Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 100 posts

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#91

Post by hot_gril »

Gigachad wrote: post #89
hot_gril wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Code reviews are the basic thing that started taking longer, yeah. Also the system architectures tend to have multiple people owning one thing, vs a more distributed setup where one person has total authoritah over a service or two and just makes sure they talk well to the others.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#92

Post by Gigachad »

birdsnezte wrote: post #47
bratao wrote: post #26

While it may be controversial, I like that some companies are trying Work from Office, for multiple reasons: It forces companies to tap into a smaller talent pool locally, which can include more junior employees that may require training. This makes the company more inclusive and gives opportunities to those who might not otherwise have access to them. Let's not forget that one of the most successful companies in the…

>> one of the most successful companies in the world, OpenAI How are you measuring success?

ChatGPT is the fastest growing consumer product ever created, by a large margin. That’s pretty successful.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#93

Post by hot_gril »

dalyons wrote: post #84
hot_gril wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

There isn't really a measure of SWE productivity. Even granular things like individual promo are more based on what others say than on any stat (unless it's Twitter and they use LoC).

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#94

Post by jchonphoenix »

drewbug01 wrote: post #68
jchonphoenix wrote: post #65

This isn't as nefarious as everyone makes it out to be. There are articles that state Meta has hard data that people who start as Remote workers at Meta significantly underperform those that don't. In light of that data, they're pausing the experiment and working to understand what the data is saying.

If their data is solid enough to justify it, they should publish it. Until they do so, I remain deeply skeptical. It’s all too easy to engineer measurements or interpret data to support the outcomes you already want. If the data is truly so revealing, show it to the world.

I'd love to see it too, but don't you think the sentiment is a little entitled?

Meta is a private company that can do whatever it wants and Zuck doesn't need to justify anything. He's also not being too egregious here. He's stopped hiring new remote, but hasn't forced any current remote people back into the office. What right do we have to demand more from them?

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#95

Post by Gigachad »

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

Office commuting is the most viable public transport service. Trains would use a negligible amount of power per passenger. It might even be more efficient to take a train to an office than to heat your home.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#96

Post by jwestbury »

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.

Just as a counterpoint of anecdata, I saw more or less the opposite behaviour when I was at Dropbox during the pandemic -- I heard from my coworkers more than I ever did working in-office, and was better-connected to the work they were doing. I personally felt more productive, and most of my team seemed pretty productive.

The downside is that a junior teammate was probably less effective than they could have been because of a lack of in-person mentoring -- their learning was slower than I would have expected in-office, but, then, that could be this particular person rather than remote work.

I don't doubt your experience, to be clear -- I just mean to say that I think the situation is more complex than "people are less productive" or "people are more productive."

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#97

Post by drewbug01 »

jchonphoenix wrote: post #94
drewbug01 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If their data is solid enough to justify it, they should publish it. Until they do so, I remain deeply skeptical. It’s all too easy to engineer measurements or interpret data to support the outcomes you already want. If the data is truly so revealing, show it to the world.

I'd love to see it too, but don't you think the sentiment is a little entitled? Meta is a private company that can do whatever it wants and Zuck doesn't need to justify anything. He's also not being too egregious here. He's stopped hiring new remote, but hasn't forced any current remote people back into the office. What right do we have to demand more from them?

I’m free to demand whatever I’d like, and they’re free to ignore my demands. “Entitled” is an odd way to frame the interaction to me.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#98

Post by BaseballPhysics »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #83
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but my comment was with respect to managers, not ICs.

For ICs, I agree, distributed teams can face coordination challenges due to increased friction, poorer communication practices (if they haven't adapted well to remote communication patterns), etc. Personally, my ideal world is teams that are geographically co-located but working remotely. That minimizes things like timezone challenges while also giving the team the option to meet face-to-face when they find it makes sense.

But management does not (or should not) require that level of highly engaged, coordinated work. Hell, pre-pandemic, the vast majority of my interactions were already remote because, outside of my direct reports (with whom my relationship is largely about providing strategic direction and then delegating responsibility so they can get the real work done), the people I work with represent a cross-section of the company's functions, and thus the company's offices.

But hey, maybe what remote is doing is exposing those micromanagers, or organizations, that rely on heavy-handed top-down hierarchy who are finding it difficult to adapt.

In which case I say good riddance.

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#99

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Meta stops offering remote work in new job postings

#100

Post by hot_gril »

jwestbury wrote: post #96
hot_gril wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just as a counterpoint of anecdata, I saw more or less the opposite behaviour when I was at Dropbox during the pandemic -- I heard from my coworkers more than I ever did working in-office, and was better-connected to the work they were doing. I personally felt more productive, and most of my team seemed pretty productive. The downside is that a junior teammate was probably less effective than they could have been bec…

My first SWE jobs were remote too, as well as one after 2020, and it worked great. I should have mentioned that earlier. Was just thinking about my main big-tech job where things were/are lackluster.
Post reply on HN