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05/22/2020

Facebook Joins Twitter, Square in Permanently Working from Home

This is a huge move for the company's large workforce

In January, as reports about the spread of a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) emerged from China, Mark Zuckerberg began to prepare for a potential pandemic. He began turning his teams to projects that would be useful during the long stay-at-home orders that would follow around the world — and would also highlight some of the more positive aspects of Facebook’s vast size and reach. Within weeks, Facebook had turned an existing program for working with disease researchers into a live map showing the effectiveness of stay-at-home orders. It partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to survey users on potential COVID-19 symptoms in an effort to identify new hotspots for public health researchers.

After the videoconferencing company Zoom surged from 10 million daily meeting participants to 300 million, Facebook introduced a competitor named Rooms. Earlier this week, it announced Shops, a significant new push into e-commerce.

All of that pales, though, next to the announcement Zuckerberg made Thursday morning in a live stream to his employees. Beginning today, the company is making most of its open roles in the United States available for remote recruiting and hiring. And, later this year, many of Facebook’s 48,000 employees around the world will be able to request a switch to remote work. Within the next decade, Zuckerberg predicts, Facebook — a company that until recently paid new hires a bonus of up to $15,000 to live near its Menlo Park headquarters — could be a largely remote workforce.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Verge.

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