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Facebook Says It Will Permanently Shift Tens of Thousands of Jobs To Remote Work (theverge.com) 54

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
In a move that illustrates how swiftly the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the global economy, Facebook said today that it would begin allowing most of its employees to request a permanent change in their jobs to let them work remotely. From a report: The company will begin today by making most of its US job openings eligible for remote hires and begin taking applications for permanent remote work among its workforce later this year. "We're going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Verge. "We need to do this in a way that's thoughtful and responsible, so we're going to do this in a measured way. But I think that it's possible that over the next five to 10 years -- maybe closer to 10 than five, but somewhere in that range -- I think we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently." Facebook, which has more than 48,000 employees working in 70 offices worldwide, is the largest company yet to move aggressively into remote work in the wake of the pandemic.
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Facebook Says It Will Permanently Shift Tens of Thousands of Jobs To Remote Work More

Facebook Says It Will Permanently Shift Tens of Thousands of Jobs To Remote Work

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  • It is encouraging to see corporations start taking COVID-19 seriously. We all need to stay at home and work, and only venture out when needed. If possible we should order everything online as well, in order to minimize interaction. As an added bonus we can spend more time working and not being outside wandering around. COVID-19 is spread through human contact, so humans should be avoided until the vaccine is out.

    • As an added bonus we can spend more time working and not being outside wandering around.

      Can't quite tell if you're being fully sarcastic here or not...?

      But if NOT...then staying indoors all the time, is NOT the healthiest thing to do.

      Indoor air can be quite bad in many homes..AND, at the very least, you need to be getting out and getting sunshine on your skin at least 15 min a day to help you generate Vitamin D, which has been shown to help lessen the potential severe reactions to Covid-19.....

      And let's

      • Do forgive our little pet. He is currently very excited to about puppet accounts and self modding. Kinda cute really.

        • I don't have any puppet accounts. Any moderation you see is done by other people. Sorry to crush you! How are things in SJW land? Still hiding in your basement I see.

      • You must be wrong. Currently the guidelines are to SHELTER IN PLACE (at home) and only go out for necessary reasons. I mean, I hear that one Slashdot every day. If you need proof just look at places like Sweden where they didn't have those guidelines. Everyone must be dead there by now! According to my Teslerati graph the growth is EXPONENTIAL!!!1!!.

        • "Sweden Tops Europe COVID-19 Deaths Per Capita Over Last Seven Days"
          Reuters, May 19, 2020, at 10:43 a.m.

          STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden, which has opted for a more open strategy in combating the virus than other European countries, had the highest number of deaths in Europe per capita from the COVID-19 disease over the last seven days, data showed.

    • YOU want to stay home like a damn scared rabbit, only coming on when GOVERNMENT allows you to, so be it. Not me and MILLIONS of other Americans. This version of an upper respiratory virus, yes, potentially more dangerous than SARS, EBOLA, MERS etc will run it's course, and 99% won't even know they had it. If people want to work from home, that's one thing, but hunkering down like a scared little rabbit isn't how to go through life. One thing this will do, working from home, is make those living in San Fran
      • Wow, I can tell you don't care if the person next to you is going to cancer treatment and just needs their healthy diet to eat so they can get better.

  • Doing the needful.

  • It's always been mind-boggling to me how much the cost of the same house can differ from one place to another. If I didn't already live in a pretty rural area, I'd be using this as my ticket, for sure.

    • Perhaps. There are a lot of factors involved.
      Lets just go With Supply vs Demand.
      If your job is in the City, then being close, access to public transportation is a big factor to have demand to live in the city to high. Thus higher housing costs.
      That said, if everyone is working from home, they may feel free to move further out. However the further out you go, the lack of quality resources diminish. Eg Grocery Stores, people who will drive to your location to fix things up, clothing...
      So City living may be

    • Maybe, but NIMBY is everywhere. No one wants the place where they live to change, after they move there. And no one wants their property values to go down.

      • And no one wants their property values to go down.

        Why not? Your property taxes go down too. Its a home, not a financial instrument.

