[HN Gopher] Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most emp...
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees
Author : prostoalex
Score : 120 points
Date : 2021-06-09 22:07 UTC (52 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| danbrooks wrote:
| Clearly great news for Facebook employees. For reference, the
| previous policy was that only level 5+ could request to work
| remotely.
| digbert wrote:
| > Clearly great news for Facebook employees.
|
| For some Facebook employees, definitely. Personally, I think
| I'll be finding a job elsewhere now.
| magneticnorth wrote:
| I'm curious to hear why - what do you see as the drawback of
| more remote coworkers?
| digbert wrote:
| Mostly that by having remote co-workers I get many of the
| downsides of remote work without any of the upsides.
|
| Once a few colleagues are remote, all collaboration has to
| assume remote as the default. Even if I'm in the office I'm
| still stuck with remote collaboration, but I still have a
| commute.
| ditonal wrote:
| I'm mixed on remote work, even as an engineering IC,
| despite claims that only management want in-office.
|
| To me, the downside of remote coworkers is we've already
| seen a dynamic at many companies that start with "we'll
| allow remote workers" straight to "if we allow any in-
| person collaboration, then remote workers will be second-
| class citizens, so to pre-empt that, we will actively
| discourage any in person collaboration."
|
| For example, Coinbase didn't just allow remote but shut
| down the SF office for this reason. Twitter is re-opening
| their office but in a crippled state, where the food
| options are massively downsized, and employees are actively
| discouraged from eating with any teammates.
|
| If you're the type of personality who gets energized by
| collaboration with teammates, if you like the real teammate
| relationships that more easily develop with facetime, then
| it's not a matter of allowing remote coworkers but whether
| those remote coworkers now get to advocate for actively
| destroying any office culture.
|
| Again, I understand why there's many advantages of remote
| work, but let's not pretend the people who didn't want to
| go remote are unaffected.
| anon_tor_12345 wrote:
| i onboarded last summer as an intern and it was pretty
| miserable. language barrier with my intern manager mediated
| by zoom plus the famously poorly documented codebase made
| it damn near impossible to get things done. i got a return
| offer but i'm pretty sure it was because everyone was
| struggling (skip said as much). i'm surprised they're doing
| this.
| gricardo99 wrote:
| what is "level 5+"?
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Avg. 4-5 years of FB experience out of college or 8 years of
| experience in industry.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| New grad is L3, mid level L4, senior L5.
| [deleted]
| magneticnorth wrote:
| https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook,Google,Amazon,Apple.
| ..
|
| Roughly, "senior" at a lot of places.
| nick0garvey wrote:
| L3 is new grad L4 is an intermediate level - you must be
| promoted to L5 in a fixed time frame (2-3 yearish) L5 is a
| senior level
| leoh wrote:
| >you must be promoted to L5 in a fixed time frame (2-3
| yearish)
|
| What happens if you don't?
| dado3212 wrote:
| You're basically evaluated according to L5 requirements.
| Given that you weren't promoted at that point, it's
| likely you're not performing at those requirements, and
| you'll be slowly managed out. More often as people get
| close to the red zone, they just swap companies
| preemptively.
| someelephant wrote:
| Let's be real. The loser here is middle managers. Not all of
| them. Just the ones who feed off of the high they get from having
| control over the office environment.
| benatkin wrote:
| This hinges on the following:
|
| > "Zuckerberg said employees who want to work in an office will
| be asked to come in at least half the time."
|
| I agree - part time remote work will be bad for micromanagers.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I feel the same.
|
| Middle management is not always useful, they mostly have the
| role of herding dogs, but if the work is not dumb and soul-
| crushing I don't think most people need to be herded.
|
| (and I am talking as someone who built companies and led teams)
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| So now Facebook is better than Apple for the employees.
| justapassenger wrote:
| I don't think that Apple ever had a vibe as being especially
| great for employees. Secrecy to a level that you may not know
| what product you're actually working on, and heavy top down
| management as a result.
| foxpurple wrote:
| They also basically ban you from working on open source. One
| employee detailed that they could not release some
| improvements they made to a Wordpress photo gallery plug-in
| because legal told them it competes with the iPhone/iCloud
| photo gallery.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Yeah, in terms of software working at Apple is impressive for
| the fact that their products are luxuries, not for any real
| technical reasons.
|
| Hardware is totally different though
| thrwn_frthr_awy wrote:
| You don't think Apple has technical challenges in their
| software? That's really interesting to hear. I worked on
| software there for five years and it was some of the most
| interesting work I've been a part of. What do you consider
| impressive in software?
| voisin wrote:
| Depends on whether, in the long run, employees who choose WFH
| are treated the same.
| alpacaillama wrote:
| Wonder if they will hire more in UK/Canada now?
