Amazon Andy Jassy shouldn’t make RTO decisions in echo chamber of CEOs feelings

One thing I learned in adulthood is that smart (not necessarily ethical) people steal credit when things are good and avoid responsibility for anything unpopular as there is no payoff for it.

rdtsc2• 3 years ago

They are on the hook for paying severance, unemployment insurance and such. If the employee is the one who “quit” well it’s “their choice”…

FFP999• 3 years ago

Yes but then that would mean less money for the company and the investors, so you see the difficulty that poses. /s

Abroszka2• 3 years ago

I don't think that makes sense. You can just go back and not work. Learn a new skill or something while in the office. You basically fire people who physically can't come back or people who are not afraid of losing their job. You probably don't want to fire based on that.

eastbayjake• 3 years ago

Was expecting this to be about AWS's Recovery Time Objectives!

politician2• 3 years ago

It was explained to me by local non-profit folks in the know that Amazon's RTO decisions need to be understood in the context of downtown Seattle real estate politics. Amazon brings a lot of people downtown -- fueling local businesses -- and as a consequence the city council provides Amazon a huge amount of leeway and power -- even siding with Amazon against the community. Consequently, if Amazon doesn't continue to publicly advocate for RTO, then the city council will have no reason to continue with the red carpet treatment which, concretely, means increased taxation and compliance requirements.

So, there is a significant game theory component to Amazon's RTO position that can't be discussed publicly.

sharemywin• 3 years ago

Plus, it's hard for execs to lie to your face over a recorded zoom call.

I'm sorry I mean be wrong about the details.

onlyrealcuzzo4• 3 years ago

I imagine Amazon could downsize their downtown Seattle footprint to match their current needs, face increased taxes, and still come out ahead.

This seems like mostly an attrition play.

The capital class also despises the labor class. I wouldn't down-play the pure spite motive, either.

willcipriano2• 3 years ago

These sort of red carpets go far beyond taxation.

Things like some executives wife gets pulled over drunk and the police give her a ride home and a warning. The son gets caught holding and the case disappears. Homeless people in their neighborhood get told to move along to your neighborhood. That sort of thing.

conductr2• 3 years ago

They get the last laugh after years of tech worker compensation going bonkers and having to compensate those plebs.

grepfru_it• 3 years ago

Seattle would fight that tooth and nail. Amazon could simply say they are thinking of withdrawing from the city and Seattle would throw tax breaks at them that would make NYC's concessions to amazon look pale in comparison. See Boeing as an example. Cannot have an exodus of talent, that is bad news bears for any major city (see Detroit as a historic example)

HappySweeney• 3 years ago

I always understood the reasoning to be that companies don't want the value of their real estate or 10-year leases to drop, which low occupancy portends.

xyzelement• 3 years ago

// there is a significant game theory component

Funny, I read your first paragraph and thought it doesn't make sense from game-theory point of view. If Amazon wants to lower city council's power over it, the easiest thing it can do is not be dependent on Seattle (ie - if your workforce is distributed, Seattle is irrelevant)

politician2• 3 years ago

Amazon is already deeply dependent on Seattle. US-WEST-1 is distributed across 13 or more locations in downtown Seattle. They have 4 or 5 skyscrapers there as well. There is a huge population of employees living in the area.

They are dependent on Seattle and Seattle has a reciprocal dependency on Amazon. "Just" adopting a distributed workforce position means putting a large investment in real estate at risk. Why would they do that?

jnwatson2• 3 years ago

I've heard that too, but I can't imagine anybody in a city administration having enough juice to make a CEO care at all. How would that conversation go?

__derek__• 3 years ago

For anyone familiar with Seattle politics, this is absurd. The city council has been openly antagonistic to Amazon for the better part of a decade.

lotsofpulp5• 3 years ago

Yes, easy evidence is the passage of this tax:

https://www.seattle.gov/city-finance/business-taxes-and-lice...

Racing0461• 3 years ago

RTO is filled with ulterior motives.

Layoffs by another name, local city government want their tax base back, Real estate companies (not mom and pop stuff, real holding companies with reits etc) want to keep real estate from "crashing", ny/ca/ma type states don't want their white collar workers moving to low tax states and working from there , middle managers want to be seen and "preside over their kindgom" etc.

The only group not benefitting from RTO are the actual workers.

jzb• 3 years ago

I'd add that underlying all that / in addition to that is the fear that people aren't putting their jobs first. That's what drove all the "quiet quitting" bullshit.

