Facebook to open up remote hiring
● Facebook plans to hire more remote workers in areas where the company doesn’t have an office, and let some current employees work from home permanently if they want to.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company plans to “aggressively open up remote hiring” starting immediately with the US, particularly for engineering talent. Based on internal employee surveys, he believes remote workers could make up as much as 50% of Facebook’s workforce in the next five to 10 years.
“We and a lot of other folks were very worried that productivity was going to really fall off a cliff,” Zuckerberg said in an interview. “It just hasn’t. We are at least as productive as we were before [the lockdown], and some people report being even more productive.”
The social network, which closed its Menlo Park, California, offices in early March due to the coronavirus outbreak, has already told employees that they can work from home until the end of the year.
Zuckerberg shared the remote hiring plans with workers on Thursday. Facebook had more than 48,000 global staff at the end of March. “The vast majority of people at the company are working remotely anyway, so constraining ourselves to only hiring people who live near an office that’s not open anyways isn’t really that efficient,” he said.
Facebook is the latest, and largest, tech company to announce a full or partial move to more permanent remote work amid the pandemic. Twitter and Square, both run by CEO Jack Dorsey, have announced that their employees can work from home permanently if they’d like. Canadian e-commerce company Shopify said this week it will allow its 5,000 staff to work from home indefinitely.
It’s a trend that could drastically change Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, which for decades has been the mecca for high-paying technology jobs. Many of the world’s most valuable companies, including Facebook, Apple and Alphabet’s Google, are headquartered just south of San Francisco, which has made the area one of the wealthiest and most expensive in the world.
Facebook employees who wish to work remotely, and are approved to do so, will be paid based on their new location, Zuckerberg said. That means employees who move to areas with a lower cost of living than the Bay Area would likely take a pay cut. Employees
now working remotely who want to extend their remote work plans beyond the end of this year will need to alert Facebook for tax and payroll reasons.
Zuckerberg said his decisions are not driven by employee demand, and there are a number of other benefits to remote hiring. This will extend the “talent pool” of people Facebook can hire, he said, and could help Facebook increase the diversity of its workforce, both racially and ethnically, but also ideologically.
There is also a potential environmental benefit, Zuckerberg said, pointing out that pollution and emissions have dipped as people have stopped travelling.
“I’d rather have our employees teleporting to work with VR or video chat than sitting in a commute and kind of poisoning the atmosphere,” he said.
There could be product advantages, too. Facebook’s mission is to create products that help people feel closer even when they are physically apart, Zuckerberg said. This would give the company a chance to put its own products to the test and “eat our own dog food”.
There are still some unknowns. Zuckerberg believes a change like this could affect some of what he calls “the softer stuff”, like social connections, group brainstorming and creativity. Companies like Facebook and Google have changed work culture by offering employees never-ending perks, such as free food, shuttles to work and even laundry. Those elements of work cultures will undoubtedly be affected.
“We don’t know yet how much we are drafting off of culture, relationships, strategy and direction that have been developed up until this point. We’re kind of just gliding forward,” Zuckerberg said. “We don’t know how hard it’s going to be to evolve.”
He said the Covid-19 outbreak and his plan to increase remote workers won’t change the company’s real estate ambitions — at least not in the short term. Facebook has been expanding its sprawling headquarters for years, and has other plans to expand east across the San Francisco Bay to Fremont. Facebook has also embarked on a major push in New York.
When some employees do return to work after the July 4 holiday, Facebook plans to keep office capacity at just 25%, so it will need as much room as possible. “If anything, we just don’t have enough office space,” Zuckerberg said.