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| The bloomberg article mentions potential CoL adjustments:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-09/facebook-...
|
| It is interesting that the Slashdot crowd was fairly universal in
| panning the idea of paying people less if they lived in a low
| cost area. In my 17 years as a designated "teleworker" at a SV
| megacorp, they adjusted compensation ratios. This meant that they
| didn't reduce my salary when I moved from an expensive city to a
| cheap mountain town, I just didn't get raises for a few years
| because my comp ratio was too high. I don't understand why people
| would rail against this kind of policy. It certainly didn't
| motivate me to move back to an expensive city.
|
| I'm not sure how well this would work out for those geo-arbitrage
| digital nomads, but I don't think that companies should be
| particularly accommodating that corner case.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| I think it would be reasonable to pay people extra if they live
| in an expensive place, and the company actually needs them to
| be in that place. Like maybe they have to be able to get on
| site at short notice, so they need to live right by the office,
| or the data center.
| schoolornot wrote:
| For new hires I suppose it's okay but to adjust the pay of an
| existing worker whose output remains the same afterwards
| because they relocated is a bit insulting to me. It's a pay
| cut, not a "COLA".
| jfoutz wrote:
| Really drives home the point, business is not a meritocracy.
| scotuswroteus wrote:
| For FB WFHers wondering whether COL adjustments are in the cards
| https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-instagram-whats...
| _rs wrote:
| Sorry how does this article address this at all?
| scotuswroteus wrote:
| Thank you for your question
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Even if they do them they're extremely unlikely to be
| significant
| warkdarrior wrote:
| After you move to a low COL area, you are really at their
| mercy, no?
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| A year ago? Sure. Now the market for remote engineers is
| competitive.
|
| I basically eliminated my mortgage by selling and moving.
| My salary can go way down without affecting my living
| standards.
| magneticnorth wrote:
| I am really curious to see where we'll be in a year, two, three
| down the line wrt remote/office/hybrid work at major companies.
|
| This forced experiment has had some surprising outcomes about the
| effectiveness of remote workplaces, but working from home for
| only a year, in pandemic conditions, is clearly not the same as
| indefinitely in normal times. But there's reason to think that
| may go even better, not worse; I am really curious to see how it
| plays out and glad more companies are continuing to let people
| work remotely.
| varispeed wrote:
| I can see that many people who worked in cafes before the
| event, will retrain to work as therapists and will be helping
| people to adjust to normal life, in the sense, for example,
| teaching how to find friends outside of work, how to meet with
| local people for lunch and so on. There will be a lot of
| opportunity to teach people how to cook and do other tasks that
| they couldn't do because of commuting, no time outside of work
| etc. I think this will lift us out of depression and improve
| economy in many ways.
|
| The gravy train for property speculators, chain tax dodging
| cafes and "restaurants" is over.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| My biggest question right now about sustained wfh is how much
| of the current productivity is the result of relationships that
| were built in the office.
|
| A year ago, I remotely onboarded for a new position and
| recently I can head back into the office, and there's a massive
| difference for me between the virtual relationships I built and
| the in-person ones.
|
| I learned more about people that I had spent months
| zooming/emailing with over the past few weeks talking to them
| face to face. Also having a dedicated workspace and a mental
| break between home & work has increased my productivity.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| > has had some surprising outcomes about the effectiveness of
| remote workplaces
|
| Curious, what are the outcomes?
| foxpurple wrote:
| Replacing predictions with experienced reality. Seeing things
| continue as normal and at full pace while working from home
| which many expected was not possible.
|
| Our company was quite restrictive of working from home
| previously but after last year seeing that we had our most
| productive year ever, things loosened up a lot.
| magneticnorth wrote:
| I was mostly just referring to the fact that team/org/company
| productivity does not seem reduced compared to pre-pandemic
| times. As far as I know, no major tech company is dealing
| with more outages/incidents or slower product launches than
| they typically saw, unless their business model was directly
| impacted by spending pattern changes. I think most companies
| expected lower output from forced-all-remote teams but don't
| seem to be seeing it.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Wasn't the video game industry fairly impacted by the
| transition?
| dheera wrote:
| A big problem with both hybrid is that you're forced to live in
| the same locality as the office, and most companies aren't
| subsidizing rent, but at the same time you need a decent office
| setup at home to be effective and that isn't cheap.
| tester756 wrote:
| it's 1.5 year into pandemic, wtf?
|
| I guess it's never too late
| packetslave wrote:
| This is the policy for _after_ the offices open back up. We 've
| been 100% WFH (except for essential workers) for over a year,
| just like everyone else.
| capncleaver wrote:
| The choice between mandatory 'more than half time' in the office
| and completely remote ('with on/offsites!') is interesting.
|
| Swooping through the office for meetings is discouraged. What a
| challenge for management!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-06-09 23:00 UTC)