Amazon reverses course, expands work-from-home options
mynorthwest.com
mynorthwest.com
It does require a cultural shift in an organization, and I do find that companies that are half-remote/half-onsite or some mixture tend to do significantly worse than companies that go all-in on remote or all-in on staying in the office because the mix always leads to remote folks being left out of important political nuances handled in the hallway and break-rooms.
I don't see myself ever working for Amazon for a myriad of reasons (or most of the other FAANG companies for that matter), but I do think this issue is more complex in a large organization than many WFH advocates give it credit for. That said, I never intend to go back to an office other than for occasional visits for the remainder of my life/career.
Sure there are focus phases I d love to have less distractions in, but tbh sometimes your value lies in quick response to big problems rather than long concentration to solve small ones.
I worked in full height cubicles and sometimes you can spend 2 weeks without sharing something with a coworker to a point you end up having spent all you time on a silly assumption you discover made you overengineer something a dude sitting 10 meters away knew you could solve in 5 lines.
Maybe we both program different kind of software and maybe need different environments ?
- Unusually good aptitude for handling context switches.
- Unusually good skill at concentrating on your work in noisy / busy environments.
- Not much time writing code that's near the limits of your abilities.
That may be true. My dislike for open floor plan offices is actually less about noise and more about visual distractions. I stare off into the distance when thinking and having visual distractions within my field of view can easily interrupt those thoughts. Thanks to my upbringing, I'm pretty good at tuning noises out and I usually am wearing headphones anyway. But the visual distractions lead me to get off whatever train of thought that I'm on. I don't find cubicles to be significantly less noisy than open floor plans, but they do massively (to completely) eliminate visual distractions. One compromise I had at a previous employer that worked well was to "pod" cubicles, so you had your back to your team but could turn around and talk, but you weren't distracted by other teams during the day having nerf fights or whatever the heck they were doing elsewhere.
Also, I do think there's an element of different personalities involved. I think more extroverted people probably enjoy offices and open offices generally, where-as I am introverted and a bit socially anxious, so having privacy and no interruptions for my work is best for my personality.
finance/banking tends to be a very different kind of programming then most developers are used to, even though the domain expertise is still CRUD at the heart.
i've been in that industry as well for 4 yrs now. I can kinda see his point, as its hard to not drift off in any other setting. You usually just get BusinessCases to implement, which are rigidly defined and just need to be implemented.
(and tested to a degree some people wouldn't believe on this forum where even TDD is often questioned)
It’s more akin to an SOC or other Ops centers, where the open floor and resulting info flow is crucial to the perma on-call nature of those work patterns.
Most developers (the kind that actually just sits and codes all day long) are not putting out fires all the time. But, many, many ops (operations) people are. This comment makes a lot of sense if you consider that the author might be in ops.
As a former devops/infrastructure engineer (i.e., my coding was mostly around lighter projects or automation/scripting), I was in some open environments and sometimes they really were a ton of fun. One day I came in and there were server boxes all over my desk... it was funny. We were constantly pranking each other (nothing permanent or painful, of course!) That camaraderie and closeness produced one of the best work environments of my career and I miss it.
However, my job now is serious, head-down coding... I would find that very difficult in the same open office environment, so I think both perspectives can be true depending on the type of job you have.
I had a full office and decent chair at home, but despite this, it was always frowned on when someome wfh.
Firstly, congrats! It's something I'm working towards myself, and the pandemic looks like it will be a significant opportunity to try and achieve it.
However, perhaps you're minimising your expertise here and the learnings and experience that the employer and the worker need to go through to make it work.
Anything to share here?
This allows you to bypass the politics situation pretty well. Interact professionally with the people you need to, get your work done, and get your social and drama needs met elsewhere, like with real friends and family :-P
If half the team is wfh it just seems like those in the office will be in the loop more consistently, especially if the team lead is also in the office. There's a lot of questions I feel comfortable asking casually if the person I want to ask is nearby but not by sending them an email or during a meeting.
There is this bot on slack called donut that every company I've been uses. Basically it prompts 2 or more random people to catch up every week or how often you think not annoying. I don't think I had more than that back in the office days but you could send slack messages to people how often you want if you like more.
