seen that

That's frustrating though. Just put those folk on notice, fire them if they dont improve, or fire their managers if they cant fix the problem. baby, bathwater, etc.

They are very aggressively doing just what you describe, too. It's not an either-or type of scenario.

ok but that just re-asks the same question - if you remove the people-doing-nothing factor (by firing them) then what is the motivation for RTO?

I get the feeling that remote employees do less work in general, except for the few who really make an effort to stay connected and on top of stuff despite WFH. I've been guilty of this at times, and when I got back into gear, I noticed how slowly everyone else responded to stuff. It's not just a few people going AWOL and ruining it for everyone.

Is people immediately responding to you a measure of the work they do? Does it seem productive they are interrupting whatever they were working on and losing their train of thought to answer your questions?

I know my team has had the talk that Teams is an async communication method, and that we'll get back to each-other when we have spare brain cycles. The message is instant, but there's no expectation the response will be.

No, but I expect someone who has committed to a joint project to pay attention to code or design reviews and respond within a week. Which started happening less often.

If people are going AWOL for more than a week you need to start firing.

They're not AWOL, they just started being less responsive, missing more things, and generally talking less. Pretty often I'll have no idea what most of my teammates are doing. I know they're working on something is all.

Just as a counterpoint of anecdata, I saw more or less the opposite behaviour when I was at Dropbox during the pandemic -- I heard from my coworkers more than I ever did working in-office, and was better-connected to the work they were doing. I personally felt more productive, and most of my team seemed pretty productive.

The downside is that a junior teammate was probably less effective than they could have been because of a lack of in-person mentoring -- their learning was slower than I would have expected in-office, but, then, that could be this particular person rather than remote work.

I don't doubt your experience, to be clear -- I just mean to say that I think the situation is more complex than "people are less productive" or "people are more productive."

My first SWE jobs were remote too, as well as one after 2020, and it worked great. I should have mentioned that earlier. Was just thinking about my main big-tech job where things were/are lackluster.

Seems like that's a failure to set and enforce expectations.

I did tons more work in 2021 when I was WFH the whole year. I built a shed and did several other large scale home improvement projects, mostly on my parents' properties. I liked to say that I was the highest paid day laborer in town. It helped keep me from going insane from being trapped at my desk at home for over a year. In early 2022 I found an in office job and it's been much better.

This is why I want to see the data though, I’m not that interested in “feelings” or anecdotes at this stage of the industry-wide discussion :)

There isn't really a measure of SWE productivity. Even granular things like individual promo are more based on what others say than on any stat (unless it's Twitter and they use LoC).

I feel like you overestimate how little people do in office.

The power dynamic does not require evidence, hence it being the root cause requiring a fix.

i know that's the generic thing to say, and its not untrue. But in this specific case i am curious what went into this decision, as I still have some small respect for the builder focused culture he created at FB for at least the first ~half of its life.

> builder focused culture he created at FB for at least the first ~half of its life

I loved that phase as well. Their culture changed drastically post 2016 elections and they grew too fast and too broad during Covid.

I think companies are trying to use the current economic environment as leverage to claw back some rights their workers have gained since 2020. It’s all about control, nothing to do with your output as an employee.

This is kind of an odd way to frame this. The increase of remote work, at Meta at least, was not a result of some kind of workers vs. management struggle in which workers temporarily gained an upper hand. It was the result of an exogenous event (the pandemic) forcing an on-the-fly experiment.

It was forced by the pandemic. Workers had to stay home, as required by governments, and companies had no choice but to adapt. In that time workers gained a right that only a small number of them could convince employers to give them before. It’s got to the point where a large number of people would quit their job rather than work in an office and now that that’s a risky proposition, companies can take the opportunity to remove that right from workers with less risk they’ll quit.

Your use of the word "right" is pretty far afield of how most people (lawyers, in particular) would use it. What you're describing is better described as an "emergency measure", "benefit", or "privilege".

If anything, companies would favor remote work because it allows them to undercut the pay required for local talent.

Meta needs its best engineers to be highly motivated in uncertain times. Otherwise innovation will be harder to come by.

All the best engineers I ever worked with so far all favor remote work because it increases code quality, throughput, and happiness.

Meta will be disrupted, seeing as whatever Meta tech they’re building isn’t even good enough for their own employees to dogfood for better remote work experience.

