Remote Work Is Winding Down—Just Ask Zuckerberg

The days of work-from-home could be dwindling for Meta employees. Hiring managers at the tech giant are reportedly no longer able to list jobs as remote as the company seemingly abandons its easy breezy work-from-home policy.

As detailed by Insider, the hiring manager directive is only one example of Meta seemingly abandoning the remote work flexibility that made working for Big Tech so appealing even after the height of the covid-19 pandemic. Meta also allegedly 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 its job listing page. Meta CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg also mentioned a return-to-office push in a letter to employees shared on Facebook on March 14.

“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. “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.”

A Meta spokesperson told Gizmodo in an email: “We remain committed to remote work. We’ve merely temporarily paused new remote work applications as leaders complete the restructuring work that Mark announced earlier this month.”

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Unfortunately for the rest of us, Zuckerberg isn’t alone. As CNBC points out, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has called employees back to the office after Salesforce President and Chief People Officer Brent Hyder declared in early 2021 that the “9-to-5 workday is dead” and “the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks.” This shift back to the office is likely due to managers and companies regaining power from workers in the midst of widespread layoffs, when people are desperately clinging to companies for their income.

Meta announced in November 2022 that it would be laying off 11,000 workers, which amounted to approximately 13% of its workforce. Two weeks ago, Meta also confirmed that it would be cutting another 10,000 employees by the end of the year as well as closing 5,000 open job positions across the company.