> extremely vague and non-quantifiable in a way that makes them technically impossible to argue against
this is why it's a shame people are ridiculing Zuckerberg's post ... they actually did quantify it and actually did come up with some nuanced insight into what works well and what doesn't and he says they are going to keep studying it to learn more.
To me, it seems like there are two tenets to this. (a) remote / distributed anything is hard. but at the same time (b) remote / distribute anything is powerful. Do it well and you will have enormous advantages that your competitors, shackled to their mere physical earthly pinprick of a location on this planet can never match.
Which is to say, it's actually worth trying to do well and I respect that Zuckerberg has taken this more nuanced approach to try and get there.
They didn’t quantify it. The made an assertion that people who started in person at Meta were more productive than those who started remotely, but there was no data provided to back the assertion up. What’s more, we have no way of knowing if that assertion is valid. The majority of people who started at Meta in the last few years would have been overwhelmingly skewed to remote, while in-person starts would be skewed to those from more than a few years ago. How are they comparing these two groups? Are the actually comparing the productivity of in-person vs remote, or are they unintentionally (or intentionally) comparing the productivity of people who have been at Meta for >3 years vs those with <3 years. They didn’t provide any kind of data or quantitative measures at all, and they fall into the exact category the person you responded to is describing.
this is why it's a shame people are ridiculing Zuckerberg's post ... they actually did quantify it and actually did come up with some nuanced insight into what works well and what doesn't and he says they are going to keep studying it to learn more.
To me, it seems like there are two tenets to this. (a) remote / distributed anything is hard. but at the same time (b) remote / distribute anything is powerful. Do it well and you will have enormous advantages that your competitors, shackled to their mere physical earthly pinprick of a location on this planet can never match.
Which is to say, it's actually worth trying to do well and I respect that Zuckerberg has taken this more nuanced approach to try and get there.