"For the remote employees whom we are asking to move to in-office roles, we will provide the option to join our three-day, in-office schedule (Tues.-Thurs.) or take a severance package."
Since Roblox is in the virtual world business, this is embarrassing. Their own world isn't good enough for them.
Amusingly, Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, was mostly remote before, during, and after the pandemic. They seem to have figured this out. They are not a fast-moving company, but, unlike Roblox, they are profitable.
I totally agree with the impact of spontaneous things happening when in person.
I had been working remotely for 8 years and really was 100% for it and advocating it.
I recently joined a new job where I'm at the office 3 days a week, and I can definitely feel the difference both in the time it took me to onboard (compared to other remote-only onboarding I did) and the productivity / relationships / other gains from those days we are all in the office.
Those ad-hoc conversation happening around a desk, a white board, at lunch, do bring a lot of value that you never get while WFH. I can definitely see how some of my previous burn outs may have been prevented if I was not 100% remote.
Of course YMMV, but personally I can definitely see how a company may decide to get back to the office and it's definitely not all black and white where remote is better and omg the mean bosses are getting butts back in seats for more control.
Depends on if the culture supports messaging the right person when it comes to mind or just when it's convenient.
Slack/Teams/email/etc can be spontaneous as well. Just a matter if the culture appreciates and encourages the behavior.
If the CEO is leaving off-sites w/ brand new, strategically significant, ideas that no one was comfortable even hinting at via Slack/Teams/email - yep, seems like a very in-person, face-to-face culture. Seems very brittle in this day and age.
Yes, spontaneous things can happen when in person. Many of those spontaneous things are time sucks and not productive.
Remote work has so many things going for it, it does not make sense to me to use a different model.
Commute time is eliminated, as are commuting costs. That is time better spent.
Remote communications have a built in forcing-function making us gather our thoughts before we type them in or call someone. This isn't a barrier to most. Is for some, typically the people who do a fair bit of idle chat or don't tryto solve things themselves for at least 20m before asking others.
Remote communications can be recorded. Serves as both a knowledge repository that can be gone back to, and as an audit trail for legal purposes.
Remote communications allow tools to be built into the conversation. In person we have a whiteboard, and someone has to take a photo of the whiteboard when done.
Remote communications allow collaboration with wide area geographies where in-person travel would be too costly to do frequently (e.g., England and U.S.).
Remote communications can be async, allowing staff who keep different schedules to easily collaborate.
This could be as simple as another layoff, but I think it's more management that are used to the usual way of doing things. In my experience with remote vs non-remote I have seen a clear bias of older management to be less likely to embrace remote comms. I've also seen plenty of outliers on both ends, so that hypothesis might not hold water. I am curious what the age range of Roblox management is, compared to remote-first companies like Github.
A CEO, whose personality is so closely tied to the company and as a result probably doesn't bat an eye at extreme overwork and constant office presence while also being able to disengage anytime (they are upper management after all), is not going to care about how nice remote is for employees.
> Within 45 minutes I came away from three separate conversations with spontaneous to do’s and ideas to put in motion, something that hadn’t happened during the past few years of video meetings
A very CEO-esque anecdote. "I had a great thought-leadership conversation in the elevator, we should all come back!"
> For many of us, “Zoom fatigue” is real.
I "Zoom" more than I did before, and during the pandemic. It has allowed me to almost eliminate all wasteful IRL meetings.
> There will be some remote employees who are not asked to return .... niche skill sets or significant institutional knowledge
Okay so the rockstars, ninjas and privileged executives can stay home - nice disclaimer.
> For managers of remote employees who choose not to move, I understand the burden this may put on you and your teams.
They're also not requiring their lowest-level employees to come into the office either, since they're obviously unwilling to pay a Bay-Area living wage for work like that.
> For the remote employees whom we are asking to move to in-office roles, we will provide the option to join our three-day, in-office schedule (Tues.-Thurs.) or take a severance package.
