Amazon will require employees return to the office 3 days a week
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
From 2 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551 97 points, 105 comments
"Amazon Mandating 3 days back in office come May first" (aboutamazon.com)
You can build a mediocre product with micromanagers - no doubt, I've seen it, but I've never seen great products being built under such poor, primitive management strategy! If you really want a great, performing, and creative team, then do a better job at hiring and motivating people! Policing works only for certain types of jobs, not for jobs where managers are less smart than the workers! And I yet must see proof that exchanging viruses onsite is more productive than online meetings, which could also get recorded, etc.
My company does hybrid work, so it has fewer desks than employees. If you don't arrive early enough on event days you'll spend your day working on a sofa with your laptop on your legs. How productive!
It’s fair to says hers was bigger than average, and access to her meant walking directly through the desk areas of two assistants, however it was undeniably a cube without full-height walls and in the style of everyone else’s at that worksite.
Meg also had a conference room nearby reserved for her use, and did a fairly typical amount of travel (a lot!), but it wasn’t a purely symbolic gesture, the few meetings I had with her where we arrived early she often arose from her desk in the cube and walked over to the conference room. It seemed the desk got used.
At that time HP was doing around $120B a year in revenue and had 330,000 employees but she didn’t say, “I need a closed door office”.
If someone needs to hold frequent meetings or be on phone calls, there's nothing wrong with giving them a closed door office.
All that said, I don't think that's the norm even at Facebook, just a carefully maintained illusion.
But being full time in an office is counter-productive as hell
If you’re one of us who write code or build things, and you live alone, it’s almost 2X minimum productivity boost working at home.
dont assume everyone else lives like you
- https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/d...
Apparently not, if you work for Amazon, according to this article.
Active work done per dat hovers around 1-2 hours and most of that is done while a kid is watching cartoons on full volume in the same room and constantly interrupting.
I've yet to see an example of of a company or product that has suffered due to knowledge workers realizing they can use WFH to put in fewer hours and make time to handle their actual important life tasks.
The biggest savings for me are, of course, time. No commute saves a lot of wasted time, as well as avoiding a huge number of meetings that should have been an email, interruptions from people in the open office, micro-managing, DEI performativity, &c. Software engineers need large blocks of uninterrupted time in order to focus and get significant work done.
If they are goofing off at home and not completing their function, fire them.
If you can’t even tell if the function is being done or not then the functions that aren’t being performed are those of management. But ensuring everyone comes to the office doesn’t solve that problem.
Employees – yikes, sounds like we should do something about that. Can you tell us how you are measuring productivity? Is shipping velocity slower? Is our revenue lower than projected? Maybe we need to adjust priorities or roadmaps? Let's come up with a plan to make sensible product and process changes that will help us better hit our targets.
Management – ...
Employees – can we even say for sure that productivity is down?
Management – we can, trust us.
Employees – ok, what can we do about it?
Management – 10% of you are fired.
Employees – that will just make the remaining people less productive.
Management – and everyone has to come in to the office 3 days a week.
Employees – but we were hired as fully remote. Most of us don't even live near an office. What will this accomplish?
Management – this will fix all our problems, trust us.
Employees – but what problems are we trying to fix?
The worst part of this is that a year later these companies will magically declare that all employees are 2.37x more productive now, and WFH was always a mistake. The corporate world/media will eat it up, and so office culture will get even more entrenched.
It's just people, relationships, employers and employees, and money.
The same CEO, when asked about why he preferred working in the office, mentioned something about being more energized by the view from his office, and something about liking the fried chicken restaurant next to the building.
It was a particularly egregious example, but I’m fairly certain this is almost entirely a matter of upper management simply personally preferring the in office lifestyle, in no small part due to the perks of upper management. But it’s hard to justify the glitzy downtown office building or corporate mega campus when they have a average occupancy rate if 20%, which seems to be the case when employees have a choice, and so they are trying to force their preference upon everyone else with made-up assurances about how much more productive everyone is in office.
I’m in a situation like that now where even though that person is six levels above me and will never know my name or speak with me directly, they are constantly trolling everyone to make sure people have cameras turned on, reminding everyone that remote work is a privilege (no it is keeping us alive, disease monkey), and they are plotting regional and global meetups for teams, or buying everyone VR headsets, etc.
But to what ends? Why would I want to get into a COVID tube and fly to Germany to eat a throw-away processed turkey sandwich and bag of chips with co-workers and then fly back in another COVID tube a day later? What would be accomplished by that? Considering the airfare and hotel costs those have to be the most expensive bag lunches ever made.
And companies that consider good communications with their employees to be "an unproductive activity" are shit companies. There's a reason that Amazon has such a bad reputation amongst all the FAANG. Whether you work in one of the fulfillment warehouses, or are a coder hoping to avoid the mandatory PIPs, it's the worst.
However, what’s right for me isn’t right for you and enforcing a rule one way or another does not work so I agree with your point.
Megacorps need to understand that we humans have a range of preferences and, if we’re to assume some prefer remote and some prefer office, then making a big decision as Amazon has will alienate a decent amount of workers. Cue calamity.
If you believe that only physical environments can be properly collaborative then you invalidate the remainder of your post.
Literally the next sentence after the one you quote is “what’s right for isn't right for you”.
I’m not saying that only physical environments have those qualities - I’m saying through my experience I work better, feel better, and contribute better when I can communicate in a physical space and not a virtual one.
Again, as I say, whatever is right for the individual. If virtual works for you, that’s great, but I’m consciously stepping out of remote work as I really struggle with it.
It's impossible to collaborate in an open office. It's hard to talk to my team if that requires yelling louder than the other 200 people in the floor.
The offices are big enough to not be _too_ expensive, and small enough to enhance collaboration and concentration.
This is a great philosophy to have when your skills are in high demand. What do you say to the people who might have trouble finding a full-remote job that pays enough?
I don't think anyone is born and dreams about working remote doing engineering work in front of a computer for 8 hours a day. You end up doing a venn diagram of what you like with what the world offers and you decide what your values are.
If my life philosophy would include sipping margaritas at the beach or spending my days with my friends outside building an off-grid community I'd be out of luck because I'm not rich and my friends are not rich either.
Find a job that you like because you'll get good at it and your skills will be in high demand as well. Work hard and save enough every month to be able to walk away and into the company next door if your boss turns to shit.
My grandpa passed this philosophy to me and he was a plumber from a remote village in Portugal. He'd tell me how he kept to his values and didn't work for anyone that didn't respect him. He didn't die rich but he was proud in his work. Find what that is for you.
If people focused more on this instead of needing to place themselves on either side "get max salary" or "unionize the world" things would be way better.
But I still believe in individual agency. There are things individuals can still do to make things better. I feel for the edge cases of people who don't have choice. But in general, people have more choice than they think.
Either way you're missing the complete point of the post to harp on a meaningless detail. I was no way implying that remote work is a "right." I was simply pointing out how in many ways worker's rights have been diminished. One only has to look at the recent rail strike to see that, or the countless examples of wage theft, or the switching of hourly to salary to avoid paying overtime.
But despite all this we still have some agency and we should exercise it, even if things are "wrong" or "unfair." That's the point.
The evolution of worker rights has always followed this path. Introduced as perks, then standardized and encoded legally as rights. While there are outliers that get dunked on a lot ( eg on-site laundry at Meta) for the most part the perks have been entirely reasonable (flexible hours and schedules).
Why? Because the calculation is biased by how atoms move, not information.
Fully remote works great - there are plenty of awesome collaboration tools (Miro for example) where you can collaborate. Fully in-person obviously works as well.
But with hybrid, someone always loses - either the folks in the room or the folks on the screen.
you will be fired without being fired
If this is not true, other companies will include WFH in their offers and will kill two rabbits with one shot: win best talents and will make them more productive.
> Management – 10% of you are fired.
> Employees – but we were hired as fully remote. Most of us don't even live near an office.
I don’t think there is any solid evidence demonstrating on-site makes workers more or less productive than remote. But companies have demonstrated over the last 6 months that they overhired to an absurd degree.
This is just a way of further reducing headcount without having to actually do layoffs.
Unfortunately when you're high up the management ladder, every problem looks like a people problem.
> I’m also optimistic that this shift will provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations
> just popping by a teammate’s office later that day with another thought
I love this, return to the office to get your focused work interrupted, spend your hard-earned money around the headquarters, but most importantly because the "S-team" thinks you should.
Andy Jassy probably never worked as an SDE if he truly thinks any of the above is motivating.
> what would best enable us to make customers’ lives better and easier every day
As someone working for AWS, better uptime, lower costs, and higher feature throughput. How about justifying return to office with hard numbers showing that we've fallen short on those points instead of just handwaving that "it's better".
Also, it's often just a layoff in disguise.
There are studies around this topic. My issue is that, they are never cited when these decisions are announced.
I think it is better to have no commute, since it is unpaid, and pollutes.
To me, an unpaid, let‘s say 1h, commute is worse on principle, and requires a strong case before accepting. WFH is better by default based on this principle.
I have been WFH since before the pandemic, but technically there is an office I could commute to. It would take me about an hour each way. If I did that Monday to Thursday, that's 8 hours - so four 10-hour days if commuting was part of my "on the clock" time. If my employer told me I had the option to make Friday a weekend day in exchange for commuting Monday to Thursday, I would strongly consider it and think of it as a reasonable compromise.
I would have less convenient and more expensive days for the working week, but more time off. They get 8 fewer hours of me in front of a keyboard, but do get the supposed benefits of office-based employees.
A full time employee is paid for 40h per week. So using commonly available tools we can determine the average commute time and in many countries travel time is considered work time.
So on paper but generally rarely enforced, you should be able to subtract your commute time from the 40h and end up with actual work time.
Everything on top being overtime and should be paid according to rates mandated legally.
Except for a handful of companies and state employees, I've never seen overtime being paid, though.
That’s not true, at least in the US. The amount of hours I work weekly has never been tracked at any company big or small.
You’re not paid for 40 hours a week, you’re paid to keep up with the general standard of your peers. 40 hours is a very vague estimate of the time required to do so.