The pandemic made people stop and take stock of their lives. A lot of people realized that they were putting work first and life is too fucking short to put everything else second to work.

The tech layoffs have further emphasized the futility of putting work first. You might have put your career first but your employer sure as shit wasn't putting you first. Why live far from the rest of your family in a high cost-of-living area to have your life dominated by work if BigCorp is just going to throw you overboard at the first sign of a dip in profits? Not even a cut to save the business, just a cut to ensure that activist shareholders and top-line execs preserve obscene profits, bonuses, and salaries.

RTO is there to remind you that they control your life, right down to where you live. Be thankful to have a job or they'll take it away from you and your health insurance, too.

borroka8• 3 years ago

RTO is there to remind you that despite claims of talent shortages and after taking into account the fact that a substantial portion of the workforce is okay with returning to the office, for many companies the supply of talent is greater than the demand for talent.

giantg2• 3 years ago

Been quiet quitting since before it was a name

stetrain• 3 years ago

We laid off half of our employees, and the other half seem demoralized. We have no idea why so we're going to try making everyone come back to the office.

Also hey everyone we made record profits this year! Great job! Pay raises are on hold though due to economic uncertainty. Remember, we're a family!

fatnoah2• 3 years ago

I'd add that underlying all that / in addition to that is the fear that people aren't putting their jobs first.

I'm a terrible manager. I openly admit that "real life" comes first, and constantly remind people on my team that it should for them, too. Only you know what you want and need, and the company will do what's best for itself, so it's only fair that you do the same for yourself.

RestlessMind12• 3 years ago

Imho, all the buzz around "quiet quitting" and stupid tiktok videos bragging about how little work one does in a day have contributed somewhat to the current RTO backlash. Workers were rubbing it in. Time to show minions their place! /s

Terr_6• 3 years ago

I think it is illuminating to consider how these debates would go very differently if employers where the ones whose budgets paid for all the hours/fuel spent in office commutes, and clearly showed that change with RTO.

There's no inherent reason commute costs are usually borne by employees, it's just tradition--and perhaps what is/isn't an appealing alternate-compensation expense under tax-code.

rhaway847735• 3 years ago

I’m pretty sure employers are paying a lot more for workers to be in office than for them to work from home. The commute would be a tiny fraction of the electricity office space and other costs they pay for workers to be in office.

JustLurking2022• 3 years ago

Think about this one for a minute - if companies paid for this type of stuff, they would expect to have a say on exactly where you live. Not "you need to be within driving distance of the office" but more like "you need to rent next door to the office". Yes, there are very good reasons the cost of commuting is left in employee hands to decide.

oarabbus_7• 3 years ago

I think it is illuminating to consider how these debates would go very differently if employers where the ones whose budgets paid for all the hours/fuel spent in office commutes

A significant number of employers do allocate budget and incur expenses for employee commuter benefits. And unclaimed commuter benefits results in cost savings for the employer, I'm not really sure I understand the point being made here.

colmmacc• 3 years ago

I work at Amazon, so I have that bias, but I'm very very skeptical of that line of argument. Remote work has the potential to save companies truly enormous sums of money, both on real estate, and on reduced salaries. For many companies, being able to freely hire anywhere would absolutely reduce mean compensation, instead of paying massive tech hub salary premiums. The interests of city and state governments, real estate companies, hardly come into it.

I find it very easy to believe the straight-forward motive given; that leaders are concerned by the impacts of remote work on collaboration, innovation, mentorship and other kinds of productivity that come through group work. That's been my experience too.

At the same time, I think remote work can be very successful, maybe even more effective than traditional office work, but it almost certainly takes skills and practices that are attuned to that way of working. It's not unreasonable to believe that an entire workforce wouldn't simply adapt to that in the long term in just a 3 year time frame driven by a pandemic.

PreachSoup7• 3 years ago

As a follow faang+er I totally understand the need for rto. Im perfectly fine with 3 days rto like my company and many others adopted which is perfect medium for everyone. In my team we get 3 days intense meetings done from Tuesday to Thursday. The devs have at least 2 days alone times for shipping the code. The company sold the buildings and the remaining building utilization is very high therefore the cost saving is also there. Everyone is happy in the end.

The question is what's the reason to increase from 3 days to 5 days? My guess is that unlike other tech companies, Amazon has high offline presence especially with a global logistic network. They are pressured by the local governments and other parties that if they don't mandate 5 days rto to prop up the cities, they are gonna lose many benefits or deals. So it's probably cheaper for Amazon choose 5 days rto instead.

