Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate | Hacker News Reader

Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

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226 pointsmmurph211264 comments

The thing is, this becomes theater of working. Imagine commuting to the office 60-90 minutes each direction just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom

Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)

And im not even going to start on the complete waste of time of people in an open space talking non stop about their fantasy football draft. I haven't heard those words in 3 years, it was nice that way

In Amazon's case, it might not be theater.

Amazon owns around a dozen skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. Amazon has a massive number of employees in downtown Seattle, and whether those people are downtown or not makes a significant difference to the real estate values in downtown Seattle. Making their employees come into the office may in fact mean a significant financial reward to Amazon, but not because the employees are doing better work.

Also, Andrew Jassy specifically has a number of personal financial interests in the Seattle area, including the local hockey team and the nearby Key Arena. Keeping downtown expensive and full of people is in his personal interests.

And don't forget that downtown businesses and real estate developers are putting pressure on local governments, who in turn are putting pressure on big employers to mandate that employees commute daily and spend money in the city.

Mayor Adams in NYC is already having to walk it back.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-remote-work-eric-a...

> He pulled the plug on the idea of remote work for city employees in 2022, saying early during his tenure as mayor: "One thing that can’t happen — you can’t stay home in your pajamas all day. That’s not who we are as a city." But now it seems Adams has evolved on the subject, acknowledging this week that "we are saying to our agencies come up with creative ways of having flexibility."

> Kathryn Wylde, of the pro-business Partnership for New York City, said the numbers tell the story. "Fewer than 10 percent of office workers are back five days a week," she said. "I think the mayor is getting the message the world has changed." Wylde added that unless an employer — including City Hall — offers a work from home option, the job vacancies may remain unfilled. "We are going to have to work with employees, they are driving the bus here," said Wylde.

Amazon looked deep into the crystal ball, got a shit response from it, and made a colossal one-way door blunder that will ultimately sink the company as they will not remain competitive with younger hungrier actually-day-one companies and embrace modern workplace trends. If I am forced back into the office, I will simply quit and never even consider working at this place again. Everyone is replaceable and I’m no exception, but the slack channel is full of fellow PEs who feel the same way. More than enough reserves to make it to a better market or beyond if there’s nothing compelling in the short-term.

they'll make an exception for you and higher level drones.

Saint Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store

It’s a good song but I’m struggling to see how it applies to the topic under discussion. Maybe if Amazon was paying their workers in Amazon gift cards I could see it.

Or maybe if Amazon owned apartments that they rented out to their employees? Afaik that’s not the case. GP said they own “skyscrapers” but really they own their own office buildings which are mostly like 4-10 stories tall and do not include apartments

It applies because Amazon itself, as well as its owners and likely executives of Amazon have personal financial interest in Seattle real estate and the downtown economy. This is the modern, more low key "company store".

I still don't understand the connection. I assume the term "company store" is being used to invoke the exploitative nature of living in a company town and being paid in scrip.

How does "a major local employer wants the local economy to thrive" lead to more exploitation than usual? If anything, I'd expect a thriving local economy to mean that there's more competition for workers, increasing their bargaining power and reducing the probability/severity of worker exploitation.

The company store was a way to earn on both ends of employees; the company made money by paying the workers to do stuff for the company, and then earned a part of that money back by selling goods to the workers at exorbitant rates.

The parallel here is that Amazon makes money off of the workers doing work, and then can also extract value by using the workers to prop up their real estate holdings.

E.g. workers may benefit from lower property values (renters), but Amazon is forcing workers to prop up those property values. Amazon makes money off paying them, and makes (or saves) money when they force them to come spend money around their offices.

It's not exactly the same, but I think there's certainly similarities.

Fwiw I work right by the spheres and walk by multiple times a day and things are generally bustling. Restaurants and food trucks have lines at lunch time, buses are crowded, etc. and there’s been a clear trend over the past year. Try grabbing a salad at evergreens at 12:30 on a weekday if you don’t believe me.

So imo this theory doesn’t pass the smell test.

doubt those two numbers (workforce payroll and real estate cost) are within the same order of magnitude

I don't work for Amazon, but used to live right down the street from the Amazon balls and the rest of the crap downtown.

I have since moved a bit out of the city and do work in tech. However, I can say that I would not care one iota about what financial interests Andrew Jassy or any other CEO has about their own interests.

They do not care about my mental health, time, cost of commuting. Why should I care about theirs?

I don’t think anyone’s asking you to care. It’s more about explaining the real reasons why Jassy and others are pushing for it.

> "Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)"

This wouldn't even be practicable - pretty much every BigTech company has offices spread all over the country, if not the world, and the odds are you work day-to-day with someone who sits nowhere near you.

If you are forced to come in and you weren't allowed teleconferencing, you'd literally get nothing done.

The idea that you can staff whole teams of people (and their dependencies!) in a way that they're all guaranteed to sit within a short walk of each other is straight-up madness. Beyond a certain scale this is quite impossible.

Heck, even in the same city this isn't practicable. When I worked at Google we frequently had teams and their dependencies spread across building all over campus. Even if everyone involved sat in Mountain View, in an office, you still can't get away from teleconferencing since it takes half an hour for someone to commute from their building to yours!

So you’re saying, being remote is okay as long as that remote in another office?

"It's okay as long as you willingly participate in the theater and power dynamic."

The problem isn't really remote as much as employers having the ability to grossly change working conditions on a whim with no worker recourse. C-level doesn't have any proof on site is a superior operating model, they feel it is, and they believe that's good enough to call the plebs back.

Who was the last person you knew who gave up substantial power willingly?

Hah, that does seem to be what the companies are saying, which is entirely silly.

My personal take is that RTO mandates are sorely misguided. Let the people who want an office work in them, and let the people who want to be remote be remote! The net difference is pretty close to nil, especially at large companies where meetings are teleconferencing-by-default!

If anything productivity has increased in the remote era. You no longer burn the first 5 minutes of every meeting kicking the previous person out of the conference room. And then another 5 minutes to wait for someone who had to sprint from halfway across campus to make it to the meeting room from their previous meeting room. Plus the mad dash scramble to claim meeting rooms since there obviously aren't enough for everyone.

In the remote-first world I just... click a button to hang up. And click another button to join the next call. Everyone is on time, meetings start and end on time. People are more inclined to take minutes and notes. It just seems to... work better.

[edit] Also, again, to be clear: people who like working from offices should be allowed to do so! There is nothing wrong with making friends with your coworkers, going to lunch with them, grabbing beers after work, or anything like that.

I just shouldn't be forced to do these things with you! I have a family I want to get back to! I resent being forced to have parasocial relationships with colleagues so they can fulfill their need for social contact! They should find other people who want to do that with them, because forcing me to be there just so I can fulfill someone else's parasocial need is honestly pretty twisted.

