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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 again by an array of managers in a bunch of departments and companies that my productivity never changes. That is regardless of whether I am travelling or at home. This is including being in Sri Lanka during their worst economical crisis and facing power cuts of 8 - 12 hours everyday. As a responsible adult I prepared in advance. I bought power banks which could charge my laptop and ensured they were charged when the power worked. I bought SIM cards for all mobile networks and ensured I had data. It really is simply a matter of taking responsibility of one’s situation and having a sense of respect for, and from, your employer/employee.

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.

I fear that this is all simply a smokescreen for the authoritarian shift which has occurred throughout the globe. It started pre pandemic and was exasperated during it. Scary times lay ahead.

It's not about productivity at all. These same companies were commissioning studies during Covid that told their analysts "look how productive our employees are now that they are working from home!"

It's about crushing labor.

WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can apply for far more roles, work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc, apply for other jobs during work hours, etc. These companies know that white collar workers are not fungible. Their intellectual workers are genuinely very difficult to replace and produce a lot of value.

For talent that isn't fungible, it's RTO. For talent that is fungible, offshoring.

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.

> Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me.

I don't think it is related to poor productivity. I think it is related to a combination of these 3 points:

1) perceived less of control from the management perspective. 10-15years ago companies were all in on "we need metrics on work being done". Let's face it, process induced metrics have often very little relevance to the success of your products. So without being able to pin point what is wrong from the metrics, upper management feel they are managing an invisible structure and they have no idea what they do. They don't have much more idea when they are at the office but they can see them peering at their screen or talking to their colleagues so they must be doing something right? It is reassuring for upper management.

2) Pretending to do something. This RTO decisions are ofen all about making changes for the sake of making changes. All my career I have seen upper management doing restructuration every 6 months to every 2 years with often very little change in the actual efficiency of the whole company or the quality of the products being done. More often than not they just throw shit at the wall and see hat sticks. Other times they just copy what competitors have just done. Once in a while they will maybe observe an improvement.

3) It also give a visible signal to the employees thast something is being done by the management so in a sense it can boost motivation a little bit even though major changes are often disruptive. If it wasn't for these kind of changes and announcement, most employees wouldn't even know/remember who their CEO is.

Having said that, I don't work at Meta/Instagram but I work in a company where the meeting culture is crazy and I think I can agree with him on that point.

It's a mistake to view this from the perspective of productivity and whether or not someone can do their job at home or not. Clearly they can. We kept these companies alive by WFH during the pandemic. But they simply don't care.

RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs. People have moved. People may not be able to come back. People may simply not want to. Some of those people will quit. And that's cheaper than a severance package.

We are in permanent layoff culture now. Why? To suppress wages and get more work for no extra compensation. 5% of the staff gets fired? The other 95% has to do their work for no extra money AND they're not demanding pay raises. Win win.

Over time profits have a tendency to shrink and the only way to maintain the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is, ultimately, by raising prices and cutting costs. I wish more people realized this is all that's going on.

There is a middle ground though between "employees can't be trusted" and "all is well". It's possible for there to be a genuine difference in affordances such that people are more productive in some places than others. I think many people would be less productive in a dank basement than in a pleasant office, but then again maybe you don't want it to be too cushy or productivity may go down. I don't think it's realistic to expect everyone to be equally productive in all environments.

That said, I share your fear that all such considerations are just a smokescreen. In a larger sense the entire issue of "productivity" is a smokescreen. We don't need "more productivity". What we need is for people to be happy, and potentially that may be achieved by reducing productivity in some ways.

I am pretty sure that 99% of the anti rto is exclusively due to the god awful soul crushing commute.

5 days a week an hour each way 10 hours of death each week.

There is no authoritarian “shift” this has been business as usual for the last 100 years. Stupid business but business nonetheless

"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 employees, when dealing with a bad employee.

If you want to work from home forever, contract with a company, and put it in your contract. This is what I've done for over a decade now.

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 probably be downvoted, but I just don't think most of these execs are engaging in some larger "authoritarian" play with these moves (maybe some are, but I think incompetence is more likely than malice in most cases). But maybe I'm naive.

As one point, consider the case of Tokyo's "Manuscript Cafe" [0] where patrons intentionally visit to have a cafe owner "force" them to compete a task they may have been procrastinating on. I read this as: being in a "work" location surrounded by other working people is conducive to productivity for some people.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/manuscript-cafe-japan-remote...

