Has the remote bubble burst at Meta?

A few days ago I was working away on my computer when this little gem sprang up on the screen.

It seems that the party may be over for Meta employees who have been enjoying everything that remote work has to offer. According to reports, the company is cracking down on remote work, and hiring managers are no longer allowed to offer jobs as remote. Apparently Meta has decided that the whole work-from-home thing was just a temporary fling, like a summer romance that must come to an end when reality sets in.

The news comes as a blow to many techies who have been enjoying the flexibility of remote work but are now bracing for the moment when they’re called back to the cubicle. The whole situation is really no shock. Mark Zuckerberg has encouraged employees to return to the office before, but apparently there’s now data suggesting that engineers perform better from the office.

“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,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to employees. “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.”

So, they have an “early analysis” that “suggests” this return-to-office decision may be warranted, but it “requires further study,” however they do have a “hypothesis” that trust builds easier in-person. At this point it almost seems like Meta is saying, "Sorry, it's not you, it's us."

Of course, not every employee of Meta is an engineer, so we’ll just have to wait and see what their analysis of other roles reveals.

With other companies like Salesforce also hopping on the "back to the office" bandwagon, there was much interest in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ recent report stating that the percentage of workplaces offering telework has dropped significantly, with more and more employers reverting to in-person work. In fact, 72.5% of private sector workplaces had “little or no telework” in August and September 2022, which is up 12.5% from July to September 2021. In addition, the percentage of workplaces with a portion of employees working from home has fallen from 29.8% in 2021 to 16.4% in 2022.

Meta has removed the line “Remote roles are now available in the US, Canada, and Europe, and we’ll continue to add more roles in more locations as they become available” from their new job postings, implying that new employees will be expected to work in-office, or at least in a hybrid fashion. This, coupled with Zuck’s return-to-office push, may mean the remote bubble has burst for the Meta folks. A spokesman from Meta, however, has stated that they are still committed to remote work but are just taking a pause to restructure some things. So, it’s basically like when your significant other says they need a break, during which you both can see other people … yikes.