We have a time tracking system and overtime is either paid (not in my company, alas) or you can take it as free time.
(Edit: Just to be clear, last time I saw a presentation on this, they did have actual metrics. But numbers on a slide deck should always be taken with a big grain of salt.)
> scale it could have a big impact on the effectiveness of the company
It does not though, if the culture is anything like Amazon's, Zoe will ask you to cut her a ticket instead of directly talking to her. There is nothing with in-person interactions that "scale".
A message or email works differently when you have an established relationship with the other party. It's one thing when I have to do something "because the company needs it" but totally different when I'm helping a flesh-and-blood coworker. You don't build relationships and trust through jira tickets and emails, you build them through unstructured messy human interactions. They pay off later.
Assuming you're neurotypical.
Definitely not in actual developers or sysadmins.
Almost all the ones I've met.
Modern corporate environments are spread out all over the planet. If you can't build relationships without sharing air, you will be at a massive disadvantage. That's just how it is, and it isn't something that was caused by the pandemic, it's a consequence of intense globalization over the past ~40 years and an aggressive investor-driven acquisitions culture.
Stack ranking forcing a number of your employees into "low performance" and putting them on PIP is awesome for social capital however. As are layoffs.
"it's all bullshit, and it's bad for you"
A layoff is going to sever some of those connections in the short term, but the number and quality of connections isn't a function of how people feel about their job. Stack ranking and PIPs are tools that the company uses to mitigate the impact of letting people go. In other words, they're there to protect social capital (for the good of the company, don't get me wrong) versus doing something like picking a random 20% of people to eliminate.
My point is that fostering a culture of mistrust and competitiveness among the employees is antithetical to protecting social capital.
I won't effectively collaborate with you if it helps you being the low performer that will be laid off instead of me.
And curiously enough, I normally don't care about being PIP'd or layoff, as I engage in healthy job hopping so that I was never actually laid off over my relatively long career. Typically I'm one to see the early signs of trouble ahead and line up a new job in the next month or so.
But it wouldn't surprise me if it was found out that the culture of PIP and Stack Ranking helped to select for the ones that are best at navigating the corporate culture in the way I described above.
Well, when you get down to it, if you find yourself back-stabbing a coworker to keep yourself out of the bottom 10% during a RIF, that's not a huge badge of honor either.
None of the reviewers ever have to lie remember. They just have to cherry pick the right examples.
(To be clear, it’s not just Amazon. It’s all companies that have a peer review system that couples with a stack ranking system. If it’s simply feedback to help you grow or established goals and your performance against it, the system will be fine)
You can't state this as a fact. My company has two main offices. Two of the other SREs I work with are in a different office/state. We're as tight as can be. A third SRE is in yet another city. Our teams performance since the start of remote work has been outstanding.
There are no "facts" to this RTO fetish. It's just a management fetish, just like Jack Welch's BS that spread like wildfire.
There's a lot of ways to share that piece of knowledge other than relying on physical proximity. Documentation, metadata, AOB in the team meeting.
Data driven is great when you’re monitoring computer performance, but that’s a domain humans have nearly built from the ground up. And even then it can still be very hard to utilize that data. Trying to apply the same to systems we barely understand seems fraught with error.
Normal churn hits you MUCH harder if you are remote and even if you have a good documentation culture (hah, that's a tiny minority) there's a lot of intangible knowledge that doesn't get written down.
Given the state of the fresh grads and the company culture in my previous company, wfh is much worse onboarding.
In 24 years of IT, I've never seen this unicorn environment.
And yes, I can believe that. With few exceptions, the execs with power are focused on sales. They couldn't give a sh!t about WFH. In fact, the reason this is probably an issue at all is because one too many of these same execs got p!ssed that they had no one to turn to help change an email setting or a printer cartridge and they had no idea how to do it. Not knowing sh!t gets old real quick (translation: "inefficient working practice which we need to do something about").
But I'm not bitter.
The senior leadership have survey after survey saying that their employees mostly prefer remote work. They have data showing they're still doing just as well as ever. They don't care. They just like it better that way, and fuck all y'all who don't agree.
Meanwhile, my new employer literally sold off most of their offices and has contracts saying no one ever has to work from an office again.
Of course, so many large companies were in the process of building large new buildings / campuses as the pandemic hit, so I can also see this as a way to ensure those large investments aren't seen as a waste.
I've been interested in learning more about the financialization of housing lately and this isn't exactly the same but it feels similar.
Whether meetings are in Zoom or in person doesn’t necessarily change how much effort is expended. It really depends on the team from my experience, not the medium of the meeting.
An unproductive team will have unproductive meetings whether in person or on Zoom.
(FWIW we are 100% remote right now, but there are for sure drawbacks)
What's the name of the company?
Sure, there are the odd person who pipes up and says 'I like open plan', or 'I prefer to work in the office' (I kind like the commute myself). But it's just a bunch of ignorant tools who just say the opposite is, on average, what people want or best serves the company.
We need to return to the office because office and other people are doing it.
Very few people look at data or reason about things from first principles.
"Employees: Because covid, we'll all work from home, your offices aren't needed at all. Hey this works great!"
"Please come back to our offices"
"Will you go back to proper office housing, like, I'm just talking cubes here"
"No."
"Why come back?"
"Because."
-----
Ok, so here are things that I liked about working in office:
- free food / drinks if it was there
- escape wife / kid constant distraction
- a bit of social interaction (like, does that even happen at AWS/Amazon?)
Things I hate about in-office:
- open floor plan bullshit
- commuting
- dehumanizing/gross shitters
I'm really growing to hate this performative bullshit. Regardless of the advantages and disadvantages of our present socioeconomic system, can we at least drop the pretense about the rationales and the motives? It would actually make me feel less angry if they openly said, "we're going to do it because that would maximize profits".
At least in my team people are gonna keep using Chime for meetings, and Slack/mail for exchanges, blocking slots on Outlook for themselves because they understand the importance of focused work. Just we'll all be at the office instead. Big success!
Personally I go to the office every day, but I also liked the office not being another crowded mess.
Even our L7s don't really come often to the office.
The whole thing is extremely stupid.
That's what I'm working with here. So it angers me deeply that they could even suggest that this is in anyway better than my home office with a good mic and webcam.
Meeting rooms have gigantic screens, smart cameras that focus on whomever is talking, good sound and connectivity. There are many assigned desks but most aren't, and it's no problem because it rarely gets crowded. There's always place for when people come from other sites, and there's always an empty room nearby for focused work, phone calls, improvised discussions and what not. I'd say it's on average at 30% capacity
Now if people have to come back, I'll hate it. There's no point in the screens and sound, nothing is spacious anymore, most desk will be assigned, rooms will be taken up and we'll start navigating floors, and everything will become a drag like any other crammed up workplace.
Because they don’t have to do it. They define your work environment and have for basically forever since there were employers and employees. At what point in that history has a worker ever made the demand “I am not showing up to where you say my job is at” and kept that job?
You have the problem backwards. It’s not up to the employer to justify their decision to RTO to the employee, even though many do. Even if the reason is a feeling. It’s up to the employees to sell the employer in this case. If your employer hasn’t bought your justification, you have failed to persuade them.
You wrote your comment as if I am implying this is illegal or something. Of course they don't have to give me any justifications, hell they could fire me tomorrow as well. However, they do need workers and Amazon, as opposed to Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc... is not "hip", "cool" or "startup-esque". Their prestige is lower than the competition, their grind is harder, and as a consequence they bleed a lot more SDE than other companies. Most SDEs at Amazon are mercenaries, they are there for the money, stocks and resume padding with entire team being <2 years at Amazon.
In that context, unless they are certain that every other FAANG-like company will RTO at some point soon, they will bleed even more employees and it will have a serious impact on product launches.
I just find that kind of a bold and entitled attitude.
When I was hired at Amazon, it was in the early months of February 2020, before we knew what was going to happen. When I was due to start, everyone was already WFH, so they shipped me my stuff and I went on to work from home for almost 3 years. During those years, I shipped products, had meetings, built relationship with coworkers and overall was (hopefully) good at my job.
So now, when Andy Jassy says it's better if we are all in the office, I can't help but doubt it. I went to the open-floor office, it was loud and I still had to take my meetings through Chime because Amazon is global, my train was late, weird homeless dudes screamed at me at the station and ultimately the experience did not feel all that better. I am convinced we changed during those 3 years and while some people long for the coffee discussions and the face-to-face meetings, they were ultimately not what made the business move forward, only an aspect of it that some people held on to because deep down we are social animals.
The "How dare they!?" sentiment comes from the fact we had not tried "real" WFH before 2020 and it turns out for a lot of people it's simply better than going to the office. When Andy Jassy says "you have to come back" without sharing actual data to show that we had a drop in productivity, the question becomes "why?". As human we do X for Y, that's how we rationalize a ton of stuff, but for the return to office, especially in software, it's not clear what Y is and without Y then it makes no sense to do X.
All that to say, maybe I'm entitled, but I still think WFH is the best way to work in software and I won't abstain from complaining when my leadership refuses to explain decisions that go against my best interest.
I don’t have hard data as to why, but right now my best guess as an explanation for my team is that we see ourselves as more productive when we are head down and cranking, and we are. But outside of those moments, we are not as productive, but we don’t perceive that we aren’t. Unfortunately my team are only heads down about 75% of the time and the productivity losses we feel are happening in that 25% of time and we just don’t notice.
How are you doing so?
It's also likely that if the productivity losses occur only in this 25% of the time that you're not "heads-down" as you say, then they could be explained by bad company culture/process which could be worked on, for an easy productivity win across all teams at the company.
If you could provide this data it would be very helpful, as it would be the first hard data that I have ever seen showing any kind of productivity loss from being remote.
We all feel more productive, management might feel we are not. It brings me back to my original point. Management holds the cards and their “feelings” will outweigh the workers in the debate absent of hard data from either side. The workers need to provide the evidence that makes it indisputable that WFH works better. If your company is doing an RTO, you workers have failed to convince their management that WFH is measurably better for the organization.