        • Why don't people want their property taxes to go down?

          I think it's because people don't like losing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe I'm wrong, though.

          • You're missing the parent's point. Property values staying high only matters if you're planning to sell at some point. If you intend to die in the house you currently own, the preference would logically be for the value to at least stay stable, if not go down, since that would reduce your yearly outlay of property taxes.

            My property was assessed at it's highest value ever this year, and my taxes went up accordingly. I'd've just as soon had the value stay where it was.

            • Unfortunately, one key reason for California property values is that property taxes do NOT go up with the value. The amount assessed for taxes can only go up by inflation, no more. So you are HIGHLY incentivized to stay put, your property value can grow easily 1000% but have the assessed value (and thus taxes) only go up like 40%, if that. The most anyone's property taxes have grown, if they've stayed in the same property continuously, is maybe 100% over the last 40 years.

  • He waits until all the cows have passed the cowid test.

  • Facebook's policy for contractors -- those who haven't been sent home -- has been that they are only allowed to work on-site. Employees can log in remotely but contractors aren't allowed to. Any updates on that, Facebook?
    • I think you have to understand some work can't be done remotely. This could be legal, wellbeing, trade secrets, etc. Apple had a prototype cell phone stolen from a bar. Things like that mean some people have to be in office. I hear FB is trying to do what they can for all people to work from home where possible.
      • "I think you have to understand some work can't be done remotely." I think I do understand that. That's really not the point at all. It's the difference between blanket policies, for employees vs. contractors. It's that there's work that a contractor *could* do from home but is not allowed to, vs. an employee being allowed to do the *same kind of work* from home.

    • Can't speak to FB, but I'm a contractor, and was among the first people to be sent home.

      At the beginning of things, I worked from home for two days on a pilot program. I went in for one day, and then was told I, (and all other contractors,) would be working from home until further notice. That was actually before the regular employees got sent home, by close to a week.

      I've never been told why that happened, but I've speculated that there might have been an additional liability owe-able to my actual employer

      • Can't speak to FB, but I'm a contractor, and was among the first people to be sent home.

        I had just started a contract with a big telecom company when this all virus shit went down, and I too was sent home at least a week before the direct employees were. I had only been in the office for a total of about 4 hours when they decided I'd be 100% remote. I went home and I haven't been back, and I'm not going back, not to any office ever. It's fully-remote or nothing for me now.

  • "We're going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale," followed by " I think that it's possible that over the next five to 10 years -- maybe closer to 10 than five..."

  • Sure Facebook (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bobstreo ( 1320787 )

    Now how about we take a 4 or 5 year H-1B break, (no new visas approved) with tax penalties on companies who offshore jobs for remote work?

  • This could be a really good thing for addressing Facebook's monoculture. Facebook suffers from an extreme case of echo-chamber thinking. The result is that they are completely out of touch with the world outside of Silicon Valley and India. To put some context on just how out of touch these companies are, 85% of people that work for a technology company say that their company is intolerant of diverse political views.

    https://www.teamblind.com/blog... [teamblind.com]

    By offering remote work Facebook has an opportunity to get

    • Good luck finding tech workers who aren't progressives or liberals.

      You know the progressives came from the Republican party right? And that libertarians are liberal in every sense of the word? And that modern neo-liberals have very little to with "liberal"?

      • Good luck finding tech workers who aren't progressives or liberals.

        Over the last 25 years or so and it's my observation that the vast, vast majority of tech workers are liberal or left-leaning. There are some conservatives here and there, but most tech workers are generally far more liberal than they are conservative.

  • in the Commercial Real Estate Markets. Like millions of Billionaire real-estate moguls crying out in terror and suddenly silenced.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      Only it's not going to result in a destruction of the real-estate market, it will result in a rebalancing of it...

  • After hitting rock-bottom in terms of squeezing as many employees as possible into "open space" offices to minimize the lease per employee, this is just the next logical step to increase profits: Ask your employees to provide the office space on their own. And while they are at it, they can also pay the network bandwidth required for working. And why not host some company server at the employees home, where electricity is free (for the company)?