In my team, most of the times, anything important needs to be sent to the channel for transparency and more chance of getting picked up. Private messages are not expected to be as important nor get an immediate reply so people won't feel bothered when you send one. Then there are also things more purposefully async such as github issues and wikis.
In a remote environment you have no idea if you're interrupting someone when you give them a call, so you need a proper reason to call someone. People discuss things in closed conference calls, chat rooms and email chains, so if they don't invite you you will never learn about any opportunities yourself.
If you're very confident in yourself and your work though this probably is less of a problem.
Politics is tricky. I have/had to do a lot more public relations. Starting/running book/video clubs, making time for 1:1s with coworkers, I even did a 2+ year stint of starting off the morning slack chats with a dad joke, that was very appreciated. There are many ways to be productive, but I had to find ways to stay noticed, likable, relevant, and appreciated outside the pull requests. As my former manager said, if no one remembers who you are, you will become just a line item on the payroll.
I think your experience is really interesting, because as a dev our work can be hard to measure, unless you're working on something huge and very visible, so this interpersonal part of the work becomes very important, kinda like your manager said, you have to be remembered for something more than just "that guy we pay to make code".
I do something pretty similar. Friday's I will somewhat regularly send a dad joke or meme. These of course stay non-political and very SFW.
On a somewhat serious side. I try to regularly send "tips". If I learn something that I think is beyond cool I'll send an email teaching that new cool thing. If it can't be done in an email I'll setup small sessions to teach that over Zoom. I prefer Zoom because it's more impactful as far as being "seen" and not just another email.
Relaying what I've learned (even basic things) works really well, at least my regular 1:1's and reviews support this view.
I was a remote employee (IC) for about 12 years, and this was a recurring problem. I was one of a handful of remotes in a global team across several time zones, so at some level everybody had to deal with this problem: I didn't have a good handle on the office politics in the US, but the people in the US had just as tenuous a grip on the office politics in Singapore, and so on.
Somehow it usually worked out OK, but we had a director who was very good at shielding us from the more distracting stuff, and we were working on a chronically understaffed, mission-critical, unglamorous, profitable product, so it sort of attracted "just do the work" types.
The OP, however, is a consultant, which brings a very different set of political considerations. Last time I did remote consulting, which was a long time ago, the biggest thing you had to worry about was budget.
Was the $2M project going to get $5M next year or $1M and why? If it's $5M you'd better be able to offer more services or they might push you out in favor of a bigger shop; if it's $1M you'd better make sure you have an internal champion to make sure you still get some of the work; and if you think you can't influence the decision you're not paying attention.
Back then, consultancies would have people on staff just to take all the meetings and drink the drinks and press the flesh and know these things. I'm talking about shops with maybe 10-20 people. I don't know how it works now, but I would bet tomorrow's lunch that whoever still has those people makes more money than whoever doesn't.
(I was a solo consultant, and my lunch was a lot more modest.)
I got a 35K raise recently - and all I did was ask - at my current job where 90% of the people are remote. The entire time I've been employed here, I've made sure to constantly mention to my manager how much I've improved things; that's what I mean by "sell your skills".
Basically from my experience, it's made no difference whether I'm in the office or working remotely; my value is recognized all the same.
EDIT: BTW I'm not a "Rockstar Dev" or any bullshit like that. My skill level is either on par or slightly lower than my colleagues. I just make sure to focus on solving tangible business problems and keep constant open communication with my team or stakeholders.
Training new employees (literally new graduates, but also new to team) can be more difficult with remotes. There are probably solutions, but having hired both remote and on-site employees, it was definitely easier to bring the on-site employees up to speed.
I fall into the "there's some value to co-located teams" camp, but I also believe that value is WAY overstated by most managers and senior leadership. In my perfect world, my team would all be located near enough to the office to come in when it makes sense, but free to work remote most of the time.
Given the choice between a traditional setting or remote, I much more prefer the remote session with those tools.
-- I'll admit to being biased towards remote but with an understanding many things do work better when together (physically).
1. White-boarding new systems/features. I find value in having the team in the same conference room and being able to use an actual whiteboard. So far, I haven't found a virtual whiteboard that was anywhere near as usable. I don't mean for pseudo-coding, but quickly sketching UIs or system architectures, where coworkers can walk up and edit each others work in real-time.
2. Onboarding new employees. Both for "water-cooler" socialization and ease of having the new team-member access other team member for whatever questions they have (Slack and other tools are most of the way there for the latter, but there's still something to be said for reading facial expressions and getting a "feel" for somebody).
And I freely admit some of that may just be my own biases. I've hired remotely and locally, both successfully, and with my company spread across 3+ continents, I'm used to remote collaboration.
I've worked with remote team-members for 20 years now. The tools today are light-years better. Heck, when I started at this company, many of the remote employees didn't even have stable internet connections - that was "fun".
Although tools like Google Docs actually replace whiteboards well for many purposes, I'm not sure why someone hasn't developed a better tablet-based collaborative tool. I admittedly haven't looked at what's out there recently but you'd think--even given admittedly limited surface area compared to an in-person whiteboard--someone could have given a better run at this.
I find miro works well for this.
#1 I'm curious what you've used & where it's come up short. I have had good luck there.
(1) Being the only remote person on a team. It was really hard to get other members to include me in meetings, etc. Perhaps your status as a consultant prevented such exclusion?
(2) Inability to stand at the same, physical whiteboard during technical discussions / design sessions.
There are some cool studies about what a “valued employee” is, in a sincere sense, depending on remote v in person.
Remote - linkers, info sharers, result generators.
In-person - basically all the people<>people skills you’d expect get valued.
I’d love to find this study again, but it provided a nice framework for me to think through how to succeed based on the workplace type.
How did you develop clients with whom you've never worked in an office at all?
(I consulted many years ago, sometimes remote, but everyone wanted to see me come in eventually for meetings, so I'm very curious.)
Generally there’s nothing in-person provides them that proper management in general does not. You’d both be looking at code anyway, on a screen, so pair programming is the same no matter the distance.
And there’s also the fact that experienced hires tend to not want to always baby juniors anyway. They need to learn how to read documentation and spend time on writing code. That’s mostly it for the first few years.
The most amazing programmer in my team, who is a loner, is 5-10years behind on the promotion ladder (against his desire).
You might be from a different era :-)
IT is a mass employer these days, there is no "not cut out of the field". Companies need software. They'll be bad engineers, but they'll be engineers regardless.
If your company's chat rooms are great, the onboarding might go well. Otherwise there's a big difference between noticing your boss/buddy is looking at their phone or having another kind of break and sneaking in a question or vice versa, noticing your junior dev's frustrated face, and looking at the green signal next to their name and wondering if it's a good time for a call.
Covid, for all of its horrors, did bring this positive change which should in the long term help alleviate traffic congestion, reduce the climate impact of commuting and revert the decay of small and medium cities.
In the future, expecting information workers to work in the office every day will feel like requiring them to wear a suit feels today. There will be certain niches that will be stuck in the old ways, and other obvious exceptions where physical interaction with equipment is necessary, but otherwise this change is here to stay.
Its implementation will be gradual after the initial batch of forward-thinking companies adopt it, but unstoppable nonetheless. After a point, companies will greatly prefer flexible workplaces due to reduced hiring costs and overhead, especially as the technology for remote work improves and more people become proficient at working from outside the office.
We should all be prepared for the change. Being effective working from home is a workplace skill like any other; at one time, for instance, information workers had to learn to transition to the typewriter and later to computers. Those who refuse to learn this new skill will eventually be left behind or, at best, have their employment options substantially restricted.
In the UK I'm starting to see a push to get back into the office by the media. Stories about how "most" people want to go back into the office, which goes strongly against what I've heard from colleagues (which, to be fair is only tech people). I've heard the argument about being trapped in a small home/flat can be an issue, especially with kids, so I can see that being a driver to get back in the office.
Some more management and sales type people have told me quick communication face to face is missing with remote working, but for me, an information worker, I value not being interrupted every 10 mins. I can put my slack on DnD and block out mornings or afternoons for deep work.
I lived in the outskirts of London and commuted in for a long time when I was getting started in this career. Now I'm 10 years in, I'm over spending £650/$900 a month on a train ticket, spending 1h 30m each way to commute in and then spending £10 on lunch every day. At home I can cook good, cheap, home cooked meals. I can go for a walk at lunch time and start and finish when I want to, as long as work is complete.
People have also told me they miss social time in the office. I'm more introverted, so I miss this much less, but if it's a big loss, maybe you need to socialise more outside of work.
Now, 18 months into COVID, I have decided I never want to go back into an office, if I can help it. I know not everyone can do this, but for me, I've committed so much that I've moved away from London up to the North of England. I want to continue to arbitrage between London tech rates and cheaper locations as long as I can.
I'm sorry to say but I think most big cities will keep a significant loss of visitors. Those that can move will do. The brain drain from a country into capital cities I feel is reversing, and I think it's for the best. We can help revitalise smaller areas and tech like the internet, video calls and the acceptance of things like Slack will power it.
So right now, I think its a battle between employers and staff. Employers mostly want people back in the office (for some reason, I'm still not sure why), and most employees want to be remote, or at least have the option. Who will break first is the big question. An employer willing to hire from a bigger pool of people is bound to, over time, gain a competitive edge.
That's crazy - where on the outskirts of London did you live? Birmingham?
[1] https://bmmagazine.co.uk/in-business/londoners-commute-74-mi...
[1] https://goo.gl/maps/UcNQmsbTE5Q3ni5c8 [2] https://goo.gl/maps/aFJ2Ut1ZLgmNGN266
Let's just say I have mixed feelings about the pandemic
I quickly learned to cope by making full use of the company provided gym: I'd leave at 5am and spend 3 hours at the gym doing stretches, exercising, watching TV on my phone, and going to the sauna/steam rooms (daily! it was amazing). Since everyone was in the same boat wrt traffic, we'd all take a long lunch most days and leave later, like 7-8pm which made evening traffic more managable. Most weekends I'd drive 3 hours one way to visit family anyway so I got used to it.
Like I said, I have mixed feelings about the pandemic. Getting 3-4 hours of my life back each day has been incredible. Never going back to any commute.
I am not too sure. When you recruit in really small pools (say 10 devs in a town) and score one of the worst engineers in the pool the next one to recruit is probably better. You don't have that effect in big pools where the untried pool share is almost still the same.
Also if the recruiting is worse than chance (quite common in my experience), having a bigger pool is worse and you ideally want one qualified candidate.
Holy cow! People switch jobs when offered smaller raises than that.
I believe the WFH shift is currently in fashion, in the same way that cubicles used to be, then open-offices. 10+ years ago, it was a big thing for a startup, for example, to get some office space at a accelerator just to have a physical location - even though you could do all your work remotely.
At some point, I suspect, work-from-office will come back around.
Big picture: Some people like remote work, some people don't. Some companies will embrace remote work, some won't. This is the same with how some people prefer cubicles (like me!) and others see them as soul-less cages.
> Some people like remote work, some people don't.
And a lot like to have the option to do both, because even if I prefer working at the office being forced to be there every day of the week no matter the circumstances makes no sense for me. What is asked here is flexibility.
It already has. The forward-thinking job candidates advertise willingness to work in an office now, (correctly) inferring that it increases their hireability and promotion chances.
The latter opportunities exist too. That's effectively the situation with my very distributed team although I could drive into an office (where the vast bulk of them are not located). But there are probably far fewer of them.
As soon as the result in each team came out, managers were talking abt who s engaged (0 wfh) vs who's not (4-5 days wfh).
I dont care, I put 0 to increase my popularity upstairs as it cost me nothing at all, but you cant help to wonder if companies are sincere in asking people to choose. Just dont ask if you dont want it to happen.
For me it goes like this (best to worse).
WFH Forever (as I currently do).
On-site own office
Small Office (only devs)
Cubicle
Open Office.
Small Office/Cubicle you'd have to be paying spectaculary well.
On-site own office I'd consider for market rate and WFH - just pay me the average for my level.
Basically if you want me on-site it'll cost more, if you want me on-site in a less than ideal working environment (for me) it'll cost even more.
At least with a cubicle your space, such as it is, is your space -- you don't have to share it with John who smells funny or Larry who talks to himself, and so on.
There are two things that stop me from working comfortably/well - noise I can't control and visual distractions (and it's gotten worse as I've gotten older).
> you don't have to share it with John who smells funny or Larry who talks to himself, and so on
A cubicle room is a shared office with more participants. It's the difference between trying to find an dorm room with a roommate or three versus a cabin full of bunks with dozens of roommates. (The fact that "apartments" with proper offices are so far below the "norm" in work environments versus home environments/living arrangements says so much. When was the last time a cabin full of bunks was something you expected to be in 90% of the year? [Also, I think in this analogy the open office is the church basement full of sleeping bags.])
Only if half the people using the sleeping bags are also practicing the drums.
- how good is your office environment as a work environment? (e.g. does it have productivity-destroying measures like being open, or is it acoustically quiet, or has nice facilities, etc). Also applies to home environment!
- how good is your commute (time/cost/gruellingness/exposure to infection from other humans)
- how much are you paying in land/real estate cost to have (a) an office in a prestige location and (b) workers within commuting range to it? There is a huge amount of money being paid to landlords and rentiers in the broader sense, and it would be a big efficiency for the economy as a whole to .. not do that.
However 21/22 year old me would have hated this! Working from an office was so much fun back then. Plus you'd meet girls at lunch and stuff. Fantastic time. Lots of work, lots of learning the soft skills and lots of laughing around and enjoying myself.
I hope that 24/7 WFH doesn't become a thing, but that we get a mix. Flexibility from both sides, whenever possible.
This is actually something that didn't cross my mind through this whole thing, and I don't know why. I love WFH, and wish my employer would extend the option, rather than take a hardline stance against it (old administration doesn't understand productivity tools so we all suffer).
That being said, if I was just starting out in the working world, my prospects absolutely would've been different as time went on. Working in an office full time 100% helped me realize that soft skills are as, if not more important than technical skill.
As a director of a very diverse department now, I actually look for soft skills more than anything. Technical aspects can be learned via the on-boarding process. Soft skills are so much harder to hone, though. Especially if you're entirely remote.
Right now it is more a fashion thing. Depending on the structure of your company it will work very well or not at at all.
Sometimes throwing 3 people in a room with a whiteboard and a few markers fixes a lot of issues. That sort of thing does not usually happen remote from my exp. But in an office it happens all the time. Sometimes there are too many help vampires. They are good enough but require a lot of hand holding to get up to 'works independent'. The ones they goto are usually the most productive people and that does not happen as much remote. So the more productive ones say 'this is awesome' because they get so much done, but meanwhile the rest of the org is struggling.
Also when you work remote after a few years people 'forget' about you. You get left out of things. Because they just do not see you. If they do not see you, you do not exist to them. I worked remote for about 10 years. I had to be very diligent to be included into things. Recently a few years ago I got to work in an office again with a great group. It was amazing. I learned so much so quickly. I became way more productive. I was able to share a lot more to more jr devs. But now it is back to the same things where I have to spend a lot of time being noticed for anything, and basically having to play a interesting game of 'be nice in email'. Also if you do not have an advocates in management it will be even worse (luckily I do not have that issue this time). Remote work has a lot going for it but also a lot going against it.
But in the end companies will need to measure it. If they don't it is nothing but a guess.
This is my first time ever to see this description. It is perfect. I am currently sitting next to someone who is exactly this! I cannot figure out if this person is lacking skills or just plain lazy... but they sure take up a lot of my time compared to their net output!
There may still be benefits though.
But anyway why not join a social club for dating? That's where people go intentionally to socialize, so your "hit rate" will be much higher.
I doubt human nature will change because or recent social mores. It will just adapt.
But over time, people tend to date people they meet regularly and get to bond with. I forget the percentages, but I remember reading a study saying that most marriages involve people who were classmates in high school, in college or were coworkers.
> But anyway why not join a social club for dating? That's where people go intentionally to socialize, so your "hit rate" will be much higher.
I'm not OP, but that's an additional effort and not always easy to do (for example your work hours could be longer, the social club might not be close by, etc, a myriad reasons).
See my previous part of the comment: a lot of people find their life partners in their vicinity, without going out of their way to look for them.
First of all, a social club for dating? Really? Are you sure you're in the right century? People most frequently meet each other dating the same way they always have, with a twist -- friends, institutions (including the workplace), bars and online dating (that's the twist).
Secondly, 22% of Americans met their spouse at work [1], and 27% have indicated they'd be open to it [2]. Does that mean that it's always a reasonable idea, or that it's free of risks and messiness? No and no. The fact that it's sometimes playing with fire isn't going to deter anybody.
Pandemic notwithstanding, Americans spend so much time at work in deeply intimate psychological settings building deep social bonds that it's only natural that romance often develops.
[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140211005135/en/Kee...
[2] https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/one-third-u-s-marriag...
From what country or culture did you write this comment?
I have lived in East Asia for a long time. Office culture is a major benefit for young people (men/women/straight/gay) to meet partners. It is actively encouraged in many countries in the region.
(note that I'm generally pro wfh, but on the climate side it is feasible that running the AC or heat in your home more during the day is less efficient than driving to work and congregating with bunch of people in a building designed for energy efficiency. I'm not saying that the claim in that article is true, just that I'm not sure that it's settled)
Anecdotally, I ended up getting a CO2 monitor for my house, and had to set the central air fan to run pretty regularly (when not feasible to open windows, which is much of the year year -- quite hot) to circulate the air to keep CO2 levels at a point where they weren't potentially effecting my cognitive abilities (i noticed that's I'd start feeling lethargic and getting headaches, etc). The house is just designed to be sealed up for efficiency, rather than an office building which is often designed to circulate air to avoid that problem. CO2 levels throughout the house have dropped, but there's certainly an energy cost to that.
I think people started asking questions like "to whom am I paying and do I get a receipt" and "what do I get in return for these dues". If there's zero loyalty from the employer side and everyone's just an instantly replaceable gig worker, the concept vanishes.
> good for a company to offer flexibility and to be very clear about exactly what is being offered.
100% this.
I feel that the latter can convey a mental image of a person lounging at home in their pajamas, drinking a chai latte while ‘dabbling’ occasionally in work, while the former more accurately describes what I’m hoping the future of (former) office work will be: something not bound to a single, company-controlled, indoor location.
This is literally what a lot of people want though.
People act (on average) with a lot more good faith than most corporate entities.
If, as a manager, you are unable to infer that this is happening, then in all probability that person would be doing the same 'dabbling' if they were co-located. (Just with a higher effort of looking busier).
Old administration thought that wasn't good, because people were screwing around during the 8-5. I tried to explain that yes, that happened, but
a) that already happens in the office;
b) they're also working at night, on the weekends, and whenever the hell I need them to, and not complaining about it, or even being bothered by it
c) they're happier and MUCH more effective for the students.
No go.
That's why, despite having the choice to work from home, I am going to mainly work in the office.
At work = work mode, at home = home mode.
I will say when I used to just sometimes work from home, it was more important for me to do the usual morning routine, dress up in my usual business casual, and sit down in my office.
The last 10 years or so, when I've been increasingly working remote--and have been effectively full-time even within fairly easy commute of an office--I don't bother and will work anywhere in the house I want.
You can have a "fixed" work environment without it being a centrally managed office.
More reason why "work-from-home" is an under-efficient specifier on both sides for what people are often really asking for/what bosses really want. "Work-from-home-office" at the very least would offer a better impression to both sides, though I think the great-grandparent here's "flexible-location" is probably better still.
if a worker wants to slack off and post on HN (or watch netflix) during office hours it does not matter if they are "in the office" or at home....
One thing I really love about working remotely is that I can maintain perspective. It's easier to take a step away and remember to see life for what it is rather than getting so caught up in the miniature worlds created by someone else who didn't necessarily have everyone's best interests at heart.
Given the shitty internet situation (might just be here in Germany though) and background noise anywhere that is not the office or home (which seems to be still bad in a lot of cases), that doesn't seem too desirable of an image. Those factors are what cause the location in "flexible-location" to be home 99% of the time for me (and probably many other people).
When interviewing candidates and speaking about the company to current employees I make a conscious effort to say that we are a “remote” or “distributed” company.
Isn't what you do in the office except you don't wear pyjamas and have to look busy?
We got home office laws, where the employer has to give you stuff to do you work from home.
And we got mobile work laws, where things are more flexible, and people are allowed to work in office if they wish, but can work from anywhere they like. This way the employer doesn't have to put effort into a potential home working environment.
"Flexible-location" implies that I might not live within commuting distance of one of my employer's offices.
"Work-from-home", so far, has been abused by employers who are hellbent a so-called "hybrid" model and still want to require that employees live within commuting distance. "Work-from-home", in any proportion less than 100%, is worthless for someone who doesn't want to live in the 'burbs.