This argument presumes that management is rational and 100% data-driven, which in some cases I’ve seen gets a big fat [citation needed] from me.
My point was really more that worker perceptions of their productivity increasing are just as subjective as management’s perception that productivity is decreasing. It’s all just a “feeling”. HN wants to stay WFH because they are more productive and want management to provide facts when they want to RTO, but the workers cannot really provide data to support their claim any more than management can.
Either way, there are probably millions of people who want to work for a FAANG and will happily go into an office if required. They'd likely be happy to move continents to be at said office.
No, he hasn't. He joined Amazon as a Product Manager in 97, became a Director in 2000, VP in 2002 and Sr. VP in 2006. The rest is history.
I too vastly prefer remote work, (and don't work at Amazon) but Jassy has a long way to fall to have done net destruction to the company.
An architect is a genius and an artist, but is not a carpenter or a manager of carpenters.
I think he's an MBA.
Albeit he is not an SDE, assuming he knew nothing about how software engineering works is just pure idiocracy and ignorance. He created the AWS business.
Which parts did he write? All of it?
Or, is he a salesman? Salesmen somewhat famously prefer open plan spaces.
It is like you saying a director for a movie has no importance, because he didn’t act a minute in the movie
That is a big big ego to claim
1) I don’t know what his role was (and neither do you, most likely)
2) that different “types” of people work differently.
in your example: imagine that everyone on production has to sit in a canvas chair all day in a warehouse because thats “how the director wants to work”.
3) If he is a businessman, which seems to be the case, then his personality type tends to favour the absolute worst type of working environments for developers.
He probably knows something about running a software business but I really doubt if an MBA with little technical background knows much about software engineering.
>>> As someone working for AWS, better uptime, lower costs, and higher feature throughput. How about justifying return to office with hard numbers showing that we've fallen short on those points instead of just handwaving that "it's better"
Confessing the antitrust collusion again.
IME, 90% of the time this "another thought" was something inane about the Patriots or the latest major TV show. Can't say I miss it, but I guess it's a blow to the large population of office workers who had nothing better to do at work than lounge and socialize.
And you're correct, Jassy's background is not technical. If Wikipedia can be trusted, he's mostly worked in marketing.
First, before the pandemic, employees kept asking for more flexibility - the ability to WFH a few days a week because of rough commutes or family/home situations. The response from management was, "Sorry, we can't function as a company unless employees are in the office. Productivity will nose-dive." Then, the pandemic happened and management's story changed, "That thing you've been asking for, WFH - you know, the thing we told you wasn't possible because it would destroy the company, well, now we need you to do it in order to save the company." People did it, started WFH, and guess what - the company didn't die, productivity actually increased (I've read this in a few articles; don't have citations). So now that the pandemic is basically behind us, the story from management has changed again: "So yeah, that thing you wanted to do, WFH, but we told you it wasn't possible, but then a crisis happened and we told you that you had to do it, and now that you've done it for nearly 3 years with no harm to the company - yeah, the crisis is over, so we need you to stop doing it because it's destroying the company." Wait, what? The thing that was gonna destroy the company turned out to save the company, and now it's destroying the company???
Funny thing: I am still meeting expectations.
WfH can increase productivity in the short term while also gradually killing the company.
Now it is second nature, and I've been doing it frequently across continents. For all intents and purposes, this never happened at the office before the pandemic.
Uhh, why? Zoom calls still exist, you know? We can also communicate through writing and ask questions. What matters is the willingness to acquire this knowledge, not the method used
Additionally, taking the time to take the junior down for some table football or a tea and a chat makes them MUCH more comfortable with you and they'll feel MUCH more able to come to you to ask for help or explanation or admit they don't understand something.
Some just confused mumbling, one made an ee sound, one gave a particular kind of sigh.
Regular checkins, pair coding sessions, onboarding roadmaps, careful selection of initial projects, and fostering an open-door culture should all be a part of managing any new employee, whether in person or remote. And when done properly, there is no difference in the ability for employees to transfer knowledge or get onboarded between in office or remote.
Remote works great for people who are individualistic and in general can make do without peer access and a social stack rank. For people who in general have low discipline score with regards to anything in life, Remote can be brutal on the long run.
I've seen a fair bit of people get obese, unhealthy and poorer in the remote era. The absolute worse thing that can happen to people with discipline issue is isolation. When no one's watching, and without the much needed feedback, these people easily shift to their default mode and struggle there.
In some ways, that arrangement seems like the worst of both worlds.
Unless everyone in the org works the same three days a week in-office, now you've got some people in office, some people still working from home, and coordination becomes more complex.
Have you ever been on a Zoom call where half the people are in a conference room and the other half are working from home and calling in individually? It's a mess. Either the in-office workers completely dominate the conversation, or, if it's more evenly matched, it's a lot harder to understand the in-office people unless you have really carefully calibrated microphones for the room.
Even if they were to agree on T/W/Th as everyone's in-office days, and everyone works from home on M/F, now you've got a large office space that is practically vacant for more than half of each week.
Amazon had a culture of small teams (≤15 people) being somewhat independent. I would imagine that you don't need _the whole org_ there, you just need the whole team there.
Every day. Works just fine if everyone agrees to and follows a few ground rules. We name a facilitator for each meeting who tracks who has their hand up and if there are messages in the zoom chat.
But if you're in a call with complete randoms, then it can be a mess.
Yes, I can just elect to do 5 days/wk in office, but it seems like at least one of those days will be a pointless commute to interact with no one, plus all the other negative things about commuting.
Being in Seattle I know a _lot_ of people who have made lifestyle decisions about where to live and what kind of house to live in based on the assumption that WFH (specifically at Amazon) would persist.
It's going to be somewhat disruptive and seems like another de facto layoff.
However with this kind of layoff you lose people who have the most alternatives first.
That’s a silly assumption considering what has been communicated thus far.
It’s fine for the people in the room, terrible for the people calling in.
You can fix it by proofing the room with soft audio mats on the walls but somehow nobody wants to do this.
What _is_ a problem (and maybe what OP meant) is when people that aren't talking leave their mics open causing awful effects.
This worked great: headphones, mics and mute ensured common office noise didn't dominate, everyone could hear clearly, and the meeting didn't disrupt any flow you were in at the time.
Otherwise if you're granting exceptions for a significant portion of your employees I don't see how the required WFO (work from office) actually gets the benefits you are hoping for.
Sigh.
(...Anyone looking for a (remote) senior SDE?)
What I haven’t heard much - here at least - is the fresh, brand new junior employee perspective. What does it mean to be hired out of college into a fully remote company? Without the structure required of an in person college? How do you become coached and mentored as intensively as junior employees need? How do you establish early professional relationships?
Maybe in office had the benefit of paying it forward for these folks? From the senior generation helping acculturate the juniors to the company, but more importantly general technology culture?
It depends on how your organization manages onboarding and communication. For a lot of junior emmployees, they don't get as much institutional support or ability to learn from watercooler conversations while being fully remote. When I started as a SWE, I was in the office and could pester experienced devs about this or that, and learn from conversations happening over lunch or over beers. While remote, that entire learning avenue shut down. In addition, most friendships are made thanks to the workplace. If you're fully remote, you aren't meeting other people and making friends. To some people that might be fine, but to others it's very restricting. That's a big reason why early-to-mid career (20-30) types prefer working in NYC over SF now - most other people our age are still there, while SF has become much older.
At the workplace? It only works in large orgs where your friend might be in a different department altogether.
The fact that I don’t have immediate access to my seniors means I actually have to try to get the answer myself before and after I ask asynchronously.
Playing devil's advocate here.
These are non representative.
If I'd taken months/years studying these big tech interview processes, academic algorithms/data structures, and leet code solutions, and self-agreed to sell my soul, Amazon would be my last choice.
Did you study our leadership principles inside and out and prepare examples from your past work experience that illustrate said principles? No? That's too bad, you're not a culture fit.
I think the people that stick around Amazon for a long time are in denial that it's Office Space come true.
Yeah bro, I totally demonstrated "Insist on the Highest Standards" by being really rigid on a code review that one time. Trust me, for real for real.
I don't know what working there is actually like but the interview made it sound like a goddamn cult.
I felt the same way on my induction ("Day 1"...) - it quickly became clear that the main relevance of LPs was as a weapon to automatically win an argument.
Trying to get someone to do something they ought not really to be on the hook for? Ownership! Bias for action!
Person objects to your suggestion because of a flaw in your logic? Think big! Dive deep! Disagree and commit!
For example everyone in advertising sector is generally happy. Was the only sector that grew in revenue, no layoffs, and technical work is fairly easy.
The main advantage to work for Amazon is that they have the most lax "I want to work for a different department" policy. If you ever wanted to do something like work/live in another state or EU, its one of the easier routes to do it.
Therein lies the paradox IMO
Yes, before the downvoters/extroverts start going on: Yes, in person meetings are good on an rare occasion. However, the claim that you have to be in person/"be social creatures" to work effectively is drastically overblown.
A good portion of what happens in a high-performing office is spontaneous, and simply cannot be reproduced via asynchronous tools, even now. A lot of folks will tell you that this isn't true and that if we just somehow changed human nature and made everyone write every decision down (aka "a remote-first culture") there's no net loss, or mischaracterize in-office work as useless meetings or micromanagement or socializing (see sibling comment), but this is largely motivated reasoning. While there can be value in working that way, it's slower and less efficient -- a spontaneous 5-minute conversation will routinely save hours of writing and reading (which lots of folks won't do anyway).
There's always percentage of people who strongly prefer to just go into a silo and code (and those people are over-represented amongst junior engineers; and junior engineers are over-represented on HN), and there's definitely a lot of bad/pathological office environments, but the reality of software is that it's a team sport. Communication is the O(n^2) problem, and in-office communication is just more efficient, even if it leads to a reduction in velocity for any particular person.
One has to be nuanced -- everyone needs heads-down time, and that time can largely be done from anywhere -- but most teams benefit from spontaneous conversation, and most junior people benefit from this in ways that they don't realize.
