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Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

businessinsider.com

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Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#81

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

hot_gril wrote: post #80
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is people immediately responding to you a measure of the work they do? Does it seem productive they are interrupting whatever they were working on and losing their train of thought to answer your questions? I know my team has had the talk that Teams is an async communication method, and that we'll get back to each-other when we have spare brain cycles. The message is instant, but there's no expectation the response w…

No, but I expect someone who has committed to a joint project to pay attention to code or design reviews and respond within a week. Which started happening less often.

If people are going AWOL for more than a week you need to start firing.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#82

Post by hot_gril »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #81
hot_gril wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but I expect someone who has committed to a joint project to pay attention to code or design reviews and respond within a week. Which started happening less often.

If people are going AWOL for more than a week you need to start firing.

They're not AWOL, they just started being less responsive, missing more things, and generally talking less. Pretty often I'll have no idea what most of my teammates are doing. I know they're working on something is all.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#83

Post by SkyPuncher »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #78
SkyPuncher wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big advocate of remote work, but my role has changed it's value significantly: * As an IC, remote is amazing. It gives me distraction free space to focus and be productive. With moderate process, I'm able to be extremely productive and unblock myself. * As a manager, remote can be challenging when trying to drive cross-team/cross-org impact - especially on ambiguous projects. It's far more challenging to drive…

As a senior manager who's job is entirely cross-team/cross-org change management, I can assure you remote hasn't made things much harder. Orgs have always been geographically diverse (show me an org that doesn't have to coordinate across multiple sites and I'll show you an org that isn't big enough to have these issues in the first place) and managing change in remote parts of the org was always hard and always neces…

I generally agree with everything you say. It aligns with my experience as well. Once you hit a certain size, people are in different locations no matter what.

The difference with remote-only is _everyone_ is in the hard bucket. That includes the people who you work most closely with.

While it's not insurmountable, it can add friction.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#84

Post by dalyons »

hot_gril wrote: post #73
dalyons wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok but that just re-asks the same question - if you remove the people-doing-nothing factor (by firing them) then what is the motivation for RTO?

I get the feeling that remote employees do less work in general, except for the few who really make an effort to stay connected and on top of stuff despite WFH. I've been guilty of this at times, and when I got back into gear, I noticed how slowly everyone else responded to stuff. It's not just a few people going AWOL and ruining it for everyone.

This is why I want to see the data though, I’m not that interested in “feelings” or anecdotes at this stage of the industry-wide discussion :)

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#85

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

hot_gril wrote: post #82
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people are going AWOL for more than a week you need to start firing.

They're not AWOL, they just started being less responsive, missing more things, and generally talking less. Pretty often I'll have no idea what most of my teammates are doing. I know they're working on something is all.

Seems like that's a failure to set and enforce expectations.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#86

Post by la64710 »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #49
la64710 wrote: post #12

Great job humans. Keep encouraging more daily commuters and contributing to greenhouse gases instead of making things better through technology. I am sure the next generations will thank us for this and not even showing the willpower to look at the issue objectively. /s

Before the pandemic I never touched my car Monday to Friday, I was strictly on the subway. I didn't even have a parking pass for work. Since working from home, I drive around the suburbs almost daily Monday to Friday for lunch/errands to get out of the house. People make weird assumptions.

The only thing I am assuming is that back to the office will increase number of car commuters - are you saying this is a weird assumption? I think it is a no brainer.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#87

Post by frumper »

hot_gril wrote: post #73
dalyons wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok but that just re-asks the same question - if you remove the people-doing-nothing factor (by firing them) then what is the motivation for RTO?

I get the feeling that remote employees do less work in general, except for the few who really make an effort to stay connected and on top of stuff despite WFH. I've been guilty of this at times, and when I got back into gear, I noticed how slowly everyone else responded to stuff. It's not just a few people going AWOL and ruining it for everyone.

I feel like you overestimate how little people do in office.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#88

Post by frumper »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #45
ThorsBane wrote: post #19

Meta needs its best engineers to be highly motivated in uncertain times. Otherwise innovation will be harder to come by. All the best engineers I ever worked with so far all favor remote work because it increases code quality, throughput, and happiness. Meta will be disrupted, seeing as whatever Meta tech they’re building isn’t even good enough for their own employees to dogfood for better remote work experience.

I'm a big advocate of remote work, but my role has changed it's value significantly: * As an IC, remote is amazing. It gives me distraction free space to focus and be productive. With moderate process, I'm able to be extremely productive and unblock myself. * As a manager, remote can be challenging when trying to drive cross-team/cross-org impact - especially on ambiguous projects. It's far more challenging to drive…

Can you give some examples of ambiguous projects? That doesn't sound like a particularly fruitful endeavor to begin with.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#89

Post by Gigachad »

hot_gril wrote: post #74
epups wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was true, why don't Meta and all the others simply hire people from those countries, like they offshored production? In some cases they even set up physical offices there to try to do exactly as you say. Yet they keep coming back to more expensive workers.

Because WFH didn't work for them. My opinion as someone who's never been a megacorp exec: WFH should work, but they long ago set themselves up around some kind of over-collaboration with too many cooks in the kitchen, then with WFH they just introduced a big latency factor to it without fundamentally changing how they work (which would've been too risky).

I get this. Work requires every single PR to receive 2 reviews. It's not so bad in office because you just pull up a chair and have a discussion. But having to do it remote is infuriating and painfully slow. It takes hours at best, days on average to get a review, and then you make the changes and have to wait hours/days again for the next round. It's especially bad when a reviewer just isn't sure what something does so they leave a question and don't approve. Now you have to go through the whole process just to have them read and approve.

And this is just one scenario. There are so many things that seem to just grind to a halt when you can't just go talk to someone. You have to instead try to book a meeting which is so much friction that you avoid doing it if at all possible.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#90

Post by hotpotamus »

hot_gril wrote: post #73
dalyons wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok but that just re-asks the same question - if you remove the people-doing-nothing factor (by firing them) then what is the motivation for RTO?

I get the feeling that remote employees do less work in general, except for the few who really make an effort to stay connected and on top of stuff despite WFH. I've been guilty of this at times, and when I got back into gear, I noticed how slowly everyone else responded to stuff. It's not just a few people going AWOL and ruining it for everyone.

I did tons more work in 2021 when I was WFH the whole year. I built a shed and did several other large scale home improvement projects, mostly on my parents' properties. I liked to say that I was the highest paid day laborer in town. It helped keep me from going insane from being trapped at my desk at home for over a year. In early 2022 I found an in office job and it's been much better.
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