Your perspective is flawed, it’s about further headcount reduction without severance, making good on tax break criteria, and building up a blind core of missionaries.

I feel ya!

At this point I just don’t see how it’s anything other than control or sunk cost of office space.

A large amount of EC2 team for example is in Cape Town South Africa, and the other is in Seattle.

> The idea that you can staff whole teams of people (and their dependencies!) in a way that they're all guaranteed to sit within a short walk of each other is straight-up madness. Beyond a certain scale this is quite impossible.

If the world has been mostly remote well before the pandemic, what does this say about the idea that outstanding results can only be produced by the serendipity and (alleged) increased efficiency of in-person collaboration?

Oh I have many thoughts about that, especially because I ran a team that was spread over 4 cities pre-pandemic and we made it work!

There is IMO well-justified use cases for in-person collaboration. As much as technology has reduced the effects of distance, the penalty is non-zero for some things. It's unfortunately still a lot easier to do some things remotely.

The trick IMO is that there's a big gap between "sometimes we feel the need to be in-person" and "we should be in-person all the time/most of the time". I think the latter statement is incredibly poorly substantiated.

The answer to all of the above is pretty straightforward: scheduled, reserved in-person time where the entire team meets. You kind of have to do this anyway! If you have developers in New York and Chicago and San Francisco and Tokyo who are all in-office, you still need to do meetups!

Have a travel budget, set up in-person sprints on a cadence that works for your team!

> just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom

Presumably, that's what the return to office plan is trying to fix. Right now, if you go into the office, you're spending a lot of time in zoom calls because half the people in every meeting aren't there. If everyone's in the office, you can just meet in person.

Yes in theory you could. I've found it different in practice. Not everyone sits in the same building or on the same floor, and meeting rooms are limited. So you still end up on zoom calls, but now you've commuted.

I sometimes wonder if execs forget what it's like not to have an assistant, or if they've forgotten the power they have so that people _want_ to be in the same room as them. Or maybe they simply like seeing on the peons that work for them.

Disclaimer work in Amazon.

That at least doesn't work at all in my situation. I'm based in Seattle and I collaborate regularly with folks in probably 3-4 other geographic locations, ironically no one actually in Seattle.

If anything getting the video conferencing to work in a meeting room is more of a hassle/friction and a poorer experience when you still have to accommodate someone remote.

I am not at Amazon, but at another FAANG, also am in Seattle, and it is the same thing for us. If we were hit with RTO, it would make exactly zero sense for my team/org.

Out of people I work with, one of them is also in Seattle, another one is in Toronto area, the team lead is in SF, the manager is in SD, and the skip level manager is in MTV. I am not even gonna talk about people on the partner teams that we gotta work with, as they are all spread out all over the place. RTO would be an absolute net negative for every single person on my team, as we aren't going to see the people we work with in our local offices regardless.

And don't even get me started on trying to find available meeting rooms in the office for meetings that were not scheduled way ahead of time. If someone wants to hop on a call with me for a debugging session or has anything to discuss impromptu, being available for that in the office is rather difficult. All while I can hop on a meeting call on a minute's notice when WFH.

> If everyone were in the office, you could just meet in person.

How many people in tech nowadays do day-to-day work only with people in the same city as them? At my company at least that number is close to 0. Return to office doesn't mean you can stop collaborating with employees in another part of the country or the world. It will just be all that much more painful to do because now you'll have to hunt for empty meeting rooms all day to take calls from.

Basically small early stage startups and not always even then.

really? There are only multinational corporations and early stage startups?

There are multitudes of single office corps and even more where the predominant collaboration is with people located in the same office.

Yes, but at FAANG scale, it's near impossible to have all the people in a meeting located in the same place. Apple might have been the company that held out the longest, but even they have now officially gone multi-site for their engineering (And de facto, even when most people were in Cupertino, meetings could still sometimes involve impracticable amounts of travel to be held physically).

This assumes that everyone you are working with is in the same office and conveniently clustered together.

This is highly unlikely to be the case with a massive company like Amazon. Teams have been pretty distributed across buildings/offices/location even prior to the pandemic in many many companies.

So I am not sure it will be as simple as you make it.

My company mandated everyone back in the office but everyone still meets via Teams, even when we have offices next door to each other. Making people come is just dumb. Imagine the environmental benefits, traffic reduction and inflation hedge that would result from outlawing return-to-office mandates for jobs that can be performed remotely. Of course, that will never happen because commercial real estate would tank.

Does amazon ensure that team members are all based on a physical office location? At my work for instance we have a few members on my team from a different country, so forcing us to go in office wouldn't end zoom calls.

We ended this long time ago our 70 ~ folks come into the office Tuesday- Thursday and work remote Monday and Friday. Specifically because early on we noticed when we let people choose their days we ended up in shitty half zoom half not . My feeling is the time in the office is to bond with co workers and collaboration on new ideas. It’s worked really well for our team as even just by chance bumping into someone on another team and talking shop has fixed dozens of bugs and resulted in at least one or two great features

This is my personal take, given that I work at Amazon. Here's the landscape of people I interact with:

* Supply Chain - Bellevue, Vancouver, Austin

* AWS / other businesses - Seattle, occasionally elsewhere (NYC, Boston, HQ2)

* Foreign business teams - Luxembourg (EU), occasionally elsewhere (India)

* Team members on my team - Bellevue, Seattle, Vancouver, and elsewhere

Tell me how we're going to get all of these groups together for "hallway talk". At best, you can get a team in one locality, but even that is difficult with immigration challenges.

I'm the only person from my team that works in the state of Texas. We have only one other person who works in the same timezone. We have others in Seattle and the DC area.

RTO might make sense for those in Seattle or the DC area, but not for anyone else. And we would all have to be on the same teleconference calls anyway, because we also work with a bunch of people on other teams at other places around the world.

There's no telling how this is going to work out. At least, not yet.

Yeah except half of my team is in an office in a different part of the country. How are they meant to participate, if not by calling in? Even if literally everyone across the entire company came back to their offices tomorrow majority of my meetings would still be online and in conference rooms.

Except that now teams are divided across sites, so not even sure you can make the statement that if everyone showed up in person that it wouldn't still be a Teams call.

Everyone I work with barr one person lives in a different country, and it would be impossible (for visa reasons, mainly) for us to move to one place. So if I was in an office, I'd still be videoconferencing as much as ever.

Maybe if you work for a small company or a small department where every person is co-located. Larger companies usually have people around the world that need to communicate. That happens over teleconferencing.

Hard to believe that 100% of the teams have members that live all in the same city. In all the companies I’ve worked for that wasn’t the case (and I have worked for small and medium size ones )

None of my team is in the same state as me. In fact I haven't interacted with anyone based in my state so far.

But that makes the room twice as stuffy.