This is true even for senior people: at this phase in my career I can go into a cave and be very individually productive, but that's not really my job now. Literally every time I'm in the office something happens where I'm able to catch or head off an inefficiency or mistake, or learn about some project that helps my own work. This is immensely valuable.
It's like all of these astroturfed posters and article writers have been trying to get us to have collective amnesia over just how bad pre-WFH tech offices were.
- People collaborate better in person: Bullshit, a lot of developers collaborate better through text. Code Reviews, code snippets on Slack, quick screen shares, diagrams. In fact, verbal communication is very inefficient, prone to inaccuracy and misunderstandings.
- Junior developers don't get mentoring: Bullshit. Most developers are self learners (that's how most people learn to code anyway). Plenty of great material online, from tutorials, to stack overflow, to Indian dudes doing videos on YouTube. Mentoring is largely overblown, and can still happen through text,
- Humans are social beings and need human interaction: Bullshit. Many developers are introverts. And if you are not, find ways to socialize outside of work. Find a hobby with a community or a meetup close to whwre you live. Anything, from tabletop games, running, playing soccer, magic the gathering. Do a language class on your free time, go to a music concert, anything. When you are remote, the world is your oyster.
For the record I'd prefer a work environment that's closer to maybe 1-2 times a month in the office.
> Most developers are self learners (that's how most people learn to code anyway)
I don't think that's true. If you poll the vast majority of people in intro to CS class, most people never coded before. I recall it being a small minority at least back when I was in school (> 10 years ago).
There's also stats comparing before WFH and after of how long long it takes someone to onboard properly/be productive (forget the exact stat/KPI, mix of survey/commit stats?) and it's extended by a few months. Now that might be due to bad on-boarding since it wasn't a remote-first, but if that still exists years later it is interesting
> People collaborate better in person: Bullshit, a lot of developers collaborate better through text
Agree with that. I really wish we would write better docs and have more of an async setup
I do genuinely think there's aspect/learning that is lost/slower in the last few years, but that might be because we haven't really thought about accepting "remote-first" and trying to shoehorn what we already had into WFH model.
I remember my time in college. From my experience, many of my peers there also didn't know how to code after taking classes. The ones that learned were the ones that invested the time to learn. The classes were there to speed it up things only.
yeah, and they are the generally low performers that waste other peoples time.
Passionate people do just fine WFH. So hire them.
This was true 15 years ago and is still true now in the top talent areas, but it's false in the larger world.
Most of this vast sea of mediocre factory produced developers haven't done any coding outside of school and work.
> Many developers are introverts.
Another thing that was more true a decade ago. Most developers I've seen in person need social interaction and half get little of it apart from their office.
Where I struggle to fully accept that without data, is that even my own leadership frequently espouses that line... but I've been largely remote for 20 years and so have all majority of my colleagues. We've built relationships and mentorship and coaching and shared knowledge and friendships while being various kinds of remote for two decades. It's not rocket science. It's doable.
Now, an argument can be definitely made that some people don't learn or motivate well in remote scenario, and I will BUY that... as long as we in the same breath/sentence also acknowledge that some people don't learn or motivate well in busy in-person open offices.
Note that this only applies to bad Seniors who don't believe in mentoring, and there are ways to mitigate this while maintaining remote working for all.
It is but people are really terrible at doing it and even worse remotely.
In person jobs will always exist, forcing everyone to be in person is not good.
Senior at FAANG means $400k/year total comp or more. You aren't going to get that at a startup. Only other large companies pay that well, and they aren't hiring.
Junior engineers are more likely to leave because a startup might pay them roughly what they make now. As a junior, salary is a larger part of your compensation. Once you are senior and have multiple years of RSU grants stacked up, it's very different.
Not only did Amazon try to weasel out of our written agreement, but I found Amazon's management to be toxic, their HR department lazy and ineffective, their base salary is bottom-rung and their stock isn't doing well, their benefits were the most stingy and dismal of any company I've worked for in my 30+ year career, they treat their customers like shit and their employees worse. The only benefit to staying the first two years was the sign-on bonus, which is spread out over your first 24 months. After that, you're better off working at a bootstrapped start-up.
I was fortunate enough to have an excellent manager during my first year, but that is definitely not the norm at Amazon. I'm not sure why anybody works there to start with, let alone if they're forced into multi-hour long commutes everyday, just so they can be marginalized and abused in person.
EDIT: Their sign on bonus is generous, so you’ll make a lot during your first two years, but after that your annual salary will drop significantly. Supposedly, their RSUs are supposed to make up for that, but they don’t.
Sometimes getting rejected in an interview for a job you really want can be a blessing in disguise. This decision also makes me much less interested in working for Amazon going forward. They definitely aren't living up to their own "Leadership Principle" about being "Earth's Best Employer" when they're doing unethical things like this.
My advice to those who are in that situation is to make Amazon get rid of you so that you can (probably) file for unemployment. I'm not an employment attorney but my understanding of employment law is that quitting disqualifies you for unemployment but that a company ordering you to relocate to "return to an office" when you were hired to work remotely is probably constructive dismissal which is eligible for unemployment. This will also help if you need to fight them in court over repayment of your bonus. It may be difficult to find another job right now thanks to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy decisions so you might need the unemployment and/or bonus money to survive in the meantime.
Pretty sure Amazon has always had virtual employees, and you should be able to request to switch, possibly with impact on your pay.
I do feel seeing people face to face a couple of times per week does help teams function better. Random water-cooler conversation lead to meaningful ideas. Overhearing team members talking about some related problem gives you the chance to jump in. Also better for overall motivation from what I've experienced.
As a manager, and someone who values creativity and productivity, I know that there's a HUGE tax being paid from people not being physically together, exactly as you described.
To the extent that everyone WFH, the tax is paid uniformly. But once people head back to the office, teams and companies that have more physical presence together will outperform and put the other people out of business.
Company B can allocate all the savings from office space and infrastructure towards increased employee compensation (or whatever else they choose to spend on).
Will the cost of office space prove valuable for the benefit of the in-person bonus performance?
I think that a "Company C" that kept all their office space and still allowed employees to exclusively WFH would be making a mistake.
But, I do have at least twice more energy and productivity if I work from home, and choose when to eat, go for a walk (and have good ideas at that time usually), when to sleep, no commuting, no worries like dresscode etc..
So for small companies, I believe distance working can be very interesting
I'd be willing to say that companies that work in ways that require more physical presence and _have it_ will outperform companies that require more physical presence and _don't have it._
But the companies that adapt to remote work and aren't trying to just do everything the same way they did before should be able to continue to compete at a high level. They have before, there's no reason why they shouldn't continue to be able to.
I'd love to see data if you have it. Many studies show the opposite.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...
I understand that companies have expensive real estate handsomely equipped with the finest of cubes, and that it comforts the old guard to see an army of business-casual-attired employees staring at screens, but it seems extremely unlikely that this costly and anachronistic model is going to outperform virtual competitors.
But on the flip side, here's some things from my experience that I would count as productive:
- saw someone looking angry at their computer for several days. Asked them what was going on. After a chat realized his project was never going to work so we canceled it. It would have taken weeks/months for us to realize this if I didn't see him physically boiling at the desk.
- need a quick chat with Bob and Alice. Saw they are at their desk, just rolled over and had the chat because they happened to be there. Vs trying to find time on calendar, ending up weeks later.
- crown jewel: ran into a dude I used to work with, now in a different department. Turns out he's working on something similar to me. That started a bunch of conversations, ended up combining efforts and building platform. Now running essentially 3 businesses based on 1 tech investment. Wouldn't have happened if I didn't bump into him in the elevator.
Rando feels entitled to interrupt 2 Co workers whenever instead of working around their schedule.
Sounds like a few things need fixing here.
I read your list as a list of ways in which the organisation has come to depend on inherently time and space limited proximity to paper over cracks in a way that is limiting because it will mean addressing opportunities and problems won't scale.
How is this positive for the two people you interrupt and keep from working? If this chat takes weeks due to WFH that just means that they cannot be interrupted.
This scenario is exactly why I'm much less productive in the office. It's a net negative.
I’m not some antisocial person either. I would enjoy traveling to the office and be sad to leave the little camaraderie party. But nothing was getting done and all that busy bee hustle was a smokescreen.
This is a downside, not a benefit. I don't want to hear about your compilation error when I'm heads down on my own work.
With few exceptions, juniors are in the default mindset that they're bothering people when they have problems. My job is to socialize them out of that. I accomplish that by bringing them into the office, because the alternatives very rarely work.
Now, I’ll submit there are people who are not considerate at all. And to be honest, a lot of people have become way worse since the pandemic. It’s almost like they’ve forgotten basic human decency. And those people can be far more disruptive in person than they can be remote. But there are ways to resolve those issues (basically by telling them that you’re busy and not indulging them when they’re disturbing you, and very quickly they’ll get the hint).
Personal productivity does not necessarily map organizational productivity. You might be insanely productive by focusing heads down on your work all the time, but the organization as a whole may not grow as much.
Now, this may not apply to you and your organization at all, or may not even be generally true, but I did want to point it out because a lot of people here wonder why managers would ask them to come to office even though they believe they’re clearly more productive at home. There are non nefarious reasons leadership may be asking for this.
I never said I don't answer people asking for help. I said working remotely allows me to decide WHEN I answer people asking for help.
If someone cannot wait 30 minutes for me to finish whatever the hell I'm doing, and try to solve or at least understand their problem on their own in the meantime, they should be fired.
I imagine it's gonna be a generational thing where older folks won't acclimate to "hanging out" in a digital space. Having tools like Slack/Discord change the game completely.
Our project team of 20 has only 1 person who's always home now - but it seems to be basically a social anxiety / hypochondria issue. With the rest of the team onsite, those that stay home get forgotten a lot - out of site, out of mind.
I realized I was sitting alone in my apartment for 8 hours a day and that was quite a sad thought I haven't been able to shake.
I started going in to the office with a few of my team members 2 days a week, but the vast majority don't want to. That's fine - I don't want to be the person that makes people do things they don't want to.