The reality is that middle managers are completely useless, but to justify their usefulness they have to force people to come to the office, to reprimand them if they don't strictly follow the schedule, to hold meetings to pretend they're useful by knowing what their team is doing, etc. They have to act as control agents: checking, monitoring, producing unnecessary reporting (a legacy of slavery) just to prove they exist in the organizational chart. The office is a theater where everyone pretends to be busy (especially them), but that's hard if the offices are empty. It's a system where we try to convince ourselves of their usefulness, which pushes them to fill the void in order to maintain a hierarchy that serves more to prevent people from working peacefully than to organize anything.
"We're also offering the option to transfer from the MPK to SF office for those people whose commute would be the same or better with that change."

So wait, you'll be able to switch offices even though your team might be in the second one? What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?

Instagram chief orders quiet layoffs to please investors in 2026

fixed that title for you

It's unfortunate there wasn't more resistance by tech employees to RTO post-covid. It seemed like one of the very, very rare solutions to the systemic problems of housing and commuting in the US. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that WFH effectively doubles or even triples your total compensation when it means (a) actually affordable housing and (b) no time/money lost to commuting, especially if you have kids.
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.

Smells like management trying to recapture the glory days by brute force.

> "focus on building great products, not preparing for meetings"

That says it all. The intent is to try to spark the freewheeling, creative, startup days. Wouldn't be the first company that tries to reconnect with its startup roots. Won't be the last, either. Unfortunately, it never works, because those rockstar startup employees cashed out their stock and moved to the Napa Valley. Your workforce is now indistinguishable from IBM or Exxon Mobile. Good luck!

> Mosseri joined Facebook in 2008 as a designer and became Instagram's VP of product in 2018

Bingo. Old dog, new tricks. Good luck!

OK, so... Employees are compelled to go into the office, so they can have better in-person collaboration. They are also encouraged not to go to meetings (aka in-person collaboration sessions), so they can have more focus time.

I haven't seen the Insta offices, but I would bet they don't have walls. In which case, you know where the best focus time is to be had? Out of the office.

5 days is stupid. I am fully remote and I can see how face time is important. After a few years remote I am definitely feeling a little detached from the company. But 5 days makes no sense. I think 2 or 3 days in the office is perfect. You get the opportunity to talk to people and you have days where you can fully focus.

Most ridiculous is to have to come to the office and then talk to your distributed team members over Teams or Slack. Even more fun is to have them spread around the globe in different time zones .

The headline makes it seem like every role in the company needs to switch to full-time in-office.

But anyone who was hired in a remote role is exempt.

This order only applies to in-office workers with assigned desks.

He's basically saying that they can't expect to have a hybrid work schedule, although not so strict that they can't ever work from home.

Oof my employer still lets us WFH 3 days. We actually signed a new contract for it just after the pandemic. They can't have everyone in the office anyway since they closed half the floors.

If they mandate this (not sure where they'd find the space!) I'll just refuse to sign the new contract. I'm in Europe so none of that "at will" stuff. If they want to let me go they'll have to give me a package for 15 years worked.

Ps I don't actually go twice a week right now ;) More like once. None of my team members are in my country anyway so what's the point.

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 the comments I saw in this thread don't discuss those factors (I'd be fine if people mentioned them and explained why they are not too important).

Obviously there are also factors in favor of WFH: commute costs, personal satisfaction (which may indirectly improve productivity and/or retention of the best people), noise in the workplace, lack of meeting rooms, etc. But it's far from obvious to me if, on balance, WFH or RTO works better for building a successful company.

I have found that at many companies with these kind of policies are selectively enforced. If you don’t show up, nothing will happen to you, until someday they need some kind of reason to fire you. This ensures you have a steady pool of employees you can drop at a moments notice, if for instance some major market crash forces you to quickly dump people in order for the company to survive.
The whole memo just reeks of not trusting your employees.

  Employees are encouraged to decline meetings that interfere with focus time.
That deep focus time that comes from being in an open office environment.
I have a job where I'm 5 days a week. The biggest problem isn't the juniors which are all happy to leave their small apartments to go into the office. Its the senior guys with big houses out in the suburbs that have the long commute. Unfortunately the new grads are having fun hanging out together but aren't getting the face time from the seniors.
Another winning call from Mosseri

After shitcanning the london office because he wanted to move back home(800 people gone) hes now doing the RTO, because as we know all the cool kids love working in the office.

The problem with instagram is not where people are working, its the culture of piss poor direction setting and no user experience advocates. Well none that are being listened to.

There are too many grand initiatives, which are poorly run, never really prototyped and just yeeted into years long slog that fuckup repeatedly (shops I'm looking at you)

Then to get a promotion you need to move a metric somehow. That means doing stupid user hostile stuff, like instantly shoving tits in your face.

Don't get me started on the horror that was instagram for kids

I know better than to think I might have anything useful to add to the WFH debate, but buried further in the memo:

”More demos, less [sic] decks”

I love it, but I’m surprised that an org of that caliber needs to say it out loud. Even the top tier people get bogged down in PowerPoint limbo, I guess?

