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Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?

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Re: Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?

#101

Post by oldbbsnickname »

easton wrote: post #5

> Meta has even implemented limits on how often these workers hired as remote are allowed to come into the office, but have not divulged the reason for doing so. The simplest answer is that they literally don't have enough space for all of the workers to be in the office at the same time, right? They probably didn't have enough space to begin with if a lot of the workforce was remote.

Untrue. Most of the buildings were predominantly empty most of the time, even in MPK and FRE. Many of the remote buildings were ghost towns. After the closure of multiple buildings and eateries, some floors of some of the buildings became quite full. Ironically, I did shared desks in a building that was absolutely jammed full of non-engineers who literally sat around and socialized all day loudly.

Re: Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?

#102

Post by toomuchtodo »

gardenhedge wrote: post #99
toomuchtodo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working on the 4 day workweek in the US at the moment. Progress takes time, it's impossible until it is done.

That's just doing 5 days of work in 4 days..

Why are you working 5 days if productivity can either be maintained or take an acceptable reduction to go to 4 days? People work to live, not live to work.

Re: Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?

#103

Post by gardenhedge »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #64
gardenhedge wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a union and got a 1.5% raise, benefits have decreased and we're forced into hybrid working. I'm in a country where I can't just be fired without notice so that union doesnt do much for me there either. I'm just pointing out that unions don't mean you get everything you want.

Well of course they aren't! Unions are there as a way of leveling the power balance between the owners and workers. That unions still terrify big companies to the point of firing organizers or closing entire locations should be telling. They're not around to prevent every inconvenience, they're around to prevent abuse of the workforce. For example, if the Games Industry (using them as an example because they're notor…

That's not my experience though after doing sprints for the better part of a decade.

Re: Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?

#104

Post by VirusNewbie »

gspencley wrote: post #66
bartwr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they sound horrible? This is a serious, non provocative question. :) I personally loved working for Google. Low workload, great work-life balance, amazing perks, mind blowing salary, potential to do really cool stuff that hundreds of millions will use, doing really cutting edge things that almost noone else can do, ridiculously good internal infrastructure and tooling so I can focus just on my tasks, kind and…

I've just heard a lot of horror stories from colleagues about every single one of them. To be fair a lot of the complaints are typical of working for any large corporate machine. I'm not anti-corporation or anti-capitalist but the bigger a company gets the more bureaucracy, red tape, polices, layers of middle management and overall inefficiencies and burdensome "structures" get put in place. I'm happy to hear of a co…

>but the bigger a company gets the more bureaucracy, red tape, polices, layers of middle management and overall inefficiencies and burdensome "structures" get put in place

eh, this hasn't been my experience working for pre-seed, series A, F50, and FAANG companies.

In my experience, small companies often let product or MBA folks dictate a lot of what happens, and generally engineering is looked down on as worker bees. At FAANG, this isn't the case. ICs have the same level or respect and authority as managers and individual engineer opinion is taken seriously.

Because there's so much infra in big tech, you can spend an entire career barely interacting with MBA/PMs/process people.

Re: Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?

#105

Post by VirusNewbie »

meiraleal wrote: post #81
bartwr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they sound horrible? This is a serious, non provocative question. :) I personally loved working for Google. Low workload, great work-life balance, amazing perks, mind blowing salary, potential to do really cool stuff that hundreds of millions will use, doing really cutting edge things that almost noone else can do, ridiculously good internal infrastructure and tooling so I can focus just on my tasks, kind and…

> doing really cutting edge things that almost noone else can do like what, adding more ads in the already ad-covered search page? It doesn't need tens of thousands of engineers for that and it is not rocket science. It is gone the time that working at google and being a worker at google means something amazing. Lots of normal low achieving people at big tech nowadays which the only achievement is getting to Google/F…

You don't think AWS, GCP, Azure, foundational models, TF, Spanner, Aurora, TPUs, M2 CPUs, realistic AR and more are impressive???

Re: Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?

#106

Post by HDThoreaun »

lowercased wrote: post #8
keikobadthebad wrote: post #3

Something you have to understand about being remote - at any time, this was true decades ago - is that you are not there when people talk and you can't correct them or defend yourself. People with commutes and requirements to be under the eyes of management resent those who don't have that problem and can all agree on that. Remote gigs will always be more tenuous than prison-jobs.

> is that you are not there when people talk and you can't correct them or defend yourself You also can't correct things when you're in an office when meetings are had that exclude you. So even with that sweet commute you can still be reference while "in the office", just not in the room where Big Decisions are made.

I mean you can sit next to your coworkers and ask to join meetings they're in. Everythings relative I guess

Re: Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?

#107

Post by HDThoreaun »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #65
nsxwolf wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point out the underperformance of unions and the response is always yeah but they got us weekends off 100 years ago. What have you done for me lately?

Working on the 4 day workweek in the US at the moment. Progress takes time, it's impossible until it is done.

If I had to guess I'd say UAW will get destroyed here and the end result will be more mexican factories but we will see. Seems extremely unlikely that they get the 4 day work week either way.

Re: Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?

#108

Post by HDThoreaun »

nerdjon wrote: post #58
not-chatgpt wrote: post #29

Worked at a couple FAANG companies and from what I've seen, management is absolutely right that remote work, overall, is inefficient. There was a Blind poll and I believe half the people admitted they were slacking off more frequently while remote. However, being laid off is just a completely different matter. Depending on the company, the motivation for the layoff could significantly differ. Some did it to save cost…

As someone else said, I think that poll is fundamentally flawed. People just didn't realize how much time they "wasted" being in the office. For me: When I was in the office I would be fairly regularly distracted by coworkers (which does have some advantages but is a loss when its every day) which causes me to loose my focus. Now I am "distracted" by my cat wanting on my lap which doesn't cause me to loose focus (if…

We can do anecdotes for days. I have worked at 3 remote companies, 2 transitioned from in person. It was clear to me that productivity at the 2 that transitioned became much worse due to remote. Productivity was never great at the other. I don't think it has much at all to do with hours worked but collaboration absolutely takes a nose dive when remote for the average employee.

I love working remote for the same reasons you do. Doesn't mean I think it's good for the company though.

Re: Will workers hired as Remote all be laid off in next wave?

#110

Post by meiraleal »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #105
meiraleal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doing really cutting edge things that almost noone else can do like what, adding more ads in the already ad-covered search page? It doesn't need tens of thousands of engineers for that and it is not rocket science. It is gone the time that working at google and being a worker at google means something amazing. Lots of normal low achieving people at big tech nowadays which the only achievement is getting to Google/F…

You don't think AWS, GCP, Azure, foundational models, TF, Spanner, Aurora, TPUs, M2 CPUs, realistic AR and more are impressive???

Not really. Linux was impressive. What you described is just normal incremental development. Even less impressive is to be responsible for one line of code of it. I don't deny it is an amazing engineering to create a machine with 10s of thousands of engineers working in one direction (mainly, increase shareholders value).

But being one of those ants doing the work? Nah, not impressed.

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