On the meeting room thing: I worked in an office a number of years ago where the name of the person who booked the meeting (and its time/duration) was shown on a small touch screen by the door.
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!
While I love working from coffee shops, one thing I really get grumpy about is people taking meetings out loud. If you're taking a meeting from a quiet corner while not disturbing others, it's fine. What drives me up the wall is people sitting at a large community table or sitting in the vicinity of many others and speaking loudly. It's elementary common sense to not do that. Mercifully, it doesn't happen too many times. (I'm located in Belgium; so the real-estate is usually small in coffee shops.)
haha, many years ago when I worked in a large office the three meeting rooms where constantly busy so my team would grab a laptop and pop down the road to the pub for our meetings.
The pub lunch is the thing I miss most about my first job.
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.
> Overheard conversations are a gold mine of knowledge sharing, many an interesting idea has come about because, "I couldn't help but overhear...".
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.
Living a 5 minute walk from the office is how most humans have lived throughout history, and what most of Europe’s most pleasant cities to live in were designed to support.
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.
I am Deaf. I never ever have overheard anything. That's a serious handicap if there are many people thinking random unstructured conversation is important.
It's the lack of "watercooler talk" due to WFH that I'm referring to. The whole post wasn't just about the pub, it segued into what's missing from WFH.
I much prefer video meetings. Being face-blind, logging onto a meeting has the added benefit of seeing people's names under their little images - no more trying to guess who's saying what! [1]
[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.
Because most people are trying to uphold some baseline of professionalism and aren't actively seeking to make the lives of the people around them harder?
Hotdesking can be so utterly impersonal it makes a mockery of RTO.
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.
Hot-desking is awful. I was going to say it's the worst of both worlds, but it's actually even worse than that. You're not around your teammates, you can't "move in" to your desk, and you have to commute. Honestly, what is the point? Either give me my own desk or let me WFH.
The company I work does hot-desking, but it is implicitly also divided into groupings. All the people in each team sit in the same part of the office each day and hotdesk within that group of desks. There are maybe 1 time in 50 that I show up and there are no desks free in my teams part of the office.
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.
My company uses a very simple system. Each team gets assigned an area that only they can book. For example a team of 15 people get a cluster of 10 desks. That solves it.
But that in turn is less efficient than 0 desks for 15 people.
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.
I’m envisioning carnival barkers trying to get other teams to use up their -15 seats as if they don’t sell out they have to pay the company a rental fee.
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.
Works if people aren’t coming in every day. We have set days where certain teams come in. You’ll be sitting next to the people you work with and the company doesn’t need as many desks
What does it solve though? If the purpose of RTO is being together with your team, and you don't have enough desks to bring the team in the office at the same time, this solves basically nothing.
A company I know forced all employees to attend a seminar about ergonomics at work. It included a visit from the presenter who would come to everyone's desk and adjust everything (chair height, reclining resistance, screen angle, light, etc). This company is now migrating everyone to hotdesking.
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?
CEO response: It is your personal responsibility to adjust your seating and workspace arrangements to your personal needs. Please do take the time (i.e. come in early) to make sure your work environment is suitably ergonomic.
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.
(Somewhat ITish company in Germany, 250 employees) - I had to fight hard to get the company to buy seven 4K monitors (total of 2800€) and now those seats are always booked lol. At least my colleagues are a bit more productive I guess... the other desks have 1080p monitors and look terrible when connected with a Mac.
What kind of company is that? The cost of a 4k display (and 400 Euro is pretty much bottom of the barrel when it comes to good displays) is a fraction of the yearly salary of an employee, lasts many years, and a good screen can help reducing eyesight problems. It always surprises me that companies apply austerity to weird things, like providing a setup that keeps employees healthy, while probably throwing a lot of money at irrelevant stuff.
You'd be surprised how accounting works at some companies. I've seen companies buying 10k euro civil engineering software to run on 1k euro computers that could barely handle it, and refusing to also pay to upgrade the computers.
Well you know, Germans are ruthless optimizers. They just tend to optimize for the wrong objective functions, and the wrong constraints. Also the wrong time frames.
Hotdesking for knowledge workers is basically so bad it's punitive. The same kind of disregard for your physical and mental comfort as Amazon warehouse workers, just with a higher salary attached.