Amazon is somewhat infamous for their willingness to make workers spend unpaid time getting ready to work. They're the folks that took "we don't want to pay our employees to stand in long security lines to get into or out of our warehouse" to the Supreme Court and won. Employees who stayed with Amazon after that because it was only being done to lower paid employees enjoy little of my sympathy.

> Imagine commuting to the office 60-90 minutes each direction

Assuming 240 work days per year. A one-hour roundtrip commute means you're spending 10 *WHOLE* days in your commute per year. Two-hour roundtrip? That's 20 whole days. Three-hour roundtrip? One whole month.

This is what I don't understand about return-to-office mandates for global software/services companies. Even 10 years ago when I'd visit Google HQ, I'd always end up on a conference room on a Google Meet with other Googler's from around the world. What is the point of going to an office to be on video calls all day?

Maintaining the value of commercial real estate?

> Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)

This is such a good angle and comment!

"just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom" this is exactly it; for a few months prior to quitting Google at the end of 2021 I made an effort to go into the office because my morale (and productivity) at home had sunk to desperate levels. I wanted RTO to be the solution for that, but when I got into the office it was just... nobody else there, or at least not reliably so, and needed to VC with everyone anyways.

And then that got piled in with commute and parking woes, which got worse ever year... why even bother? I quit, instead. Have a fully remote gig now, and while I miss in-person work - - and the Google $$ I was getting -- I don't miss spending 2 hours of my life driving.

I'm sure things have improved some with more people returning to office, but the dynamic is forever changed as a result of COVID. There's a whole generation of hires who started during remote work.

I don't like WFH, but I dislike commuting to torture-zone deadsville even more.

This was why I left my previous company. The CTO would ask me to come to work, he lived next door to the office, and I loved 90 mind away. I'd leave home at 8, be in by 10 only to get a text from him at 11 that he's going to WFH. My team members did the same. Picked it up from him. I tried my best to stay level headed but I had it and quit. Culture is respecting your colleagues' time. He and his employees had no respect for any of it.

> Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days

I like this idea. It supports the ostensible goal and removes a real annoyance. If I have to come then I sure has hell shouldn't have to be on a call.

*Amazon Chime, not Zoom :D

Press pound key

£?

Kind of think people not being able to return to the office is the goal. It lets them reduce head count without the need for severance. Kind of like in office space when they just stopped paying the guy.

I did laugh at the part about being the world's best employer. Pretty hard to do with mandatory pips and firing warehouse employees via algorithms.

Constructive dismissal is still a layoff.

I'm all for remote work in tech, but I also think it might be difficult to convince a court that "please come to work" is creating a hostile work environment.

I guess it depends on the circumstances. Like if they were told they could go full remote, and the employee moved out of state and settled down somewhere where there is no office, now to be told j/k get back in here, seems like a case could be made.

There is no case to be made in the US unless the constructive dismissal was discriminatory in nature. It is legal to get people to quit by making working conditions worse, as long as you don't break any employment laws by doing so.

Say that I want you some of my employees to quit. I say you are only allowed to have meetings while doing handstands, but I provide reasonable accommodation for disabled people who can't do handstands. If I fire you for not doing a handstand or if you quit because you don't want to do handstands, I have done nothing illegal under US law.

Doesn't mean it's a good system. But that is the system we have.

Constructive dismissal is legal. The point is that if an employee can show that you changed the rules to make them quit, they get unemployment benefits.

Of course it’s discriminatory based on age, familial status, and disabilities. There’s data, just wait.

Unfortunately US courts have not been very receptive to disparate impact claims recently

Especially if they were hired with remote in their original agreement. Changing the location of work would necessitate some additional consideration and a new agreement.

I have numerous emails and messages from agents (recruiters) of the company assuring me that positions were fully remote. I was sent plenty of job descriptions that specifically stated they were fully remote positions.

Maybe that means I would have been rif'd in one of the "okay we have to call it a layoff" layoffs before this policy tho.

Significant changes in job location absolutely do count. Forcing people to work from home would probably be enough to count, actually - If the employee objected. Forcing an employee who had promises about WFH availability to come into an office is going to be a slam dunk, for essentially zero gain - The damages will generally be too small to be worth it, at least in the US with at-will employment. But as a matter of labor law, it should be classified as a layoff.

Agreed on damages. It's been my limited experience that US lawyers won't even bother with such a case unless they think there is a very good chance of a jury awarding punitive damages. Which, practically speaking, is very rare and only happens in the most egregious of cases. I suppose it matters somewhat what the local jury pool is like, but generally if it isn't something absolutely flagrant and politically charged juries don't award punitive damages in these cases.

"Please come to work where we can better surveil you for 100% of the day, penalize you based on sensitive activity signals and metrics, and better take away your privacy (spyware) and civil (going to the bathroom) rights."

Welllll, when you are a cloud for the world's governments and systemically important financial institutions, you have operating functions that keep you being able to retain those customers. AWS has had issues in the past with employee retention in those types of departments.

If there is a theory of RTTO as a form of soft layoffs, it still seems like we have a lot to learn about how that impacts the compliance and security capabilities of companies using such tactics.

Re "AWS has had issues in the past with employee retention in those types of departments." Amazon as a whole is the only first tier tech company where people I know wanted to get jobs, and later decided to leave because the work environment was bad.

I've always thought of Amazon as a step into Faang. You get a job there, it pays really well. It sucks. You maybe survive 2 years and leave or don't and get a nice severance. Now you have faang on your resume and can go somewhere else. Never thought of it as a long term type place as you are very much not a person but a line item or even worse a hire to fire.

Isn’t most of FANG/MAMMAA like like that?

Honestly not sure. I'd never thought it was. Always heard google and Netflix were good places to work. This recession appears to potentially be changing that though

> when you are a cloud for the world's governments and systemically important financial institutions, you have operating functions

You can do all of that and still have plenty of money left over. Don't forget all the wasted money amazon has sunk into Alexa (recent news is the whole division is failing to turn a profit) and their attempts to dip their toes in video games (New World) which failed spectacularly. Yeah they can afford to do a lot of things better, and it's all a write-off for them either way.

Money doesn't matter if you can't attract and retain talent, which is my main point. IDK exactly what you are getting at.

I remember an article a while ago where Amazon execs were expressing concern about blowing through all of the available warehouse talent around their large warehouses because they hired and fired so quickly.

I'm saying that Amazon has no excuse for it's inability to improve working conditions. It's able to bleed money elsewhere, it damn well should be bleeding it to the tune of improving workers' conditions and salaries

I think the 2 of you are saying the same thing just in a different way and at each other

I must be one of the very very few software engineers that would prefer to RTO. (I'm not at Amazon, btw).

I do enjoy the flexibility of being able to occasionally work from home. But I miss the bustling office culture, going out to lunch with coworkers, forming friendships with people from the office who don't necessarily work in the same department/team.

