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Comment by smashem | Hacker News Reader

Funny, I left Amazon two weeks ago because WFH burned me out. I'm currently taking a sabbatical.

* 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.

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I suspect the problem is that Amazon doesn't want to change the way it works. So WFH is more or less the same as the office, but with Zoom (Chime?) instead of conference rooms. But of course that is awful.

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.

Like writing essays on slack/confluence/email is better than zoom. Not really for me.

Do you know of any companies doing new things with WFH? That sounds very interesting!

No, but I'd like to know about them too!

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.

Don't underestimate the impact of COVID on your mental health. I was WFH for years back then, and it was not like that.

This is an important point. The transition to working from home is not "Here is a laptop with network access, try to ignore the pandemic, go", that is a recipe for a bad experience. Like wise, working from an office completely sucks if it is "Here is your cubical and desktop with network access, try to ignore the pandemic, go".

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.

> * Zoom fatigue is real.

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!

Been going back to the office one day a week for a a few months now. People are okay with dropping the masks when not in the main flow of traffic (hallways).

One on ones with the boss are much nicer when we can go outside for a stroll....

> Deadlines, at least from my perspective, got even more ridiculous since WFH started.

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.

I get the feeling that a lot of discontent related to the archaic 8-hour work day. I have personally interacted with at least a dozen other engineers at my workplace who openly admit they "actually" work maybe 2 hours a day. The rest of the day is spent idly feeling burned out forced to sit at their workstation for the next meeting or instant message to reply to. I personally suffer burnout from this.

Hmm, that sounds familiar, but I think the same was true in the office.

I had that groundhog-day effect for a while too, living in California. Then I moved to Montana. It's impossible not to notice time here. The leaves changed colour, it snowed, it rained, it was hot, and the leaves changed colour again. My daily routine is a bit monotonous, sure, but the world pulls me into it.

This is so accurate, especially the 3rd bullet. When WFH, all interactions are centered around your immediate work responsibilities; although minimizing social interactions at work sounds great for some, it can make it much harder to gauge where you stand in relation to all the people you work with.

Exactly right. It’s extremely dehumanizing, ultimately making a tool of a human, and that will probably make it easier for people to exploit others.

One thing I found helpful was some chill time in virtual rooms periodically. For those who opted in it seemed to work well. For folks who are all business all the time it was fine to opt out.

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.

The problems with virtual rooms is that you can't have small breakout conversations naturally. In-person I can walk around a space and talk to small groups of people. On a virtual conference call, if I'm speaking everyone has to listen to me, which makes speaking for some people even harder.

Among us with proximity chat as a work conference call?

I was wanting to do that for my birthday last year, but I know too many people who don't own laptops

There was a "meeting" startup on HN last year (several years ago?) that had such a product. Each "room" had multiple tables, which you were free to move between. You could sorta hear people at the other tables; the closer the table was, the easier you could hear the people at it. There was also a "stage" feature that allowed someone to address the whole room at once.

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.

gather.town? We used it for a few virtual meetups where I'm based.

In my case I setup a Mumble server which allows break out rooms

And that's a totally valid view. Strangely enough, I suspect Amazon will be a great company for you long-term if you go back. Management is aligned with your needs, not mine.

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'.

I quit Amazon a few months ago for the same reason. Holy shit Amazon culture does not work over video. I used to work hard, but I would stay late with my cool team and we’d build things. That stopped happening and I burned out.

> 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.

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

This was key for me as well. Just leave the house with my headphones and some podcasts or music, and wander around for about an hour, rain or shine.

I try to do it every day.

It's usually when a "work-from-office" culture (for both you and your company) collides with the "work-from-home" culture.

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.

I found the meeting lid increased as did a lack of decision making. But that’s mostly because there are too many facilitators and not enough engineers. Most of my career WFH has been built on solid in person relationships. So I do get the dichotomy. I think more on or off sites are needed for sure where people get a chance to work in person just to have the human connection and informal pieces.

I'm with you. But you missed the social interaction part. I actually like my coworkers as people and enjoy(ed) hallway chit-chat.

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.

> 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.

How about replacing your commuting by a morning walk outside?

> zoom fatigue You mean chime fatigue I assume ;) it’s like zoom fatigue, just can’t get that ringtone out of your head forever

All that stuff can be ameliorated somewhat imo with a cultural change. At my job (admittedly a much smaller group of a few dozen, nothing on amazons scale), we initially had a ton of zoom meetings but have cut out most of them since people want to have uninterrupted days of productivity, with room to schedule their own submeetings with peers when it comes time to collaborate with specific people. We all still live in the area so we've gotten together in a park and do potlucks and stuff like that after we got our vaccines. For the lack of commute thing, I find it helpful to build in a morning routine rather than wake up > work. I tend to my garden in the mornings, workout, and usually do a walk around my neighborhood to serve as a faux commute before I make my cup of coffee and begin the workday. Sometimes I head out to the golf course early in the morning and get back home before 9. Other coworkers surf at dawn. If I had to commute it would be tough to fit in gardening and working out or golf without waking up indescribably early to make it all work.

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