In meta's case its: "lots of people left who joined remote, perhaps its because everything is tribal knowledge based? lets evolve the culture to make it more frien.... YOLO RTO PEOPLE"
Were I used to work they did all the things you suggested and it worked well. Every desk had a good setup, nice chair, massive screen etc. There were plenty of lockers and other storage if you needed to leave things in the 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.
A previous company managed to do hotdesking very well. The key was they started small and rolled it out as they learnt. By the time they moved building and went full hotdesking, they'd ironed out the problems and made it workable.
The only point of RTO is to make the C-suite and managers happy to be back in control, since the only thing that gets them going is the thought of their underlings being miserable.
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.
>"It seems impossible to get one desk for a long enough period," one employee said. The person noted one day having to go between hot desks at Menlo Park on different floors to get through a work day in which they'd been required to come in for meetings.
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.
The most likely option is that the booking system allows you to book a desk for less than a full day, so late bookers might be forced into fragmented bookings.
> "We have not yet figured out hybrid work," Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, wrote on Threads. "Assigned desks mean lots of empty chairs. Hotel desks mean lots of unfamiliar faces. Pods are good for privacy but take up a ton of space. We have a lot to figure out."
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.
It also seems a bit strange for the company to have an overarching goal around building a "metaverse", but not to try to figure out how they themselves might use those tools for their own work. No appetite for their own dogfood?
Especially with the new Metaverse tech that can be seen in the Lex Fridman interview. No-one gives a damn about those weird comic avatars, but a real representation of a human including facial movements etc., that might more interesting.
I feel like this is kind of missing the forest for the trees.
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".
Yet even with Slack around we still do video meetings, every day. So clearly there is something that Slack does not cover, and a video call is good enough in many ways, but it's certainly doesn't capture the sort of face to face, in-a-meetingroom-together sort of feeling. How important that is for productivity, I don't know, I could think of a few usecases like brainstorming and such.
I am a huge fand of learning by doing. This is a great way of dealing with problems you cannot anticipate. But it is just bad planning, if you are not dealing in advance with the problems you can anticipate. Like not having enough desks in the first place.
Iteration can be good to more effectively optimize metrics, but what are they optimizing for here? Is there any particular metric that is currently down and should be up, other than butts-in-seats?
The metric is profit, and they're trying to optimize it by "encouraging" people to leave. Zuckerberg has wasted $40 billion on a failed idea and needs to turn things around.
A unionisation of tech workers is long overdue, we can't expect fair working conditions consistently by leaving the single randomer citizen to fight alone against multi billion companies and various interests
Why is it ironic? What does you comment aim to achieve? It's a statement of a fact, are you implying that should we aim for shittier conditions for tech workers? Really sometimes I wish people would activate braincells before writing
I don't consider 'tech workers', working class. We're higher paid, our jobs do not destroy our bodies, in my mind it's a purely middle class career. I agree with your actual point though, we are pampered.
Of course tech workers are working class. You either give your labour for a living or you invest capital in businesses, and almost every tech worker is doing the former.
Not everyone who is working class is on minimum wage. Train drivers or boiler engineers or site foremen? All paid very well, in the UK as much or even more than tech workers.
I come from a working class background so I'm very aware of all of this. However my family (extended+) have all had poorly paying jobs, coal miners, nurses, pallet makers, warehouse, electricians, labourers, bakers. I'm the first to go to uni and do an easy job that pays well.
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
There are plenty of factory/labor jobs that don’t require people to wreck their bodies. Many of them provide workstations where people have the option to sit/stand or they are walking around most of the time. Occasionally bending over, not too much heavily lifting. Many of my ex coworkers who did these jobs were in fantastic shape. It’s disingenuous to pick out an extreme example.
> By the definition you give then people who claim benefits and do not work are not “working class”.
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 is a valid definition of “working class,” (I.e. non-owners), but it’s not how the phrase is typically used.
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.”
> Of course tech workers are working class. You either give your labour for a living or you invest capital in businesses
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.)
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.
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that the "middle class" was a fiction invented by the capital class to divide the working class in two and pit them against each other. If you or someone in your family has to work so that you can survive, you are working class.
