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

businessinsider.com

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

#311

Post by jakupovic »

safety1st wrote: post #289
imcrs wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've already kind of made it clear here where I stand on this, but I gotta tell you, you really do sound a lot like management. Do you really think your superstar programmers are well and truly doing intellectual work, the kind of work that produces business value, from the time they hit the coffee machine at 9AM to the time they grab their briefcase to go home at 5PM? If you believe this, I think you might be intere…

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?

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

#312

Post by eastbound »

saagarjha wrote: post #302
eastbound wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 forums.

Yeah, I know “Treat them even better!” is, again, the word of the union guy, but in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.

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

#313

Post by jakupovic »

dkga wrote: post #307
messe wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup, short walt to my colleagues who are all spread across the world. /$

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

#314

Post by jeena »

dkga wrote: post #307
messe wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bullshit. When I'm in the office most of my time is spent on making sure it looks like I'm working and obsessing about if someone is standing/sitting behind me and looking at my screen or not, because I'm in a panopticum. There is no time for deep work.

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

#315

Post by jeena »

p_l wrote: post #264
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.

The nature of modern offices pretty much prevents deep work. You're not going to get deep work when you pack people like sardines into neat rows of desks, where pretty much at any time someone within one row away is going to be in a meeting - conducted of course over teleconferencing software. Or some people will talk (honestly, being in the office mostly translated to chit-chat for me).

This is exactly my experience too.

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

#316

Post by jakupovic »

agubelu wrote: post #274
legostormtroopr wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't expect someone to do deep focused work from 9am to 5pm. But at the same time, I don't expect them to spend their 9-to-5 working for another company at the same time. As a founder, who respects the 9-to-5 and supports WFH, if I'm paying for 8 hours of work, I want 8 hours of output. Not 4 hours of output, and then you working 4 hours for another job. If multi-jobbing becomes a thing, then WFH becomes untenable…

How do you measure whether some output corresponds to 8 hours of work, and not 4 or 16 hours?

He doesn't known what he is talking about. Bunch of wannabe founders waxing BS. If you want 8 hours of guaranteed output use a bot

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

#317

Post by sensanaty »

letmetweakit wrote: post #242

I don’t think it’s hard to imagine that people work better together when they are in the same office. It’s also not hard to imagine people work harder when there’s more social control. From the perspective of the business owner, this makes total sense. Yes, some people work harder and better at home, but, in general WFH is net negative for a company I think.

If you trust your employees so little, why even bother employing them in the first place though? And for what it's worth, I'm equally capable of slacking both in-office and at home and I'm definitely not alone in that one, it's just that the slacking is more often in the form of socializing, eating snacks, taking toilet and smoke breaks etc.

We have a choice thankfully, so no one really slacks in person or remotely because surprise surprise, when you treat your employees like human beings and not cogs in the machine they're actually motivated to do good work, who'd'a thunk it?

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

#318

Post by jakupovic »

LunaSea wrote: post #309
bambax wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You forgot the IMHO.

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

#319

Post by amrocha »

stavros wrote: post #251
amrocha wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s only because you go to the office once in a blue moon. If it was your daily routine you’d get used to it and be productive there too, just maybe not as much as when you’re home. Did you work in an office before covid? I’m sure your productivity wasn’t abysmal or you wouldn’t still be working in tech

I go to the office around one week out of every four, it's not that rare. Sure, there's some catching up, but not that much. Mostly it's the continuous interruptions that are never time boxed, the way they are when remote.

That’s odd, in my experience most engineers know to at least send a slack message first before talking to a fellow engineer in person, unless it’s an emergency.

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

#320

Post by amrocha »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #275
amrocha wrote: post #229

Earlier 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.

There are offices where I definitely feel productive. Today’s tight open offices just are not those places.

I don’t know what you mean by today’s because most companies I’ve worked at have had pretty nice offices. Even the open space ones were quiet and spacious. The one exception was a startup at an incubator.
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