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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

> S-team listened to employees, watched how our teams performed, talked to leaders at other companies, and got together on several occasions to discuss if and how we should adjust our approach.

> 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".

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By summer of 2021, just after that "We all know how excited you are to be back in the office" email, I made my exit from AWS.

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.

This sounds very like open plan offices. Survey after survey after study all the support the idea that they are, on average, vastly less productive. Yet, management simply goes ahead and makes everyone sit in one huge cattle pen.

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 don't like / are too cheap to pay huge offices to house you properly for work, so we are going to open floor plans"

"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

People jump on bandwagons. This is no different from how developers decided a few years ago “microservices because microservices” and microserviced everything because microservices.

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.

It shocks me so much that management loves open offices, despite the data and just plain logic making it worse than individual offices.

I can only imagine the overhead expenses saved by a company embracing the full wfh option in this manner.

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 wonder how the math works for the financial aspect of this. Building an office is an investment in the sense of it being good for your staff to go there and work well yadayada. It's probably also an investment in the sense of the value of the land and the surrounding areas which the probably own a chunk of too. Kinda like how McDonald's is more a real estate company that is good at finding renters (aka the people who run the fast food joints).

I've been interested in learning more about the financialization of housing lately and this isn't exactly the same but it feels similar.

Most companies rent their offices, they are not in the real estate business

You buy less offices, but likely need more managers and spend more time in zoom. It’s not as clear cut as most people assume.

I’m curious why you think you’d need more managers.

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.

I have run both in person and fully remote startups. It takes way more time and effort to manage a remote team well.

(FWIW we are 100% remote right now, but there are for sure drawbacks)

Would be happy to chat about this or learn more. I am a manager of a remote team, and have not been a manager of an in-person team, and I can't quite envision how much more challenging my work is compared to if my team was co-located each day.

It reminds me of the time when Microsoft ditched individual offices and switched to open floor. It was also pitched strictly as being about productivity, and they claimed that most employees wanted it. If you actually asked others, though, it was obviously very unpopular.

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".

> 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.

What's the name of the company?

It's in my profile.

Sounds like GitHub but I’m sure there are plenty others

It would be interesting to know why are C-level executives acting to the detriment of the company (by wasting $ on unnecessary office rentals/purchases/maintenance)? Isn't that illegal? Shareholders will not be amused.

Are y’all hiring? :-)

Sadly we did layoffs first (last summer) and have frozen hiring ever since.

That's the most frustrating part of these return to office announcements. The reasons for RTO are never based in rationality. It's because management has a feeling that certain things will improve.

Also, it's often just a layoff in disguise.

Not saying whether I believe it or not, and I personally work remote 100%, but one of the arguments for RTO is that remote work diminishes "social capital" in a company, where the social capital of a company is the combined value of all the social connections between the employees. In other words, if Bob has to fix the database and he knows that Zoe created it and is in the next cube over, he's going to be able to get through that problem a lot faster than if they've never met and he doesn't know what she works on. The idea being, of course, that at scale it could have a big impact on the effectiveness of the company.

(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.)

> remote work diminishes "social capital"

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"

I think you're misunderstanding the point. "Social capital" isn't another way to say "happy workers". There's probably a ton of it in a gulag, for example. It's better for a prisoner to know who can patch a shoe versus having to walk their toes off in the snow, and it's better for the guards because they won't be short a log hauler. Social capital manifest, without a smile in sight.

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.

I understand full well what "social capital" is supposed to mean.

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.

That's a fair point, but based on my experience I don't think most people are as deliberate as that. I've survived more layoffs than I care to count over the years, and it's always seemed like there were plenty of people on the far left of the bell curve without anyone needing to actively sabotage them.

That has been my observation as well.

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.

> 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.

I don't expect people to be after badges of honor, generally speaking.

You’re only looking at those that are far to the left. There are plenty of the people in the right and middle that get dragged down all the same. Because 360 at Amazon didn’t just decide whether you stay or leave but also your raise and most importantly the RSUs that are issued 4 years out. Amazon issues RSUs based on your growth trajectory. And promotions.

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)

But that seems like a faulty reasoning, assuming I'm Bob, Slack and Email allow me to reach Zoe just as easily with the bonus that I'm not interrupting her flow.

> 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".

That's not what social capital is.

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.

I absolutely have close work (and friend) relationships with people on far flung teams, and even companies I no longer work for in countries I'll never visit, whom I've never met in meatspace (or only a couple times at conferences or whatever). These relationships were built mainly by IRC/jabber/slack (depending on the vintage) and phone calls/videocon though, not tickets and email. Time zone probably matters more than anything -- I keep in touch with colleagues from India who I met when working third shift in web hosting support, but couldn't tell you the names of the daywalkers from the same office I was in.

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.

> 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.

Which most people are. You make structure how your business works on the typical case. That will provide the most transformation.

