Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/16/amazon-jassy-tells-employees-to-return-to-office-five-days-a-week.html

by jbredeche • 2 years ago

1498 1863 2 years ago

cnbc.com

ydlr• 2 years ago

They are allowed to work from home the rest of the time.

redleggedfrog• 2 years ago

:^D Best first post evar.

neofrommatrix7• 2 years ago

Extremely apt and true for Amazon

more_corn2• 2 years ago

Ha. That’s funny. I had a friend go work there years ago. He came back because they worked him like a dog.

psunavy032• 2 years ago

The past four years have really been an astonishing example of the executive class being hit over the head with a good idea, picking themselves back up, and carrying on as if nothing ever happened based purely on their own prejudices and egoes.

darth_avocado4• 2 years ago

It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed. It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.

jrs235• 2 years ago

Next step will be to let go of people to rehire people on a team to be in the same location. This will all be in another attempt to help push salaries down. It's stupid in my opinion and will kill productivity and velocity in the near and mid term.

zhyder• 2 years ago

I agree that seems like the next step, but how will that help push salaries down? I thought remote work would do that much more, coz many employees would move to less expensive areas in the same country and new hiring would focus on lower-income countries.

This cost savings from remote work is what I expected to push adoption of remote work more, and I'm surprised by this reversed trend.

spondylosaurus• 2 years ago

I went through a round of layoffs last year from a company doing this. But not only do they still have multiple cross-continent HQs (so now they just have multiple "local" teams!), they're also struggling to re-fill some of the roles they cut. Turns out it's easier to source people with certain niche talents when you don't limit yourself to one or two metro areas.

closeparen4• 2 years ago

I don't think so. They need the offshore sites to maintain the size of their empires without spending too much, and they need the Tier 1 US sites to keep the wheels on.

valbaca2• 2 years ago

only to have all of them talk to each other on Chime*

Amazon doesn't get to use anything that isn't Amazon-built

mcast• 2 years ago

I will gladly use anything that isn’t Zoom!

senderista5• 2 years ago

Nope, we use Quip and Slack because the Amazon equivalents were just too painful.

tivert5• 2 years ago

It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed.

It just goes to show how executives are either are stupid, think everyone else is stupid, or most likely some combination of both.

People aren't stupid, and they can see blatant contradictions like that.

It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.

Oh, they started before that. I haven't had a real in-person meeting since maybe 2016. It's always something like Zoom, because there's always at least one guy located at another size (and probably in an awkward time zone to boot).

dhruvrrp• 2 years ago

every single team is distributed. Unfortunately this isn't true. Amazon already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it RTT (return to team). So majority of teams are in the same location/building.

Nimitz142• 2 years ago

already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it RTT (return to team).

Not true. I work at amazon.

darth_avocado4• 2 years ago

Nope, most teams still have at least a few members in a different time zone than the rest of the team. They all go to an Amazon office, just not the same one.

gorbachev2• 2 years ago

This is my #1 pet peeve about the RTO hysteria. I don't understand in which universe the managers who decide these RTO policies live, but in the universe I live in there's ALWAYS at least one person in another location requiring us to Zoom even if everyone else spent an hour getting into the office.

It's the worst of all possible choices.

toomuchtodo15• 2 years ago

https://code-cwa.org/organize

clayhacks• 2 years ago

Thanks for this. I really want more software engineers to see the benefits of unions. Yes we’re paid well but there’s more to life than a paycheck

toomuchtodo15• 2 years ago

From first principles, it is the only way for these workers to have more agency and not be treated as disposal feedstock, and as a high empathy human, I would like them to have more agency and be less controlled (if they would like it; the choice is theirs).

snapcaster9• 2 years ago

What do you envision a union doing for software engineers? like what's the 3 sentence pitch for joining?

kerkeslager2• 2 years ago

And, just because we're paid well doesn't mean we can't be paid better.

whywhywhywhy• 2 years ago

I really want more software engineers to see the benefits of unions.

How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.

mariusor• 2 years ago

My company tried at the start of the year to get everyone back in the office. The worker's council (which is not entirely a union, but very close to it) negotiated for the everyone a three day a week RTO.

I refused to go back for those three days in the hope that nobody who matters will notice, yet they made line managers snitch on people and I was fired with notice because the agreement with the worker's council was "legally binding" and no exceptions could be made. So for me personally the involvement of the union sealed my fate into unemployment.

Unions are not a panacea, it leaves individuals without anything to bargain outside of the lines of agreements already established, and while some professions might benefit from them, I think unions for high skill jobs are not a good solution.

eikenberry2• 2 years ago

There is no way to join w/o having a job at a union shop. I want a union I can join no matter where I work and that can help me find a new job. Why isn't this the model?

johnnyanmac9• 2 years ago

Unions have their own incentives, and they expand slowly using existing union shops as leverage. Can't really hold much power over any one company if it's 2 people are shop A, 10 and B, and 200 at C. A would just drop them and only hire non-union, while B would make negotiations hard.

jay-barronville5• 2 years ago

This might be an unpopular take here, but from my perspective, the downsides of introducing unions in tech for software engineers far outweigh the benefits. I understand why unions can work for certain industries, but I just don’t see how they’d be a net positive for tech.

For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous:

- You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.

- Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.

- One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.

- The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.

Essentially, many of the things that make startups—and the innovation that comes with them—great will be pushed aside for a one-size-fits-all model that, to me, feels more like a utopian ideal than a reasonable solution for tech. Many of these concerns also apply to larger companies too.

I’m open and willing to being proven wrong about all of this though!

JumpCrisscross3• 2 years ago

For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous

I agree for start-ups. But Amazon is not a start-up. Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

hughesjj12• 2 years ago

Why would a startup have a Union?

Unions aren't like the bar association, it's not obligatory across the industry, or even the same company. Literally today Boeing is on strike in WA but not in South Carolina, exactly because only the WA employees are union.

bit_logic2• 2 years ago

When you hear about unions in software, stop thinking about auto-workers and think about NBA players instead:

https://nbpa.com/

Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.

Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:

https://www.wga.org/

Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.

crdrost• 2 years ago

Hi! I worked at US Engineering, an MEP subcontractor. This means that when you're building a building, they will hire a general contractor (GC), and that general contractor will be responsible for the overall building and rake in the big bucks—but they'll bid out the MEP -- whether Electrical lines or Mechanical ducts or Plumbing out to a subcontractor, and those margins can get pretty thin, like 5% profit. That needs to cover all of the overhead of office jobs, it needs to cover legal because the final phase of construction is inevitably litigation, etc.

Software wasn't unionized, but the pipefitter were, the welders I met were, unions were a very heavy presence.

You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.

Those pipefitters were very tight-knit, never saw them on the job debating contracts. They took a pride in their work that from an outsider seemed kinda strange, saying things like “welp, gotta go help Tyler make his next million.” (Tyler being the CEO and heir of the family business.)

I also know a former teacher who was head of her school's branch of the teacher's union, her teachers were relatively tight-knit, she did describe her particular job as handling and filing complaints and stuff, not so much contract negotiation though.

Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.

At USE, merit became more important, not less. if you were getting a raise, you had to be able to justify to every other part of the company “hey why is she getting a raise and my people are not.” At Google it was “who can play the perf game best and talk the best talk,” at USE it was “my people made Tyler an extra hundred thousand, what did your people do.” The teacher friend, I didn't ask, but it might be a moot point because during the Bush administration all publibly-funded schooling in the USA was transitioned to hard metrics and student outcomes, so it surely stands against your point but you would also surely say that it's not a representative sample?

One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.

So the shop floor did have some very specialized roles. If you are a Master Welder, then the entire rest of the shop floor is basically set up to provide you the illusion that all you have to do to make Tyler money is to show up and weld every piece that is fed to you and inspect it and sign it. Someone else at the Cutter station will make sure that the pipe was cut the right length, someone at Tack-Up will take care of making sure that your parts are already tacked together so that you don't have to hunt around for parts. Stuff like that. But the rest of the folks just wear 10 hats over the course of a day. Like until you have met people who work with their hands like woodworkers, you don't quite have an appreciation for how much freedom one has to just make little tools or racks or a holding enclosure, just welding together some little crane because you got sick of having to sometimes hold this thing for a minute or two while others slid things into place. I want to say at one point they casually dropped “yeah we rebuilt these doors on the loading bay last month, so that we could load another skid into our trucks sometimes.”

Freedom to do stuff, they had! And with teaching, I mean, they load you with so much work that there's no time but aside from the exact minutes of when a class is in your room, the teacher had creative freedom to teach in any way they wanted (and they needed this freedom because any given class has vastly different students with different learning needs). One personal contribution I made: “trashketball,” students could perform tasks on paper to earn the right to throw it into the trash to win either 2 or 3 points off their team. (A different teacher needed an approach to build a kinetic fun activity into their curriculum.)

Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.

Like I don't think this comment would have gotten me decked or anything if I’d said it to one of these construction workers, but it may have ended several conversations with “yeah I don't work with Chris, that guy's a prick.” I think that the teachers would agree that their hard work and unique contributions are deeply undervalued, but they would blame the taxpayer and the embezzlement-adjacent acts of some school administrators for most of that?

marcus_holmes4• 2 years ago

I think your model of how unions work has been heavily influenced by negative publicity.

Unions do not lock down job roles, or enforce collective bargaining, or any of the rest of it, if their members don't want it.

Unions are like the anti-HR. Exactly like when the other side of a negotiation lawyers up, you want a lawyer on your side of the table. Unions are the HR person on your side of the table.

I'm a startup founder and I can definitely see a point where we'd encourage union membership. I want my staff to be happy and productive. I'd love to have someone I could talk to regularly who was very much a representative of my staff. Of course I'd continue talking to all of them individually as well, but having a single person tasked with telling me any bad news would be great.

phendrenad28• 2 years ago

Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective

"Top performers" and "10x engineers" is largely a myth nowadays. It existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).

As a sidenote, most often when you see a "top performer" you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.

xingped• 2 years ago

Heck yeah! This is what I like to see! Thanks for sharing!

DataDaemon5• 2 years ago

What about CO2?

ekianjo2• 2 years ago

collaboration will solve everything hé said

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

Eventually, the goal is to have everyone live in an apartment building in the city and walk to work. That is far less CO2 than people living far away from infrastructure and services in detached single family homes and driving everywhere in their unnecessarily large vehicles.

DataDaemon5• 2 years ago

Ah, I see, 15-minute towns - the idea directly from the green EU.

user39393822• 2 years ago

So the goal is to have everyone live in noisy environments totally detached from nature?

QuinnyPig• 2 years ago

Why would a company who recently added "strive to be the earth's best employer" care about a little thing like that?

karmakurtisaani4• 2 years ago

They really announced that? They really have no self-awareness, or they've decided to fully embrace this whole double speak thing. Why not even both.

pton_xd• 2 years ago

I think this was a pretty obvious end-goal when they required everyone to relocate back to Seattle and go in 3 days a week.

As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there. How is that a sustainable corporate culture?

throwanem• 2 years ago

Only by virtue of throughput.

toomuchtodo15• 2 years ago

There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.

jackyinger• 2 years ago

Actually I heard from a friend that worked there that eventually Amazon will run out of people to hire in the US who haven’t previously worked at Amazon, tho this includes warehouse workers.

tivert5• 2 years ago

There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.

Amazon is the only FAANG that regularly reaches out to me with recruiting spam, and I am not located in a sexy tech hub nor do I have an on-trend resume. I've never responded, but I imagine their recruiting pipline counts on a combination of prestige and ignorance.

alephnerd• 2 years ago

How is that a sustainable corporate culture

Take a look at the hiring market today. Not that many options.

It's scummy and imo represents bad leadership (a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached during the pandemic which caused some internal degradation as their replacements were strong but not as experienced with 0-to-1 + ), but there really aren't many other options that can pay Amazon level.

Hybrid (2-3 days in the office) solves most of your communication needs at the leadership level. 5 days is just too much.

+ A lot of the all-star PM and Eng leadership I knew of at AWS were poached during the pandemic to leadership or leadership track positions at plenty of companies (eg. Datadog, Felicis, Google, etc)

eli_gottlieb• 2 years ago

Amazon has been Like This since long before the pandemic and the tech downturn. I was told they were Like This when I was finishing undergrad.

yourapostasy• 2 years ago

...a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached...

I hear a lot of complaints of Amazon management going to other companies bringing the Amazon culture with them, and turning off the collaboration, communication and innovation spigot between and even within teams with their imported leadership style. Have others seen this first-hand and seen effective counter-measures they can report upon that deflect that energy towards more positive ends?

alex_lav3• 2 years ago

Having had lots of friends work there, the approach seems to be "Complain about working at Amazon for literal years but never really do anything about it", followed by "Get laid off"

benterix2• 2 years ago

I don't believe they can actually do anything about it as this "culture" comes from the very top.

I remember a few years ago an Amazon worker died in the workplace and his supervisor watched him die instead of helping him because "these were the rules" (see the related HN thread[0]). You can imagine what kind of place that is.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28927844

nyrikki• 2 years ago

People want it on their resume and money.

While I knew RTO was coming, the way that it has been implemented is going to cause some huge issues that I wonder how companies are going to move forward.

Disengagement was bad pre-pandemic and how these RTOs were handled industry wide have resulted in a lot of delegating upward.

Not sure if that culture shift will impact their recruiting efforts or if they will address it before that happens.

Perhaps it being industry wide will mitigate he impact for Amazon. Losing their scaling properties would be disaster for them compared to many.

But working there has been more of a stepping stone than a career for a long time for many people.

sbrother• 2 years ago

Amazon's value proposition to potential employees is basically that it's the easiest way to break into big tech. It's an awful place to work but they hire people who can't get into to other FAANGs, pay them more than they would make outside of big tech, and give them an onramp into better employment situations after they put in 1+ years at Amazon.

Spartan-S63• 2 years ago

What do you mean by delegating upward?

supergeek133• 2 years ago

The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.

Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're successful and consistently promoted/paid more.

This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.

burningChrome• 2 years ago

> The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.

This is a very important distinction.

At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard when you already have everything you need to be happy. This hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike, live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will cut me loose whenever they feel like it.

I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and co-workers.

I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even a few years after making several changes, I still look back with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to myself.

algebra-pretext3• 2 years ago

I think it's encouraged due to milestones always being set with unrealistic ECDs, so every project is always behind and there's always urgent security fixes to 'catch up' on (I work on an AWS microservice as an L4 SDE, and joined 2y ago, for context). So you work in the off-hours thinking you're 'catching up' to the work you've 'missed', when in reality that is just the expected velocity to keep pace, and being 'caught up' is an unreachable goalpost.

I personally just learned to hide lack of progress on one task behind the urgency of another new issue, or keep tasks as vague as possible so that I can slow down on some days and speed up on other days. As a result I don't think I work crazy hours, but there's just a constant, fatiguing pressure of the feeling of 'I should be catching up on work right now'.

And I only recently realized that it's degrading my ability to enjoy any time at all, whether its PTO or just after work hanging out with my girlfriend.

This is my first eng. job though and I can't tell whether its better or worse in other places, and I tell myself it's probably better than the hours required at a startup. And I feel bad complaining to my friends when they're almost all unemployed or working gig jobs. /rant

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

This is actually why I’m skeptical about the complaints about Amazon

I’ve never worked there but I feel like I could? The complaints sound like a baseline level of toxicity seen in many places, I have the discipline for and others dont

Amazon would still be the last of the big tech’s I would choose for those reasons, the worst vesting schedule, and RTO, but it definitely sounds relatable

dividefuel5• 2 years ago

I thought 3 days/week would settle as the equilibrium -- enough to maintain real estate value while still paying lip service to employee wishes, and still achieving the stealth layoff of blocking full remote work.

A4ET8a8uTh04• 2 years ago

Alternatively, it can be seen as a test of where things really have landed.

couscouspie• 2 years ago

I highly doubt that there is any truth to the narrative of real eastate value as a driver of RTO policies. The effect if there was one would be way too indirect and furthermore a classical prisoner's dilemma, as your company would benefit the most if you have the only company not forcing RTO: having the value of the real estate, while having the greates talent from remote work.

jarsin• 2 years ago

We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way

I have fond memories around all the the childish politics, favoritism, and fights caused by desk assignments.

josefritzishere• 2 years ago

Never has a white-collar office needed so desperatelyl to be unionized.

omegaworks• 2 years ago

Why would they unionize when most of their comp is stock? The fear mongering, uncertainty and doubt stoked by their CEO's fully-owned press[1] would tank their stock value.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/business/media/jeff-bezos...

t3rabytes• 2 years ago

Bezos isn't the CEO, and hasn't been since 2021.

nielsbot2• 2 years ago

So they can fight back against before forced into the office 3 days per week?

People have democracy in the personal lives, but not in the workspace. Unions give the workers democratic power so they can collectively make demands of the business owners. They can also demand a greater share of profits.

phendrenad28• 2 years ago

Serious question: why is stock more valuable than cash at this moment?

thousand_nights• 2 years ago

i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer

this capitalistic yearn for endless growth is such a parasitic meat grinder

they write these memos with "touching" stories, i started from the bottom here, 27 years, amazon is my life, blah blah, as if anyone, pardon my french, gives a flying fuck

neofrommatrix7• 2 years ago

When it comes to Amazon, you are allowed all the French you can use..

tivert5• 2 years ago

i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer

It might not be that they're "out of touch" but rather they just don't care. Sort of like slaveholders back in the day, who often complained about how their slaves were lazy and how unjust it was that the slaves weren't giving their all.

rty329• 2 years ago

Exactly. Whether you can figure out your daycare situation with 5 day RTO is at the bottom of the long list of things Andy Jassy cares about. Even if you are an L6 -- a senior position that takes years to achieve within Amazon -- that means nothing to the CEO. Probably the same if an L8 decides to leave. So what? There are so many L8s in the company, let's just hire someone else. See this at Apple -- https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/17/ian-goodfellow-joins-de... -- even if you are a DIRECTOR.

Once you realize that the corporate, especially large ones, don't give a ** about your life, you'll have a clear(er) view of how the world actually works, and what you might want to do with your life.

And because of this, I kind of cherish my relationship with my manager. I am an IC and he is a bottom level manager. There is still a lot "human" aspect of this, and he actually cares about me taking time off etc. He himself fears layoffs. You can't say the same when you go up the ladder. The only things senior management cares about are product, revenue and efficiency (maybe a few more). Employees are nothing but replaceable tools. The higher up, the less they are about individual employees.

WalterSear3• 2 years ago

They've been successful by, been selected for, being "out of touch". Why would they stop now?

jamalaramala2• 2 years ago

i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer

You must consider their objectives and incentives... making shareholders richer makes them richer. Making employees happier doesn't. (At least in the short term...)

princevegeta89• 2 years ago

Exactly... we don't need the fucking nonsense of how he made an agreement with his wife on a napkin and other personal shit in his life.

Not getting to the point promptly enough and painting the message to look better only makes it much worse.

tra3• 2 years ago

Color me surprised..

the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy

More quiet firing?

also plans to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer managers in order to “remove layers and flatten organizations,”

Combined with not so quiet firing?

Jassy took the helm and instituted widespread cost cuts across Amazon, including the largest layoffs in its 27 years as a public company.

Cost cuts worked great for Boeing. Can't wait to see Amazon stock go through the roof.

allenrb• 2 years ago

So AMZN wants to have layoffs without using the word?

dbliss• 2 years ago

"So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.." .. manager layoffs coming too.

suslik• 2 years ago

manager layoffs coming too.

A large pharma company which I worked for until quitting in July went through a similar process this year. The goal was also to reduce the manager / IC ratio - organizational efficiency and span of control, they called it - but in most instances it were ICs who were laid off while their managers were simply relegated to ICs.

Yizahi2• 2 years ago

Layoffs AND fuck with human lives at the same time, what could be more arousing for the chief director of directors or whatever. :)

bananapub• 2 years ago

wait, european offices don't even have assigned desks? it's all hotdesking?

rsynnott5• 2 years ago

Surely you mean "agile desk arrangements"! (What a euphemism)

That would actually put me off working for Amazon (though, I mean, there's a lot that would). I like working from an office, but I did _not_ like the hot-desking that I had to do post-pandemic because our office wasn't big enough (my employer eventually let people who come in frequently get assigned desks, and it's been a huge quality of life improvement).

subhrm• 2 years ago

Why is this on page2 of HN! This should be on the front page.

wifipunk• 2 years ago

They say the policy goes into effect January 2025, but I'd expect some managers will try to get their teams in sooner for appearances since in the same post he mentions reducing bureaucracy and in turn the number of managers.

whiplash4513• 2 years ago

Given that finding a job takes time in the current market, January 2025 essentially mean that people who don't like the policy should start looking right now.

Macha2• 2 years ago

Especially as Q4 is a slow time for hiring from seasonal factors alone. Companies doing layoffs in Q4/Q1 to boost numbers for whatever the end of their financial year is, holidays and stuff slowing down hiring pipelines.

toomuchtodo15• 2 years ago

throwway120385• 2 years ago

Such a powerful and strong commitment to addressing climate change by making everyone drive more.

acedTrex• 2 years ago

Amazon is truly the arm pit of software engineering careers. One can only hope this hastens their demise.

tivert5• 2 years ago

Amazon is truly the arm pit of software engineering careers. One can only hope this hastens their demise.

The only thing that will hasten their demise is if the government rips them a new one (which this Amazon shareholder says it should). Otherwise, absent some black swan, their demise will be slow and measured in literal generations.

TuringNYC4• 2 years ago

1st Prediction: the rest of FAANG will quick-follow.

2nd Prediction: the rest of industry will not quick follow, unless they are in the same pay-range

DataDaemon5• 2 years ago

Other companies will follow soon. A tough job market will allow them to do anything they want with you.

toomuchtodo15• 2 years ago

The Fed begins cutting rates Wednesday (25-50bps), and will land near 2.5-3% by end of 2025. Assuming traditional macro policy outcomes, the tough market is transitory (with my apologies to Powell).

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-15/is-the-fe... | https://archive.today/5B8Tk

DataDaemon5• 2 years ago

FED is too late; damage has been done.

paxys3• 2 years ago

Big tech companies have been making record profits year after year and their share prices are at record highs. Competition in the tech job market isn't due to Fed policy, it's because companies figured out that they were overstaffed and could afford to lose the headcount. That isn't going to change moving forward regardless of what the interest rate is.

y-c-o-m-b2• 2 years ago

If you're counting on this for a recovery, you're in for a bad time. Remember, the drop is quick, the recovery is slow as molasses. It's going to take so so so much more for things to turn around and I doubt we will ever see the 2020-2022 days of high salaries and full remote again. I hope and pray I'm wrong, but after nearly 20 years in tech, my gut says we are in for some hard times ahead.

more_corn2• 2 years ago

Tech job market is wildly different from general job market.

whiplash4513• 2 years ago

Not so fast. "Strangely, America’s companies will soon face higher interest rates" by The Economist [1] explains why Fed cutting rates will not translate into easier money for US companies.

[1] https://archive.today/fvRnt

chinchilla20202• 2 years ago

It's never going back to the level of the pandemic again. It might improve... but those days are over forever. They were hiring people as SWEs who could hardly read and write.

aceshades3• 2 years ago

the current rate is 5.5%. everyone is expecting 25-50bps in a couple days.

under what pretense can you assert that it'll drop another 200-250bps by the end of 2025?

EasyMark• 2 years ago

I’ve been hoping for this as well, fingers crossed and making plans for jumping ship next year into a relatively new area of tech for me.

bbqfog5• 2 years ago

Tough job market or tough market? Seems a lot of companies are struggling right now, so attracting top talent on its own terms seems like the only chance for survival (or in Amazon's case, treading water).

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

[dupe]

Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421

rwalle• 2 years ago

As a reminder,

https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...

Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer
Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.

neofrommatrix7• 2 years ago

"Disagree and Commit" to that argument.

WalterSear3• 2 years ago

Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled.

https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...

DataDaemon5• 2 years ago

Read like this: you must return to the office or leave—50 waiting for your position now.

Yizahi2• 2 years ago

Other corporate hellholes furiously taking notes and looking at the reactions. A month later: "Metoo! Metoo!"

mensetmanusman2• 2 years ago

Wall St. tightening their grip on the STEM population.

blackeyeblitzar9• 2 years ago

What an absolutely dishonest company, lying to employees repeatedly. I’ve heard from Amazon friends that their internal survey even shows that remote work improved productivity. But their old school behind the times executives don’t care. Plus whenever I visit Seattle I’m blown away that it has worse traffic than LA, so I don’t see how it is good for them either, since employees won’t stay late to make up for the time lost to commute.

nyxtom3• 2 years ago

I'm very close to being completely done with tech. This whole career has been stressful and the ROI is debatable

snapcaster9• 2 years ago

Did you start your career before covid? If not, didn't you already experience and endure 5 days a week in the office and not quit your career?

SoftTalker5• 2 years ago

I worked in an office 5 days a week, wearing a shirt and tie, for 20+ years of my career. My commute door-to-door was nearly an hour each way. Most of that by train fortunately. It was just normal.

nyxtom3• 2 years ago

I've been in tech for 20 years now. Inflation has outpaced everything

monknomo• 2 years ago

Don't you think experiencing years of a different world might change someone's opinion?

matwood2• 2 years ago

What else have you done? Tech has been a godsend for me. When I started I had to wear a shirt and tie every day, and now there are a lot of WFH options out there.

0xbadcafebee2• 2 years ago

I've been doing it nearly 20 years, and I'm very done with it. But I need to save for retirement and I don't have anything else I want to do more. So I'm just apathetically collecting a paycheck.

If you focus on the career part, you can increase your network and find a much less stressful position. Last two gigs I've had I wasn't even on call (lol, imagine!), and found remote work. So better opportunities are out there if you work at it.

nyxtom3• 2 years ago

I'm in the same boat, this is a requirement to save for retirement and there's very little else that can compete - despite the fact that inflation is outpacing nearly all the efforts I've made thus far to have a reasonable retirement.

DiggyJohnson13• 2 years ago

For what its worth, "I've been burned out for years but need to collect a paycheck... so I've been taking remote work" isn't a good reason for companies to prefer hiring remote. That's actually a perfect description of how the same individual might have worse differential performance while WFH. The reason for the preference to WFH is also the reason for businesses to prefer RTO.

mindwok• 2 years ago

There's very few other fields out there that provide the benefits that tech does, with the work-life balance. What are the alternatives?

VirusNewbie7• 2 years ago

Ignoring the RTO part, I'm always confused that a CEO implements weird sweeping changes like "we're increasing the ratio of ICs to managers by 15%".

Like, if he's not happy with the productivity of his workers, shouldn't he be telling his SVPs/VPs to come up with plans, and/or hold them accountable?

steveBK1235• 2 years ago

Sounds like another stealth layoff via force attrition.

