AT&T follows Amazon in demanding employees spend 5 days a week in office

https://fortune.com/2024/12/18/att-return-to-office-5-days/

by belter • 2 years ago

51 90 2 years ago

fortune.com

commandlinefan• 2 years ago

I'm honestly shocked WFH has lasted as long as it has. I thought we'd all be back in the office full time in 2021.

ElectRabbit• 2 years ago

Laughs in freelancer

You guys have an office?

diob2• 2 years ago

Yeah, the one upside to this stuff is I feel like the next few years are going to be prime for consulting.

Abandoned projects, AI slop, etc.

criddell• 2 years ago

I do. And I have a door. Everybody in my company has a private office with windows and in a way it's the best of both worlds. Collaboration and impromptu discussions are possible, we sometimes have lunch together, and I can close my door when I want. We also have the option of working from home Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I've only ever worked for one company that had an open office plan - a big room with a bunch of desks loosely organized into teams - and I wonder if money saved on real estate is worth the productivity loss? I assume the big companies and consultancies have measured this, but I'm skeptical.

malfist4• 2 years ago

Why? WFH has been a thing for a long time before the pandemic. I've been a fully remote worker for over a decade now. No plans to change that either.

utopicwork• 2 years ago

Businesses love to burn through talent I've learned

diob2• 2 years ago

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

siva74• 2 years ago

Talent is expensive and the job of mgmt is to keep costs down

belter• 2 years ago

Can't wait for next pandemic....

zzzeek2• 2 years ago

I think conditions are pretty good for another one quite soon

tivert3• 2 years ago

AT&T and Amazon have the right idea. Conference calls with offshore teams are far more effective when done in an open office environment, surrounded by people from unrelated teams doing the same thing.

The collaborative energy of hundreds of tightly-packed people trying to focus on different things together is amazing.

malfist4• 2 years ago

Last time I was in the amazon office, I got to see how absurd it is, especially since this has all, supposedly, been in the name of productivity.

The office my team is in is setup so there's a long hallway that has the security corridor, then a coffee shop, then a convenience store then the elevators. Anyone coming into the office has to walk through all of these to get to the elevators to go to their floor.

Last time I was there, they'd put desks in hallway between the coffee shop and the convenience store, and they were always full.

You'd think if they were doing this for productivity, they wouldn't be sticking desks in the hallway everyone has to walk through all the time.

pintxo• 2 years ago

Maybe it’s about the productivity of the lay-off HR team? Than desks in hallways sound like a good idea.

Balgair2• 2 years ago

... then a coffee shop ...

Okay, I want to be super clear on this one: Do you have to pay for the coffee once you pass security / they know you work there? Or is that coffee shop not part of the company and just so happens to be onsite?

pro14• 2 years ago

The collaborative energy of hundreds of tightly-packed people trying to focus in different things together is amazing.

Imagine this. You are trying to write a Python script to produce another report for your manager. You can sit anywhere in the amazing open office. You accidentally sit next to the Anti-Money Laundering team, and have to listen to that.

The next day you choose a different floor. Your manager shows up wearing a mask and says she has a flu. The rest of the day, you listen to small talk, while trying to focus on implementing the report.

Whenever you walk to the coffee machine, people stare at you and wonder who you're sleeping with.

Finally, you revolt and refuse to come in to the office. Then you don't have a job.

77pt772• 2 years ago

But how is your manager going to get the immense health benefits he gets from constantly making your life hell?

Be considerate of his feelings, you selfish child.

dagw3• 2 years ago

The rest of the day, you listen to small talk

The office where I work we have a whole section of one floor that is strictly no talking and phones must be on mute. If you want silence you can sit there. I cannot imagine that we are the only company that has come up with this idea.

That being said, I still work from home when I feel like it.

InDubioProRubio2• 2 years ago

Our metric shows that AIs productivity improved 20% compare to workers ever since return to office. The conclusion is inescapable, AI likes it when developers cluster together in glass towers and improves.

dtgm92• 2 years ago

I would rather stay unemployed than be forced to work with other people like that

xoneill4• 2 years ago

The right idea? These companies have no problem outsourcing American jobs -- outside of the US!

