[RancidDiarrhea]

>To me, although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture and certainly has benefits in logistics, it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture, and I suspect is important especially to larger orgs because it helps to even out performance.

The anti-WFH screeds are always nearly indentical: extremely vague and non-quantifiable in a way that makes them technically impossible to argue against. I can't argue against the idea that they produce a much "stronger culture" I guess because how would anyone even begin to prove that one way or another? We probably couldn't come to a consensus on what that even means.

If coming in to the office had the positive impact pro-office people said it did I promise you that by now, 3 years after COVID lockdowns started, someone would have managed to put together some actual hard data instead of the same "culture", "watercooler ideas", "ad hoc collaboration" nonsense we've been seeing constantly since then.

[zmmmmm]

> extremely vague and non-quantifiable in a way that makes them technically impossible to argue against

this is why it's a shame people are ridiculing Zuckerberg's post ... they actually did quantify it and actually did come up with some nuanced insight into what works well and what doesn't and he says they are going to keep studying it to learn more.

To me, it seems like there are two tenets to this. (a) remote / distributed anything is hard. but at the same time (b) remote / distribute anything is powerful. Do it well and you will have enormous advantages that your competitors, shackled to their mere physical earthly pinprick of a location on this planet can never match.

Which is to say, it's actually worth trying to do well and I respect that Zuckerberg has taken this more nuanced approach to try and get there.

[NeutralCrane]

They didn’t quantify it. The made an assertion that people who started in person at Meta were more productive than those who started remotely, but there was no data provided to back the assertion up. What’s more, we have no way of knowing if that assertion is valid. The majority of people who started at Meta in the last few years would have been overwhelmingly skewed to remote, while in-person starts would be skewed to those from more than a few years ago. How are they comparing these two groups? Are the actually comparing the productivity of in-person vs remote, or are they unintentionally (or intentionally) comparing the productivity of people who have been at Meta for >3 years vs those with <3 years. They didn’t provide any kind of data or quantitative measures at all, and they fall into the exact category the person you responded to is describing.