Meta's Mandatory Return to Office Is 'A Mess'
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
To start the meeting, that person (or their proxy) had to swipe the screen with their badge. If the swipe had not been completed after 10mins, the room would become free and accept anyone's swipe to start that meeting. Their name would then be displayed for the same duration as the original.
The kicker was that after the 10mins (and if no swipe), the system would send an email to ALL EMPLOYEES saying "Room XYZ, booked by [name of culprit], is now free".
To this day I still fondly think of the genius of the person who got that system approved!
Every Friday almost the entire office would decamp down to a local pub for lunch and a pint or two.
The quality of the food was always very hit-or-miss (unless we went down the king's arms*, but that was seen as a bit pricey and fancy), and for many places if there were too many of us would get arsey for not booking ahead.
But it was a great opportunity to just hear what everyone was up to and have a good chat in an unstructured way.
I don't know if it's changing attitudes over the past 20 years, the particular companies I found myself at, the price of going to the pub, but it hasn't really been a thing at any of my places since.
Now with WFH of course there is a complete absence of unstructured conversation. Every meeting has a purpose, every interaction there's something someone has in mind they want from the conversation.
And while it's not impossible to chit chat still, it is impossible to overhear chit-chat, which is an underappreciated thing.
Overheard conversations are a gold mine of knowledge sharing, many an interesting idea has come about because, "I couldn't help but overhear...".
Now don't get me wrong, I don't want to suffer an hour long commute for that benefit, the cost-benefit skews all wrong. But I would like if everyone lived a 5 minute walk from the office.
* might have been the king's head, memory plays tricks.
So you replaced "watercooler talk" with "beercooler" talk. Sounds enlightened.
I know tech changes things, but if I had to guess, the era we just lived through was the weird one, and living a 5 minute walk away from work and amenities is the norm we’ll revert back to the moment that tech adequately supports it.
Not only that, but looking back on my early career I feel I learned a shedload just by sitting in an office surrounded by people older than me talking about work, about life, etc. I learned what was acceptable, what not, how people handled issues that arose, how to basically operate in the world of "work" in a wider sense. None of that would be possible now. Not that I'm pro working from offices - but something will change because of it long-term.
BTW this also reminds me about office printers back in the day (circa 1998 this was). They ALWAYS had a massive pile of uncollected printouts around them. I learned so much from just rifling through stuff there. Emails, always emails (who prints emails? loads of people apparently) with stuff about other employees, clients, costs, money, opinions. Then there was PowerPoint printouts too - projects you didn't know where happening, kite flying of all kinds. I know the words "gold mine" are a cliche, but until they had "secure printing" systems, this was my world.
[1] Except for those people who go to a meeting room and (eventually!) join the meeting as a group; those people remain the bane of my working life.
That and the crappy microphone in the meeting room preventing me from understanding half of what the in-office group is saying.
"Dear All, there will be a 5 minute silence to commemorate the untimely passing of [name of culprit] over the weekend"
The point of RTO is that you are surrounded by colleagues in your team so that you can spontaneously collaborate. It sounds like its just a meat market and everyone is jammed together regardless of team or affiliation.
hotdesking only really works for a small number of situations, and even then, it needs careful planning and thought.
You need permanent lockers so that you have somewhere to stash your shit.
the equipment needs to be all the same class(to avoid "I want this one") and _higher_ quality than non-hotdesk.
Repairs need to be proactive.
Of course, neither of us nor the company really has hard knowledge of what is "more efficient", because despite being entirely driven by profit metrics and A/B testing there is still no real way to measure productivity for knowledge workers. And even if there was, employee misery wouldn't be part of the metric unless it measurably affected retention.
Thinking about it, why stop there? Negative desking is the future. A team of 15 could have -15 desks (or less, if they are high performers). Super efficient.
One other potential advantage with hot-desking is that you can have different zones with different rules. Working on a project where you need to talk with your colleague a lot during the day, sit in the 'talking' zone. Need to be left alone in silence for 8 hours straight, move to the 'quite' zone.