RTO my a$$, the strategy was and always will be displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.

'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!

hobs• 2 years ago

They are not the only ones, I interview remote engineers all the time for jobs that they are way overqualified for because they are happy and most of the time, they were remote BEFORE the pandemic, its only this ridiculous meme of RTO that forces people to change who already had proven success.

It genuinely tells you that whoever makes these calls is running the business on ego instead of using their brains.

cogman102• 2 years ago

My theory is it's just a soft layoff.

Same thing happened to a coworker of mine. They closed the branch for his office, mandated in office attendance, but they didn't fire him, just told him "well you'll have to come into office every weekday, nearest office is 500mi away".

pavel_lishin3• 2 years ago

Isn't this a classic example of a constructive dismissal?

Neonlicht• 2 years ago

I don't know anyone who works 5 days a week... Sure wages aren't as high as in the States but folks live comfortably enough (evidenced by the fact you can find Dutch tourists from Cambodja to Canada).

rickydroll• 2 years ago

I think there is a relatively simple explanation.Overall, it appears you have time to breathe. It doesn't look like you are burdened by as much existential fear about survival, it seems that you get medical care whether you're employed or not, you don't have to worry about medical event driving your to bankruptcy and ruining your life, and most of all, you have much better food especially coffee than we do. American cappuccinos suck. Cappuccinos I've gotten from coffee stand in the middle of the park in Finland were orders of magnitude better.

I know it's not all unicorn farts and sprinkles. You still have right-wing civilization shredders in your political system. You have a boatload of bureaucracy, and it appears to be more difficult for a small business organically to a medium-sized business.

ra120271• 2 years ago

Discussing this with some friends last night there was some consensus that sometimes this may be to force a significant cut in the workforce that is cheaper to do by firing due for cause, as compared to making roles redundant and dealing with redundancy packages. Probably not true in all cases, but maybe in some.

jmyeet• 2 years ago

It's absolutely true.

Companies are now in a cycle where they want to lay off ~5% of their employees every year. Why? To suppress wages. And to get people to do more work for the same money. People in fear of losing their jobs aren't going to demand raises or say no to extra work.

RTO mandates are cheaper and easier than severance.

This has been the case in Corporate America for decades at this point. The rude shock for many on HN is that the veneer of Big Tech being rogue disruptors is gone. Working for Big Tech is getting increasingly indistinguishable from working for Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.

And it's only going to get worse.

wbl• 2 years ago

The difference is the customer for some of those companies demands cutting edge tech and is willing to pay handsomely for it. Because if they don't have the best, the adversary will and that is unacceptable.

makestuff• 2 years ago

Yeah Big tech is running out of ways to grow profits YoY. So the next solution is the consulting approach of just laying people off. Eventually it will catch up to them and they will become the next IBM/Boeing/etc. where people ask what happened to these companies they used to be great.

Bezos said in an all hands one time amazon would go out of business in 50-60 years and that is happens to every company eventually. I think you get too big and too bureaucratic where everyone is just looking out for themselves because you are more worried about getting laid off or fired than you are building great products.

ZiiS• 2 years ago

TBF a lot of their staff probably have AT&T connections at home.

orzig• 2 years ago

This seems on brand for an old tech company like AT&T. But Amazon is a puzzle to me. it’s been a decade since people started talking about how terrible it is to work there, and how all of the squeeze they put on employees is for short term gain, but they have clearly had immense growth since then, and (while every company has failures) considerable innovation. How are they “getting away with it“? Shouldn’t all of the high performers have left by now?

jdbxhdd• 2 years ago

They simply can afford to pay more high performers. And since they have sustainable growth, there is no reason to switch course of action.

Compare this to consulting which is known for squeezing their employees to the max. They simply pay enough that there is a steady stream of new highly qualified and highly capable candidates.

duxup• 2 years ago

Yeah Amazon has to some extent had a reputation for working people to the bone but as far as I can tell it hasn’t hurt them.

I wouldn’t want to work that way but if it is as competitive to work there as they say …. I’m probably not qualified.

yesiamyourdad• 2 years ago

These are two wildly different companies. AMZN still has some upside and pays a lot in equity. The only reason to own T is for the dividend while your capital sublimates.