But I joined this company during the pandemic when all offices were closed and I have learned so much and made some really important professional connections simply by turning up to the office and meeting people there.
It feels like you can have more 'casual' yet still work-related chats in person that I've never been comfortable having on video calls for some reason.
WFH we are in silos. Maybe that's okay for people who were a part of the organization before WFH.
I wouldn't know how we would get empirical evidence but collaboration in the office is definitely valuable...I think the debate now is: is it worth all the downsides of commuting and colocating around high COL areas
It is also valuable to be at home in a quiet environment.
https://commoncog.com/goodharts-law-not-useful/#:~:text=Amaz...
(if you don't have a Chromium-based browser, scroll to the heading "How the WBR Accomplishes This").
- watercooler conversation is not searchable and is ephemeral, so team members that have valuable input may not even know the conversation occurred. Had the conversation taken place on slack or some other chat system, others with valuable input would see it and chime in. And somebody looking for context can search for the conversation years from now.
- the office is full of distractions, from unrelated teams in the same space doing some kind of team building to co-workers phone calls, to random irrelevant conversations between coworkers that I have to tune out. So pretty soon I put on noise-canceling headphones and tune out ALL conversations, which negates most of the purported benefits of in-office conversations.
- Commutes suck
What if there was the promise of a friendly AI used to filter out all non-work related discussions?
Then a chatGPT model fine tuned based on previous team discussions, that automatically replies in the team chat any time it has some especially high confidence that it's generated a good answer to a new question.
On my team, there is a lot of "tribal knowledge" that is known to part of the team, and buried in Microsoft Team's chat history somewhere, but having to use Team's search for anything is always the last resort. Maybe add a process where you have to wait for a team member to "like" the AI generated post before the person who posed the question uses the AI answer.
I can't agree with you more regarding the commute. It really does suck.
Going back to the office 2 or 3 out of 5 days is still better than 5 out of 5, but the amount healthy personal things that I get to "miss" don't sell it for me. I probably prefer an entire week offsite with my team once a quarter where the commute is literally a 5 minute walk from my hotel room to whatever conference / workspace we've reserved. Bonus points if the offsite is in a place that has wellness facilities so I can still spend that extra "hour" on health.
Trying to do focused work in an open floorplan environment always felt pretty silly to me, but I never really minded being in the office, but thinking about it now...a leisurely morning walk to the park to sit in the sun with coffee before work is a hell of a lot nicer than any commute I ever had.
Unless the employer is forcing you to live in a particular place, your tolerance for commute vs. rent (and other lifestyle impacts of location) is saying that, not your employer. I’ve rarely seen a worksite [0] (and doubt that it is the case for any FAANG HQ job) where it was impossible to live closer than 1/2-hour one-way commute from the office.
[0] There obviously are some, and even some where the distance is much farther, but they are exceptional.
For a single person, yes, moving based on employer might make sense. I have a wife, who owns a business tied to the community. I have kids in school. I have family and social commitments in my neighbourhood. Why would I cause my whole family stress and frustration by uprooting them to reduce my commute?
It's entirely possible that I will be directed to return to the office. At that point, I will politely but firmly decline, because I was hired as a full remote employee. And then I will find a new remote job, probably in less then a month, and probably making more money, even in this market.
You presumably wouldn't, because you have a set of preferences due because of various (from your description, non-rent) lifestyle impacts of location.
Which is, if you read my upthread post, rather than lobbing insults without doing so, exactly what I was talking about.
Now, in your case rather than overriding concern for commute time (which is evidently the case for lots of other people), neither those preference nor your commute time preference arr negotiable, so you would just resign if your employer decided to make your job an onsite job. Other people wpuld choose to commute. Other people, who dislike the commute and don’t have the other factors you have holding you in place, might move closer to the office.
In any case, the employer isn’t dictating commute time, but work site. Your preferences will determine commute time if you work (or, for that matter, will determime if you continue working at all.)
If you're commuting at typical times (getting to the office somewhere between 8-9am), there aren't a whole ton of places that are 1/2 hour commute away from, say, the googleplex. The east bay can be cheaper, but anything across the Dumbarton is out because the bridge can easily take 45 minutes during commute hours on any given day.
The places that are a reliable 30 minute drive on the peninsula are pretty much NW San Jose (SJC), parts of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Mountain View itself, Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, and Menlo Park. With commute traffic, Milpitas is too far east, Redwood City is too far west, and even Cupertino is too far south.
"Impossible to live" is of course up to definition, but if you have kids and don't yet have FU money, you might be looking really long and hard at those houses in the east bay and wondering whether the commute is really that bad (it really, really is).
I'd be open to commuting again, but only if I'm paid for the extra time. If that makes employers pick someone else, that's fine (yes, I get I am in a privileged position to be able to afford to be that picky).
Fixing the statewide housing shortage, or replacing the suburbs with something dense and walkable enough to allow good public transport, is not.
If you think we can do the latter, please do so! I'd be happy to return to the office after it's been done.
This is why you document key conversations (though obviously this requires more discipline than searching for the information after the fact).
Another counter is that search often sucks (caveat: my opinion here is perhaps coloured by the fun and games sometimes had trying to find anything in Outlook or Teams, YMMV if you have different tools).
> the office is full of distractions
You should encounter my home!
> Commutes suck
Agreed. I have the luxury of living very close to the office which helps my preference for working here.
My main reason for preferring to be mainly in the office (I do work from home occasionally, more so temporarily ATM as I have a terminally ill pet to spoil until the time soon when the bad outweighs the good in terms of QoL) is that I don't have a room to designate a work room (well, I do, but I'd rather designate it for my hobby work & such) and I find switching on/off as needed is more difficult when work and home life don't have a good solid door between them.
I also hate the phone (OK, there are video options, but I find they help little and anyway the proponents of them usually have their cameras off so a phone is what we effectively have) as it combines the bad points of in-person communication with the bad points of written comms.
Having said that, while I'm definitely an office worker by choice, rather than a home worker, some do genuinely both work better remote and get a better life out of it, so we need some flexibility (with the caveat that I do wish people who want the remote work flexibility show me some flexibility in return and consider answering messages/mails by message/mail instead of trying to arrange a call which they know is by far not my preferred option!).
That isn't my answer at all, if you read my entire post.
People on both sides need to stop with the "you are 100% with us or your arguement is 100% incorrect" attitude.
> at some point you'll be working with someone not-in-person.
Which I'm fine with. But they way many want to manage that communication does not work well for all, hence I suggested people have done flexibility on that along with the flexibility they want/need in other matters.
It'd never happen in a random chat service, people don't start water cooler stuff on public channels, they either use more limited team chats or private messages.
Success in remote work is all about proactive communication and good use of tools.
At least in my experience this hasn’t really held me back, even in predominantly office based companies. I definitely miss a bit of gossip, but I saw a steady stream of promotions over the years, ending up in fairly senior management, and I had good relationships with everyone I worked with.
I’m now in a different job which has a very remote focused culture - there is an office, but apart from one guy most of the technical team don’t really use it as much more than a hub for meeting up now and again.
1. Juniors like to come into the office. For those that went from fully remote to -> hybrid, they really relish the social aspect + mentorship they get from more experienced engineers.
2. Mid-level is split. Less experienced mid-level prefers WFH as they can work independently and the type of work they have does not generally require high levels of collaboration. For people that are close to senior it is split between those that do more collaborative work vs complex individual work. The former tends to prefer coming into the office vs the latter prefers WFH
3. Senior and above tends to prefer hybrid with 2 days or so in office on the same day. Most people at this level are either doing some form of mentorship and/or collaborating across multiple individuals both within and external to the immediate team. This work tends to be more easily facilitated in person. This area also tends to more likely have families and there is a split between those that feel coming to work provides them good Work/Life separation vs relishing the opportunity to step back from work for a second throughout the day to spend with family.
I also see the tendency for those that come into the office to be perceived more positively, even when controlled for the actual outcome of work as well as whether the evaluator comes into the office or not.
I'm a "senior" manager, and I personally feel like coming into the office or not doesn't really change my day. I'm basically in group meetings or 1:1's all day, so whether I'm in the office or not I barely spend any time at my actual desk.
Isn't feeling good something worth producing?
I (work at Amazon and) already have to go in once a week, and I literally do NOTHING that day.
Being at home allows me to delay answering coworkers so that I don't have to shift focus every 15 minutes between what I am doing and between helping Bob with his other shit.
Being at home also allows me to not be in a constantly noisy environment, where even with top of the line noise canceling technology you still cannot focus properly.
Lastly, the offices are NOT suited to handle the growth that Amazon has seen in the past 2-3 years. In Luxembourg for example it went from 4K to 6K employees, but no new buildings have been added (some have closed actually). Already when it was 4K employees, people had to go through MULTIPLE BUILDINGS before finding a seat that was free. And Luxembourg is not the office that grew the most, by far not.
This is a disaster in the making.
People are trying to justify RTO by "muh innovation". The truth is that you are not innovating 90% of your time. What you gain in "innovation" you lose 10 fold in actual productivity.
I'll be that guy, so:
People who were the most vocal about going back to the office... turned out they missed their work buddies more than work (I am okay with that) but me and my direct colleagues don't ever see them anymore at the water cooler. Those conversations have dried out. Oh, they are in the building, just behind their doors. The cafeteria is empty 90% of the time.
I'd say the water cooler discussions were more about things not work related than work related, or about office politics.
I don't think I've ever had a "productive" water cooler talk without going in with that in mind already (i.e. I would've scheduled a meeting or walked to the desk anyway.)
In my world, my team and I are in adjacent shared offices (not cubes), and we all walk or bike to the office. It works wonderfully.
I feel like people romanticize office working and it confuses the hell out of me. I never saw the benefits people argue existed across multiple jobs and no. Personally WFH has been nothing but beneficial for me. We still have informal calls which are more relaxed and similar to Discord calls for discussing problems or talking tech nonsense because we generally enjoy each others company, but if y'all aren't talking while WFH then moving to the office isn't going to change anything.
