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

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

#361

Post by wredcoll »

eastbound wrote: post #312
saagarjha wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do know there are several productive companies that are entirely remote, right?

Instagram ragequits remote working. Atlassian is a dumpster fire, they run shit engineering since about 3 years. Give me the secret sauce to being productive with remote employees. Maybe some have found it, but apparently paying above the employee ask, offering to double the salary in case of success, sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them gives me the “evil employer” category on most…

I don't know you and you aren't my current employer anyways but a good first step to requiring me to go back to the office would be actually giving me an office!!

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

#362

Post by Terretta »

rustystump wrote: post #279
lukas099 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll attempt a steelman and say, no, employees are not doing deep work from 9–5, but I could see being in an office 9–5 setting the stage for a lot of deep work to be done. Moonlighting for another company I could especially see as detrimental to focus at work.

Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles. The steel man is that in the office you get cross team pollination organically. Team lunches, talking about an idea with another team on how to do something better as in that moment the idea came up. This happens more often in person than remote. Does it need 5 days a week in the office? Absolutely not. 1-2 is plenty.

> Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles.

Or doors.

25 years ago, Microsoft Redmond had a slogan: "Every dev a door".

In early 2000s, it began to be two devs per room. We all know what happened since. Open offices save facilities concrete money per seat. Productivity lost from lack of deep work is not a line item anyone knows how to track.

The "every dev a door" plus "pair programming" was shown by studies from groups like Pivotal Labs as being optimal for working code, but ... and a big but ...

Companies intentionally optimize for things other than working code. You get what you measure and they measure what's easy instead of measure what matters.

// See https://lethain.com/measuring-engineering-organizations/ but also https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/

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

#363

Post by xzjis »

makingstuffs wrote: post #194

Reading 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…

The reality is that middle managers are completely useless, but to justify their usefulness they have to force people to come to the office, to reprimand them if they don't strictly follow the schedule, to hold meetings to pretend they're useful by knowing what their team is doing, etc. They have to act as control agents: checking, monitoring, producing unnecessary reporting (a legacy of slavery) just to prove they exist in the organizational chart. The office is a theater where everyone pretends to be busy (especially them), but that's hard if the offices are empty. It's a system where we try to convince ourselves of their usefulness, which pushes them to fill the void in order to maintain a hierarchy that serves more to prevent people from working peacefully than to organize anything.

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

#364

Post by tacitusarc »

iteria wrote: post #327
raxxorraxor wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With DEI you had to care about the same "structural issues®". It wasn't exactly employee representation and much more of a HR tool to sanction mostly low level employees. Usually I don't care about race and sex at work and I am not sad that DEI is gone. Creates room for issues much more relevant to work. Like working hours, salaries, holidays, health insurance and general work benefits. Stuff that matters.

That's because you are not impacted I assume. If you are from the DEI bucket then there is nothing more important. Every few years they come out with a study where all they do is change the name on resumes. Having a black sounding naming still, in modern day, greatly reduces your chances of getting an interview. Except, during the most current rendition of this study found that wasn't true at all at companies that ha…

My experience of DEI was as ideological cover to offshore jobs to India.

While the executive team performed sweeping layoffs to push up the stock price and increase their own compensation, they paid lip service to DEI as if engaged in a karmic balancing act and that was their cheat code.

And the company culture degraded as a result. Far more inter-group fighting, more politicking, more backstabbing, less cooperation.

I’m not there anymore, but I hear they are trying to revert things back, slowly. Basically every project since then has been a failure and they’ve been coasting on their original success.

Good people don’t need three letter acronyms to treat others fairly, and if someone is selling you new holier-than-thou rules, it’s worth asking what moral cost they no longer feel they need to pay.

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

#365

Post by wkat4242 »

will4274 wrote: post #267
wkat4242 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not directly but they do create an open and fair working environment for all. Once you leave room for discrimination and bullying, everyone suffers because it makes company culture harder. And it's not just about "quotas". That's an extreme-right talking point. Diversity done properly doesn't involve quotas. Those are just a way for companies that don't actually care about it to have an easy 'fix' to get their number…

> And it's not just about "quotas". That's an extreme-right talking point. Diversity done properly doesn't involve quotas At Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta, diversity programs were implemented as soft quotas. All this talk about "diversity done properly" is just so much noise when approximately all the largest companies aren't doing it that way.

Soft quotas are not great but at my work (also a huge multinational but headquartered in Europe) we just use stats as a guide. Obviously if a country has 30% people of a certain ethnicity and in your employ it's 2% you're doing something wrong. We use that to measure hoe effective we are at combating bias and prejudice, what works and what doesn't. I wonder if that's sometimes regarded as a 'soft quota' but it shouldn't be.

We don't fix this with hiring targets. We hit the root cause with training for HR and management (and also some for all employees in the yearly mandatory training package). Recognising hidden bias, challenging people to bconsider their reactions.

And then measure the performance with stats, but not just force them. That's lazy and only fixes the problem on paper. Window dressing. Diversity is more than the hiring process anyway, a huge part is discrimination on the work floor. Often not by managers but co-workers, so we give management skills to deal with that.

Maybe in US big tech this is common but those are all pretty immoral companies anyway. See how quickly they pivoted to sucking up to Trump. The world is much bigger than the US and big tech.

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

#367

Post by red-iron-pine »

array_key_first wrote: post #347
ChadNauseam wrote: post #236

Earlier 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 doubt it, productivity is an equation that's very complex for knowledge workers. 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 actuall…

true for many creative and intellectual jobs too.

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

#368

Post by safety1st »

jakupovic wrote: post #311
safety1st wrote: post #289

Earlier 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…

First, nobody cares what you want. Second, do you pay for those 4 hours adequately, guess what if you don't? Even if you do, are you OK with 2 hours today and 6 hrs tomorrow? How about a year of 1 hour days and then a 24 hour period that fixes all the problems for last 2 years?

The Internet tough guy strikes again, as if employment is not a voluntary contract between two consenting adults. This militant attitude is always good for a laugh... hate management if you like, but if you think no employee ever worries about what their manager wants, sounds like you've never held a job.

Not really sure why I am even responding to this amazingly stupid line of discussion. I mean if you absolutely hate the idea of having a boss (I know I did) then there is a solution for that - start your own company! It's not as easy as being a badass on the Internet, sure, but you might have to look at both sides of the argument and you might even end up getting rid of that chip on your shoulder.

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

#369

Post by safety1st »

messe wrote: post #291
safety1st wrote: post #289

Earlier 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?

I'm on record many times saying that I think open office plans are a bad idea, so I'm not sure where you got that straw man

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

#370

Post by JamesBarney »

array_key_first wrote: post #347
ChadNauseam wrote: post #236

Earlier 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 doubt it, productivity is an equation that's very complex for knowledge workers. 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 actuall…

It's definitely not more productive per hour than 40. And if you're moonlighting another 30 hrs that'll definitely decrease your productivity at work.
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