That said AMZN is a lot more like the old model, they never really subscribed to the Microsoft & Silicon Valley ways of doing things.

RicoElectrico• 2 years ago

Guess some psychos take pride in hardship for hardship's sake. Think navy seals, but in tech.

michaelt2• 2 years ago

it’s been a decade since people started talking about how terrible it is to work there, [...] How are they “getting away with it“?

Some companies have tough working conditions in some areas of the business, and not others.

You work for Amazon as a delivery driver or a warehouse picker? They'll probably be breathing down your neck about performance all the time, and not paying all that well, and you'll have to stand and walk a lot, lift heavy things, and endure heat and cold, and work unsociable hours, and they'll be mad if you call in sick. Maybe they tell you you're "self-employed" and you never know how much work they'll have for you each week, you get no sick pay, no holiday, and you're subtracting the costs of your own car, fuel and insurance from your pay packet.

On the other hand, if you have a white collar job in the retail division of the business? You'll still have demanding targets to meet, and the pay might not be great - but you'll know you're going to get paid each week, you'll be working normal hours in a nice air-conditioned office, and you'll be able to take sick leave when you're sick.

And if you've got a white collar job in AWS? levels.fyi claims after a single promotion you'll be on US$275,000.

gr4vityWall4• 2 years ago

Shouldn’t all of the high performers have left by now?

What I hear is that the pay is really good, and worth it if you can tolerate the high workloads. I assume most FAANG high performers who also are workaholics would do well in Amazon's environment.

ablation• 2 years ago

I guess AT&T have a need to slim down the rank and file a bit!

CapmCrackaWaka2• 2 years ago

Every time I hear news like this, I think “hmmm layoffs coming to XYZ soon”.

For some reason, the idea that RTO is caused by out of touch execs is pervasive, but I really don’t think that’s the reason. These companies need people to leave. The cheapest way to do that is for an employee to leave voluntarily after they have gotten another job. Hell, if enough people leave, you might not even have to do layoffs.

We can bitch about it all we want, but these execs know what they’re doing. They aren’t stupid or out of touch.

EDIT: I will add that I’m also curious about the long-term implications of this kind of trickery. It doesn’t seem like a good long-term solution, you can’t just order RTO and then allow remote work year after year. Everyone is going to have to find something that works long-term eventually.

pavel_lishin3• 2 years ago

It also means they've done the arithmetic, and know that it's worth losing their top X% of people - the ones who'll have the easiest time finding a better job.

CapmCrackaWaka2• 2 years ago

It would be really interesting to see if they take that into account when they make these decisions. I’d have to imagine that the top X percent are also the highest paid, so maybe that’s actually a benefit.

scsh• 2 years ago

I don't think they really care, or feel that they have to care. The way that I've seen it work is they'll make rare exceptions for individuals they absolutely can't lose or wan't to hire but that's it and the exceptions truly are rare.

iamleppert• 2 years ago

Obviously you've never worked for a big corporation before. Corporations don't want top employees. In a corporate environment, top employees are a nuisance much of the time. Most managers, if given the choice, would rather have an employee who shows up, does their work (but not too much), doesn't care about anything (and thus will do whatever they are told) and will accept whatever is given to them, and someone who is not at risk of leaving and can be laid off or fired easily/cheaply when the time comes.

Top employees often have an axe to grind, an ego to satisfy or a ladder to climb. This is the last thing a corporation wants or needs. When I was a manager in Corporate America, I was instructed to screen out overly ambitious or eager candidates. They are just too much trouble for what amounts to normally a 10-20% increase in performance over a regular candidate.

michaelt2• 2 years ago

A smart employer is already paying their best employees more than they can get elsewhere.

After all, I know Alice gets things done fast and to a high standard, she can be trusted to deliver important projects, and she's very familiar our most important systems.

All anyone else knows is her job title is "Level 17 Engineer", she's got a firm handshake, and she knows how to find a cycle in a linked list.

It'd be pretty absurd for me to let myself get outbid on salary by someone with less information.

xienze2• 2 years ago

I think it’s a bit of that coupled with:

* Not liking the idea of paying for office space that sits mostly empty.