6D794163636F7562• 3 years ago

The cities give huge tax breaks to companies based on how many employees they have there. The tax incentives are why Amazon is moving workers from Seattle to Bellevue. Also, Amazon doesn't own most of its offices so the companies they rent from are pushing for it. It's a convoluted mess but there is money to be made from rto.

devmunchies2• 3 years ago

The only group not benefitting from RTO are the actual workers.

That depends on the worker’s goals. If your goal is to have work/life balance or “personal” productivity then, yeah, I empathize. But there is more investment I put back into my team when I’m in person. It’s not just my code output. I find it very hard to mentor young engineers remotely.

Also, if you are a stockholder, like many engineers, and if teams do in fact have more “synergy” (bleh) then it’s also good for the workers via stock based comp.

screwturner682• 3 years ago

When I was young and learning my trade I had a group of older co-workers who decided they liked me enough to invite me to join their lunch group. It was a very informal mentorship, they showed me the ropes, provided guidance and generally made me better at my job. This was all because they knew me enough and liked me enough to put in the effort, they got little out of it other than enjoying watching another guy come up in our field. Now I'm a grey beard with less than a decade left and I'd like to return the favor but to whom? I don't work in an office and I have no relationship with most of my co-workers, I do my job and they do theirs. Management could force me to mentor one or more of the engineers but that probably wouldn't work out very well for anyone. There's no relationship with my co-workers anymore because we never see each other and while slack and zoom is great for a 20 something it just doesn't work for me and in the end I'm the one with the institutional knowledge that I won't be passing along to the loss of both the employee and the company.

sqeaky• 3 years ago

That depends on the worker’s goals.

If the worker's goals aren't pro-worker then the business certainly won't be. Your goal of training others is admirable, but that can be often be remote and won't stop them from getting rid of you the moment it is convenient.

sharadov• 3 years ago

I read somewhere that big cities ( SFO) with tech concentration are giving tax breaks to companies that will bring their employees back in-office.

Cities like SFO with estimated 30% vacancy which primarily rely on corporate taxes will collapse!

mulmen• 3 years ago

Is that bad? SFO isn’t known for being a well run city. A dose of bitter medicine might be exactly what it needs for long term health. Seattle is the same. We spend absurd amounts of money and get very meager results. This is what happens when your only tax revenue is property tax. If they taxed income they’d be incentivized to increase wages and employment. Instead they’re incentivized to drive up property values and barely keep the working class alive.

jsjohnst2• 3 years ago

ny/ca/ma type states don't want their white collar workers moving to low tax states and working from there

NY doesn’t care where you live, they’ll gladly tax you and aggressively pursue said taxes no matter if you get any benefit from those tax dollars or not.

lotsofpulp5• 3 years ago

While it is a travesty that the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the “convenience rule”, NY state only taxes income from work performed outside of NY state if the worker sometimes works within NY state and could have worked in NY state.

https://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/memos/income/m06_5i.pdf

The premise is:

If a nonresident employee . . .performs services for his employer both within and without New York State,

So if you never worked in NY state, or move away from NY state, then you are not liable for NY income taxes.

gamblor9563• 3 years ago

RTO is not some huge secret conspiracy.

Companies have long-term leases on their offices. Office space is the single most expensive line-item on most companies financials. They want to maximize the use of these very expensive assets, and having workers in the offices accomplishes this.

From a more practical perspective, working from home is great for more senior workers who are already established in their careers and know what they're doing, but it's hugely detrimental to the career development of younger workers, who largely learn from working alongside their older/more senior counterparts. Communicating over email, slack, zoom, etc., just isn't the same, and you can see this across pretty much every white collar domain--even programming. This is why companies have pretty much settled on hybrid schedules; it allows for the in-person collaboration while still allowing workers greater freedom in where they work.

And while you're complaining about "the workers" consider that essentially all blue-collar jobs have been on-site full-time even through the pandemic.

heleninboodler2• 3 years ago

They want to maximize the use of these very expensive assets, and having workers in the offices accomplishes this.

