That’s pretty funny. I have an amazing home office setup, and even all that high-end kit cost a very small fraction of an FB engineer yearly salary. Are they planning on burning the delta by throwing in high-end telepresence hardware, or something?

I don't know if it's high end, but every FTE I know got a Portal.

The top end afaik is the Cisco telepresence gear used in eg the White House. There’s a spectrum in between, but $280 is definitely near the lower end. Maybe portal is really good, though?

But honestly, it could be the best teleconferencing gear, I’d never put a camera from FB in my home.

Pardon my ignorance, but what is a Portal?

A video-call device they make: https://portal.facebook.com/

I was about to ask the same question. I didn't even know this product existed!

a whitelabled version of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

The average dev at Facebook is paid like $150k. If they implement this then some engineers will lose $50k per year.

$179. Lol

If Facebook gave each dev a $15,000 computer setup then most will still be royally fucked by this policy.

At $179 that's a cheap product.

Isn't office rent far more expensive than equipment?

Home office equipment is only a fraction of the company's potential savings from office rent or other operational costs. Some of those costs get passed on to the employee, like electricity or heating costs.

Seems like the Uberization of white-collar workers, shifting costs to employees.

And if not shifting those costs, then seems like a windfall for accountants to deal with all the tax implications.

Or, an opportunity for a new wave of politicians to figure out how to implement tax and labor laws in such an environment.

WFH might be simpler for tax purposes since you don't have imputed income from free lunches and such.

Oh, interesting. Didn't think about that.

To be honest: all of the office equipment is a mere fraction of a month's of an engineer salary, providing the basic tools for your workers that is less than a month's salary is nowhere a "cost-saving measure", even less when you are saving on real estate...