    • Re:"Bring Your Own Office" is so much more profita (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AmazingRuss ( 555076 ) on Thursday May 21, 2020 @01:39PM (#60087484)
      If I don't have to go into that noisy, smelly, disease ridden cesspit to make my ridiculous salary, Id be HAPPY to host a server rack or two.

      • The cost of operating a home office and even running a handful of servers in it is significantly less than the cost of commuting for many people...
        The cost of network bandwidth is going to be negligible, most people already have a connection at home and it would have been sitting idle while they're at the office anyway. At the company side, hosting your servers in a datacenter will be cheaper than getting a line installed to your office premises.

        And that assumes you stay living where you are, if your selection of where to live is no longer being dictated by having to travel to an office every day you have a lot more choice of where to live and will probably find somewhere better and cheaper.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ffkom ( 3519199 )
          If the place where you live is not correlated to where you work, then chances are not only you will find somewhere cheaper to live, it will also be probable that your employer will find somebody who lives where it is even cheaper, and so are the standards of living and the wages.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ffkom ( 3519199 )
        I'm sorry for your terrible experience with working in an office. I have different experiences, working in offices that were quiet, well ventilated, populated by a reasonable amount of friendly co-workers. If your experiences made you think that "bring your own office" is preferable, then maybe that was exactly the motivation for your employer to create the adverse conditions you experienced.

  • It's about the space (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cyrano de Maniac ( 60961 ) on Thursday May 21, 2020 @01:45PM (#60087506)

    I doubt Facebook would be doing this if it weren't for the fact that their current office environments are based on open seating plans, without even so much as a cubicle to separate employees from one another. If this anti-employee real estate policy hadn't been implemented in the first place, there'd be no need to permanently transition people to work from home in order to protect health.

    A also agree with ffkom that this is all about reducing costs. Even if they get 25% of people working from home, that's a 25% reduction in spending on office spaces.

    • If they can get the remote worker thing working, they can hire people in other parts of the country, where than can pay 30% less salary.
  • The best work-from-home setup I've been involved with had all engineers working from home but supported it with an office space tailored for the situation. The office space primarily consisted of conference rooms that were equipped with high-end capabilities for hosting meetings of technical teams. Typically, we were fully home four days out of the week but found it very valuable for teams to actually meet in person for a full team meeting a few hours each week. The in-person meeting always felt like a dam

  • First they got a bonus for ripping out drywall and putting in cube farms, which everybody hated. Then they got a bonus for replacing cubicles with cafeteria tables and calling it "open plan", which everybody hated more. Now they'll get bonuses for letting people work from home, which lots of people wanted all along.

  • If most people work from home, is there still any reason to hire most of the folks from the Silicon Valley area?

    • This is Slashdot so schadenfreude is part of the DNA of the commentary. No doubt covid will be changing work for a lot of folks, and no doubt SFBay commercial space is going to soften. I'll even bet thousands of people will move out of SF for quality of life, work, or other issues,but that's not a lot compared tot he total

      But for the people that think residential rent will decrease dramatically, you'll likely be disappointed. Sure it will go down a bit, but not much compared to the +60% increase from 201

  • The more remote work there is, the easier it becomes to hire employees from other countries. American programmers are going to lose jobs due to this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      Why eastern Europe? - That place is still relatively expensive when compared to let's say rural areas in India, the Philippines or Bangladesh. Once Starlink solves the "no Internet available" obstacle everywhere, there is no more reason (at least from the perspective of the non-IT people counting the beans) to not contract people where the standards of living and salaries are the lowest.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by khchung ( 462899 )

      The more remote work there is, the easier it becomes to hire employees from other countries. American programmers are going to lose jobs due to this.

      Come to say exactly this.

      Next step, remote working from off-shore. What kinds of work that can be done by an American working remotely but cannot be done by someone off-shore working remotely?

  • Zuck also said that anyone not living in Silicon Valley will have a lower salary.

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