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Comment by KallDrexx | Hacker News Reader

From the blog post

> 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.

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How disorganised does a team need to be that they need to call meetings so involved they can only be done in-person with less than 24 hour’s notice? This isn’t a genuine business requirement, it’s just management wanting to remind everyone that they’re on a leash which can be yanked whenever they like.

I've found this really depends on seniority. Higher seniorities like principle engineers, senior managers, directors, vp meetings are much different than a normal stand up, strategy session or engineering discussion and physical presence does have an advantage. But I admit this isn't likely to be the target audience for the original policy.

> How disorganised does a team need to be that they need to call meetings so involved they can only be done in-person with less than 24 hour’s notice?

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.

I think this is putting the cart in front of the horse.

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.

I don't know how productive it is to search for the true definition of "WFH". 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.

> I don't know how productive it is to search for the true definition of "WFH".

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'm not sure what we're discussing here. "WFH" is a common, casual shorthand for any sort of arrangement where you work while being at home - I've only seen the term used to summarize, not to trick or mislead people. It's worth noting that Amazon's formal message (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-offering-t...) identifies what they're offering not as "WFH" or "work from home" but "more flexibility as we return to office".

We’re discussing GP requiring that their “WFH” team live within a certain radius of the office for regular meetings. It’s my assertion that the team described is not really WFH, but rather a mislabeled form of flexible working or semi-remote work.

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.

Don’t feed the troll, man. This person clearly has an axe to grind against working from the office and nothing you say will help them see the other side.

Sigh. I’ll remind you that calling other people trolls here is verboten, so please don’t do that.

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.

That’s sort of the worst of both models. You have to pay expensive rent/mortgage to stay within range. You’re commuting at the whim of your boss.

IMO, companies that do WFH well are ones that are designed for the work to be async.

Or, just host fully remote meetings. Which, if your employer is large enough, you have to do anyways because there’s an office in Europe or India or someplace else.

Pretty sure facebook needed to do this last week :)

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.

The question this raises to me, is what travel times is this accounting for?

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.

As an errand example. I schedule my dental appointments 6 months out. If my work gives me only 24 hour notice I have to be in the office for a meeting that didn't exist until now, it makes no difference if I live a 6 hour flight away or a 30 minute walk away.

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.

The common pattern across various L8 all hands ive been in is that we all want to have fairly regular planning and design sessions in person, then go home to get the implementation done.

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

Really curious why only within country? Security reasons? Also why 4 weeks? Just to be available for meetings?

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.

Likely tax?

Almost certainly. Taxation is hard enough between states, for both the employer and the employee. Adding another country in the mix and it gets really hard, especially when (as is common with tech employees) people go to other countries to work without paying the slightest attention to how incredibly many immigration and labor laws they're breaking in their target nations.

There's really no such concept as an employee in another country. You need a subsidiary incorporated in that country and then they become an employee of that entity. So...huge paperwork hassle at the very least.

There's different tax, visa and HR regulatory implications they probably don't want to deal with. For example if Amazon has an American worker who decides to work remotely in France (where Amazon is also established) can Amazon fire the American "at will" or are they subjected to French regulations that make terminating workers extremely difficult?

Speaking of tax, allowing employees to work from home may allow them to avoid the newly created Seattle payroll tax: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/tax/articles/city-of-s...

To be able to legally work in France, an American citizen would need a work visa which requires to have a local work contract. So they would have to follow French regulations.

It also includes a minimum of 5 weeks vacation and 2 weeks of PTO, too bad!

Sorry if I misunderstood -- the 5 weeks isn't paid? If it is, what is the difference between the 5 weeks and the 2 weeks?

Yeah, I think you misunderstood. In Europe, "vacation" pretty much universally means "paid vacation". Otherwise, we'd call it "unpaid leave" or something.

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.)

PTO = Paid Time Off.

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.

Thanks! Learned something again. (Still rather weird.)

Tax, visa, and regulatory reasons. Other jurisdictions will impute residency for all legal purposes if you spend too much time there or work from there. They are trying to avoid myriad very messy legal edge cases.

