Open source software is not the best argument for distributed teams when you need to iterate fast.

Hell, I had commit rights to a popular open source “AWS Solution” when I was there and it took so long to get something approved to be pushed into the mainline that I ended up forking it for individual customers (AWS ProServe) and then eventually getting most of it merged back in later.

Now that I’m not at AWS, even though I know the team there, I doubt I could get something approved to merge back in even though I was the third highest contributor to the project for awhile.

Reading this made me wonder if I have an alt account that I forgot about, because this is exactly how I think about our current state.

Hey, remote work isn't productive, lets go into an office and push all our code to github and deploy to Linux (both largely developed by distributed teams, thankfully without Zoom).

But you are right, organizational and productivity theater dominate at many companies.

Literally doesn’t matter to the people making these decisions. It’s unfortunate.

>along just as many fart pods

You mean phone coffins?

Do you really have one desk per six rooms? That's pretty sparse 8)

Now the real issue is: what on earth is a fart pod?

Anyway, my (quite literally mine as in I'm the MD) tiddly company still clings to the notion that remote working is a good thing, in general. Pre-pandemic I was a sceptic and post-pandemic: I'm happy that a lot more remote working happens.

There do need to be additional controls but not of the intrusive, automated variety. I deliberately ring people up and encourage using the dog and bone and frown on email for immediate requirements.

It is a fact of modern corporate life that people will use email as it was intended: a reliable store and forward communication mechanism. A side effect is that what should be sorted out now can be ... legitimately ... punted off into tomorrow.

Many executive jobs are little more than “being in the office” - they have to “go to work”. This leads them to think presence = work being done - they don’t know what actual work or productivity is. If they don’t have people present to lord over then their job starts to be seen for what it really is… a suit and tie in an office and nodding while saying “hmm” at meetings.

This. The actual numbers show that remote workers are more productive and that fully remote companies generate outsized returns when compared to companies that RTO. Executives know this and chose to ignore it.

This is about the appearance of doing something, not actually doing something.

> They never reveal their core intentions.

Is it so hard for them to say, FU, office time now because I like it, or because we want to force attrition, or we bought all this RE and by god we are going to use it?

I mean, if they give the honest non vibe reasons, it would be the same, but at least honest.

Wall Street doesn't care as long as the stock goes up.

Customers don't care as long as they get the product.

And employees can't do anything other than vote with their feet.

So what's the downside of being honest?

Not true anymore. Every large tech company is now filled to the brim with career managers.

i understood that reference... and, like Wash, feel like i'm "flying" a stone at gravity's whim while i pretend to be in control. tech leadership at a lot of corps do the exact same thing most days. a good reason to find your tribe asap, get out of corp, and assert some control.

It was before matching so I am guessing overall HR policy.

I feel a lot of the noise complaints are due to open plan offices.

I've worked at a cubicle farm before. Partitions were high enough to avoid being able to see people in a sitting position, but high enough that you can still stand up and ask your neighbor a question. The cubicles were spaceous, had ample desk space and didn't feel claustrophobic or "caged in" at all. If anything, it felt like I had my own little space that I was in control of.

The partitions had steel sheets in them to allow people to use magnets to hang up documents/whatever. My cubicle walls were covered in [documents and datasheets](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzIxZmIzYjEtZGMyZi00...). Some of my colleagues had extensively decorated their cubicles with photos and tchotchkes. Others had their entire desk space littered with PCBs and tools.

Managers got cubicles on the sides of the building with windows, theirs were larger and had higher partitions, with a window filling in that extra height.

The extra desk space was great. I worked as an embedded SWE and I often needed the space for tools and the devices I was working on. The few times I needed an oscilloscope, I could easily find room for it, no need to move my setup to a lab.

Cubicles get a bad rep. It's actually quite a nice way to work, if executed properly, that is.

That said, I did have noise issues before. But that was always the same colleague. She luckily only came in on Wednesdays. She totally lacked the concept of an indoor voice while on the telephone.

I'm old enough to remember having an individual office (and, a bit later, two-person offices). Great for collaboration, because it had a whiteboard and enough space/furniture for a few people to huddle, and for focused individual work, and for meetings with remote people without disrupting anyone and without taking up a meeting room. Nowadays we have unforced poor conditions and outcomes, mostly for pretend savings on facilities.

And, of course, serendipitous collaboration rarely happens when everyone is sitting with noise cancelling headphones, focusing on hitting their ambitious individual goals for the quarter/half/year.

Booking.com had low-noise offices back in the late 2010s. Engineering, product, design. Nobody taking calls on their desk, that was rude. All meetings in well-isolated rooms, some well placed noise barriers. It was pretty quiet even in an open office floor with 400 people.

Yes!!! Before the pandemic we had an it floor that was quiet. Now we sit next to loudmouth sales goons barking into the phone all day. Ugh

Beens stepping into various offices most of the past 25 years and have not noticed that.

You sound like a parody of a librarian.

> most of us are not even talking to each other unless there’s a dedicated meeting time for it. This whole thing about collaborating is better in person has never been my experience

Obviously varies by culture. And while I've never worked for Meta, I've been at your Mountain View and New York campuses more times than I care to have been. Everything–including communal spaces–seems laid out for individual work. (This was true before the metamates nonsense, though that obviously accelerated it.)

> which kind of companies or offices do these things happen?

Frankly, the ones that tend to play, goof off and shoot shit together. And it’s not necessarily companywide nor evenly distributed. But it’s something I value tremendously in work cultures, both because it’s productive and fun.

For me it's been like 1-2 times in 25 years, if that

Ego/pet project/appearance of doing something as an executive is probably the main driver.

A lot of these decisions have very little quality data behind them.

The vast majority of American software companies worked from the office in 2019. I understand and acknowledge that some people advocated for remote work even then, but I don't understand this idea that CEOs disagreeing can only be explained by belt tightening and disrespect for engineers.

As the memo says, it achieves "Building a Winning Culture"; Mosseri's judgment is that "we are more creative and collaborative when we are together in-person".

Isn't this the same story for every moderately large company that did RTO over the last few years? It's not about efficiency, it's about shaking out some people by forcing them back into an office.

Around 2023 I was working at a company that was, at the time, just threatening RTO, and when hiring we had to decide if it was worth it to hire someone who (might) report to a different office in a different time zone. Which was not an issue at all a month before, when the company was still committed to being fully remote. The hours talking about it were a waste of my life for what, in the end, didn't even matter because they laid off most of the team six months later.

The concern is reasonable, but I'm not sure there's a great way to make people act as though RTO is happening other than actually doing the RTO. A number of companies never said remote work was going to be long-term in the first place, yet still had employees moving around randomly based on an assumption that peak Covid norms were the new status quo.