And a good booking system to assign people to desks "in their regions"
But I guess the managers that "are worried about collaboration" didn't think of that
These sociopaths don't care if it's awful for everyone involved as long as they get to see their minions at their desks, knowing that they're the reason dozens/hundreds of people are having their lives wasted on thumb twirling in some depressing office.
Some of us had laid claim to a desk if we were always in, but most people tended to be in only a few days a month. Different teams tended to cluster in particular parts of the office when they were in. There were plenty of desks so there were no arguments.
Hotdesking, hybrid working, remote working and fixed desk in-office setups can all work, but they require people to actually think about how space and systems are designed, and to put enough resources in place.
Unfortunately, most companies just don't put the thought in to the details, or the resources in to make them work properly, so they become terrible work environments and then they complain that no one wants to come to the office.
I have very little sympathy for companies that can't make hybrid work because they just put the minimum effort in, and then complain that it's all the employees fault.
What I'd love to ask the CEO: was it all a circus back then, or do you not care about your employees' health now?
No mention of how this was sold at the time or how much time is invested in fixing everything every morning, or how that will work for employees with disabilities that make it difficult/impossible to adjust their workspace by themselves.
Sincerely, the management.
So even when teams are co-located (which isn't a given), they aren't necessarily working face to face. This kind of flies in the face of the premise that RTO is needed for "collaboration". There's definitely another reason for RTO and it's not one the bosses are willing to state on the record.
They can probably work anywhere, but need to be in the office for face-to-face meetings.
Although, I'm not sure why the person would be losing their desk between meetings unless Meta had a policy for people to take their belongings with them if their going to be away from their desk for an extended period of time.
Yeah, maybe work all that out before you demand everyone come back to the office? Just a thought ...
Surely the company has enough money to figure all this stuff out. The way things are described, it feels like the company is being incredibly disrespectful to its employees.
Probably at high risk of landing in the uncanny valley, it has to be executed very well, so well I'm not sure it possible at this time.
Making super-realistic telepresence in VR is really hard -- absolutely. And Meta is the kind of huge tech company that might have the resources to do it.
But do you need super-realistic telepresence to be a useful remote work tool? Who knows?
Slack is fairly useful for remote work (arguably) and it's mostly just text, emoji and meme images. Online text chat has been around for decades and Slack is a decent implementation of it (way easier for most people than IRC, for example). What are some more useful tools that could be made for remote work, and why isn't Meta building those?
Edit to add: if you're taking Snow Crash as your starting point for "metaverse", I think the important point is not "it's a super-realistic VR experience"; the point is that "it's a cool and useful place where people like to hang out, so a lot of life and work happens there".
While some level of forethought and planning is essential, sometimes you just have to learn by doing.
Ironic, considering that tech workers have by far the best working conditions of the working class.
> our jobs do not destroy our bodies
I've got news for you there.
It is delusional to think our jobs are on the same level as someone who grafts all day with their hands and does back breaking work for minimum wage.
It is physically easy and it is very different from the other jobs I've listed.
Our jobs aren't working class.
Edit: by the by, boiler engineers are not paid well. A self-employed plumber with a gas cert can earn a good wage, but your average british gas tradie isn't bringing home half of what I earn
Yes, people who do not rely on overwhelmingly on selling labor for their support are not working class (people who are working class might transitionally be on support without working, or might be on support while working, depending on the benefit structure, but if their principal source of support over an extended time is not selling labor, then they aren’t, as a matter of economic class, “working class”.)
Just as someone isn’t part of the capitalist class if over time they do get most of their support from working and don’t have capital holdings. Economic class is a description of how you relate to the economy.
> It is delusional to think our jobs are on the same level as someone who grafts all day with their hands and does back breaking work for minimum wage.
The proletarian class isn’t defined by the nature of labor, but by the fact of selling it as one’s overwhelming-majority means of support within the economy. Yes, there are important differences within the class as well as the broad common features and interests.
