Is office work more efficient?
Last week, Meta announced another 10,000 upcoming cuts. Of course, layoffs are terrible, but there are a few interesting things. First of all, they clearly reduce the sometimes oversaturated structure of the company:
“In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organization less hierarchical, flatter, so to speak, by removing several levels of management. As part of this challenge, we have made many managers performers. We have also introduced accountability at almost every level – not just at the bottom – so that information flows between direct executors and management was faster”.
The last decade has led to a cult of engineering management that many tech companies have begun to consider even more important than the development process itself. When I came to the Valley in 2012, I had a manager who wrote as much code and did the same amount of work as me, it was considered good form. We’ve heard that Google keeps the IC/manager ratio high on purpose to cut overhead and make micromanaging impossible. Heavyweights like GitHub even openly embraced the “managerless” policy they boasted about at conferences.
By the end of my time at Stripe in 2021, there was a 180° turnaround. Managers who didn’t actually perform any role in the R&D organization – didn’t do product work, didn’t do operational work or handle requests from other teams, didn’t manage JIRA boards, and often didn’t even manage our meetings (in these cases, managing meetings were delegated by the IC). And for some reason, the prevailing opinion was that it was good. The idea of having a manager write the code would be absolutely crazy and unbelievable – their function was to do strategic planning, manage leads through face-to-face meetings, and participate in the stack ranking process, while there were four more levels above them that did the same.
Personally, I have nothing against managers, many of them are wonderful people, but I have never seen any evidence that an organization with a lot of managers doing one thing is more productive than an alternative system. Any non-trivial decisions had to go through the chain of command, making any decision was a complex process, because many people were involved in it, more documents were written than code, and the costs of communication and meetings were prohibitive.
But every tech organization copied each other’s practices, and a similar top of the pyramid was everywhere. I lost hope that there is any other model of organization of the company. But for an organization the size of Meta to move away from it is a huge development, and it certainly happened shortly after similar (and more controversial) decisions were made on Twitter. Can we hope that the intense infatuation of the last decade with middle management was only a temporary phenomenon?
And now, while I haven’t pissed off enough people yet, I’ll move on to Zuckerberg’s other point of view:
“We are committed to a distributed work model. This means that we also strive to continuously improve our model so that it works as efficiently as possible.
Our initial analysis of performance data shows that engineers who either started Meta offline and then transitioned to remote work, or stayed in the office, performed better on average than those who started working remotely. The analysis also shows that early career engineers perform best on average when they work face-to-face with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that face-to-face meetings help build trust more easily and these relationships help us work more effectively.”
Returning to the office is now a highly contentious issue. The attitude of the developers on this issue is clear: remote work is better in every way, and only idiots would try to force them to return to the office. If these idiots tried to do this, it would turn out that all their employees would immediately quit and go somewhere else. However, we are seeing almost all high-functioning organizations push for employees to return to the office, and big companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google are starting to require three days a week to be in the office.
The developer’s response is that this is nothing more than an obsession with pre-2020 times, fueled by unprecedented dogmatism from the evil ghouls at the top rung of the corporate ladder. But as we can see, companies like Meta are making efforts to quantify the impact of remote work on productivity and have come to the conclusion that it matters and is important enough to encourage a return to the office.
I certainly agree that working from home brings a lot of logistical benefits, but it’s clear that face-to-face collaboration is more efficient, it creates a much stronger internal culture, and I suspect this is especially important for large companies. because it helps to level performance. Highly-skilled, experienced employees probably do just as much work from home as they do in the office, perhaps even more, but younger employees without direct supervision are more difficult to manage, and remote work provides the perfect cover for less motivated people (in a large company there will always be is the percentage of people) who could be more responsible in person.