Must be going well over there.

claytongulick• 2 years ago

The problem with that strategy is that for the remote work crowd, the only people who stay are those with golden handcuffs or those that don't have better/other options, so you end up losing your best people to companies that are more flexible.

steveBK1235• 2 years ago

Agreed, and not just a remote thing generally.

This is why one big and well communicated cut is always better than round after round.

Once your company tilts into the direction of getting worse, anyone with better options leaves. You end up with a lot of adverse selection as an employer if you take the slow burn approach.

xpl• 2 years ago

so you end up losing your best people to companies

Management probably thinks they don't need the best people anymore, as mediocre employees + ChatGPT (or whatever they use at Amazon) will suffice.

rtkwe2• 2 years ago

Sometimes the goal is to shed some of your most expensive people to cut costs or open up some roles for churn to bring employees up. My employer occasionally does buy outs where they offer payouts to people with certain tenure at the company (and I think age combined) to leave. A few people take that then come back as contractors at even higher rates to solve the lost knowledge but that's for uncommon niches like mainframe people.

valianteffort• 2 years ago

Rakuten, temu, aliexpress, etc. are probably gaining concerning market share for amazon.

I cancelled prime years ago because if it's some mass produced chinese white label products you can get the same thing on ebay for cheaper let alone the aforementioned 3 for dirt cheap provided you don't care to wait a couple weeks.

Everyone is hawking the same slop, and although amazon can get it to me in a day, that's often not worth the premium.

itg• 2 years ago

Amazon already required employees to be in office 3 days a week.

steveBK1235• 2 years ago

Yes so that was one round of shaking people out, and didn't have a sufficient effect clearly.

lainproliant• 2 years ago

This is not a good way to hire or develop the best. The best are going to go elsewhere.

redleader55• 2 years ago

Where? If FAANG starts being bad, where else to go?

yodsanklai7• 2 years ago

Are blockchain startups still a thing?

JonChesterfield2• 2 years ago

To whatever companies will be top of the pile in a decade or two, after Google and Amazon have gone the way of IBM. Some of those will be founded by engineers who left the current FAANG setup and managed to not copy the insane parts of their previous org.

grumple• 2 years ago

There are plenty of high paying companies that aren't FAANG and aren't in the bay area. I work at one. A small software company owned by a huge non-tech megacorp. Zero people have left my dev team in the past 4 years.

alistairSH5• 2 years ago

Depends how badly you want the "big bucks". Non-FAANG software jobs still pay good money. Maybe not "I own a yacht" money, but definitely "I own two new cars and a 5 bedroom house" money.

Plasmoid2• 2 years ago

I wonder if engineers are going to start refusing to do on-call. "Sorry, it's going to take me an hour to get to the office because I'm not allowed to work remotely".

nine_zeros4• 2 years ago

I think there should be a automatic overtime law. Every minute beyond 40 hours should be automatically billed to the company.

Use the laptop spy software that companies have been conveniently using anyway to enforce this.

geodel4• 2 years ago

Huh, there are exempt vs non-exempt employees and I believe all software employees are exempt (just like in all places I worked as FTE) which means they are not entitled to overtime pay.

People here talk like they have just invented the wheel.

progforlyfe• 2 years ago

i don't agree with the mandate but at the very least, if they're going to do this they should absolutely exempt workers from returning to office during the periods they are on-call!

Xeronate3• 2 years ago

when i was there and it was 3 days a week on call definitely wasn’t exempt

harshaw3• 2 years ago

we already do that on my team- you can hardly respond to a pager in 10 minutes if you commuting. I suppose it's an unofficial policy but we never got any pushback from it.

neofrommatrix7• 2 years ago

Instant PIP. That's how Amazon works.

Lord_Zero3• 2 years ago

People have sued and won over being asked to check emails off the clock.

wojciii3• 2 years ago

On call? I never had to do any kind of support of any of the software products that I worked on. Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support?

Is this an American corporate thing?

cj• 2 years ago

It's a solution to the problem of "our servers crashed at 2am, the product isn't functioning, and we have no one working right now capable of fixing it"

How does it work at EU/UK companies?

ativzzz• 2 years ago

Do you work on software that gets sold to customers? Often, uptime guarantees are included in contracts. If your software breaks, somebody has to fix it.

Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support?

Because eng is the only people who know how the software works if it breaks, who else can fix it?

I would also say that good support is not trivial (this is not eng specific, it's a company wide initiative) and can be a competitive differentiator

simoncion14• 2 years ago

Is this an American corporate thing?

It's a "Our company has sufficiently-complex software that we sell to customers that pay us enough money to justify calling in one or more programmers outside of regular business hours to help handle problems that one or more of those customers considers Very Serious that our (IME often very, very knowledgeable) support staff can't figure out." thing.

yodsanklai7• 2 years ago

Oncall isn't user support. Amazon (and a lot of services) are supposed to work correctly even outside of office hours and someone needs to be able to fix things. That's one downside of software as a service.

teqsun• 2 years ago

In my experience its more for critical time-sensitive systems that run in off-hours (i.e. if this job fails overnight it needs to get fixed before x time or we'll be bleeding massive amounts of money).

So even if there is tiered support, they'll want an SME on some aspect of the system on-call as a fallback for higher/highest level triage.

interroboink• 2 years ago

Snark aside, that's not how oncall works at Amazon.

The oncall person has a laptop (and perhaps a pager), and they are expected to remote connect ASAP when needed. That was the norm well before Covid; doesn't make sense to wait for a commute before responding.

But then maybe after you do the first level of triage, if it's still ongoing, then you go in to the office.

x86x87• 2 years ago

Pending/Arrival of Technician

sorry boss. stuck in traffic on 520/i90/insert your fav bridge

reply 90 min later.

goostavos7• 2 years ago

I hear a fair amount of this sentiment floating around. Not so much "I won't do oncall" but more so a deflation of moral -- if you want clock punchers, we can be clock punchers.

Setting a SEV2 to "pending" does prevent you from getting re-paged during the weekend when you're at home (where work, as I understand it, does not get done).

mensetmanusman2• 2 years ago

Why don’t they mandate 6 day work week to compete even more…

dh2022• 2 years ago

Spot on based on my work experience at Amazon. Working Saturdays from home was much better because at least I did not have to interact with those psychopaths from Retail.

algebra-pretext3• 2 years ago

Same, I've been able to focus best when finishing up something either during the weekend or when I allotted more OOTO time than I actually needed, I think it's just being in that (slightly) more de-pressurized state and no overhead of Slack pings and meetings.

apwell233• 2 years ago

5 days in office , 2 days work from home. AWS.

saos2• 2 years ago

Is that a soft layoff?

baq3• 2 years ago

Why the question mark?

saos2• 2 years ago

Was genuinely wondering after reading official statement on their blog.

cosmic_quanta• 2 years ago

Usually I would think these are shadow-layoffs, but employees were already required to be in-office 3d/week, which means that employees were at least proximate to their office.

vineyardlabs• 2 years ago

I wouldn't be so sure. Proximate for 5 days in office and 3 days in office might be two different things. I got an offer from Amazon last year (ended up declining) and the HM at the time talked about how a sizable portion of the team were commuting extreme distances to work there (including by plane) on the pretense that they only had to be in office 3 days a week.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

I wonder if there are any exemptions. But I am sure the best talent can easilly find work at Microsoft, Oracle and or IBM without any issues.

mywittyname• 2 years ago

The job market is tough out there for SDEs. Granted, I'm not top-tier talent by any means, but this past year I interviewed for like 10x as many jobs as I did in my previous 15 years of working with no luck. I even get ghosted by recruiters that reached out to me first.

So, I have my doubts about easily for most people, even at these places.

yodsanklai7• 2 years ago

For the same level of compensation? near their home? do these company offer remote/hybrid position to new joiners? do they even hire at the moment?

bravetraveler2• 2 years ago

Avoid businesses this large, they mimic each other/get the rough end of politics. Trading one ham-fisted set of policies for another

You know how cities or even states try to compete for employer offices/headquarters? This is the other side of that.

bediger40003• 2 years ago

Wow Amazon must have metrics that show a big productivity increase in-office! I predict trouble for other tech giants that don't have these metric(s)!

dmoy• 2 years ago

dup?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41559051

fnfjfk2• 2 years ago

My prediction: strong remote work advocates will claim this will be catastrophic for Amazon, many critical people will leave and only those not competent enough to get a job elsewhere will stay. Office advocates will claim it will reinvigorate the culture and lead Amazon to new heights. The actual outcome will be that mostly nothing changes about Amazon’s performance or product quality.

stuckkeys• 2 years ago

Your statement is solid. But from What I have heard, Amazon is getting a lot of pressure from the GOV to bring in more people into the office to support local businesses which I think it is a bit vague. But yeah, they are going to lose some great talent. They are going to have a bunch of useless recruiters roaming the offices lol.

fzeroracer• 2 years ago

Many critical people will leave. The problem is that issues of brain drain, process devolution and lost institutional expertise are effects that only occur years after the cause. When you try and figure out why all of your internal services are down because one core server is in a bootloop and the engineer with knowledge of it all has left.

Speaking from my own personal perspective, it's quite frankly scary how many teams and companies are running with skeleton crews because they've chased off a lot of competent engineers and think they can coast by with the bare minimum. Stuff like what happened to Boeing or Crowdstrike are great examples of the end result, and a lot more companies than you'd expect are operating right on the critical failure margins. The concept of redundancy has outright vanished.

causal• 2 years ago

It's even more subtle than that. Things just start decaying when talent leaves- you often can't trace it to a single engineer or piece of knowledge that's lost. You'll find reasons why things broke- but you won't see the myriad ways a more talented pool of developers would have prevented it from ever breaking in the first place.

foobarian• 2 years ago

FFS we're 3/4 of the way migrating our stack to AWS. They better not screw it up!

fnfjfk2• 2 years ago

I agree they may decline over time, but I don’t know how to disambiguate that from the general rot of big tech companies that have been around for a long time.

When Elon fired everyone, people said Twitter would collapse, but they’ve been technologically ok. They may be struggling on the business end but that’s more likely to be caused by the owner telling advertisers to fuck themselves and by him tweeting racist conspiracy theory stuff rather than any problems with their infra.

throwawayFanta2• 2 years ago

It won't work that way. If you look at the internal structure of amazon, you realize that majority of the good engineers have been there for 5+ years. Amazon always churned through people, causing good engineers who couldn't deal with the culture to leave within 2-3 years, and mediocre engineers getting pipped over 3-4 years.

snapcaster9• 2 years ago

I have yet to see metrics cited by any of these announcements. Do people think that's because:

a). They don't have metrics, and all the cynics are right about this being vibes based

b). They actually do have the data, and it's very grim for how poorly people on average perform when WFH but don't want to share it due to sensitivity or something

Like, i'm actually pro Work From Office (don't yell at me, i joined a company with this culture in place already on purpose) so i tend to believe that it's more productive for myself and the population on average but if that's true why has nobody proved it? why aren't any of these companies able to show data?

bediger40003• 2 years ago

I loathe going to the office I'm a critic, it's (A) vibes

snapcaster9• 2 years ago

Do you think they have metrics showing the opposite? or just nobody even wants to look into it since leadership wants it badly?

rty329• 2 years ago

c) They don't have metrics and will never have, because the only thing they have is "of course the real intent is to quietly forcing people to quit. what else do you think is happening here?"

snapcaster9• 2 years ago

What are you basing this on? Just the perception from the outside? that's my view too and while what you said makes a certain sort of sense but is also so overly complicated compared to just doing layoffs (which they have done, so not like they always avoid them)

Lord_Zero3• 2 years ago

Do you honestly believe that if all the studies and research showed performance goes down when WFH that executives wouldn't be screaming it from the rooftops and shoving it down our throats to get us to come back in? Most people don't want to commute.

snapcaster9• 2 years ago

Right, so presumably the data indicates the opposite? Or they knew better to not look for it? Confused by the whole thing

twobitshifter• 2 years ago

So why do something irrational that is not in the company’s best interest? Must be they want to reduce headcount, but even then, this is a poor way because the people with options will leave.

throwaway562if1• 2 years ago

Considering how much negative publicity companies see every time one of they require RTO, and yet not one has published metrics? They absolutely don't have any.

snapcaster9• 2 years ago

Yeah, i guess that just leads to the question of "why not?"

0cf8612b2e1e6• 2 years ago

Pretty obvious when all of these CEO reports lean on nebulous “culture” benefits.

rurp• 2 years ago

It's almost certainly not b. There has been enough published research showing WFH to be somewhere between a significant productivity boost to a modest decrease that such data would be a significant outlier.

More likely the policy is being pushed for some combination of:

- Increased attrition

- Intangibles that management believes in

- Expected modest productivity gains they think are worth the downsides

- Reducing worker leverage

pcthrowaway• 2 years ago

You forgot

c). They don't feel strongly about WFH vs remote, but getting a bunch of employees to quit is a great way to reduce headcount and then fill any necessary positions from the pool of endless candidates likely to work for less. Normally this is a poor move because they would lose employees who are already onboarded, and hiring is typically more expensive, but Amazon has always been more than happy to let go of experienced employees as part of their sacrifices to the pip gods. Normally this would also be a bad idea because the employees you lose would be the employees who are in highest demand, so likely their best employees. But with 50 candidates waiting in the wings for every rockstar they lose, they figure they'll likely be able to pull more diamonds out of the rough, and even with hiring and onboarding, their long-term expenditure will be less than if they hadn't triggered an exodus.

axpy906• 2 years ago

Forced attrition is definitely a goal with this. Markets cared little about previous cuts so doing it silently.

metadaemon2• 2 years ago

d) tax incentives?

tdeck6• 2 years ago

In software engineering we still haven't developed a good metric for output of our work, so it's hard to see how they could even have decent data. It's an open question how we can measure productivity when each task is substantially different from previous tasks.

barbazoo3• 2 years ago

Or maybe c) They actually do have the data, and it's inconclusive or d) They actually do have the data, and it shows a positive impact on productivity and they don't care, or d) They don't care about data at all here?

xinayder3• 2 years ago

My company did a survey on this. Comparing 2021 to 2023, WFH had 15-20% more supporters than WFO, as per last year's results. They simply ignored this statistic and mandated a return to office anyways.

98% of the people responded negatively to the change in our remote work flexibility when we heard about it. Higher management continues to ignore that 98% of its productive workforce is not happy and the good engineers WILL leave the company.

bit_logic2• 2 years ago

Amazon already openly stated that there is no data to support RTO:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...

https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...

jedberg• 2 years ago

They're not sharing the data because the data says people are on average more productive from home.

rsynnott5• 2 years ago

but if that's true why has nobody proved it?

It'd be extremely difficult to study properly; there _have_ been studies, giving answers in both directions, but they're very easy to poke holes in due to confounding factors.

arunabha3• 2 years ago

The cognitive dissonance from the CEO class is astonishing. From the article

'“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy said in the message.'

This, just a couple of years after they were falling over themselves touting the productivity of WFH.

tootie4• 2 years ago

Doesn't Amazon also have offices all over the world plus remote consultants and contractors? My last year of pre-pandemic work (not Amazon) I spent working from NYC for a client in the Midwest, with developers in South America and an account team on the west coast. Executives were so proud they could staff teams from anywhere on anything to maximize labor utilization and reduce costs. I would go to the office and see none of my team. This was considered peak collaboration. I would WFH whenever I felt like it because nobody would notice. Now all of a sudden we have to be together again.

agentultra• 2 years ago

I find WFH policies go through cycles between all-remote to always-office.

Three factors I suspect contribute to this:

1. execs/management are completely disconnected from the product of the labour they “manage.”

2. Greener-pastures effect.

3. Management attrition

Together, you have a class of people who aren’t involved in production telling everyone how to do their work. In one generation that is stuck in-office all the time they want WFH. So they work towards it and eventually we get to the pro-remote end of the cycle. Managers/execs get promoted or move on and eventually… the grass starts looking greener on the RTO side of the cycle. A new generation of managers starts working towards that.

All of this happens in the context of capital and interest rates. Lower rates and cheap property tends to favour WFH sensitive managers. High rates and expensive property favours RTO.

jppope• 2 years ago

Its obviously not about productivity. We all know WFH is more productive (for people like who amazon hires)

wwarner4• 2 years ago

please prove this. i am now committed to wfh, yet to set and reach important milestones i have to buckle down and focus in the office.

ghaff7• 2 years ago

I actually think that's generally true. But a lot of workers are distributed anyway. And, with the pandemic, a lot of additional people became even more distributed and many CEOs ended up shrugging their shoulders about a great deal of co-located work being gone for good even if they didn't really like it. That's more or less what happened where I used to work.

Past some point, what are you going to do? Fire half+ of your workforce?

kingnothing• 2 years ago

I've worked full time remote for over a decade, with most of that as an IC but several years in management as well. It really depends on who the teammates are in the quote. You can definitely get more focus work done in a quiet environment free from distractions, such as at home. But that comes at a pretty big sacrifice for the type of collaboration that higher level ICs (Staff+) and managers often, but not always, need to do.

Think things like quarterly and annual planning, or getting a group of cross-team engineers together for a day or a week with a whiteboard to design a new system or major improvements. Miro exists for virtual whiteboarding, and I successfully use it all the time, but for big planning I would much rather do that in person.

If you move further up the chain to the level of VPs and Execs, their entire job basically consists of attending meetings to solve problems other people can't. For them, they probably would heavily prefer working in person.

My preference is working at home with quarterly week-long trips to the office -- it's historically the best for me and I'd recommend it to anyone wherever possible.

canjobear• 2 years ago

It's good for people to change their mind in response to data.

rty329• 2 years ago

What data?

obnauticus2• 2 years ago

At least they get to keep their two days of WFH.

New policy - five days RTO, two days WFH, per week.

indigodaddy• 2 years ago

I chuckle but this may not be far off?

dymk4• 2 years ago

I've had a disturbingly large number of friends cancel on weekend or late evening plans because something at Amazon broke, and they had to drive into a downtown office to fix it.

htrp6• 2 years ago

Which LP would this policy most align to? and is there an LP that can enforce the 996?

obnauticus2• 2 years ago

Frugality. Your cost per hour is reduced.

Learn and be curious. If you’re working on the weekend, you get to do this 24x7.

pelagic_sky• 2 years ago

I see Mayor Bruce Harrell rubbing his hands together as he slowly nods in approval of all this.

Hopefully where I work doesn't try to pull this off. At least my manager would not like it one bit seeing as their commute is already 50 min one way 2 to 3 times a week. But who am I kidding, it will probably happen and then I get to sit on video calls in the office with all the people I collaborate with across the states and europe.

wwarner4• 2 years ago

well, without people working downtown, it will be abandoned to drug addicts in a spiral of insufficient public safety resources and declining revenue. so i don’t blame him.

hiddencost• 2 years ago

Or maybe all of the ridiculous pressure from sky high salaries and no affordable housing led to the homeless population...

stefan_2• 2 years ago

At least then you might get a mayor that works for the people living downtown than whatever suburbanites swarm it on work days.

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

I suppose this means Amazon wants to cut their workforce without announcing layoffs.

everybodyknows• 2 years ago

Bingo. The other tool they use is a secretly higher perf review bar.

nine_zeros4• 2 years ago

Mandatory overtime law is in order. Every minute beyond 40 hours a week should be automatically billed to the employer.

shaism• 2 years ago

Actually that is how it works in many companies in Germany. It has its benefits and drawbacks, like every system ;)

duringmath• 2 years ago

Least you expect from workers is to show up for work.

declan_roberts• 2 years ago

Please log off hacker news and get back to work.

happytoexplain• 2 years ago

This seems obviously wrong - the least you expect is of course for them to accomplish the goals of their position. If that requires physical presence, then obviously that's part if the deal implicitly. But for tons of jobs, that's part of the "above and beyond" bucket. I.e. things like after-hours availability, that may improve outcomes, but actually have downsides that mean they could be net negatives depending on the specific job and the specific individuals.

Aside from such executive blindness, the only other reason anybody alive still thinks of commuting and in-office work in more innocent terms is because up until very recently (generationally speaking) they were simply a physical necessity for nearly 100% of jobs, so there was nothing to be gained by dwelling on it. That changed, so the acceptance of petty suffering changed. Also, the fact that the ratio of life improvement to hard work has steadily decreased since those times motivates employees to find other means of maintaining sanity.

behindai2• 2 years ago

People can resist it! Violet shift!

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

[dupe]

Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421

pknomad2• 2 years ago

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume.

I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then again, Amazon doesn't claim monopoly on those and one has to assume the risk of working for a place that churns people out and has upper-level management that are hostile to IC's needs/wants.

Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?

htrp6• 2 years ago

Money.

iosguyryan• 2 years ago

Easily more elsewhere with less BS

harshaw3• 2 years ago

Money, but that has diminishing value. The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.

SoftTalker5• 2 years ago

I mean this is all completely relative to the other options available.

If all/most employers start mandating a return to office then we'll find out where people really stand on the issue. Will they suck it up and work from the office to keep their generous paychecks? Will they stand on principle and try to find another employer who will let them work remote and who they like working for in other respects? Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms? Have they already saved FU money and will just retire?

TuringNYC4• 2 years ago

> The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.

Putting aside quality of life (though I agree that is a huge consideration) -- even when people show up to the office, they are on Zoom calls most of the day.

tdeck6• 2 years ago

If you work in Seattle it's one of only a few options. A lot of folks in the Bay Area (including former me) don't understand how much of a monoculture this place is. There are really only 2 major places to work as a software engineer and very few startups or small companies. Nearly every SWE I meet works at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta (the last 2 have smaller offices here).

Klonoar2• 2 years ago

Apple has a very small office here too.

angmarsbane• 2 years ago

Or Oracle!

aurizon3• 2 years ago

A Newco, or even a startup with a good shot that both with a WFH culture will have a good choice from these 'newly imprisoned' folk = might well lead to change of heart - When you have them....their hearts/minds will follow...

pknomad2• 2 years ago

Hah! That jibes with my experience. I've applied for few startups in Seattle back in 2018 and every interview was prefaced with - "our engineering team is made up for ex M$ and/or AMZN".

packetlost6• 2 years ago

This makes me sad because I've been trying to move to Seattle from Madison, WI for years and was hoping the startup market would be better out there

lelandbatey• 2 years ago

I think there's tons of companies in Seattle, but the sheer size of Amazon and Microsoft skew the distribution massively. I've spent my whole career so far ignoring the big companies you mention. There's lots of engineers working at the big names but there are also hundreds of smaller companies in the area.

dymk4• 2 years ago

Google and Meta have thousands of SWEs and multiple buildings up here, I don't know if I'd call that a smaller presence. Smaller than the bay area, sure, but still a major employer.

wwarner4• 2 years ago

very true.

forrestthewoods• 2 years ago

Theres more to Seattle than that. But Amazon and Microsoft are HUGE so they are a very disproportionate amount of the people you’ll meet.

The upside is you don’t have to live in the Bay Area! Couldn’t pay me enough to move down there.

irrational2• 2 years ago

Not as much of a monoculture as Portland. Portland has Intel (where they are in the process of laying off tens of thousands of people), Nike (where they just went through layoffs and aren't hiring), and... not much else.

toddmorey• 2 years ago

There's got to be opportunity to work on things at a certain scale that you can't find elsewhere. Graviton, AWS data centers, etc.

neofrommatrix7• 2 years ago

It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working on an absolutely new product. The only engineers,IMO, that like it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.

hughesjj12• 2 years ago

Worked there for 7 years (left in 2021) and this is an accurate summary of my experience there.

Adding on thoughts:

One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).

I will add that I learned a TON from AWS, and got to practice much of it too. It's the best boot camp one could ask for regarding general skill development imo (not particular frameworks etc but like, the theory and practice). There's also some things I miss like the weekly ops review and the general engineering culture, especially when it came to explicitly listing service limits, API specs, and cost up front in your design. Oh, and I honestly miss the docs culture. Quip wasn't as good as Google docs but the actual docs themselves and process of authoring them were SUPER valuable.

Coding wise, CDK was so much better than terraform (once we moved to CDK from lpt+cfn, which was way worse imo). Smithy and open API are neato too (@smithy externally everyone uses thrift it seems, but the overlap of functionality/use cases isn't identical).

Probably the biggest thing I miss was bones (kind of successor to octane), which is kind of like yeoman or create react app but would include so so much of the excellent internal tooling of ci/CD approval actions. I don't know of a real external equivalent, but would love to have one. If you ever see a Breland Miley or Ian Mosher apply to your company, HIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. (There was another really solid guy on that team but their name escapes me at the moment, and here's hoping I got the spelling right)

Oh, also isengard is still easier to use than okta or AWS organizations to manage accounts imo.

darth_avocado4• 2 years ago

You forgot the PIP culture.

zzzbra• 2 years ago

This sounds exactly like the team/culture that launched Marcus at Goldman Sachs. A lot of people went to Amazon from that team and seemed to indicate it was very much the same type of deal.

HeyLaughingBoy• 2 years ago

NGL, that sounds like my ideal work environment. Except for the in-office part.

karmasimida3• 2 years ago

Right, this is accurate.

You can't have a mentality of working on something forever in AWS, unless it is S3/RDS/EC2, those forever systems. People are fighting to create new codenames for new products, PRFAQ all the time, etc.

Does this approach work? Maybe, but definitely at a cost. It creates many half-assed products that one acknowledgement away from turning off its life support. And many grifters and land grabbing attempts to create some glue services just to back on the hot new trends. Yes, I am talking about the AI stuff. It is embarrassing how little Amazon has to show for, while spending billions, all because the in fighting and internal sabotaging kills its chance before it can see the light of the day. Epic level failure if you ask me.

jp573• 2 years ago

My experience there (15 years ago) was that on-call was terrible because line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues.

When I started I lucked into a situation where I was one engineer a "team" of two. We didn't have a manager and were reporting to the director of our department. He only had about an hour a week to meet with us. We spent a lot of time fixing broken stuff that we'd inherited (a task that I actually found kind of fun), and soon our ops load started going down. We eventually got another engineer and a manager who was willing to prioritize fixing the root causes of our on-call tickets.

During black-friday-week of my second year there we had essentially no operational issues and spent our time brainstorming future work while we kept an eye our performance dashboards. We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy". Our manager called that a win.

Even back then Amazon had the reputation for being a brutal place to work and for burning out engineers, but I rather liked it. I ultimately left because my wife hated living in Seattle.

MuffinFlavored• 2 years ago

I've never worked at a company where total compensation for engineers was more than $250k

To see "it's not worth it to make $420k as an L6 Amazon engineer" is super interesting

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

wubrr9• 2 years ago

They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.