This company has never been remote friendly. Posts like this are absolutely despicable because they hire people remotely without the clear intention that they will RTO. That's called lying.
>> But there was a pivotal moment for me when we had our first post-quarantine, in-person group gathering. Within 45 minutes I came away from three separate conversations with spontaneous to do’s and ideas to put in motion, something that hadn’t happened during the past few years of video meetings.
This is the only reason to work in an office: in person brainstorming is much better. Virtual brainstorming doesn't seem to cut it (or we at least haven't figured it out yet).
Something spontaneous about it that is hard to replicate via predetermined remote calls.
No reason remote work can’t be spontaneous, even easier IMO because you don’t have to herd cats into the same space. A ping on chat and within 1 min multiple people can be in the discussion without even having to move.
Plenty of kids play roblox. They're not profitable. Clearly this is a shadow layoff. They carve out an exception for their best and brightest, but clearly the writing is on the wall. Profitability is not on the horizon, and talent should leave.
I was ready to argue with you as I recall articles about them making money hand over fist, but according to wikipedia their net income last year was almost negative $1B.
I truly believe that software engineers are just as productive when remote as they are when forced to commute to an office.
In that sense I like that these companies are forcing a return to office because presumably they're leaving talent on the table that I can hire and outcompete them with.
> While we know this is the right decision for Roblox
Only a Sith speaks in absolutes... How does anyone know anything like this for a certainty? What if there's another pandemic as soon as everyone moves back?
This sort of false conviction always rubs me the wrong way. Better to say that you're very confident. Leave yourself some wiggle room.
Right on schedule. My company just announced tightening of the hybrid and remote as well. It almost as if the CEOs thought pre-holiday you won't get as much grumbling. Not totally wrong. My bonus is not horrible ( not great, but nothing to sneeze at either ) and it genuinely reminded me why I don't immediately say fuck it.
San Mateo (& Bay Area in general) is expensive and you cannot find a liveable house for less than $1.5M. And around San Mateo, houses go for $2M+ if they’re not in need of any fixing before the move in. Add to that the additional taxes in CA, unless they’re offering a substantial raise, this is a no brainer.
Apologies for being slightly off topic, but Roblox is an absolutely gross company that is well overdue for some regulatory scrutiny. The mechanisms they allow to be put into place in nearly every game to extract money from children and get them addicted to the platform make dark patterns look positively friendly.
I feel like Roblox were not using the tools for remote work effectively. It needs to start at the top so I'm not surprised it failed for them.
Each employee at Roblox now has to commute to/from work which means every employee will likely spend at least 5-10 hours a week commuting. For 'commuting' I include the time to wake up earlier, showering, getting food, getting in the car & warming it up, waiting at lights etc... and per month that's ~20 to 40 hours a MONTH per employee 'commuting'. That equals a WORK WEEK of time per month taken from each employee for NOTHING!! It feels wrong morally.
Remote companies STILL have too many Zoom or Teams meetings, Slack Huddles, or whatever tech they use. Many companies opt for the free versions of tools or non-enterprise versions of better collaboration tools which often limits their ability to record virtual meetings and share files more easily. I'm not familiar with what tools Roblox used inside, but I wouldn't be surprised they skimped on paying for the right tools.
What is interested in such a case, it is that the point of these so called leaders is not a study of the real productivity but the supposed impact on culture.
The big point is that they don't want employees to have the edge but stay their slaves.
If you are impacted by this type of surprise RTO by your employer, it is perfectly fine to pretend to go along with the relocation plan to give yourself more time to find a new job.
The terrifying part is the evidence that on-site is better is a couple of anecdotes from the CEO. These people are sociopaths. “I had a couple of good meetings, so all people who stay remote are fired.”