Nothing is more compelling than, as they say in show business (ie that Bill O’Reilly meme), than saying “f*** it…”:

  (╯°□°)╯
  ┳━━━━┳  WE’LL DO
          IT LIVE!
Really sad to see the WFH era ending, it's such a better way to work - especially as these companies embrace distributed teams so you now get the worst of both worlds with RTO.
Folks it’s very simple. They want to reduce labor for free.

Why? Because no company can afford the bills for LLM infra.

These companies are spending 100s of billions on building infra. Most countries have less GDP than this. The numbers are insane!

And Nvidia demands payments in cash today. Not amortized in 5 years. Every employee slashed is extra compute the hyperscalers can buy today.

White collar office society can barely cope with the relatively minor friction that technology brings from allowing work from anywhere and we're expected to believe it, it can deal with somewhat unaccountable and unknowable AI smoothly? Hard to think anything else than that we're in for a wild couple of years imo
In general having a chief "order" employees sounds like a red flag to me. Isn't ordering a bit authoritarian and used in leau of being able to change things in a more civil manner? If you aren't able to get people to work more at the office through more civil manners, maybe you should reflect on why?

Surely this is just to get people to quit without needing to give them expensive severance packages, that seems pretty common nowadays?

I’ve always thought of this like being at University and studying for finals or doing labs. You could basically do them wherever you wanted for the most part.

Some people thrived in an actual lab. Some people worked from their dorm/apartment. Some would go to the library. Some to a coffee shop.

Seems this trend of not having a one size fits all best continues in industry.

Just a move to get rid of people, some people won't do the RTO and they can easily let them go.
I enjoyed working on campus for a bit - because I also lived there, sleeping, eating, showering etc. and saved a lot of money! Of course, you have to hide that and they eventually caught me...
>Additional changes include fewer meetings

Where have I heard this before, wait at every job I have ever worked at. Every time it is said, meeting time increases.

Where I worked, Friday was the only day real work got done. Why, everyone was at home, but that was my go to office day. Thursdays was my WFH day because that whole day was nothing but meetings.

Basically soft layoff
ins't this the same guy who moved to london [0], just because he could control things better ?

or maybe the tide has changed from remote working so again the minions are pushed around!

[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/02/instagram-boss-adam-mosseri-...

I've worked remotely most of my career, long before Covid.

Last few months I've been in the office almost every single day.

And I get what they're saying, there are definite advantages to having everybody in the same room. I don't think pretending otherwise is going to help us much.

There are definite advantages that go the other way as well.

The goal has to be to find a good compromise, you can never go back.

They mean the office in the Metaverse, right?
> the change applies to employees in US offices with assigned desks and is part of a broader push to make Instagram "more nimble and creative" as competition intensifies.

I don't think RTO or fewer meetings is going to reverse or even slow Instagram's slide down the enshittification chute. I recently returned to the app to connect with some friends and local communities, but the density of ads and dark patterns is pushing me away. IMO Instagram and Facebook in their twilight (which will still last another decade or so), where the path forward has more to due with extracting the remaining value from their existing users rather than outcompeting the alternatives.

I realized this morning, while talking to a coworker. That when we are in person we complain about shit more than we fix it. But when were remote we voice our concerns in the major channels and shit gets fixed.

I'm convinced by keeping people in person less shit will get fixed.

"back to office" is a modern strategy to easily and covertly shed employees to cut costs and improve the short term bottom line to get higher performance bonuses for management.
If you want people to be in the office, structure their pay such that everyone gets an “8 hours in office” bonus daily.

If you prove you’re in the office you get extra money.

I would honestly not mind 2-3 days a week but PDX is dead for tech jobs, and the pay is trash.

Can't wait to have to move to SF and pay 5k for a shoebox so I can work in an overcrowded office in a boring, crappy part of town.

I don’t think it’s hard to imagine that people work better together when they are in the same office. It’s also not hard to imagine people work harder when there’s more social control. From the perspective of the business owner, this makes total sense. Yes, some people work harder and better at home, but, in general WFH is net negative for a company I think.
How independently does Instagram operate from Meta?
Was the work from home ever presented as only temporary? Initially it was for sure because of health.

Seems like many companies and government agencies thought it permanent and sold their office spaces. Perhaps we will see them buying more offices to house their valuable workers once again.

Perhaps our cities will feel more lived in again.

Given we have agents that give 10x productivity gains do we also need to meet in person to get much more gains?

What this seems to be suggesting is that productivity gains due to agents are meaningless because 99% effort goes in non coding tasks which will get sped up by meeting in person

I think its okay for there to be jobs that require you to be in a specific place, especially so if you were hired under such an arrangement originally. If there is a significant advantage for companies that are remote, then they will have a significant advantage on talent.