Since Roblox is in the virtual world business, this is embarrassing. Their own world isn't good enough for them.
Amusingly, Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, was mostly remote before, during, and after the pandemic. They seem to have figured this out. They are not a fast-moving company, but, unlike Roblox, they are profitable.
For Meta it's different, they're pushing for working and collaborating virtually.
It's not the same.
I had been working remotely for 8 years and really was 100% for it and advocating it. I recently joined a new job where I'm at the office 3 days a week, and I can definitely feel the difference both in the time it took me to onboard (compared to other remote-only onboarding I did) and the productivity / relationships / other gains from those days we are all in the office.
Those ad-hoc conversation happening around a desk, a white board, at lunch, do bring a lot of value that you never get while WFH. I can definitely see how some of my previous burn outs may have been prevented if I was not 100% remote.
Of course YMMV, but personally I can definitely see how a company may decide to get back to the office and it's definitely not all black and white where remote is better and omg the mean bosses are getting butts back in seats for more control.
Slack/Teams/email/etc can be spontaneous as well. Just a matter if the culture appreciates and encourages the behavior.
If the CEO is leaving off-sites w/ brand new, strategically significant, ideas that no one was comfortable even hinting at via Slack/Teams/email - yep, seems like a very in-person, face-to-face culture. Seems very brittle in this day and age.
Remote work has so many things going for it, it does not make sense to me to use a different model.
Commute time is eliminated, as are commuting costs. That is time better spent.
Remote communications have a built in forcing-function making us gather our thoughts before we type them in or call someone. This isn't a barrier to most. Is for some, typically the people who do a fair bit of idle chat or don't tryto solve things themselves for at least 20m before asking others.
Remote communications can be recorded. Serves as both a knowledge repository that can be gone back to, and as an audit trail for legal purposes.
Remote communications allow tools to be built into the conversation. In person we have a whiteboard, and someone has to take a photo of the whiteboard when done.
Remote communications allow collaboration with wide area geographies where in-person travel would be too costly to do frequently (e.g., England and U.S.).
Remote communications can be async, allowing staff who keep different schedules to easily collaborate.
This could be as simple as another layoff, but I think it's more management that are used to the usual way of doing things. In my experience with remote vs non-remote I have seen a clear bias of older management to be less likely to embrace remote comms. I've also seen plenty of outliers on both ends, so that hypothesis might not hold water. I am curious what the age range of Roblox management is, compared to remote-first companies like Github.
Some people sure, not all.
> Within 45 minutes I came away from three separate conversations with spontaneous to do’s and ideas to put in motion, something that hadn’t happened during the past few years of video meetings
A very CEO-esque anecdote. "I had a great thought-leadership conversation in the elevator, we should all come back!"
> For many of us, “Zoom fatigue” is real.
I "Zoom" more than I did before, and during the pandemic. It has allowed me to almost eliminate all wasteful IRL meetings.
> There will be some remote employees who are not asked to return .... niche skill sets or significant institutional knowledge
Okay so the rockstars, ninjas and privileged executives can stay home - nice disclaimer.
> For managers of remote employees who choose not to move, I understand the burden this may put on you and your teams.
And? Suck it up I guess.
They're also not requiring their lowest-level employees to come into the office either, since they're obviously unwilling to pay a Bay-Area living wage for work like that.
This company has never been remote friendly. Posts like this are absolutely despicable because they hire people remotely without the clear intention that they will RTO. That's called lying.
This is the only reason to work in an office: in person brainstorming is much better. Virtual brainstorming doesn't seem to cut it (or we at least haven't figured it out yet).
Something spontaneous about it that is hard to replicate via predetermined remote calls.
Have you ever tried this? Half of them won’t reply to you for the next x hours, others will have meetings, and others will say not right now I’m swamped. Most of those excuses are because they can’t be bothered joining a “quick call” with you, not because they’re actually busy.
Compare to a physical office, where by chance you’re in the cafe at the same time as someone else who you usually don’t think about. But somehow you start talking and a good idea comes from it.
I’m remote and have no problem pinging anyone on slack from my teammate to the CEO — but when I visit the office I always find connections & ideas I would never find sitting at home.
Personally I've never used a virtual whiteboard that was any good. I blame the much smaller area and the mouse input.
Of course if your ways of working mean you can collaborate without any need for whiteboards, I guess things could be fine. Clearly, things like the Linux kernel get along OK without such collaboration.
How is that possible? They don't even have to bother making the "games" they immensely monetize on.
* 25% payment fees (google and apple app stores)
* 28% developer exchange fees (they have to incentivize other people to build those games on their platform)
* 31% (up from 24%) infrastructure (servers/cloud) and trust and safety
* 39% (up from 28%) R&D
* 13% (down from 16%) general and administrative
* 5% (up from 4%) sales and marketing
They'd have to slash the last 4 of those items by 70% to get to a +20% operating margin.
In FY2022 and averaged over the past 4 quarters revenue growth has fell back down to 15% (in FY2021 revenue more than doubled, which is likely where everyone felt that the gold rush was on).