While this is practically the best-case scenario for enforcing RTO (generous severance if you answer "no" and plenty of time to plan and get relocation support for "yes"), I can't help but feel like this is yet another instance of extroverted people who end up in management and leadership positions judging the importance of in-person collaboration for other people at the company's jobs based on their impression of how important it is for their jobs.
As a SWE who does IC and planning / TL design work, I find it immensely easier to work from home. I don't have to find a meeting room, I have one stable multi-monitor setup that I'm comfortable with for running and participating in meetings, and I can make myself available for "emergencies" early and late in the day without having to work my commute around that.
The leaders making this decision at Roblox have generous compensation packages (even for tech), and can likely afford to buy a new house every single year based on how much they earn. The reality for a rank-and-file SWE trying to secure housing in the Bay Area, especially near San Mateo, is much more precarious. No joke, if these companies offered to factor in a cost-of-living adjustment to compensation based on rent rates in the area surrounding the office, I'd go back in a heartbeat, but I spent enough time as a new grad commuting 90 minutes each way saving less than 10% of my paycheck after rent and basic living expenses, to where I would literally quit SWE work before being forced back to my company's HQ.
Mind you, certain economic classes of young individuals will have safety nets from their family and the support they need to not worry as much about finances. This will have a deliberate effect on the types of backgrounds that will become predominant among employees -- likely, folks already in the bay area who went to nearby top-tier schools and have upbringings that primed them for such a life one way or another. My experience thus far is that our remote teams at my job tend to be more diverse and the new-grad experience is less economically precarious because you have the choice of living where you want to. Caretakers and people with kids also suffer disproportionately with RTO vs. those younger or with less family duties, and this affects the population of employees drastically too.
As important as in-person collaboration is for mentoring, brainstorming, and culture, I feel like there's probably a way to create space for that without bringing everybody back to the HCOL areas where leadership tends to already own personal and commercial real-estate (potential conflict of interest, though this varies by company/leader in terms of the size of the assets).
I think the writing is on the wall though and probably every major tech firm will slowly creep back from "hybrid" to "well, 3 is the minimum" (see: flair bit from office space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7SNEdjftno), to having the real "team players" be the ones who can afford to come in 5 days a week. This was probably inevitable but I find it vastly disappointing.
- they want to keep up the city model, where people might be slave of countless of services and economically by them, by their need, slaves of those who operate such services;
- they want people who can be exploited in various ways while WFH people can change far easier and so are less bound to a company.
Both reasons are AGAINST the current formal economical view since the '800s at least (The Science Of Government, Founded On Natural Law, by Clinton Roosevelt) and human evolutionary needs.
The rest is just mere organizational issues, for instance many WFH have issue brainstorming from remote, simply because they are not much engaged/motivated to, but that's not "by nature", it's just the need to learn a not-really-new but relatively new for too many, work paradigm.
Animats|2 years ago
Since Roblox is in the virtual world business, this is embarrassing. Their own world isn't good enough for them.
Amusingly, Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, was mostly remote before, during, and after the pandemic. They seem to have figured this out. They are not a fast-moving company, but, unlike Roblox, they are profitable.
joshl32532|2 years ago
For Meta it's different, they're pushing for working and collaborating virtually.
It's not the same.
jypepin|2 years ago
I had been working remotely for 8 years and really was 100% for it and advocating it. I recently joined a new job where I'm at the office 3 days a week, and I can definitely feel the difference both in the time it took me to onboard (compared to other remote-only onboarding I did) and the productivity / relationships / other gains from those days we are all in the office.
Those ad-hoc conversation happening around a desk, a white board, at lunch, do bring a lot of value that you never get while WFH. I can definitely see how some of my previous burn outs may have been prevented if I was not 100% remote.
Of course YMMV, but personally I can definitely see how a company may decide to get back to the office and it's definitely not all black and white where remote is better and omg the mean bosses are getting butts back in seats for more control.
thenerdhead|2 years ago
garrickvanburen|2 years ago
Slack/Teams/email/etc can be spontaneous as well. Just a matter if the culture appreciates and encourages the behavior.