There are a number of reasons, first is that by working from another location you might be breaking the law, second is taxes - if you stay somewhere long enough they might argue you need to pay income tax there. Lastly, data protection laws vary per country and there's a chance you have to give your laptop with company data to authorities in another country, which might be a security issue.

>second is taxes - if you stay somewhere long enough they might argue you need to pay income tax there

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.

It depends on the state but some states, as you say, want you to file for even working a single day and states are apparently really starting to crack down.

It's likely that this is the Official Policy, but then people will just not mention to HR where they happen to be traveling to.

> 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.

> 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's not.

BUT its a nice way to get a change of scenery without burning holiday time.

Or support your kid in that overseas one month study program. There are a lot of interesting things you can do here with flexible working arrangements.

Maybe you live in a cold climate and want to spend winter somewhere warm, but still work.

You can visit family and take care of them. I could imagine some doing this the entire month of December for the holidays.

There is an insightful summary of all the issues from HashiCorp founder when trying to establish an international remote-first company.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563

What you can do is be working while travelling, extending your vacation by 2 days. One on the way to the location, and one on the way back.

I wonder about the definition of "easily travel [...] within a day's notice".

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.

We(seattle team) had an SLC team member for a bit, and it was pretty rough. Even Phoenix partner teams are a huge pain since lunch time overlaps so much

>> work up to four weeks per year fully remote

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 wouldn't even consider working for a company that didn't offer that as an unquestionable human right,

I don't think things you prefer automatically get elevated to 'unquestionable human rights'.

Then you must think of it as a privilege. And I shall not work for you.

I understand and that's fine. I don't actually care about where you work in this context.

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.

>> Human Rights are special things

Very true and my point would have been made without me presenting it as such. My apologies.

Well, at least the right to life is a human right. It turned out that having to work in a crowded space with many others can be a real threat for your life.

Man as much as I hate the whole "snowflake" thing...comments like yours really are pushing it lol.

I won't hire you either.

The old "you can't fire me because I quit" inverted. That's fine.

Sure, if that makes you feel good about yourself.

Didn’t you do it first?

I thoroughly enjoyed this whole sub thread.

Unquestionable human right?? Christ we are spoiled in tech.

It is not I who is spoiled. It is old school boomer management who have become spoiled and exploitative.

We are very fortunate to be paid as much as we are for sitting at home and working on a computer. Compared to 99% of other adults around the world, we are spoiled.

I don't fully agree. Instead, what I think, is that the stock holders of the company I work for are very fortunate that I work for them.

Are we better off compared to service workers? Oh yeah, definitely.

>I don't fully agree. Instead, what I think, is that the stock holders of the company I work for are very fortunate that I work for them.

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.

a large chunk of the workforce, from accountants to stock brokers to HR, work on a computer. It's not a privilege to have no fresh air and to spend 70% of your life in front of a screen on a chair.

haha yes it is. The vast majority of people don't have that opportunity.

Your phrasing makes it sound like people should be grateful that their generous employers pay them so much. Employers don't do that because they're nice, they do it because tech workers generate enough value to justify paying large sums. Not paying them accordingly will result in them getting poached by another company.

Would love to know if they believe that 'unquestionable human right' extends to all the service workers that tend to their daily life by making and delivering their food, transporting them to/from entertainment, packing and delivering their toys/consumer goods, etc. too.

>> 'unquestionable human right' extends to all the service workers

The notion of service workers working remote is a silly one. I regret calling it a 'unquestionable human right'.

not spoilt, rather, forgetful

This is the most privileged, special snowflake and tech bubble thing I've ever read on this site.

It's not limited to HN. Even in a local dev Slack community, I often see people expecting companies to flagellate themselves just for a chance to hire the unique, special talent that they believe and need constant reassurance that they are. As far as I can tell, it's unique to tech because that kind of talent is in demand, but the toxic behavior it brings out in some people is really something to behold.

I prefer to know my value and vote with my feet. No pontificating required.

I guess we can dispense with the usual idea that workers have no choice but submit to anything a company wants.

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