This phrase would include any non-owner professional like lawyers or doctors or even upper management.
On top of that many tech workers don’t fit even your definition because equity is often an important part of comp. That’s not the case for lawyers or doctors or management in other industries.
Using standard and customary vernacular, tech workers are not “working class.”
Eh, compared to my relatives in the trades, construction, retail and warehouse work, and the jobs I had in high school, I'm on easy street here.
Negligible risk of trips or falls, no lifting anything heavy, no working around powerful machines or using dangerous tools, no dealing with chemicals, no need for hard hats or safety boots, no working in hot or cold or wet conditions, no working with knives, no splattering hot oil, no working in the dark, no loud noise, no working near moving vehicles, no standing on your feet 8 hours a day, no boss that gets mad if you're off sick, no mandatory overtime, very low stress.
The only thing that makes tech work more dangerous than sitting on my ass on the sofa is the office's free chocolate.
I mean, you’ve left out the petit bourgeoisie entirely, describing only the proletariat and haut bourgeoisie. Its true that some tech workers are in the proletariat (part of the proletarian intelligentsia) but a whole lot of tech workers are petit bourgeois, having a mixed reliance on capital and labor (not, for tech workers as such, the classical pattern of applying their own labor to their own capital, but that’s not the only pattern of mixed reliance that puts people in the middle class that sits between the working class and pure capitalists.)
Totally agree.
> If you or someone in your family has to work so that you can survive, you are working class.
It's not so easy.
A dentist owning his own doctor's practice - the means of production, quickly worth several million dollars - does pretty clearly belong to the (petit) bourgeoise. His interest are often clearly opposed to that of the staff he employs. Every dollar saved on salaries, every day of vacation denied means more money in his pocket.
Yet he has to work every day.
The real difference are the means of production.
There was a very important reason for that. Early socialist leaders were usually selected among the best in any trade. The carpenters chose the best and most successful carpenter to represent them, and so on with most professions.
That was simply unacceptable for "intellectuals" like Marx or Lenin or Trotsky that never touched a tool or worked physically on their entire lives, something they were all the time being reminded by actual workers(something Lenin hated so much).
The new Frame made them the bosses on the new system.
Like Natzis could decide who was arian or jew, even if they had dark hair or jew parents, the marxist could decide who was working class and who did not. The children of rich jew merchants that were most marxist revolutionaries could became working class if they said so.
There are lots of people that do not accept the Marxist frame at all because they are not marxist.
>if you or someone in your family has to work so that you can survive, you are working class.
As someone who has lived in Africa , Asia, South America and Europe, I tell you that 90% of people in the US don't need work to survive. Unless by "survive" you mean things like buying a pickup truck.
There are kids in Africa in which "survive" means eating once a day and their minds being confused after two hours of work like learning to read.
In discussions about philosophy ans philosophical concepts, one do not need to agree with all the interlocutor's assumptions: it is just required to understand them and discuss them in a balanced way.
Anyway, for most people, compensation and income level are really good, which is why unionization isn't as much a thing for tech workers. This is also because there's a lot of disparity, with some earning $35K / year and others $350K / year for basically the same job; unionization and successful agreements would mean the $35K / year would go up, but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate. And that's just salary, then there's stocks, stock options, bonuses, perks, etc to consider.
I'm not saying tech workers shouldn't unionize, all I'm saying is that the incentives are low. Because if you don't want to work under the conditons that e.g. Meta offers, you can vote with your feet and work somewhere else, pretty much anywhere and anything you want.
Well yes, those that need to work. As opposed to those whose day to day spending come from capital investments.
People usually believe investors are those scammers that advertise in Internet along rented Villas and Lamborghinis talking about how to live without working and so on.
They usually do not spend too much, as they are into the habit of saving way more than what they make.
Those that waste their money are not the investors themselves, but their families, like the trophy wife or the spoiled children.
