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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

#451

Post by wkat4242 »

pb7 wrote: post #417
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…

[flagged]

They are merit based. Especially with DEI. It just aims to remove the common human bias to trust people more when they are more like us. With training and hiding names/photos during CV preselection. So it is only based on merit.

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

#452

Post by dreis_sw »

munksbeer wrote: post #448
dreis_sw wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

> And we all pay for it. That's a very confident statement to make. My company is very much happy with remote working. 50% of my team aren't even in the country. Most other teams are the same. I don't feel like I'm paying any price for that.

Happy to hear that it's working out well for you, but there is always a cost. The less common successful remote work becomes across the industry, the more companies like yours stand out. And remote work goes back to being a premium, highly competitive perk, like it used to be in the past.

And I agree that remote work is perfectly possible with a good culture and responsible employees, but most companies don't really have the culture or hiring practices that optimize for that.

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

#453

Post by slater »

pb7 wrote: post #417
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…

[flagged]

> We're back to sane times thankfully, but it will take a long time to undo the rot caused by DEI.

Don't be counting your chickens too soon. Once the current clown show is voted out, we can hopefully get back to a more reality-based situation.

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

#454

Post by OkayPhysicist »

_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…

It's rather simple: You don't pay me to write code for 4/8/12 hours per day, you pay me to get a job done. If that job's worth $X to you, you pay me $X, everyone's happy. And that's exactly how it works in office, too. Ever notice that HN's busier during work hours than after?

If don't feel an employee's work output is worth their $X, tell them that. Then, if they suddenly improve, great. If they don't, fire them. It's really that simple. This is America, any obstacles to sacking incompetent employees are of your own design.

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

#455

Post by jarjoura »

wkat4242 wrote: post #158
jarjoura wrote: post #115

Sad, because before COVID, no one at Meta cared where you worked as long as you were getting your shit done. There was never available meeting rooms, and the open floor plans were so loud, that people would spread out all over the campus and use single person VC rooms to communicate in. Basically, everyone trusted everyone. This is 100% just a soft layoff.

I notice US tech companies have also become really tough on white collar workers in order to suck up to Trump and his country goons. No more diversity programs, work life balance no longer promoted, that kinda stuff. This fits in with that trend.

meh, you're just conflating two different things.

Tech companies spent a decade (since 2010), driving towards some belief that the entire world was going to go online and stay there. They also ammassed an insane amount of wealth in that time. Wealth that is now structurally tied to the stability of the entire financial system.

For whatever reason, investors get bored and want to move money around and so the tech companies, that built healthy, stable businesses, needed to keep that dopamine hit coming with new mega annoucements. What else is there to build? "Efficiency" is the current corporate white collar trend, because that's what investors are woo'd with. AI is the other new-new thing, but instead of a that next reason to reverse hiring trends, AI itself is built and sold as an employee replacement.

Anyway, the fact that there is an entire class of people in the US who feel and believe, it can't get any worse, are geniunely suffering in ways many of here on this forum can't even imagine. Definitely think it's unfair to put these two concerns in the same bucket.

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

#456

Post by ponector »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #48
paxys wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week - kids to pick up from daycare, health issues to manage, a social life in the evenings, travel plans - basically the exact category that a company like Meta would want to replace with a younger, more exploitable bunch.

> And the employees most likely to quit will be ones with responsibilities that make it difficult to do the commute 5 days a week Or senior people who have a dozen offers waiting in their inbox that they've neglected responding to because they're reasonably happy where they are...until the prospect of commuting.

Dozen offers to try to go through 5+ stages of recruitment process without any feedback and possibility to be ghosted after each person. How good senior people are with leetcode?

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

#457

Post by duskdozer »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #385
venturecruelty wrote: post #202

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?

Looks like you don't have to choose between Boeing and Google! https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/25/22243138/google-union-alp...

Though yes, I'm not sure if that union still exists now. The point is that you do not have to prefer working at every company that has a union over every company that does not have a union. It's enough to prefer having a union over not having a union at any company you do work for.

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

#458

Post by rcbdev »

sensanaty wrote: post #310
rcbdev wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I hear U.S. commute times, I keep thinking they must be grossly overstated. How is your infrastructure so inadequate for... living?

I live in Utrecht and despite living very close to Utrecht Centraal, it still takes me 45 minutes to get to Amsterdam where my office is. Count late trains and general rush hour, so for me it can take 2h out of my day easily if I'm unlucky (thankfully where I work we count commute time into the work day, the very first time I saw my manager I saw him sprint out the door at 3PM on the dot because he had a lengthy comm…

I think if you counted commute time as billable hours in the U.S. workforce, there would be much less complaining.

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

#459

Post by rcbdev »

iteria wrote: post #331
jedberg wrote: post #258

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…

Most cities on earth have mixed-zoning, with office and living spaces mixed together. There, this does not occur.

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

#460

Post by ggm »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #434
array_key_first wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Boards have a finance subcommittee and review income on investments. Meta does not invest 100% of its worth inside Meta, it will have billions of dollars invested through merchant banks who in turn balance in private equity, shares, and property. The property component will be reporting risk on lower future returns if the building declines in value as an asset. His fund manager will be advising him that signals to increase occupancy reduces his risk.

That he wants to do it, is an added bonus.

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