Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026 (businessinsider.com)

The headline makes it seem like every role in the company needs to switch to full-time in-office.

But anyone who was hired in a remote role is exempt.

This order only applies to in-office workers with assigned desks.

He's basically saying that they can't expect to have a hybrid work schedule, although not so strict that they can't ever work from home.

> the change applies to employees in US offices with assigned desks and is part of a broader push to make Instagram "more nimble and creative" as competition intensifies.

I don't think RTO or fewer meetings is going to reverse or even slow Instagram's slide down the enshittification chute. I recently returned to the app to connect with some friends and local communities, but the density of ads and dark patterns is pushing me away. IMO Instagram and Facebook in their twilight (which will still last another decade or so), where the path forward has more to due with extracting the remaining value from their existing users rather than outcompeting the alternatives.

The whole memo just reeks of not trusting your employees.

Instagram chief orders quiet layoffs to please investors in 2026

fixed that title for you

"We're also offering the option to transfer from the MPK to SF office for those people whose commute would be the same or better with that change."

So wait, you'll be able to switch offices even though your team might be in the second one? What's the benefit of working remote from your team but next to random, noisy people?

Just a move to get rid of people, some people won't do the RTO and they can easily let them go.

[flagged]

How independently does Instagram operate from Meta?

Basically soft layoff

Another winning call from Mosseri

After shitcanning the london office because he wanted to move back home(800 people gone) hes now doing the RTO, because as we know all the cool kids love working in the office.

The problem with instagram is not where people are working, its the culture of piss poor direction setting and no user experience advocates. Well none that are being listened to.

There are too many grand initiatives, which are poorly run, never really prototyped and just yeeted into years long slog that fuckup repeatedly (shops I'm looking at you)

Then to get a promotion you need to move a metric somehow. That means doing stupid user hostile stuff, like instantly shoving tits in your face.

Don't get me started on the horror that was instagram for kids

They mean the office in the Metaverse, right?

OK, so... Employees are compelled to go into the office, so they can have better in-person collaboration. They are also encouraged not to go to meetings (aka in-person collaboration sessions), so they can have more focus time.

I haven't seen the Insta offices, but I would bet they don't have walls. In which case, you know where the best focus time is to be had? Out of the office.

5 days is stupid. I am fully remote and I can see how face time is important. After a few years remote I am definitely feeling a little detached from the company. But 5 days makes no sense. I think 2 or 3 days in the office is perfect. You get the opportunity to talk to people and you have days where you can fully focus.

Most ridiculous is to have to come to the office and then talk to your distributed team members over Teams or Slack. Even more fun is to have them spread around the globe in different time zones .

I know better than to think I might have anything useful to add to the WFH debate, but buried further in the memo:

”More demos, less [sic] decks”

I love it, but I’m surprised that an org of that caliber needs to say it out loud. Even the top tier people get bogged down in PowerPoint limbo, I guess?

Nothing is more compelling than, as they say in show business (ie that Bill O’Reilly meme), than saying “f*** it…”:

  (╯°□°)╯
  ┳━━━━┳  WE’LL DO
          IT LIVE!

Layoffs by another name.

It's unfortunate there wasn't more resistance by tech employees to RTO post-covid. It seemed like one of the very, very rare solutions to the systemic problems of housing and commuting in the US. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that WFH effectively doubles or even triples your total compensation when it means (a) actually affordable housing and (b) no time/money lost to commuting, especially if you have kids.

I think its okay for there to be jobs that require you to be in a specific place, especially so if you were hired under such an arrangement originally. If there is a significant advantage for companies that are remote, then they will have a significant advantage on talent.

I enjoyed working on campus for a bit - because I also lived there, sleeping, eating, showering etc. and saved a lot of money! Of course, you have to hide that and they eventually caught me...

Sad, because before COVID, no one at Meta cared where you worked as long as you were getting your shit done. There was never available meeting rooms, and the open floor plans were so loud, that people would spread out all over the campus and use single person VC rooms to communicate in.

Basically, everyone trusted everyone.

This is 100% just a soft layoff.

White collar office society can barely cope with the relatively minor friction that technology brings from allowing work from anywhere and we're expected to believe it, it can deal with somewhat unaccountable and unknowable AI smoothly? Hard to think anything else than that we're in for a wild couple of years imo

ins't this the same guy who moved to london [0], just because he could control things better ?

or maybe the tide has changed from remote working so again the minions are pushed around!

[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/02/instagram-boss-adam-mosseri-...

I have found that at many companies with these kind of policies are selectively enforced. If you don’t show up, nothing will happen to you, until someday they need some kind of reason to fire you. This ensures you have a steady pool of employees you can drop at a moments notice, if for instance some major market crash forces you to quickly dump people in order for the company to survive.

I am here to repeat my sort-of non-but-almost conspiracy theory: It's not about the work, it's about the value of the Listed Property Trust (LPT), as a construct, if the entire central business district price model behind buildings tanks.

Every company of this scale is in LPT. They have shitloads of money tied up in the declared value of the office space either they invested, or they leveraged. If it tanks in value, they are on call for the decline in value related to that.

Thank you for reading my almost but not quite tinfoil hat conspiracy theory.