This is the same rationale as finishing your dinner after you're full because you don't want to "waste it." The food is still wasted; it's just wasted on needlessly making you fatter. If you don't actually need the office space to make the company run, you're wasting the same amount of money whether you force someone to sit in it or not (except when you force them to sit in it, you're not only wasting the money but burning employee morale).

harshaw• 3 years ago

counterpoint: all my young engineers who started during the pandemic vastly prefer working from home most of the time with 1-2 days a week in the office. Some want remote only.

coffeedan• 3 years ago

Office space is the single most expensive line-item on most companies financials

Is it? Not payroll? Expensive commercial real estate in the US rents for $80/sq ft/year (source: https://www.matchoffice.com/news/rental-rates-for-commercial...). Tech workers are generally factored in at using 250 sq ft (source: https://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee...). So, $20k per year, per employee for rent in the most expensive cities in the country. How can that possibly be more expensive than payroll?

slillibri• 3 years ago

Just as an FYI, neither the city of Seattle nor the state of Washington has an income tax.

oarabbus_7• 3 years ago

I am not sure I find this explanation convincing. If a corporation thinks it could increase profits without RTO and after eating office real-estate losses, it'll do so. The real estate companies and the middle managers do not make decisions for these companies. If wasted office costs are $10M, but more happy, productive, and efficient remote employees make an additional $20M, there wouldn't be RTO.

Are certain cities (like NYC) taxing unoccupied office space? If so, how much? This information is much more convincing than a claim that companies are enforcing RTO to make middle managers feel like they are "presiding over their kingdom".

imoreno• 3 years ago

But he will.

captainkrtek• 3 years ago

Either way, they’re getting what they asked for: either folks back in the office with poor morale or resignations. Has reached a new level of low morale and distrust in leadership.

gumby• 3 years ago

All these companies have leases burning a monthly hole in their pockets. So I guess they figure they should get people into those buildings.

It's a foolish sunk cost fallacy.

LanceH• 3 years ago

A more savvy (or less short term) take is that these places are able to negotiate favorable leases right now. Once office space fills up again, those prices will go up again.

I think the real reason lies between "butts in seats" and layoffs.

I also feel like there is a class of management that feels good about themselves by having subordinates observe them with all the trappings of their office. These are the people that want a dress code and spend money to look good at work even if nobody ever sees a customer. They have to have the bigger office -- not out of need -- to demonstrate their position. Bigger desk. They might have a better computer than developers even though they never use anything more taxing that Excel (this happened a lot more 20 years ago, less today). These people want to return to office, otherwise nobody knows how much they are in charge of.

washywashy• 3 years ago

Companies also get tax incentives based how many butts are in seats. So, it’s not just a sunk cost fallacy at play here

finitestateuni• 3 years ago

Return To Office in early 2023 caused many people hired during the pandemic to uproot their family and move closer to their assigned office.

Some of these folks are now being told that the office they moved closer to is not a “Hub” for their organization and that they now need to Relocate To Hub.

Most engineering teams will not be colocated even after this relocation as there a multiple hubs.

There is a strong belief that Amazon will have a 5 days in office policy starting after the holidays and further Relocate To Team initiatives. The delay is to mitigate the risk of attrition affecting Peak and to get people to move before they’re told they need to be in the office 5 days (sunk cost).

A textbook lesson in how to boil a frog courtesy of McKinsey. Hopefully customers enjoy the taste of boiled frogs.

DebtDeflation• 3 years ago

There is a strong belief that Amazon will have a 5 days in office policy starting after the holidays

It's not just a belief and it's not just Amazon. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that "mandatory 3 days/wk RTO" will quickly morph to "recommended 5 days/wk RTO" which will then morph to "mandatory 5 days/wk RTO". The endgame is very much a return to status quo ante, i.e. full time in office; hybrid was always intended to be transitory despite the messaging.

hoppersoft• 3 years ago

Andy Jassy is showing 1M+ Amazon employees that Amazon has become a "Day 2" company.

rescbr• 3 years ago

That’s what I wrote on my farewell email - just a little more corporate-speaky :)

costanzaDynasty2• 3 years ago

Do what ever you want CEO's but don't be surprised when you have to bend over backwards for talent in other ways while advanced economies populations get smaller every generation and the up and coming areas need to be remote.

But don't get it twisted, everyone sees through your HR cornballs pretending a food truck coming by once a week is worth a 2 hour commute everyday.

RestlessMind12• 3 years ago

and the up and coming areas need to be remote.

Looking around the world, all the up and coming areas are mega-metro areas from Tokyo to Bangalore and from Sao Paulo to Shanghai. Or are you generalizing from a tiny handful of Americans who may be going to midwest / rockies after Covid?

costanzaDynasty2• 3 years ago

Japan and China are not up and coming, they have worse demographics decline in their future than America. Vietnam is up and coming. You will need remote as a part of your Megacorp.