Most days, I go into town and work from a WeWork (because it's nice to have a daily change of scenery), but 95% of the time, I'm the only person there (in an office with nine desks). Before the pandemic there were 80~100 people in our office.

Sigh...

A lot of comments are indicating you're alone on this, but I'm finding the contrary. Our team doubled in size in the last 6 months or so with an office mandate (to almost 20 now). With aggressive hiring goals, we discussed whether we might have to transition to a remote company to satisfy market expectations, but found that as long as we're completely transparent in the initial conversation, there are people who are all-in on RTO.

One of our recent senior hires specifically wanted an in-office role and a lot of our junior engineers are hungry to learn from the seniors.

What I suspect is there will be a divide in the coming years and as long as companies are open about who they are, people can make the choice of where they want to work.

Some food for thought: seems like the majority prefer to WFH, now think of all the coworkers you were having lunch with, how many of them would prefer to have lunch with you if they were not forced to go to the office? Not many.

Don’t get too attached to people from work.

This may be your experience, but I made lots of friends at work, and kept in touch for a long time after leaving. People I first met at work are currently a large fraction of my real-world friends.

I regularly meet with the same people I used to work with before I changed jobs to a remote one. I made zero friends in my new remote work.

It's OK to make friends at work.

For a lot of employees, RTO is not a matter of preference but wether they can get away with not being at home.

I think many of the full WFH people might actually have enjoyed offices very much, but given a choice it just doesn't make sense.

If your choices is between chatting with your colleagues and enjoying low latency communication vs supporting your spouse and family in their everyday life, even if you personally enjoyed the former, it's tough to throw away the latter.

Commute time is one of the killer apps of WFH.

Same. I do like the flexibility but miss the "bustling office culture" as you call it.

Seems like the idea for me would be some kind of hybrid where 2-3 days a week at least most co-workers are together in-office and the other days people are where they are personally most productive.

Wouldn't have to be draconian, leaders could say "I highly encourage" and provide things like lunches and expectations that that's when collaboration, meetings, etc would happen and then also have expectation that there would be "get shit done" days on those non-collaboration-focused days

As a parent who also enjoy lunch with co-workers and in person time, I'm a big fan of hybrid going to work a couple times a week. I'm also the only parent that goes in regularly.

I'm in a small "remote-first" company where there's only a handful of other engineers in the area, most of us used to work in in-person offices. Even just a handful of us is enough critical mass to have a good conversation and even collaborating on a few problems together that would otherwise require more effort to schedule and work through.

I prefer the office as well. Work 4-5 days / week.

A big part is my employer allowed me to transfer to a closer office to my home, so now my commute is ~15 mins via light rail rather than ~1 hours via car.

Do you mind me asking if you're under 30yrs old?

I'm over 50 and I'm in the same boat. Hybrid is ideal for me for the same reasons. I find collaboration on work to be more difficult when I don't have an in-person connection with my teammates.

I'm 40 and I work from the office 5 days a week for roughly the same reasons. General expectation from the company is around 2 days a week in the office, but I prefer it, so I come in every day.

Not OP - I'm in my mid 30s and do this for roughly the same reasons.

Not OP, but I'm under 30 years old and I agree with OP 100%.

I'm 45.

Do you mind me asking you if you are anti-social?

I don't mind, and the answer is 'no' - I am quite social on a regular basis. I was asking the OP out of genuine curiosity.

I feel the same way. Unfortunately, I work for a "remote only" company so I either 1) have to find a coworking space, or 2) find a new job.

Being on Zoom for even an hour a day is miserable.

A lot of people will say to do your socializing outside of work.

IMO the kinds you described are really helpful for work collaboration and even politics.

Plus when you build better communication relationships with coworkers for regular chatter then it drastically improves respect and discourse in important team discussions and code reviews.

What do you think of having it completely voluntary to RTO?

You mean like it is now?

Mmm I like interacting with people but hate being forced to every day. But I was remote long before COVID.

You pay a few hundred bucks a month to rent a wework desk so that you have an excuse to commute somewhere?

No, I don't pay for it myself. My employer setup the WeWork and pays the monthly bill, on the premise that there would be a handful of people in our city (Portland, OR) who also want to work from an office. There have a been a handful of other people who used to come in occasionally, but now it's dwindled down to mostly just me.

I also ride my bike ~10 miles each way (even in Portland winter!) because it's a great way for me to make sure I get daily exercise and breathe some fresh air.

Without the commute, I get cabin-fever in the dreary Portland winter.

I have a pretty robust social life with my wife and other non-work friends, but if I work from home every day, I start to get some major cabin fever...

And I specifically miss the PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL LIFE that comes from having a close face-to-face relationship with my collaborators.

He explains why he does this in his post.... >But I miss the bustling office culture, going out to lunch with coworkers, forming friendships with people from the office who don't necessarily work in the same department/team.

Not everyone is built the same way

No, they say they do it for the change of scenery and nobody else is there.

Some people find they benefit from physically separating home life from work life.

Bingo. Work and life are two separate spheres for me. Having physical separation of them is important.

I realize not everyone is like that. I’m also not a parent which would probably tilt the equation for me.

No one knows what the future holds, but as the dust settles on WFH, I think that FAANG will double down on in-office and use their leverage as desirable large market cap companies with lucrative total comp packages to selectively seek out and retain those who are willing to agree to an in-office or hybrid work environment. They have identified in-person collaboration as a key competitive advantage going forward, want people who agree with that philosophy and don't see the need to budge despite threats from some of their workers that, without WFH, they will quit and the company will wither and die without them.

WFH will continue to proliferate among lower tier companies who simply don't have the same levers around prestige and compensation to recruit and retain good talent and are more strongly incentivized to embrace remote work.

The FAANG key competitive advantage is cartel/monopoly status. Getting employees into the office is just middle management ego stroking, it won't actually help them.

The degree to which they maintain market dominance over the next 5-10 years will depend on how well they time buying out startups which threaten their dominance (and which will no doubt be built by more productive WFH employees).

Exactly this.

I think startups that work in-office have an advantage because of the potential for early velocity of execution and social cohesion -- if they can find and retain local talent in this market. But I think the ship sailed for the BigCorps a long time ago.

And on top of that the round of layoffs they just did are killing morale. And the status that came with their titles is sinking or has sunk.

Their only advantage now is compensation rates, and those are dropping too, by their own efforts and by the drop in their stock values.

Finally, I'd say the problem with startups that are doing in-office, is that so many of them continue to insist on the Bay Area as their locus, which limits their talent pool and also diversity of ideas of their workforce. It can work for some companies but not all.

OH, but if employees competence is a large bottleneck for them to maintain that cartel/monopoly position. If they keep messing up with their people, not even buying all the correct startups will suffice.

We may be just witnessing the beginning of their end.