> the "middle class" was a fiction invented by the capital class to divide the working class
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.
I am not sure putting people working from pay check to pay check or having to work two jobs to survive in the same category as people getting middle six-figures TC would be helpful for analyzing the social strata.
You don't want to be divided from the miners who extract the minerals and the factory workers who assemble the crappy tech that we design? I do. It's absolutely squalid over there.
You want to trade off positions with those 10 year olds in the quarries? That's fine. I'd rather go home at night to my family, watch The Wire with my wife for the tenth time, and then when everyone goes to sleep I'd like to come here and post on Hacker News. Please report back with your experiences.
I didn't say that, or anything close to it. Funny how in your eyes the only way to not separate yourself from them is to literally do their job. Maybe you can ignore those 10 year olds in the quarries, but I think it's our responsibility to use our positions to improve their situations. It would be kind of neat if there weren't 10 year olds in the quarries, and they could instead go to school, no?
Then who's going to do the mining? Adults? Do you want your iPhone, your car, your video games, your shoes, your plane trips, or not? All that stuff is gonna be "cost prohibitive" if all of these quarry kids go to school and all if these factory workers go home early. Cause: These unfortunate saps work 14 hours a day, eat straw, and have the philosophical thoughts whipped out of their brains. Effect: We live like kings and post all kinds of philosophy online. Don't believe me about this causality? Good, then we can go back to living like kings. You keep posting about ethics, and I'll keep posting about epistemology.
Yes, it should be adults with good compensation. Child labor should never be acceptable to anyone, especially if you reap the rewards as described! I'd rather not live like a king quite as much, and have them have a better life. Or better yet, I'd rather have billionaires not exist and have both of us live like a king.
I don't know about that. I'm on a first name basis with my CTO. I hope to never see in person those wretched souls mining the cobalt for my Tesla. Ghastly!
The man that invented the concept of classes to divide society in order to make them fight against each other was Marx. He created the concept of "class struggle" along the classes himself.
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.
Class is a very useful concept to understand societies. It's not even an exclusively Marxist concept. Weber also uses the term, but uses different metrics than Marx to distinguish between classes. How can you effectively have a good understanding of feudal society without understanding the division between feudal lords and serfs. Or between citizens, outsiders and slaves in classical Greek societies?
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.
Working class as in "people who work"? Since tech workers are comfortably in the middle class when it comes to income level.
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.
> but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate
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.
Fascinating that German unions sometimes have managers as members. Are those members ostracized by the real workers? In the US, taking a management position means quitting the union -- workers don't want management in their meetings, and management don't trust anyone in the union so would never promote you anyway.
> Fascinating that German unions sometimes have managers as members.
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.
> 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
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.
It depends on the specifics of the union. There certainly have been/are unions with fairly strict pay scales based on seniority and related factors. The SAG is obviously not one of those. (It's mostly, as I understand it, minimum pay scales for time actually spent working--a lot of SAG members don't work very much.) Public sector jobs can often be.
I know a lot of investors like Warren Buffet. I bet they work harder than you do.
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.
If Warren Buffet stopped working tomorrow, how long do you think it would take for him to fall behind on his bills and default on his mortgage? That is the basic differentiator. If you work because you have to, then you are working class. If you work primarily because you want to, then you are not. There is of course also a large 'grey' area of people who could stop working and live quite comfortably, but feel compelled to keep working to finance their current lifestyle.
A lot of people on here denigrate executives, management, money people generally. Maube they add value commensurate with what they're paid. Some almost certainly do. Others probably don't.
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.
> 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!
> Wasting their valuable time on earth for the sake of a manager's dictat.
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.
I think one of the reasons there's not much unionization in tech is that the market balances itself. When your skills are in such high demand, the market has no borders and investors queue to fund startups, working conditions naturally goes up.
But it goes both ways. When a given company decides to cut costs or change some working policy you can't blame them, especially when they still pay way above the local median and provide astonishing perks. Also you don't need unionization to have your conditions written in your contract.
Certain professions deserve better working conditions, I don't think SWE is one of them,
I will never understand this. I prefer working from the office and being around my colleagues. It’s more comfortable than home, and the commute is an added bonus for me (short enough that doesn’t bother me, but provides a barrier for “I’m done with work for the day”).