* Even if they wanted to unload their commercial real estate and go fully remote, the market for that is not good.

* Local governments pressuring companies to bring employees back to offices because those employees in turn buy goods and services in the area.

xenocratus• 2 years ago

You're forgetting:

The people calling the shots might also be investors in the real estate market, so have an incentive for it to not crash. :)

InDubioProRubio2• 2 years ago

So, you say as a return to office employee, if i boycott local services by bringing my own food, making my own coffee and not going out for lunch, i can render political pressure moot?

77pt772• 2 years ago

if enough people leave, you might not even have to do layoffs.

Signaling to stock holders that you're doing layoffs is the most important part of layoffs.

If done in secrecy it's almost useless.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 2 years ago

I know that RTO is offensive to many, and not mildly so... but if they were trying to force people to quit of their own accord, wouldn't we also see an escalation of tactics beyond RTO? If it's a good strategy, why stop there?

SauciestGNU• 2 years ago

Many of these rto mandates have been followed by layoffs if enough employees aren't induced to leave by the degradation in working conditions.

ozmodiar2• 2 years ago

Sadly I think you're right. As some say the cruelty is the point. I also think much of the AI boom is just an excuse to get rid of people and get them to accept worse conditions. At the local IBM office they cut half the staff with the reason given being that AI would replace them, then told the other half they would need to work unpaid overtime to cover the lost staff (what happened to the AI?).

Programmers have been an expensive cost to companies for awhile and it's been obvious since outsourcing attempts decades ago that CEOs would like to do whatever they can to break their backs.

gr4vityWall4• 2 years ago

These companies need people to leave.

Why? I don't have the impression neither Amazon or AT&T are unprofitable.

fred_is_fred• 2 years ago

Not unprofitable is not a measure of success for a CEO. More profitable than last quarter is.

xoneill4• 2 years ago

They're not out of touch they know exactly what they're doing, following orders while these centibillionaires are jockeying for position on the Forbes 100.

The strategy was and always will be bottom line: Displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.

'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!

TrackerFF• 2 years ago

The DOGE bros even said it publicly - that RTO is one of the cards up their sleeve for making federal workers quit.

The mask has come off. Everyone knows that these RTO steps are indeed part of their "make work so miserable that they'll quit" strategy.

rwyinuse• 2 years ago

Hopefully applicants will remember these decisions in the future when job market turns better, and go elsewhere. Companies like this deserve only employees that treat their employer with equal contempt, or are otherwise plain bad at their jobs.

JadeNB• 2 years ago

when job market turns better

Now that's optimism. At least, these companies are betting it won't, and it's in their interest to work against it.

zzzeek2• 2 years ago

this is an ongoing ploy to get older, more experienced and therefore much more expensive and less manipulable workers to just quit, so they can replace with cheap, young and easily manipulated new hires. this is the oldest play in corporate america

gr4vityWall4• 2 years ago

Another decision that affects the workers, made by people who don't have the workers' best interests in mind.

I assume anyone who tries to fight over this will be harassed, and attempts to organize against it will be frowned on and, often, actively sabotaged.

Other posters may very well be correct in assuming this harassment through policy _is_ intentional and meant to make employees leave 'voluntarily' rather than doing a layoff.

nimbius• 2 years ago

the unspoken reasoning for these back-to-work efforts is to stave off a western financial collapse in commercial real estate. https://hbr.org/2024/07/u-s-commercial-real-estate-is-headed...

after COVID the number of companies that either did not renew commercial leases or defaulted on existing leases jumped significantly. banks saw this and quietly extended commercial leases and relaxed payment dates and penalties to stave off a crisis in 2023. Joe Biden even injected ten billion dollars in assistance to commercial real estate and publicly demanded all federal workers "return to office." the government owns its real estate by and large, so this was largely an expression of solidarity with the landed gentry.

moving into 2025...it does not appear to be working. Many corporations are not falling in line to prevent the collapse and instead are seeking short-term gains as they realize massive savings by ditching commercial landlords. productivity and worker satisfaction is also improved. even climate change is impacted positively by work from home efforts.