So fucking true. They also treat their employees like shit generally, and prefer to hire externally for higher level positions - causing existing engineers who are closely familiar with the systems to quit and replacing them with higher-paid new hires, who have no context or familiarity with the service/product in question. I worked there for a few years on some fairly important, foundational services, and it was incredible that they had almost no-one around who initially built these services... 50% of the job was oncall, 40% was reading and trying to understand huge amounts of undocumented code that no one was familiar with... I felt like I was back to working on legacy banking systems.

amw-zero3• 2 years ago

Levels.fyi puts L6 at Amazon at over $400k. That’s not worth it?

leetcrew2• 2 years ago

eh, big company, many different opinions. working on stuff that's already built can be pretty chill. you spend a lot of time being hard blocked on approvals from external teams. no amount of extra hours can change that, and management generally understands. the downside is that promos are harder to find and there's a greater risk of some VP figuring out that your org doesn't really do anything useful. then it's time for the next round of musical chairs.

if you're more ambitious and/or genuinely enjoy building things, new product teams are the place to be. you don't have to deal with approval hell so much, but the dates are more aggressive and managers will do anything to hit them. this is where you learn what "building the plane while flying it" means.

I find people exaggerate how bad it is, but you definitely need to be good at reading the room to stick around.

Xeronate3• 2 years ago

i worked there for a couple years. wasn’t terrible, money was fair, and people i meet always seem impressed when i mention i used to work at amazon music which is kind of nice.

i’ve got recruiters saying i can go back without a real interview because i left less than a year ago and i might go back. it’s really not any different than any other programming job i’ve had.

BeetleB2• 2 years ago

How did you like their benefits? For me, PTO is the main reason I avoid Amazon. I get 20 days a year, not counting sick days. I think Amazon is still stuck at 15 days[1], and almost no sick leave.

[1] 10 days for the first year

packetlost6• 2 years ago

It's for those for whom want a guaranteed good amount of money and work their ass off for it. They're competing with startups where you work your ass off for mediocre pay instead and a moonshot at equity with a ton of value.

Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix.

John23832• 2 years ago

Oh you will work your ass of at Netflix, and the keeper test is just an artificial ceiling to keep the ranks small.

red-iron-pine5• 2 years ago

Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix.

Justify your existence every quarter or catch a pinkslip. Wicked good payouts, though -- roommate in college ended up there and was straight up cash. He loved it until he didn't and vanished promptly.

throwawayFanta2• 2 years ago

It's mostly money. If you are good at your job, amazon pays much better than most companies. I tried looking for a new job last year, and the only ones increasing my current comp were HFT and pre-ipo startups. Google wouldn't even match my current comp.

In terms of the rest, only Netflix, meta, snowflake and roblox (why?) might have offered better, but the wlb in the first two is similar to amzn, and i didn't like the outlook of the latter two.

hadlock• 2 years ago

roblox (why?) might have offered better, but

Every time I talk to a roblox recruiter it's something about how they have 70mm monthly recurring users and they're "building the platform to build games on" or something, but they're a total ghost in the mainstream media. I don't see the value proposition. Maybe they're the next "it" social media company as the users turn 16-21. Whatever they're doing, they pay full price for talent, allegedly.

strivingtobe5• 2 years ago

Money, mostly.

But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new design in a service that saves hundreds of millions of dollars per month or day, is something that really scratches my engineer itch.

Amazon and AWS really have the potential to be a great place to work, but leadership just squanders it. That's what makes announcements like this even more painful.

BryantD• 2 years ago

I'll second this. You will learn a lot about operating at scale at Amazon. You'll learn many of the same things at another FAANG/hyperscale company, mind you, but they've all got their problems.

kccqzy3• 2 years ago

Everything you said applies to Google as well. Genuinely interesting at a technical level, but terrible leadership that squanders it.

mmcconnell1618• 2 years ago

Both Amazon and Google are in their post-founder CEO phases. Microsoft went through the Balmer phase and found footing with Satya Nadella. Balmer probably set the stage for Nadella to succeed but sometimes changing the face is enough to reset culture a bit. Right now, Jassy and Pichai will never be seen in the same light as Bezos or Page & Brin. It might take another CEO at both Amazon and Google to unlock potential.

colmmacc• 2 years ago

I've worked at Amazon (and AWS) for over 16 years and have made many friends, and it's how I met my wife. What's always kept me here is that it's been fun the whole time, with meaningful problems and opportunities that move the needle for so many customers.

So many modern experiences that are built into our improved quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers, low friction same-day delivery, far greater access to online services including education and financing, just wouldn't exist (or at least not as quickly) if weren't able to cut down so many old-school structures and replace them with much more efficient and available alternatives. Getting to create a transformation in digital infrastructure and logistics at that level is just nuts. And there's still plenty to do. The money is great too; a far better result for me financially than the startups I worked at.

But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs.

If that resonated, and you have an opportunity to join Amazon towards the middle or advanced stages of your career; definitely try to do it. I interviewed several times at Amazon to get in. But if you are at the earlier stages of your career; choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join. That will make a bigger difference.

xtracto3• 2 years ago

I've heard from people working there that Amazon tech is full of Indian managers. And the "hearsay" here in Mexico is that Indian work "ethic" is terrible. That they are terrible bosses (same with TCS and HCL who also have lots of positions here in Mexico).

A Mex programmers subredddit r/taquerosprogramadores has plenty of stories about that.

Maybe it's just the structure AZ has established for Mexico. No idea.

strivingtobe5• 2 years ago

As a current Amazonian (and one that, as mentioned in my other comment, enjoys working at AWS largely because of interactions with brilliant tech minds and projects), I agree with most of your comment.

However...

choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join

I love my team, and even my organization that I work with. Multiple people on my team have stated that ours is the best team they've ever been part of in their career. But I don't love my company. I'm still at Amazon because even though my company is actively pushing me away, the love and enjoyment working with my team has been enough to get me to stay. So your advice here really strikes a chord with me, and I wish I could echo it.

Unfortunately, this advice isn't actually tenable, because no matter how great your team is, it's only one company leadership decision away from being ripped apart. I've watched this happen multiple times now, and this announcement is going to make it happen again. Caring less about your company just doesn't work when your company has shown multiple times that they are willing to throw away your team like that.

mykowebhn• 2 years ago

Yours is a heartfelt, sincere take on a successful 21st century career in tech, but I feel it is so one-sided.

Yes, you seem to have benefitted greatly, but your examples of efficiency and availability are flawed. For example:

"apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences": I don't see any benefits. When Youtube recommends for the billionth time a stupid soccer short because I previously watched one soccer short, I want to scream. Also, privacy or lack thereof.

"hailing a cab virtually": made possible due to full-time workers who have none of the benefits of full-time workers, in other words, exploitation.

"a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers": One word that encapsulates the other side of your "bonkers level of selection"--Temu.

"low friction same-day delivery": Made possible due to our reliance on fossil fuels

"far greater access to online services including education and financing": I'm not sure about the financing part. Education? Yeah, if I want to learn about something like video-editing. But I could've bought a book on that in the past and probably learned it much more in depth. If I wanted to learn something like German Idealism, not so much.

I think your pocket book has benefitted immensely, but all of the other benefits don't seem like benefits to me on a macro level. But kudos to you for doing so well and believing the world partakes in your good fortune.

red-iron-pine5• 2 years ago

But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs.

aka "its a wall to wall hustle that will never get better, and when it comes to trade-offs, you're the one making them"

apwell233• 2 years ago

choose your team and manager very carefully

how can an outsider possibly do this?

Yeul• 2 years ago

Yeah for me work is work. It's not life. I don't make friends. I don't celebrate co workers birthdays. I make money for my employer and after that I go home.

I do my research if the company has a ping-pong table or cafetaria I am not going to apply.

JustLurking2022• 2 years ago

Hate to say it but Amazon was hiring the folks getting laid off from major banks a few years ago. They abandoned hiring only the best a long time ago.

gosub1002• 2 years ago

What do you say to the warehouse workers peeing in cups because they're not allowed enough time to use the bathroom? Who get fired for being a few minutes late to stuff boxes? How can you rationalize your wealth while they work harder and live in poverty?

lokar2• 2 years ago

Thanks, that’s a really interesting perspective. I had a similar tenure at Google, and it was a great fit for me, but for very different reasons. Working towards technical perfection, almost divorced from any real world implications. Just puzzles to solve as elegantly as possible.

But I can see how that would not be for everyone. And I did see people who were more customer/outcome oriented really struggle.

jgerrish• 2 years ago

Hey Colm. I briefly met you at my stint in Amazon around 2011.

You were an inspiration and a wonderful example of the calibre of talent Amazon has.

I especially remember the ease with which it appeared you navigated informally between teams, building relationships and bridges to help the company and fellow engineers. Although I'm sure it was actual work, it was still inspiring.

Happy to hear you're still there and found love.

dbtablesorrows5• 2 years ago

Hi Jeff, Big fan.

matrix876• 2 years ago

Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?

People on blind say facebook is pretty similar with the hire to fire culture

alienthrowaway• 2 years ago

Meta is not similar to Amazon at all in broad company culture. It's not even close. The RSU vesting schedule differences are one hint.

VirusNewbie7• 2 years ago

I have not interviewed at either company, but Meta is known to be harder to get into and pay quite a bit more than Amazon. I imagine they treat their employees quite a bit better as well, though i'm sure expectations are still high, like they are at all FAANGs.

eitally3• 2 years ago

I spent 8 years at Google (Cloud) and have lots of friends in the revolving door of AWS -> Google Cloud -> MSFT/Azure. I've been long convinced that MSFT has the best management and offers the most predictable corporate culture & behaviors. At least on the Azure side, comp is on par with both of the others, so if I had options for all three I'd definitely choose Microsoft.

Meta pays better but it's too long a drive from where I live to put up with the reduction in WLB.

tourmalinetaco2• 2 years ago

Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog. My wife worked as a WHS specialist, and really enjoyed her team starting out. However over time they all got weary of the workload and left. Insolent managers, incapable and sometimes even unintelligible workers (it got so bad they started posting signs in two languages), and a mounting focus on speed over safety completely burnt out their facility’s entire safety team. Only one remains from her OG team, and she‘s looking for her chance to jump ship too. Now my wife is much happier working in an insurance field, even despite the pay cut.

elevatedastalt2• 2 years ago

Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog.

Ironically dogs live pretty royal lives in America.

stackedinserter3• 2 years ago

Gosh, I work like a dog and pretty much own the whole company codebase, but probably for 30% of AMZN money.

steelframe2• 2 years ago

What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days?

If you're entry-level and will put up with anything just to get Amazon on your resume.

oneepic• 2 years ago

For one person's anecdotes on the culture, read Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter. Amazing read IMO, and it explained a lot of how I've felt at Microsoft and Google.

FactoryReboot• 2 years ago

No. Choose the other FAANG offer

rvz• 2 years ago

Well the many employees at Amazon (and also FAANG) don't have a choice and have to keep up with the high cost of living (HCOL) standards and extreme competition of jobs from those willing to work for less. This is even before mentioning the potential for Amazon investing in robotics (to replace workers).

Additionally there are some on work visas which if at the event of a layoff, they have to find work within months otherwise they have to move back. Amazon is the last one to consider given the amount of employees there (1.5M) which screams the following:

1. Hire advanced roboticists into Amazon.

2. Build and train the robots against the employees in the customer support and warehouses areas.

3. Gradually replace them and do a soft-layoff.

They won't be going after programmers for now, but Amazon will try to find a way to do more with less, given the staggering amount of employees there which is a red flag and motivates them to automate many jobs with robots to reduce costs.

darthapple764• 2 years ago

In Europe they're one of the biggest tech employers. Relatively low hiring bar, one of the better paying, and generally stable job unless you're really bad.

trallnag3• 2 years ago

Actual "tech" or sales?

mathverse• 2 years ago

Never heard of this? Where? What location?

ranman• 2 years ago

You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS.

That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough.

What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results.

This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.

hughesjj12• 2 years ago

Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears, happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM.

There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry.

Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.

lubesGordi• 2 years ago

What's their narrative and what's the reality? Sounds like you got something to say!

goostavos7• 2 years ago

entrenched management class

This exists among the ICs class, too. "The bar" is under active manipulation so that they sit higher amongst the sea of low performers.

hintymad8• 2 years ago

That said there are a ton of cons.

Like the amazing story where a L7 insisted rewriting a python-based CLI tool in Rust, all in the name of performance even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?

What's more amazing is that the manager of the team thought that was an L7 scope and a great achievement.

captainkrtek2• 2 years ago

Worked for AWS for 7ish years, from L4 to L6. Just my own experience, but I saw the company shift heavily from building high quality services to chasing sales/marketing hype and launching a plethora of “services” that did not match the quality of existing services. Also saw lots of empire building across organizations, many layers of management, more bureaucracy, etc. Can’t say its all bad or that I know better, but it felt like a slow culture shift from “it’s still day 1”, to that becoming an inside joke.

minkles• 2 years ago

Sounds about right. A couple of the things we rely on appear to be run by two guys in a trailer somewhere who can't even get basic fixes out without a 6 month lead.

goostavos7• 2 years ago

empire building

I've been here about the same amount of time. Also L4-L6. I'll echo your "empire building" comment. That, above all else, seems to be the root of the evil. Managers need "scope" to get promoted. They get scope by building an empire. That leads to programs and initiatives and new processes without any connection to customer value. They only exist to be a line item on a promo doc. It is a topic of endless and open complaint that ICs get sucked up into some manager's "promo project."

The big shift seems to be that only a subset of people are talking about producing value. The majority are talking about being seen as producing value.

karmasimida3• 2 years ago

Comparing to other FANNGs, I think Meta seems like a drop-in upgrade, it is more cutthroat, same level of boringness, but more money. Google seems a little laid back, at least it is used to be that way, but money potential is less, as well as promotions. Apple I don't know. So I think most Amazon people left to Meta as a result. Not the other way around.

jarjoura2• 2 years ago

Can confirm. I saw a flood of ex-Amazonians come to Meta in the late 2010s. Not sure I interpreted their comparisons of Meta being more cut-throat, but it did seem like Amazon had way more intense politics with opaque decision making that hurt morale. Kind of seemed like they paid less for the same amount of stress but from different reasons.

hintymad8• 2 years ago

L7+ IC roles are not bad at all. Competitive packages. Tons of responsibility and freedom. I can't stress this enough. an L7+ really has lots of freedom and influence. They get to choose which meetings to go to, how much code they write, what architecture to use, who to work with, and have a serious say on what product features to launch, and which oncall to participate (except the GM escalation oncall). The company's policies and culture ensure that. They will be accountable for the architecture they choose, so of course they have the final say on what architecture to use -- typical freedom and responsibility. Plus, they have veto power of one's rating and promotion, after all. Other benefits include Lots of resources at their disposal. Good opportunity to learn from truly great engineers, at least in AWS. Note I'm not saying that every L7+ is great. All I'm saying that there are many truly great engineers and scientists that one can learn from. Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc. Think about the L7+ who are fellows of ACM or NAE, who invented algorithms, built new systems, created new programming languages, and etc. They did not only spearhead the evolution of the underlying distributed systems, but also pushed large-scale application of queuing theories, formal verifications, and etc, as well as helped shape the engineering culture of the company. Oh, one also gets to learn the most elaborate and thorough operational practices. The production readiness review is amazing and is a gem for anyone to learn from.

joshdavham2• 2 years ago

That actually sounds kinda nice! (assuming you make it to L7)

trevor-e• 2 years ago

Sure, being the top 1% of employees (which I'm assuming L7 principal is) at any company is sure to be great. Very few engineers will ever make that position at a FAANG.

jarjoura2• 2 years ago

Presumably, anyone at a staff+ level position in big tech, is likely influential and their word carries weight. So, I'm not sure how this is a pro or con for joining Amazon.

If anything, someone at that level earns so much money, and has so much unvested stock waiting for them, that even if they grow tired of the work, or disagree with its direction, they are unable to leave for something more fulfilling.

Being forced into the office 5 days a week might be enough to force you to reconsider though?! Maybe?!

thr0w• 2 years ago

Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc.

Does the average L7 person architect those services significantly, or just kinda maintain them? It's almost crazy to think about any old AWS employee (granted L7 is up there) conceiving those things, they've had such a massive impact on the ability to build things on the internet.

notinmykernel4• 2 years ago

100% NOT worth it. Don't be fooled by any stories to the contrary. Amazon is a very abusive workplace.

Root_Denied5• 2 years ago

The day to day toxicity is highly dependent on your team, manager, and skip. My current team is great, my manager is halfway decent, and my skip is basically invisible to my team in a day to day sense. I've seen a few other teams where it's very clear there's cutthroat politics going on and they're all miserable.

Organizational toxicity, like the original 3 day RTO and now 5 day RTO change, is the bigger problem. My L8 and L10 both learned of the 5 day RTO change at the same time as everyone else, meaning the S-Team made a decision and didn't give a heads up to anyone - probably because they don't care about feedback or data. Organizational toxicity also takes the form of stack ranking, URA metrics, and changes to promotion requirements over the last year to make them more difficult at all levels.

I'm coming up on my 2 year mark and more than ready to find something else, but it seems like fully remote security roles are pretty competitive right now.

qingcharles• 2 years ago

I had a good friend just leave AWS. The money was amazing, but he said it was an awful place to work. He took another job at a much lower compensation after 3 months. He didn't want to go into details due to his NDA. He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that.

naijaboiler• 2 years ago

>He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that.

that's not the type of person that should work at Amazon. The place is best for people who are driven, works hard, cares little about backstabbing others.

100pctremote• 2 years ago

It's the worst reason to end up there, because you have to really want to work there for some qualitative reason to have any hope of adapting to and succeeding in that culture. I always felt so bad when I helped onboard a new hire who said they just wanted to experience working at a FAANG.

011000112• 2 years ago

Some people need the money. I left my $160k/yr job in 2018 because I got a divorce and the alimony payments were going to slowly make me homeless. One of the first places I looked was Amazon. Fortunately I found something better and ended up tripling my salary. Many non-valley/low-stress jobs just don't pay the same as crap jobs like Amazon.

andirk• 2 years ago

Many non-valley/low-stress jobs just don't pay the same as crap jobs like Amazon.

Clarify. Your current 3x salary job is better than Amazon, but it's in-valley/high-stress?

bmitc5• 2 years ago

I interviewed there a couple of years ago. It felt like I was being interviewed by robots to be a robot. It was openly hostile towards my background and experience, and to be frank, my interviewers didn't really seem to know all that much themselves. One person asked me to solve a dumb and poorly specified game of life thing, and he kept interrupting me while I was proposing a solution with his own thoughts on some premature optimization that my solution supposedly didn't handle, which is the complete opposite of how you should do engineering. It was a complete waste of time, and you have to study and speak to their "principles" as if you're taking a Scientology test. There wasn't a single ounce of humility or curiosity during the interview process on Amazon's part.

sbaidon94• 2 years ago

Spent 5 years there, I definitely know the experience varies wildly between teams and orgs so take all of this as just my personal opinion.

I was part of the Amazon Luna team and Devices org.

Yes oncall is super rough, yes people are very demanding. Internal documentation sucked.

But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it.

As long as you could justify the customer value managers and execs were pretty open to experimentation and trying out new approaches.

I also was lucky enough to have a very technical oriented manager, he had a great long term vision of where he thought we needed to go and the technical chops to guide us there.

The approach is definitely not for everybody nor the only one that can work in a company like Amazon but I think it did fit with my own values (if that makes any sense).

Some other random things I miss not in any particular order:

- Strong document oriented culture, it is expected of you to dive deep into certain areas while at the same time communicating them effectively

- smithy

- While CDK started out clunky pretty amazing high level constructs were available later.

- Full access to AWS, pretty easy for you to experiment and prototype.

- Both internal FF tooling and the AWS options were quite good.

heavyset_go• 2 years ago

But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it.

This is one of those terms that drive me nuts, because actual ownership implies revenue/profit sharing, decision making, and property rights.

Sounds like you're getting all the responsibilities of ownership, but none of the tangible benefits.

llm_trw• 2 years ago

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days?

I've interviewed with them three times, all before 2020. It seemed like a cult held together by the sunk cost fallacy.

ghaff7• 2 years ago

I'm not sure why I would work for Amazon. Had plenty of opportunities to work for other other companies that paid well enough. Maybe not as much, but who cares?

varispeed5• 2 years ago

Ask how much they pay and the itch will be gone in no time.

eranation2• 2 years ago

Been at AWS for 5 years, learned there more in one year than in my entire career. Great colleagues, and I was lucky to have great management (both direct and skip level). Great internal mobility, and (surprisingly, to me) great work life balance. The main issue is that it highly varies from team to team. It is such a large company that asking how it is to work for Amazon, is like asking how it is to live in Europe, YKMV.

shermantanktop• 2 years ago

K = Kilometrage? Kilometers-per-liter?

Der_Einzige• 2 years ago

Can we remove Amazon from the FAANG term yet? Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, or any number of other companies with much better pay/WLB exist.

I don't care about it's historic term for stocks that went up. Today, we use it to refer to the "elite" of the tech industry. The "FAANG" should refer to the tech giants with the best pay/WLB ratios. Amazon is not even close to that anymore, and frankly never really was.

scarface_743• 2 years ago

None at all for most software engineers.

For me in particular, it was a remote opportunity (still is as far as I know since it is considered part of the sales organization) and they paid top of band for my specialty - enterprise app dev + AWS.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212

Working at AWS was the best thing that happened to my finances and my career.

Leaving AWS was the best thing that happened to my mental health

aceshades3• 2 years ago

speaking for myself: i stick around because of the my soon-to-vest RSUs and because they gave me an official remote work exception. both of them are ticking time-bombs though.

1. I've got like $110k vesting this November. After that it starts to dry up quickly. $50k in May 2025 and another $50k in November 2025. After that it's basically nothing, unless my PCS next year comes with some re-up. 2. The remote work exception is indefinite, but i'm worried that if I'm one of a few remote employees on a big team that are all mostly in-office, I'm not going to really get as many opportunities otherwise.

Long story short, I think my time at Amazon is coming to an end soon, but I'm still sticking around for now.

VirusNewbie7• 2 years ago

You don’t get yearly refreshers?

stackedinserter3• 2 years ago

Money.

weezin• 2 years ago

Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?

It kind of depends on the person. I've seen people go from Amazon to Google and they want to go back to Amazon because they are bored. Some people just thrive in high pressure environments. Also everything is pretty team dependent at FAANGs, you could end up at a bad team at any of them.

behindai2• 2 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm4LYX3xdkU

nblgbg• 2 years ago

Reducing the number of managers is an interesting decision. I briefly worked at Amazon, and the only way for managers to get promoted is by hiring more people under them. There isn’t any other way to get promoted, which incentivizes managers to grow their teams and sometimes add features that may not make sense. Any opinions from ex-Amazonians?

nine_zeros4• 2 years ago

Headcount based promos is the most backwards system out there.

But Amazon is too dysfunctional to change.

_heimdall6• 2 years ago

It can make sense when done right. If the team grows organically in response to the work, rather than work increasing to grow the team, it can make sense to reorg the team and often internal promotions can make that transition more smooth.

aurizon3• 2 years ago

I thought this went out when the USSR fell?

syntheticnature• 2 years ago

This is a common issue in large corporations.

timmg• 2 years ago

Isn't this (kinda) true, in general?

I work at Google. Many of the "official descriptions" of various levels include "size of team" as part of the description. I think, generally, anyone in a middle management position, particularly at a growing company knows that "more people equals more advancement".

TheGlav• 2 years ago

Yeah. At many places, team size (and eventually, number of teams you manage through other managers) is codified in manager role descriptions.

xyst4• 2 years ago

what kind of asshole makes head count a promotion statistic? What does this prove?

blindhippo2• 2 years ago

Lazy management, ones that focus on "metrics" and "numbers" rather than actual engagement with their teams/business lines.

I'm only 20% joking here...

Olreich6• 2 years ago

Once organizations get to a sufficient size, increasing your "scope" is the only metric left to compare. You could compare revenue, but the easiest way to get more revenue is to increase the amount of work that falls under your purview. You could compare profitability, but then you encourage everyone to make the most expensive products they can get away with and your company fails. You could compare productivity, but there is no scientific way to do that, and funding the research required would bankrupt you and your company fails. You could do it by vibes, but the snake oil salesman will sell you garbage and your company fails. You could do it by seniority, but then you stagnate and your company fails. You could do it at random, but then none of your managers would bother trying and your company fails.

Do feel free to suggest a better way to compare two managers that doesn't fall into worse situations than "scope".

johnnyanmac9• 2 years ago

Goodheart's law. As well as too many cooks.

it's not like FAANGs are strapped for teams. Managers can just mnage horizontally instead of needing to hire more people to "prove themselves" (especially when the hiring process is absurd these days).

Bostonian• 2 years ago

I can believe that 3 days a week in the office is more productive than 0, and maybe 4 slightly more than 3, but I wonder if 5 is any more productive than 4, or if Amazon is mostly trying to reduce headcount.

Are there studies on productivity vs. # of days in office for white collar workers?

tivert5• 2 years ago

Are there studies on productivity vs. # of days in office for white collar workers?

Yes, you can cite it as "the CEO's fart."

bbqfog5• 2 years ago

Any days in the office a week is going to filter out your talent pool to people who live by the office, thus giving you orders of magnitude less choice or opportunity to hire the best candidate.

VBprogrammer2• 2 years ago

So any time Amazon make any noise about doing something "for the environment" you can basically just point out they are full of shit.

It probably takes a dozen electric cars to offset the carbon saving of just not going into the office.

_heimdall6• 2 years ago

That's a really difficult comparison to nail down and is heavily dependent on assumptions you make of the alternate reality you compare against.

Does Amazon shutdown all of their office buildings completely? Do employees still leave home and work out of shared office spaces that they prefer to home or the Amazon campus? How do you factor in things like HVAC costs for individual home offices versus a main campus building? For electric cars as the unit of measure, are they new? How do you account for production costs? What power source is charging the cars?

VBprogrammer2• 2 years ago

Yes, it's was pretty flippant. I didn't expect a series analysis.

sharemywin2• 2 years ago

I was curious to see what o1 thought:

Order of Magnitude Assessment

"Bad" for the Environment: Emitting nearly 3 metric tons of CO₂ annually from commuting alone is significant. Potential for Reduction: Eliminating or reducing car commutes can substantially lower an individual's carbon footprint.

I didn't post all the calculations and rebuttals because I figured it would pollute the conversation but there's the nut of it.

bbqfog5• 2 years ago

I'm never working in an office again. Forcing WFO is the start of a death spiral you can't recover from.

adabyron2• 2 years ago

The irony here...

"On the first topic, we’ve always sought to hire very smart, high judgment, inventive, delivery-focused, and missionary teammates. And, we have always wanted the people doing the actual detailed work to have high ownership."

Then shortly later..

"We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements"

So they hire smart people with great judgement who have high ownership but also treat them like incompetent workers who need to show up to the office, in their assigned seat & do their assigned tasks... And he calls this startup culture? Can Amazon even be considered a "tech" company at this point? It seems long gone are the days of innovation & growth at the cost of profit.

malfist7• 2 years ago

Butts in seats as a KPI is the definition of "Day 2 culture"

0cf8612b2e1e6• 2 years ago

As someone in a hot desking situation, I would kill for an assigned seat.