IMO they're more likely to mess up their cartel/monopoly position by getting too greedy than by being unable to hire competent staff (see Doctorow's [enshittification cycle](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/) for more).

Count the number of management layers and the percent of MBAs in roles managing non-analysts. That tells you everything you need to know.

You can abstract away from FAANG and generally observe that companies with "professional manager culture" have less work from home, while companies with "founder culture" or "SME culture" have more remote/hybrid work.

You see this even in "never were work from home" fields like Medicine -- plenty of MDs I know will be WFH doing zoom apts for more days/week than SWEs at Amazon, which is kind of hilarious.

All it takes is 1 faang to say screw it you can wfh, then they have the recruiting advantage over the old dinosaur style businesses.

And that ultimately is what WFH is all about.

These companies have generous vacation policies and health insurance benefits not for reasons of productivity, but because that's part of what it takes to attract talented workers. People love to argue about WFH for reasons of productivity, but in the end that flexibility is another benefit that these companies may start to compete on.

Netflix is remote for everyone, but they already had the highest comp. They hire significantly less than other faangs though.

Now replace WFH with 401K and see if it makes sense. Its a benefit. To be competitive you offer it. If you don't, bye bye talent.

401K is unambiguously a benefit to every employee. Remote-first or remote-only is not unambiguously a benefit; some people actually prefer to be in the office and interact with people face-to-face. Yes, even some talented ones.

If remote work was all it took, Gitlab (remote only since 2014) would have sucked up every talented engineer on the planet. Yet somehow they're still a very distant second to Github in their space.

Gitlab is somehow in the conversation with github and a huge reason for that is talented engineers. There hiring process is not the best, the ego level is higher than it should be and management isn't the sharpest or most creative.

Without wfh you wouldn't be talking about gitlabs.

They have access to a greater pool of talent but they still have to have a solid business plan / sales / some luck.. And they have to pick the right talent from that greater pool

The problem is that interaction face-to-face takes at least two people. You may like it and you would do it any day of the week, but the person in front of you may hate it. So, obviously the win-win scenario is to be flexible and let the people decide where they want to work from. Only then you can be sure that the person in front of you really want to see your face that close… it was their choice.

I prefer to microwave fish for lunch. Leave your preferences that make me ill at home. Where you belong.

FAANG total comp is a lot higher than what most other companies will pay. I think the parent poster is right -- the smaller companies will pay lower salaries and offer remote work, and the larger companies will pay higher salaries and require at least 3 days per week in the office.

FAANG total comp is higher, but I think I've made way more money/hour off working remotely than I ever would have if I stayed at FAANG [1]. So while I have less total money, I have made the money I made way more efficiently. Which in some ways, makes me richer :)

I sometimes have to remind myself that this level of leisure is basically what "traditional retirement" looks like (but with like a quarter-mil/year income + benefits) and that gives me get a sense of perspective when I'm feeling stressed.

[1] A key thing that makes this true is that commute + forced office time is like 3-4x the active working time I average working from home. So it's not hard to beat the Amazon 400k total comp quote when weighted against hours - I honestly beat that at my first remote gig years ago as a relatively junior dev! And I have the same engineering output more or less.

The commute angle of the remote work argument always seemed weird to me. If you work at a FAANG you can afford to live anywhere, including in places that would give you a short commute to work.

I feel sorry for people in the service industry who have hour-long commutes because they can't afford to live closer. But that is not the case for tech workers.

> If you work at a FAANG you can afford to live anywhere, including in places that would give you a short commute to work

I think this is an exaggeration. Not everyone who works at FAANG companies is making $300K+/yr or whatever the current figure being quoted is, although senior people probably are. For rank-and-file employees, even engineers, your choices "within walking distance" of a FAANG office typically are: 1. A tiny apartment or townhome, 2. A larger townhome with roommates, or 3. Unaffordable. Numbers 1 and 2 are fine I guess if you're young and don't have kids, but I'm not willing to move my family into a sardine can in Mountain View or Cupertino.

So yea, you can afford to live almost anywhere, but only if you adjust your lifestyle drastically.

> If you work at a FAANG you can afford to live anywhere, including in places that would give you a short commute to work.

Not necessarily. If you're an E4 with kids, good luck paying $150k a year for a 3br apartment in walking distance of Facebook's NYC office.

To be fair, I had a 15-20 minute walking commute. But that adds on 30-40 minutes to an 8+ hour workday.

Also, you can start bean counting and consider the costs of housing with a short commute vs the longer commute and realize that the market knows what it's doing and it becomes a wash comp-wise.

Smaller salary to be able to live in much cheaper cities where your general quality of life will also be massively improved?

Sounds like a win-win to me. Especially considering that the decrease in cost of living probably far surpasses de decrease in salary.

If you do the math that doesn't always work out.

The main thing that is cheaper in cheaper cities is housing. Most of the other stuff people buy costs the same everywhere. If you move to a cheaper place and have a lower income, your non-housing expenses will become a larger portion of your spending.

Once you've worked in tech for several years in the Bay Area or Seattle you will generally be well off enough to buy a home in a nice area and still be able to save or invest a large amount every year. Housing will feel expensive but everything else will feel cheap -- even new luxury cars will cost a fraction of your income. Early retirement will be a definite possibility if you have a basic amount of self control over your spending. And if you have children, they will have access to all the opportunities that some of the country's largest metropolitan areas offer.

> If you do the math that doesn't always work out.

I disagree. But it depends on how less the remote companies pay. Are we talking about 80% of the salary of a RTO company? 60%? 30%?

The close it gets, the better the math works out for remote companies. Moving away from metropolitan areas incurs in a huge decrease of expenses, and a huge increase in quality of life. But of course, it depends on the salary you'd make working remote.

You pay more for many products and services in cities but have more choice. You are also taxed at a lower rate, qualify for different rebates.

Contractor total comp is a lot higher than salary. I don't see anyone talking about the glamour and prestige, just the uncertainty and overhead. Companies that don't offer it 100% will be seen as "gig" equivalent. Cheap, manipulative, gross sweat shops.

Being a contractor means less income security than an employee, higher and more complicated taxes, and no benefits. There is not much "glamour and prestige" either.

Frankly most contractors do not make as much as FAANG employees, and even if they did, they would end up keeping less of it because of the taxes and paying for their own health care etc. Even contractors contracted by FAANG companies make less money than full-time employees at those companies.

I've always thought about this being the settling point at the end of the day.

Putting aside the debate between what people like/is effective.

FAANG companies have a lot of political leverage when they have in office employees.

Amazon specifically in Seattle, wouldn't surprise me if some of the reason they're doing this is so they can continue to work their way into city's politics.

You don't think it might have something to do with the billion dollar campuses FAANG companies had built?

> WFH will continue to proliferate among lower tier companies who simply don't have the same levers around prestige and compensation

...as it was for all of the tech world's history before 2020.