Driving from the suburbs in most American areas to a city is an hour each way.

AlbertCory3• 3 years ago

Not one person here even admits the possibility that some WFH people are not really working. Or at least Jassy believes that.

Marissa Mayer ended WFH at Yahoo for exactly that reason:

https://money.cnn.com/2013/02/25/technology/yahoo-work-from-...

If you're CEO of a company that's shitty to work for, you have to suspect that everyone except the middle managers and suckups is just phoning it in. Literally.

Edit: all you people taking issue with this are just preaching to the converted (each other). I'm talking about what CEOs think, not what actually is.

baq3• 3 years ago

As if people actually work in the office.

Please.

jfghi• 3 years ago

The amount of 2 hour birthday lunches people get dragged to after in-person meetings not even relevant to their job is off the charts wasteful.

jnwatson2• 3 years ago

Many, many folks that come into the office are not really working. WFH didn't change that.

geodel3• 3 years ago

Yeah, but they get hassled by RTO, so some win for employer.

o1y326• 3 years ago

My coworkers regularly spend one and half hour chatting during lunch.

That's definitely worth your commute to the office and better than working from home, right?

0cf8612b2e1e• 3 years ago

You have never seen hours long discussions of Game of Thrones, Bachelor, sports, etc? Professional water cooler jockeys who transit from conversation to conversation to eat up the majority of work hours?

I once read a claim that all work is done by the square root of the total company head count. Honestly, that does not feel too far off from reality.

baq3• 3 years ago

Feels too high IMHO…

geodel3• 3 years ago

Regarding. ..square root part I also find it intuitively true. Another way is to find people who most other need to reach out to during work, again that number probably come close to square root.

jodrellblank• 3 years ago

The claim is Price’s Law, originally an observation about academic publications in a field - half of them come from the square root of the number of contributors, now taken as a general MBA style business rule of thumb. One which joins nicely with evaporative cooling, the idea that the top performers also have the most skills and experience because they are working harder, have the easiest time leaving for another job because they are the most driven and have the better work history to talk about, perhaps the most contacts from the more work done.

And together, there is likely to be a big overlap between the most useful employees and the ones who have the easiest chance of leaving. Lose sqrt(employees) of people for any reason where they self select - e.g. cancelled bonuses, deathmarch project, austerity measures, return to the office - and it’s likely to hurt disproportionately.

xwdv• 3 years ago

Forget about whether or not people are “working”. That’s just micromanagement.

There is either work not done, or work finished. If work isn’t being finished, then people aren’t working. If it is, then people are working. That’s all you need to know.

surgical_fire• 3 years ago

This is bullshit.

If you can get away with "not really working" remotely, you will also get away with "not really working" in the office.

rented_mule• 3 years ago

I worked at a huge company 30+ years ago (~300K employees). There was an engineer on our floor whose entire team, including his manager, had left the company in a short period of time. The company acted as if the entire team was gone, cancelling all their projects. He fell through the cracks.

Initially he sat at his desk all day reading newspapers and books, ready to do any work he was asked to do. Eventually he got bored and started up his own one-man business that he operated from the office. All the while he continued collecting a salary and benefits from the big company. This had been going on for two years when I left the company.

My manager and my skip level manager both seemed quite aware of what was happening. But this guy was in another division of the company, so they didn't think it was their problem to solve.

The lesson... for a big enough company, you can be just as invisible in the office as you are at home, but the office gives better plausible deniability.

leeoniya• 3 years ago

this literally just described Milton from Office Space. :_)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BUE0PPQI3is

supertrope• 3 years ago

Have you consider alternative explanations such Yahoo! doing a stealth layoff by shaking off employees who want remote working or require it because they reside in a different metro area? IBM was infamous for shaking off headcount by requiring employees to move cities. Or management’s inability to measure performance so they resort to lowest common denominator methods like ending remote work instead of just correcting individual bad behaviors through discussions, PIPs, termination, etc.

AlbertCory3• 3 years ago

I think she felt she could turn things around with her MAVEN strategy (don't ask me to remember what that stood for). So for that, she needed people.