However, I bet that the vast majority of software developers would hate the job and the lifestyle, perks or not--which among other things generally involves a ton of tightly-scheduled travel.
The travel is a prison they create for themselves, and generally one that they get off on. If your job is just chatting with and manipulating {employees,customers,higher-ups} then you need to invent a contrived way in which it seems hard, so you can keep justifying your salary.
Even better if you can tie your self-worth to your airline miles balance, and avoid your family for 3/4 of the year!
As a result, many are communing hours a day, to sit on zoom calls. Wasting their valuable time on earth for the sake of a manager's dictat.
Things are good. But they can always be better :)
Management pretty often do not have the best ideas, and often the people doing the work know how best to do it.
I mean, isn't that what work is?
You get paid, in exchange you spend your time doing stuff at your boss's behest, which you wouldn't do if you weren't being paid?
I mean sure, there are some jobs like being a doctor which you might consider a higher calling, but nobody joins Facebook expecting to do socially useful work, it's an ad company.
That's not necessary. A large portion of corporate tech in Germany is unionized, and union jobs have hard salary ceilings (and also, of course, salary floors). But a company is allowed to offer a worker a non-union contract. They just always have to allow a worker to decline and take a union contract instead.
In real life, this means many team leaders and senior engineers and practically all managers/directors are on non-union contracts.
Non-union contracts that on paper are strict worse than the highest union contract get killed by the union. But when you make the jump, you usually have to do some math. Because leaving the union contract means you go from 35h/week with compensated overtime to unlimited overtime, so you might get screwed anyway if you're not careful.
Of course! From a theory perspective, it's completely clear: just because capital gives some workers a mediocum of power over other workers doesn't mean that those managers suddenly have different interests than the people they lead. They still need to sell their labour to survive, after all.
> Are those members ostracized by the real workers?
So much for theory. In the real world, bad managers exist everywhere. In union shops, they are probably reigned in much more than elsewhere, because they quickly find themselves in mediation meetings between workers, union and management every time their workers realize that they actually do have rights, and that those are violated by management frequently. Those guys are ostracised, whether they have a membership card or not.
But yeah, managers can easily get into situations where their own performance metrics would suffer if they follow union directives, so conflict of interests are not uncommon. Just like humans everywhere, they somehow live with the cognitive dissonance.
As an example, I worked in a production plant where the floor boss would go through quite a bit of paperwork to hire scabs from a temp agency during union strikes, because missing production deadlines was unthinkable to him. Normally a pro-union guy, glad to take the union-negotiated salary increases, not a bad boss, but seeing that his production lines never stopped was his job, and so he did just that.
Why would the top-level go down? Employers are paying what the market demands. It's not like Jessica Chastain makes less money because she's in the SAG-AFTRA union with the same job as actors making less than $35K / year.
That being said I would never force my colleagues to go back to the office if they don’t want to. Their circumstances are different than mine. So what’s the problem with “you want to come to the office? Come. You want to work from home? Don’t”
It’s cheaper from the company (no providing food for everyone, the office doesn’t have to accommodate everyone, etc) and better for all employees, who can do exactly whatever they want.
This is the one I find baffling about RTO. I know plenty of people who have been dragged into offices where they have no team members. So they are just on Zoom at a desk in the office rather than at home.
I know of one guy where the company set up a local office for him and another person (who is not on his team), so they could be the two people in their office in their city.
I did it for the last few days of my prior job. Was dragged into the office when all my co-workers were at least 3.5 hours away.
Even if all the supposed benefits of in person are accepted at face value, none of that allows for them.
I mean.. what is the whole point otherwise?
edit: it is also insane that Zoom is doing the same thing ... Zoom!
Kinda surprised at this. To me the "obvious" thing with remote onboarding is to fly in new hires somewhere with at least a handful of team members, and then do onboarding face to face. That along with travel twice a year would probably be more than enough.
Sure, you'd likely need a big team to just plan out this kind of stuff, but you'd have a vibrant office, teams with each other, and people not feeling they're being dragged in.