Not a comment on if that's a good or bad thing, just stating that we're seeing a reversions to what was considered normal.

Pre-2020, if you met a random guy living in small town Idaho or some random suburb in Indiana, working out of his house, completely remotely, it was more likely that they worked at some company you've never heard of than one of the highest-paying FAANGs, and that their income was more similar to his neighbors than the FAANG worker making $400k.

Meta has committed to embracing remote. They are even shutting down some office buildings. Too many employees don't even live near an office.

FAANG want you to come back for their real estate valuations. You get to sit on zoom and pretend you are doing this to increase face to face.

This is one of the most strange recurring theories. Companies are valued based on the recurring cashflows they generate from operating activities. A large technology company could have a _huge_ one-time write down of their real estate assets, and (assuming it does not make the company illiquid) not have its valuation materially impacted. Nobody is buying these companies because of their skill at investing in real estate.

It's many aspects.

More employees in one location, more political power, bigger tax breaks can finance billion dollar campuses.

People buy these companies because of hype and asset vs profits. Real estate is a part of their assets and it increases their balance sheets

Look at Google making 7 billion dollar investment in 2021. They need to make that payoff. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.architecturaldigest.com/sto...

Nobody is seriously looking at the real estate portfolio of a FAANG when they value the stock. They care about future earnings projections.

7 billion dollars for Google is a tiny amount. They make almost 300 billion per year. Nobody gives a crap about the value of their office buildings.

> They have identified in-person collaboration as a key competitive advantage

That's an interesting statement about the relative value proposition of a lot of the technology many in this sector make their money selling firsthand or secondhand.

> lucrative total comp packages

Yeaaah not sure those are coming back

Remote work definitely comes down to a company culture issue. For most engineering jobs I would say flexibility is a massive competitive advantage. There are so many great engineers out there who prefer not to be in the office it's a great talent pool, but needs to be actively managed in order to get the best out of it. Having said that, Amazon comes across as exactly the company that would require you to be in the office, I'd be kind of surprised if many people joined Amazon not expecting an extremely high pressure, highly demanding, strong cultured work enviornment.

imho Amazon has a big problem with its image and hiring. It is literally impossible to find good developers that want to work for Amazon. Taking advantage of the current market conditions to do this is going to spectacularly backfire once the market recovers.

Given Meta and Google are slowly turning into another Amazon (e.g. by an influx of Amazon managers bringing their "culture" with them) and Amazon is now paying competitive, I don't think that would be a big medium-term problem for them.

I worked for a mid-cap tech company that brought in Amazon and Salesforce senior leadership in 2021. The culture immediately eroded as these guys’ penchant for finger-pointing and hustling beyond a reasonable human’s capacity became clear.

TeamBlind today:

https://www.teamblind.com/post/Ex-Amazon-managers-are-horrib...

It’s been true for me.

They have been able to grow to almost a trillion dollars in market cap, during very competitive hiring market conditions, with those image problems. I will be very surprised if any backfiring, much less a spectacular one, happens.

If the growth stops the same tactics stop working.

Also, markets can stay irrational longer than people stay solvent.

I'm going to tell you what. I still remember the Microsoft layoffs in 2008. I was not impacted but at that point I decided I will never work for Ms again. Amazon is also on my "hell no" list.

The company hired and promised whole orgs and teams remote work for the last two years, many in areas with no Amazon offices. Some were tied to offices 3+ hours away on paper, but during recruiting were promised never returned to office. Others have remote only as a condition of their employment.

When your recruiter, boss, director, VP are all remote and promising a remote only employment, what are you supposed to think?

There's no evidence that remote-only ("Virtual location") employees have to ever go to the office. It's really just people that would have had an office before that had a loose RTO policy since like 2021.

The issue is that Andy Jassy letter isn't clear on this, or many other specifics, so there's a lot of concern due to lack of clarity.

The thing is these big companies don't really need a lot of great talent. They're fine skating by with masses of mediocre talent and a few great ones sprinkled in.

So yes, they'll attract fewer great engineers, but it won't matter much.

"For instance, some employees who are part of global teams will come into the office only to continue taking virtual meetings, and they may not even have a coworker in their office, the petition states."

My company is RTO, but with teams across offices, so I know this pain all too well. Our leadership has not addressed this disconnect either, so I wouldn't hold your breath.

I'm in the exact same situation. My company issued a 3 day/week in the office mandate for anyone living within X miles of an office. Except that most of our hiring during the pandemic has been remote and in lower-cost regions (to cut costs no doubt), and so people who do end up going to the office will still not have any coworkers around them and will just be in meeting rooms doing zoom calls all day.

I guess the obvious question is that if no one on your team is in the same office as you, who will even notice if you don't show up to the office? As long as your direct manager is on board, it seems easy to just disregard the RTO requirement and keep working from home.

who will even notice if you don't show up to the office?

They don’t have to “notice” it. They don’t even have to see it.

Do you have an access badge to get into your company campus/building/suite?

My last job started tracking access badge activity to monitor and enforce RTTO compliance.

Found it funny to get nagged about not hitting the required minimum number by a boss who lived four states away.

Laughed all the way out the door and into a new company whose policy is “if you wanna wfh, then wfh. If you want to come to the office, be our guest.”

Clearly you don't have the kind of dystopian office which records to the second when you scan your office pass for the first and last times in a day.

This is basically how I started WFH before the pandemic necessitated it

The doors know I haven't been there in X months, but nobody in my distributed org cares to look

this RTO mandates are getting old. Do people, in general, believe that we can revert to whatever we were doing before the pandemic started?

I think the biggest wins from covid will just be that we did a massive 3-year WFH experiment and overall it went just fine. Great, even, if you account for the fact that it wasn't just a WFH test in isolation, it was accompanied by a generation-defining negative psychological and virulogical event. We all went fully remote for three years during a terrible humanitarian crisis and nothing exploded (except inflation but that's not our fault)

Nothing exploded while most companies had no idea whatsoever on how to implement it properly. Things worked mostly fine even though it was through a panic emergency plan that was completely winged due to sheer necessity.

Imagine if it was a plan properly designed and implemented? All this bullshit of RTO is getting old for me exactly because of this point, nothing was done in what would be even close to the optimal way for working remotely and things are still going ok...

Some parts of it were coupled with parents trying to homeschool their kids (for younger kids, at least, the parental attention required for remote school was high enough it wasn't too far off from simply home-schooling) while "working". Plus the extra stress of, you know, the whole being-in-a-pandemic thing. I recall some grumbling in those days about remote worker productivity and it's like, yeah, no shit, daycares and schools are all closed and households are all dual-income because game theory and zero-sum competition for housing/schools, so....

Those parts ought to be disregarded for any kind of lessons-learned from this, as far as the broader viability of WFH. 2020 through early 2021, at the very least, had some strong confounding factors going on which, one hopes, will not be common in the future.

