Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026 • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by will4274 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 8:05 AM UTC

wkat4242 wrote: post #422

pb7 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Obviously if a country has 30% people of a certain ethnicity and in your employ it's 2% you're doing something wrong. Do you apply this to everything? Like say, a sports team? >The world is much bigger than the US and big tech. Anything impressive to show for it? Because it really seems like all this focus on diversity is your downfall not your strength.

> Do you apply this to everything? Like say, a sports team? No, at work where we have tens of thousands of people. Sport is a voluntary thing, people just join it when they want (I guess, I'm not into sports, not watching nor playing). > Anything impressive to show for it? Because it really seems like all this focus on diversity is your downfall not your strength. Yes we have great quality of life. It's not all about…

> Sport is a voluntary thing, people just join it when they want (I guess, I'm not into sports, not watching nor playing).

Sports are one of the highest paying jobs in the world. Professional athletes in popular sports leagues are in the 0.01%.

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

#432

Post by duskdozer » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 8:28 AM UTC

redhale wrote: post #350

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…

Congrats on your work ethic. But consider that this may simply not be the case for every working adult on earth, and may not even be true for every working adult in your company. Not everyone is like you. I am, but I know people (some of whom are former and current coworkers) who are much more easily distracted, and are meaningfully less able to compete their work in a timely manner when they work from home. I'll pro…

I think it's only a small portion of WFH advocates who say that everyone should be forced to work remotely. Most want each person to have the ability to work the way that's best for them.

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

#433

Post by port11 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:22 AM UTC

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…

It's the middle managers. They're the unproductive ones in a remote setup.

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

#434

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:57 AM UTC

array_key_first wrote: post #388

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody except Mark Zuckerberg matters for Meta. He has majority control of the board voting rights.

It seems much more likely that this is driven by the fact that Facebook culture has always been very much around in-person 1:1 contacts between people. This frustrated me a lot when I was there, but it did seem to work for a relatively long time.

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

#435

Post by a96 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:49 AM UTC

billy99k wrote: post #337

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…

"Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them." They are forcing them back into the office, which was pretty much the norm pre-covid. Having hard to fire employees isn't a good thing for the company or the well-being of other employ…

Being a one person company with one client is circumventing employment laws. Sensibly illegal in many countries.

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

#436

Post by filleduchaos » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:46 PM UTC

OGEnthusiast wrote: post #426

filleduchaos wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Smarter coworkers. Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days. > Better engineering culture. Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days. > Bosses with engineering chops. Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days. The rest of your list is just "money" written over and over and as I've already said, if that's all you care about, that's your prer…

Not sure how it is in Nigeria, but in America people think much more highly of Apple products than recent Boeing planes. So by the logic of "Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days.", Boeing does much worse on that metric than Apple.

Not sure what countries are supposed to have to do with anything but if that's where we're taking it, America is full of people who think all sorts of nonsense that is barely rooted in reality. I don't really see how the opinion of a public that revels in ignorance and is easily led by the nose (and I'm aware that this applies on both sides of the Atlantic) is supposed to be relevant to an engineering discussion.

I guess at least you didn't bother trying to argue that Google is a bastion of high quality products

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

#437

Post by filleduchaos » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:16 PM UTC

VirusNewbie wrote: post #428

filleduchaos wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Smarter coworkers. Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days. > Better engineering culture. Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days. > Bosses with engineering chops. Doubtful, we can see the products that come out of them these days. The rest of your list is just "money" written over and over and as I've already said, if that's all you care about, that's your prer…

So wait, your argument is that you actually think Boeing has a better engineering culture and smarter coworkers, than cream of the crop prestigious and high paying software companies. You're just that certain that the vast majority of engineers don't care about money, and aren't competing to get in there? And instead work at Boeing. Where you think the engineering culture is better...even though their software has a…

On the contrary, I actually know that the median engineer at Boeing is working on much harder problems than the monumental amount of webslop that the median Google engineer is responsible for. And while the engineers at Boeing are not perfect on top of working under the constraints of the airline industry, I also have eyes to see the sheer enshittification of nearly everything that has come out of Apple and Google in the past decade. Google in particular - for goodness' sake just look at the state of YouTube web right now after their last "update", or the steady decline of Search, or the hatchet job they performed on apps like Fitbit after acquiring them - these are things we all know and bemoan even on here but sure, let's suddenly pretend that the company is a super bastion of quality. It's definitely not the name and the dollar signs flashing in front of the eyes.

As an aside, what I said is that if all you care about is money, then that's your prerogative. Plenty of us aren't slavering to work at The Empire Of Ads because they give free food. Apple at least has more dignity as a company, although outside of their silicon (which almost no software engineer is going to touch) they've been spinning the wheel for years papered over by vendor lock-in and their pricing strategy.

> All those terrible products that all those people are using from Apple and Google

If your argument is "well people use them", then I have some potentially really shocking news for you about Boeing products.

Now this is probably the part where you say a lot about MCAS without necessarily understanding what it is.

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

#438

Post by sjw987 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 3:12 PM UTC

kaliqt wrote: post #207

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…

As Office Space says: it is a question of motivation. If you care, it'll get done. If you don't, you'll find a way to slack off, even if you're at the office.

Wild that anybody thinks simply being in the office makes employees work. I have a colleague who sits within 2m of me who keeps their (personal) phone on their desk all day. They literally prop it up against the bottom of their computer monitor. They're not even subtle about it.

They get distracted every 2-3 minutes and spend upwards or 2-3 hours on it. It distracts me when it vibrates 100+ times per day.

Boss walks in, phone is down. Boss walks out, phone in hand.

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

#439

Post by footy » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 3:16 PM UTC

will4274 wrote: post #409

footy wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is such a weird response to me. Those American Meta employees may have more money, but it's not enough money to stop working and their lives are objectively worse. What's the point of money then?

Well... their lives are objectively better, so, I don't really know what to tell you. It's true that poor people in America live less well that poor people in Europe (though if European economies continue to lag, this may stop being true in my lifetime), but Meta employees in America have really good lives. They have massive houses, retire young with huge savings, and send their kids to elite private schools. And per…

how are they better? we're talking about them being forced to go into the office and despite having money having no power. The very thing that this thread was about is what is worse about their lives.

I don't know that a massive house is enough to make up for it.

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

#440

Post by dreis_sw » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #384

_cs2017_ wrote: post #341

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?

(2) At the office, it's harder to pretend that work took longer than it actually took. If you're done with the design doc in 2h, with colleagues sitting all around you, what can you do to pretend that it took you longer? Mess around with Confluence, pretending to work? You might as well move on to the next design doc, or find something useful to do meanwhile.

At home, you can just pick up the Xbox controller and say it took you 4 hours.

I like the comfort of WFH, and there are plenty of people (myself included) that are responsible enough to handle it, but the problem is that the average person isn't. And we all pay for it.