I'm a big advocate of remote work, but my role has changed it's value significantly:

* As an IC, remote is amazing. It gives me distraction free space to focus and be productive. With moderate process, I'm able to be extremely productive and unblock myself.

* As a manager, remote can be challenging when trying to drive cross-team/cross-org impact - especially on ambiguous projects. It's far more challenging to drive outcomes when you can't simply walk into someone's office for a quick conversation . Good process can help with this, but most companies don't reward for this.

As a senior manager who's job is entirely cross-team/cross-org change management, I can assure you remote hasn't made things much harder. Orgs have always been geographically diverse (show me an org that doesn't have to coordinate across multiple sites and I'll show you an org that isn't big enough to have these issues in the first place) and managing change in remote parts of the org was always hard and always necessary.

I generally agree with everything you say. It aligns with my experience as well. Once you hit a certain size, people are in different locations no matter what.

The difference with remote-only is _everyone_ is in the hard bucket. That includes the people who you work most closely with.

While it's not insurmountable, it can add friction.

Sure, but my comment was with respect to managers, not ICs.

For ICs, I agree, distributed teams can face coordination challenges due to increased friction, poorer communication practices (if they haven't adapted well to remote communication patterns), etc. Personally, my ideal world is teams that are geographically co-located but working remotely. That minimizes things like timezone challenges while also giving the team the option to meet face-to-face when they find it makes sense.

But management does not (or should not) require that level of highly engaged, coordinated work. Hell, pre-pandemic, the vast majority of my interactions were already remote because, outside of my direct reports (with whom my relationship is largely about providing strategic direction and then delegating responsibility so they can get the real work done), the people I work with represent a cross-section of the company's functions, and thus the company's offices.

But hey, maybe what remote is doing is exposing those micromanagers, or organizations, that rely on heavy-handed top-down hierarchy who are finding it difficult to adapt.

In which case I say good riddance.

This post contradicts itself. Basically, it seems to suggest that whatever benefits your role is what needs to be done.

However, given that there are far more staff employees, wouldn’t it make sense to optimize for their output?

I could have done better elaborating on the conundrum.

Ultimately, companies are looking for outcomes (e.g. financial return). Outputs are an important part of outcomes, but not the goal in of itself. Outputs also need to be working towards valuable goals. Without value, outputs are worthless.

This creates a conundrum where you need to find a proper balance between the large quantity of people who need to make the outputs and the fewer number of people who need to guide the value.

Can you give some examples of ambiguous projects? That doesn't sound like a particularly fruitful endeavor to begin with.

The place I work for hasn't fully embraced remote for in house staff, since lockdowns it's now 2 days a month in the office but we have hired an agency to help with an app rebuild. We've got 5-6 people from the agency working from Spain, Hungary, Poland and the UK and they're brilliant. Really knowledgable about our specific niche with loads of experience in related areas. I have no idea how we'd find people this good in the UK let alone ones tied to commute distance of the office.

I can only assume the huge companies like Meta are wanting to reduce HR overhead of dealing with different countries and states employment laws, taxes etc.

Larger companies have economies of scale that enable dealing with these laws easier.

Smaller companies have to use something like Deel.

That hypothesis doesn't sound that convincing - especially since multiple Americans I know who wanted to join big companies pre-pandemic did so because of the access to living in different places outside of America.

Suddenly all these layoffs from the tech industry now make sense. Companies view the WFH movement and the rights which the workers have gained over the past three years as a threat to their very existence. The layoffs combined with a mandatory return to office will discourage any sort of dissent.

Do they though? I see the WFH movement as a threat to the existence of my job. If the entire IT department works from home, what's stopping the company from moving it to India, Bangladesh or Pakistan? If you live in North America or Europe then I feel like you should fight against WFH, since a lot of smart people in the world would gladly do your job for half the salary.

If that was true, why don't Meta and all the others simply hire people from those countries, like they offshored production? In some cases they even set up physical offices there to try to do exactly as you say. Yet they keep coming back to more expensive workers.

Because WFH didn't work for them.

My opinion as someone who's never been a megacorp exec: WFH should work, but they long ago set themselves up around some kind of over-collaboration with too many cooks in the kitchen, then with WFH they just introduced a big latency factor to it without fundamentally changing how they work (which would've been too risky).