> we did a massive 3-year WFH experiment and overall it went just fine.

Did it go fine because it was massive?

I don't think it went "just fine". It looked like companies were doing well because we were in a bubble market.

I definitely feel, and observe, a noticeable decrease in productivity and speed of execution compared to where my org was a few years ago. I know others have noticed it too, including management.

On top of all that, companies are expected to run leaner than before because now that the bubble is over, apparently everyone remembered that having a sane balance sheet and making a profit are things that matter. So now we want per-worker productivity to increase because we can't hire as many people.

The basic social contract of work has not changed. Tech workers have better pay and benefits than almost anyone else, and we should not be whiny about this. Most workers in other fields had to return to the office too.

Times are tough.. let's spent what little money we have on renting an office space?

> Tech workers have better pay and benefits than almost anyone else, and we should not be whiny about this. Most workers in other fields had to return to the office too.

So, if it’s bad for some, let’s make it bad for everyone? What kind of reasoning is that? FFS, we should be making progress, not the opposite!

Define "progress".

Working from an office is not some kind of dystopia. Quite a few people prefer it to other arrangements. Having a pandemic that forced people to work from home for a year or two does not change the fundamental reality of human social interactions.

All you need are enough people to fall in line.

Amazon is filled with workers on visas. At least from the subset I've talked to, this isn't the hill they plan to die on. "Come in or fuck off back to {home country}" is a pretty strong bargaining chip.

For me, getting fired would mean taking a few months off to leisurely reset, then slowly getting back on the leetcode grind, and then trying to find a new remote job. Drawing lines in the sand is much easier when "uproot your entire life" isn't on the table.

I agree. This is where the people that can draw lines in the sand are even more important.

I will cancel prime and hit them where it hurts. Who will join me?

Cancelled prime eons ago. What else?

Tracker and Ad-blockers, and SEO to discard Amazon results (e.g., tinyurl.com/brave-googles-amzn-free-search).

The complaints are also getting old. If you were hired with the expectation that you go in the office, RTO is an eventual expected outcome.

I do see the psychology of taking away what many see as a "benefit", but it's really just going back to the norm.

Hmm... the complaints are getting old? I guess the beatings need to continue until morale improves.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/traditi...

Hard disagree with "If you were hired with the expectation that you go in the office, RTO is an eventual expected outcome." Ask yourself why do we need to RTO? Who needs the RTO?

we should all read between the lines, this big push is from those that invest in the office buildings and surrounding businesses chains, and are hurting from lower proximity of consumers.

Stop making your own meals, start consuming from their fast food chain down the block from the building theyre leasing to your company.

Stop for gas and buy from their other investments close by.

Need people to stop being so self sufficient at home, and suck the rich tit.

We are so desperate for the help :( /$

i agree that things are shifting. forcing everyone to the old routine that is worse for them, worse for the environment and worse for the tech corporations that are peddling this is insane.

Gas? If we consume less gas that's good right?

Less wear an tear on the cars? Good

Not wasting 1-2 hours commuting? Great

Having a quiet place where you can gather your thoughts and do knowledge work? Amazing

But what about the hard working real estate companies that are going to be impacted by this? What about the small businesses? What about them? Close shop and/or figure out something else that works. Why does everyone have to have a crappier life for you to continue with your crap practices?

Don't ask yourself or your neighbor. Ask your company why they want you to RTO.

Who needs the RTO? Apparently, the company does. This is why they are asking people to return...

hah. i did ask. I also did ask about the metrics that are used to measure productivity. Do you want to hear what the answer was? crickets!

So, I guess at this point you have at least two options:

* Go back to the office as expected

* Look for another job

Which one will you pursue?

If I had to make the choice it would be another job. Easy choice.

Agreed. If the expectation was to work from the office when you were hired, you should expect to go back to the office once the pandemic is/was over. Otherwise, why would you take a job in an office if you didn't want to work there (there - as in "in the office")?

Why does it have to be the norm?

We can't just stick to what's been done previously just because it used to be that way. Clearly, for years, workers have been productive remotely. I get some people like being in the office more than WFH, but the "some" is key here and does not align with an RTO mandate

1. of all the norm for a couple of years is home office

2. it is an objective benefit

3. the norm is what the majority want it to be

I'm not certain about that, but I do think companies believe this is a simple way to kill two birds with one stone:

1. Trim headcount.

2. Keep the most "loyal" employees (or those who need the job the most and will say yes to anything, which is a double-sided sword).

haha. Because loyal == high performing. That is how it works. There is absolutely no way that high performing employees that can get a job by crossing the street will ever think about jumping ship because of the shitty manner they are treated.

These companies have no accurate way of measuring performance anyway.

I don't know of you are making a judgement there but I think it's important to point out that there is practically no useful way of measuring performance in our industry; it's not a company problem.

Some of the most useful employees I've met probably produced less than the most junior developer in tangible assets.

It’s not about being mathematically perfect about performance. In any given team, area, organization one can easily point out who are the good ones.

They may not be after high performing right now, they may just want the ones who won't or can't cross the street.

Not to mention, most of these companies keep on saying there will be exceptions for exceptional employees in a clear attempt to still keep the high performing employees they like.

Problem is loyal != performant. The most valuable engineers want it all, so they will probably leave because they can.

3. Separate the wheat from the chaff. The chaff come to the office.

>Do people, in general, believe that we can revert to whatever we were doing before the pandemic started?

Why not?

Yes. The biggest companies, with the most political power, believe just that. I pray smaller companies make themselves more competitive by offering WFH but that’s yet to be seen.

hah. i have some bad news for them. the cat is out of the bag. they may be able to force people to do things in the short term but long term they are going to become obsolete.

I mean unless proven otherwise most companies do believe that. What happened to that Vote with your feet / vote with your wallet thing?

It was rebranded as cancel culture and demonized

Until management can prove being in office drives productivity and all that energy was not merely fueled by lots of people around each other being just as useless, it’s a bias to maintain power and privilege

The economic philosophy of our society is no more a sacrosanct truth than religion

Office life is a social prison that enables their expropriation of agency and outputs

Return to the status quo like the last three years didn’t happen.

It's sort of ironic for Amazon to push for a returning to pre-pandemic norms, given that the pandemic was such a boon to their retail business and stock price.

this was due to low interest rates and savings/stimmies not anything about remote work

Really, it had nothing to do with people ordering even more online for home delivery than prior to the pandemic? You don't think that folks might continue ordering more home delivery if they aren't out driving every day? References for the other reasons for their growth can be found with even the slightest effort.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=amazon+pandemic+growth+cause&...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/technology/amazons-profit...

[2] https://fortune.com/2021/10/18/amazon-massive-growth-covid-p...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/29/how-amazon-managed-the-coron... (non-paywall, yay!)

For some things like delivered food, delivery is a luxury.