I do not even have someplace to put a coffee cup. Have to pack/unpack all of my stuff daily.

op00to5• 2 years ago

I can leave my coffee cup on my home office desk for weeks at a time if I choose.

juunpp2• 2 years ago

Seems like the capitalists have found the way to make office workers be constantly on the edge about their job security. Pack/unpack stuff every day is hilarious.

1970-01-01• 2 years ago

Reminder that Amazon is doing this for itself, and not for you.

tippytippytango• 2 years ago

If they don’t lose a ton of people from this, I would bet other faangs follow suit in the new year.

neverrroot• 2 years ago

The next year is long away, let’s see how o1 changes the things. The side with the upside drives the employment conditions in the end.

benjiweber• 2 years ago

The irony of setting up a '“Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy' while announcing an edict enforced by centralised control to replace autonomous decision making about where & how to work.

goostavos7• 2 years ago

This is not the first "we're starting a committee to figure out what to do about there being too many committees" I've seen in my ~7 years here. Makes me laugh every time.

lesuorac2• 2 years ago

The best is when the top issues the committee finds outlast the committee.

zeptian3• 2 years ago

this memo is one for the ages. filled with management speak.

dbish• 2 years ago

Well the current CEO is an MBA. Post founder, MBA days morph into this

beachy• 2 years ago

A long time ago I joined Deloitte to set up a local software dev. practice.

A few days in I was invited to join a "bureaucracy reduction taskforce". Someone handed me a literally 12 inch thick stack of paper I was meant to read up on before the first meeting. I gave my regrets and withdrew from the taskforce (there were no repercussions - apparently a few others had noped out as well).

DonsDiscountGas• 2 years ago

I choose to believe that was a strategy. Invite everybody so they feel included, weed out almost everybody so it's a small group and can maybe get something done

strivingtobe5• 2 years ago

We want to operate like the world’s largest startup

It's always amusing when a multi-decade-old, multi-hundred-billion-dollar company says stuff like this. You're not a startup. You never will be.

And if you were, you probably would actually offer perks in your offices that might actually encourage people to be there. Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove multiple times.

I've never seen a company where it seemed more like the leadership of the company actively despises the employees that worked for them. Between stuff like this and the incessant pushing of Amazon Q against everyone's will, it's really apparent that Amazon execs think that having to employ humans as SDE is a defect they're trying to get rid of ASAP.

tomjakubowski• 2 years ago

Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove multiple times.

This is crazy, seriously? Apparently no one has written a good enough two-pager arguing that gratis coffee pays for itself with increased productivity

strivingtobe5• 2 years ago

They have repeatedly tried to remove the free coffee perk (usually by claiming that it was only intended as a temporary thing and will be removed at the end of the year) and the only reason it has been retained this far is because for multiple years running now there was an internal uproar about it.

I suspect at the end of this year they will fully remove it, uproar be damned.

belval3• 2 years ago

I like working there, but Amazon definitely has the worst in-office accomodations. No snacks, no free coffee, for-profit (like 4-5$ for a chocolate bar) vending machines on every second floor, no cafeterias in most building and when they have one it's a hole-in-the-wall that microwaves stuff (except Seattle).

In the original RTO email they even pointed the importance of employee spending money in the surrounding restaurants to support the downtime economy as if I should feel personally invested in spending 30$/meal on an overpriced burger for lunch.

barbazoo3• 2 years ago

no free coffee

Do they have coin/card operated machines then or just no coffee at all?

spacemadness3• 2 years ago

It is incredibly insulting they want to use guilt of not spending like a good consumer as another tool in their sociopathic toolbox.

devinplatt• 2 years ago

When I worked at Amazon, I also was tired of paying for expensive lunches available nearby. But I didn't always have time to make pack lunches.

So I ordered canned soup, on Amazon, to be shipped to the office mailroom. Then picked up the soups and kept them in the drawer by my desk.

user39393822• 2 years ago

Super tangential please accept my apology. Do you have any insight on why one of the biggest companies in the world can’t create a dark mode on their app after 10 years?

alistairSH5• 2 years ago

Holy crap, not even coffee? That's so laughable.

Not that we get great coffee here. It's one of this pod/packet machines. But, it does various teas and some cold drinks as well (fruit/herb infused stuff). So, it works for my second coffee, or a hot cocoa when it's cold outside.

We also get free lunch on T/Th, but that's a new thing since COVID (to entice people back), so I'm not counting on it being around forever. But for now, it is a nice perk and encourages some of that chit-chat the executive class tells us is so critical to making them more money.

whiplash4513• 2 years ago

Not sure why they went all the way to 5 days when 4 days would have done most of the job. Anyone has insights into this?

TavsiE9s• 2 years ago

RIF without paying severance.

excalibur• 2 years ago

So long, and thanks for all the free shipping.

pxeboot• 2 years ago

What is the best way to handle this if you are unwilling to return? Wait to get fired? Resign? Hope they make an exception for you?

8organicbits4• 2 years ago

Run it by your supervisor. When I worked as a developer at Amazon, pre-pandemic, I worked from home whenever I wanted, which was mostly one or two days a week. If your manager won't let you flex, consider switching teams.

xinayder3• 2 years ago

What if your supervisor can't allow you remote work because policies from higher management strictly forbid it? What do you do in this case? Go to the office and not be productive?

bravetraveler2• 2 years ago

The director told my manager that I could ignore it, then the director was made to move out of the house he just built!

Be wary of who and what you trust. There are proper remote gigs, don't risk it IMO.

edit: To be clear, this wasn't at Amazon or even part of FAANG. I took my own advice and went elsewhere, seeing the writing on the wall.

malfist7• 2 years ago

That's not the case anymore. There are teams that run badge tracking systems to make sure you're badging in every day, for enough hours and ping your manager if you've not been in enough.

If you continue to not come in enough, your manager gets assigned a task to have a conversation about firing you or getting you in the office regularly.

If you continue to not come in enough, you're fired and it doesn't look good for your manager.

indoordin0saur3• 2 years ago

Wait to get fired? Resign?

Job market is bad right now. Probably why AWS felt they could do this currently.

milkytron• 2 years ago

If I was absolutely not willing to return. I'd probably continue working, maybe even more, smarter, or harder than currently. And attend everything I can virtually. Make it known that I exist and my work matters and they need me. Continue working. If they make any threats to fire me, I work towards an exception. If no exception is granted, probably just get fired and hope for a severance.

I might consider negotiating for lower pay to continue working, or try to work towards some sort of deal like that. But I'm not sure if that would actually be better than a potential severance and unemployment considering the a firing could still be on the table and would only make the severance and unemployment lower.

senderista5• 2 years ago

Yeah, good luck persuading an SVP to approve an exception for you.

gorbachev2• 2 years ago

The best thing you could do, if you're working at Google, Meta or Amazon is to always be looking, or any other publicly traded company for that matter. They prune people whenever they feel like it. If shareholders aren't happy, this typically happens roughly every three months.

Bluescreenbuddy2• 2 years ago

Leave. You get fired, it'll be with cause.

rybosworld2• 2 years ago

Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense.

Might be an extreme take but, I think engineers have some onus to stop agreeing to work there, lest the amazon corporate culture spreads further.

mr90210• 2 years ago

Engineers on a work visa don’t have that much leeway to strong-arm Amazon on such a decision.

paxys3• 2 years ago

It made sense starting from when the concept of an office was established until mid-2020. Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now? That too considering every other industry besides tech is already doing it?

op00to5• 2 years ago

Huh? I have friends that work in engineering, accounting, and purchasing that are all at least partially if not 100% wfh. Plenty of other industries have given up on 5 days in the office.

typewithrhythm• 2 years ago

It's not some big or recent development, effective WFH has been possible since ADSL matured for many, it just took a while for that to be commonly understood.

cruffle_duffle3• 2 years ago

I'm really not sure what people were expecting, honestly. Of course things would always revert back to the mean.

rybosworld2• 2 years ago

WFH would have worked before Covid as well. Covid just forced the hands of most companies. So no, there hasn't been some breakthrough that has made WFH possible within recent years.

we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now

For a lot of people, yes. The reason why there is so much outrage around RTO mandates is because:

1) WFH offered a massive quality of life improvement

2) There is essentially no evidence that in office workers are more productive (or vice-versa)

When executive teams, (many of whom work remotely themselves, as often as they'd like), try to reverse the quality of life advancement that WFH offers, without an evidence backed reason for doing so, workers get angry.

It's the equivalent of a parent saying "because I said so". Except these aren't children that Jassy and others are speaking to.

icehawk• 2 years ago

WFH worked before COVID. Parts of my team were fully remote 10 years ago. I haven't been going in a full five days a week for 6 years. I got way more productive from home.

I'll never do the 5 days in the office again.

ddfs1232• 2 years ago

Yup, having 1-2 days to care for your home is just that good.

asynchronous2• 2 years ago

You have it backwards- it hadn’t made sense from the invention of the internet until 2020. I point to “teleworking” being a legitimate thing even before the internet was mainstream as evidence that the traditional office is a relic from the 40s and 50s typewriter factories.

shortrounddev22• 2 years ago

Yes, it has. We spent 4 years working from home with no loss in productivity, and now we're being dragged kicking and screaming back into the office to satisfy the KPIs of some business degree loser and his fragile ego. Offices suck. A lot of people here talk about the commute, but the office itself sucks, too.

xdennis• 2 years ago

Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now?

I think we are going further and further away from "the future".

In 1964, Arthur Clarke said that "I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand." and "Men will no longer commute, they will communicate." [1]

I would think that a future where people aren't limited by where they live is desirable and not commuting to office is a way to achieve this.

Covid was a way for companies to realize that many jobs don't really need physical presence in an office. And maybe we should invest in technology that makes more jobs remove so that even brain surgery could be so. But it seems like instead of Covid being the impetus for change, things are reverting, as if non-remote is the normal state of affairs.

Maybe it is the natural state, but it's a sadder world because of it.

[1] https://fortune.com/2024/05/29/arthur-c-clarke-space-odyssey...

dboreham3• 2 years ago

Amazon has been a known "do not work there" employer for a very long time. At least since 2008 in my recollection.

Yes there are people here who consistently post on Amazon threads that they enjoy working there. I even know a couple such people personally. But it's always with the disclaimer "you need to be in a good team". OK but is there a field in the offer letter that denotes "Good_team: TRUE". Nope.

So you can like the idea of competing in "The Hunger Games" while trying to write and fix code. Or not..

Root_Denied5• 2 years ago

They pay too well to say no if you don't have any other competing offers. For some roles they pay too well even with competing offers. It's literally life changing money for a lot of people.

I'm just about to hit 2 years and was planning to leave anyway around that point, which is typical, but now there's going to be a sudden increase in the competition for remote jobs that I wasn't anticipating.

varispeed5• 2 years ago

Make sense for owners of the real estate.

paulcole9• 2 years ago

Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense.

Why not?

Sure you might not like it, but it’s not like it’s inherently bad. It’s just a decision and it might have a bad outcome, but it might not.

consteval19• 2 years ago

but it’s not like it’s inherently bad

Sure it is. We can directly measure the impact of this.

Amazon has approx. 35,000 software engineers. Assuming a commute of total 1 hour a day (very generous of me), that's 35k extra hours of human labor wasted a day. Assuming an average lifespan of 613,620 hours, that's about 1 entire human lifespan lost every 17 days.

We could also measure the carbon impact, too. 1 hour of driving releases about 4 pounds of CO2 into the air. This is about 70 tons of carbon a day, or 25.5K tons of carbon a year.

Or maybe we can measure deaths? Assuming a commute daily of 30 miles, that's about 1 million miles traveled a day. The rate of traffic deaths is about 1 for every 100 million miles traveled. So, every hundred days, Amazon indirectly killed one of their employees, or about 3.5 dead employees a year.

And we can go on and on. Point being, yes bad things are bad and yes, when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences. This isn't like deciding what drink to get at McDonald's.

nextworddev• 2 years ago

"Everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out" is the biggest myth.

Practically the majority of middle management I knew at AMZN didn't do anything.

Source: ex-AWS

harshaw3• 2 years ago

maybe. In my case my big project was cancelled and my engineers borrowed to work on an away team. So yeah, not super productive after that. But other times it was very busy and rewarding.

codingwagie• 2 years ago

Managers at Amazon just enforce dates and identify the underperformer on their team.

DiggyJohnson13• 2 years ago

That... doesn't strike me as the the worst activities for management to work.

artyom3• 2 years ago

This is true. Not only management, but a bunch of the so-called SDEs that are only there to say "we're investigating" every time there's an issue while they all wait for the guy who knows the system to wake up in his timezone.

There's people that's overworked and stressed out, tho, but those are the minority that do the actual work. I'd say it's an 1 out of 10 ratio at best, being conservative.

This is all because every single project is scoped, designed and implemented with the only goal in mind: your own promotion. Same applies for hires, you don't hire roles, you hire _the structure you need to be promoted_.

Source: same.

fortylove• 2 years ago

I left Amazon a few years back because this ending was the inevitable outcome. Amazon had a chance to reinvent themselves as the scrappy startup that they claim to want, but instead they went full IBM.

xyst4• 2 years ago

Amazon is just filled with B-grade, MBA losers now. Just like IBM. So, not surprised.

zeptian3• 2 years ago

Being ex-IBM, i can relate.

Basically, the management class despises SDE worker class, and thinks of them as overhead. Recent statements by the aws head about chatGPT replacing SDEs is along the same lines.

SDEs are tools that just do what mgmt tells them. mgmt holds the decision-making and all the cards.

periodically there is a whipping (pipping) in the form of a layoff to keep the troops in fear.

mattgreenrocks2• 2 years ago

I’m curious: what, in your experience, was the root cause of this contempt? Other skilled professions can make decent money as SDEs do. Is it a love/hate thing? Feeling like the tools could easily not need them if they had sufficient gumption and will?

yodsanklai7• 2 years ago

What's the remote policy at other FAANGs?

SV_BubbleTime3• 2 years ago

I’ve seen all the sides of remote work now.

The only people that are offended by Musk’s comment are the being he was talking about.

“You can pretend to work somewhere else”

Remote work is awesome for some people. But if you don’t admit that a great number of people are scamming it - then your opinion is just as invalid as their obviously defensive position.

thrtythreeforty• 2 years ago

Nah. I wrote critical boot code for brand new silicon from home. Took my team from "behind" to "changing how people did chip bringup." Without ever seeing them in person for literal years.

Can be done. And yeah, that comment rubs me the wrong way.

SV_BubbleTime3• 2 years ago

Yea, cool.

You aren’t the point.

If you can’t see and admit the massive abuse from most people - obviously except for you - then there is no discussion.

Everyone is always so quick to say how great THEY are and can’t ever even sort of discuss the reality of abuse because that position threatens their goal.

It is obtuse self-interest and disingenuous. Those comments rub me the wrong way.

Animats• 2 years ago

Only 5 days? Why not 996 working?

MisterBastahrd2• 2 years ago

Any company that tells me I have to be in office 5 days a week is a company I am never bringing home a laptop for. If the place burns down because it isn't adequately staffed outside of normal working hours, so be it.

FrankoDelMar• 2 years ago

So long as they don't take my stapler.

senderista5• 2 years ago

You're definitely bringing your laptop home when you're oncall.

MisterBastahrd2• 2 years ago

I'm never going to be on call. It is a condition of my employment. If you've let them abuse you like that, then it's on you.

That isn't to say that if something needs to be overseen because a part of our infrastructure needs updating that I won't volunteer. But being mandated to babysit systems? No, absolutely not.

tinyhouse• 2 years ago

I worked at Amazon pre-covid and the funny thing is that even then Friday was WFH for at least 50% of the office.

dividefuel5• 2 years ago

It'll be interesting to see how soon the other big tech companies follow suit and do the same. Cynically, I wonder to what extent that forced RTO has been directly coordinated between these companies VS copycatting each other.

Eumenes• 2 years ago

Does this include AWS employees? This could be a boon for GCP, Azure, and the other infra/cloud companies. Lots of great talent there. Amazon.com, eh, they'll find warm bodies to maintain the spring boot services and Jsps.

kbos87• 2 years ago

I've worked at two companies that are heavy on former Amazon leaders.

As leaders do (and should!) they are often sharing stories of how they approached similar problems in their past roles. What I find to be interesting is how different people across time weave the same caveat into everything they say about their time at Amazon - some version of "...but keep in mind, that isn't the kind of culture we are trying to build here."

kerkeslager2• 2 years ago

There's a lot of back and forth about whether it's more efficient to work from home or from the office. There are arguments to either side. I'll say, when I'm working with a team, I'm far more effective working from the office, because communication is simpler.

A lot of the ways in which people point out that in-person work is ineffective aren't actually problems with in-person work. For example, people complain about "attendance periods" where workers are expected to be present for 8 hours even if there's not 8 hours of work to be done, but this can easily be duplicated with remote work, where people are expected to be online for 8 hours. Micro-managing employers who prioritize control over productivity might have slightly fewer ways to micro-manage remotely, but remote work is really only a band-aid to that problem, not a solution.

Ultimately, my conclusion from a few decades of working on teams is that given effective management, in-person is more effective.

And here's the thing: I don't care. Working from home is worse for the team but it's better for the worker. Decade after decade workers have become more productive, and decade after decade workers are paid less and less of a percentage of the benefits of their labor[1]. The ability to work from home is one of the few concessions employers have (begrudgingly) made to workers in the last few decades, and it's nowhere near enough. Employers should be forced to give up productivity to improve workers' lives, and if they want the productivity (and/or control) of in-person work they should be made to pay more for it.

I'm tired of seeing the whole conversation about this being about what is more productive. Workers aren't seeing any of the benefits of being more productive, so there's no reason for workers to care what's more productive. That's basic incentives: if you don't like that, you don't like capitalism.

[1] https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...

oblio8• 2 years ago

Awesome point!

spacemadness3• 2 years ago

I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode. Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so. Now that interest rates have wrecked the employment market they are wasting no time going scorched earth on their current remote employees. The narratives they keep shoving down peoples throats are insulting at best. They should just tell everyone they want to stand over people and feel powerful and get it over with.

fhdsgbbcaA3• 2 years ago

Imagine being a billionaire CEO and still having to bend over backwards to give “perks” to entitled engineers!

Think of those years and years of suffering that must put a CEO through! To be at the top of the mountain - and still beholden to little people! That is the worst kind of injustice.

And the joy - the relief! - of finally being able to treat the engineers with the same contempt you feel for your customers. It must feel GLORIOUS.

WorkerBee28474• 2 years ago

Do you think that Amazon treats its customers with contempt?

hashtag-til2• 2 years ago

Sadly, other CEOs will be quick to follow for more days in the office or full time in office.

Much quickier than they followed for salary raises, obviously.

joshdavham2• 2 years ago

Yeah I can imagine that there is a bit of that going on. I imagine that there's also a bit of pent-up resentment from the pre-pandemic and pandemic era where tech workers were job hopping every couple months and demanding full remote. Now that the tables have turned, mgmt likely feels pretty emboldened.

tschellenbach2• 2 years ago

I don't like this us vs them mentality. Nothing stops you from starting your own business and being on the "manager" side of things.

Cost of capital is up, productivity is down. So all companies have to work through options to increase productivity, and/or reduce costs. Companies will take different approaches to this

pydry• 2 years ago

This idea needs to die.

Gone are the days when you can start the next google in your garage. You need capital to compete.

mupuff1234• 2 years ago

An easy way for "them" to stop that mentality would be to take a pay cut and show solidarity in cutting costs, and yet I don't really see that happening.

nateglims• 2 years ago

Is productivity down? It seems like it's just growing slower than pre global financial crisis.

YokoZar• 2 years ago

Productivity growth may be slowing, but it is not "down" in general. It's the highest it's ever been.

Is there a specific reason to believe Amazon would have less productivity than the rest of the economy compared with before?

insane_dreamer3• 2 years ago

productivity is down

according to which statistics?

ipaddr6• 2 years ago

Money/capital stops the worker in general or do you expect the average worker to be able to buy the firm they are working for now because wages are that good?

consteval19• 2 years ago

Nothing stops you...

No, lots of things stop you. You can't just say "nothing stops you" and pretend it's true and work from there. Obviously, lots of things stop you otherwise everyone would do it.

AviationAtom2• 2 years ago

I think it's more the few bad apples that spoil the bunch.

Have you heard of over-employment? There are people working 2-3 full-time jobs, pulling over $500k, while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.

There are a ton more that are working one job, but likewise giving very little output. It's harder to catch those folks in the act when they don't physically have to be present in the office.

While in office can be less productive in a fair amount of aspects it can also be more so in others. It isn't always some sinister plan from above.

Labor costs have risen greatly post-lockdowns, so companies expect to see a return on their money, more so in a rapidly tightening labor market.

vasilipupkin• 2 years ago

they had a 3 days a week in office policy, that should be sufficient to catch the people you are talking abut

techjamie• 2 years ago

That sounds like a management problem to me. If they can't tell that someone's output is that low, then clearly they need to switch their goals for what they consider "productive."

Handy-Man• 2 years ago

Who cares about how many hours of work they are putting in. As long as tasks are getting done on time, it shouldn't matter what I am doing with my "hours".

hashtag-til2• 2 years ago

False equivalence. The issue you describe is an issue of setting goals and measuring output.

admax88qqq• 2 years ago

If you can get your work done in only a few hours and you are not marked as a low performer and fired something horribly wrong with your job expectations and your management.

tenacious_tuna• 2 years ago

It's harder to catch those folks...

I don't understand this; if they aren't producing what's expected of them, that's noticeable, and a problem. If they are producing what's expected of them, that's good, and what's it matter what they're doing with their time?

For the first time in my career I feel able to actually perform to the expectations set for me as remote staff. I don't have to invent busy work to do while I'm waiting on another team, I can just go do laundry.

If management doesn't have faith that their team's output is what it "should be" that's a separate problem from being in-office.

ivan_gammel• 2 years ago

while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.

This is the tax for dysfunctional organization and bad management, it has nothing to do with office presence. Most people who work less than expected don’t work elsewhere and have very different reasons for that. They can continue doing that in the office: if their manager didn’t notice low productivity in remote setting, very likely this won’t happen in the office too.

pbhjpbhj• 2 years ago

How does any worker manage that? Your output is, you're saying, a few hours out of 40 in a week. That's impossible for someone actually doing something -- surely only managers can get away with that.

If a manager thinks someone is doing that, fire them as your belief is that person is not contributing. Do their job yourself in the time you would have spent managing them, get a bonus for cost savings.

Labor costs have risen

Call us when C-suite wages drop back to the comparative levels they were even 10 years ago.

Workers got a wake-up call. Capitalist still want to shackle them and beat the work out of them whilst they run off with the money.

Massive wealth gaps can't end soon enough.

imperfect_light2• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the famous Reagan "welfare queen" story about someone showing up in Cadillac to use their food stamps. Did it happen, probably. Is it widespread, it is representative of most people on food stamps. Of course not.

Same situation here. Of course it's happened, some people have taken advantage of remote work. So what's the manager's excuse for not catching this?

ipaddr6• 2 years ago

Employers want the employee in the office to produce the same amount of work but they want them to roam and bother others because they might be making money elsewhere? That sounds foolish.

paxys3• 2 years ago

If there are employees who are putting in a few hours of work each week and management isn't able to catch it, what will bringing these same employees to the office accomplish exactly?

dividefuel5• 2 years ago

This feels like a strawman. How many people are working multiple jobs? How many are doing it effectively enough to not get caught nor fired for poor performance? And, if they are able to somehow juggle multiple jobs without performance/NDA issues, then is it really a problem?

PhasmaFelis2• 2 years ago

"A handful of employees might not be performing to spec, and we can't be bothered to find a good way to measure that, so let's screw over hundreds and hundreds of good employees instead" is still basically malice.

heraldgeezer• 2 years ago

It's harder to catch those folks in the act when they don't physically have to be present in the office.

Maybe look at output? My experience is in call center/helpdesk. Either someone takes calls and tickets or they do not, very noticeable.

If the company really wants, there is software like Teramind and Aktivtrak that screenrecords and keylogs.

IshKebab• 2 years ago

It's harder to catch [remote workers]

Yeah... that feels like it should be true - obviously they're harder to monitor because you can't see them! - but I think if you really think about it it isn't.

I think the number of people actually working more than one job is very small. So you're really talking about people slacking off, and that's just as easy to do in the office. Unless your boss is literally next to you anyway.

I used to read Reddit all the time at work.

markus_zhang• 2 years ago

If they can complete the sprint in a few hours, I don't see why they can't do that. Executives typically hold multiple board positions and they are perfectly fine for that.

photonthug2• 2 years ago

I used to hate the over-employment thing, because I suspected it was making my own job harder while I do someone else’s job. But I get it now. Workers can only be punished so many times for being passionate, interested, and trustworthy before they say “ok, let’s do things your way” to management, and start to play the game that the system has pushed them into.

If you want to treat your employees as cogs in a machine, constantly frustrate well intentioned shows of initiative, remove their job security and treat them as interchangeable and discardable.. then you should expect them to do exactly and only what they are told rather than looking around for the best way to help. If you can’t keep them busy & don’t really understand what they do well enough to supervise or evaluate the work, and you slashed wages for the same job to half what it was a few years ago.. hell yes they are getting another job and laughing if you’re upset about it.

wiseowise2• 2 years ago

There are people working 2-3 full-time jobs, pulling over $500k, while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.

Why doubly care if they perform well enough? Some sense of misguided justice?

DiggyJohnson13• 2 years ago

I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode

Doesn’t this sound like tribal, us-versus-them, reductive explanation for the behavior of those you disagree with?

LanceH• 2 years ago

I've always felt there was a certain amount of us-versus-them going on in the office -- though I don't think that's the main reason here.

Right now, I think it's a matter of over-hiring the last couple years. This is both a productivity and loyalty check. Anyone not coming in will either be let go, or recognized as an exception.

As for my opinion of there being a level of us-versus-them, I felt it has manifested in things like dress codes. If you're old enough, you might have worked at some place where you wear a suit. That might seem perfectly normal for higher paid management or sales, but it's just keeping people in line at the lower levels.

I've worked at a number of places where "rank has its privileges". Managers would have larger desks, offices, better computers, etc... Regardless of what was needed to do the job.

I'm certain there is a level of "I have to, so you have to", whether it makes sense or not.

nimih2• 2 years ago

The economic goals of management and labor are fundamentally at odds, so any explanation which isn't us-vs-them is going to be missing a key dynamic and motivating force of the relationship, at least to some extent.

lolinder4• 2 years ago

Tribalism is in, nuance is out. I'm as much a fan of WFH as anyone and will never go back into an office, but posts like OP's aren't getting us anywhere—they just reinforce the idea that WFH is an immature demand of an entitled and antagonistic subset of engineers who they'd be better off losing anyway.