Your last sentence is right on, though.

klyrs• 3 years ago

I'll admit it, some people don't work at home, or only work minutes a day. But I've known people that did the same in the office. What did Marissa Mayer do about them?

purpleblue2• 3 years ago

When I worked at Yahoo during the mid-naughts, I had about 1 day of work a week, if that. Most of the other time my entire team spent playing video games, watching the stock market, getting food (food wasn't free at the time but I believe the smoothies were), etc. It was a bizarre environment and couldn't wait to leave.

Abroszka2• 3 years ago

Amazon monitors your work laptop day and night... They know if you work or not.

AlbertCory3• 3 years ago

Only if you're not smart enough to defeat their monitoring.

hbosch• 3 years ago

Walk around any office in Seattle or SF, and you'll see many people on Amazon, Reddit and YouTube as well... the only difference is they had to commute from Pleasanton/San Jose/Duval/Renton/etc. first.

Most of the people I know who shifted to WFH from in-office during COVID ended up buying places in cities outside of the "urban" radius, and now feel like they are randomly being forced back due to nth-order repercussions around overpaid pandemic hires and shortsightedness from executives who spent all of 2020-2021 remarking in memos how successful and wonderful WFH was for everyone.

In my opinion, it's not that people don't want to work in offices. It's that cities are hostile places for work, period. Companies can start by covering 100% of moving expenses, guaranteeing safety inside and around corporate offices, and offering in-office daycares/preschools for free just to start the conversation.

n4r9• 3 years ago

I certainly admit the possibility, but if you have no way to catch that situation then you have bigger problems. Demanding RTO is a lazy and ineffective attempt to plaster over the gaps.

nxobject• 3 years ago

I'll chip my vote in for "stealth layoff". Phrasing research in terms of "why do you prefer hybrid work over 'fully remote'?" is misrepresenting what's under debate – mandatory RTO policies.

burgos_thrw• 3 years ago

So the amount of the people that report internally that they were given 30 days to relocate or to "voluntary resign" makes this very plausible.

Now, I have been called from several competitors to leave AWS for the couple of years, but I was happy with the company, projects, prospects, etc. The clusterf*ck of decisions the company made in the past several months made me finally reach out to them when the RTO was announced, and I finally quit. I am going to work from the office (hybrid) on the next job, but at least I'm not going to work for Amazon. And that sparks joy.

say_it_as_it_is• 3 years ago

What is the sentiment of the investment community? Researchers covering Amazon and majority shareholders influence the decisions that Jassy is making. He's not taking a hard line just because he's a tough guy who doesn't care about employees. Focus on the situation.

CoastalCoder3• 3 years ago

Ooh - nice observation!

Large investors are motivated to carefully examine the issue, with a singular focus on the company's performance w.r.t. their fund's goals.

Presumably those fund managers are somewhat dispassionate about the managements' and employees' takes on the topic, excepting for how they'll affect the company performance.

mr_tristan• 3 years ago

Well, as an employee of Salesforce, I witnessed operating margin goals of activist investors drive a layoff this year. (And Salesforce just met those goals last week.)

Part of me wonders if that's just broad inflationary concerns and uncertainty about the world economy, pushing for profits over everything else.

Really seems short-sighted, but, so did the "hire everything that breathes" era in the 2010s, too.

o1y326• 3 years ago

My company's CEO used words no other than "we believe collaboration is better in-person" to justify forcing everyone to work in the office three days a week. The usual "revitalize downtown" or "support local business" argument doesn't even apply in our case because company is on a highway. You know this decision is not based on any concrete data but purely on the investment in those useless buildings and wanting to force people out.

phone8675309• 3 years ago

I have never had an in-person joint whiteboard session that was actually productive. I have had several virtual whiteboard sessions that were very productive (thanks cheap graphics tablets!).

CoastalCoder3• 3 years ago

Just a data point, but my experience has been exactly the opposite of yours.

And I say this as someone who invested a lot of time and political capital trying to find good (and within constraints) virtual whiteboard solutions.

tracerbulletx• 3 years ago

The most annoying part about all of this is how smug and proud some of these companies were about announcing that they were remote first and hiring all of these people on promises of being "all in" on a distributed remote workforce which they saw as the future. I get that everyone likes to be able to change their mind at any time, but commitments that affect people's lives need to be honored if there can ever be any sort of working trust.

jatins• 3 years ago

Unfortunately Amazon is one of those companies which can get away with this.

Moats so strong that they could completely fuck over (as they have been doing for a while) their employees but will still end up okay as a business.

CEOs with moats as thin as a razor will see this as correlation though and burn their companies to ground forcing their employees to RTO.