> Which most people are.

Definitely not in actual developers or sysadmins.

Most of them are in this manner.

Almost all the ones I've met.

We do an occasional get-together every few months (with a big break due to the plague). Seems to work just as well as when I worked at the office.

Yeah I think it is this. Teams glue easier when working physical together. Person in the office also buys managers bullshit and company peculiarities because there is social pressure to buy-in those . So in the end keeping remote workers is way harder and work is more transactional.

"Teams glue easier when working physical (sic) together."

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.

Yeah, except one has seen people next to each other in cubicles working on the same project not really talking with each other unless dragged into a meeting room (that also could be virtual later during pandemic) ... and others who drop just few chat messages around to identify their person of interest and just reach out regardless of whether they are near by or in another coorp office in another city? I believe it is a people are different problem, and also this is just belief ;)

Knowing who is in charge of what service is something that should be solved by a service registry, not by a flaky informal gossip network. If people believe they can't solve this problem without overhearing things in the office, they are probably spending their social capital on the wrong things.

"and he knows that Zoe created it"

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.

Companies who treat employees as meat-based dysfunctional robots diminish their social capital... If they want a "social capital, people who feel to be part of the company, something like a family" and so on, it's not WFH the point but how companies hire and behave.

In my experience WfH is perfectly fine for the old hands, their productivity goes up due to lack of commute. However, it's absolutely awful for onboarding juniors and knowledge transfer.

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.

So you tell your juniors and seniors to communicate. I'm spending some time every week talking to either juniors or peers about things they're learning. If your seniors don't initiate teaching and your juniors don't ask enough questions... That's not an issue with a remote system.

"Tell them to communicate" is much less effective than having an environment that makes it natural and encourages it. E.g. the reason way more people are fat now is not because being slim isn't possible or because willpower has gone down, its because the environment is different. You can just tell people to eat less or you can make eating healthily and less easy.

Given the state of the fresh grads and the company culture in my previous company, wfh is much worse onboarding.

"An environment that makes it natural and encourages it."

In 24 years of IT, I've never seen this unicorn environment.

My previous company managed it with the expectation that people take regular breaks and pick someone to take that break with.

To be fair, the evidence provided for why not to return to office also contains no data or numbers and is based purely on anecdotal personal opinions and feelings.

WFH has no commute. That is a fact. We can argue if that is good or bad.

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.

There's no evidence to provide if that's the preferred way to work, which we know because we've had a ton of internal surveys about it. People prefer working remotely, that part, at least for AWS, is not up for debate.

i will return to office 100% of the time the day companies start to pay for commute time. they are making me spend my own time going to the office, so they should pay me for it.

Are you paid by the hour? What would it mean for your job to “pay for commute time”?

I'm salaried, but this could fit with another idea which is in the air at the moment - a reduced working week.

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.

Heh. That's not a solid argument, though.

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.

> A full time employee is paid for 40h per week.

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.

In Europe, contracts generally specify a number of hours per week. For instance in Austria, my contract says 38.5h/week - this is what people usually think of here when they say "full time".

We have a time tracking system and overtime is either paid (not in my company, alas) or you can take it as free time.

The US is an outlier for the developed world.

We are talking about a US company.

With hundreds of thousands of employees outside the US.

I can get 5h of work time with a commute or 7h without due to family reasons. Mandating the office means I quit because the final 3h of wfh after 2h commute turn my life into hell.

You'd work a 2h shorter day, get there later/leave earlier than currently or than that you'd be working in your home office if it was a remote job.

I like driving; maybe I should then look for jobs about 150 miles away.

Agreed.

There are studies around this topic. My issue is that, they are never cited when these decisions are announced.

What makes it particularly irksome is how Amazon fashions itself as a data driven company, requiring reams of evidence from employees to get promoted - but that doesn't apply to the S-team and their decisions, because they are obviously just applying the "Are right a lot" LP!

What makes you think they don't have data? It's just data they can't share because it's not morally palatable.

Does anyone actually buy data driven? Seems like a great methodology to adopt if you need to absolve yourself of responsibility for your failures. Most questions people try to apply “data driven” to are so ridiculously complex I’d need to see some incredible methodology and ground breaking understanding of human behavior to put any faith in them. There’s just too many unknowns and confounds.

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.

> The announcement comes after [the company observed data from] nearly three years of experimenting with different models of hybrid and fully remote work

Data which they haven't shared. Don't you think that if it was convincing, they would gleefully publish it?

Is there a company that doesn’t fashion itself as “data driven” these days? The term lost all meaning a long time ago.

Yeah I'm expecting another round of layoffs from Amazon soon.

I can't believe people are really on here thinking that zero data was considered and it's just a bunch of execs going off random "feels".

It must have been sh1t data then if you can use that data to impose the same policy on all people.

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.

If they have data, share it, in the absence of said data we can only assume it's poppycock. Exec teams do that all the time, work on feel, why should we believe it's any different here?

