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In that sense I like that these companies are forcing a return to office because presumably they're leaving talent on the table that I can hire and outcompete them with.
As a SWE who does IC and planning / TL design work, I find it immensely easier to work from home. I don't have to find a meeting room, I have one stable multi-monitor setup that I'm comfortable with for running and participating in meetings, and I can make myself available for "emergencies" early and late in the day without having to work my commute around that.
The leaders making this decision at Roblox have generous compensation packages (even for tech), and can likely afford to buy a new house every single year based on how much they earn. The reality for a rank-and-file SWE trying to secure housing in the Bay Area, especially near San Mateo, is much more precarious. No joke, if these companies offered to factor in a cost-of-living adjustment to compensation based on rent rates in the area surrounding the office, I'd go back in a heartbeat, but I spent enough time as a new grad commuting 90 minutes each way saving less than 10% of my paycheck after rent and basic living expenses, to where I would literally quit SWE work before being forced back to my company's HQ.
Mind you, certain economic classes of young individuals will have safety nets from their family and the support they need to not worry as much about finances. This will have a deliberate effect on the types of backgrounds that will become predominant among employees -- likely, folks already in the bay area who went to nearby top-tier schools and have upbringings that primed them for such a life one way or another. My experience thus far is that our remote teams at my job tend to be more diverse and the new-grad experience is less economically precarious because you have the choice of living where you want to. Caretakers and people with kids also suffer disproportionately with RTO vs. those younger or with less family duties, and this affects the population of employees drastically too.
As important as in-person collaboration is for mentoring, brainstorming, and culture, I feel like there's probably a way to create space for that without bringing everybody back to the HCOL areas where leadership tends to already own personal and commercial real-estate (potential conflict of interest, though this varies by company/leader in terms of the size of the assets).
I think the writing is on the wall though and probably every major tech firm will slowly creep back from "hybrid" to "well, 3 is the minimum" (see: flair bit from office space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7SNEdjftno), to having the real "team players" be the ones who can afford to come in 5 days a week. This was probably inevitable but I find it vastly disappointing.
I totally agree with the impact of spontaneous things happening when in person. I had been working remotely for 8 years and really was 100% for it and advocating it. I recently joined a new job where I'm at the office 3 days a week, and I can definitely feel the difference both in the time it took me to onboard (compared to other remote-only onboarding I did) and the productivity / relationships / other gains from th…
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I came to post the same comment. They are going to lose their best people but it wont matter. Or their top 5% will get the ok to work remotely. Roblox is the exact opposite of any company I would want to be involved with. It is a platform to create malformed children, a simulated dystopian hellscape.
> They are going to lose their best people I doubt Arseny is going to leave over this.
At least they're giving people a full 9 months to relocate, including aligning it with the typical school year.
I'm guessing the answer is no.
"For the remote employees whom we are asking to move to in-office roles, we will provide the option to join our three-day, in-office schedule (Tues.-Thurs.) or take a severance package." Since Roblox is in the virtual world business, this is embarrassing. Their own world isn't good enough for them. Amusingly, Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, was mostly remote before, during, and after the pandemic. They se…
Roblox is "virtual world business" for gaming, not workplace. For Meta it's different, they're pushing for working and collaborating virtually. It's not the same.
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No reason remote work can’t be spontaneous, even easier IMO because you don’t have to herd cats into the same space. A ping on chat and within 1 min multiple people can be in the discussion without even having to move.
Maybe? Personally I've never used a virtual whiteboard that was any good. I blame the much smaller area and the mouse input. Of course if your ways of working mean you can collaborate without any need for whiteboards, I guess things could be fine. Clearly, things like the Linux kernel get along OK without such collaboration.