unpopular take: It is (financially) critically important that all workers return to the office. a crash in the commercial real estate sector would cause solvency problems for large cities dependent on cashflow from office workers. the auto sector (repair and sales) would also take a massive hit at a time when Stellantis is facing down a potential bankruptcy. the locus for most states in terms of homeless outreach and drug treatment is their city, which would receive serious cutbacks at a time when the opioid and fentanyl crises are still of great concern.

barring some sort of major shift in policy (which wont happen) at the federal level, the US economy was not prepared to move to a work-from-home model.

ozmodiar2• 2 years ago

We've done something very wrong as a society if we need to kneecap ourselves to prop up property investors. My life feels like nothing but "once in a lifetime" financial problems.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 2 years ago

the unspoken reasoning for these back-to-work efforts is to stave off a western financial collapse in commercial real estate.

If I asked some superintelligent AI to create the most wrong reddit theory possible, I think it might be this one.

Large companies (small ones too) have to spend money to give you a desk. Some will even go so far as to put a price tag on it, that facilities cost is $x per square foot or whatever. If they can offload that cost onto their employee, that's win/win.

Some real estate companies might do bad if that happens... even if none of their leases are going unrenewed, it puts downward pressure on prices. But those companies have almost no overlap with the ones doing RTO. And I've yet to see that people like Jeff Bezos or whoever have any significant holdings in real estate (even if they did, the positives of remote would outweigh the negatives, and you'd just see them divest).

There are winners and losers in a remote-work world, and the people who would win are or should be happy to let the losers lose. Something else is going on.

a crash in the commercial real estate sector would cause solvency problems for large cities

Mayoral politicians are so powerless I can't come up with a witty way to describe it. They're Vice President-levels of worthless (and not the Dick Cheney sort either). They have no influence or mojo to swing this. If this would hurt large cities (and it might), then those cities will just be hurt.

xoneill4• 2 years ago

No, the unspoken of motive behind this is to put more money in investor pockets while centibillionaires jokey for position on the Forbes' 100.

This is complete bullshit!

The strategy here is to displace American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.

These companies have no problem outsourcing American jobs -- outside of the US!

'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!

siva74• 2 years ago

The crazy thing is that younger generations think that's actually how in-office work looks like (because they haven't experienced anything else): You come in, have teams calls all day with people distributed all over the world, get a coffee, leave office. I swear to you, it wasn't like that a decade or two ago.

semi-extrinsic• 2 years ago

Even just 7-8 years ago, the pre-Teams solutions (like Skype4Business!) were so abysmally bad, nobody were using them for anything but occasional meetings. And essentially never from your own desk, it was 3-20 people in one room calling 3-20 people in another room.

nradov• 2 years ago

Two decades ago I was having WebEx calls all day with people distributed all over the world. Back then in order to do this well it took somewhat specialized hardware and Internet bandwidth beyond what most employees had at home, so it was only practical to do from an office conference room. It worked well enough.

phillypham• 2 years ago

There is a lot of snark here. My non-cynical take is that they are aping the practices of top AI labs. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and many other AI startup darlings have a culture of in-office work. People in non-hub offices are encouraged to travel a lot.

Yes, it will take a lot more than RTO to create an innovative culture like paying more for one, but one can reasonably hypothesize that working physically together is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

drivingmenuts• 2 years ago

OK, fine. But give me an actual office, not the open plan that's like standing in a train station with a constant loud noise level (I'm from the US - I have to imagine that horror). If I wanted to be around people, I'd be in marketing or management, but I like to pretend I'm actually useful and that means I need the quiet of a graveyard so I can concentrate on actually getting work done.

xoneill4• 2 years ago

This is complete shit!

The strategy here is to displace American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.

These companies have no problem outsourcing American jobs -- outside of the US!

'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Amazon Delays RTO Mandate for Workers Due to Space

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42453041

0x000xca0xfe• 2 years ago

Funnily enough I wanted to order three books for Christmas yesterday and for the first time ever got a server error with broken HTML that wiped out my shopping cart. Umm... wasn't that exactly what Amazon was famous for as it supposedly would never happen?

Crazy how fast the enshittification seems to go nowadays. Ordered on a different site without problems.

AT&T follows Amazon in demanding employees spend 5 days a week in office

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