Of course data was used, but you may have the order of operations wrong; execs often make the decision before the data.

> return to the office to get your focused work interrupted

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.

Not to out myself too much, but my Amazon office is a mix of SDE and TAM. When in office I get to enjoy "Jim" talking to a customer while I'm trying to work. "Brad" opening the windows because he's wearing a suit (customer meeting) in the middle of the Canadian winter and 4 people having a loud meeting at their desks because there are not enough phone booths for everyone. All the desks are "agile" so if I have another member of my team we need to find a spot with two free desks.

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.

Ours is perfect to balance people at the office and remote. It literally feels like made on purpose for hybrid work.

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.

> Andy Jassy probably never worked as an SDE if he truly thinks any of the above is motivating.

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.

Just another product manager on track to destroy a company. Chalk another one up.

We're talking about the same Andy Jassy that, with Bezos, came up with the idea for what is now AWS and grew it from a 50 person team to a $50bn business? That Andy Jassy?

I have no idea of the extent to which it was his 'idea', but one of his products (from day -n) was AWS.

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.

Product Manager means he chose features to prioritize, and pitched management. I'm sure he's quite talented. But he didn't contribute to actually building it.

An architect is a genius and an artist, but is not a carpenter or a manager of carpenters.

"The man who literally built AWS has no idea how to run a software company because I'm mad about RTO."

Where did the original comment imply this?

> 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"

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.

> 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 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.

Was not my intention to do that, but I posted more as a general commentary of the strange attitudes I have seen regarding RTO on HN. I get the stress of it—I have been WFH for the last 3 years and wouldn’t want the commute again. However, it almost as if on HN the prevailing attitude is one of “How dare they!?”.

I just find that kind of a bold and entitled attitude.

I get where you are coming from, but let me explain why I feel this way.

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.

Totally understand. I know I am more productive at home and everyone on my team feels they are more productive from home too. However, as a team, I also know our productivity is subtly down in the last 3 years, because it falls on me to measure these things.

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.

So 75% of the time you're more productive, and in the other 25% of the time you're less productive? You said you don't have hard data as to why, but can you provide some more of the data that shows the productivity loss in the first place? It sounds to me like your net productivity could be break-even, or even higher given the very vague numbers you provided.

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.

As I pointed out, it’s all subjective and feelings based. I know our code quality is down and delivery gets delayed more since WFH. Maybe our team is extraordinarily bad at it. But I know some other folks have seen similar things too.

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.

> 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.

How about "management is motivated by money and success, which for them is strongly correlated to the performance of the company"? But, no, for some reason many HN posters prefer the "management wishes to exercise petty authority over us" reason.

I agree with you that upper management is very often motivated by money and success, and I didn't say anything to the contrary. However, I was more getting at the fact that a lot of tech CEO types seem to have a belief that employees being physically present in an office is somehow related to "success" and "performance of the company," when I have yet to see any credible study or data that shows this. So I think that they believe they are acting in the interests of the company, but their beliefs don't seem to be grounded in empirical data.

> However, as a team, I also know our productivity is subtly down in the last 3 years, because it falls on me to measure these things.

How are you doing so?

I don't think anyone will share real data. I'd really love for some director level person to spill the beans and provide anonymized data but it's super unlikely.

How do you "know" that? Also, did you know we had a global pandemic recently?

Yes, I’m aware there was a pandemic. Thank you for the smartassery. I know it because our code quality is down (bug reports and defects have increased) and scheduled deliverables are missed more often than prior to the pandemic. Same team, same general workload, same platform and code base. Difference is…we all WFH now due to the pandemic.

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.

Maybe they are fine with the attrition.

Amazon needs workers, and if everything is remote, you're (likely) going to be a lot easier to replace with someone cheaper from a country with lower salary :)

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.

To me the decision was based on a combination of local government leaders begging for a return to office to help with tax revenue AND as a way to layoff people without a formal layoff.

Andy Jassy works for Amazon like 20+ years now.

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.

He did? Thats impressive.

Which parts did he write? All of it?

Or, is he a salesman? Salesmen somewhat famously prefer open plan spaces.

U would be really lying to yourself believing writing some lines of code is more critical than making a business profitable. At his level, deciding what to do is 1000x more important than how and who to do it

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

I think the main point I am trying to make here is:

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.

"pure idiocracy and ignorance"

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.

> Andy Jassy probably never worked as an SDE

I think he's an MBA.

Married But Available?

> talked to leaders at other companies

Confessing the antitrust collusion again.

> just popping by a teammate’s office later that day with another thought

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.

  >>> 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"

This is the most logical argument I have read on this post. Surely forcing a decent percentage even if not majority to come to office would not improve productivity. I have seen most water cooler talks which are just gossiping and not about the aha breakthrough you stumble upon when talking to a co-worker.

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