CoastalCoder3• 3 years ago

Is the "80% regret" number misleading?

From the Fortune article:

A whopping 80% of bosses reported that they regret their initial return-to-office decisions, according to new research from Envoy, which interviewed more than 1,000 U.S. company executives and workplace managers who work in person at least one day per week.

But it's not clear if 80% of the executives...

(a) regretted reducing WFH at all, or

(b) regretted certain details of how they tweaked the policy, e.g. how they communicated it, the number of in-office days required, etc., or

Unfortunately the report from Envoy [0] isn't much clearer:

80% of executives say they would have approached their company’s return-to-office strategy differently if they had access to workplace data to inform their decision-making.

This is one case where seeing the original questionnaire would be helpful, but I'm not finding a link to it. So it's really hard to decide if Envoy's conclusions are justified.

[0] https://envoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Workplace_Data_...

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 3 years ago

When asked for data to support the move, Jassy lacked a good answer. He said that he spoke to “60 to 80 CEOs of other companies over the last 18 months,” and “virtually all of them” preferred in-office work.

Are they colluding to suppress wages/working conditions?

These tech companies already colluded in the past to suppress wages.

gaucheries• 3 years ago

Offices make it easier to control employees and their time.

seizethecheese• 3 years ago

Amazon is one of the most successful companies of this century. This might be misguided, but let’s actually grapple with why, not just invent strawmen to attack. Surely, Amazon has thought this through and really believes their company will perform better in office.

disgruntledphd2• 3 years ago

One of the things I've learned over my career is that basically everyone is winging it, and successful companies often don't understand what makes them successful.

Also, unless you are a saint, your reports are lying to you because of the power imbalance. These two factors combined are the cause of lots of incredibly boneheaded business decisions.

AlexandrB• 3 years ago

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Amazon of ~7 years ago was a great customer experience. Second to none in online retail. I happily had a Prime subscription. I avoid 2023 Amazon like the plague because of multiple bad experiences with their shipping and lack of trust that what I receive will be genuine and fit for purpose. It's basically AliExpress with faster shipping.

I think Amazon (at least their retails arm) is largely coasting on its past success at this point. If another retailer came along and offered the 2023 Amazon shopping experience they would crash and burn instead of becoming the dominant e-commerce website.

cragfar• 3 years ago

Jassy and Zuckerberg have both said that new employees (even experienced hires) are underperforming compared the workers who were in an office setting at some point. With a couple of years of turnover, that can compound quite a bit.

InitialLastName• 3 years ago

Thinking back to when I started working, I somewhat buy that. I would have had a much harder time getting up to speed (both technically and institutionally) in a remote environment, where the barriers to learning from your peers are higher and the feedback processes (especially in a company formed around in-person work) are slower.

purpleblue2• 3 years ago

I personally love working in the office and I hate working from home. I worked at a remote-only company during the pandemic and I never felt so unproductive, twiddling my thumbs waiting to hear back from my coworkers because I didn't know where they were, or they would be MIA for hours on end.

However, I don't understand why WFH isn't a discussion entirely between the manager and the employee. Why is this something that's being mandated from high above like the Ten Commandments. If someone wants to WFH and the manager is okay with it, and the employee can justify it with performance reviews, why does anyone care?

This should strictly be a performance issue, and if the employee is unproductive at home, then either force RTO on her, or fire her. It feels more like the higher-ups don't trust their own performance review system, but it seems like that's really the answer. If the manager is unproductive because of unproductive employees, then fire the manager as well. This is NOT a hard problem to solve, what it requires is accurate attention to performance on all levels. It shouldn't be a blanket edict because this is 2023 and we've already shown that WFH can definitely work for many people.

shadowtree3• 3 years ago

All the bragging about working multiple jobs or just clocking 20hours at most on so many forums like Blind, etc. is now coming to roost.

So yeah, many abused WFH and now the backlash is here. Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta, Zoom, Bloomberg ... all have the same conclusion: you can't trust people, at scale, to work full time from home.

These stories were posted here too! You think no exec reads HN?

karaterobot• 3 years ago

All the bragging about working multiple jobs or just clocking 20hours at most on so many forums like Blind, etc.