PhasmaFelis2• 2 years ago

If it's obvious that my boss' interests are far out of line with my own and he's fine with that, "us-versus-them" is simply the truth. The fact that he can rattle off a complex-sounding but empty justification doesn't change that.

dsugarman3• 2 years ago

I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".

vundercind3• 2 years ago

Seems plausible, from what I know of management.

Why do you think tech workers have upper-middle pay but not upper-middle social class or perks (until wfh, partially)? Tribal us-vs-them behavior. Not reductive, just what it is. Can’t let a new group rise into that class just as the MBAs and finance guys are wrapping up kicking doctors and lawyers out.

consteval19• 2 years ago

When a reasonable explanation refuses to be given, repeatedly, one begins to wonder if it exists. There's only so much "trust me bro" underlings can take before making assumptions.

hintymad8• 2 years ago

Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so.

I have a contrarian view on this. People will be efficient remotely and the management can use result-oriented performance management only when the talent density is high. Unfortunately high talent density is the luxury that Amazon does not have. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of employees after all. Otherwise, Amazon's culture should be uniquely suitable to WFH. Case in point, many teams are already distributed across multiple time zones; Amazon rely heavily on writeups and asynchronous commenting; and Amazon discourage discussions with more than a handful of people.

fsflover• 2 years ago

I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode.

Indeed this is how Cory Doctorow explains it: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/

dookahku• 2 years ago

maybe part of it, certainly many reasons for this decision.

more likely, it's a constructive layoff and they want to justify real estate cap-ex

arunabha3• 2 years ago

Yes,revenge(or rather a desire for reversion to the previous norm) might be part of the reason, however there might be another aspect which makes it more urgent for the execs

WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on. Tech employees realizing that collective action can work genuinely terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible before people start to organize. The weak job market just makes it easier and the upcoming interest rate cuts might dent that advantage a bit.

idiotsecant• 2 years ago

Yep, the tragedy is that the average tech worker has 'temporarily embaressed rockstar billionare' syndrome, and they've got it bad. They don't need collective action because their beautiful, perfect mind can do much better bargaining by themselves.

Carpenters know that they are labor and labor has value only when it takes it through collective action. Somehow tech workers haven't figured that out yet. When will tech workers catch up to carpenters? Hard to say.

kardianos• 2 years ago

I have always work remotely. I know many people who should not be trusted with work from home. Believe it or not, people are selfish, including workers, not just the managers and execs.

vundercind3• 2 years ago

All—every one of—the non-tech office workers in my social circle at this point are at least hybrid with a more remote days than in-office.

And almost none of my social circle is tech, so this sample is a fair proportion of all the people I know. Four different industries, and government, state and federal. All at least hybrid-mostly-remote, and about a third fully remote. Still, this long after the pandemic. Most aren’t high-earning, either, so it’s not that they have remarkably high personal leverage or something.

It’s to the point that non tech office workers I know aren’t going back to full-time in the office unless the pay difference is enormous. WFH is too valuable.

doctorpangloss• 2 years ago

I don't know. Have you acted any differently? Whom have you employed? Did the money come out of your pocket? What were the rules?

wubrr9• 2 years ago

Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so.

They are in 'avoid responsibility and blame all misses on circumstances outside their control' mode. Remote work is the perfect excuse for incompetent management in big tech.

forgot-im-old• 2 years ago

Good theory. Killing remote seems the first line of defense in covering.

HDThoreaun2• 2 years ago

This sounds much more likely to me than the revenge narrative.

ahmeneeroe-v2• 2 years ago

Thinking like this doesn't help you understand the game, and if you don't understand the game, you can't play it.

eptcyka• 2 years ago

I worked remotely years before the pandemic, and it was great, for the most part. But there are people who definitely hate it. And there are also people who love it, but can't be trusted with it.

dsugarman3• 2 years ago

Your feelings are valid and they're doing this to perform better as a business.

dividefuel5• 2 years ago

I don't think revenge is the motivation, but it's hard to know what the actual motivation is. I think it's some mix of:

- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs

- Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments

- Belief that remote workers are more likely to jump to another company

- Opportunity to claw back a perk that can be returned in future negotiations if needed

- Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks

- Execs personally prefer employees in office for some other reason (e.g., wanting to feel powerful)

- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)

clumsysmurf• 2 years ago

- Upper management wants to reserve remote perks for themselves. Otherwise what's the point of being upper management without perks.

htrp6• 2 years ago

it's really an indictment of management, whose inability to learn how to manage a remote workforce means that they default back to the idea of management by walking around that they learned at HBS

if your management tree is a bunch of ex MBB consultants, you absolutely have this problem whether you believe so or not

wubrr9• 2 years ago

and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

They had the exact opposite conclusions when they were pushing WFH. They also shut down comment threads and questions from internal employees asking for data backing up their more recent claims.

Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks

If AWS starts losing employees at any serious rate, they will collapse. They already have a huge amount of products and services where the initial engineers left and where oncall/support load is absolutely brutal.

ransom15382• 2 years ago

US tax codes prevent hiring software devs. No one is going to hire US software devs ever again. (Good voting guys!).

https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/12/19/the-tax-change-that-s-...

yodsanklai7• 2 years ago

Perhaps culture and productivity is actually better in office. I'm remote and would like to keep it that way, but that's also an hypothesis to consider (Occam's razor). These big corps claim they're data driven, so perhaps that's what their data is saying.

hnthrowaway65433• 2 years ago

- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

fwiw I talk to a lot of execs/board members and the belief here is genuine, whether or not workers agree with it. Most other execs I've talked to have wanted to pull the trigger on full RTO for years but have been afraid because they know it's a hugely unpopular decision. With a major player like Amazon doing it now, it's suddenly a lot easier to justify to employees. I suspect by 2026 fully-remote jobs will be about as common as they were pre-COVID, which is to say they exist but are an exception, not the norm.

- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs

this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word. Layoffs = we want to cut spending to improve our cash position/burn rate/etc. It's more accurate to say it's a way to get rid of people who aren't "dedicated" for lack of a better word, without a ton of paperwork. The idea being that if someone hates the company enough that showing up to an office 5 days/week will make them quit, you're better off replacing them.

- Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments

This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now

xyzzyz• 2 years ago

- Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments

This is something that banks and commercial real estate owners would want, but it is highly unlikely to be motivating the companies actually using the space.

1. If they lease the space, they don’t care about the building values, and in fact would prefer for them to sink so that they can renegotiate leases or move to cheaper buildings.

2. If they own the building, then forcing your own employees into it does relatively little to influence its value, because the value of buildings is determined by the market, ie. the sale prices of similar buildings in similar locations. If buildings around you sell for peanut due to low demand, yours won’t sell for higher just because it’s full. You’d need everyone else to cooperate, and this kind of coordination problem is extremely hard.

3. Even if forcing employees into offices was beneficial from the perspective of real estate values, or at least people responsible for managing real estate inside the companies, the fact of the matter is that these people ultimately don’t have enough pull to enforce such a critical policy change. No CEO in his or her right mind will decide to sign off on return to office mandate based on any real estate value projections. The potential gain here is really trivial relative to changes in employee productivity or increases in turnover.

streblo• 2 years ago

- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

I think this is the reason, but its more nuanced than this. Management finds in-office employees easier to manage. They are more likely to attend meetings, participate in team communication, give status updates, etc. There's much less of a question around "is this person doing the work" if you can see them doing something that looks like work in the office. If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.

Management of remote employees is a huge information gathering exercise - very little of the above information is proactively surfaced to you, and instead you have to go looking for it. Frankly, it's just a lot more work for managers.

I realize the above may not be fair to employees, or that the perceptions of managers accurately resemble the truth - just stating what I think is going on.

throwaway240916• 2 years ago

My company was

- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

Eng was a cost center, so the business side didn't understand and thought it unfair.

- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs

Eng was happy for attrition to meet a strategic goal of 50/50 India hiring

- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)

Opposite: during the initial switch (we had a mgmt change later too), they found ppl were active more hours on slack, had better silly metrics like code commits, prs, pr reviews. Not the best measure, but since no one knew they were looking, likely to be relatively accurate. They were very confident in this posture.

AtlasBarfed• 2 years ago

Look people, those foosball tables are a major investment.

Major.

yodsanklai7• 2 years ago

Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so.

I don't know about top executives, but many managers work remotely and would rather keep it that way. Most managers are close to the leaves of the hierarchy tree and are just as powerless as ICs.

ghaff7• 2 years ago

In the case of one CEO of a moderately large company who I know pretty well, they honestly do think that the energy and camaraderie of having people in an office is a positive thing and they're probably right. They're also shedding real estate and are pretty resigned to the co-located workers genie not going back into the bottle especially given changes that happened over COVID. Sure, companies can force it but they'll lose a lot of their workforce in many cases and they may not consider that a good tradeoff.

I actually don't think it is about conspiracy theories in general but more about executives trying to recreate a past that had some positive features that have evaporated. Even 15 years ago, I spent a lot of useful face-time with people which evaporated with COVID and travel/off-site budget cuts. You can deal with the latter to some degree but a lot of companies really haven't.

r0m4n0• 2 years ago

Super commuters are going to start sweating. I work with people that commute from DC to NYC and a few times a week is doable. 5 times is impossible

Exoristos• 2 years ago

Not impossible. You just are home only on the weekends. Years ago, I used to commute from Pennsylvania to NYC by train. Spent the week nights in NYC.

raverbashing3• 2 years ago

Honestly, this lifestyle is extremely stressing, and to go back to it just due to the whims of a higher-up seems very frustrating

My polite way of saying "f.ck that sh.t". I wouldn't do it

xinayder3• 2 years ago

My company just pushed for a 3-day at the office week, now that Amazon is going back to full time at the office, I think it's only a matter of weeks before higher management decides that it's time to return to the office.

We don't have enough space for everyone and a lot of the workers are located 1h away from their office. And yet, higher management is being so opaque about this mandated return to office scheme.

Blackthorn• 2 years ago

Yeah, this is exactly why I ignored every single recruiter email from Amazon during and after the pandemic years. I knew this was going to be the result no matter what promises they gave.

technick2• 2 years ago

This explains why the aws sales engineer assigned to my account updated his linkedin last week to looking for new opportunities. He lives a few hundred miles in the middle of no where.

0xbadcafebee2• 2 years ago

The brain drain will continue until the stock price improves, I guess.

blitzar• 2 years ago

Nice they let employees work from home 2 days a week.

ahurmazda• 2 years ago

Hopefully it’s a win-win for most. If you are happy with RTO, rubbing-shoulders with peers, you should be happy. If you are a startup looking for bright engineers, quite a few will be in the job market shortly. Good way to distribute talent imo

iLoveOncall3• 2 years ago

Except for the 95% of employees who don't like to come to the office?

dopylitty• 2 years ago

I can’t tell if this applies to AWS as well but companies that have gone on all in on cloud hosted infrastructure should probably come up with an exit strategy pretty quickly given Amazon’s general flailing.

You really don’t want your important systems being underpinned services run either by disgruntled employees about to quit or by the bottom of the barrel types who have no choice but to stay even when treated like this.

anothernewdude2• 2 years ago

I hear a bunch of companies are thinking of moving everything back to the office.

trallnag3• 2 years ago

Everything? Employees and the servers?

anothernewdude2• 2 years ago

I guess I'll follow suit and go back to on-premises.

ivraatiems2• 2 years ago

A note for engineers looking for jobs, based on this and about a thousand similar posts: If you joined a "remote" company that went remote during the pandemic, no, you didn't.

Look for companies that went full-remote before 2020, or after ~2022. Otherwise, it can't be trusted.

ryukoposting7• 2 years ago

Companies that went full-remote around 2020-2021 are more likely to try to drag people back into the office, but I wouldn't suggest that you don't interview with those companies.

The best thing you can do is get to the finish line, get the offer sheet, and demand that your position as a full-time remote worker be written into your agreement with the company.

FWIW I know someone who did exactly this with a defense prime, and the crazy fella actually won the battle with HR when they tried to bring everyone back into the office.

Worst case scenario, they say "no," you decline the offer, and you've sent a clear message to management. It might feel like a few hours of wasted time, but we as industry practitioners have the power to make this a normal interaction between a prospective hire and a stubborn corporation.

gsk22• 2 years ago

This might work, but it also guarantees you will be first on the chopping block when layoffs come around. I have seen this happen first-hand multiple times: any employee with a special arrangement that doesn't meet what the executive team desires will be let go at the first chance, even if they are a huge asset to the company.

Not to say you shouldn't try that approach. Just that you'll have less job stability.

malfist7• 2 years ago

100% of people who told amazon "My contract says fully remote" did not win the argument. With at will employment, companies are free to change their agreement with you at any time and you're just as free to leave.

ivraatiems2• 2 years ago

Most companies in the US are hiring workers at-will. There are no contracts and anyone can terminate employment for any reason. I don't think that would work in the United States for most non-contract roles. It might work for contractors and for people in Europe.

ekimekim• 2 years ago

I joined a company in late 2020 that had gone remote at the start of the pandemic, and this crossed my mind. The deciding factor for me? The founders had since moved to different locations across the US. That put their money where their mouth was more than anything.

nvarsj• 2 years ago

I was in the "office is a good thing" camp for a while, but having been forced now to do 3 days, then forced to move to an office an extra 20 minute commute away, I've changed my feelings on the matter. Spending 2-2.5 hrs in commute a day is a terrible experience when trying to balance a high pressure job with the rest of life.

I really miss hybrid with 1-2 days in the office. That was the best compromise all around.

kccqzy3• 2 years ago

Commute really is key. When I used to have a 15-minute bike commute, I voluntarily went to the office five days a week. The 30 minutes spent each day is just good exercise.

Now I take the train that's 30 minutes long each way. I don't get the benefit of exercise, the time spent is doubled, and now I'm only going to the office three days a week.

justanorherhack• 2 years ago

At least you can be productive ish on the train, sitting in the car for a daily dose of near death experience is even worse.

consteval19• 2 years ago

It's really more complicated than this, because often commute has an inverse relationship with cost. The longer you commute, the more you save.

Sure, you could say going to office isn't too bad if you're 15 minutes away. But at 15 minutes away you're paying double for housing than if you were 90 minutes away. So even in the ideal scenario, RTO can be perceived as a huge pay cut.

closeparen4• 2 years ago

Hybrid means I still have to live in $1000/sqft territory, but also need a home office.

sirspacey• 2 years ago

Why does it mean that?

I’d assume with hybrid you could always go in.

Spivak2• 2 years ago

How is any number 0-5 based on your preference not the best compromise in your opinion? Do you gain anything when someone who would choose not to be in the office ever is there?

All the people who want to socialize at work get the office, everyone who wants the flexibility of remote work get to enjoy that. From experience, making a remote-first team work in office is just working-remote but next to one another. Once you get used to all your processes being in-chat and having 5-10 async conversations going at once while working having to like stop and have only one stream of thought is like an adhd rug pull.

1xer• 2 years ago

Funny how that works huh? Only when it affects you, thats when you start paying attention.

paulddraper• 2 years ago

Or, to put it with less hostility, Experience has value.

thinkingtoilet• 2 years ago

This was my first thought as well. A complete lack of self-awareness.

billfor• 2 years ago

I usually read or sleep on the commute because I can take the train. It never really bothered me much because I like to sleep and read. Are all these negative comments about the commuting because you have to drive to work?

Aachen3• 2 years ago

Or walk. Can't sleep or read when walking :( Podcasts are okay but doesn't fully engage me and so it's still just passing time and enduring the weather

Taking one bus and being forced to take a 30-minute break (usually reading for me) was fine, but now walking 25 minutes additionally to that same bus trip after the office moved to a new location is rather a pain. Tried taking an electric kick scooter but that slides all over the place and doesn't fit at the foot end of a bus seat so to cut down on walking I'd have to stand and babysit the device the whole ride (forfeiting the relax time); not exactly an improvement

Car is by far the quickest (about as fast as the waking time alone) but I'm not doing that on most days for climate reasons

freilanzer• 2 years ago

I can sleep in my bed and I can read everywhere at home. Being forced to commute is not an advantage just because I can do both of those things in a worse way than at home.

LightBug12• 2 years ago

Same. But that's ALL you can do. At its best, hybrid or full remote opens up a whole world of healthy, fun lifestyle options - which cost a company ... NADA (unless they're shitty companies)

mezzie210• 2 years ago

Even if I had access to public transit, I'd be driving every day because I'm on immunosuppressants and public transit is a germ pool. Same reason I'm not a fan of working in person with parents of small children.

loco5niner• 2 years ago

I used to sleep on the MAX(train) in Portland on my commute. I would never do that today. Too much crazy stuff happening in Weird Portland.

Besides, the sleep you get on a train/commute is not quality sleep.

NeutralCrane3• 2 years ago

Yes. For much of the US a train isn’t even an option.

DiggyJohnson13• 2 years ago

Commuting over an hour each way, if you're not exageratting, is so much an outlier that it makes these discussions difficult to talk about. Same way the real estate conversations on Reddit always devolve into "sounds good from my perspective in [New York|San Francisco].

iamhamm• 2 years ago

I've personally always had at least an hour each way. What are commutes like where you are?

asadotzler• 2 years ago

Average one-way commute time SF Bay Area: 30-45 minutes

For many, 60-90 minutes each way are not uncommon.

schmorptron• 2 years ago

Unionize!

kazinator• 2 years ago

So, those employees who feel like working six days or more per week are free to make those days remote? How nice!

If you work -1 remote days, and 5 in-office days, you can achieve the four day work week!

karaterobot3• 2 years ago

“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy wrote. “That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration (you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems), and a shared commitment to each other.”

When I hear a C-level saying they want to operate like a startup, the text processor in my head just replaces that with "we've decided to cut a lot of you, and work the rest like dogs". My condolences to everyone at Amazon whose lives are being turned upside down by this stupid decision, although I guess you knew the company you were working for.

Come to think of it, most of the startups I've worked for were WFH. None of them had assigned desks.

xyst4• 2 years ago

What sucks is that other companies will follow Amazon because “Amazon did it”. Other company I worked at went to a “hybrid model” to be followed at the end of last year. Ended up “silent quitting” by using up all of my PTO and sick time which allowed enough time to get my bonus and find a new job. Of course I was put on a PIP but by that time I was already gone, lol.

guywithahat4• 2 years ago

Silent quitting is a great way to permanently ruin your reputation. Even if you never get a job there again, you could never ask your coworkers or management for a job. Silent quitting is indistinguishable from being a bad employee.

From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results. If companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality up while not paying rent I’m sure they would, it’s just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet.

Edit: My experience with WFH has to do with software development. It may work for other fields, however WFH often attracts the wrong kind of employee which is why I don't do it anymore. If you can't be bothered to drive 10 minutes into work you probably aren't that motivated and you probably won't stay that long.

xyst4• 2 years ago

I don’t care about references from that dog shit place filled with micromanagers and corporate grinders working on projects that have no meaning and add zero value to company and the world. Hence, silent quitting. RTO just gave me the push to move on from the bullshit.

From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work

Corporate profits tell another story

People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results

Anecdotal. What backs up this claim? Just your personal experience? What’s your data?

companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality up while not paying rent I’m sure they would, it’s just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet

What do you think happened during COVID-19…

Have seen many companies reduce their corporate building costs due to shift to remote work. In some cases, it was eliminated entirely the following year.

tester756• 2 years ago

From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results. If companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality up while not paying rent I’m sure they would, it’s just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet.

There is good thing called stock based compensation.

Because why would I want to sabotage MY money?

Of course it aint perfect.

op00to5• 2 years ago

I’m plenty invested in my company’s success and have worked both in office and for the last 15 years remotely. This is hogwash. Hire shitty people, get shitty results. All you get from being in the office is more opportunities to play hallway politics.

tamimio• 2 years ago

From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work.

Apparently, it does work with thousands of consultants and contractors, and it did work during the years of lockdowns. We didn’t see any productivity decrease, generally speaking. But we all know the whole back-to-office thing is just because C-levels want to justify the grants from banks, investors, etc., by showing a “working office with people in there.” Middle managers wanted it back because, as it turned out to everyone, they were useless, so it was a justification for their positions. Additionally, real estate landlords lobbied to push it back because, without rent income, they wouldn’t be able to pay it back to the banks. The government has its reasons too, because it’s easier to focus on building small hubs and maintaining infrastructure for these offices instead of starting to work on rural areas. It ultimately shifts the power dynamics from the government, landlords, and banks to the average person, and that was an absolute no-no direction for them and had to be killed early on.

dudul2• 2 years ago

From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results.

What a terrible take. I've been remote for 7 consecutive years at a couple of companies and I was always invested in their produce. You know why? Cause they gave me RSUs so I actually cared about the value of the stock. Nothing to do with being remote or not.

givemeethekeys2• 2 years ago

ruin your reputation

How would this happen, exactly?

jacobgkau• 2 years ago

If you can't be bothered to drive 10 minutes into work

Nice strawman. It's closer to an hour for a lot of people, though (especially with employers that value cheap rent over being in a good part of town).

horns4lyfe6• 2 years ago

It’s cute that you think most people can afford to live 10 minutes from work in cities.

horns4lyfe6• 2 years ago

I’m invested in my company because they pay me. If you think there’s anything else you’re deluded. Just give people RSUs if you’re so worried about that.

linotype3• 2 years ago

Tell me more about where I can find a place for under $2 million where I can commute to work in 10 minutes. I’ll wait.

raverbashing3• 2 years ago

From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work.

Your inability to WFH is not shared by most people. Sounds like you were the one quiet quitting by default (even if not realizing it).

consteval19• 2 years ago

Silent quitting is indistinguishable from being a bad employee

So? Plenty of people are bad employees and they're actually trying. Who cares if you, or I, am a bad employee for selfish reasons?

phito• 2 years ago

Terrible takes all the way

lopkeny12ko• 2 years ago

Before the pandemic, everyone was working in-office 5 days a week. The pandemic is now over. Why is it so controversial to return to what everyone was already doing previously?

Kudos to Jassy for being a leader in this space.

ryukoposting7• 2 years ago

Because working in an office at most tech companies sucks, and now that it isn't the norm, there's no good reason to accept that it should be.

If you work in-office for an American tech prime, there's a good chance your office is in one of the following cities: SF, LA, Seattle, NYC, Chicago, Houston, DC. Commuting in all of these cities is absolutely miserable. It benefits neither you nor your employer to spend multiple hours per day not working, not tending to personal matters, but simply getting to and from a job you could just as easily do at home.

If you're a parent, working from home makes it easier to be present as a parent. Commuting can be exhausting, and the energy saved by working from home can be put towards your kids.

It makes the logistics of everyday tasks easier. Because I no longer piss away 20 hours a week on the L going into downtown Chicago, I now have 20 more hours per week to work out, do the laundry, buy groceries, and cook healthy meals. This is a flat-out benefit of remote work that simply cannot be offered by any employer that demands in-office work. Paychecks can't buy time.

Tech companies are also are prone to the most backwards forms of "modern office design," which universally result in a distracting and uncomfortable work environment. There's also research to suggest that they result in higher rates of illness among workers [1]. So, even if your commute doesn't suck, there's a good chance your office does suck.

None of this is to say that you shouldn't be allowed to work in an office if you want to. I sure as hell don't. I'm happier, healthier, and more productive than I ever was in an office environment.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10269830/

adamredwoods2• 2 years ago

Because as humans progress, so must our working conditions. The onus of working in the office is ALL on the employee:

- getting to the office (commute time is never paid time)

- figuring out a mode of travel (parking, gas are rarely paid, transit sometimes)

- child / senior care (major cost for parents)

- biology issues (quality of bathrooms, quality of kitchen, bringing items to/from work, flatulence, illnesses)

ketchupdebugger• 2 years ago

because its a regression. WFH is better for a lot of folks. It saves time and money. Being forced back to office is like taking a pay cut as well as wastes 2 hours each day.

brandon2722• 2 years ago

Why is it so controversial to return to what everyone was already doing previously?

One reason is that they aren't returning to what they were previously doing: many companies have sold off office space and have removed dedicated work spaces in favour of hybrid-friendly environments and 'hot desks'.

fer• 2 years ago

Before the pandemic, everyone was working in-office 5 days a week. [...] Why is it so controversial [...]?

Because it is a lie. Teams managed themselves and trusted their members.

People who were virtual employees, or whose team was in a different location than theirs, have been let go at different points of the layoffs/RTO mandates, when they existed before the pandemic.

This is a regression to a point that never existed in Amazon's history.

npalli• 2 years ago

The actual announcement

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...

An equally important update was reducing number of managers which nobody seems to care about :-)

   So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.

Olreich6• 2 years ago

Strategic of them to include the 5-day a week to hide the 15% managerial layoffs. 1 in 8 managers need to be converted into ICs. The average manager has around 8 ICs with the "two-pizza team" ideal, so that means 2% overall layoffs. Not huge, but managers generally cost more than ICs, so there's likely outsized salary impact. Organizational changes will surely reduce productivity as everyone gets shuffled too.

moomoo11• 2 years ago

I honestly wonder how useful most managers are..

Just anecdotal ofc but over my career having worked for 14 managers.

Half of them were eventually fired.

Most of them sucked at rallying teams, mainly because who the f is going to follow a doofus cringe lord?

2 managers stand out to me in my career. I’m really good friends with one of them that I’ve been in contact with for over a decade now.

Most were basically checkbox checkers who sucked at engineering and faked their way into “people management” only to be found out that they just plain suck as employees. I actually checked LinkedIn just now of a few of those bad ones and they work at small companies and have made no upward progress. Not surprised honestly.

Keep in mind I worked at a pretty good place, not a noob tier place.

rsynnott5• 2 years ago

I mean, how long does the average manager stay at Amazon? If the average tenure is four years, say, then more or less all they have to do to achieve the above is to stop hiring managers for the next two quarters.

unicornhose• 2 years ago

Thankfully they can still work from home the other two days.

cactusplant7374• 2 years ago

That made me laugh. Thanks.

lijok• 2 years ago

“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy wrote.

Who’s “we”?

sankyo• 2 years ago

It is great when claim everything works better when we are all in the same office together and then expect you to get online in the off hours because of an outage, or work with teams from other offices 3 timezones away on a project, or work with offshore to save money.

ezekiel68• 2 years ago

Yeah, honestly this looks like a poorly-disguised mass layoff.

fnordpiglet7• 2 years ago

As a former senior person at aws although I left on good terms I will never return there and this stuff cements the deal for me. I need a company that respects my decisions on how I do best in my career and not surveil of police my work style. As long as I am a trusted leader who delivers results that customers need why does anyone care where my bag of water is physically located? Who are you to tell neurodivergent employees to suffer? People who had an organ transplant to expose themselves to death? How petty are the tyrants.

hintymad8• 2 years ago

How petty are the tyrants.

I would consider the relationship between a company and its employees as alliance. If both have the same goal and compatible style, then they work together. Otherwise, they part ways. Tyranny is possible only with violence, while employment is at will, at least in Amazon.

benoau• 2 years ago

Tyranny is pissing in a bottle lest ye be fired for malfeasance.