If the CEO is leaving off-sites w/ brand new, strategically significant, ideas that no one was comfortable even hinting at via Slack/Teams/email - yep, seems like a very in-person, face-to-face culture. Seems very brittle in this day and age.
Communitivity|2 years ago
Remote work has so many things going for it, it does not make sense to me to use a different model.
Commute time is eliminated, as are commuting costs. That is time better spent.
Remote communications have a built in forcing-function making us gather our thoughts before we type them in or call someone. This isn't a barrier to most. Is for some, typically the people who do a fair bit of idle chat or don't tryto solve things themselves for at least 20m before asking others.
Remote communications can be recorded. Serves as both a knowledge repository that can be gone back to, and as an audit trail for legal purposes.
Remote communications allow tools to be built into the conversation. In person we have a whiteboard, and someone has to take a photo of the whiteboard when done.
Remote communications allow collaboration with wide area geographies where in-person travel would be too costly to do frequently (e.g., England and U.S.).
Remote communications can be async, allowing staff who keep different schedules to easily collaborate.
This could be as simple as another layoff, but I think it's more management that are used to the usual way of doing things. In my experience with remote vs non-remote I have seen a clear bias of older management to be less likely to embrace remote comms. I've also seen plenty of outliers on both ends, so that hypothesis might not hold water. I am curious what the age range of Roblox management is, compared to remote-first companies like Github.
imetatroll|2 years ago
josefresco|2 years ago
Some people sure, not all.
> Within 45 minutes I came away from three separate conversations with spontaneous to do’s and ideas to put in motion, something that hadn’t happened during the past few years of video meetings
A very CEO-esque anecdote. "I had a great thought-leadership conversation in the elevator, we should all come back!"
> For many of us, “Zoom fatigue” is real.
I "Zoom" more than I did before, and during the pandemic. It has allowed me to almost eliminate all wasteful IRL meetings.
> There will be some remote employees who are not asked to return .... niche skill sets or significant institutional knowledge
Okay so the rockstars, ninjas and privileged executives can stay home - nice disclaimer.
> For managers of remote employees who choose not to move, I understand the burden this may put on you and your teams.
And? Suck it up I guess.
dublinben|2 years ago
They're also not requiring their lowest-level employees to come into the office either, since they're obviously unwilling to pay a Bay-Area living wage for work like that.
thenerdhead|2 years ago
This company has never been remote friendly. Posts like this are absolutely despicable because they hire people remotely without the clear intention that they will RTO. That's called lying.
NotGMan|2 years ago
This is the only reason to work in an office: in person brainstorming is much better. Virtual brainstorming doesn't seem to cut it (or we at least haven't figured it out yet).
Something spontaneous about it that is hard to replicate via predetermined remote calls.
ghthor|2 years ago
flerchin|2 years ago
mysterydip|2 years ago
lvass|2 years ago
How is that possible? They don't even have to bother making the "games" they immensely monetize on.
chewbacha|2 years ago
CSMastermind|2 years ago
In that sense I like that these companies are forcing a return to office because presumably they're leaving talent on the table that I can hire and outcompete them with.
LoganDark|2 years ago
notpachet|2 years ago
Only a Sith speaks in absolutes... How does anyone know anything like this for a certainty? What if there's another pandemic as soon as everyone moves back?
This sort of false conviction always rubs me the wrong way. Better to say that you're very confident. Leave yourself some wiggle room.
