Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

The mixed messaging is pretty stunning. Pushing the metaverse, but simultaneously pushing "be at the office". Then seniors leaders spending more time on LLM projects than on the metaverse concept. All from their new remote homes rather than the office.

View on HN

I think it’s getting toward that dystopian future where we are forced to Jack into the matrix only from regulated spots in the physical world.

So rather than just putting on your goggles from wherever you are and working, Meta wants you to drive into the office, sit in a tiny cubicle, put your goggles on and work there.

Hopefully it’s just stupidity and culture clash and not maliciousness.

It’s similar to an early push at my org for “return to office” that involved everyone coming in and zooming all day with people in mostly different spots. Some people like this, but for many it seemed like a waste.

You left out getting paid (well) every two weeks and receiving options that are increasing in value as the company becomes more efficient. It’s not personal, it’s not stupidity it’s just business and there are hundreds of thousands of developers who are willing and capable of replacing any of us.

The alternative is to start your own business. If you did and generated more revenue while your employees were in the office based on previous data, I think you’d end your remote work policy for all but the people who are irreplaceable to your revenue stream.

+1. It is important to put it in context.

Meta can be shitty to its employees... but tech in general (including Meta) can also still be better than other jobs.

On the other hand, the value of stability (aka "every two weeks") appears to be decreasing as it becomes apparent a lot of tech management has no strategic clothes, and the end result of that is going to be 1/3 of the company being laid off.

Or as the quip goes, 'Anyone can make money in a bull market.'

> options that are increasing in value as the company becomes more efficient.

I feel it's more like options that are recovering lost value. Recovering after admitting mistakes with the metaverse concept and over hiring.

> there are hundreds of thousands of developers who are willing and capable of replacing any of us.

You're basically describing a Prisoner's Dilemma.

Who runs the prison?

> The alternative is to start your own business. If you did and generated more revenue while your employees were in the office based on previous data, I think you’d end your remote work policy for all but the people who are irreplaceable to your revenue stream.

I think it’s simpler than this and if my goal is maximum productivity to recognize that different work modes get me there. I think some work and people combo (eg, software dev and data work) is well-suited for remote work. So I’ll actually outperform in office companies in my field by strutting my work culture to maximize this.

I’d certainly start my own org if needed. Or more likely just choose to work with others who have done the same.

That is too defeatist. There isn't an unending pool of potential employees that FB wants to hire. The company is getting less efficient because they are not negotiating effectively. Remote work is a powerful bit of leverage for recruiting and retention, and FB has flushed it.

> If you did and generated more revenue while your employees were in the office based on previous data, I think you’d end your remote work policy for all but the people who are irreplaceable to your revenue stream.

This is confusing "happened in overlapping time periods" with "happened because of". What if you generated less revenue during a period where TikTok was eating your lunch, Apple changed privacy controls which impacted the targeted ad landscape, your CEO was focused on VR, and also lots of people were WFH? From the stories I've heard from Meta, the issue was way more that there were a lot of strategically questionable projects than that staff were less efficient at pursuing them because of WFH.

> What if you generated less revenue during a period where TikTok was eating your lunch, Apple changed privacy controls which impacted the targeted ad landscape, your CEO was focused on VR,

The underlying commonality here is out of touch, uncreative, and inept executives. Why is TikTok eating Facebook's lunch? Because they spent their considerable engineering talent trying to squeeze ever more money out of their users via advertising than making compelling products.

Apple impacting their revenue by allowing the users, of all people, to be aware of and control data sent to third parties (Facebook). They doubled down on surveillance capitalism and when Apple simply made their collection opt-in they lost a ton of revenue. Apple didn't even block Facebook, they just made it clearer to users exactly what Facebook was collecting.

And then the CEO is off making stupid bets on VR. The Metaverse is conceptually bankrupt. Instead of letting users create environments and content from the bottom up and fully control how their virtual world and self work they created a curated top down shitty theme park.

Facebook spent years squandering their engineering talent on bullshit. Working from home has zero to do with their management failures. In fact, for a company like Facebook whose every product is tied to communication, a requirement for engineers to be in an office should be seen as the massive fucking failure of mission that it is.

If their platform was worth a fraction of what it's valued at (by Wall Street) Facebook should hardly need offices. They should be able to dog food all of their own products to communicate and collaborate with ease. Demanding everyone return to offices is a signal that either their executives either don't believe their own bullshit and/or realize their platform is actually garbage for communication and collaboration.

It’s not personal, it’s not stupidity it’s just business and there are hundreds of thousands of developers who are willing and capable of replacing any of us.

I agree that it's just business, and that ultimately what employees at most large companies are paid for -- is to smile, and eat boneheaded apparently blatantly hypocritical directives from upper management (in the latter sense, referring specifically to the attempt to drag mid-level employees back to the office, while top lieutenants are apparently exempt).