Now the rest of the workers can experience it!

the_lonely_road• 2 years ago

You will have a hard time being heard over the hoards content to tear down their houses out of anger that they are not palaces.

lanstin• 2 years ago

I have an expectation of democratic rule outside of work. In work I expect to be told what to do top down. If tyranny is too strong a word, how about feudal or dictatorship or top down? Not only is this unpleasant it is information theoretical inefficient, and greatly damages espirit de corps and the development of a group dynamic that inspires the best performance people are capable of.

monadINtop4• 2 years ago

I consider you wrong since an alliance presupposes a unity of interest whereas the interest of a worker (get more money, work less or maybe more nuanced: have as much control over own work as possible, have as much exposure to fruits of work as possible) is directly opposed to that of what you call the "company" or, really, the owners of the company (compel the worker to produce as much as possible, and pay as low a wage as possible to extract as much profit as possible).

Brushing this dynamic under the rug by conceptualizing it as a mutual agreement of "I will work for you for this wage" is at best glib, even if we ignore the elephant in the room that the worker doesn't choose to work since unfortunately we all need to buy food and a place to live, doesn't choose his wage since the entire labor market is practically the same and not in his power to influence nor shop for an alternative (we don't live in a text book where people can make purely rational economic choices since are born to a context and we live in places and have access to a given pool of resources etc) and lets not even glance at the lack of political alternative to this economic arrangement in this historical flash of time.

__MatrixMan__• 2 years ago

If you need to refer to a system where those at the top don't give their reports adequate leeway to get results but instead choose to make all-encompassing proclamations about how the entire hierarchy must behave, then "tyranny" isn't so bad a word.

Money is just violence that got too old to carry a sword anymore, so the threat if violence and the threat of termination are pretty well linked. It's only different in that once the money runs out the violence will come from elsewhere.

fnordpiglet7• 2 years ago

For me it’s at will absolutely and I won’t work there no matter how much money they offered me to go back.

For most people it’s only at will in one direction. They need the job, often for home and board, and always for insurance benefits. Saying it’s at will ignores the worker needs the benefits more than management needs the individual worker. Management absolutely uses that asymmetry to force people to do their petty whims. If you’ve ever worked for anyone else before we all know this to be true. It’s so true and pervasively experienced it’s almost vacuous to even say it.

I for one am pretty sick of the endless litany of bullshit in my career and am probably going to go it on my own again or just retire. Almost no one is so lucky as me and that’s a fucking tragedy of epic proportions.

sorenjan4• 2 years ago

How petty are the tyrants.

Having to work in an office for $300k/year is an incredibly privileged position. There are so many people that have it much, much worse, and calling it tyranny is so out of touch it's a bit distasteful. I'm not disagreeing with the points that you probably can get your work done remotely or that companies should respect their employees, but tone it down a few notches. And the organ transplant thing should be a conversation about social security and health benefits in general, it's not really a remote work issue.

adamking• 2 years ago

Having to work in an office for $300k/year

More like $98k/year on average

givemeethekeys2• 2 years ago

300k a year is what they get paid for making the company 3-4x as much, if not even more. If they can generate that value remotely, then being forced to waste another 1-2 hours of your life every day to go to the office should be worth even more pay.

haliskerbas2• 2 years ago

Just because we have it great as tech workers and much of the rest of labor is absolutely fucked up in many ways, doesn't mean we should stop fighting to make our situations even better and use the privilege to advocate for those in worse situations.

fnordpiglet7• 2 years ago

I didn’t ask for pity I pointed out their requirements are petty and in the labor market it’s my choice as a worker to not take their offers no matter how much money they throw around. I am fortunate that I’m in demand and make a great living. This gives me more power to refuse their petty mandates, but that in no way makes it any less petty or tyrannical. Most people don’t have my optionality but that doesn’t mean I can’t call things the way they are, because it’s petty and tyrannical for everyone everywhere who doesn’t have to be in the office but is forced to be.

There are petty tyrants in all aspects of our lives and your boss being a petty tyrant spans classes.

Saying organ transplant is a health care issue misses the point. Even with the best health offerings you have to take powerful immunosuppressives for life. People who are severely immune compromised live longer the more they can isolate from infections. But requiring them to go into a crowded open floor plan office in a company mandating presenteeism is a, risk adjusted, significantly worse trade for the immune compromised. (Speaking as someone whose wife is in this situation)

dnhxqd• 2 years ago

Why is it mutually exclusive? There are tyrants in all aspects of life, rich or poor. Privilege has nothing to do with it.

Root_Denied5• 2 years ago

The difference between someone making $50k/year and $500k/year is functionally irrelevant as compared with the C-levels. It's a rounding error to their multi-million comp packages.

There shouldn't be anything distasteful about advocating for yourself and others who rely on their labor to survive, even if they're well paid for that labor.

politician• 2 years ago

This isn't about pettiness. Amazon has a significant investment in commercial real estate in downtown Seattle. The foot traffic supports a thriving ecosystem of shops, restaurants, and housing. When the employees aren't coming to the these buildings, that extended non-Amazon environment withers and impacts city politics.

Amazon employees must return to the office because otherwise downtown Seattle decays even further.

oblio8• 2 years ago

This can happen regardless, it's worse than Detroit, which ar least had 3 big companies supporting it.

Seattle needs to hedge.

fnordpiglet7• 2 years ago

On the other than people working at home frequent their neighborhood businesses more leading to broader economic activity. Downtown can take care of itself and can become relevant for a better reason than people are forced against their will to be there. I shed no tears over this - cities evolve over time as we as humans change in structural ways. It’s time to move on.

rachofsunshine• 2 years ago

This is a legitimate thing to want, and I myself prefer remote work and run a distributed company...

...but I don't think it's engaging with the problems involved.

Management exists for a reason. I'm not going to speculate too hard on what that reason is, but it's a profession older than those practiced by just about anyone on this forum, found across every culture, in every part of the world, at every time in history. You could say that it's just the case that managers can abuse and extract value from their employees, and that certainly does occur, but in claiming that that's all that management is you would be arguing for the greatest market failure in the history of mankind. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, but you better have some really strong evidence if you want to argue it's remained irrational independently and in the same way across millennia.

So taking for a moment for granted that management exists and is important, its ease of execution does matter, too. And I think it's more-or-less a truism that it's a lot easier to manage a group of people who are all in a room, who you see every day, whose facial expressions and mannerisms you have a chance to read, whose casual water-cooler (water-bag? why do you have a bag of water? i am so curious) conversations you can overhear or participate in.

Remote work has trade-offs, and like any trade-off, it's in principle legitimate for someone to decide the upsides outweigh the downsides. They might be wrong about the trade-offs they choose to make, but that's not the same thing as being a petty tyrant - it's just running into the limitations of your judgment, which is a very ordinary human thing to do. If you want to convince people to run remote teams, you need to figure out what the trade-offs they're concerned about are and address them, not pretend they aren't there at all.

fnordpiglet7• 2 years ago

As someone who spent half his career in executive management of globomegacorps management is for the most part total bullshit.

Every global company is already working remotely because teams are spread out everywhere. Even if your team isn’t your dependencies are. The more senior you get the more you work on zoom these days. Before the pandemic it was in conference calls.

In fact the half assed in office approach is worse because not everyone is on the same foot. The remote offices from the leaders don’t get to have the on mute influence with the leader. When the call ends the people in the local room with the leader have a little meeting to make the real decisions. That’s grossly inefficient and unfair, to the point it’s started to make me sick to my stomach when I see it happen and I refuse to book rooms for in the office meetings.

In fact a role I had prior to the pandemic was figuring out how to shut down most offices of a megacorp to save money. We called it “bring your own office.” We analyzed deeply the interactions and determined in a global corporation the percent of time we make better decisions in office was less than 20% or 1 day a week. When the pandemic hit our predictions came true. But our elderly CEO couldn’t understand how the strategy he agreed to to save money would work once his ideological hackles got raised so he mandated everyone return 5 days a week even tho we were then 5 years into the bring your own office plan he agreed to. There were no metrics or reason other than, basically, he likes working in the office because it made him successful in his career and he can’t conceive that anyone could do anything different.

There are people who work better in the office and having a small office with plenty of high quality meeting areas and private places to work is smart. Management should allow knowledge workers to work the way they work best and figure out how to maximize team efficiency as managers are required to do. It’s a hard job. I know. I’ve done it. But RTO is a short cut that fails to recognize the incredible inefficiencies inherent in the approach, especially in a global company.

billti• 2 years ago

Who are you to tell neurodivergent employees to suffer?

I found this line telling. I’m wondering if the Hacker News crowd is biased towards the “hacker” stereotype - the socially awkward coder who likes to be left alone and crank out largely independent work.

I have a couple of folks like this in my team, and they are absolutely as good (or better) working from home, as they don’t really talk to others much or contribute in meetings anyway.

But you can’t build a team/org out of those personality types. Much of the creative work and important decisions _does_ happen face to face, let alone the ad-hoc ideation and brainstorming from being in the same space.

I don’t think it’s a requirement that everyone be in the office 5 days a week (I don’t do that myself), but I do see the negatives of letting the team work from home whenever they want and expecting to get the same level of work done over Teams/Zoom calls and email.

dymk4• 2 years ago

Much of the creative work and important decisions _does_ happen face to face, let alone the ad-hoc ideation and brainstorming from being in the same space.

Maybe for you. This is not a universal experience.

adnjoo3• 2 years ago

https://basecamp.com/books/remote

Bluescreenbuddy2• 2 years ago

Bro you were making more money than most people ever will. Unclutch your pearls. That's not tyranny. An annoyance at best.

pb74• 2 years ago

If someone spits in your food, you better eat it because there are millions of people who don’t have food reliably.

op00to5• 2 years ago

I am not looking forward to the influx of ex-Amazon folks in the industry at large. The ones I have worked with have been difficult to work with, having no interest in opinions outside of their own.

dudul2• 2 years ago

I never hire any former Amazon or Facebook. I've worked with some when I was an IC, I even hired a few before I knew better. Never had a positive experience.

op00to5• 2 years ago

Ex googlers seemed much easier to work with. But Amazon - yeesh.

monkaiju• 2 years ago

I had exactly this experience at a previous job. I hadn't seen anyone with such confidence. Even worse he was a self-described 'devops' guy that would tell you he wasn't a 'good coder' but would then strong arm the entire dev team on architecture decisions.

I think about it regularly and while I've seen a lot of overconfident phonies, none of them stuck out quite as much as he did...

mmrryy• 2 years ago

discussion in Blind: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Amazon-5-days-RTO-yQTXm6YQ

gravitronic• 2 years ago

At least they can work from home the other two days!

ycic2• 2 years ago

If you can't be at your desk on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Monday. Coming soon from Amazon.

alistairSH5• 2 years ago

Are Amazon teams co-located?

My team is global. My customers are global.

When I go to the office, I still spend >5 hours/day on Zoom. The only reason I go in is to get out of the house.

giantg2• 2 years ago

Only a matter of time before my company pushes 5 day RTO. Now is the time to do it while the market sucks.

ryukoposting7• 2 years ago

As a firmware engineer, my job demands more "in-office-y" stuff than most other engineers on HN. I have specialized equipment. Hardware. I need to interface with manufacturing. So on.

Guess what? I'm going on 1 year fully remote, and I'm doing great! Turns out, all that fancy equipment can be brought home with you. We deal with a contract manufacturer, and emailing them from home is no harder than emailing them from the office. Instead of being stuck in a concrete jungle, I can go test the product out in a more realistic environment in the park across from my home. It's made me happier, healthier AND more productive. Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Who'da thunk it?

keyle• 2 years ago

I'm in a similar situation, but no hardware involved. Just the flexibility to juggle the kids at pick up times is godsend.

I have much better no-interruption stretches of programming which yields better results overall.

blackeyeblitzar9• 2 years ago

Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign? After all older people have more responsibilities outside of work like children and cannot work through Amazon’s meat grinder or do things like support brutal on call cycles. They’re also the ones with bigger commutes and other barriers to RTO, since they probably live away from city cores to buy houses and have space for a family. Meanwhile young people who live in the middle of downtowns in apartments that are near their work probably are unaffected by this kind of change.

Salgat4• 2 years ago

Same here. I can do all my family errands when I want and plan around them. The best part, at least with the company's interest, is that I work when I feel most productive. Usually 3 hours in the morning, along with a few hours in the evening, I even often work weekends like this. And guess what? During these programming periods, I'm at my most productive. Force me into an office where I'm forced to synch with the office's schedule, and met with constant noise and interruption from others, and my productivity is maybe half.

hellweaver6662• 2 years ago

Same here, thanks to me working from home my wife has been able to return to work (she's a teacher) which has given us more income (and less costs!) and massively improved our financial position!

varispeed5• 2 years ago

My friend's job pays him enough he could lease his own office near where he lives. He has all the "toys" he needs, space for his own research and he doesn't have to waste time to commute.

My view is that offices were a thing because there was no technology to do otherwise and back then equipment was too large / expensive to be kept at employee's place.

Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.

Often the owners also have shares in the business and influence this return to office aka sustain my property portfolio nonsense

deepspace• 2 years ago

Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.

Bingo! Many companies are invested in real estate, and having the ticking time bomb of empty offices vs unsustainable office rent finally implode would be bad financially. Hence, the push everywhere to return to the office.

The benefits of being in a physical office disappeared 20 years ago. COVID accelerated the formation of globally distributed teams. To now go back to commuting 2-3 hours a day, just to do your Zoom calls from and office desk, is insanity.

tbrownaw2• 2 years ago

Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.

My boss goes in to the office even on non-office days.

If I still lived in an apartment - ie, no separate room at the house to use as an office - I'd probably go in most days as well.

Taniwha• 2 years ago

I'm in the same situation, though I design more hardware - I stopped going in most days of the week and avoided those commutes when my son was born, that allowed me to spend more time with him as a toddler. When he started highschool we left the US, he's mid 30s now and I've just retired.

COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then

devsda3• 2 years ago

COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then

The worst part of this RTO phase is those who were previously(pre covid) afforded permanent WFH or x days WFH at the time of hiring are also forced to go to office without exceptions.

analog31• 2 years ago

I'm also in a supposedly "hardware" role. Early in March 2020, the people in my group were all watching the data that were becoming available. My boss came into our work area and said: "You guys can all see what's happening. Let's clear out of here, then we'll figure out what to do."

I went and got my minivan, loaded it with the contents of my lab, and took it home. Then I ordered high speed Internet service. A few days later the schools closed, and my family was all working at home. I already had some lab space at home due to my side business.

Now, I didn't really mind working from work. It's a few minutes bike ride from my house.

Oddly enough, things were happening so quickly that even being a few days or weeks ahead of the game meant that we were charting new territory within our company, which is a large multinational. For instance, with no specific location, we started collaborating beyond our original group. We improved our use of rapid prototyping services. We got a lot done despite, I think, having a more relaxed pace of work. Though I work in "hardware," what that means in this day and age is spending somewhere between 0 and 100% of your time programming. I spent a lot of time programming while looking out the window, taking a break and going for a walk, and so forth.

It was also comforting to go back, eventually. I like the people. It could get lonely at home. I'm definitely not a introvert.

(Edited to clarify: March 2020)

teekert• 2 years ago

I was in a role that did require a lot of talking, in a large health tech company. Oddly enough Covid was a great leveler for the org and I found myself reaching out to people across the world and learning about how Africa leads in certain market areas because of their straight-to-mobile attitude (midwives are fully mobile with cloud connected ultrasound devices in their backpack), I connected with India and that one guy in our team from the US promoted from on a laptop in a corner to a full meeting member. Shortly he was showing his home and we hung out after meetings.

For someone expected to create a lot of IP, this was great.

And then management started screaming we should get back the office. Which I did enjoy... For about 1-2 days a week.

PeterStuer2• 2 years ago

The craziest thing I saw was a digitalization project that was on planning for months and scoped to take a year bwith a sizable team be realized by 3 people over the weekend.

True nescessity has a way of cutting through all the usual crap.

ofcrpls• 2 years ago

Telematics HW during peak pandemic. Went from an Group office who's top eNPS opportunity was remote work requests - It went from not letting the Services guys telecommute in once a day to the hardware guys orchestrating a lab move to a new office location and enabling remote connectivity to test benches while shipping out 3 new products polling in test data from vehicles across the 50 states.

RTO is an eyewash.

ldenoue• 2 years ago

Same here: I work on speech for a big company and working from the office is terrible. I had to squat the restroom 3 times yesterday so I could work (talk to my phone!)

At home I am so much more productive and zero commute.

Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office (doing email, reading other docs, meetings which are always with remote folks anyway but at least they see a genuine meeting room or phone booth behind my pretty face, so I guess that counts? ;)

esafak• 2 years ago

Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office

An added benefit of this is that it makes working from home look more productive, if they're keeping score :)

highcountess3• 2 years ago

What all these discussions about home vs office work largely miss (I’ve seen a few tangential mentions) is that so much of this debate has a far different priority driving it than people think, it’s both capital investments and system pressure to keep the house of cards standing that is driving all meaningful measure of this issue and corporations/CEOs are willing to sacrifice the aloneness and even productivity and profitability of their employees in order to maintain the overall system and serve the central planners in the government that are pressuring them to get the commercial real estate house of cards stabilized by utilizing the floor space … even climate change and destruction of the planet’s climate (if we can believe the inconsistent propaganda in that regard) be damned.

It’s time to shut up and “toe the line” as I’ve been told from regarding this kind of matter. If it chokes down to it, you could even be a specialized and expert in the field that they absolutely need; if you defy them, at least be ready to move on or even be laid off. In this kind of authoritarian system, nothing else takes priority over obedience … no matter how much your corporate “family” would be cutting itself deep in the flesh. I know this from experience and repeated observation.

mattnewton• 2 years ago

If that were true, I would expect a lot of smaller CEOs hiring away talent that likes to work remotely.

But I think the truth is much simpler- the C suite is primarily made of extroverted people-persons who work better in person and think others will too.

blindluck3• 2 years ago

I love a conspiracy but I dont see how the incentives align.

Real estate leases and ownership is a sunk cost. Office space can be relet. And even Amazon wont make a dent in the office realestate marker (warehouses, maybe...)

They want people back in because either they think it makes the company more productive, to get people to quit rather than layoffs, or to give the appearance of doing something. Knowing Amazon they probably have some data to drive the decision too.

RNAlfons• 2 years ago

if we can believe the inconsistent propaganda in that regard

How is anything about those fact "inconsistant" when besides a few fringe scientists, everybody in the sector knows that for a fact.

euix• 2 years ago

Well I mean, look back to the Covid mandates - if employees were compliant than, I see no reason why management wouldn't think they would be compliant now. Having worked middle management in the corporate world - corps are self-selecting, all the people I have met there who have been around 10-20 years already internalized their state a long time ago. My direct boss was quite transparent about this, once referring himself as "a slave for 18 years".

newsclues6• 2 years ago

Should we be giving 25% raises to grocery store and retail workers who don’t have the option of WFH? Lots of people don’t work in an office and still have to commute, shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?

forgotoldacc• 2 years ago

I'm of the opinion that actual hands-on labor is significantly undervalued, so yes.

ryukoposting7• 2 years ago

To this day, I maintain that the hardest job I've ever had was being a carhop at Sonic. All the soul-crushing foodservice insanity, and oh, you're on roller skates too.

The hours I worked and the shit I saw in that job do not compare to any other foodservice job I ever had, let alone other jobs. The tips (which you only got if you weren't on shake duty) were the only part that made it worthwhile, which meant putting on a happy-go-lucky face even if it was covered in grease, shake crap, blood sweat and tears.

tbrownaw2• 2 years ago

What kind of "should" is that?

A relative change in how annoying two classes of jobs are is effectively a relative change in how much they pay, so once the dust settles I'd expect the relative actual dollar pay to end up adjusting itself in response.

Larrikin• 2 years ago

I would argue so what? There are low and high paying jobs that require people to be in person and low and high paying jobs that can be fully remote. Why should it matter to one group where the other group works? I'm sure the pediatric surgeon isn't complaining about having to work from the office.

The only people that actually care where others work are people who realize they are ineffective at their job/their job is pointless without being able to physically bully, the rent seekers, and people who built a business out of being near another business.

I feel a little bad for the small businesses that got lucky by being near a huge office space, but most of those small businesses have been replaced by corporations and small businesses close all the time.

Your grandparents favorite restaurant when they were a kid is probably long gone and it would be nice to have an eventual restructuring of convenience businesses near homes instead of suburban parking lots and office buildings.

7bit2• 2 years ago

That's a straw man if I ever saw one.

mrweasel6• 2 years ago

Moving everyone who realistically can work from home out of the offices benefits those who MUST commute as well. During COVID the roads where empty, cutting my commute in half, even during the later days where many was back at work.

For stores in particular, if people work from home, you can move stores closer to where people live, including those who work in the stores. It's country dependent, but there's no need to have all only huge supermarkets in the outskirts of town, when very few pass through those areas. Then smaller stores closer to the population becomes more relevant.

johnnyanmac9• 2 years ago

Sure, why not? Minimium wage in California is still not a "living wage".

shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?

depends on the company, but they used to stipend transportation and sometimes even car gas and repairs as a benefit. I see nothing wrong with that idea.

Lio• 2 years ago

Well my take, having done retail and factory factotum work when I was younger, is that I'm not going to take one of those jobs ever again.

I've also done jobs where I had to commute into a windowless office and be at my desk at an exact time too.

I'm not going to work for in those jobs again either when WFH is a viable option.

It's a free market and I suspect that Amazon know this. I suspect that RTO is just a way to boost property usage and disguise redundancies. At the very least it means that Amazon don't know how to measure productivity properly if they only way they can ensure it is to force people to sit in a chair each day.

pacija• 2 years ago

In my country it is already visible. New entry level corporate white collar jobs are scarce, and they pay like half or one third of entry level blue collar jobs, which there are plenty of. Just a few years ago it was the other way around.

dickersnoodle2• 2 years ago

Yes, they should.

jebronie2• 2 years ago

Let's also spread human feces around every workplace. It's only fair, because sewage workers also have to deal with feces. Every worker should also be submerged in freezing water for hours each day, because commercial divers also do that.

NoGravitas• 2 years ago

Yes, yes we should.

commandlinefan2• 2 years ago

I keep seeing this line of "reasoning". You realize that me being at home makes your life marginally _better_, don't you? There's one less car on the road creating traffic and pollution. There's one less guy in the line at starbucks. There's more real estate opening up for purposes besides mindlessly filling offices. But you'd rather make your own life marginally worse as long as it makes mine significantly worse.

lincon127• 2 years ago

Why? There's no option to work from home in those positions, so there's no need to pay them extra to work on site. Seems kinda like a roundabout way of asking for better wages for non-office workers.

weq• 2 years ago

Instead of announcing mass layoffs, tech companies use RTO orders.

They are very effective at trimming the fat and creating peons. Also effective in stopping the corperate real estate crash that alot of important trust funds depend on.

Productivity < Compliant Workers < Stock value

WhyNotHugo• 2 years ago

RTO definitely helps reduce workforce and keep the most complaint workers.

I suspect that "most compliant workers" and "most creative engineers" has little overlap.

hiAndrewQuinn3• 2 years ago

I'm a software lead for passenger information systems on public transit. What that means is: The little screen that shows you what your next stop is, and the little voice clip that plays "Next Stop: Braintree" or what have you.

It's not quite as nice a feedback loop as ordinary web dev, but I've found a $20 webcam easily pays for itself many times over in this environment. This becomes all the more important as we start to build more advanced software functionality into our product offerings, which is where I really shine despite my undergrad in electrical engineering (I chose EE, like how aspiring writers choose to major in the classics).

slekker2• 2 years ago

Thank you for your work! I always wondered how those worked, and where the info came from, on top of what it runs on etc -- moreover I love seeing software built that directly improves people's lives :)

thaumasiotes3• 2 years ago

I'm a software lead for passenger information systems on public transit. What that means is: The little screen that shows you what your next stop is

Why does that screen always cycle through a bunch of worthless messages that hide this information, instead of just displaying the useful information ("next stop: X") at all times?

tapoxi• 2 years ago

How does it know what stop it's at? Operator control? Signaling system?

MBTA related, I finally rode in a new Red Line car, are those radically different?

walthamstow2• 2 years ago

I'm extremely curious about the nationality and residence of a person who uses Braintree (a town in Essex UK with a silly name) as an example but purchases things in dollars

lofaszvanitt• 2 years ago

Healthier, for how long?

I can't wait to see the influx of books about this topic 10 years later.

mrweasel6• 2 years ago

Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work!

Companies forget this. I have had coworkers quit because they couldn't deal with transport. One got stressed out of his mind because our office was close to motorway which frequently has accidents and if that happened he might not be able to pick up the kids on time. Others had to leave clients hanging because they had to leave, "daycare closes at 16:30 and it's now 16:00". Working from home it was much more frequent that clients in the late afternoon would get "Sure, give me ten minutes to pick up the kids and we'll finish this today".

camillomiller• 2 years ago

Ok, so why is that. I can't seem to find any reasonable explanation as to why they forget it. Especially considering that data absolutely does not seem on the side of RTO. What's your theory?

kwanbix• 2 years ago

I know this might be an "unpopular opinion," but after working fully remote for three years, I found myself feeling really down. I felt like a prisoner in my own home. So, three months ago, I started a new job with an office that’s 45 minutes away, and I’ve been going in every day—and I couldn't be happier! I do have the option to work from home all days if I want, but honestly, I prefer going to the office. Now, I get to see people, move around more, and when I’m at home, it truly feels different from being at work. It’s been a game-changer for me.

jmyeet2• 2 years ago

Companies forget this.

No, they don't. It's intentional.

Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff. And if someone doesn't quit, they're likely to put up with a whole lot of other grief too. Unpaid extra work (to cover the people who quit), not asking for raises, etc. It's purely money-saving and to instill fear.

In the 20th century, IBM and the Welch era brought in a lot of tools to extract the most from employees like the "up or out" mentality or simply firing the bottom 5-10% of employees every year.

Tech has simply reached that point. You are a replaceable cog. Tech is now in permanent layoffs culture to suppress wages. Laying off 5% of the workforce every year is now a permanent fixture of your company.

Personally, I think engaging in layoffs means you, as an employer, have demonstrated there is insufficient need and you are ineligible to sponsor a work visa in any broadly related area for 24 months. "Broadly related" here means if you layoff a software engineer, you can't sponsor another software engineer. I don't care if one does C++ and the other does Python. I guess you'll have to train somebody.

michaelcampbell2• 2 years ago

Companies forget this.

More that they assume (or demand) the worker is going to pay this cost on their behalf.

pavel_lishin4• 2 years ago

When my employer tried to make us come back to the office, I flat out told them - school dropoff is at 8:30, the next train is at 8:50, so the earliest I can be in the office is 10, if every train arrival is precisely synchronized, which it never is.