I get this. Work requires every single PR to receive 2 reviews. It's not so bad in office because you just pull up a chair and have a discussion. But having to do it remote is infuriating and painfully slow. It takes hours at best, days on average to get a review, and then you make the changes and have to wait hours/days again for the next round. It's especially bad when a reviewer just isn't sure what something does so they leave a question and don't approve. Now you have to go through the whole process just to have them read and approve.

And this is just one scenario. There are so many things that seem to just grind to a halt when you can't just go talk to someone. You have to instead try to book a meeting which is so much friction that you avoid doing it if at all possible.

Code reviews are the basic thing that started taking longer, yeah. Also the system architectures tend to have multiple people owning one thing, vs a more distributed setup where one person has total authoritah over a service or two and just makes sure they talk well to the others.

Have you ever tried to manage outsourced work?

Trust me: the problems with outsourcing have almost no overlap with the challenges of remote, on-shore work.

Think: timezones, talent quality, language barriers, cultural differences, just to name a few.

> India, Bangladesh or Pakistan

Many of the best you can find from cheaper countries already moved to US or EU, or are willing to move.

Also, while I'm all for remote work, time zones different are a mess to manage.

To what "rights", specifically, are you referring? How were they "gained over the past 3 years"? There is a weird strain of thinking in this thread that tries to frame this as some kind of Marxian labor-capital power struggle. But that framing doesn't really fit the facts.

Maybe rights is the wrong word. 'Leverage' is what I meant.

Might makes right ;)

Paywall blocking the article for me, but... I considered changing jobs to FB about a year ago. The recruiter was saying that they're remote-first and plan to stay that way.

Recruiters are there to get you hired, not to tell the truth. I imagine the messaging internally for recruiting teams has changed drastically.

Is there anyone who still wants to work at facebook at this point? The company that is laying off thousands, that has wasted billions on a metaverse that no one wants, not to mention one that has helped rip apart the fabric of society? And now doesn’t want you working from home? Is it really worth the money at this point?

As long as they pay top dollar, many people would. For many, works is not a question of morals, principles, or company values. It's a question of collecting tokens into their bank account at the highest velocity possible. Meta is still one of the top payers in the market, so people will keep lining up to work there.

Wasn't about money for me

I doubt the recruiter would have known anything different. A lot of these sudden RTO initiatives appear to be top-down things, not something recruiters would have known about a year in advance.

Well, a year ago they were also hiring. It's entirely possible that plans changed.

Remote work was supposed to be part of the long-term vision straight from the CEO, tied together with the Metaverse stuff. Said the recruiter. Other companies said much vaguer things. I'd expect recruiters saying they support WFH without mentioning the risk of that going away, but Facebook recruiting was making bolder claims (which ofc I took with a grain of salt).

Maybe this means the Metaverse is being abandoned.

This isn't as nefarious as everyone makes it out to be. There are articles that state Meta has hard data that people who start as Remote workers at Meta significantly underperform those that don't. In light of that data, they're pausing the experiment and working to understand what the data is saying.

If their data is solid enough to justify it, they should publish it.

Until they do so, I remain deeply skeptical. It’s all too easy to engineer measurements or interpret data to support the outcomes you already want.

If the data is truly so revealing, show it to the world.

I'd love to see it too, but don't you think the sentiment is a little entitled?

Meta is a private company that can do whatever it wants and Zuck doesn't need to justify anything. He's also not being too egregious here. He's stopped hiring new remote, but hasn't forced any current remote people back into the office. What right do we have to demand more from them?

I’m free to demand whatever I’d like, and they’re free to ignore my demands. “Entitled” is an odd way to frame the interaction to me.

As I had written a long time back as Facebook slowly dies, we will see the monster thrashing and causing destruction in its wake. Trying to lobby for banning TikTok, getting rid of remote, they will try everything now. The metaverse idea failed and now they are completely lost.

"Meta is confused! It hurt itself in its confusion!"

Work on the metaverse but in-person.

Come work in the office meatspace on the metaverse

Arguably I'm not quite done mulling over this, but I've started to wonder if the insistence that work-from-home isn't working, isn't an indication of failed management.