But I don't see why we're not allowed to call it "stupid" (or to apply even stronger words) when that's plainly what it is.

The alternative is to start your own business.

Or join a company with more manageable levels of cognitive dissonance.

"boneheaded and apparently ..."

> [..] there are hundreds of thousands of developers who are willing and capable of replacing any of us.

Where are all these developers and why are they available? Everyone I know is either already working for someone they like or wouldn't consider Meta anyways. My guess is that Meta will have a tough time hiring if/when they get past their current problems.

"The alternative is to start your own business."

Or, you know, for employees to push back on a policy that's bad for a majority of employees rather than "look at me, I'm a rugged individual who can start my own business."

It may not be personal but these forcing people to commute to work on a virtual reality platform where they don't actually believe in remote work / virtual reality is stupid.

Seems to me if I was leading a "Metaverse" type project I'd be wanting my developers in that environment and making it good enough for "in person" collaboration so it will succeed for everyone.

(I am not a big believer in Meta or its vision for this but if someone could develop a viable platform that made remote collaboration feel more like in-person collaboration it'd be very exciting.)

> Meta wants you to drive into the office, sit in a tiny cubicle, put your goggles on and work there.

They want you to sit in an open office, which is even worse imo.

The cubicle walls are virtual.

Nope, no longer "open" office.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-metas-push-to-solve-the-...

This is one of the funniest things I've seen yet from the RTO movement.

It's a cubicle, but smaller! And someone could steal 1/4 of it at any time! Brilliant.

To make it doubly funny, I'd actually love a few of these panels for my home office — they look great for just mounting on the walls to quiet things down a bit. I just bought a bunch of those hexagonal acoustic panels that are marketed to Twitch streamers for the same purpose, but this thing that Meta made looks even better.

They should just brand it as a "Metaverse Pod" and sell it directly. Maybe they could probably even book the revenue under their Metaverse unit.

> It’s similar to an early push at my org for “return to office” that involved everyone coming in and zooming all day with people in mostly different spots. Some people like this, but for many it seemed like a waste.

Would have made sense in the early 2000's. Back in the days, corporate HQs had fast networking. Even lugging a machine home, doing anything over 56k would have been a pain. Now folks have dedicated fiber going straight to their router.

Heh yeah even in the mid 2000s I at one point lived directly across the street from the office. I would get calls sometimes on the weekend to the tune of "hey man can you just run in real quick and check something for me?" because it was just such a PITA to use remote tools in those days. I think the tool of that era was WinVNC IIRC, though there were slight improvements every other year or so until RDP became the defacto standard.

Also, at work you generally had much better equipment, a bigger monitor, and later multiple, etc. Nowadays the reverse may be true. I asked the office for a replacement monitor after one of mine kicked the bucket, and they sent me home a 1920x1080 monitor, which compared to my thunderbolt and 2560x1440 dell, looked like a window back in time 10 years.

> I asked the office for a replacement monitor after one of mine kicked the bucket, and they sent me home a 1920x1080 monitor

I'm fully remote and my job sent me a monitor, keyboard, and mouse along with my work laptop. The keyboard, mouse, and monitor are all garbage. They're just e-waste to me so I use the laptop stand alone.

It's 2023. Employers know developers stare at their screens all day. Giving them shitty 1080p screens is an obliviousness bordering insulting.

More Brazil than The Matrix I'd venture.

I've got a friend who works for a government agency up here in BC, Canada. She's been all remote for years, but they now want her (and everyone else) in the office 2 days a week, likely going up to 3. Problem is, the office is almost a 2-hour drive, one way, from home, and she's not doing anything there that can't be done from home. Her manager (who has no power over the policy itself) thinks he has a solution though; there's a different government office in her city that she could probably work at instead, at least most of the time. She doesn't know anyone there, and there's no work done there related to her work (let alone anything she couldn't do at home), but they think it could check the "be in the office" box.

No defense of meta, but this doesn’t seem like a contradiction. If they thought the metaverse was done and ready to use for work, they wouldn’t need to invest in building it. Seems a bit like wondering why the construction management team doesn’t just use the office building they’re constructing rather than a trailer.

I was assuming the metaverse was an extension/improvement on doing things remotely, rather than a pre-requisite for it to work at all. Meaning you would have to believe remote is a solid concept to start with. And, there's the obvious contradiction that working remote seems fine for a lot of the senior leadership.

If you’re $13.7 billion into a project and can’t even dogfood it internally, you’re at least $13.6 billion beyond where you should be.

About $6 billion for everything above the waist, $6 billion for legs. Toes: another $6 billion, and the world is Meta's oyster.