Really? Based on the overall tenor of the comments here, it sounds as if a lot of people would be resentful of being dragged into the office for the sake of onboarding/mentoring newbies and creating a "vibrant office culture."
I honestly think that people will need to vote with their feet over time and potentially make significant tradeoffs (salary/stability/choice of work/commute) to get the work environment they personally prefer.
And ultimately onboarding remotely is super tough and isolating compared to having someone around physically for a bit.
This is easier for me to say, as I do not have kids and am generally fond of staying in a new place for a bit every once in a while.
I think twice-yearly team get-togethers (especially if they're organized in the understanding that work won't really get done) is a good breather. Get people to give little talks about stuff, chill out, have blue sky discussions about future plans... all the advantages that people get at conferences, on a small scale.
I think people whine about "pointless" RTO (especially when executives calling for it aren't even following it), but what I'm thinking about at least has some defined point and pretty time gated. Some people really don't like adult field trips though (for good reason).
The problem is that the "how it was before" refers to how it was 15-20 years ago. We had been building towards remote/flexible work for a long time before Covid, Covid was just the catalyst that forced everyone to break through the organizational inertia preventing progress. There was a time when you went to an office, sat in front of a desktop plugged into an ethernet jack and next to a landline phone, and ran a bunch of on prem corporate applications to get your job done. As laptops, smartphones, collaborative SaaS applications, WiFi, 3/4/5G all became ubiquitous, many of the reasons for being in a physical office went away. Now we have this meme world where I bring my work laptop from home to an office (commuting 45+ minutes in the process), connect to shitty WiFi, and get on Zoom calls with my team who are scattered around the world also sitting in offices they've been forced back to.
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You could have created either of these links yourself in the time it took to post your comment (just go to archive.ph or web.archive.org and paste in the original URL).
I'm wondering if there are Meta employees on remote work contracts. The contract at the company I work for specifies that I work remotely, and no one can change that without offering me some quid pro quo (which of course I would never take).
> the continued mandate that team leaders decide that 14.5% to 16.5% of their workers are in the lower performance categories
Think team of great creative people working in same office, with door shut.
This works for any team no matter the skill level (ie if you have so-so developers, they will perform best in these circumstances even if better developers exist.)
And every step away from this a company takes the company is explicitly accepting its reduction in performance.
Have people spread over different desks in same office. meh
Have people spread over different offices and time zones?
Have no clear mandate? Confusing requirements ? constantly changing roster of management needing different items ?
In the end management has just one lever (like central banks) - how they org wise their people. It's not a hard job but to justify their own wages they have to keep fiddling. And it costs everyone
Then there is the problem, if you do put everyone in the same room, that can be distracting too. A lot of software development requires quite time for concentration. Yes, having direct access to your team members is great, but not all the time.
for seperate distinct teams that's fine. See conways law. but often the people are in same team across different locations - meaning their interaction is just kaput
Not saying my personal experience is the best example, but is well, the best I experienced.
Which further underscores the importance of fuck you money.
One possible explanation for this would be a war of attrition over severance. But why would Meta not want to do just another round of layoffs?
I assume all the engineers have already reverse engineered the API and set up cron jobs to auto-reserve the same desk every week.
Before Covid people for the most part worked at the office? Then there was a period where people worked from home. Now they have to return to the office 3 days a week.
Esp considering sold layoffs, would the amount of space availalbe now, be the same as prior to Covid?
Or did Facebook hire so many people during Covid, that the layoffs were not enough to return to pre covid numbers?
Or did Facebook close / sell part of their office space?
One thing I expect to happen is companies will install more one-person soundproofed cubbies for salespeople to make calls without disturbing the entire floor, or people to have videoconferences.
What I would love to see is now that offices are less loaded, have more individual offices where people can concentrate and work rather than open-plan layouts that were really introduced because they are space-efficient, mealy-mouthed rationalizations about collaboration notwitstanding.
Didn't last long, did it?