And since pick-up is at 4:30, it means I have to leave the office at 3:00 at the absolute latest, lest I incur significant monetary penalties - as well as the ire of the people who care for my child - for late pick-up.

So sure, if you want me in the office for five hours a day - one of which is going to be taken up by going to lunch with my coworkers, since face-time is so important - I'll be there.

Unless there are significant delays, which there usually are, in which case I'll be there for maybe four hours a day, because I'll also have to leave early since delays in the morning frequently mean delays in the evening.

tbomb• 2 years ago

Companies forget this.

they don't care about your commute at all. "if [c-level exec] can make it to the office every day, so can you" not to mention that, said exec does not in fact make it to the office every day

mihaaly2• 2 years ago

Also 2 x 60m commuting + 15-45m (depending on circumstances) of preparation for the office before leaving. So much waste of one's life!

I was steering myself towards remote work since it was technically unfeasible. I worked from home in the late 90's setting up a removable hard drive with data and two computers taking that (office + home), but that WFH was beyond the 40h / week, I had to go in 9 to 5 still. I liked the tasks, so it was exciting.

Then technology improved, chose a position where the pay was only acceptable but I had the chance of working from different places, city, country, so no chance of going in to the office! This was the 2010's.

Then chose an on-site work in a rich country so after getting to know and trust each other I'd have the theoretical possibility of working from a cheap country remotely on a very good salary (or something between the two for mutual benefit). Unluckily I had a stoneheaded and actually very incompetent COO coming from decades of secretarial position in a uni unable to comprehend working elsewhere than in an allocated (rubbish) chair at a particular (rubbish) desk in a cheap office (being cold in winter so my poor female colleagues sat in coats) far from amenities, from 9 to 5. This was her sole understanding what work is, the poor soul. So after some time trying (suffering, fighting) for remote dominant settings I handed in my resignation (they headed a wall anyway with that poor incompetent COO) into the nothing. Having some months of rest before picking up something new. That was 2019 December. Oi! : )

Now I work with colleagues - working on the very same codebase - from 3 continents spanning 18h of time zones, most of them never met. This is nice!

aurareturn9• 2 years ago

It’s great that it works in your case.

But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.

Also, HN posts may have selection bias. Perhaps people who perform better in office do not want to admit it. Perhaps people who work in the office don’t have time or the opportunity to post on HN as often.

Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted. When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.

chgs4• 2 years ago

Is anyone preventing those people working in the office?

johnnyanmac9• 2 years ago

HN is not the majority. But we've seen many studies that say tech WFH has either no/minimal efficiency loss, or even has better productivity. Most tech companies in fact made record revenue (maybe profits, but hard to say) over COVID, so the business logistsics do not imply a loss in production.

Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted.

I mean, there's many reasons an otherwise unwarranted RTO happens. Maybe there's executive conspiracies, but the simplest two reasons are

1. We're still in layoff mode and RTO is a soft layoff without paying out severance. Especially to people that are physically unable to move back

2. managers and executives are in fact not rational actors. They can make decisions based on vibes, or because they need to make some shakeup (any shakeup), or because some other executive made a decision and they are mimicking. I would not take their decisions as gospel. Otherwise they would have shown some shred of evidence of productivity loss (which they cannot, because again: many tech companies have record revenues).

wubrr9• 2 years ago

But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.

Most likely Amazon has zero data supporting the argument that WFH is less productive and probably has data to the opposite. They went from 'we're super data-based, data-oriented and objective' (which was a joke to begin with) to the complete opposite on this topic.

When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.

The reality is you have no idea what you're talking about, you have no data to back up your claims, you just can't resist licking the boot.

gambiting2• 2 years ago

I'm a game dev and traditionally console devkits were the most guarded secret in the world, you had to have special locks in your office, only keep them away from the windows with areas with controlled access etc etc etc. Luckily during the pandemic the requirements have relaxed and I can work from home and have console devkits at home, turns out it's not such a big deal. Devkits just brick themselves if they don't have regular access to home servers anyway.

thaumasiotes3• 2 years ago

So, if you have a power failure, your devkits all commit suicide?

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

Yep, I'm doing firmware work from home too; I have a create with the hardware with me which I bring with me when I go to the office, which is basically never. Weird to think this was considered 'impossible' before by many.

naikrovek• 2 years ago

ah-hah, but have you considered the executive's perspective on this? that perspective is "no."

the only reason executives really dislike remote work, is because as "face people" they have never had a place for it. It doesn't benefit them in any way, so how could it possibly benefit anyone else? they have never had a position like yours. they both deeply understand that no one is like them, and bizarrely believe that everyone works like they do and benefits from working in the office.

I have worked closely with executives throughout my career and the only common thread between them all is the intense hatred for telecommuting. I have never met an executive which understands it well enough to understand its place in their work environment. These same executives frequently called me after hours asking for work to be done immediately; work that could only be done in the office because that's where all of my digital tools were located and where the network connectivity was, etc. Zero recognition that one of those things could solve the other.

Well, it's that, or they just want to be dicks and give out orders. That could be it, too.

It's probably 50% of each. "executives get benefits, plebes do not."

throw0101a2• 2 years ago

Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Who'da thunk it?

I think I saw it mentioned in an old HN thread once, but I'd like to see a study between the WFH desire and its relationship with (a) commute times, and (b) commuting method: walking, cycling, driving, urban transit, commuter rail, etc.

If your commute was a 15-30 minute (one-way) bicycle ride, how different would you feel about going into the office more often?

ryukoposting7• 2 years ago

I live in Wisconsin, so 30-60 minutes of cycling year-round is a non-starter. I'd much rather take public transit, since then I can read a book or daydream.

Cthulhu_4• 2 years ago

I'd say one counter-argument to bringing stuff home, outside of the obvious one like it being a supercooled quantum computer, is if it's valuable stuff; say you've got 100K of gear at home, who is responsible / whose insurance gets billed if it gets stolen or damaged? Does the insurance require additional security measures on your house to insure it? Who pays for that?

Anyway that depends entirely on how specialized your specialized equipment would be. I had a quick browse of your profile, it looks like you're a firmware engineer so I assume what you have is a few thousand worth of electronics hardware like oscilloscopes and that other magic stuff that firmware people have so nothing that would break the bank or fall outside of your homeowner's insurance, but you get what I mean.

That said, most non-hardware IT people have laptops nowadays that they are expected to take home, I've got two current-day macbooks so that's at least six grand of hardware sitting at home, plus the rest. I should double check my insurance <_<. At least the macbooks themselves are covered by my employer's insurance.

synergy20• 2 years ago

similar situation here, I'm also a firmware engineer for the most part, and I thought it's very hard to make remote job to work(e.g. comparing to web developers,etc) since I need hardware access. Turns out all I need is a home lab with a few basic equipment(scopes,etc) and a few boards, worked well so far. The key is to get the job done.

polishdude20• 2 years ago

Is your company hiring? This sounds like a dream job. Having a little home hardware lab.

killingtime74• 2 years ago

Soon it will be 6 days a week

drawkbox• 2 years ago

Looks like they have until January to change to fully on-site. That isn't much time to make life changes that allow using 2+ hours extra per day that was typically remote.

The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy.

So on top of all the hustle of end of year, everyone will need to frantically prepare for return to office one day into the new year. Just seems a bit heartless.

Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes. I just don't understand the need to force RTO so drastically.

insane_dreamer3• 2 years ago

Some companies used this to reduce their headcount without having to fire people. Maybe Amazon is doing the same thing.

jtriangle• 2 years ago

It's a great way to create layoffs without having to spook investors by laying people off.

squigglydonut7• 2 years ago

This is what I believe as well. It's an assuming narrative that allows them to say that it wasn't them it was the employee choice.

FuckButtons• 2 years ago

“Just seems a bit heartless” which, from everything I’ve read about Amazon as an employer, sounds completely on brand.

akira2501• 2 years ago

Just seems a bit heartless.

The writing has been on the wall for a while. Aside from that, Amazon decided to convert their workforce to work from home rather quickly, and shelled out the money and the effort in order to actually achieve that.

Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes.

If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.

makeitdouble• 2 years ago

If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.

To put it another way: "Look for a remote position elsewhere and quit"

That has been the return to office dynamic since the COVID emergency stopped.

rconti2• 2 years ago

If you WERE hired into a remote job, then you also don't have any rights to expect or demand to stay remote. At least, in an at-will state.

hansvm• 2 years ago

If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.

This is being mandated for a number of employees who were hired remote as well.

Separately, why not? I generally have an expectation that I won't have to move across the country from one office to another. Especially not without some good reason. Especially not without literally any reason. Especially not if I'm going to have to foot the bill for switching houses, either disrupt my spouse's career or spend time apart, switch kids' schools in the middle of the year, .... Employers are (often) within their rights to do so, but the knowledge that Amazon does this sort of thing frequently is precisely why I work elsewhere.

realmike33• 2 years ago

Take this with a grain of salt but I read on a similar Reddit post the return to office is mainly due to the tax incentives the city/county/state provided Amazon for having their offices located there. The Reddit user made a claim which Amazon could only receive those tax benefits if their workers actually worked in person at the location. ---

I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.

burnte3• 2 years ago

I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.

Holding on to what is now an outdated view of worker utilization might help them for a couple years with these tax incentives, but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit. They're going to have to pivot to having less commercial real estate eventually.

shagie3• 2 years ago

It's a very reasonable argument. And even if it isn't something now (where Amazon gives Seattle the bird... wait, that's San Francisco that got the bird from the bird), it is something that would impact their ability in the future to negotiate tax breaks with cities.

There's also the question of even if remote work was more productive on the whole (and I believe this to be true) and that these productivity gains come from the more senior workers who are able to identify tasks that they need to complete and effectively shut the door on the office and focus ... while also being able to handle other things at home (being more productive because you can put a load of laundry in at noon or being able to get something to eat without having to go all the way to the break room)...

So, grant that on the whole productivity is higher with WFH for mid level and senior level individual contributors ... junior ICs may be suffering quietly without more direct mentorship, the listening in on ad-hoc hallway meetings, managers being able to pick up on work stress more easily.

It would be very easy to imagine a conversation at some director level (where I'm making up the numbers)... "From 2020 to 2024, we've seen the number of junior ICs advance to mid level drop from 20% to 16% compared to 2016 to 2020. This is a declining trend and when looked at year over year 2020 to 2021 had 8% advancement while 2023 to 2024 only showed 4% advancement. Furthermore, the senior ICs are comfortable in their role and the number of them moving up to management has dropped from 5% to 3% in the 2020 to 2024 time frame. If this continues, we may be looking at a lot of unsatisfied junior developers who are not progressing and a lot of satisfied senior developers and leads who would traditionally shift to the management track... well, not take that step in their career progression."

Yes, that's a just-so story. I find it to be a believable one.

So even if everything is great with remote work currently for productivity, some trends may be showing a problem years down the road where people are not improving and the company as a whole is stagnating (even more).

----

(edit / addition) - from last year, that tax revenue thing with some numbers: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/community/amazon-return-to-...

Aurornis2• 2 years ago

The Reddit user made a claim

Did they provide any links or evidence at all? Reddit is a hotbed of misinformation and claims like this proliferate and grow on Reddit with little basis in reality all the time. Unless someone can find compelling evidence that this is both true and a substantial tax credit, I would assume it’s just another product of the Reddit misinformation machine.

Even if it is true, the majority of the RTO is a transition from hybrid to 5 days onsite. I doubt they would have allowed hybrid to begin with if it impacted some hypothetical giant tax breaks.

Olreich6• 2 years ago

Usually the tax incentives are relatively minor and are long term as well. The more important thing with the real-estate strategy is that there's a lot of capital and personal clout wrapped up in these massive building projects and investments. Amazon recently had 2 shiny new buildings built in Arlington, VA. They have a bunch of buildings that were built in Seattle. There's definitely tax incentives involved, but those tax incentives are tiny compared to the billions of capital poured into the buildings.

shusaku• 2 years ago

There’s no shortage of conspiracy theories online trying to explain return to office policies, when the simplest explanation “managers like being in the same room as employees” has sufficient explanatory power.

raverbashing3• 2 years ago

I doubt it, and actually, with NYC it's the exact opposite

hackernewds3• 2 years ago

Not to mention, Amazon has vested real estate that is massively depreciating along with the entire corporate real estate market

ipaddr6• 2 years ago

They wouldn't need the tax breaks if they didn't have the big office. Chicken and egg.

wnc3141• 2 years ago

I think this is a backdoor layoff that doesn't spook investors.

greenthrow• 2 years ago

Investors love layoffs right now. It's actually to avoid paying severance.

jogu• 2 years ago

For what it’s worth the change isn’t from full remote to 5 days a week. It’s from 3 days in office to 5 so it shouldn’t be as drastic of a shift.

blackeyeblitzar9• 2 years ago

Yep. The plan to enforce this in January, after Q4 when people are busy at work (with Amazon’s Q4 peak retail sales period) and with the holidays, makes it clear that Andy Jassy intends to make this an impossible change. He just wants to force people out - maybe to do a layoff without paying severance. Or maybe it is a way to select for young people that live in downtown cores near Amazon offices, and get rid of older people or people with families. You know, people that live away from city centers, have commutes, and cannot deal with an abusive RTO policy. I hope they face lawsuits and also that talent flees.

The only reason Andy Jassy and Amazon can get away with this is because they have enough market power that they don’t have to care about consequences. In other words, they are too big to fail, and immune to the negative effects of this that may result from real competition. It’s time for them to also face anti trust regulation. As a customer, I’m going to cancel Prime and stop shopping there entirely. I don’t like rewarding companies that set illogical trends across the entire industry.

hackernewds3• 2 years ago

Not to mention, employees have bought home and shifted to other cities and neighborhoods

mikro2nd• 2 years ago

It's a way to get rid of people without looking like you're laying off.

Sadly it's the most competent that leave first and fastest.

iLoveOncall3• 2 years ago

I think you got the messaging here wrong. He's not saying that you have 3 months to move houses, he's saying you have 3 months to move jobs.

Productivity has cratered since he implemented RTO, so to believe that this is anything but a way to get rid of employees without severance package is extremely naive.

bagels• 2 years ago

Where do you get 2 hours from?

manvillej• 2 years ago

just 2 days after they release their Q4 results. there will be a grace period and then they'll start firing.

They're expecting subpar Q4 results.

398968803• 2 years ago

If you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely. This was understood, and will be moving forward as well.

This is Amazon having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can work remotely 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background.

I found this paragraph to be somewhat galling since, like, if you're sick you shouldn't work at all, you should be focussing on getting well. Ditto if your kid is sick. Raising one or more whole other human/s is a super important thing. One result I saw from the pandemic is fathers doing more of the childcare, and what full-RTO like this fundamentally does is shift that dynamic back to where it was before.

Shame on Amazon.

thepasswordis• 2 years ago

Strategic ambiguity.

malfist7• 2 years ago

Amazon _always_ engages in "house always wins" games with ambiguity. They want it both ways

awsguy123• 2 years ago

I would not listen to their PR there is no reasonableness being applied to these rules.

I hurt my knees back in May and tried to get HR to make an exception for me. They shot it down because they said I didn’t have enough documentation. They wanted more paperwork, which meant I had to make another doctor’s appointment. Getting a doctor’s appointment these days takes weeks, so I never managed to get the exception.

How much leeway you get totally depends on your L8 Director. If you’ve got a strict L8, good luck—this policy isn’t going to be applied reasonably. They’re actually looking at badge reports that show how many hours you’re in the office, and managers will call you out if you’re just “coffee badging.”

If you think this kind of thing doesn’t happen, just take a look at Blind. There’s no logic to how these rules are applied. Meanwhile, if you go to an L8/L10 meeting, try counting how many people are actually in the office. It’s a joke, especially when all the <L7 exceptions have been pulled.

toomuchtodo15• 2 years ago

I would recommend speaking to an ADA attorney with regards to civil action, as well as potentially filing an ADA complaint with the federal government.

https://www.ada.gov/file-a-complaint/

hackernewds3• 2 years ago

There has been a shift since the 9-5 meant you leave your laptop at work, and were virtually unreachable.

Next, you were reachable so managers especially also bothered you at 7PM (I even sometimes had meetings at a FAANG). In exchange, employees got the freedom often to work in their desired 40 hours as long as things got done.

Now, companies want it both ways where you come in 9-5 AND they want non office hours productivity as well. Somehow we've forgotten the paystubs and employee offer letters say "40 hours of work"

firtoz• 2 years ago

In the UK anywhere I tried to become an employee in the last 5 years also asked me to sign the "I am ok to work more than 40 hours" addendum, and it was a condition with the offer.

hparadiz• 2 years ago

Been working remote since before COVID and this hasn't ever been a thing for me. I just don't reply after hours. At one gig where I ended up being laid off (it was Playboy) I would stress about not doing this or that but in the end my performance had nothing to do with it. They sold the store I was working on and that was that. Of course the 401k "match" that took 24 months to vest was entirely worthless. Now I don't even consider any equity that doesn't vest immediately as part of my TC.

These companies don't care about you at all. Put in your hours and always keep looking for the next thing.

rjh29• 2 years ago

In Australia it is a legal right to not be bothered by your employer outside of working hours. I don't know if you can opt out of it, but it certainly helps change public opinion of what is expected of employees.

jbs789• 2 years ago

Before that it was the BlackBerry (my experience), and before that something else (presumably the pager, telephone, telegram, man on horseback?).

I just think it’s important we are all deliberate about what is important to us and therefore what we agree to. If the precedent is set early, it helps tremendously, in my experience.

DebtDeflation• 2 years ago

I especially liked "if you were on the road seeing customers" as if they're reluctantly granting an RTO exception to people meeting with customers and those employees should be thankful for it.

pc867• 2 years ago

I think it's more instances like "if you're traveling and you get back to your home city at 9am don't feel like you need to be in the office by a certain time, just WFH that day." Obviously if you're traveling as part of your job you're not going to be working from the office during that travel.

Salgat4• 2 years ago

My wife's company does this hybrid office bullshit at a fortune 500 and they not only track the days you come in, but they will bring it up in annual reviews if it hits a certain threshold.

antimemetics• 2 years ago

What I don’t understand is why people tolerate this. Of course companies will do this and worse if people let them.

aikinai• 2 years ago

Who will bring it up? I've never worked at a company where managers are suddenly assholes who diligently apply unreasonable policies. My experience is committees make all sorts of policies, but unless consequences are doled out by some automated system, no on actually cares or follows the policy.

At my current company, there's a place I think I can see my reports' office attendance, but I've never actually checked it. Why would I? I'm not even a WFH zealot myself; I just don't see why I should care if they're in the office.

jensensbutton2• 2 years ago

You mean an employer set an expectation, checks to see if people are meeting the expectation, and holds them accountable if they aren't? What incredible bs.

mxkopy• 2 years ago

From the CEO’s memo:

“(you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems)”

Somewhat telling that he’d use a congenital disorder as a metaphor for how work should be done at Amazon

mjlee• 2 years ago

I'm not defending the CEO's memo but "joined at the hip" is a very common idiom and in normal (and this) usage has no connotation with conjoined twins. Attack the opinion all you like, but this isn't productive.

yard2010• 2 years ago

"When your boss is asking how are you when you're sick, he doesn't really care about you. He's thinking 'this asshole lying in bed costing me the money'"

sokoloff2• 2 years ago

In over 20 years of managing people, I’ve never once had that thought.

I may have a dual motive for wishing for you to “get well soon”, but even that is majority personal.

dbtablesorrows5• 2 years ago

How does leave policy work in your companies? Where I work you can use that leaves quota for something else (i.e taking a vacation). So its gonna "cost money" the same way.

jajko• 2 years ago

Is sick leave paid in US by law (till certain extent of course) from some employer's mandatory insurance, or some sort of corporate perk like extra paid holidays? And what about when having sick child?

Even in Europe I've seen various mix, some countries ie don't pay first 3 days of sick leave, some do but pay only some minimal compensation, some do full for X days etc. But it was never completely on the employee, meaning no pay. Covid shuffled this a bit so may be different now.

xienze• 2 years ago

Is sick leave paid in US by law (till certain extent of course) from some employer's mandatory insurance, or some sort of corporate perk like extra paid holidays? And what about when having sick child?

For the kinds of jobs we’re talking about here (corporate Amazon, college education required, salaried) you basically just call in sick and that’s it. You didn’t work but you still get paid your normal salary. This is the flipside of salaried work obviously — just as there may be times you work over 40 hours and don’t get additional pay, there are times when you work less than 40 hours and still get your regular pay.

Now all of this depends on circumstances like your manager, but in general, in these kinds of jobs, no one is running around tracking your sick days. If you’ve got something more substantial going on then you’ll have to take short-term or long-term disability however.

hnbad• 2 years ago

FWIW in other countries you not only get paid sick leave by law but also paid leave when your kid is sick (only for one parent usually but the idea is that it doesn't matter whether you're sick yourself or have to care for a sick kid because the kid can't be expected to take care of themselves).

You don't fix this with corporations having better policies out of the kidness of their heart, you fix it with laws. The reason corporations were moving everything to remote work during the pandemic was that in many places travel was severely restricted and they needed to ensure the operation of the business in the case of a full lockdown. Now that that's no longer an urgent risk, they're rolling everything back because the benefits to the business don't outweigh the drawbacks and everybody else doing it makes it an easier sell (just like the wave of mass layoffs).

starspangled• 2 years ago

Not sure about Amazon, but I work for a big US corporate that is making similar noises. I suspect "sometimes" basically equates to how much your more immediate management chain wants to keep you around, because after a few steps up the chain, you're PYs and percentages rather than an individual. Your more immediate management would have targets, but if 80% of their group's hours are logged in the office, it probably doesn't show up as a red light higher up.

misja1112• 2 years ago

if you're sick you shouldn't work at all

Well it depends how sick you feel. Personally, if I only have a cold, I prefer working (from home) over hanging on the couch and watching Netflix all day long. If I'd have to come to the office I'd report ill though, also because I don't want to contaminate my colleagues.

fundad4• 2 years ago

We have to be in n the office 3-days so if I WFH because sick, I would have to badge in Friday. This is foolish so I take a sick day if I’m not going into the office.

398968803• 2 years ago

If you are happy about your relationship with work such that you would prefer to do it rather than rest, then what I have to say next is not relevant to you. For others whom this might not be the case: You need rest. If your only or primary form of rest is Netflix on the couch, such that you feel you “should” work instead, you might consider if other forms of rest might be better for you.

Rest benefits you and your employer. Working while ill is a sure path to burnout. Burnt out employees are less productive and more likely to quit.

It’s okay to not grind 25/8.

jeffwask• 2 years ago

I was at a large manufacturing software company where the CEO came out with a return to office mandate early on except it didn't apply to anyone in my chain of command. My director lived in an RV and worked from that travelling. Every VP above worked from a remote location, so I asked. I was told they all had other arrangements. I left within a month.

398968803• 2 years ago

Yeah. My reaction to the leadership for this kind of mandate would be: you first. Release your badge-in metrics for the C-Suite, then progress down the chain from there. They can all afford houses right next to the office, as well as nannies and private schools and a house on the coast. So when the highest paid employees show they’re in office 5 days a week for a single quarter, then let’s talk.

I doubt this would be the case. The L10s get to wfh from there vacation homes while the L5s get commutes.

palata• 2 years ago

Shame on Amazon.

Wouldn't be the first time, would it?

VyseofArcadia2• 2 years ago

This is Amazon having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can work remotely 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background.

This isn't really different than startups offering "unlimited" time off. That's just

This is Company XYZ having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can take time off 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background.

I think it's widely known that "unlimited" time off is a scam, and people with "unlimited" PTO actually take less time off then their peers who have to accrue PTO the old fashioned way. And yet sometimes I still see people who are enthusiastic about it.

dml21352• 2 years ago

I don't know why people are so convinced that "unlimited" time off is always a scam. I took 7 weeks off last year, it doesn't feel like a scam to me.

collyw2• 2 years ago

if you're sick you shouldn't work at all, you should be focusing on getting well.

Most people could work perfectly well with a bit of a cold. Then covid turned it into a virtue signal to slack off for something trivial.

insane_dreamer3• 2 years ago

Some companies have used this "technique" to reduce their headcount without having to fire people. Maybe Amazon is doing the same thing.

jgalt212• 2 years ago

Tons ICs on here saying how great and productive remote is for them. But, we rarely here the same from managers. Of course, there are more ICs than managers, but the skeptic and manager in me is suspicious of remote work (in the general case).

simoncion14• 2 years ago

But, we rarely here the same from managers.

a) My manager has zero problems with remote working and has found the team to be just as productive. AFAIK, my manager also doesn't waste time posting on HN.

b) Are you SURE we're rarely hearing from managers? It's often that people don't bother to mention whether or not they're a people manager... because why the hell would you?

c) In ANY sufficiently large software business, you WILL have some-to-many geographically distributed teams. If your geographically distributed teams work fine with their asses in company-provided seats, then they can nearly always work fine in with their asses in worker-provided seats.

dboreham3• 2 years ago

Well I'm sure Bezos will appreciate that this is a nice A/B test: will Amazon end up losing business to remote friendly competitors. My guess is: eventually yes. Considering selling some of my AMZN now.

sub7• 2 years ago

Remote work leads to less productivity, this isn't really doubted by anyone not working remotely. At-will employment means either party is free to walk away for reasons like this and that's exactly how it should be.

Surprised it's taken companies this long - I guess it's much harder to rollback than implement this so there will be a set of companies which just suffer on growth/performance and that'll be justification enough for the next cohort to go back to allowing remote work in edge cases only.

aussieguy1234• 2 years ago

If you're good enough to work for Amazon, you're probably also good enough to start your own startup or get equally paying work elsewhere, even in the current market.

I read the internal memo shown in the article and I really dislike how casually he tries to put a positive spin on forcing everyone back into the office with zero mention of the consequences on the employees and no hard evidence on any productivity benefit.

Studies show that out of full time in office, hybrid and remote, in office is the least productive.

I expect to see an exodus of top talent from Amazon and possibly a reduction in the quality of their services.

downrightmike6• 2 years ago

There's only hard evidence that WFH is more productive. They would be plastering the productivity of in office work if there was any.

iamnotsure• 2 years ago

demand the impossible

ShufflerL• 2 years ago

Hmm I am not sure what exactly is Amazon trying to solve for? I reckon only the managers know.. Moving to office-first does not solve the root cause - because it might be some other deep seated issues. If it's really about boosting collaboration and communications in a remote working culture, that requires fostering by the Management especially the company does not start with remote first culture from the get-go.

adamredwoods2• 2 years ago

> Amazon said each team will review their structure as part of the process, and that it’s possible they’ll identify roles that are no longer required.

