Amazon tells employees to pause nonessential travel in U.S. due to coronavirus | Hacker News Reader

Amazon tells employees to pause nonessential travel in U.S. due to coronavirus

reuters.com

68 pointsalpb27 comments

This seemingly goes further than Google’s travel restrictions[1] and it’s safe to assume more tech companies will encourage reduced or even restrict travel. How long until these companies start to encourage remote work to reduce transmission or has any major tech company already done this?

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-tests-positi...

My large company has banned travel to certain countries without speciql authorization, and anyone who has been to same before the ban required to work from home for at least two weeks. Furthermore, anyone sick is encouraged to work from home or take sick days. We have offices in quite a few countries and our products are used in almost all. I expect a trip to India for some of my team may be cancelled, from the US.

It’s easier for Amazon; they’re so cheap they hate employees traveling even in healthy times.

The PMs/TPMs I know travel constantly.

The travel cap is so ridiculously low. Even a 3 to 4 star hotel was over cap in South Africa and my PM friend had to pay out of pocket. Amazon truly hates its employees. The least they could do is free Prime but no not even that. Well let's start with bathroom breaks for the warehouse people first.

I work for AWS - opinions are my own and not of the company.

I don't know about your "friend," but I don't share their experience.

I have occasionally had to stay in hotels that were more expensive than the "reasonable price" listed due to higher fees than normal. Sometimes it's impossible to get a room in Seattle or New York -- or especially San Francisco -- for less than $300 a night, especially during busy seasons like summertime.

The travel portal does warn you if a room charge is in excess of "reasonable" rates, but it will still allow you to book your stay. And I have never had a hotel room expense claim denied after the fact, even if I had to pay excess rates.

Overall, my impression of our travel and expense policies is that they are totally reasonable. I've had far fewer issues traveling as an Amazon employee than I have at other companies.

The only hard limit that's ever been imposed on us is that we must fly economy coach rates; any excess must be paid out of pocket or come out of airline frequent flier benefits. And there are even some exceptions now for extremely long flights for some employees, where they are permitted to upgrade to Premium Economy.

At G you can regularly fly business. If you save the company money you can use the credits for upgrades in your next business related trip. I found that I am way more productive when I am flying half way across the world and am well rested in the flight.

Nice, I guess? In the era of gigabit broadband and zoom/chime/hangouts/etc i'm not sure why an engineer would even need to travel half way across the world to even need to be "well rested".

Is there something more you're trying to say here? That we are less valuable or something?

Aah, have you ever tried working on a project with a team from a different time zone. It can get slow when time zones don't sync. We travel to get face time and really prototype some difficult stuff. You're trying to defend Amazon's behavior by undermining face to face interaction.

I am trying to reinforce the parent point in this thread. That Amazon is cheap even more so when it comes to travel.

Frugality is one of Amazon’s leadership principles. The flight class restriction is consistent with that. It helps them keep doing things like building new things and lowering prices for customers.

There are other ways Amazonians get rest, like flying the day before a meeting and staying in a hotel the night before. And even with the added hotel and meals expenses, the total cost is often cheaper than flying business class.

Again, just my opinion, not speaking for Amazon.

At G you still get to fly in before. Amazon has enough money. They just don't want to spend it on employees. There's a reason churn is so bad there.

Yes, I have. Face time is possible over video chat. Code collaboration is possible through pull requests / change lists / whatever.

Again, not sure what you're saying here.

Enjoy the sub par "perks". As Amazon tells you that spending less on employees is the way to go.

It's higher bandwidth to work face to face. There are many studies citing the same.

So true

Do you have any idea about what’s gonna happen to people who are going to intern at these companies? I will be interning at Amazon this summer and am afraid it doesn’t get cancelled.

I work for a F500 and we got a company wide email today. It says we can travel and to follow the CDC/WHO guidelines. And that certain places are to be avoided, HK, China, South Korea.

I would have to see the memo myself. Curbing travel in the I US to cut expenses given economic uncertainty makes sense.

But the article makes it sound like they don't want to spread the virus by traveling within the US. Which I just don't believe I until I see the actual memo.

This is unfolding amazingly quickly.

AFAIK Microsoft did the same a few days ago too.

Do you have a link to a policy document or an article that states this?

No, but a person, who works there said, that they got an email along the lines of "considering coronavirus, you can refuse travel requests from your manager at will".

That's a different angle than Amazon's "no nonessential travel" policy. Being uncomfortable to travel and corporate policy banning travel have different implications and consequences for employees that decide not to travel or work remotely.

Depends on unit. My extended team got a recommendation to discuss with managers if uncomfortable with travel. Same mail also pointed out (inaccurately) that the WHO stated the situation as “low risk”.

Considering most of MS who travels are either sales or on-site consultants, this “discuss with manager” thing is extremely ambiguous. Are you going to be the one saying no to a large enterprise customer and halt a 50M deal?

I also it particularly self-serving in the sense that it pointed out that since there were no sick MS employees yet, the “risk to Microsoft” was low.

No mention of remote working or families in the e-mail either. Biggest risk is to elderly relatives, not necessarily young turks who might just be carriers, or the f*cking company.

We see major cancellations of trade shows and similar.

At the same time, cademic conferences are moving full speed ahead... Including in areas with community transmission. Publish-or-perish becomes publish-and-perish.

This isn’t true of all academic conferences. I have a close relative who’s a researcher and lecturer in global nutrition and her next 6 months of travel have effectively been paused due to the outbreak.

Ironically, the only major organization in her world that has allegedly pleaded to keep things running as normal is the Gates Foundation.

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