People

Mark Zuckerberg: Remote work is the future of Facebook

Even as the company reopens offices, it's only going to operate them at about 25% capacity for the foreseeable future.

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg said he wants Facebook to be "the most forward-leaning company on remote work, at our scale for sure."

Photo: George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images

More than 95% of Facebook employees are working from home. On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg said that setup will be permanent for many of them.

In a live-streamed version of Facebook's weekly staff meeting, Zuckerberg told his team that even as the company starts to reopen offices, it's only going to operate them at about 25% capacity for the foreseeable future. And rather than try to force a return to normalcy, Zuckerberg said he wants Facebook to be "the most forward-leaning company on remote work, at our scale for sure."

Because COVID-19 is likely to be an issue for a long time, Zuckerberg told his team, there's no obligation to make sweeping changes immediately. But he made clear that Facebook is about to become a different kind of company. "This is fundamentally about changing our culture in the way we're going to work long term," he said.

The company's first step, he said, will be to immediately ramp up remote hiring, particularly for senior engineering roles in the U.S. and Canada, and to ease more existing staffers into permanently remote roles. "I think it's quite possible that over the next five to 10 years, about 50% of our people could be working remotely," he said.

He said that's not a goal or target, but simply reflects the trend. For now, Facebook is looking particularly for people within a 4-hour drive of an existing company hub, Zuckerberg said, and hopes to create mini-hubs of remote workers to build in-person communities even where there's no official office. The first of those hubs? Atlanta, Dallas and Denver.

While he cautioned repeatedly that this will be a huge change in how people work, Zuckerberg cited a few upsides to a more remote team. The company will be able to hire people who would never move to a big city to be close to a Facebook office and can retain people who move away for personal reasons. There are environmental upsides, too, with fewer people commuting.

As part of the change, Facebook announced some new products designed to facilitate remote work. It's bringing more video tools to Portal devices and adding video chat and video rooms to its Workplace feature, which Zuckerberg said now has 5 million paying users — up from 3 million in October. (Those numbers pale next to Microsoft, Slack and others, but are a sign Workplace is growing quickly.)

Zuckerberg also said in the meeting that Facebook is planning a series of hackathons for people to build internal tools for remote work, because all the necessary tools don't exist yet.

Facebook's not the only company to announce a shift to remote-first work — Twitter, Square, Shopify and others have done so in recent weeks. But with more than 40,000 employees, it's the largest tech company yet to begin this journey. For years, Facebook has been one of the most competitive, highest-paying employers in Silicon Valley, and its moves will likely prompt many others to follow.

But Facebook's shift alone could cause big ripples around the Bay Area. A company survey of its employees over the last few weeks found that if given the option, somewhere between 20% and 40% would choose to work remotely full time. Of those, up to 75% said they were thinking about moving, not only to new cities but even to new countries.

Starting soon, anyone at Facebook who meets four criteria will be able to apply to work from home full time. They'll need to be experienced, relatively senior employees; they'll need to have high ratings on recent performance reviews; they'll need to be on a team that supports remote work; and they'll need to have their group leader's approval.

At first, Zuckerberg said, remote work is for Facebook's best — for others, it might be too much of a change. Salaries will depend on where people live, Zuckerberg said, and may be adjusted even for existing employees.

There are plenty of open questions for Facebook. One big one: Is all-remote work better than a hybrid of in-office and remote? As some employees go back to the office, Zuckerberg said, the company will face a challenge in sorting out schedules and meeting rules, as well as ensuring that macro-level initiatives like employee growth and career development are shaped so that everyone gets the same opportunities, no matter where they are. It's still not even clear how offices themselves will work, Zuckerberg said, though he's committed to keeping the company's physical footprint going forward.

A central question is how to train employees, particularly young ones. Initially, Zuckerberg said, Facebook will still do training in its offices before figuring out what remote work looks like for new employees.

And what will this all cost? How much might it save both Facebook and its employees? That's hard to say. "A lot of people feel like this hasn't really been a big cost-savings," Zuckerberg said. Companies with remote workforces have told him that supporting employees with remote-work tools and increased travel requirements can offset other savings.

Zuckerberg stressed that these transformations won't happen all at once — and don't have to. And he said he's working hard to make sure Facebook doesn't lose the culture it built over nearly two decades. But, he said, this is clearly the way forward.

"We're not doing this because this is a thing that employees have asked for," Zuckerberg said. "We're here to serve the world, and to serve our community, and to try and unlock as much innovation as possible." Going forward at Facebook, that means beginning to leave the office behind.

Before he could finish the staff meeting, Zuckerberg's livestream cut out. It appeared he was right: The tools are getting good, but they're not there yet.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins