Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
In my view, the personality traits that are conducive to promotion up the Amazon leadership ladder are strongly aligned with loving work-from-office. Most people L10 and higher not only don't understand the desire for permanent work from home, I think maybe they cannot understand it. It's just too foreign to many of them.
The first announcement was "We can't wait to be back in the office, and we know you can't either". Senior engineers started quitting. Then it was "Okay, okay, you can work from home 2-3 days per week, but only with your L10's approval". The exodus continued.
Now it's "Fine, you can work from home with your L8's approval, but you better be ready to show up on 24 hour notice if we say so!". The biggest benefit of work from home is not needing to commute, and lower cost of living by leaving the HCOL cities.
They don't get it. Other companies do. And anyone who has spent 5 or more years working for Amazon is well-trained enough to get a better paying job with a company that understands the cultural shift that just happened to the developer world.
Edit: I know not all developers are anti-office. But for those of us who are, working for people who don't understand us, who make policies based on what works best for them, is a problem.
Success leads to ossification, which creates opportunity for new life to exploit untapped potential.
* Zoom fatigue is real.
* I find it much harder to collaborate with peers.
* I feel like less of a part of the company. Not being in the office, so I'm no longer seeing that busy bee activity on the floors, not able to mingle with other people from other teams, not seeing new faces, no team activities, and no desk with my name on it. It's a very isolated feeling.
* I find it even more Groundhog Day. To wake up from bed, walk a few steps to my desk, and start plugging away. Yeah, commuting can suck, but at least there's more stimulation and "life" to it.
* Deadlines, at least from my perspective, got even more ridiculous since WFH started.
The question is whether there are enough developers like you to run one of the largest software companies in the world, while maintaining 'the bar'.
IME different life seasons can bring different preferences. With a young family and project house I don't want to socialize as much with coworkers as I did when I was a single 20 something.
I was wanting to do that for my birthday last year, but I know too many people who don't own laptops
It seemed like a pretty good experiment, but I don't think it caught on. Maybe Slack (or Teams) should aquihire them and implement something similar.
Companies that are embracing remote work are changing the way they work. Becoming a true distributed organization isn't easy and we're not really sure what that looks like yet, but it's much easier to cope with than WFH in an organization where the executives say "we can't wait to be back in the office, and we know you can't either".
Edit: Of course, if you can't wait to be back in the office, maybe Amazon is just the right place for you in the long term. That's perfectly reasonable. I just doubt your experience is representative of the emerging industry trend toward permanent remote work.
I've worked at two companies that have embraced remote work, and are hiring "anywhere", though still obviously limited by language, jurisdiction etc. The changes I've seen are mainly cultural: preference for asynchronous communication and preference for structured coordination over ad-hoc. So fewer meetings, and those that remain tend to be standing meetings on a regular schedule with a defined leader and consistent agenda, and they often get cancelled or ended quickly if possible. Slack tends to be more asynchronous; you're not expected to respond right away, and people turn off notifications when they need to concentrate. Waaaay less email, to the point where it's mainly meeting invitations. More writing and documentation, but even then, a preference for things like Jira, Notion, Coda or Team Retro over more unstructured tools like generic documents or spreadsheets.
Now obviously none of that is new or confined to remote-first organizations. But I do see deliberate thought about how to collaborate more effectively, and how to mitigate the downsides.
The issue I had is once we started going back to the office 2x a week, all my meetings were STILL on zoom all day, I just took them from my cube with my mask on. It was a total bummer!
One on ones with the boss are much nicer when we can go outside for a stroll....
There are real traps when it comes to WFH that need to be considered, even outside COVID. Trying to work from the couch or bed is 'possible' but 99/100 a terrible idea. You will likely need a fairly dedicated space, setup that supports your workflows. These things take time to workout, and having a supportive company that gets this can make such a difference.
Once I found what works for me and was clear about what I expected from employers, things were generally a lot better. Saying that, if your bosses ever become heavily anti-WFH, they can make things suck pretty quickly, but the same bad office politics/dynamics I guess.
This. People keep talking how much more time they have for work now that they don’t have to commute, and don’t realize how terrible that is for them.
For me, the dealbreaker is the groundhog day effect that working from home has. Never heard anyone one describe it that way, but it’s so true, i will probably steal it. It’s the primary reason why it still feels like April of 2020 for me. Time paused then, and hasn’t moved since.
Working from home is amazing if the company and the employee can embrace the changes that come with it. If your social stimulation happens to come from your office and your commute, maybe that's a problem? Same goes for meetings, usually embracing work from home comes with more async communications, more emails, documentations and less meetings.
But I agree, even at it's best work from home makes you come across less people face to face than a commute + office time. And I think in the coming years we will see some cultural impacts of this between people who love work from home and people who abhor it.
You're allowed outside for non-work reasons too though haha. I've incorporated an hour of just wandering around into my day and it's the best work situation I've ever had
I try to do it every day.
Some members of the team, for example a woman that does documentation, I see almost not at all any longer because she's not one of the WebEx invites. But she was always just down the hall in the office.
How about replacing your commuting by a morning walk outside?
What an advantage in life to have chosen this career path over any of the above ones. And what a shame whenever we come across one of those "I am a developer and it's horrible!" type of posts.
/anecdote
Vs
A culture that will always prefer an hour long zoom meeting to a 2 minute exchange on stack. A zoom based culture is one that hasn't fully walked away from the office.
But TBH, after the pandemic hit, I found written communications to be far better than they had been previously.
That really leveled the playing field for me. But from my point of view, I've derived much of my communications from mailing lists, forums, listservs over the years. When people get around the water cooler and and I am just hanging around Thunderbird, I'm at a big disadvantage.
In particular, "remote-first" can effectively work, and bring diversity in the work place that is always welcome. It requires discipline and a real buy in from every layer of the company, but when it works I think it's the best.
Using a camera cover, and working butt naked.
> Senior engineers started quitting.
> The exodus continued.
The Toronto office (where I worked) is seeing a shift in the seniors vs juniors ratio. The rate of senior engineers leaving is exceeding the rate of promotion and hiring- not that Amazon has ever had an easy time hiring senior engineers in Toronto.
The other big names will pay you the same or more and treat you better.
Amazon also has an on-call culture that - depending on the team - can be brutal. And it's often viewed as the team's own fault and problem to fix.
There are some really wonderful niches within Amazon that I will continue to refer friends to.
I had to, though, be intentional about setting up my commute so i had time to read a book to and fro, and I’m sure not everyone is willing to think about it in those terms.
I foresee a movement in a few years of “commute forward” people trying to improve on their work-life balance, once they realize how much of life they’re going to be missing once they start commingling work and home life together.
Could we just agree that people are different and that some of us do not feel the way you do?
When I'm working I put on work clothes, I sit at my work desk and I take my work coffee cup. When I am done, I roll down my roll-top desk, and go pick up the kids on foot.
Arguably I appreciate that work culture in North-America and Asia may not be conducive of this. But ultimately we can all have the separation we need.
For me I built it around routines and work/leisure separation. For you it is your commute. Could we not let us both have what we want?
It might be nice for a change of pace of a specific purpose (i.e. planning meeting that is just easier in-person).
If I want to go downtown and socialize with coworkers, I can do that after work (and have while WFH).
I moved from the Middle East to the US. Cairo was a shit city for commuting. But that didn't stop socializing, because the other big difference between the US and many other countries is how individualistic and work-based society is. Back home, I had relatives, child-hood friends, etc that I was not only able to see, but often EXPECTED to see (even when I didn't want to).
In other countries, life was much more social, and work was just a tiny part of your social life. In the US, everything is individualistic (and nuclear family oriented) and people rely on the office for socialization.
Obviously this isn't viable solution to many people, and cycling has lots of risks, but its just an anecdote I had.
ALSO, the days I had to drive my car in the city were some of the most stressful ever(big car too).
I need 30-45 minutes to get there, and our public transit system is supposedly good. But the metro's still too crowded, dirty, smelly, etc. And I even usually avoid rush hour and take an automated, hassle-free line.
Commuting by personal motorized vehicle is hell, so you can forget that.
I'm contemplating buying an electric bike, but only because I'm lucky I have a place to keep it secure both at the office and at home.
The situation may be better in smaller cities, but I think that this consideration still affects a quite sizable bunch of people (20% of the country's population lives in the Paris region).
For example, I would much rather prefer to walk 30-40 minutes instead of taking a crowded, smelly metro for 20. I actually used to regularly walk 50 minutes to get home in the evening because I didn't want to deal with the transit.
There's also the fact that this is the time it takes when everything works well. Again, I take an automated line, which is fairly reliable.
But most of the other lines have "incidents" going quite often (more than once a week). In this case, if the delay isn't extreme (less than 30 minutes) people will just wait and stuff themselves in the even-more-crowded trains when they do show up. Or they'll try taking another line, adding to that train's usual crowd.
When there are too many people, trains usually have delays, because they have to deal with people literally not fitting in the train at the stops.
So even if you're OK with riding a train packed to the brim (say you ride from end to end, so you're guaranteed to have a seat and won't have to fight your way off the train), you still can't count on getting at your destination on time.
Why?!
I won't walk for 5 minutes sandwiched between a fast road strip-mall parking lots, industrial facilities, or open fields.
It's fine if you walk you can think about anything, but if you drive a car you waste your time.
The rest of the world would prefer you to think about driving a car when you drive a car.
When you're walking, OTOH, thinking about anything is OK. (The only person you'll kill by doing that unthinkingly is you.)
God, Americans are weird.
I used them as synonyms because I assumed the GP meant "thinking" as in thinking with concentration about some specific issue(s), which tends to divert your attention from your surroundings far more than the idle stream-of-consciousness / daydreams we all have going in the back of our heads all the time. Didn't you?
Should probably have said "When you're driving, the rest of the world would prefer you to concentrate on your driving and your surroundings, traffic, pedestrians etc. Deep actual thinking is far better done while walking than while driving."
But that wouldn't have made for a snappy turn-his-own-words-against-him comeback. :-)
Edited to say I suppose I am privileged enough to have the option, and that I have traveled more than an hour before (I just wasn't happy about it)
I cannot even imagine not being able to rewatch part of a lecture as a student. That seems incredibly bad.
Once you get used to a life where you do not have to drive more than 5min to get everywhere, it would really suck to have go further. Even better than a 5 to 10min drive is being walking distance.
This is the standard way of commuting in most of the US.
A threshold for me is probably around 5 minutes, counting from my apartment's door to the office door. Anything more feels like wasting time, so I'll avoid it for as long as I have the option.
On the other hand I have an 45m2 apartment, since I would rather have a small place in the center of Stockholm than having a bigger one in the suburbs.
I miss taking the train when I was in Europe compared to driving in the US. I had the option to read a book some days or play a game. Definitely more options to find joy when compared to driving when I can only choose from podcasts, music and audiobooks
The main difference for me is the mode of transport provides different possibilities for joy or benefit. While the cons of biking or walking maybe be sweating and climate, there’s a lot of joy and health benefits to be had if the times are comparable (e.g., 20 minute walk, 20 minute bike ride)
Why would I want to go to the office???
so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywhere.
Seems to me that many people here simply project their tourist experience while vacationing in London of Paris, as a result getting a wrong image of how people in Europe actually live their lives.
Sounds like you two are nit picking over the difference between the I495 loop being the "DC area" vs everything east of Fredricksburg/Front Royal/Fredreick being the "DC area".
Citation? I think we travel less far, but that's not because people choose to stay home so much as because you don't have to travel so far to achieve the same things (e.g. we probably travel less far to visit relatives than Americans, but still visit our relatives more often and spend more time with them).
#2 I live in Zagreb, Croatia - recently drove from Austria back through Slovenia to Zagreb, ended up spending more time in Zagreb traffic at 11:30 am then driving across three countries.
OTOH they extended the Metrobus and Expressbus like mad, at least it felt so after my initial disappointment from around 2004.
Most bus stops have an electronic timetable, dynamically updating their 4 rows. The busses are prioritized on traffic lights and partially have their own reserved lanes.
For when- and whereever I need to go I simply don't care when exactly, because a few minutes later the next one is coming, which applies the same way for sometimes necessary switches.
30mins max from outlying suburb to core, rather 20mins, maybe 50 to 60min from my edge to another edge of town, not necessarily through the core.
Only at night the intervals are getting longer, and the net is less 'dense', but not catastrophically so.
And it is fu****g expensive for single tickets :-(
When was the last time you used the HVV?
Besides that usually I want to ride my bicycle, bicycle, bicycle... ;)
edit: Try this? [·] https://geofox.hvv.de/jsf/home.seam?clear=true&language=en
Yup, inner centre is pretty great for a bike.
Even in another much smaller German city of only ~50k inhabitants, my school commute for years was ~40-50 minutes (dependent on season etc.; EDIT: 40-50 minutes per direction, also on mondays and another weekday my schooldays started at 07:05 not at 08:00) when the trip by bicycle to the same school would only take me ~20-25 minutes. Add to that the rapid aging of the population combined with the old people having the absolutely stellar idea to go by bus during the 07:15 morning school rush. Not like they have the whole day free to schedule their appointments... oh, wait And after years of having to deal with these fossils (most with that creepy perpetual half-smile-half-smirk) who think they're entitled to demand that people of all pre-pension ages (sometimes even heavily pregnant women) vacate their seats for them instead of literally just walking one or two steps further to the next seat, thereby not only clogging up the bus corridor while everyone has to shuffle around but also being a general nuisance I've got enough and for years haved avoided riding busses in this city like the plague.
I've seen public transport done differently and better in other cities, one key feature for working better AFAICT being tram lines with low intervals, not like in the above example relatively short busses every ~15-20 minutes per line.
I'm not sure this is true. Ireland went from one of the poorest nations in Western Europe to one of the richest from 1990 to now. In Dublin, commuting to work via car has been falling since at least the late 90s, driven by increased traffic, and greatly improved public transport and cycling infrastructure (though still quite bad by European standards); it hit 30% by 2018. The number of cars per capita is still, as far as I know, rising, but they're being used to commute to work less.
Rural areas of the country are much more of a mixed bag, and prosperity did drive an increase in driving there (though it has started to fall off a bit during the recovery after the financial crisis). But in urban areas, prosperity does _not_ seem to drive increased car use.
Ah, the classic joke, "nobody drives in Manhattan; there is too much traffic there".
> The number of cars per capita is still, as far as I know, rising, but they're being used to commute to work less.
Alas, 75% of Irish workers commute by passenger car, either as driver or as passenger. Only 10% of workers commute using public transit. That's what I meant when I said that Europeans are very much car dependent too: even in Dublin, the capital, most of the workers drive, and small minority uses public transit. Outside Dublin, cars dominate even more.
It's working well and reliable enough.
> The city with the best public transport in the world is probably Tokyo in terms of frequency and service reliability but it is constantly over capacity and things are not getting better.
Things absolutely are getting better; crowding is better than it was. A healthy growing city will always have some capacity issues at any given time, but that's the same as anything.
> so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywhere.
Not at all proven. Most people choose not to live right next to their workplace even when that's an option. 15-30 minutes' separation is helpful IMO. Even if I'm not commuting, it takes me that long to get my head out of "work mode", and having my home be my workplace makes that worse. "You don't take your work home with you" was always something I looked for in job applications.
If you change jobs, the new office might be on the purple line. Which does not cross the red line. So now you need to take the red line, to the green line (15 minutes + 10 minute layover = 25 minutes), and then change trains again to get to the purple line (15 minutes). That's assuming there are no delays, weather, construction/remodeling at any of the stations. If your morning coffee takes too long you might miss your connection, and now you've blown out your schedule by another 15-20 minutes, especially if part of your commute takes one of the less-frequent suburban lines.
End result is your 20 minute commute to your old office, has turned into a 40+ minute commute one way, assuming no delays. On a good day. Plus walking to and from the station.
My old office used to be on Castro Street in Mountain View, a 5 minute walk from the Caltrain Station. Then they leased a large building in the warehouse district, a 20 minute walk away. My old train commute + walk was almost exactly 1 hour from San Francisco; with the new office relocation it turned into 1 hour 15 minutes each way, which meant when I got home in the evening, the tram I wanted to take home had already stopped running, meaning either walk 45 minutes, or take a $9 (probably $15 in today's economy) uber home.
What point was he making? Well, switch jobs, and just move closer to your new office! Easy! Just never buy a house and only switch jobs at the end of your lease term, and rent forever.
Sounds precariously close to "you'll own nothing and be happy" or something along those lines.
For whom?
Around this German state, a 30 minute drive turns into 2 hours commute into each direction if I go with public transport.
And this is one of the places with best connections.
Back home in Portugal, and many other southern countries, good luck with the bus connections that only come around once per hour, and better not skip the 2nd connecting bus/train.
It depends. Though German public transport is one of the best in Europe.
There are tons of places where car is the only option, or after 8pm there are no running public transports (you are supposed to stay home, I guess).
Clean, blanket statement, what a good argument to make! based on what metrics exactly?
I wish I had American citizenship tbh.
Well, until recently I've lived in a very much French city for twelve years and I've never had to face a strike or any problem besides bus traffic being shifted around due to road work. To the point I've now got to get a driving licence in my thirties, as I've never needed it before. Maybe that was just luck.
This is the same argument has "what about the rain ?" for people who don't want to commute by bicycle.
Yes, it happens. But it's only a few days a year. Contrary to traffic. So you can adapt. Human is supposed to be great at adaptation. And the rest of the year it just works.
As for rain, the average where I am is about 120 days a year. While some of those days are "not much rain", it's still enough that walking/biking to/from work would be fairly annoying a large number of days per year. Plus... winter and snow (which is included in the number above, but more of an issue).
It only matters if it rains in the few minutes you spend cycling. Yesterday it rained here, but I assume it was before dawn.
A few days a year? Thanks for the euphemism, it made for a good laugh.
Well, you get used to it. I like reliably crowded trains much better than occasionally crowded trains.
Been "from home" for the last 20 years as I am an ISV and pretty much "enjoy some social life" without any commuting to work.
I live (well lived) within easy biking distance of the office (and commuted by bike nearly every day) and after the first few months of COVID work from home, I didn't ever want to go back to the office. We have an open floor plan office that's loud and not conducive to concentrating on work, and we have a distributed workforce (3 USA locations and 3 international locations), so most meetings had at least one zoom participant.
I took advantage of working from home to move farther from the office (now I'm within biking distance of a transit station that will take me to work, but the commute takes over twice as long as it used to), and will do my best to go to the office as little as possible. (we don't have a return to office date yet, but we reportedly won't be expected to be back 5 days a week)
But I hate being at the office. There's nothing I like about it. Noise, disturbances, poor desktop setup, too hot in summer, too hot in winter, no place to take an actual break...
Hmm, European cities weren't built for commuting or public transport, almost all of them were laid out in the medieval era for walking. They then acquired one or more railway stations in the 19th century, creating commuter ring #1 and becoming an order of magnitude larger, and may have been partially redesigned for cars in the 20th century, creating commuter ring #2. A popular conversion was demolishing the medieval-era city walls and replacing them with a ring road. Some were entirely flattened during the war, although generally rebuilt on the same plan.
Now most American cities were by comparison entirely designed for commuting ... by car. The problem with car commuting is that once you're over capacity it slows down the experience for everyone. Public transport just jams you in physically, which was uncomfortable before the pandemic and now just a nightmare. An overcrowded train is not slower than an empty one. (Subway throughput can be embark/disembark limited, though)
The difference to me seems to be the walkable core. That in turn depends on norms about use of public space and perceptions of public safety.
I'm slightly biased, but I think the Edinburgh New Town design with a couple of modern adaptations could be the ideal even for the 21st century. Grid layout, four to six floors, high ceilings, decent size windows, wide streets, occasional shop on the corner or restaurant in the basement.
("New" here means 18th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Town,_Edinburgh, not "new" as in postwar new town or medieval New Forest)
Likewise Berlin, though a bit taller: https://goo.gl/maps/HyMJsSFKQNErfWJZA
(New Town reminds me a lot of some parts of Cambridge; I think it’s the stone colour and some of the motifs).
I have taken the "California Train" which runs from San Francisco to San Jose, and advertises its capacity to carry bicyclists. Numerous times, however, bicyclists were denied boarding (each had paid for his ticket) because the carriages had become overcrowded, with the subsequent train arriving in forty-five minutes' time.
This experience made me understand why many commuters in that region embrace the automobile in spite of its many drawbacks.
House prices are obscene in/near big cities, and commuting still sucks (used to do 2 hours each way in London!).
Unless you're rich you will be living 40 mins - 1hr out, I am more like 1hr20 so I can own a home that isn't tiny or in a high crime area.
The commute costs, if I pay a year in advance, ~£5k/yr, set to go up by 10-15% next yr.
Generally speaking, and especially taking into account the climate crisis, it really doesn't make much sense to do all this even when there is more infra.
It is time for more companies to accept that WFH is largely a win/win.
I looked it up so you don't have to.
Can anyone name some of those companies? I would like to start applying in those places.
However, I'm anti commute all the way. I'll never go back to working full time at a office where I need to commute to.
I figured, well, at least he was honest with me.
The folks I know who work there were almost entirely all prepared to quit if the company forced their initial "everyone back in the office" requirement, especially in this current job market.
It feels rare to see Amazon ever make a change to such a publicly stated policy like this, I can only imagine that the groundswell of feedback from employees was quite startling in how much of a problem their retention would be with such a hard rule.
He even suggested that it would be totally okay if I was one of those people that wanted to study for a month or two before interviewing. Study?! For a job interview?
It was a weird experience. I normally shun recruiters, but I was just curious enough to hear what this guy had to say. His LinkedIn profile didn't indicate any past involvement with recruiting, so I wanted to know why a senior manager would spend time recruiting random people -- he must spend every waking hour on these calls.
My Facebook interview was weird also, but the people were super nice and the coding problems were fairly easy. I failed on distributed systems architecture, oddly enough, as it was an area I had no experience in for a senior hire (but I got an offer from Google the same day I was rejected from Facebook, so I didn't have much time to be sad about it).
But managers recruiting random people, just seems weird to me. If they wanted me for my specific skill set, that would be great! But if they were just looking for general hires, they must have lost a bet or something.
Neither of us get any attention from “good” companies whatsoever, but we both at least got a handful of messages from Amazon recruiters. They seem desperate. I didn’t bother pursuing as a little research showed they wouldn’t offer enough for me to relocate anyway. I’m not a fan of the FAANG hiring/placement and would probably not engage Amazon on that unless they could offer me a particularly enticing role, at least not now. Am I missing out on money? yeah probably.
The most interesting thing though, was how robotic the recruiter felt. The messages I got felt more like some mass automated messages than someone reaching out to speak to me about open roles.
They seem to have a lot of recruiters and I'm surprised if this even got you off their "contact every month" list.
A recruiter call doesn't mean a company has interest in a candidate. It just means the Amazon job description and your resume both included the word JAVA.
And considering their current controversies, my opinion on working for them has not changed.
If they ever contacted me again, I'd probably just laugh.
- 4 straight hours inside a room
- every hour the interviewer changed
- got asked the same questions over and over again
I was quite upset that I didn't pass... couple weeks later I was not, what a shitty experience it was.
- every hour the interviewer changed
- got asked the same questions over and over again"
It's the same in UK, at least they standardised it!
All that is moot now because of covid.
The current job I'm at was like 5-6h of interviews, it was hard to pass, but it didn't feel like the interviewers were trying to play "good cop, bad cop"
The recruiter was great, super nice, got me all organized for a full-day loop. They gave me some things to prepare, so I did. Admittedly, I was under-qualified for the job as a fresh grad but was assured that'd be fine.
Still, the entire team made it abundantly clear how much I was apparently wasting their time even being in the room with each of them as they took turns throughout the day talking to me.
Felt so unbelievably toxic, and even though this was in the early 00s, I have never even considered working there since.
I contrast that with another FAANG interview I had, where you had lunch on campus and they tried to leave a positive impression.
They blitzed him with leadership questions and were “not inclined”. Incredibly dumb given their current situation. He’s not even bad on those dimensions, they just can’t get pretty off topic imo.
Getting expensive to move to Seattle though
"Oh but they can just google the solution. Welcome aboard."
None of this is a reflection of the value of unions from the employees' perspective. But it's important to realize that unions are one of the instances where the employees' and employers' interests are not aligned. So, emailing a recruiter and mentioning unions has only one possible outcome - none.
Lots of equivalent paying companies in Canada now, yet alone USA.
Amazon fails to understand that it is currently a worker’s market in software engineering so they are the ones who have to convince engineers to work there.
I get pinged by Amazon recruiters almost every week right now, and once I discovered the assessment was 2.5 hours during my last job search, I had trouble finding the time and energy to fit it in amongst all the other job search requirements I had to do.
Ended up getting so far along the process with 6 other companies that I just didn't bother to take it. Still ended up with a job offer with a 60% bump in pay and what seems like a better environment than Amazon would have been, without any threats to force me back into the office or needing to relocate.
> Lambda School to Launch New Backend Engineering Program, Jointly Developed with Amazon
https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/lambda-school-launches-...
> Inspiration for the new backend program came from Amazon Technical Academy, which trains current, non-technical Amazon employees for software development engineering roles within the company. Amazon Technical Academy’s curriculum is based on the critical knowledge, skills, and attributes required to succeed as a software development engineer at Amazon, which Lambda’s program will cover in their entirety. Amazon Technical Academy is part of Amazon’s commitment to upskill 100,000 of its own employees by 2025.
People seem to forget that outside of the supermega metro areas the typical downtown/financial districts are basically dead.
The lack of downtown workers going into offices. Effectively there is no one working near those restaurants.
Before working in tech I lived in mostly small and medium sized cities. The downtowns were always packed, and usually the artists were local, but as much as I hear "artists and musicians" brought up with respect to a cities value, they don't lure people in. It's just a bonus. What does is good schools, affordable home prices, stable jobs, and a decent economy.
How long ago? If you compare downtown Seattle to downtown Seattle 10 years ago, it was much better back then. Things changed quickly this decade, I wouldn't be surprised if the places you left packed are struggling today.
Seattle in general isn't struggling at all, it grew 25% this decade and the housing market...but downtown has a huge hill to climb in going to back to a fun place to visit on the weekend.
If I'm reading it right, the problem you're calling out is that it is unaffordable to live in a downtown metro after it reaches a certain density. People still think they can hack together solutions by subsidizing housing, rent control, applying grants, etc but I'm more of the mind that there's probably a max size to a city, where once you hit a threshold it either takes a nosedive into poverty or becomes so unsustainably expensive that it chases out what desirable things may have existed there in the first place.
I don't know where you got that. Affordability downtown isn't really what is keeping people away (and it is not like rental buildings have lots of vacancies, nor are close to downtown condos, towhomes, and SFHs difficult to sell), but retail and restaurant choices have been decimated over the last decade, it isn't thriving from the point of view of someone going there to do things.
The homeless factor can't be understated in Seattle, especially with all the encampments downtown. I worked at 3rd and Pine McDonalds in the mid-90s, and for as bad as it was back then, it is ten times worse today.
So at least as far as its peers in the PNW, Seattle isn't very much of an outlier. Well, unless we can compare to other Seattle-area cities like Bellevue, which can simply push most of the homeless problem onto Seattle.
The city is trying to move people into housing but there's a lot of mental health and addiction problems that make many people resist the outreach support.
But when I tell my son Seattle center used to have arcades and a roller coaster, he doesn’t believe me. Or when I talk about sending my great aunt and uncle off back to Alaska on the ferry at the water front (the Alaska marine highway used to start at Seattle rather than Bellingham).
Sounds very dependent on what stage of life you're in. I can see how people who are already looking to start a family would want the things you mentioned, but for those of us who haven't married yet, good options to socialise and meet people are a prerequisite before we even start to think about schools and buying homes.
Just the other day I visited Capitol Hill around 15th Avenue and an entire park is full of tents, and a person defecated in an alley by Kaiser Permanente in broad daylight. Reminded me of Tenderloin district...
Feels like the city is going downhill - especially if you have family I'd stay away
The question really comes down to how much downtown real estate is paid off or under mortgage, which basically depends on how recently it was sold to a new owner.
Anything under a mortgage will be subject to a CMBS that was valued based on the worth of renting out the units in the building. These will have terms setup such that if the owner lowers the rent, they will be required to pay an additional down payment to cover the lost value in the mortgage's collateral (the building) from the now lower rents.
CMBS's will be invested in by multiple investors at different risk levels, creating different incentives on modifying or maintaining the collateral requirements, and anywhere from 50% to 75% of the investors will have to agree to any changes to the loan terms.
In short, some landlords downtown are bound by terms forbidding them from lowering rents without having to pay a huge capital expense for the privilege to do so.
Jeff Bezos recently stepped down as CEO. Google tells me that happened July 5th of this year, a few months ago.
He founded the company. It's essentially under new management for the first time ever.
I don't think you can infer much from this incident. There are too many unusual factors at play and we don't have an established track record for what the "new normal" (post Bezos) will be for Amazon.
Jeff accepted it like, "Oh well." You could tell he couldn't care less.
But Andy Jassy looked ashen. I think his becoming CEO was the reason Amazon changed course. If Jeff had stayed, he would have let HR decide the policy for the entire company, and it would have been disastrous for AWS.
I am just envious at how developed your tech scene is.
I realize a fair number of people can't do that or, commonly in my experience, feel that they can't do that but it's not actually impossible if that's what you prioritize.
Turns out sometimes not only is the grass greener but it's much better tasting as well.
Ironically the place I left announced a "developers can work from home forever" policy a couple of months ago (after they'd lost 7 out of 9 senior devs off their 9 teams - the attrition rate wasn't much lower for non-seniors).
They are so fucked it's not even funny - literally decades of accumulated domain/business knowledge walked out the door.
It isn't being picky, it is employees having actual worth and choice. Employees can "pick" the pay, conditions, and benefits that suite them best: In this case moving out of one of the highest housing cost areas in the country.
This is not possible everywhere.
To be explicit, there's nothing being sacrificed. People leaving their jobs because they don't want to go to an office are finding new jobs that pay the same amount or even more. They're not giving up anything.
Europeans work to live. Americas live to work.
So you may as well come over and get a share of the spoils
The interview was, and I hate to use this word, followed a template clearly put together by an MBA who went into middle management without any work experience, The two people to whom I talked showed the enthusiasm of a dead wet beaver while asking the questions. This was for a storage position that I've been doing for 20+ years at some of the biggest accounts all over the planet.
During the 2 hours, I got asked two very basic questions. Then a bunch of weird generic scenarios - what have you done that fits this scenario and how did you handle it.
About half way through the second interview I decided there's not enough money in the world, and decided to have fun with it. I tells ya what - I made up some of the most ridiculous obviously fake <and then vanilla ice walked into the meeting> stories ever. They sent me a rejection letter, just to ask me to interview for a similar position two months later. I asked their recruiter to read their employee reviews and only contact me again if they offer 7 figures. Been a year now - nothing. Maybe they got the hint.
Sorry about your bad experience though.
"This interview has a simple three step format. There's no gotchas or narrow trivia here. I'll start by asking you technical questions about the work you say you did until I've gotten the information I need about that. Then there will be a few social questions. Lastly, I'll open it up for you to ask me anything you want about working here."
Doing this seems to help the people with social anxiety and/or autism. Setting specific concrete expectations right up front and then sticking to it really comforts people.
well, let me correct myself. for this sr position in storage, i was asked one question about storage. "what is the difference between object storage and file storage."
imagine you are interviewing to work as a mathematician. a sr level one, you walk in, and the ask you no math questions, except "what is the difference between multiplication and derivatives."
here is the issue i take with this completely undeveloped script: it tells you zero about someone's technical skills or abilities. this means the hiring criteria, for highly technical roles, might as well be what color car I drive. if this is what leadership uses to determine who is good during an interview, they're going to have useless, illogical, and bogus criteria for performance. and this means the job will be frustrating and will wear me out. oh look - that's what all the tech employees are saying about amazon on glassdoor.
That part was particularly frustrating; often I couldn't think of anything relevant to the specific wording. At least you got a rejection letter, though. Multiple interviews over >1 day and I had to log in to the Amazon Jobs account to see my application's status had changed to "no longer under consideration".
They are pushing the decision from the L10+ level to the L7/L8 level. But we all know behind the scenes, L7/L8 will be pushed to behave a certain way. If it was truly their choice, those with a strict policy would bleed engineers to the directors with more lax policies, Amazon would not accidentally create a free market within their own company.
This is a deflection of blame, and nothing else.
If you hate commuting into the office and your current team is going to make you do so, you can transfer teams if there's not a hidden directive to just say no across the board.
If you dislike working from home, as I do, and your current team isn't going to encourage attendance 3+ days a week, you again have the chance to transfer.
Amazon keeps employees this way, and employees get their ideal balance. It seems better than the top-down one-size-fits-all approach if there aren't hidden instructions being passed down management chains. There's not as large a problem of a "preferred class" of workers if your director and everyone below them is on the same WFH/in-office balance.
I do agree about this being mostly a punting of the responsibility for deciding from L10 to L8. But I think competition is not a bug, it's a feature.
Also, amazon definitely makes free markets within the company. When I accepted the offer, multiple teams pitched on which team to join. Plus, OPs is different by team, as are opportunities to work on promotion worthy stuff (well, at least once you get to sde3)
Standard disclaimer: opinions are my own
> At this stage, we want most of our people close enough to their core team that they can easily travel to the office for a meeting within a day’s notice. We also know that many people have found the ability to work remotely from a different location for a few weeks at a time inspiring and reenergizing. We want to support this flexibility and will continue to offer those corporate employees, who can work effectively away from the office, the option to work up to four weeks per year fully remote from any location within your country of employment.
I find it funny that this is the American version of a nice holiday - go pay money to rent an Airbnb so you can work in a different environment.
It also includes a minimum of 5 weeks vacation and 2 weeks of PTO, too bad!
I've only recently -- in threads here on HN in the last few weeks, in fact -- encountered the acronym "PTO", and concluded from context that it must mean "personal time off". (Right?) I also didn't quite grok what the GP meant by including those "two weeks of PTO"; WTF are those, in a European context? Can't be sick days, because AFAIK at least in most of Europe there's no quantitive limit on those: When you're sick, you're sick. Have I understood correctly that Americans who happen not to be ill for more than the "sickday limit" in a given year usually take the opportunity to "use up their sick days" even if they're healthy? (To repeat what is rapidly becoming my refrain on here: God, America is weird.)
In some companies, there is a separate "sick day" allowance, but that's rapidly vanishing. In most companies it's all put into a single bucket and your employer doesn't know or care about the reason you are not at work. It does not matter if you just want to stay at home and take care of things or fly to Venice.
If you are too sick to work for an extended time, then there is a disability insurance program. Sick days, for companies that have sick days, are for things like the flu, dental appointments in the middle of the day, etc. They are not for months-long cancer treatment.
Point being, when I go on vacation, I take PTO. There is nothing else to take if I want to be paid.
I think my company also has an unpaid leave program for unusual situations - say someone wants to take a year off to go to school but they still want their job waiting for them when they come back. But using this is very rare. Of course, each company is different as benefits are part of how firms compete for workers.
This is true even if you work a single day in a state. Consultants at Accenture, PWC, Bain etc. end up having to file in dozens of states a year sometimes. Fortunately their employer almost universally handles all the paperwork.
> Hey [team], I'll be in [foreign country] for the next 3 weeks!
and no one outside of that team ever knows anything except someone's zoom background has changed.
If it gets mentioned once in a press release, and HR forgets to work hard to implement this in an ongoing way, it becomes a non-rule.
Useful for lawyers and when talking to compliance people, but not a meaningful barrier for anyone actually going anywhere.
It's not.
BUT its a nice way to get a change of scenery without burning holiday time.
I can agree on almost everything from his post because my employer (startup) is trying to do the same, we are a US-company, in the process of acquiring by one of the giants, and I'm working and living in Ukraine with a US-based contract.
Wow, that's really something.
Personally, having spent a pandemic working fully remote I wouldn't even consider working for a company that didn't offer that as an unquestionable human right, didn't frown upon it, didn't consider it to be "a way to refresh my sense of duty" and didn't think of it as a privilege.
I'm never going back to the open landscape of hell.
I don't think things you prefer automatically get elevated to 'unquestionable human rights'.
Human Rights are special things. They aren't preferences. The more you conflate the two, the more you erode your position and the term 'human right' in general. I would urge you to stop doing that.
Very true and my point would have been made without me presenting it as such. My apologies.
Are we better off compared to service workers? Oh yeah, definitely.
This is true and often lost on a lot of people. It's easy to blur the big picture when so many people slave away for scraps. If you weren't worth a significant portion more of what you are paid, you wouldn't be employed.
>We are very fortunate to be paid as much as we are for sitting at home and working on a computer.
We are fortunate enough to be born with the brain capacity to be rarely apt at such an in-demand and highly valuable skill. Of course developing the skill itself was hard work, not luck. We automate at pennies on the dollar. If we were paid 5x more than "market rates," our employers would merely double their investment rather than 10x. Double is an impressive return on any investment.
The notion of service workers working remote is a silly one. I regret calling it a 'unquestionable human right'.
I prefer to know my value and vote with my feet. No pontificating required.
I've put similar bounds on WFH hires before. Not because we were calling short-notice meetings frequently, but because it prevents single, long-distance employees from dominating all of the scheduling requirements.
Once you have someone on your team who needs a lot of notice to attend any meeting, you are now planning every single meeting around their schedule. Everyone else must choose between accommodating that person or quietly doing the thing without them. It's ultimately not a great experience for the employee who gets left out of things because their schedule has become difficult to accomodate.
It also sets appropriate expectations. Some people interview for flexible WFH positions when they really want full-remote positions, then spend a lot of energy trying to shut down any in-person meetings no matter how much the rest of the team wants them. This is a good way of signaling that in-person meetings are a requirement for the job.
The thing you should be optimizing for is not geo-location, but time zone. The latter is only weakly related to the former. It doesn't matter if someone is within driving distance of the office so long as they are in (or willing to work in) the time zone that the office works at. Rejecting someone in Los Angeles because they're not within driving distance of Seattle would be penny wise and pound foolish.
> Once you have someone on your team who needs a lot of notice to attend any meeting, you are now planning every single meeting around their schedule.
This doesn't sound like you're actually running a "WFH" team then. You just can't demand short notice in person meetings with a remote team; that's an unreasonable ask. Hold remote meetings and schedule in-person meetups far in advance, or don't call it a "WFH" team.
It's very productive, because abusing terms like "WFH" will be the technique that companies use to try and get through this without giving up anything. If you thought you were going to be "working from home" and discovered that your boss had the option to demand a commute from you at will on short notice, you would probably feel like you'd been tricked, no? Or if you landed that dream WFH job only to discover that it required you be X miles from Y expensive city, you would probably have some questions about what exactly they meant by "work from home".
Personally, I'd call the environment OP described above as semi-remote or "Flexible Working Arrangements", although I'm sure there are other terms that would suffice.
> Regardless of what we call it, it seems reasonable to have an intermediate model like Amazon's proposing, where you can mostly work from wherever you'd like but you have to be available for in-person meetings because the company thinks they're valuable.
Not for me, but that's fine I guess. But it's very important that everyone be clear about what this is, and it's not WFH. If the expectation is that you'll commute regularly or on the demand of your boss (ew), then that's not a WFH job. Come up with a new name for it if you want, but it does not meet the social expectation of what "WFH" means.
Unrelated to the terminology, I find this intermediate proposition utterly perplexing. So I have to live within reasonable commute range for the 2-3x times I commute per week, and I have to pay higher per foot cost if I want to work from my home? You do you, but I find this to be the worst of both worlds; I'd rather have a short commute to an office all the time, or no commute and more personal space.
(Excepting of course the “I have a dentist appointment in the other direction, I’m going to WFH for that.” But even my non-remote jobs have offered one-off remote days for logistical reasons for years, so I implicitly exclude that from such discussions).
I do not believe that Amazon’s framing here is duplicitous, although I find their policy insufficient. I would however keep an eye out for companies offering “WFH” with expectations that are incompatible with the popular understanding of that term. Therefore I disagree with your assertion that it’s not profitable to discuss what “WFH” means.
If you bothered to read what I wrote, you’d realize I haven’t said that going to the office is bad. I have my own preferences, yes, but I also gave clear room for the fact that others might have different preferences than me (“you do you”, “not for me, but that’s fine I guess”). I even made it clear I’d prefer to work from the office with a short commute than half time from an expensive city, but why let nuance get in the way of a good ad hominem?
What I am absolutely adamant is about is that companies are clear about what they’re expecting and offering. What I’m railing against here is companies offering “WFH” and then demanding people come to the office on short notice, a practice which I think is misleading at best. That should have been extremely clear from the context. This is in fact the third time I’ve said it. In fact I said that such policies are fine as long as they aren’t marketed as WFH, even though personally I wouldn’t want to work that way.
Also, since when is having a preference “having an axe to grind”? How bizarre.
It's important for large companies to still have some way of getting people together quickly to solve problems. That's hard if people in are different timezones.
There are more complex issues (taxes, school pickup, dog walking, local errands) before travel in a plane and rental car can't get you somewhere in 24 hours.
Pre pandemic some nycers had a 15 minute walking commute, others might grind it out for 2 hours each way in the northeastern corridor.
Now do the same for a 1hr meeting at 10am or 2:30pm with a need to be able to dropoff or pickup school children at 9am or 4pm.
I've hopped on a plane to LA in the afternoon from San Francisco same day... is this just about "how willing are you to book a last-minute flight?" or is it "do you live near enough a major airport?" (Plus the usual "travel and abandon your family at a moment's notice").
I feel like if you're committed to "I wish to live in Toronto, while my team is in Seattle" that's tough (one flight and not every day currently!) but you could probably easily live ~anywhere along the West Coast or even SLC / Boulder / Denver no problem.
I think the "withing a day's notice" mirrors that, and that the fully remote days will keep growing and growing and growing to match being in the office for ~3 days every 2 weeks. Occasionally more if you need to do lots of in office work, and said in office work could come up at random.
Before the pandemic most of my team at amazon was already WFH about half time, answer were trying to work out how to make sure the right people are in at the same time together
It is better than giving money to "something" they would be providing real stuff and places.
There’s also more uncompensated time spent on duties a janitor, office manager or IT person would perform, like unloading the dishwasher, preparing coffee or being on the phone with an ISP during an internet outage.
It is clear, however that this data was gathered and released by a different part of the company than the ones that make the call on whether or not people will be required to come back in. Ultimately it's as we would expect: executive leadership deciding to pull people back in has little to do with data and more to do with feelings. Despite publishing that data and overwhelming support for full-time WFH, both have begun the process of pulling people back in.
One of the few things the far left has been right about all along: it is not a meritocracy, it is all about perception and feelings.
I'm sorry none of those are direct indication of productivity per se, even profitability, which is a long lagging indicator of productivity.
That or bad management techniques work better in person.
I've never seen all of Corporate America's CxO-level Leadership so aligned with each other on a topic like they are aligned on Return To Office being the only logical way...
Maybe they are afraid of a way more aggressive competition for workers and what they have to pay them. Considering they now could switch the workplace via different login credentials.
If significant investors have heavy positions in commercial and residential real estate in particular locations, and also has a significant position in companies who employ workers in those locations, how might that change the perception of how your employer does business? Will support a CEO taking a position that tanks their real estate positions?
Mostly it is very hard politics.
Forcing tech people to live in zone X will increase voters and tax revenues to political party Z.
there is whole system to "milk" the middle class.
Rents, taxes, products, private schools, medical centers, etc.
Now with remote working suddenly some rents are getting lower in high rent places.
People are now really choosing where they want to be and whom they will socialize.
Imagine the audacity of serfs having freedom..
It's like asking polar bears what temperature to set the thermostat. They're going to want it like the arctic because that's their home.
As an anecdote, as part my class last semester I did an interview with 2nd in command at our company. It was exactly this. Covid is a temporary distortion of the market.
edit: removed between the lines part; its my interpretation so it might be an unfair read
Most businesses wouldn't even need to an entire floor.
Another reason could be real estate related. If you signed a long term commercial lease right before covid hit, you want to make sure that you're getting your moneys worth.
Also, part of the human experience is that bond. fellowship with your team if you will.
Could you say a little more about why you feel this to be the case? I haven't noticed much slowdown at all.
You are assuming that the people who make decisions are somehow more rational than anyone else.
TBH, I’m crossing my fingers employers will prioritize folks willing to work in the office to compensate for my lack of pedigree in other hiring/HR attention areas.
I was lucky - I bought a house in the suburbs of my hometown and moved back. Told my company I was moving out of Toronto during the second lockdown last year, they didn't even question it.
Now my biggest distraction is my 2yo running in because he doesn't understand that dad works, yet. Sometimes he might be having a tantrum in the kitchen/living room and it makes it a bit difficult to concentrate...nowhere near as bad as the constant barrage of irrelevant noise from an open office.
I will never commute again.
In some jurisdictions they pay clear above industry standard.
All companies have good and bad aspects, some feel better in a startup , some feel better in a corporate giant.
Note this isn't actually a question. You then go on to preemptively defend Amazon's reputation with:
- "depends on department, location, job."
- "I know a couple of employees who are happy."
- They pay really well.
- "All companies have good and bad aspects"
What I find striking about this defense is that it is so generic, it could apply to any and every company (aside from maybe pay). You obviously have no interest in learning why Amazon's reputation is negative, and frankly are trying to shut down discussion of it.
I specifically chose a team based on my perception of the manager, and that decision has paid off so far. Amazon is a huge company and experiences can vary dramatically.
Imagine if 20 public state schools, 50,000 students each, formed a mega university and someone started describing it in terms of a singular culture. Ridiculous right?
I fully expect my experience is different than others and I don’t expect it to generalize to Amazon as a whole. It’s nice to hear first hand accounts from former employees (positive and negative), but I could do without the people parroting what they read online.
"Joined"? What is it, a club?
I learned about technology more in 5 years there than my entire (20+ years) career. Smart people, always got help when I needed, always were able to keep work life balance (it’s many times up to you to know how to disconnect and say no, people respect it).
It will make you a better decision maker, much better writer (it might make you hate writing narratives but you’ll get dangerously good at it).
If you join and you got into “one of these teams”, use the wonderful tool of internal transfers. It’s one of the best things about Amazon. There are no minimums and no manager approval required to find a better match.
It seems the expectation is that they want people to be available to come to the office on demand every once in a while, so you need to be living within at least a 1-2 hour drive from the office. While that is certainly an improvement, it isn't true remote.
If there are any big tech companies who only expect travel to the office a few times a year I would love to hear about them!
Big cities have things like major hospitals and major employers, they have airports, they have baseball stadiums. They've also got social networks -- it's much easier to make friends in a place with 100,000 people your age than 50.
Now, escaping to the undeveloped areas is cheap, and many of them have access to things like beautiful mountains or beaches that are either far away from or too crowded near big cities. However, rural areas generally have poor infrastructure that big cities have, and often have extremely bad schools.
Being 1-2 hours away from a big city? That's kind of a sweet spot. You're still close enough to the city for culture and hospitals and the airport. But you're on a big plot of land, and since you're still in a metro, you've probably got reasonably good infrastructure and schools.
The whole "move to the mountains" thing that so many people talk about assumes you don't care about good schools, airports, hospitals, etc.
That certainly is a trade off some people have to make.
We're finalizing a move to a new home that fits that description. 20k pop, basically on the beach, backed by mountains and trails, 4 hour drive to anything with greater than 200k population, small hospital that is not well equipped, local schools are pretty meh to terrible.
Here is the thing though, I'm the sole breadwinner. That opens up tons of options and flexibility.
My wife and I are deeply involved in our son's education, in which we substantially add on to his online classes. We have gigabit fiber internet, I can drive to an international airport in under 15 minutes(granted, only 3-4 days a week for flights), and our son is now getting a chance to make friends again, outside of school.
My wife wanted to move to the area, my sole objection was having fast and reliable internet to do my job. I grew up on a farm, so getting out of dense metro areas suits me just fine.
Now that we have secured internet, and my starlink reservation should be delivered in a few months as a backup, there is nothing stopping us.
Remote work has allowed me to get away from California and their income taxes, raise my pay in the process by finding a new and fully remote job, and live in a much cheaper COL area.
Renting for now, but we build our house in 2022/2023. My pay versus the cost of the area means that we will pay cash for everything, no mortgage needed.
1-2 hours away from my old office is basically Burbank, which is still quite expensive and crowded. There are tons of small cities that provide better quality of life than Burbank for cheaper, including the small one I picked (Boise). Also, I can get to nature much easier from where I live.
0 - I’m assuming from context that the “major city” you reference is the one where the office is located.
After few days, they arranged for next set of interviews and the HR mailed me bunch links I had to study. Then I got a call from one their senior managers to inform me that there will be lot of leadership principles questions and they are very serious on them and I have prepare for them thoroughly! They took another month to complete like next 5 rounds and at the end the HR calls me and say that I had to take one interview again as one of the the directors had lost the feed back on me!. I said no, then he comes back and says that they have found the feedback.
They took another few days and sent me a rejection letter. I wasn’t expecting an offer from them as I did sort of average in the interview, but the whole experience made me think how unprofessional they were!.
It's bad that he didn't tell you this, but it's expected of an amazon interviewer to write a more or less accurate transcript of the interview. Almost certainly what the interviewer was doing on his laptop was writing down your work.
Are mass recruitment events a recent software thing, or perhaps a local culture thing? I've never heard of them before except maybe for new graduates
I ask because I’m curious how far employee pressure goes as that’s so much worse than other FAANG companies.
Your friends might also be including the full four-year grant in a single number, which creates a sort of nonsense figure? Another thing that increases comp is if the stock rises a lot after grant — but that would not show up in offers.
Levels.fyi is as legit as any other source, as far as I know.
It is easy the underestimate the significance of it.
Amazon offer generally gives you roughly the same "total compensation" for the first 4 years, assuming that the stock price doesn't change much.
So if they're trying to pay you 300k per year, then you get 160k salary, ~140k starting bonus each of the first two years, and ~300k of stock that mostly vests in years 3 and 4.
Their current offers are actually scaled on the assumption their stock grows 15% annually, I think.
This reminds me of what George said to Jerry in The Deal on Seinfeld:
> Jerry: Spending the night. Optional.
> George: No, you see? You got greedy.
Making the policy discretionary will ultimately make it like an "unlimited vacation" policy where it actually doesn't happen but the company gets to say that it's their policy.
A company sent me roles at $125k recently. I wrote them back with a polite variation of "heck no, my rate is $250k".
I'm currently quite broke-- $5k to my name (too many sabbaticals, plus only recently paid off student debt and pivoted into engineering). But I bluff every time and sometimes it works out. Nothing to lose: there seem to be infinite employers in need of software engineers.
They wrote back to schedule an interview.
Excluding finance, there's Spotify, Doordash, Salesforce, Square, Twitter (incl. remote), Coinbase (remote), Palantir, Roku, Affirm, Robinhood... and that's just the publicly-traded companies that explicitly have offices in New York. You have even more options looking at companies that are either remote-friendly, or are late-stage startups with competitive equity grants (i.e. Stripe, Instacart, etc), or both (there's a lot of overlap between those two categories).
They have some good cultural points (easy to change teams) but also bad ones (bad on-call). So depending on your tolerance of WLB vs salary, and how good you are at shipping, you could have a good experience.
I have friends that work at Amazon. It seems that work/life balance varies quite a bit among different parts of it.
Google of today isn't the same as that of a decade ago. It's just another megacorp.
This is an example of how this interferes with the career of a very senior executive: https://www.geekwire.com/2021/microsoft-standoff-amazon-big-... However, this problem also affects junior engineers, more junior than you may think.
I have been lucky, in that I had worked with my first team's director at a previous company and so I knew he was a good boss, and I had known the manager for my second team prior to joining. It's important as part of the interview process (at Amazon, or anywhere else) to treat the interview as a two-way process, as you're vetting the company, the team, and your boss as much as they're vetting you, and if you don't get all your questions answered as part of the interview (interviewers are supposed to save time for you to ask questions!), feel free to relay them to your recruiter.
This is they key right here. Basically you still have to live within a few hours drive of Seattle or Palo Alto, or even less depending on your patience.
Still better than five days a week in the office though!
That encompasses the entire state of Washington, and includes a good chunk of Oregon.
Not a burden.
P.S. Friends of mine have lived in Seattle and commuted to eastern Washington some decades ago. It's entirely workable.
The cynic in me thinks big tech wants to promote WFH forever, as they have benefited stupendously from the war-time economy and they are in no rush back to normalcy.
I hate these kinds of half-compromises because they feel really disingenuous. The company knows a significant proportion of their engineers want to work from home permanently and rather than giving a straight yes or no they try to weasel their way out with a solution that sucks for almost everyone.
People that want to WFH permanently are forced into the office, with the restrictions on commuting that entails.
People that want to work in the office are frustrated that people aren't in when they want to speak to them.
Hybrid solutions genuinely look like the absolute worst of both worlds from the perspective of all parties involved.
It seems that somewhere between you must be butt in seat all day every day and everyone can move to a mountain town or the beach if that's what rocks their boat there probably exist reasonable flexible approaches.
Some will doubtless resent that they can't depend on being able to tap an arbitrary coworker on the shoulder on a given day and others really don't want to live close enough to an office to drive in occasionally. But there seem to be intermediate approaches that make most people happier overall.
Compared to my old employer that's a ton.
Long before Covid I worked at a co-located office that allowed WFH for logistics or “heads down” days. Employees there regularly racked up 5-8 days remote a month. And it was a nice office to work from, all things considered.
> Compared to my old employer that's a ton.
The issue is that after the pandemic the standards have changed. Most of us have spent 1-1.5 years remote now; for those that want to work remote 16 days is now badly substandard.
Personally it’s my belief that if a company is going to remain in the office and offer flexibility, the minimum seems to be 1-2x a week.
While I was there (more than half a decade back), my manager had a week where they were working remotely. And the first thing they'd do every morning in that week was call everyone on the team _individually_ to get updates. Not a team standup, but individual calls. And they were honestly "a good manager" by Amazon standards.
There was also very little writing culture back then which is very important to have thoughtful conversations in remote setting.
I expect google, apple and even the biggest stalwarts of working from the office to finally relent and allow work from home permanently. They can't put that genie back into the bottle even if they tried. Companies in tech want to be serious about climate change, then don't force your workers to commute hours to your office, its bad for the environment, bad for the workers mental and physical health, and horrible for the areas these companies cluster in by driving real estate prices to the moon and contributing greatly to homelessness and over-congestion.
My takeaway is that maybe the C-Suite has been convinced, but now you need to convince line-managers and the like.
If we're told to go back, then I'm looking for an internal transfer to an org with a more reasonable director or even a new job. WFH has been a huge boon to my quality of life.
Still, I prefer to work remotely. Commuting in certain places makes working remotely a necessity but this is not the only reason for not having to go to the office.
There is a lot of friction about this, mostly I suspect is because higher management became such before working remotely was an option.
Talk about same planet different worlds, sheesh.