If they could hold the last 4 of those items constant and grow topline revenue while letting payment fees and developer exchange fees grow with revenue it would take them ~8.5 years to get to a +20% operating margin.
It's kind of interesting how they pile trust and safety into infrastructure so that you can't tell if they're either underfunding trust and safety (freaking everyone out over their kids using the platform) or those T&S costs are exploding (indicating lack of scalability of T&S and making it even harder to achieve any kinds of operating margins). One very obvious problem with the idea of across-the-board 70% cuts in everything is that they likely can't do that in T&S.
Now the next problem is that their cash has dropped from $3.08B to $2.12B in the latest quarterly report, they have $1.65B in long term debt up from $1.39B a year earlier (although it looks like only $1B in an actual loan and the rest in capital leases, which is what has been growing). They have total assets of $5.6B and total liabilities of $5.4B (with Goodwill and intangibles of ~$200M) for effectively zero net equity.
They look pretty well doomed unless most of the company goes on a pretty severe diet.
And given the "higher for longer" interest rate environment they're not going to get any cheap financing bailouts to kick the can down the road.
This article is pretty funny:
https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/04/06/will-roblox-be-a-t...
In that sense I like that these companies are forcing a return to office because presumably they're leaving talent on the table that I can hire and outcompete them with.
Only a Sith speaks in absolutes... How does anyone know anything like this for a certainty? What if there's another pandemic as soon as everyone moves back?
This sort of false conviction always rubs me the wrong way. Better to say that you're very confident. Leave yourself some wiggle room.
I love that, and am saving it for my quote book. Attribution will I give, of course.
I'm guessing the answer is no.
That said, I am looking for full remote.
Sounds like severance will be decent for people who choose not to go though.
Roblox is the exact opposite of any company I would want to be involved with. It is a platform to create malformed children, a simulated dystopian hellscape.
Each employee at Roblox now has to commute to/from work which means every employee will likely spend at least 5-10 hours a week commuting. For 'commuting' I include the time to wake up earlier, showering, getting food, getting in the car & warming it up, waiting at lights etc... and per month that's ~20 to 40 hours a MONTH per employee 'commuting'. That equals a WORK WEEK of time per month taken from each employee for NOTHING!! It feels wrong morally.
Remote companies STILL have too many Zoom or Teams meetings, Slack Huddles, or whatever tech they use. Many companies opt for the free versions of tools or non-enterprise versions of better collaboration tools which often limits their ability to record virtual meetings and share files more easily. I'm not familiar with what tools Roblox used inside, but I wouldn't be surprised they skimped on paying for the right tools.
The big point is that they don't want employees to have the edge but stay their slaves.
Juniors and young college grads won’t be able to learn from them
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As a SWE who does IC and planning / TL design work, I find it immensely easier to work from home. I don't have to find a meeting room, I have one stable multi-monitor setup that I'm comfortable with for running and participating in meetings, and I can make myself available for "emergencies" early and late in the day without having to work my commute around that.
The leaders making this decision at Roblox have generous compensation packages (even for tech), and can likely afford to buy a new house every single year based on how much they earn. The reality for a rank-and-file SWE trying to secure housing in the Bay Area, especially near San Mateo, is much more precarious. No joke, if these companies offered to factor in a cost-of-living adjustment to compensation based on rent rates in the area surrounding the office, I'd go back in a heartbeat, but I spent enough time as a new grad commuting 90 minutes each way saving less than 10% of my paycheck after rent and basic living expenses, to where I would literally quit SWE work before being forced back to my company's HQ.
Mind you, certain economic classes of young individuals will have safety nets from their family and the support they need to not worry as much about finances. This will have a deliberate effect on the types of backgrounds that will become predominant among employees -- likely, folks already in the bay area who went to nearby top-tier schools and have upbringings that primed them for such a life one way or another. My experience thus far is that our remote teams at my job tend to be more diverse and the new-grad experience is less economically precarious because you have the choice of living where you want to. Caretakers and people with kids also suffer disproportionately with RTO vs. those younger or with less family duties, and this affects the population of employees drastically too.
As important as in-person collaboration is for mentoring, brainstorming, and culture, I feel like there's probably a way to create space for that without bringing everybody back to the HCOL areas where leadership tends to already own personal and commercial real-estate (potential conflict of interest, though this varies by company/leader in terms of the size of the assets).
I think the writing is on the wall though and probably every major tech firm will slowly creep back from "hybrid" to "well, 3 is the minimum" (see: flair bit from office space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7SNEdjftno), to having the real "team players" be the ones who can afford to come in 5 days a week. This was probably inevitable but I find it vastly disappointing.
- they want to keep up the city model, where people might be slave of countless of services and economically by them, by their need, slaves of those who operate such services;
- they want people who can be exploited in various ways while WFH people can change far easier and so are less bound to a company.
Both reasons are AGAINST the current formal economical view since the '800s at least (The Science Of Government, Founded On Natural Law, by Clinton Roosevelt) and human evolutionary needs.
The rest is just mere organizational issues, for instance many WFH have issue brainstorming from remote, simply because they are not much engaged/motivated to, but that's not "by nature", it's just the need to learn a not-really-new but relatively new for too many, work paradigm.