[colmvp]

> > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.

I don't doubt that people earlier in their career work better with more senior people at arms length to help them. Hell, I experienced a bit of that my first few months at a new job where I struggled to understand processes.

But after a period of time, I got it. Sure it took longer, but I got there.

Now, I get less work done in the office because people spend time socializing, and more importantly, the workstation is not customized to my liking because of this whole satellite desk situation.

I'll say this: If these companies tanked during the height of Covid, they'd blame it on WFH. Of course, the financial performance for these companies was quite good, so now that there's a bit of correction, they search for reasons to bring employees back to the office.

[lennixm]

Why would they search of a reason if they see their employees being more productive WFH and they can save a significant share of their capex by getting rid of their real estate footprints? HackerNews needs to stop with the motivated reasoning when it comes to arguing against RTO. Every single major tech company clearly has bucket loads of data showing some portion of their employees being more productive working from the office to an extent where it justifies taking the massive capex hit by bringing them back to the office. Your anecdotal experience doesn't outweigh that.

[joshstrange]

> Every single major tech company clearly has bucket loads of data showing some portion of their employees being more productive working from the office to an extent where it justifies taking the massive capex hit by bringing them back to the office. Your anecdotal experience doesn't outweigh that.

I think you are grossly overestimating the validity of that "data". Data can be twisted to say whatever you want it to say. I've watched management throw out results because it didn't align with what they thought, I've seen them cherry-pick and distort employee survey data to backup whatever they already wanted to do, I've experiences KPI hell and how it has zero bearing on the work being done.

These companies are not data-driven, they are people-driven and people are not coldly logical/analytical.

[bart_spoon]

So there is no such thing as a cargo cult? Every time some trend picks up, be it agile, standup, open offices, WFH, return to office, over-hiring, massive layoffs, and what have you, it’s because it backed by rigorous data analysis?

[cutemonster]

> Every single major tech company clearly has bucket loads of data

People (managers and execs in this case) don't primarily make data driven decisions.

They do what's good for themselves personally

Sometimes that means following whatewer the data says -- in other cases they might rather not want to look at any data

[JohnFen]

> Every single major tech company clearly has bucket loads of data showing some portion of their employees being more productive working from the office to an extent where it justifies taking the massive capex hit by bringing them back to the office.

That's very far from clear.

[choudharism]

Another perspective on your first point (learning from senior peers) is that after you spend a certain period of time learning, you're on your way to becoming a "senior" as well - and you're supposed to be on the hook for overseeing the next batch of younglings. Remote working needs to (and I believe it can, we probably haven't found the right combination yet) solve for paying it forward.

[dclowd9901]

A pessimistic person might say that companies don’t trust their employees to work unless they have absolute control over their employees and how they work.

It’s a power play. Companies need to know they’re in charge.

[rhaway84773]

How is this not more applicable to remote work where your company can track nearly every interaction you have with a colleague?

In-office I’ve had several discussions with colleagues about the state of the company, as well as competing companies looking for new hires etc. The number of those conversations have dropped to 0 since we went all remote, for obvious reasons.

[latency-guy2]

> But after a period of time, I got it. Sure it took longer, but I got there.

And then you leave the company. So it's not really at all in the best interest of the company for you to take longer to get up to speed.

Average tenure of a SWE is still low across the entire market, at Meta it's probably even lower given who they hire for.

[prirun]

> And then you leave the company. So it's not really at all in the best interest of the company for you to take longer to get up to speed.

Maybe it would be in their interest to pay more, so you don't leave. If average tenure of a SWE is low, they are probably switching jobs for better pay. In that case, paying them more to stay makes more sense than having to pay to get a cheaper but unproductive new hire up to speed.

[JohnFen]

> Maybe it would be in their interest to pay more, so you don't leave.

I think that would have limited effectiveness. In my experience, people usually don't leave because of pay reasons, and more pay wouldn't get most of them to stay.

They usually leave because they want to learn something new, or work on something different, or there are things about their working conditions or company that makes them very unhappy.

Offering more money would keep some of them around, sure, but not most of them. And those that it keeps around will still have those problems, but they'll no longer be able to address them. That can't be good for them or for the company they work for.

[latency-guy2]

Meta consistently paid the highest out of all FAANG for it's entire lifetime, only beaten by Netflix at specifically senior, but easily overtaken just by stock performance YoY. How much more could you possibly want? Even if you don't limit it, all FAANG pays consistently well, maybe minus Apple who is just on par or slightly ahead of Microsoft, even then, you are paid insanely well.

I don't believe paying more would instill any sense of loyalty in SWEs.

[8note]

> I'll say this: If these companies tanked during the height of Covid, they'd blame it on WFH. Of course, the financial performance for these companies was quite good, so now that there's a bit of correction, they search for reasons to bring employees back to the office.

What's entertaining is that the various faang companies performance is likely unrelated to employee performance, and Elon musk's twitter will show a path forward for near-term tech employment

[IntelMiner]

I don't think anyone could replicate the utter disaster that Elon is every single day