Zuckerburg was always a bit of a hypocrite. "Facebook's mission is to create a more open and transparent world", while simultaneously buying the 4 properties around his Palo Alto estate so that he'd have privacy from the neighbors and general public.

Seems like a pretty stretched comparison. Transparency and fairness can be applied to different topics and domains. It's like saying that If Zuckerberg really believed in transparency, he should work naked and have a public webcam in his bedroom.

I don't know that Facebook is living up to an ideal of fairness and transparency, but I don't think bad comparisons really shed any light on the topic

To be fair, he bought them off a guy who was trying to rent them to tourists with a chance to live next to Mark Zuckerberg.

If they cared about the metaverse then they'd be dogfooding it and insisting all meetings happen there.

They tried. But employees apparently rebelled.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/6/23391895/meta-facebook-ho...

Their metaverse sucked and nobody wanted to use it.

You can’t kick ideas around without legs.

You've talked the talk, now walk the ... oops.

Never mind.

I personally like VR meetings but there is still too much friction versus how quick it is to start up a video call.

In my opinion larger meetings do work worse in video calls. It just isn't great having lots of small squares. But small <4 people meetings do work better when you can really see and pay attention to every clearly.

IIRC, they tried to mandate that some quota of meetings needed to happen there.

But it wasnt very popular.

I think it was this or around that time: https://futurism.com/the-byte/leaked-memo-facebook-metaverse

I'm sure they do dogfood but insisting every meeting is in VR is like banning the command line while working on an unfinished GUI OS.

It's also not a realistic dogfood either. Users are not going to be fully in VR so why dogfood that way? It's better to figure out what flexible and low friction workflows.

I mean - this is the obvious conclusion. Because the metaverse is a stupid idea. Nobody needs the full VR movie theatre when they can go to youtube quicker and easier.

If they received push back from dogfooding, that just means they need to knock those sharp corners off. I'd suggest what they want is a meeting application and making VR easy to put on and off, and combining the two worlds.

It's entirely realistic to dogfood here, people are just reacting to the obvious reactions from the first iteration. You don't stop there though.

About ... 10 years ago I got a recruitment offer from a company working on remote collaboration tools for software developers. it was going to 'revolutionize' what was possible. but... i had to move to SF to work in their office. they didn't even see anything wrong or odd or off about the requirement.

This description makes me think of ScreenHero, which really was an incredible leap for remote collaboration until it was eventually bought by Slack — and the thing Slack eventually came out with for screen collaboration was weak by comparison. That was a real shame.

Did you ever find a replacement for ScreenHero?

No, I never found something that was even close to that smooth, convenient, and efficient, and geared toward screen-collaboration first.

What everyone else offers is collaboration, as an extension of screen 'showing' (virtualized projection), which itself is packaged only as an extension of a teleconference.

Have you checked out https://tuple.app?

Full disclosure - I’m a part of the team that built it, but I think it might be more of what you’re looking for.

If you do check it out, let me know what you think.

- Dan

It’s not mixed to me. VR and mixed reality failed for work. Text is too hard to read and the headsets are too heavy for all day use. Still, VR is great for gaming though

Completely agree. I love games like Beat Saber and Half-Life: Alyx. But it doesn't work for fine text and it's very very hard to make VR presence feel like anything other than a game.

It needs to be at least 4K per eye to work well for text, IMO. Then I could see it being actually useful in a sense that you can get as many large virtual displays as you want around you for different tasks.

But that still has nothing to do with the "verse" part of the metaverse. Why would I want that, either for productivity or for entertainment?

It’s also the PPD. I believe you need something like 35, and only the consumer Varjo model even comes close. The Quest Pro is around 19 or 21. Other VR headsets are in a similar range.

Instead of pushing work, meta should be emphasizing fitness. Their headsets are no ready for work. It’s been two years now and I have yet to see infinite office. The nreal is closer to being ok for work than the quest pro

It's Brad on YouTube had a discussion with another VR tech nerd, and their conclusion was that 60ppd was retina clarity and 40ppd was the minimal to get work done. Ymmv.

I think the corporate varjo is the only one that fits the bill right now, but it's so big, I'm hoping 2025-2027 we'll have the mini OLED to have the quality and form factor needed to replace monitors

Ouch, then the $1999 Varjo (which doesn’t include controllers or base stations) only goes up to 35 PPD. Thank you for jogging my memory

There's also mixed messaging about being at the office. They're cutting transportation programs and in-office benefits. Even reducing the variety of sodas stocked in the kitchens (you would think there isn't much cost saving there).

The major selling points of metaverse is that you can do work or play from anywhere (why else would you wear a 1500$ helmet that makes you look like a goofball). The push to "be at the office" is proof that metaverse does NOT work. It's truely ironic.

I don't see mixed messaging. They're pushers, not users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com