FpUser• 2 years ago

All it really takes is one coordinated action. They can just tell those execs to go and fuck themselves. If done by everyone then Amazon would have no options but to oblige. Unfortunately people are rarely capable of thi.

hud_dev• 2 years ago

When you’re too cheap to pay severance and too chickenshit to have layoffs

nfRfqX5n• 2 years ago

L6’s got no raises and now this. Gonna see a lot of good people leave I think

smcleod• 2 years ago

I don't know how true it is I've heard that the ratio of managers to engineers has been increasing over the last few years, if that's true this policy lines up with what we've seen from management-heavy / inverted triangle org cultures

jarpschope• 2 years ago

Inverted triangle

That can't be the case my man. Even if there was a manager for every two employees below, the number of all managers at all levels would at most be equal to the number of employees at the lowest level given that:

x (lowest level) = x/2 (first) + x/4 (second) + x/8 (third) + ...

In reality, there are way more employees per manager and the levels of management is not infinite, so the ratio of managers to employees is way less than 1.

horns4lyfe6• 2 years ago

“We’re better when we’re together” So stop offshoring “No not like that”

wannacboatmovie3• 2 years ago

Unsurprisingly, this is one of the most divisive threads I've seen on HN in a long time. Angry people left and right (working on their couch in their underwear no doubt) pettily downvoting every post they disagree with. Chill out, everyone.

EricDeb• 2 years ago

I'd rather see more forced RTO than more off/near-shoring at this point as sad as that is to say.

pm906• 2 years ago

Who do you think is going to replace the workers that leave due to forced RTO?

simoncion14• 2 years ago

Folks on the other side of the globe, or in other such low-cost-of-living areas outside of the US, duh. ;)

pm906• 2 years ago

The original sin of Amazon has always been how it treats its warehouse staff. There is just no way you can isolate that to one part of your org. Eventually some sociopath will see what they can get away with and decide to apply the same principles to everyone.

ayakang31415• 2 years ago

Is this move possibly motivated by what Elon did at Twitter?

jnaina• 2 years ago

this seems like a calculated move to thin the crowd knowing how unpopular this full RTO is going to be, after the massive over hiring during Covid.

razzleddazzle2• 2 years ago

They will make everyone sit and watch “Rings of Power.”

razzleddazzle2• 2 years ago

They will make them sit and watch “Rings of Power.”

23B1• 2 years ago

Pairing this move with the belt-tightening is mutually-supporting fires.

neycoda2• 2 years ago

Fuck this. What good is an office if it's just to babysit adults like they're in a daycare center?

neycoda2• 2 years ago

If they're gonna require us to go back to the office, it better come with an office bonus.

vouaobrasil• 2 years ago

I used to work for a company that had a lot of rules about working from home/working in office and I hate being controlled.

I just came here to say that quitting back in 2023 was the best decision I ever made.

redmajor12• 2 years ago

How does Amazon's RTO policy correspond to their mostly Asian-Subcontinent H1B workforce? Is this a strategy to get rid of those few American citizens that are still there and replace them with indentured serfs who won't argue with management?

aceshades3• 2 years ago

does anyone have any advice for finding remote roles?

casenmgreen• 2 years ago

Within a company, employees (managers or otherwise) attend to, and take care of, their own interests.

As such, within a company, employees are attentive to, and take care of, the interests and needs of those who control their job security.

So for example, HR cares about management, not employees.

In this case, with RTO, we see that managers run a company, and they attend to their own needs; and their need is to be able to control and monitor their staff, because managers are held responsible for outcomes. This is inherent in a hierarchical arrangement of power. Managers then fundamentally attend to their own interest, which means having employees at home. The face this is not necessary, and is absolutely non-optimal is every way except for maximizing managerial control and monitoring, is irrelevant, as managers here are attending to their own interests.

This is exactly the problem the Soviet centralized economies faced, when they were trying to improve economic efficiency. Managers were responsible for meeting plan targets, but to be more efficient the system as a whole needed decentralization, but managers had every incentive under the sun to maintain maximum control (useless and efficiency destroying as it was), and so decentralization never occurred.

alistairSH5• 2 years ago

Are "managers" really driving the RTO mandates? Or do you really mean "executives"? Because none of the line managers or directors I work with care about RTO - they're mostly ambivalent about it (and about 50% remote or hybrid themselves). The only push for RTO here is from the very top down (ie the PE group, BoD, and C-levels).

technick2• 2 years ago

Go add up all the time you've wasted, sitting in traffic or getting ready to go into the office, it'll sober you up quickly.

"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time." - Tyler Durden

ta988• 2 years ago

Amazon found the best way to reduce their workforce. Make them switch from a perfectly fine work environment to a horrible one and wait for them to leave. You don't even have to make them come, threaten to do it.

Just come work in small companies that respect their employees. Good talents are hard to find.

squigglydonut7• 2 years ago

They should also remove all desks and force people to sit directly on the floor. Forget open office plan. The new trend is Minimal Office.

softwaredoug• 2 years ago

Unfortunately for them it means losing highly sought after senior employees with the option to leave, and keeping those without that option.

I can never actually find this study, but it's similar to a study showing companies that moved their headquarters to Connecticut instead of staying in downtown NYC actually perform worse as they lose employees that have an option to stay in NYC and not uproot their lives. The mediocre ones that cannot find another job end up moving.

artyom3• 2 years ago

This. It's just layoffs without saying it's layoffs.

And the market answers. They've been doing it for quite some time and their stock is in an all time high.

SavageBeast• 2 years ago

Am I the only one who scrolled down and read the full memo? Thats the biggest load of shit Ive ever read - like maybe seriously it is. Thats epic bullshit. I don't even think Zuckerberg could top that with his brand of AW SHUCKS WE CAN DO BETTER GUYS!

"I continue to believe that we are all here because we want to make a difference in customers’ lives, invent on their behalf, and move quickly to solve their problems."

"We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way"

"To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID." - The stock price is UP $100/share since March '19

If you didn't read the whole thing take a minute and revisit the article. NO MATTER WHAT DO NOT THROW YOUR LAPTOP OR PHONE!

Now, we get to see if 5/15/40/40 is the handcuffs its intended to be.

lnxg33k1• 2 years ago

Are we near shareholders dividends or CEO bonus and we need people to quit without paying severance? My last company did the same announcement, I acted like I didn't receive anything, instead of quitting, eventually after 8 months of "Oh didn't get it", they terminated me with severance

zer0zzz2• 2 years ago

Well, Amazon’s definitely not going to be poaching talent from the other faangs now (I think).

wordofx5• 2 years ago

I always find it amusing, reading comments from all these people who claim to be more productive working from home, or think that it works better. It proves they work in silos and contribute little.

But HN is like “no WFH good, WFO bad, me downvote you cos I fink I know wat I talk bout”

itake4• 2 years ago

What do you think about these remote CEOs/executives (like the new CEO of Starbucks or Elon)? Do they contribute little too?

wordofx5• 2 years ago

lol you think Elon sits there writing shit at a desk? He delegates. Runs multiple businesses and floats about unblocking people and making sure progress is made.

Engineers don’t work like that.

gabegm• 2 years ago

People have different work preferences; some thrive working from home, while others do better in the office. I think the strong opinions about mandated office days stem from the fact that the job doesn’t necessarily require employees to be physically present.

wordofx5• 2 years ago

While jobs maybe not require someone been physically present. So far over the last 2 years seeing multiple businesses do return to office, productivity sky rocketed. Sure a few people who didn’t want to return to the office left, but turns out they weren’t that productive. People are easy to replace now.

lynx232• 2 years ago

Wow, look at the number of comments. Lots of entitlement around here. We have a saying around here, "give them a finger, and they will demand your whole hand." Fascinating how a single precedence case can raise expectations through the roof. The office will not go away, no matter how much the priviledge people rant.

JSDevOps4• 2 years ago

If they are that serious they should turn off the vpn. If they don’t this is just talking heads.

horns4lyfe6• 2 years ago

But then the execs won’t be able to work from home

ConcernedCoder• 2 years ago

this is why we need a union

matthewsinclair2• 2 years ago

I find the “remote vs onsite” debate to be a little bit misguided. I try to reframe it as a balancing act between “broad work” and “deep work”. The difference being that broad work is the kind of thing that needs collaboration and interaction and deep work needs focus and singular attention.

As an engineering leader, I have had some success and traction with non-engineers by re-framing the debate in this way.

I wrote these ideas up as a blog post earlier this year:

Broad work vs deep work https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0165-broad-work-vs-deep-wor...

Terr_2• 2 years ago

Now that we're in the spiffy sci-fi year 2024 with video calls for all, I find that 90% of the "collaboration" work benefit is achievable remotely. (Like a co-debugging session.)

Less task-oriented stuff--general office chatting--doesn't work quite the same though.

matthewsinclair2• 2 years ago

I think the main thing you miss with 100% remote working is what I call "corridor creativity" [0]. As good as working from home is (or can be), I do miss the serendipity of walking past someone in a corridor, having a quick chat, drawing something on a whiteboard, and then continuing on about my day. In a fully remote world, I need to organise a meeting (over Zoom) for just about every interaction, which ends up being quite a chore and far less than serendipitous.

[0]: Corridor Creativity: https://matthewsinclair.medium.com/0124-corridor-creativity-...

aaravom• 2 years ago

TechieTom: “I get that Amazon wants to boost collaboration and productivity, but isn’t the flexibility of remote work one of the biggest perks these days? I’m curious how this will affect employee morale.”

blurbleblurble• 2 years ago

Translation: Amazon doesn't need so many engineers anymore.

firefoxd• 2 years ago

Where I used to work, their theat was less subtle:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxqnx/dont-mess-with-us-web...

rnts08• 2 years ago

A lot of companies are speed running "How to lose your best engineers any%" lately. Yes, there are times for face to face but forcing people back to the office just to justify their space cost and middle managers meddling is a path to failure.

slowhadoken• 2 years ago

The four day business day is still best. In office or not.

aszantu• 2 years ago

So ppl have to bring their consoles and fridges to the office now

Kon5ole2• 2 years ago

Commuting is probably pointless for a large number of individual office workers as well as their employers, but the busywork of commuting generates so much economic activity and value to society that it can't be killed overnight.

Having people move between home and work drives value in car sales, public transport, real estate valuations, construction, lunch restaurants, public infrastructure projects and countless other things that generates value.

The collected services catering to commuters is larger than any single company, and society can probably not handle a decision (most office workers can work from home) that effectively bankrupts it. It needs to slowly be replaced with something else.

iLoveOncall3• 2 years ago

the busywork of commuting generates so much economic activity and value to society that it can't be killed overnight

Except when it was for 2 years and the economy boomed, you know?

Kon5ole2• 2 years ago

Except when it was for 2 years and the economy boomed, you know?

It wasn't a boom, it was a bust.

During the pandemic most governments paid through the nose to keep the economy going. The US even paid every American hundreds of dollars directly. Other countries subsidized everything from restaurants to car manufacturers.

Now that this money has to be recovered, inflation has eliminated a decade of salary increases for most workers and governments are borrowing left and right. We can't do many more years like that.

I'm not saying it's right that we force people to commute when they don't have to, but removing this part of the economy is a real problem that has to be handled.

It's like when a coal mine closes, just saying "the coal mine is no longer needed" is no comfort to the unemployed coal workers and the nearby town.

phendrenad28• 2 years ago

Companies are their people. What else does AWS have? Patents? Worthless. Name brand? Ephemeral. Server farms? Cost centers.

We could all switch to Linode tomorrow and forget AWS existed the day after.

oblio8• 2 years ago

AWS is orders of magnitude bigger than Linode in both depth and breadth and despite all the memes, there's a reason it makes so much money and that reason isn't purely "executive stupidity". Does Linode even offer something like SNS or SQS?

phendrenad28• 2 years ago

Serious answer: Most people have moved to K8s so most of AWS is a few lines of code away.

xchip• 2 years ago

Amazon tells employees to stay suck in traffic 5 days a week.

andyish• 2 years ago

I bet they're happy to have out-of-hours support done from home.

jamalaramala2• 2 years ago

Another point to consider: the environmental impact of having hundreds of thousands of people commuting to work every day.

Transport is the second most important source of greenhouse gas emissions, after electricity and heat.

I'm not sure if large office spaces are more energy efficient than home offices.

isoprophlex• 2 years ago

Any improvement in heating/cooling efficiency will be greatly nullified by the environmental effects of commuting

mattmaroon• 2 years ago

And the fact that their homes are still being heated and cooled while they’re in the office too

squigglydonut7• 2 years ago

Yea it would be more efficient to have "living pods" essentially little chambers where the employee can sleep in after a long 16 hour day a work. The personal home emits too much energy and waste. It would be better for the employee to just go into the pod, plug in their nutritional tube, and watch netflix for a few hours before falling into an induced asleep at the mandated time as set by their work schedule.

consteval19• 2 years ago

Person one: hey driving is bad for the environment, why don't we drive less? Besides, wouldn't everyone enjoy that?

Person two: this is slavery and you're a commie. I want muh freedom to be forced to drive 2 hours a day!

Are you seeing how this isn't a reasonable response? Like, at all?

yoyohello132• 2 years ago

Don't give them any ideas.

detectivestory• 2 years ago

and the job market is likely to be flooded with even more people looking for fully remote jobs over the coming months. Should be good for some companies looking to hire remotely, but it will be tough time for job-seekers.

downrightmike6• 2 years ago

We saw that taking all those cars off the road could really accelerate our climate goals.

adnjoo3• 2 years ago

ironic since one of their LPs is Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day.

https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...:

horns4lyfe6• 2 years ago

And I’m sure those same execs love to carp on about ask the sacrifices everyone else needs to make to stop climate change.

james_woods• 2 years ago

Citing an article from MIT Sloan Management Review:

"But there’s no clear evidence that these mandates improve financial performance. A recent study of S&P 500 companies that was conducted by University of Pittsburgh researchers found that executives are “using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.” Those policies result in “significant declines in employees’ job satisfaction but no significant changes in financial performance or firm values,” they concluded." (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/return-to-office-mandate...)

Peroni• 2 years ago

When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.
we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture;

They believe there are advantages to being fully in-office because they have observed these things. Zero mention of actual data to back up their beliefs and observations despite substantial industry data verifying that remote and hybrid work environments are more beneficial on almost every level.

pm906• 2 years ago

At the very least I would have expected some kind of internal survey data. But they’ve offered 0. Just vibes.

valbaca2• 2 years ago

“Data-driven culture” until a board full of Boomers just kind of feels differently

stubybubs2• 2 years ago

They were called out on this for not living up to their "data driven culture" when they went to 3 days back and the response was basically "Uh well... Eat shit I guess."

wildrhythms• 2 years ago

The companies are getting tax breaks. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...

ycic2• 2 years ago

Maybe there's an upside to this. If you take Jassey's comments about collaboration at face value, it may mean corporate spivs have a harder time justifying outsourcing to remote teams in other continents.

arendtio• 2 years ago

pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings

This is not a structural problem but a cultural one. Sure, you can address it by changing the org structure, but 15% fewer pre-meetings to pre-meetings sounds like a drop in the ocean. In my experience, pre-meetings are a result of low-trust environments.

I wonder where CEOs are getting the input to drive these decisions forward. Has there been significant research lately suggesting that working from the office is better, or do they just rely on their gut feeling that the office feels more productive when people are present?

btbuildem2• 2 years ago

Pressure from local govt to somehow salvage the "downtown tax base", pressure from boards of directors that are inbred with big investment funds holding most of that commercial real estate. The relatively small group of ultra-rich parasites is trying to claw back the inevitable change of decentralization. We would all be so much happier in a scheme where instead of one giant "center" our metro areas were "distributed" ie more commercial centers closer to more residential areas.

monch1962• 2 years ago

I work for a consulting company in Melbourne Australia.

The Melbourne city council has started petitioning the government to force govt employees to return to the CBD for work. Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels, which means employees need to start coming into the CBD more often. Apparently this is getting serious consideration.

It's not like we home-based workers stopped going out to buy lunch on workdays. We still go to the local shops most days for coffee and food; as those shops aren't paying CBD-type rents, their food and coffee is generally cheaper and/or better quality, the service is friendlier and the local school kids have a lot more job opportunities. The past 4 years has seen a real community feel spring up around where I live, whereas before it was just another dormitory suburb where nearly all the workers disappeared during the day.

From my perspective, we moved from pre-COVID, in-office work arrangements to post-COVID, remote arrangements, and that genii is now out of the bottle. We've all conclusively proved we can be productive working from home, and any attempt to roll that back is going to hit resistance in one form or another. It's gonna take a recession where the supply of workers exceeds the demand for everyone to come back into the office each day, and even then I don't think it'll stick long term.

goosedragons• 2 years ago

Here in Canada the federal government has started forcing federal public servants back to the office. Everybody thinks it's just to prop up the capital city businesses and commercial landlords. Their union has actually called for them to buy local in their neighborhood rather than in downtown. Ottawa has a pretty terrible downtown with many businesses having awful hours like 8a.m-2p.m M-F because they got so used to relying just on civil servants.

brandon2722• 2 years ago

That same federal government, who wants to put tens of thousands of employees on the road in commutes to their offices, is simultaneously communicating to the public that carbon fuelled climate change is an existential threat and that carbon consumption is immoral and wrong, thus requiring end use carbon taxes, and even going so far as the current party's health minister saying that families taking summer road trips is sacrificing "the future of the planet". [1]

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/10542273/holland-road-trip-questi...

onlyrealcuzzo• 2 years ago

Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels

It's more like downtown property prices are based on those levels, and property is leveraged, and if banks collapse do to commercial property prices plummeting, you're in for a bad time.

Also, although downtown is a very small part of the city - in many cities, downtown property taxes make up a relatively large chunk of total property tax revenues.

You either death spiral downtown property prices by keeping taxes steady while values decline, or you increase tax everywhere else to make up the difference.

Either of those options leads to a bad time for politicians.

GenerocUsername3• 2 years ago

Poor politicians.

"Government for the people by the people, unless the people don't want what they want"

BeFlatXIII• 2 years ago

Then I hope the workers don't patronize the CBD businesses and cause the collapse anyway.

whimsicalism• 2 years ago

I’m not in for a bad time, the banks are in for a bad time.

HenriTEL• 2 years ago

I agree, unless other exceptional conditions, having to go 5 days a week to the office is a strong no-go for me, FAANG or not.

immibis2• 2 years ago

It's all corruption? Always has been.

fundad4• 2 years ago

This is such corporate welfare BS. I especially don’t get it for tech companies whose employees eat lunch on campus.

With big tech, I think it has more to do with real estate holdings being part of the portfolio and they would have to write down the value. Then the hedge funds where executives invest would also have to write down their real estate holdings and lose value.

I am dying for commercial real estate to be written down so hard in the US that the Federal Housing Administration buys it and converts it to public housing.

downrightmike6• 2 years ago

The internet has allowed remote work for a long time, and in office work was dead walking until the pandemic finally put it in the ground. It needs to stay dead. These local shops don't deserve to lose their business either. if the CBD businesses want to compete, then they need to move. This is a sunk cost. You don't throw good money after bad

hn727742• 2 years ago

I think a big part of this math is avoiding huge balance sheet write downs on unoccupied real estate.

When Amazon was heavily investing in SLU in the 2010's they purchased all of their leased offices from the developer, Paul Allen's company.

It's the GE-ification of Amazon. Financial engineering with little care about employees or customers.

LightBug12• 2 years ago

Well, he can shove that right up his Jassy.

adornKey• 2 years ago

Working from home has advantages, but my boss also cancelled home-office. One big customer of us went for extensive home-office. And since then that company seems to be paralyzed. Workers there are openly doing personal stuff during video meetings. And it became impossible to get any decisions. A lot of people just don't have the discipline to work unsupervised.

gttalbot• 2 years ago

And this is how we operationalize age discrimination. Note the layoffs of middle management announced at the same time. Force everyone into the office, ideally through a difficult commute into an area that it's very expensive to have a family.

People for whom this is really untenable will quit without severance. Some with difficult circumstances you can PIP out without severance. Then the rest you lay off. Congratulations now the severance bill you have to show to Wall St. is a lot smaller.

Sociopaths.

kreims• 2 years ago

You know, I’m actually pretty surprised that there’s not more lobbying for some kind of tax incentives to promote remote work. It takes a lot of burden off transportation networks. Honestly, it’s probably cheaper than building more roads and more rail.

I suppose the best you can do is just use the commute cost in your calculations of what your compensation is worth. I made a lateral move to a company that offers hybrid work. The irony is the company I came from was all in office, but I worked exclusively with people outside of my office so I would drive to work just to interact with people on MSTeams.

forinti• 2 years ago

Public transportation is also cheaper than building more and wider roads, but I'm not sure it's straightforward to sell this idea.

In the Americas most people are still fixated on owning a car.

In political debates in my city, public transportation is only ever talked about as a burden on the city's finances, never mind that car infrastructure costs many times more.

3minus1• 2 years ago

This reminds me of when cities in the Bay Area started considering restrictions on free meals at work, because local restaurants were annoyed it reduced their lunch crowd. I'm sure that same group has a vested interest in people commuting to jobs.

dark-star• 2 years ago

I really like to think that in a year or two, I can basically make a fortune by applying for jobs that require me to go to the office every day. I actually enjoy it. I have no proper office at home (nor room to build one). And it helps me separate work from "recreation" by having dedicated (disjoint) places for both.

It seems that "being okay to commute to work daily" or even "enjoying work in an office" is a skill that is rapidly getting lost, like coding in Cobol.

Cobol developers can basically set their own hourly rates and still get hired, so I hope that we few "like-to-go-to-the-office" people will be able to do the same soon....

So: who actually enjoys going to the office daily, like me?

zulban• 2 years ago

You wouldn't enjoy it if your commute was 3 hours total a day, or nobody you work with is also in the office (all meetings are remote) or if the lunch options were bad and overpriced, or you rent a bad apartment from a negligent landlord because even a decade into your tech career you cannot own a home in your city (Canada). Your preference for in-office is not a skill, it's a privilege that you haven't experienced how stupid and horrible in-office can be.

farceSpherule• 2 years ago

This is an attrition forcing tool.

These CEO's who think they are business geniuses fail to grasp that they look like morons parroting this "RTO means productivity and collaboration" nonsense which has been disproven time and time again.

They are doing this because they are just dumb people. They over hire and allow their organizations to become bloated because they know that when it's time to make their metrics look good, they just create such miserable work environments that they know they will lose some people. Next comes the layoffs.

I mean, this is ape level intelligence here. No thought required.

commandlinefan2• 2 years ago

Well, that makes sense, since Amazon has been losing money and it's stock has been underperforming ever since they went fully remote - oh, wait.

hn727742• 2 years ago

The only way out of this is probably unionization. Or a slow death from the inefficiency of idling or pushing out so many people who are job hunting while coasting.

I never imagined Amazon could be a place to coast and collect a paycheck until they fire you. Bet there's a ton of 2-job 1-person incomes right now. The company culture is rotten and the leadership principles don't have any meaning.

downrightmike6• 2 years ago

I'm really tired of seeing CEOs and the C-Suite all having three or more jobs. They really need to focus.

GenerocUsername3• 2 years ago

Every discussion about RTO is missing a big point, it's not being in an office that everyone hates, (even though it's generally worse than home), it's the commute to and existence of downtown cores.

Companies, stop buying the most expensive real estate! Setup offices 2 towns outside a major city and encourage your employees to move to that town.

The US with its top 15 cities are all infested shitty rat holes.

Why do we continue to try to optimize existing cities, rebuilding over and over with insane expense rather than grow and invest in more, smaller cities.

cooloo• 2 years ago

That was just question of time. Many managers like to keep stuff close, the reasoning not existence.

Justsignedup• 2 years ago

Layoffs incoming.

shayankh• 2 years ago

are there any Amazon folks out here looking to hire Applied scientists (ML, forecasting, recommender systems)?

englishspot• 2 years ago

I think it's really as simple as a big corpo just pushing their employees as far as they can, as always. we can debate on the benefits of WFH, but really in this market employees just don't have much leverage.

gsck• 2 years ago

I read five days a week and thought to myself, christ thats quite a lot. 70% of your week, then I remembered I do that. It is crazy to think you spend that much time in the office.

bitcharmer• 2 years ago

At this point forced RTW is just a red flag and a clear giveaway about the company's execs and their culture. I think it's great they are doing this because we know who to avoid on the job market.

jwmoz• 2 years ago

More importantly, is anyone here from Amazon quitting over this? What's your response?

algebra-pretext3• 2 years ago

Purely observation from team members leaving and browsing the #remote-advocacy channel over the last two years, but the 3-day mandate and the relocations have already pushed most people who can (and want to) quit, to quit.

j45• 2 years ago

Having worked remotely for many years more than most people than I meet by fair margin..

I love my home setup. It’s better than my office setup. But my office has faster fibre than I’ll ever get at home and I can get more done.

It’s ok for both to be good for different things.

Entirely remote or in person isn’t ideal. I maintain both a home and work. Just when I think I might not need one I get reminded.

Too much of anything or one can limit or stall your growth and lead to all those feels of why do you feel you’re standing still when you’re sitting at home all the time, or just the same office.

Companies have to be designed to be distributed, or suck at it. Distributed is a better word I find than remote (disconnected) or virtual (those contributions aren’t real)

Having a mix of activity and locations to

p3opl3• 2 years ago

How to induce mass layoffs without needing to offer severance packages.. without telling employees this is a massive layoff without severance packages being available..

Surprise surprise.. ... not really .. when it comes to Amazon.

vondur• 2 years ago

This is just a stealthy way to do some layoffs without having to do real layoffs.

fsndz• 2 years ago

they just want to layoff soon

karaterobot3• 2 years ago

It's like these LinkedIn awards for best company to work for mean nothing anymore!!!

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/linkedin-top-comp...

TheMagicHorsey• 2 years ago

They can "tell" employees all they want, but the engineers who really get stuff done are not going to get fired for working from home, and a bunch of them are choosing to stay remote ... or paying lip service to office days by promising to come in and then not showing up.

What are managers going to do with critical engineers who are delivering? Fire them? They will have another job doing their individual contributor work in a week. There's a real shortage of individual contributors with skills and the ability to deliver consistently.

On the other hand, if you are in one of those political mid-career positions that mostly involves communication, coordination, impressions, etc., then yeah, the org doesn't need you as much as you need the org so you better haul your ass back to work.

koinedad• 2 years ago

An experience I’m familiar with: 1. Hired fully remote to virtual location etc. 2. A few months after joining RTO (return to office) enforced even though I’m not technically returning 3. About a year later RTH (return to team hub) announced with about 1 month for internal transfer or move to Seattle with in a few months. 4. Roughly 2 months later 5 days a week announced.

motbus3• 2 years ago

Covid does not work as an excuse anymore. They need a different excuse to say it is not bad C level strategy or stupidly high bonus for someone who does nothing special

adnjoo3• 2 years ago

is there a spreadsheet somewhere that shows if a company is WFH or RTO or HYB?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ar4qcghnGjlGwZAAXdu2...

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Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

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