Faster prototypes? The whole app feels like a constant prototype. There are numerous bugs that never get fixed, and if they do, new ones appear.
Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026
301–310 of 472 posts
Re: Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not about productivity at all. > WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can [...] work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc Probably "working fewer hours" and "moonlight for multiple companies" has negative effects on productivity that employers would like to avoid.
I’ve hired remote employees, made them come, offered stimulating work, 5% above their requested pay with mentions that I could double it in one year, but I could never get them to the smartness and clarity of analysis they had during the interview. After 6 months they were clearly winging it in I fired both the employees and the manager. This “remote employees don’t moonlight” is a union trope.
You do know there are several productive companies that are entirely remote, right?
Re: Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office Just a reminder that there were plenty of great distributed teams long before Covid. I had had only a few "in office" jobs in my pre-covid career (and generally found collaboration better on remote teams, though goofing off has a bit harder to organize). I also find it funny that somehow software engineers completely forget about the existence of op…
Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast. Hell, I had commit rights to a popular open source “AWS Solution” when I was there and it took so long to get something approved to be pushed into the mainline that I ended up forking it for individual customers (AWS ProServe) and then eventually getting most of it merged back in later. Now that I’m not at AWS, even tho…
Most open source projects I’ve worked on could move faster than any of the large companies I’ve been at.
Re: Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week Or senior people who have a dozen offers waiting in their inbox that they've neglected responding to because they're reasonably happy where they are...until the prospect of commuting.
That's not how the job market is right now. There's like 5 companies in the world that can compete on compensation while allowing remote work with meta.
And guess which of your employees can take that option.
Re: Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026
#305Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me. If your employees cannot be trusted to fulfil their responsibilities (whether in an office, their home or a tent in a woodland) that is not a geographical issue. It is a mentality issue and you are always going to face productivity issue from that employee regardless of from where they work. I’ve been told time and time…
I am pretty sure that 99% of the anti rto is exclusively due to the god awful soul crushing commute. 5 days a week an hour each way 10 hours of death each week. There is no authoritarian “shift” this has been business as usual for the last 100 years. Stupid business but business nonetheless
Noisy open spaces with many people talking at the same time and people coming in sick with contagious respiratory infections is not really a recipe for productivity independently of commute.
Re: Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time I hear U.S. commute times, I keep thinking they must be grossly overstated. How is your infrastructure so inadequate for... living?
They're overstated. The median commute time in the USA is about 27 minutes each way. NYC is the highest at 33 min.
Is that one way?
Re: Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Deep Work, Cal Newport posits that even the most disciplined, high performers can do work that requires really focused attention for a max of four hours per day. He's a computer science professor, not exactly "management." And these days, for a lot of knowledge workers there's a pretty strong case that anything which isn't this "deep work" can probably be automated. So yeah if I'm paying you a full time salary I w…
And you think you're more likely to get those four hours in an open office environment with distractions aplenty, as opposed to my effectively noise-proofed home office where I can actually focus?
It really depends. I believe and apply a lot of Cal Newport advice, and benefit greatly from it. But I also see in my daily life how just being close to people you work with, and (crucially) being a short walk away/floor from people in other groups, creates immense value by helping unclog processes and especially by creating new ideas and products that wouldn‘t otherwise exist.
Re: Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026
#308"We're also offering the option to transfer from the MPK to SF office for those people whose commute would be the same or better with that change." So wait, you'll be able to switch offices even though your team might be in the second one? What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?
> What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people? You'll cross-pollinate across functions. Or at least increase the chances of that happening. Not saying that's worth the tradeoff. But my time in the office often finds serendipitious value in random off-team conversations, not scheduled time.
I have quite literally never, not once, "cross-pollinated" ideas in office. I'm not saying it has never happened, but anecdotally even when my entire team is there, other teams are simply not working on the same scope of work that we would be at the time, so there's no cross pollination of any kind.
I mean, I've heard good ideas being discussed, but at the end of the day we all have our in-progress projects and tickets, and future projects already planned out, so those good ideas never make it to fruition because everyone is busy anyways and doesn't have the time or resources to do anything about it. So in reality, those "cross-pollination" talks become nothing more but socialization moments, which is fine, but to force everyone into a miserable commute just to achieve a bit of socializing is insanity to me.
Re: Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good thing for you that you’re productive anywhere. I’m not. I much prefer working from an office. I’m way more efficient and happy in an office than working from home. It’s not a matter of mentality. It’s a matter of being in an environment conducive to work. You would benefit from not assuming that everyone is the same as you.
Nobody was ever prohibited from coming to the office. If you like it, do it. But forcing people to come to the office when they hate it, is counter-productive.
A lot of people are not responsible enough to work well remotely.
Re: Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would take a lower comp for remote work and a better work environment. They will never pay me the amount that would make me choose 2h in traffic everyday instead of having enough time to cook breakfast to my family, take my kids to school, have lunch with my wife, etc.
Every time I hear U.S. commute times, I keep thinking they must be grossly overstated. How is your infrastructure so inadequate for... living?
I live in Utrecht and despite living very close to Utrecht Centraal, it still takes me 45 minutes to get to Amsterdam where my office is. Count late trains and general rush hour, so for me it can take 2h out of my day easily if I'm unlucky (thankfully where I work we count commute time into the work day, the very first time I saw my manager I saw him sprint out the door at 3PM on the dot because he had a lengthy commute lol)