Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026

1) A lot of informal (i.e., not in a scheduled meeting) chats are more valuable than meetings. They are much more rare when people WFH.

2) Many folks tend to be more distracted when WFH. TLs don't have a perfect vision into whether someone spent 4 hours on a bug (or a design doc) or 2 hours on the bug / design doc and 2 hours on online shopping / playing with kids.

It's quite confusing to me that none of the comments I saw in this thread don't discuss those factors (I'd be fine if people mentioned them and explained why they are not too important).

Obviously there are also factors in favor of WFH: commute costs, personal satisfaction (which may indirectly improve productivity and/or retention of the best people), noise in the workplace, lack of meeting rooms, etc. But it's far from obvious to me if, on balance, WFH or RTO works better for building a successful company.

RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs. People have moved. People may not be able to come back. People may simply not want to. Some of those people will quit. And that's cheaper than a severance package.

We are in permanent layoff culture now. Why? To suppress wages and get more work for no extra compensation. 5% of the staff gets fired? The other 95% has to do their work for no extra money AND they're not demanding pay raises. Win win.

Over time profits have a tendency to shrink and the only way to maintain the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is, ultimately, by raising prices and cutting costs. I wish more people realized this is all that's going on.

Not enough to move the needle. 25% would move the needle.

> with mentions that I could double it in one year

They didn't believe you, or didn't after a short time working there. So it didn't move the needle.

More so if they're experienced. Similar mentions of prospects are common in interviews, and rarely followed through. You eventually learn to be skeptical of them, while rolling with it, just in case.

Also, if you might be willing to pay double their requested salary, they start realising their value on the open market is much higher than they'd previously thought, or could be with a little presentation and experience.

On the other hand, if you'd put it in the contract that their salary will double after 1 year, subject to well-defined criteria and a history of actually doing it with existing employees, then they'd believe you, and that would move the needle a lot.

From your story I speculate you were right to fire them, but you never figured our how to get the best out of them. In recent years it's possible you were subject to employment fraud, as clarity of analysis can disappear if it's a different person doing the work than the person answering interview questions.

Progress that's entirely stalled or negative can happen for many other reasons than moonlighting, and many other reasons than not putting enough time.

For example, is 80 hours of work a week more productive than 40? If you're working an assembly line, probably.

If you're a programmer, definitely not. You will write more bugs, make more mistakes, and churning out code doesn't mean much. Any monkey can write code, but writing maintainable code is hard, and reading that code and actually choosing to maintain it is harder.

Ah, yes. I’m a clown because you live in a very curated bubble?

I notice you offered no refutations, just ad hominem.