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.
> Until OKd, office work is required, even when teams are elsewhere.
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.
It's time tech workers realized they're just expensive sheep with no real power. Time to unionize or form co-ops, or it'll just be another race to the bottom like every other job. Companies will say whatever they need to say when there's a growth bubble, and then take it all away as soon as there's not. It shouldn't be surprising.
Unions are not the solution to the RTO policies by itself. At least Austria and Germany have unions, and RTOs are rolled out same as in the US with no unions.
This 1000%. It is crazy that they are spending billions on the metaverse but ignoring this huge opportunity to dogfood. Remote work is in its infancy and there is great potential here, and they have the resources and reasons to make it work. The only way to find it is to actually try all kinds of things. Explore all kinds of hardware, and let individual teams be creative. Find out what works! If they figure out a way to make remote work 2x better, they will get the massive growth %s they desperately want!
edit: it is also insane that Zoom is doing the same thing ... Zoom!
Probably they know their own technology well enough to understand that it's not really fit for purpose, still they will try to sell it anyways to stupid corporate CEOs.
> "It's a mess," one current employee said of Meta's RTO so far. "And all of this because it's difficult to remote onboard new hires. Instead of solving that problem, they just decided let's go back to exactly how it was before."
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.
>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.
Maybe it's just me projecting. I don't like being dragged into the office all the time. I like meeting up with coworkers a couple times a year (if only to get a feel for our "real personas", which can be hard over async text and video). It's also a good way of establishing a certain rhythm for progress.
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).
Oh, I'm fine with twice-yearly get togethers of an often highly-distributed team. But I'm not sure how much that helps with onboarding. It certainly doesn't lead to a vibrant office culture.
Also not sure how people who usually don't work there would create a vibrant environment, probably just as awkward to them as to the new people unless they were there for ages before WFH
> they just decided let's go back to exactly how it was before
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.
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).
People don't want to test this out, given that the job market is difficult at the moment. It does hint at the real, unstated reason for all this which is to try to get the headcount down. They are massively overstaffed and losing money on nonsense like the metaverse.
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).
I (believe/know/research support?) that the most effective team setup is one well defined team in one single physical location, with a clear mandate (and no "management" to duck it up).
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
This breaks down if you have teams in more than one location which have to interact. So yes, for smaller companies, being together at one location and reaping the benefits of direct collaboration is a thing, for international companies less so.
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.
>>> This breaks down if you have teams in more than one location which have to interact.
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
I agree, but I personally also need a couple of WFH days each week so I can be completely without distraction for tasks that require deep thought. My concentration is broken easily and I find other people talking across desks to each other or walking around in the office area distracting. When I'm WFH they simply can't distract me, as my notifications are switched off and I'm alone.
Yeah I think there is a rough rule of thumb like "two pizza teams, that literally have pizza lunch together twice a week" for me makes the various issues coalesce - same people same team same location, often enough to eat together, plus eating together has big binding benefits for teams etc etc
Anecdotally, the most productive teams I worked with were in a remote setup, but with a style of management that was present only to help define medium term goals, not really concerned with day-to-day activities.
Not saying my personal experience is the best example, but is well, the best I experienced.
It was already hard to find a conference room sometimes there on a day when only 10% showed up. I can only imagine how bad it is now that people are there 50% and needing to VC with the other 50% that are home or in another office that day.
> The Meta spokesman said any issues with hot desking should be resolved if desks are booked properly through Meta's online desk reservation system, which lets a person book a desk a week in advance for up to three days in a row.
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?
Covid fizzled out, then we were told we were amidst an imminent climate apocalypse. Good time to make that end to unnecessary commuting permanent, right?
They did hire a lot during the pandemic, and have recently broken the lease on a London office with a $180M penalty or 7 years of rent (they had 18 years left).
For all the conspiracy theorists claiming that RTO is being driven by CEOs propping up the commercial real estate investments of their buddies, anecdotally I'm seeing quite a bit of companies not renewing or even breaking leases, putting most expansion plans on hold, and either leasing much smaller dedicated spaces or even just making co-working arrangements.
That is indeed a bizarre theory. No amount of kudos from golfing buddies is going to make up for the raises they could have given themselves for cutting office costs.
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.
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!