Though there were a few people that liked to be annoying and just pop around desks to ask random questions and interrupt work.
If you want butt-in-the-seat work, you're getting 40 hours from every employee and nothing when they get home. If things break, they get fixed the next morning.
If you want remote work, you're getting however much work is allocated per Scrum iteration. People will work weekends and evenings as they need.
If you want both, you're going to have people finishing their assigned iteration work and then fucking around for the rest of their butt-in-the-seat office time.
I wish we had a cafeteria though, my location doesn't have one.
Last time I went to the office I spent 40 minutes waiting at the Tender Greens across the street.
UberEats usually runs circles around the office complex, gives up, and leaves my lunch at some random office building and then I have to hunt it down.
Selfishly I wish everyone would come in -- way more productive side conversations, and more humanity. A coworker opened up to me a few weeks ago about a vacation that got denied, and just needed someone to vent to. That wouldn't have happened over a scheduled Zoom.
I also suspect some coworkers are working 2 or more other jobs, or are just insanely checked out and filling their day with errands, long workouts, ballgames, etc. The same few people have "internet issues" all the time, etc.
Happens to me plenty of times, with multiple people (like I'll have a scheduled meeting with the PM and we'll do the meeting, then chat about some things, then it'll drift into bitching/venting about stuff at work, etc).
I probably have had way more of those over Zoom than not, because there's no chance anyone can overhear us (assuming we're both not in the office).
I think I tend to give off that vibe, though. Like you can share that stuff with me, and I'll understand and reciprocate and won't tell anyone because I'm obviously not playing office politics, not sucking up to anyone, I'm just there to do my job and help get others unstuck when possible.
I suspect this is the real reason. The internet is full of people boasting about having 2, 3, 4, 7 senior jobs pulling in millions in TC doing nothing but interviewing for next sucker employers. If WFH ends, it’ll be because of them.
For context, I work with hardware in a role most employers think is necessarily in-person.
The team I started the pandemic with adapted to lockdown by spending $500/person on buying equipment and having "just chat" times a couple times a week or before meetings where you could talk naturally. Periodic in-person drinks/dinner/events and an active chat helped too. That worked really well and the infrastructure we built turned out to be useful for all sorts of automation where people wouldn't be physically present anyway. The team is overall in a better position than before.
I also observed a team that didn't do any of that and simply went back to being in-person when lockdown ended. One way that manifested was as excluding remote workers from meetings/information flow. By complete coincidence, that team has trouble hiring and retaining people. When the people they do have take normal vacations or need visa renewals, they're completely unable to work because they never dedicated the time to building infrastructure around employees not being physically present. They're no worse off than they were pre-pandemic, but they effectively wasted 2 years.
But making the effort to build a remote team does have a lot of advantages, automation has to be built in which, in the end, helps having greater flexibility when there are issues and people cannot be present. It helps with recruiting talent because you no longer restrict yourself to a single area...
People also say that it's impossible to form friendships with remote coworkers but it's not been my experience, I've made a lot of friends with coworkers who live in different countries and timezones than my own.
Also free snacks & drinks, great people and a nice atmosphere :)
I’m pretty sure my pudgy form can’t intimidate them even if I tried.
Working in an office requires an "outfit", and in American culture you can't wear the same "outfit" multiple days in a row, for some reason, probably because of television. I dislike this.
This has not been my experience.
In late 2019, when I switched to remote work, it was not particularly hard to find a WFH job. It was a little harder than finding a job at an office. There were certainly fewer companies who offered it than there are now.
At the end of quarantine, I think it's probably easier to find a WFH job than it was before the pandemic, and (ignoring the current job market) not much more difficult than ever to find a company that will let you work from the office if you want.
What I mean is, people generally have a better set of options with respect to choosing how they want to work today, compared to late 2019.
So, it's a good thing, except we still have to allow time for things to settle down. Companies who make all their employees return to the office will lose some of those employees, and companies who allow WFH will gain some of them. In the end, I still think it's a better situation than before.
When random convos happen in slack I don't miss them if I step away for a 15min walk. I can even search them.
Here is one data point:
https://steveblank.com/2023/02/14/startups-that-have-employe...
I've also seen some pandemic data that individual unit productivity suffered, but was more than made up by the fact people worked longer because they did not have to endure the commute:
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/work-from-home-prod...
It probably also depends on the job function, software developers are likely more productive when they can work uninterrupted. WFH does not guarantee that, however, if you have young kids at home or a small apartment without a dedicated home office. I suspect companies will start offering perks like being able to "WFH" not from actual home but from a WeWork-like space that is a shorter commute from your residence.
Some company cultures are clearly more congenial to remote working than others, and those companies will have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent. Automattic (makers of WordPress) sold their underutilized SF office because no one was coming in anyway. Culture eats strategy for breakfast and I'm sure it's hard to impossible for a behemoth like Amazon to turn its culture around to be remote-first, even if they wanted to. Still, it would be useful for researchers to do proper studies on how to make this work. Making WFH more widespread would improve workforce participation, specially for women or caregivers when the population is aging, and thus benefit the economy as a whole.
It's just similar companies responding to the environment (market, covid, etc.) in a similar rational way.
And a bit of a herd mentality too, which is human nature. But that doesn't require collusion, it's just board members reading headlines.
There are plenty of companies still haven't done layoffs (Apple), or have even raised employee salary (Nintendo, Sega) to ensure that employees feel safe and continue to perform at high levels.
If anything, it's irrational behaviour. Herd mentality, prioritizing the short-term, fear-based, etc.
Even if that wasn’t happening, public announcements like this signal copycat behavior is fine.
OTOH, if a company cannot offer WFH/remote now, then I'd say that's a strong signal of a money losing company that's in trouble. Hint: a lot more than you think, they just were able to coast on easy interest rates for so long.
At any rate, the Fed will eventually inflate the trampoline below this falling economy. The economic pain will be too much to bear, especially given how vulnerable Biden is for re-election.
That's the whole story here. It is very realpolitik. Amazon is a very data driven company, if the company finds out that recruiting or retention is becoming a serious issue due to this policy change then they will course correct.
That is all.
However, In my experience at Amazon (going on 7 years), they are are slow to course correct or provide clarity. This guidance was handed down on a Friday, with no email, no forward notice to at least L8 or below leadership (Director), and relevant policy pages were unclear and hastily edited. This sent managers scrambling to provide answers to everyone panicked. And sends everyone off into the weekend with anxiety about their future. Its a non surprising but shitty feeling.
Meanwhile we had an all hands meeting earlier in the week, this wasn’t even mentioned…
Oh sorry I had some car trouble...but I can jump on VPN and clock in for my shift.
I literally don't need to talk to another coworker or manager to do any of my tasks. This is stupid and I suspect it's to thin the herd. Luckily this is my second full time job so I'm not afraid of treating amazon like they are treating me.
Editing to add: That I also recognize my privilege and am grateful for the opportunity to work at one of the biggest employers I have encountered.
I honestly haven't felt siloed in my position one bit. Everything I need to do my job is there in the network. All the documentation I need. All the previous slack messages to search. company wide searches for any info not related directly to my position. And updated docs that are literately so easy a 15 y/o could follow them if they know how to read and pay attention to detail.
There is literally no reason whatsoever for me to be in the office.
Besides in person there is literally nothing I can do that I can't from home. I don't need to see the person to learn from them. I don't need to hear them to understand what they are telling me. And I don't need to physically be there to be productive. I was able to do the job out of my car and still help others while parked on the side of the road for two minutes while I answered a question they could have found the answer to if they RTFD.
I don't know if I liked it better because this was the first legit remote position I ever had and it seemed smarter in every way how it was done.
This does not seem like a smart move to me and I can't quite put my finger on it. But I don't think this will increase productivity.
You seem to lack professionalism.
Yea my second full time job wasn't given to me. I worked hard and I chose them to do business with. I am the CEO of my "enterprise". So this isn't an entitlement. It's what I worked hard for.
When I interviewed there they thought they were interviewing me. I was interviewing them. I chose them to work there they didn't pick me. I don't owe them anything accept for what I agreed to when I contracted out my future self.
I enjoy the business relationship I have with them. If the terms of that relationship change. Then I will re-evaluate and make the best decision for my "Company". It' really as simple as that.
For the rest of us its been a roller coaster of wfh being forbidden pre-covid, to wfh being what “saved the companies”, to now it being a problem all while we’ve delivered for the company (Ive been with AWS for 7 years). All the while, folks like myself have had to make decisions like where to buy a home given messages of “amazon has fully embraced wfh/remote work, we won’t be forcing a return to office” [1] to now this… its out of touch from reality.
1 - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
No, I didn’t miss you at all. I’ll submitting my resignation, don’t worry.
Companies have offered remote/semi-remote roles to highly skilled/productive individuals for decades. SWE's who stayed as ICs often switched to remote after ~4 years if they built a good rep with senior management. Pre-Pandemic it was common to see "in-office" firms seeking remote talent with rare specialty skills such as DB internals as either contractors or full-time employees. There was usually a tradeoff with these roles that you had to make your own career.
Applying this model to junior engineers, open ended collabs, and non-specialist labor doesn't seem to be working all the time. A few trends I've observed.
- Some staff are putting in heroic efforts, and some do nearly nothing - Management doesn't have any idea that someone on their team is working 80 hrs/week sitting next to someone working 20.
- If an uncomfortable decision must be made, it's trivial to punt on the decision indefinitely.
- Teams may view their job as "doing the minimum", it's common to see teams where everyone is silent 24/7.
- Engagement is hit/miss. I've heard many of my younger colleagues struggle with finding a social circle in a new country/city/life phase. The only time I see this pattern break is when a project lights on fire - but that is unsustainable.
When you're in an office, unless you're explicitly in a meeting Coworker Jim can walk by your desk, tap you on the shoulder and ask for help, or a talk, or to simply ask about your day. You don't have a choice in this interaction. Ignoring him is rude and often even when I told people I was busy they would persist or break my flow.
When you're WFH, they can't do that. They send you a message on slack and you can choose to asynchronously respond, or schedule a meeting for later or if it's important to clarify something now hop on a call. A good team understands this and reorganizes everything to work around that asynchronous nature.