The new guidance is still very much "office centric" and requires that everyone be in the office 3 days a week. And even if you do get an exception to work remotely (which will probably be extremely rare), you are still required to live within commute distance of your assigned office. That defeats the purpose of remote work for a lot of people.
I can do a two-hour commute (especially if it can mostly be by rail) once a week or so. But much more than that and it gets pretty painful. Mind you, some flexibility is better than no flexibility but it's not remote work by any means.
Amazon's policy is exactly the same as Microsoft. Is Google proper remote now?
Many parts of it can be a bad place to work. But it's a huge company. There are some parts doing cutting edge work as well that you won't get access to at other companies. But to your point, the likelihood that a junior engineer will get access to that is slim, and so your assertion holds.
I.e., it's a point of contention, and there's an incentive to bluff. Each side wants to make the other side fear the consequences of demanding more than the labor market will bear.
5pm-2am - work from home
thank you amazon for flexible work arrangements!
I have heard this at Facebook though, where 9-to-9 is more typical, but you know, you don't see people complaining about that online.
Edit: Not an uncommon view either, see - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27473505
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
So give up the hazing. We all know the job's not that hard.
However we just recently heard about Amazon hiring to fire, with an internal policy and broken pursuit-of-metrics that yields fundamental dysfunction.
Guess I'm not the perfect person then or else I'd know all of this, right? Fuck that.
You now have a FAANG company that is embracing remote work, and the other companies stand to lose a decent amount of talent to them, so are forced to change what their tune.
This doesn’t really mean anything “thinking is predicated on what we believe will be most beneficial for customers, while also trying to give employees more flexibility in their work environment and lives.”
I did a bunch of interviewing and hiring for remote software engineers during this time (interviewed 100+ people). One of the main things I tried to assess was whether or not the person was a good fit for working remotely (essentially, they needed to be very good at self-motivating their productivity). Some people's personality just doesn't work as well in an isolated, work-from-home environment. In my opinion, this is going to be a new realization many companies (large and small) are going to come to in the next year and will have to deal with accordingly. It's also unfair to people who were potentially thriving at their jobs when in-person full time, but may now be struggling to maintain the same productivity remotely.
I think it's inevitable that things will shift slowly back towards full-time in-person workplaces.
Something like 3-in/2-out feels like one of those uncomfortable middle grounds. OK. So workers get a bit more flexibility. But the downsides:
- Companies can't really save on real estate unless you do scheduling and hot desking which seems like an ugly solution.
- Workers can't really increase their commute times much but have to keep a reasonable working area at home.
- Schedules will only overlap for meetings etc. if there's a lot of coordination
- Either remote people on a given day will get left out or some of those in-person will resent having to work as if everyone is remote even though they're in-person themselves.
I also wonder how many companies will get bit by leadership (CEOs, engineering team managers, whoever really) not working as well in a remote environment.
Also, just looking for people who have successfully worked remotely before is a plus. People who have built meaningful side projects on their own can also be a good sign (although definitely not a sure sign of success).
https://www.iizcat.com/uploads/2017/08/94gwt-cat-jungle-gym-...
I've seen salaries of my peers getting remote jobs increase by 50% across the board, it's kind of insane right now.
I had to start feelancing and work with international companies to find people who didn't expect me to come to an office.
Good to see this change now.
It's nice being in a field where all your compatriots have leverage.
In Switzerland, Gov asked companies to pay % of rent. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/court-decision_companies-must-p...
The only exception was Germany. There is ongoing discussion that Remote workers should pay a (*5% tax*) for having flexibility/option to work from home. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/deutsche-bank-proposes-a-5pe...
I'm a WFH software developer, and I have some experience with residential construction and soundproofing. I'm considering teaming up with a full-time building contractor to start targeting this niche market.
Be careful what you wish for!
> Amazon reverses course, joins other Seattle tech companies in expanding work-from-home options
A better contracted title than the current one ("Amazon reverses course in expanding...") would be:
> Amazon joins other Seattle tech companies in expanding work-from-home options
or if that doesn't work,
> Amazon reverses course, expanding work-from-home options
@dang
Edit: oh, I see - it's because of the problem explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27469696. Edited now.
"Amazon reverses course, joins other Seattle tech companies in expanding work-from-home options"