Roblox says employees must return to office because the metaverse still isn’t good enough
By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
Roblox — a company that builds a hugely popular virtual experiences platform, recently introduced its own spin on video chat, and even created an in-Roblox career center — is “transitioning away” from remote work and will be asking “a number of our remote employees to begin working from our headquarters in San Mateo by next summer,” CEO David Baszucki wrote in an email to staff shared publicly on Tuesday.
Like many other companies, Roblox will be shifting to a model where employees are expected to work three days in the office (Tuesday through Thursday). Staffers will have until January 16th, 2024, to decide if they want to stay on at the company under the new rules. If an employee chooses to stay at Roblox and relocate, the company will help with relocation costs and expects them to report into the company’s San Mateo, California, offices by July 15th, 2024.
Staffers who “are not able to relocate” can stay at the company until April 15th, 2024. Roblox will be offering a severance package for those people who choose to leave.
Roblox went fully remote in March 2020, but, according to Baszucki, the company had “numerous deep discussions” about its future and ultimately decided that “we needed to get back to working in person.” While he “hoped” that it “might be possible to imagine a heavily hybrid remote culture,” he had a “pivotal moment” during the company’s first “post-quarantine, in-person group gathering,” he says. “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
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