I don't follow these forums where people are saying this, but your comment struck me because neither of the two things you listed are wrong, as long as the person involved is doing acceptable work. This assumes there are no requirements to disclose other jobs, no enforceable non-compete agreements, etc. The consequences for doing unacceptable work—or not doing any work at all—are well-established from before covid, and would still apply in this case: that is, if they can't do the job, fire them. I agree that it's different and perhaps scary new world for executives, but what about it is wrong?

shadowtree3• 3 years ago

If you're contractor, this is the right mindset - I get paid for a unit of delivered work.

Employees get full-time salaries to be available, well, full time.

WFH makes people hard to reach - sorry, was out walking the dog, etc. - and all the other stuff that would never fly in an office.

Not disclosing your other side gigs is a violation of most work contracts btw.

bluefishinit11• 3 years ago

So yeah, many abused WFH and now the backlash is here.

You can't "abuse" WFH. Either you're producing results that satisfy your manager or you are not. Also, any exec making decisions based on Blind posts should be fired.

JambalayaJim7• 3 years ago

I’ve never worked at a company where managers actually had the time to actually assess the quality of a single reports work.

A managers job is generally more team results oriented.

harshalizee• 3 years ago

And many CEOs run multiple companies and is part of several boards of other companies. Why is it suddenly unethical for a mid level, much less paid employee to do so?

cycomanic• 3 years ago

If the CEOs based their decision on these sort of posts I seriously have to question their leadership ability. I think the main reason why we see management in favor of RTO is because in my experience WFH exposed how little contribution comes from management.

In my experience many managers (at all levels) like to make the "informal rounds" where they go around the office and have chats with everyone to see what they are doing (instead of e.g. Looking at tickets or waiting for the weekly meeting). That mostly stopped with WFH, so suddenly many in management felt like they are not working anymore. The thing is this absence was often helping the engineers etc to be more productive.

shadowtree3• 3 years ago

Absolutely and easily provable - go work at a company with the employee count of FAANG and zero managers. As all managers are useless, this company will EASILY outperform the stupid FAANGs.

Just like an army without officers, amazing stuff.

Seriously, what's going on here on HN? YC has managers ffs!

hardware2win• 3 years ago

How managers do not detect it?

GiorgioG2• 3 years ago

Maybe folks should quit Amazon Prime en masse to hit them where it hurts (and the only place it matters to them) - the bottom line.

o1y326• 3 years ago

And what will happen is that Amazon employees get paid off with no change in WFH policy.

a2xd94• 3 years ago

I'm convinced that the main reasoning behind this is that it implicitly keeps employee retention higher than with WFH, where employees are free to learn skills that are beneficial to THEM in their free time, and interview much more easily for new/better roles.

firstSpeaker• 3 years ago

This is one of the primary contributors to the decision, not only the free time/etc. contribute to the higher retention but also the sense of beloning, and friendships that are made in workplaces.

archo• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/eebu2

SilverBirch• 3 years ago

I think it's really interesting to watch how poor performing CEOs have been through this period. The work from home decisions, and the subsequent hiring of remote workers with no thought of the long term was a massive mistake. It's just a pure example of CEOs operating at a very low level of competence. No strategic plan for what the business looks like in 2 years time, no forward planning of how these decisions might bind your hands. No, the stock market was up because of stimulus so these companies all just threw money out the door.

Now we're on the other side of it and they've basically all admitted they just massively fucked up. So what's next? A thoughtful and long term strategic discussion about how we organise distributed teams (because let's face it, most of these teams are distributed geographically even if they're all office based), a serious discussion about how workers are willing to trade some level of flexibility for compensation and loyalty?

Nah, instead we're going to insultingly insist that all our workers are lazy assholes and tell them "Forget the deal we made, you can't trust our word. See you on monday".

Also, Bonus points as Andy Jassy to just whenever someone points out your doing something with absolutely no evidence it's correct just shout "Yeah well AWS!". Beyond parody.

JSavageOne2• 3 years ago

"Return to office" is all about control. Companies want to control their workers' lives to squeeze every last ounce of work out of everyone. They'd demand employees live on premise if they could get away with it. Forcing employees to commute to the office and have their social circle consist of fellow employees increases company power over the employee.

Really what these companies should be doing if they want to lure the minions back into the cages is to entice them with things like benefits and compensation increases. Making ultimatums like this is just terrible for morale, and I imagine many talented employees will leave. I don't use AWS, and hearing this kind of thing makes me less likely to want to use AWS in the future, for the same reasons I prefer not buying clothes made in sweatshops

Amazon Andy Jassy shouldn’t make RTO decisions in echo chamber of CEOs feelings

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