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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

#381
post #327

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…

I am an ethnic minority, not visibly though and not from any DEI bucket. But that doesn't matter. Some DEI proponents perhaps meant well, but the way the went about was simply the wrong one. Criticism wasn't welcomed at all, even treating everybody the same regardless of sex or race was looked down upon. Words like racism were redefined and you had to adhere to certain dogmata.

The classic approach to treat everyone equally is still better, even if there is some prejudice left. And that doesn't preclude any program that helps those in need. And here the same thing is true: Race and sex are irrelevant.

Some proponents of DEI had their own problems with prejudice to solve in my experience. So perhaps the onus should be that everyone works on their own personal prejudices for now.

Some things will be unfair, but introducing more unfairness doesn't solve any problems. And here DEI simply failed in its approach. A bad job market doesn't mean we can discriminate those that might have been more lucky regardless of reasons. The task would be to fix the job market.

To propose two groups of minorities against some diffuse ethnic majority is simply childish, comes with multiple problems and it doesn't provide tangible benefits to anyone in the long run. I would argue it even entrenches prejudices and pits people against each other.

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

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market will solve this problem eventually. In industries where WFH is more efficient, eventually the companies that go that route will outperform their peers. It’s inevitable really. It will take time because companies feel the need to use their offices while they have an ongoing lease, but when it comes time to renew the savings are difficult to ignore.

Ah, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, applied to labor.

That doesn’t seem correct to me. Explain?

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

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again, it depends. Maybe they have more pride in their job or despise their company less, who knows.

And I don't mean productivity per hour. Lol. No, I mean absolute.

An employee working like a dog will get less work done than one just working normally, probably. Because most of the work is negative, so it doesn't add to the work done pile, it chips away at it.

Eventually, I would think, you reach a point where an employee is less productive than no employee at all. Seems impossible to be working 100 hours a week and be getting less than nothing done, but if you're actively making the product worse or creating debt, that's how I would classify that.

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

#384

I noticed: 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 t…

I definitely agree with you about (1), though this can be somewhat mitigated by having a good culture of agreeing to hop into impromptu video calls.

(2) feels weird to me; if the work is getting done, is there an issue? Does it matter if I spend 4 hours or 2 hours on a design doc, if the result is a good design doc?

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no one wants to work at shops that actually have unions compared to other places. it's just silly to actually suggest it makes things better.

Yeah, speak for yourself. I'd love to work at a place where I can't be fired because my manager had a bad day and I didn't move the right Jira tickets around to his satisfaction, where I'm treated like a human being in stead of fungible cattle. I also don't want to go back into an office. Ever. But if people actually want to affect change at their workplace, instead of just kvetching, that's basically the only way to…

There are companies in the US that have engineering unions. Boeing is one. You're going to tell me you'd rather work at Boeing over Apple or Google?

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

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the propaganda they used to keep us from organizing in our best interest.

Right, they want you to believe that each of us is a special little snowflake so we can crab bucket each other. Of course, simultaneously, they treat us as completely fungible. Every engineer is like any other in their eyes. Such a perfect contradiction should surely spark introspection in employees... you would think.

"The enemy is simultaneously strong and weak" - one of the warning signs of fascism

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

#387
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My RTO'd team of 13 is distributed across 3 office and not evenly distributed (8, 4, 1) so the probability of the person you need being in the same physical office is ~43% instead of the 0%. So overall it's better if you value in person and I say this as the 1

There's a 100% chance that you can't work in person with your full team, so if you think in-person work is important I'm not sure how overall it can be better value, since you won't get that.

You still get in person for 1-1s, small team whiteboarding and pair programming.

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't even a conspiracy theory, it's just true. I mean, some of it is definitely induced attrition (you always want the expensive people to quit, in the Milton Friedman cinematic universe), but the rest is that the commercial real estate market would collapse tomorrow if businesses couldn't justify their 10- or 15-year commercial leases. Not for nothing did endless headlines about how "going into the office is s…

I'm pretty sure that Meta don't own most of their buildings, so this wouldn't apply to them.

But it probably applies to a lot of their shareholders, and they have big influence.

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

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, speak for yourself. I'd love to work at a place where I can't be fired because my manager had a bad day and I didn't move the right Jira tickets around to his satisfaction, where I'm treated like a human being in stead of fungible cattle. I also don't want to go back into an office. Ever. But if people actually want to affect change at their workplace, instead of just kvetching, that's basically the only way to…

There are companies in the US that have engineering unions. Boeing is one. You're going to tell me you'd rather work at Boeing over Apple or Google?

...yes? Is that supposed to be a hard question?

No, seriously, literally what does Apple or Google have over Boeing as a company to work at? Compensation? If money is all that matters to you, then there are several Web3/AI/etc startups offering absurd cash comp that you can go and throw yourself at.

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

#390
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're overstated. The median commute time in the USA is about 27 minutes each way. NYC is the highest at 33 min.

For tech hubs? Because tech hubs tend to be in some of the most traffic nightmare cities. I have worked in DC and Atlanta. My commute for all my jobs except 1 was an hour. The one exception was 20mins because it was a small weirdly placed company that just happened to be in the suburb one over from me. For all other jobs, I had to commute to a business district I didn't live close to because business district and low…

In a real tech hub, it's definitely going to be a longer commute. Nashville, for instance, is not a tech hub. Yet it has some of the worst commute times for people who have an office there.
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