Communitivity|2 years ago
I love that, and am saving it for my quote book. Attribution will I give, of course.
dividefuel|2 years ago
api|2 years ago
I'm guessing the answer is no.
okokwhatever|2 years ago
A4ET8a8uTh0|2 years ago
That said, I am looking for full remote.
datadrivenangel|2 years ago
Sounds like severance will be decent for people who choose not to go though.
laweijfmvo|2 years ago
darth_avocado|2 years ago
micromacrofoot|2 years ago
michaelkaufman|2 years ago
Each employee at Roblox now has to commute to/from work which means every employee will likely spend at least 5-10 hours a week commuting. For 'commuting' I include the time to wake up earlier, showering, getting food, getting in the car & warming it up, waiting at lights etc... and per month that's ~20 to 40 hours a MONTH per employee 'commuting'. That equals a WORK WEEK of time per month taken from each employee for NOTHING!! It feels wrong morally.
Remote companies STILL have too many Zoom or Teams meetings, Slack Huddles, or whatever tech they use. Many companies opt for the free versions of tools or non-enterprise versions of better collaboration tools which often limits their ability to record virtual meetings and share files more easily. I'm not familiar with what tools Roblox used inside, but I wouldn't be surprised they skimped on paying for the right tools.
benjaminwootton|2 years ago
imetatroll|2 years ago
dev_daftly|2 years ago
greatgib|2 years ago
The big point is that they don't want employees to have the edge but stay their slaves.
foogazi|2 years ago
Juniors and young college grads won’t be able to learn from them
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
goalonetwo|2 years ago
throw156754228|2 years ago
davedx|2 years ago
user47294739|2 years ago
[deleted]
outside1234|2 years ago
Willish42|2 years ago
As a SWE who does IC and planning / TL design work, I find it immensely easier to work from home. I don't have to find a meeting room, I have one stable multi-monitor setup that I'm comfortable with for running and participating in meetings, and I can make myself available for "emergencies" early and late in the day without having to work my commute around that.
The leaders making this decision at Roblox have generous compensation packages (even for tech), and can likely afford to buy a new house every single year based on how much they earn. The reality for a rank-and-file SWE trying to secure housing in the Bay Area, especially near San Mateo, is much more precarious. No joke, if these companies offered to factor in a cost-of-living adjustment to compensation based on rent rates in the area surrounding the office, I'd go back in a heartbeat, but I spent enough time as a new grad commuting 90 minutes each way saving less than 10% of my paycheck after rent and basic living expenses, to where I would literally quit SWE work before being forced back to my company's HQ.
Mind you, certain economic classes of young individuals will have safety nets from their family and the support they need to not worry as much about finances. This will have a deliberate effect on the types of backgrounds that will become predominant among employees -- likely, folks already in the bay area who went to nearby top-tier schools and have upbringings that primed them for such a life one way or another. My experience thus far is that our remote teams at my job tend to be more diverse and the new-grad experience is less economically precarious because you have the choice of living where you want to. Caretakers and people with kids also suffer disproportionately with RTO vs. those younger or with less family duties, and this affects the population of employees drastically too.
As important as in-person collaboration is for mentoring, brainstorming, and culture, I feel like there's probably a way to create space for that without bringing everybody back to the HCOL areas where leadership tends to already own personal and commercial real-estate (potential conflict of interest, though this varies by company/leader in terms of the size of the assets).
I think the writing is on the wall though and probably every major tech firm will slowly creep back from "hybrid" to "well, 3 is the minimum" (see: flair bit from office space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7SNEdjftno), to having the real "team players" be the ones who can afford to come in 5 days a week. This was probably inevitable but I find it vastly disappointing.
kkfx|2 years ago
- they want to keep up the city model, where people might be slave of countless of services and economically by them, by their need, slaves of those who operate such services;
- they want people who can be exploited in various ways while WFH people can change far easier and so are less bound to a company.
Both reasons are AGAINST the current formal economical view since the '800s at least (The Science Of Government, Founded On Natural Law, by Clinton Roosevelt) and human evolutionary needs.
The rest is just mere organizational issues, for instance many WFH have issue brainstorming from remote, simply because they are not much engaged/motivated to, but that's not "by nature", it's just the need to learn a not-really-new but relatively new for too many, work paradigm.