Amazon plans to ‘return to an office-centric culture as our baseline’

Yup I did the same.

Maybe you were supposed to reforward it to the other person.

Someone always misses the memo in a large organization.

We have had two cases where a system was replaced with company-wide announcements and we received questions about where its predecessor went over a year later.

Interview now while everyone is remote and it’s easier to do versus taking time off when you’re forced back into an office.

Did you bring it up with your manager? How about your colleagues. You can significantly affect your chances by talking about it, making clear that you see this as a major benefit (that doesn't cost the company a dime and, in fact, opens up for saving money on office rent), and highlighting that you can be as productive at home as you can in the office, if that's actually the case of course :) Several of us where I work have been doing this over the past year, and in my last conversation with my manager I got approval for working from home permanently even after the restrictions are pulled back. It's hard to say for sure, but I don't think I would have gotten the same answer if we hadn't been very clear and vocal about our preferences. And of course it helps that the company outperformed its pre-COVID19 projections :)

It is a mobile app primarily, so I'm not sure that's true.

Curious on your response to this story -

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/30/amazon-tw...

At least G's office perks are way better lol

Eight years of an account, BANNED!

Better service this way.

>Also, property taxes don't they pretty directly pay for roads which are used for commuting?

Basically the answer to this is no. Often roads are paid for out of grants to build infrastructure in the next ring of suburbs.

https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

This impacts the cost of parking lots, and basically because we tax property rather than land value, parking lots are generally pretty cheap if you already own the ground, but expensive enough that buying new land to meet a parking minimum is one of the single largest line items in many development projects.

Property taxes contribute to local road building and maintenance at most. They do not (here at least) contribute to roads located in other towns or states that an employee may commute on.

I'd say it heavily depends where you are. When I was in CA, it was ~$300/mo for Caltrain+gas, ~3 hours of my time per day, plus neither lunch nor coffee was free, so ~$60/wk for that. The pandemic would have been a net benefit to the wallet there, I think.

As it was, I moved before the pandemic, because I got tired of fighting that very commute, tired of fighting to get CA to see the light on housing. So my commute was ~2 hours and ~$80/mo and lunch and coffee was paid prior to the pandemic, and I'm definitely in your bucket, since the loss of lunch significantly outweighs not paying for the commute. (And my commute was optionally biking, and I miss getting that in as much, too.)

I don't know where you live but is it possible to write at least the electricity off as a work expense? Sure it won't offset it but at least dull the cost a little.

It's more than just travel, it's also the cost of owning and maintaining a vehicle, the space to park it both at home and at work, the cost of insuring a vehicle.

Or the cost of a bus pass/transit at least. But the time cost of transit is generally higher than the time cost of commuting by car. And the time cost of commuting in general is pretty high and will never, ever show up on an expense report.

It's silly how much of our lives we give up for a full time job and kind of a lot of it isn't compensated in any way.

to internalize those costs for most workers, as most workers are hourly, you can just make the regular commute part of work time (perhaps using average commute time to exclude abnormal variances). that avoids using tax law, which can convolute incentives and create unintended loopholes.

I'm 41 and glad to see the back of it. My commute was never miserable, but it was always wasted time. A lot of people also don't like the social aspect of the job, and the fact that it's been the default since basically forever has meant that those people have been under what I might call (somewhat hyperbolically) the tyranny of extroversion. I've been noticeably less stressed since I noped out of the office last year.

It's also worth bearing in mind that if you do want to be social, you can be social outside office hours no matter whether the job's in-person or remote. I can't choose not to be social in a face-to-face environment without suffering professional consequences.

Not everyone is in their 20s in an unfamiliar city.

I don't think I qualify for either introvert or extrovert (that is, I tend to be self-reflective about some things and outgoing about others).

There are plenty of other reasons too. It is much faster to communicate face to face (for me) and I tend to be much better at resolving micro-miscommunications that can blow up in hours of days of work delays when I'm face to face than when I'm remote. Compounded with the fact that I am not good at reading people in general (but much worse so remotely), in the WFH setup I end up having a lot more situations where I don't know exactly where a coworker and I stand on a certain issue, which even if it happened in the office it would be resolved in < 5 minutes face to face.

I think it's because in the office, interrupting someone with a quick question is a much lower barrier/less hassle than asking them to join you on a short video conference.

I’m not in GP’s boat (I unexpectedly love WFH), but if part of what I miss is the effectiveness of shared analog whiteboard discussions, those are hard if you’re the only one at the whiteboard.

I don’t care how people do their focus time, and I’m fine with Zoom for broadcast/presentation style meetings, but I’m excited to have my coworkers physically present again when we’re discussing and troubleshooting things together. Zoom fatigue is real, latency kills interactive conversation, and the avatars on my screen are at this point pretty disconnected from the real people I once knew.

Extroverts had become accustomed to introverts bearing their externalities.