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Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

cnbc.com

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Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#171

Post by Sunspark »

someelephant wrote: post #28

Let's be real. The loser here is middle managers. Not all of them. Just the ones who feed off of the high they get from having control over the office environment.

Awful that so much of corporate culture is oriented around having a middle-manager bully. Always yipping and yapping about "productivity" never focusing on what you do as opposed to how much of whatever. Never wanting you to take breaks, but always wanting you to work unpaid overtime and taking all the credit for themselves. Super quick to make sure the blame is yours whenever there is an issue.

Engineers are some of the worst middle-managers you can encounter. Never work for an engineer middle-manager if you can avoid it unless you're an engineer yourself. They tend to come with huge egos and entitlement due to their degree and don't have the people skills to allow them to manage or run a team successfully. They only care about themselves and wearing their ring to make sure all of you know they have one.

I realize a lot of the HN audience are engineers. I don't care. Just because you're an engineer doesn't make you a project manager or even good at managing a project or a team of non-engineers. This is a self-delusion that many of them have.

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#172

Post by bsimpson »

johannes1813 wrote: post #165

I've been back in my company's office in person (medium-sized tech company) for the last week with a small subset of employees before we all go back, and I've become pretty convinced that these hybrid models will not go well. Even while wearing masks and social distancing, I feel far more connected to the others that work in the office, and whether it's fair or not, personal connection and trust play a huge role in c…

Is this substantially different than having a manager in a different office?

I'm in SF, but my manager has been in NY for the last 3 years. Being managed from a different office seems to be common in large companies.

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#173

Post by 988747 »

lamontcg wrote: post #149
prmejc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is why facebook can do full wfh. They don't care if you look at facebook all day.

Businesses need to stop caring about if you're on facebook 8 hours a day. If you're getting your work done at the end of the week that's all that really matters. The idea that the business owns your ass for a minimum of precisely 40 hours a week where you must be solely focused on the outcome of the business is both toxic and nonproductive.

That's not how this works - even if you get your currently assigned amount of work done your manager will always wonder: "how much more this guy could accomplish if he wasn't constantly distracted by Facebook?" Which is a legitimate concern.

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#174

Post by johannes1813 »

Igelau wrote: post #170
johannes1813 wrote: post #165

I've been back in my company's office in person (medium-sized tech company) for the last week with a small subset of employees before we all go back, and I've become pretty convinced that these hybrid models will not go well. Even while wearing masks and social distancing, I feel far more connected to the others that work in the office, and whether it's fair or not, personal connection and trust play a huge role in c…

> But I'm saying this as a young person excited to work in person, so maybe others (parents, those with long commutes) feel it's still worth it. Parent of three, going on four. Get me out of here!

Totally reasonable and I'm glad for parents that there will be options now

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#175

Post by fbggthro »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #52
magneticnorth wrote: post #12

I am really curious to see where we'll be in a year, two, three down the line wrt remote/office/hybrid work at major companies. This forced experiment has had some surprising outcomes about the effectiveness of remote workplaces, but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions, is clearly not the same as indefinitely in normal times. But there's reason to think that may go even better, not worse; I am r…

In particular I'm curious on the impact to junior employees. Some people think that junior people are having trouble learning things when WFH.

I think we're going to see a massive knowledge gap start to manifest itself within the next 1-3 years. Employees that are junior or started during WFH are going to find it difficult to stack up against senior engineers who have been around since before WFH.

Now also consider all of the college students who received a substantially subpar learning experience during the pandemic. My team is already seeing the effects of this when trying to hire new grads.

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#178

Post by Rapzid »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #35

The bloomberg article mentions potential CoL adjustments: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-09/facebook-... It is interesting that the Slashdot crowd was fairly universal in panning the idea of paying people less if they lived in a low cost area. In my 17 years as a designated "teleworker" at a SV megacorp, they adjusted compensation ratios. This meant that they didn't reduce my salary when I moved from…

> I don't understand why people would rail against this kind of policy

I don't understand why you would accept this if you don't have to?

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#179

Post by throw2932away »

I've honestly been thinking through what it would be like to have a second full-time job. And by that, I mean actually executing satisfactory work for two organizations for the long-term. I work in a relatively niche space and am able to operate at a more efficient level than the type of employee most companies are looking to hire for the salary the employer wants to pay.

I make good money but if I ran at 100% capacity, I'd run out of things to do. Unfortunately at this point, there aren't a ton of opportunities to lead larger teams at larger organizations so I'm wondering if it would make more sense to just pick up a second job doing what I'm doing now.

Effort and execution-wise, I can't imagine it being a problem. If it were, I'm pretty sure I could outsource certain tasks to overcome those hurdles.

The part I'm not so sure about is maintaining visibility and how on earth you could coordinate meetings to avoid being double-booked while still maintaining at least the appearance of availability. I guess the difficult part with what I do is the fact that I do need to communicate with a fair number of people within the organization.

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#180

Post by treis »

marcosdumay wrote: post #116
nanidin wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked remote for 5 years before COVID. I was somewhere around 10% travel to customer locations, and about 1 week per year to HQ overseas. It was a great balance. I’m not sure how that would scale to an entire company though as one week of travel expenses worked out to around $2000 for domestic travel within the US. Does the cost of carrying office space work out to more or less than $8k per person per year? COVID…

Renting a hotel for a week is probably way cheaper than $8k per person. Your costs were large in part because of the small scale that is done.

You're not including airfare, food, and meeting space. It might not quite reach $2k but pretty close.

But that's likely still cheaper than office space. That ranges anywhere from $20-$70+ per square foot depending on city and how nice it is. So even a tiny desk space is 500-2k a month.

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