I have a feeling the breakdown is that upper management hates this aspect. They can't stand that they can't simply walk the floor and annoy people or micromanage people as they see fit. Even if it's better for productivity, it's worse for them mentally. Which is why you see them cramming RTO or hybrid even when most people indicate otherwise.
> https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
Looks like he has a plan now.
Amazon isn't Google, it doesn't care about its image, like ... at all.
Most companies I've worked at had a large majority of people adding as little value as possible.
So where does most organizational leadership come from? Paying their dues as management in a prior life. So they're inculcated with the same mental model. Difference between a leader and a manager is, managers tell people what to do, while leadership like to tell their reports what they should have done.
Anyway all these components feed the whole back to work thing. Managers keep their jobs by telling people what to do, and the easiest way to do that is via the official office environment. It's also the most expensive and inefficient way to get anything done, leading to most corporations having very mediocre delivery systems. That's my take after consulting with numerous F500s.
Sure, there are exceptions; work dependent on equipment that isn't practical for remote applications, heavy experimentation with specific environment requirements, etc. But if your office life is centered around a laptop, then use the "laptop" as intended.
So what's far more strategic is moving from managing people to managing the flow of value. Manager mind blown. The latter doesn't have the same dependency on having people come into the office, but it's a much more sophisticated approach requiring at least some interest in business systems engineering, which is more complicated. But the approach is far more efficient, cost-effective, and requires far less energy usage. Manager refrain: "Can't I just go back to telling people what to do, in the office?"
Do you have more details regarding managing the flow of value?
Reading material or other resources that goes deeper into this?
"The Fifth Discipline" by Peter Senge. This is a classic text that also covers the mental model side of the shift from managing people to managing flow.
"Team Topologies" by Skelton and Pais. Another classic on team structure as it relates to flow of value.
And well, have to mention my little book, "Agile V2 Coach's Field Manual" available on Amazon. Hardcover only. I need to write a rev, but still holds up regarding the concept of codifying behaviors into a delivery system, thus cutting down on politics, finger-pointing, unethical decision-making, and other crap that represents the legacy people-management model. Quick read.
Lot more books available. This is a very rich area of study that's been around since people have been trying to figure out how to get out of each other's way for better outcomes.
Thanks for those reading suggestions.
I teach all 12 SAFe certifications, so I'm familiar with the framework. The issue that SAFe identified, is the very issue I'm bringing up here. In the case of this framework, it gives managers the chance to keep managing people, but with an out of box framework that keeps them from the burden of understanding systems engineering fundamentals that emphasize flow. That's the problem in a nutshell with SAFe - layer 1 process and team fundamentals are sacrificed in favor of a layer 2 framework. And managers get to lead meetings and report-outs.
Otherwise, SAFe is ok. It just puts some structure around managing an increment of increments - another chance to inspect and adapt, pivot, whatever is needed for minimum viable product, plus managers feel like they (managers) are useful by guiding PI planning, whatever.
The reality? High performing teams tend to snicker at SAFe. They think things like confidence vote events are silly because they expect product owners to be bringing them nothing but work-items that already meet their confidence standards. Otherwise their time is being wasted with this event. Additionally, high performing teams will refuse to plan out multiple iterations worth of work (as done in PI planning), when they expect to have a healthy backlog to work that already meets their readiness standards for multiple iterations. All they'll say is prioritize that work and they'll knock it out. But once again, planning out multiple iterations helps managers reinforce telling people what to do in a micro fashion.
after the 1,5 years of corona they looked at the numbers and evaluated if they should get the devs back into the office
overall productivity stayed the same (after the chaos of the first corona lockdown has settled) for all measurable metrics.
but individual productivity showed major changes, some completely faltering, some performing much better. for most of them it stayed more or less the same. hypothesis: the loss of f2f communication was counteracted with more time to focus.
and yes, they did let go those of who did not perform any longer. also the hypothesis was that most of them were not so great from the beginning, but were able to "swim" with the rest of the teams. (some exceptions)
the upside was also they now they had a much bigger pool of pot. hires in eastern europe which they did not had before.
All depends on the direction the company culture wants to take; more focus, more skill or more communication. Either is fine, but the leadership should pick one and stick to it.
I honestly used to feel bad when in the office if I was on Youtube or Instagram, I just didn't really do it. But when WFH I could have unlimited access to anything without people knowing, even porn if I wanted.
I also remember the feeling of having others around me working pretty hard and kind of fed off that, like I wanted to be part of a team who was delivering and while I still have that feeling, I feel less guilty if I slack off when remote and I notice the whole team going through waves of slacking off, and then someone pulls the team back together to be motivated.
I have strategies to get myself into working and I can be productive, I'd argue I often am productive because I care a lot about where I work and what I work on, but it's not just "magic" that I'm just sitting in my room at home and all of a sudden I'm ultra productive? I really have to work at it, especially if I'm not working on something exciting. People also come distract me, neighbors ,friends, family even delivery people etc.
Slack and email are for me, huge productivity killers and distractions and still are if remote or on-site. So that distraction has never gone away for me.
I think being a productive remote worker is a skill that I'm still learning and an investment I have to make, my own office renovations, furniture etc, and I've been doing it since before the pandemic.
I hate to say it, but I think most people know deep down inside and are admittedly defending WFH as by default being better from a productivity standpoint when really, it's probably just better on a personal level and so they want to keep it. I think that's fine because I agree, if I had the choice, I'd be remote too, forever. I'm just not really sure people are being entirely honest with themselves and their motives and it would be refreshing to see a bit more of that honesty shine through without the constant, "I'm just more productive at home by default, I work 10x harder and more hours etc".
It would be nice to live in a world where employees and employers just said, "You know what, who cares about the productivity aspect so much, let's just embrace the technology we create to make our lives better and embrace working from home even if we actually do take a 10% productivity loss", it's wishful thinking but it would be nice :)
Smart decision would be to let employees decide.
I work at Microsoft and we were told that we can choose between 100% WFH, 100% office or something in between. We could even change our office location to other place more convinient.Everyone was happy with this
Stack ranking, layoffs, and now micromanagement from Jassy himself.
Just months ago, they were positively frantic to hire anyone they could get their hands on.
I hope potential employees remember this when the market is on the upswing again.
Edit - I refer to the anger in the YouTube comments rather than in parent’s comment.
Maybe it is a vibes things. Who knows.
If on the other hand, other employees are fine with it, no need to change anything, I just left and they can remain happy and now I can be happy. There's no need to push your view on others.
I cannot identify with someone who sees themselves in a bad work situation and decides the right solution is to push their views to the people who created the business they want to run, instead of going to work somewhere aligned with their views. Why support someone who different world view from yours and why try to improve them? Just go help someone else who is doing things right.
(a) employees moved away from the city during the pandemic for cheaper housing on the same salary and don’t want to pay a premium to move back;
(b) senior-ish engineers shirking their leadership responsibilities by claiming their role just requires them to focus on writing code all day;
(c) junior engineers underestimating how much social contact they need to learn on the job; and
(d) established employees failing to empathise with the new hires who have never met any of the team.
We should expect more of this.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-a-pioneer-of-remote-work-ca...
Fully remote for the last four years, now running my own company, I refuse to have a corporate office. Most business gets done at bars or in conference centers anyway, most work is done at a laptop and a wifi connection, and paying for the overhead of a space to force people to come into seems ludicrous. I can also recruit across the country, and reach talent that won't otherwise be available to $bigcos.
Seems like a win for me, thanks Andy!
I suppose for the east coast people you can take the first flight out to California Monday morning and get back home in time to wake your kids up on Thursday.
Doing 10 hours/week on a plane sounds hellish.
The interesting part is the seems like a deal compared to cost of living of San Fransisco/Seattle and the salary slash of working in Phoenix/Las Vegas/Denver/Salt Lake/Boise.
$300-500 roundtrip flight every week, $250/night in a hotel X 4 nights, $50 Ubers to/from the airport at both ends, plus meals and other incidentals.
That's closer to $85k/year.
If you are staying in the city four nights a week you'll probably be better off getting a studio apartment, both in costs and comfort. SLU studios would be ~$2100/mo with utilities. If you assume $5000 for initial furnishing a studio will cost $30,000/yr instead of $50,000/yr for a hotel.
It'll also be faster to go between SEATAC and SLU on the Link Light Rail than an uber (unless you are traveling between 9pm-6am), which costs $2.25/ride compared to $50. So that reduces the costs by another $5000.
If you claim Washington state residency you can probably stop paying your current state income tax (Washington doesn't have one) which will save you thousands or tens of thousands a year.
After looking deeper into it my $15,000 estimate is way too low, but your $85,000 is much higher than reality for Seattle.
If they force you to any office, then their stated reasoning is BS and they just want to lord authority over you.
What about this seems inconsistent with Amazon's business practices?
I thought we might have seen some companies downsize their space and require office time but make it more fluid. Has that happened, and are people writing about it?
I figure very few companies will stay all-remote in the long term if they weren't already operating that way.
Wasn't trying to be uncharitable, there are certainly other reasons why you might want to be in person, but for an Amazon-sized company your choices are either use your buildings or let other people into your buildings, which is going to be some combination of hard or undesirable.
Sure they'll always make a few exceptions, usually temporary for extenuating circumstances, but you'd better have a real good reason why you deserve special treatment.
Virtual takes away a lot of those serendipitous opportunities.
That being said, there are times when virtual is fine, eg once a project is well-defined and one needs to just deliver, or when doing admin paper work, or when reading.
https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/marissa-mayer-defends-her-...
When you're desperate for labor and always have a surplus, you just bend to employees. Like the tech bubble in 2000 with people bringing pets to work.
Then when the money doesn't come in as fast and you need to shed workers, you stop bending to demand. Because hey, if people leave, well, they'll be someone else who doesn't mind coming into the office.
- don’t waste time on random slack chats and emails
- get inspired with random coffee chats and office drop ins.