While software developers and similar roles have rather easily adapted to working from home, some managers haven't been able to keep up. I suspect this is because many of them weren't great manager to begin with. They struggle to do project planing, follow ups on current tasks and keeping the job queues full. Forcing people back into the office is an attempt to revert to an environment that hides poor management skills, even if it's worse for everyone else.

The success of "work from home" seems to me to be very much dependent on the management and culture of a company and Facebook may simply not have a management layer that can deal with developers not being at the office or working at odd hours.

While it may be controversial, I like that some companies are trying Work from Office, for multiple reasons:

It forces companies to tap into a smaller talent pool locally, which can include more junior employees that may require training. This makes the company more inclusive and gives opportunities to those who might not otherwise have access to them.

Let's not forget that one of the most successful companies in the world, OpenAI, operates mostly from the office. For one, if there truly is an advantage to remote work, then companies that embrace it will naturally outperform those that don't. However, the fact that Meta and other companies are requiring employees to return to the office suggests that there may be benefits to in-person work that can't be replicated remotely.

My company choose an hybrid option that I find interesting. It is remotely only, but hires only locally.

> My company choose an hybrid option that I find interesting. It is remotely only, but hires only locally.

Oh, the worst of both worlds. The talent pool of one city and reasonable commutes, combined with the great communication and innovation of video calls looking up someone's nose.

> It forces companies to tap into a smaller talent pool locally…

But this is meta we’re talking about who are deeply embedded in the one place on earth every software developer wants to go to get the best job opportunities.

They might deny it on “moral grounds” but, yeah…

>> one of the most successful companies in the world, OpenAI

How are you measuring success?

ChatGPT is the fastest growing consumer product ever created, by a large margin. That’s pretty successful.

I truly appreciate the negative climate impacts of Work from Office, the faster we can accelerate global climate change the better!

Great job humans. Keep encouraging more daily commuters and contributing to greenhouse gases instead of making things better through technology. I am sure the next generations will thank us for this and not even showing the willpower to look at the issue objectively. /s

Before the pandemic I never touched my car Monday to Friday, I was strictly on the subway. I didn't even have a parking pass for work.

Since working from home, I drive around the suburbs almost daily Monday to Friday for lunch/errands to get out of the house.

People make weird assumptions.

It sounds like you may live in one of the few cities in America with public transportation

The only thing I am assuming is that back to the office will increase number of car commuters - are you saying this is a weird assumption? I think it is a no brainer.

Office commuting is the most viable public transport service. Trains would use a negligible amount of power per passenger. It might even be more efficient to take a train to an office than to heat your home.

Metaverse for thee but not for me

WFH may very well be a trap for companies to identify their "least loyal" employees. I've heard in business that if you're not at the table you're not involved. I can see a future where the same will be said about WFH: If you're not at the office you're not involved, a team player, or someone to keep.

Why in the future? It is already the case in a lot of companies that are not able to make WFH and office work in parallel, especially on the information sharing, on the spot decision making and so on. My personal biais says that most companies actually failed to transform to viable remote-oriented companies and are not ready to remove the bandaid and bring everyone back to the office.

So what? Job hopping has been the norm for so long.

I don't want to be kept. Even if they wanted to keep me, they most likely wouldn't make it anyway.

I don't blame them. Were entering a bear market, they have disadvantaged themselves with metaverse (although their hand was forced when ad market was nuked).

It's a hectic market where job seekers and employers are about to get tight.

You'd think then, entering a bear market, you'd want to keep your best people happy by letting them WFH.

But maybe they're going the HPE route and trying to cut staff via attrition. When I was at HP in 2014, Meg closed all satellite offices and got rid of most WFH- this lead to overly cramped offices as an abundance of employees were dragged back in.

A lot of employees quit or simply took early retirement as a result.

These are new jobs. My pet theory is that meta is a business with no product or purpose at the moment.

Once they know what they want to do to remain a business they will hire good people for that new product.

I suspect though that "good people" for someone like Meta are usually head hunted and will be offered bespoke contracts from day 1.

All tinfoil hat speculation on my part to be honest.

I follow, that makes sense.

I really wonder when Meta will fail. I stopped using Facebook over a year ago (still use Messenger).

This goes to show that it doesn't take talent to be one of the worlds richest. It just takes luck. And Zuck has run away from what made him so lucky. He will fall.

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