Lmao
- guy who gets paid 100 million to sit around and write “Nice!” in emails once a week, which is still more than his replacement does.
> He pointed to the ease of asking ad-hoc questions on the way to lunch or in the elevator.
> It’s easier for leaders to teach when they have more people in the room and can assess whether the team is digesting the information as intended
nauseating. a bunch of rich b*stards in a room making semi-arbitrary decisions that affects thousands of people without consulting them.
It's just an echo chamber here on HackerNews that we begrudgingly don't want to believe it.
Maybe? But it's human nature to feel a little better about shelling out cash on something if it actually gets used.
To make an analogy, let's say your kid insisted you buy them a car. Not some lame Toyota, it has to be a Ferrari (read: lavish office in expensive downtown location). They use it, they're happy. Then some event happens that makes them not want to use the car anymore, but for contractual reasons you still have to keep it around for several more years (read: pay insurance and maintenance). It doesn't ever get used, but you're still paying for it (read: paying for maintenance and utilities for a mostly empty office). You'd feel at least a LITTLE better if your kid at least attempted to drive the car a few times per week, but they just want to stay home and call you an asshole.
I strongly prefer WFH, but I get the thinking. Also keep in mind that city governments are probably breathing down the necks of these companies telling them to get workers back into the office ASAP because the local economy is going to shit without thousands of office workers buying Starbucks, going to lunch, etc. every single day.
You might be onto something with the cities asking for this, but I have not seen any data or anecdotes pointing to that.
Yes and all people should be decent and look out for each other as well.
Amazon spent $2.5 BILLION on HQ2. It's not just a some normal office complex, but rather a massive custom complex with domes full of trees and all sorts of weird stuff.
It's the same thing with Facebook's MPK 2x, Apple's Apple Park, and Google's "circus tents". These buildings aren't just for housing people, they're statements to the companies' -- and through extension their executives' -- greatness.
They're modern day temples... and they're empty.
Selling or renting out these buildings is literally unthinkable for the executives, but also impractical. It's humiliating to have have to part with your custom shrine to yourself. You can't sell item because the only companies that have the money buy it, and the people to fill it, are your competitors, and they have their own shrines to fill. You can't subdivide it and rent it out, because the buildings are giant aircraft hangers that no one wants, and they're not easily subdivided due to the location of cafeterias and bathrooms.
So what do you do?
Exercise your capricious and unaccountable power to force the serfs back into the temple. You like seeing the building filled because it makes you feel important. They'll even admit this to an extent when they talk about the joys of seeing people in the office, being able to ask people what they're doing. If we want to be charitable, we can call it the primacy of management by random encounter.
But they know, we know it's all bullshit, because everyone has witnessed the growth and effectiveness of when the company was (almost) fully remote.
I hope us the serfs can ‘win’ this.
If it isn't productivity (or morale) driving their decision on "putting their foot down and demanding no work from home", what is it? I don't believe it's some simple reductionist "they're evil and want employee control" narrative.
Unfortunately, my background is in data science. I would say the field of psychology is better suited to answering that question.
Remove the "they're evil" part and I don't see what's reductionist about it being about "having more control over employees"?
That to me sounds like a very likely explanation.
1) Working in an office full of people is what they personally prefer, and
2) They have large investments in physical infrastructure that they need to use.
Why does it matter what leadership prefers/why do they prefer it if 80% of their employees are saying "I'd rather work from home / going into the office in inconvenient for me / I'm just as productive at home"?
Why, exactly?
I think it comes down to not liking the idea of paying $$$ on lavish offices that are ghost towns. And I also wouldn’t doubt cities are “encouraging” companies to force BTO because local economies have been hit hard by the lack of office workers.
(my own team is operations/application maintenance, and we are WAY more effective and efficient now that everybody is remote and on the same level. I understand that may not be the case in all fields/areas/teams).
DaTa DRiVeN cOMpaNY
My own mentor, when I pushed in a friendly manner, related an anecdote how last time he was in the office, he met this new person from another team and they had a nice chat.
Which is a LOVELY anecdote, and COMPLETELY irrelevant to forcing 300 people on our project back to office. If meeting people from other teams is a priority, there are a myriad ways of doing do (I avail of many of them myself). Neither the business nor personal benefit of this chance random encounter was quantified nor discussed, nor compared to alternatives. But I keep hearing these benefits of "water cooler conversations" and "elevator chats" etc. Is it a generational thing? I'm a 45 year old grouchy geezer, but between slack and sms and teams and webex and email and everything else, I've developed strong and productive relationships with co-workers I've never met and feel I have many methods of engaging depending on my timing and priority needs.
When working at the office, it felt meh. We mostly talked on slack, worked async, and ignored each other. But the weekly outings for lunch were nice.
When working from home, it’s b been great. We talk a lot on many channels, work together, and feel a great sense of camaraderie. But we mostly haven’t met in person.
Team morale has more to do with it than physical presence.
BUT whenever we do meet in person, you always find out the inside scoop about all sorts of goings on. You hear murmurings of big decisions months before they’re made.
I think the grape vine is a crucial information channel for people in leadership and it’s almost impossible to reproduce virtually. But it’s much less, if at all, valuable to us peons.
No offence, and from a place of love.... I think you're being slightly biased, and prejudicial. Clearly you're on the side of working remotely, and I'm sure you have a solid set of reasons you tell yourself why that is supper great for you. By all means continue to believe those reasons, as they are clearly important to you, and part of who you are as a person. I too share much of those sentiments.. but ultimately disagree.
What is more important is if those reasons and ideas represent the proverbial "hill you're willing to die on", where you will have your last stand defending the ideas you stand for? Also, you might want to try reasoning about the idea that there are good reasons for going back into the office, even if the employer doesn't recognise a need to explain those reasons to you, and comprehensively persuade you. Many would consider these reasons to be self evident, but even if they were not, it probably doesn't matter.
A positive in-person interaction is worth 10 positive remote interactions, and so much more. Any time two co-workers form a friendship, to the point it goes to the level of taking lunch together, or even socialising outside of work... is priceless. That's free team building. But beyond that, rigorous statistics show that in-person teams are more productive in the long run, even taking into account and correcting for, all the various reasons remote work could be characterised as highly productive in a narrow focused vacuum.
I've been working remotely for a long time, and I both love and hate it. My little anecdote is this: I found out that my team in Boston was going out after work to eat pizza, or would have the occasional team lunch at a restaurant. My manager was paying for that, and my team was bonding together, but not me... At first I was angry that I've never been afforded a budget for weekly pizza delivery, and then I realised it wasn't about me, or what I initially saw as inequitable, like a benefit I was unfairly not being given... I then realised it was all about fostering a human connection, and team building. Then suddenly I got even more angry by that realisation. I felt dehumanised, marginalised, and overall demoralised.... I wasn't ever going to really be part of that team, and would exist as a useful "Resource" on the other side of a network connection. Nobody was personally invested in knowing me, and if I left the company or whatever there was no strings attached for any of them.
You're mentor was trying to tell you how they were attaching strings, and even randomly so... you 100% failed to see that, and you seemingly focus only on your selfish reasons why working remotely is good for you. And, that's not wrong, we all have to protect our self-interests. If not forming relationships with other people is a major aspect of your self interest... then go with that! I've known plenty of people over the years that were nice folks, good workers, but only ever went into the office on-time, left exactly on-time, never socialised with anybody outside of work... and they were great workers, and by all accounts probably great people as people go... But even having those reclusive quiet-quitters around is a net positive for them, and everyone else.
Link please, you astroturfing HR shill. Your stupid anecdote doesn't speak for all people.
I would almost feel sorry for you needing work to have fwiends and warm little feelings of belonging if you weren't so biased in your own stance.
In my opinion this is a flexing of power by the executive class, and I think it will backfire heavily. They think people can't find new jobs, and sure its a tough job market. But employees are creative, and can cause all sorts of damage if they'd like via slowdowns, "accidents", leaking information, etc.
I keep warning my firm, but they aren't listening. If just 5% of our employees decide to be a pain in the ass, it'll be a god damn disaster.
I think what happens here is that management, or rather managers, feel like they are lacking something: And that something is the public display of hierarchy. No team lunches, no better office space for higher-ups, no dedicated parking lots, etc. Many perks of being a team lead, or tribe lead, or whatever depend on a fully staffed office and are essentially symbolic or offer only very little additional comfort. It reminds me of pre-boarding or security fast lanes for status customers at airlines (priority de-boarding has an actual value sometimes, but of course belongs to that expensive seat).
With empty or even no offices, these perks have gone and managers miss their importance. What better to do than to slowly force these pesky SEs back to their desks, where they belong? But one has to move carefully, of course as to not scare them away. Hence the industry will follow the big tech here. These 3 days will soon become the norm, just wait for it.
From an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551 (100 comments)
From 30 minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838828 (54 comments)
Period.
Edit: Fine, disagree with me.
Care to back that up with some data or evidence? Otherwise, you're just blowing smoke.
-- The Dude
I believe this is empirically false. Einstein, Newton, Curie, and most of the greatest scientific minds in human history worked alone. The same is true for literature, whether it's Chaucer in lockdown during an epidemic, or Shelley in a summer retreat, or Solzhenitsyn writing away in a remote cabin in Vermont. Teams are great at work, but I don't think they're great at the deep thought that results in new ideas, especially when surrounded by chit chat and buzzing overhead lighting.
> The best . . . collaboration happens at the office.
This is more plausible, but I'm still not convinced. In-person collaboration tends to be lazy and involves all kinds of weird social dynamics getting in the way of collaboration. Telework requires a bit more thought on the front-end, leading to overall higher quality of collaboration. Performative intelligence-signalling [what happens at most in-person meetings] doesn't contribute to collaboration. Putting real thought into solving a group task, and communicating that clearly in writing to your team, does.
"Doing great work generally requires fairly large chunks of time alone." -Paul Graham
"Management treats us like faceless cogs in a machine! They only care about grinding productivity out of us."
Also tech workers:
"How dare management require us to go to the office! I can do my work perfectly fine from home over Slack. I don't need that office socializing BS. It's a waste of time."