However, I fully expect that during the pandemic people discovered a lot of things that they could have picked up in the next couple of days in "only" 25 minutes or so can actually be ordered from Amazon at competitive prices. I ordered from Amazon a lot pre-pandemic but added various random stuff instead of going to, say, Home Depot.

> believe that we can revert to whatever we were doing before the pandemic started?

Yes. We built it that way for a specific reason.

What did we build exactly? The current model of tech open offices originated in the early 2000s. Before that we had cubicles, starting around the 60s and 70s. And something else before that. Office buildings themselves don't go all that far back, maybe a couple hundred years.

None of these is the "right" model. We will continue to evolve to what suits the present work culture and requirements, and WFH is where we have reached for now.

> What did we build exactly?

A shared workspace with centrally located and maintained resources. This allows for greater overall efficiency but allows the organization as a whole to quickly dedicate resources to new and emergent problems. In theory this should save money and allow the company to successfully capture and serve more business.

> None of these is the "right" model.

There is no "right" model. Everything is a question of compromises. Work from home has some employee benefits, but has higher direct and abstract costs for the employer.

> And WFH is where we have reached for now.

This is understandable, companies have not been particularly cognizant of sharing the rewards of the above configuration with their employees. To me, though, this seems like an opportunity wasted to correct this.

> Work from home has some employee benefits, but has higher direct and abstract costs for the employer.

Ah come on now. Instead of my employer paying for a space for me to sit in central London, the electricity and internet connection, I pay for those things myself. Instead of wasting time on a train I get a bit of work done before most people are online.

The only costs are in the crocodile tears of middle management who cannot advance themselves simply by growing their headcount.

Anecdata: been doing it since 5/15/2020. With best effort “social distancing” up until a few months back.

As a layman, in my unprofessional opinion, people in generally good health should not perceive the office as a death trap.

Many made expensive decisions assuming remote work would become the norm. My guess is there is a large overlap between the bristling crowd and expensive decisions crowd.

Sure remote work is good for many experienced individual tech workers but bad for basically everyone else including the company and the communities remote workers have moved to.

The pro remote arguments reek of motivated reasoning. It is especially hard to escape noticing that remote work is financially beneficial for tech workers. Particularly as it relates to housing.

>bad for basically everyone else including the company and the communities remote workers have moved to.

Why? Is it better for places with more jobs and money to stay that way instead of spreading the wealth around?

I was thinking of upwards price pressure on housing stock in those communities as the main negative effect. Rationale being that tech salaries are going to be significantly above incomes the local economy supports and thus tech workers are going to be relatively price insensitive.

That said, remote work is hardly the only thing contributing to this problem. And I agree with the idea that changing housing policy is the best way to address it.

I don't dispute that there will be positive effects as well. They seem less significant to me.

yeah. fuck those entitled prick for expecting work to be financially beneficial for them /s they should be glad to have a job and stop complaining.

Let me preface this by saying I don't have much of an opinion for or against RTO, but I feel like there's too much emotion attached to companies mandating RTO by tech employees. I'm at a company that is mandating RTO and for the past couple months there has been tons of whining and moaning in public slack channels, team Q&As, company wide Q&As, HR Q&As, being passive aggressive etc. All this behavior has reeked of immense entitlement, leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

The fact remains that a company exists to make money. When a company mandates RTO, generally it's doing so because it believes that's the best way to get the maximum output of it's resources against whatever metrics they are measuring against.

Employees should feel like the relationship between them and their employer is mutually beneficial, if that's no longer the case, pursue external opportunities.

We are incredibly lucky we are in a field that has a high demand for strong engineers, so you should be able to find what you are looking for.

I strongly disagree that companies mandating RTO are doing so to improve their bottom line - it seems like it's largely done out of a sense of tradition, to placate management's anxieties, or to justify sunk costs in office real estate. Remote work has worked fantastically for my company, and my observation in working as both a manager and an IC since moving to remote is that both I and other employees are in general both more productive and happier. My company has set the remote vs. hybrid vs. in-person decision to be on the department level, and in general it seems like the departments mandating fully in-person have elderly, out-of-touch management who rarely come into the office themselves.

Employees are justified in complaining about mandatory RTO - it presents a significant impediment to work-life balance and demands extra time, money, and energy from employees while giving almost nothing of value in return and providing questionable value to the company.

> All this behavior has reeked of immense entitlement

> Employees should feel like the relationship between them and their employer is mutually beneficial, if that's no longer the case, pursue external opportunities.

I'm not following between the two. If the relation is supposed to be mutually beneficial, shouldn't the employee feel entitled to complain and express their grievances?

If your point is they should leave instead of complaining, look at it from the other side: should companies just fire with severance employee that don't feel happy returning to office ?

If that whining and moaning doesn't represent enough of an issue for the companies to act on it, why would you push individual employees you take radical action instead ?

I understand what you're saying about entitlement. It can be tiresome to hear the same topics brought up repeatedly. With the constant negativity that surrounds it, it gets exhausting to listen to.

At the same time, most of those complaints are coming from generally reasonable people. If a company promised no RTO and then went back on it, that'd be frustrating for them. If a company can't state why they want to go RTO, then I'd be frustrated with needing to change my life for the reason of "because I said so". If the company has grown a significant amount and been able to manage the growth and whatnot while working remotely, then it also brings up the question of "why is there a RTO mandate?" I think more people are frustrated with the lack of reasoning and justification beyond some hand-wavey "collaboration" answer that companies are giving.

> beyond some hand-wavey "collaboration" answer that companies are giving

I'm confused what the alternative is that you would like. I'm sure they can link a bunch of studies that show its more productive to work in office, and I'm guessing those that want to stay remote will show a bunch of other studies that say its not; which continues ad nauseam.

If a company claims they're data driven, then they should use data to make choices.

In this case, they'd need to look at the cost. "will my employees being in office perform so much better despite having to drive through an hour of traffic?" I'm not sure how you'd go about this one.

"Will increasing risk of becoming sick be worth the extra productivity increase, assuming there is one?" If there's a 10% increase in getting sick, and the median number of sick days per year is 5, then will 0.5 more days of being sick for every employee be a justifiable cost?

RTO also has all the costs associated with office space, employees to manage those facilities as well. I always hear that building costs are miniscule in the grand scheme of the business, but I never hear the number as a percent of overall costs.

At the end of the day, some attempt to justify the decision beyond "collaboration" is what I personally want. I don't think putting a bunch of introverts in a room together is going to suddenly increase socializing.

I went down this rabbit hole on another RTO thread. Bottom line, it’s all a matter of feeling. Management wanting RTO feels it’s more productive for the org. WFH advocates wants remote work because they feel that they are more productive at home. Reality, both sides cannot really provide a lot of hard evidence to support their position, but the only position that really matters is the company’s position. If they want to RTO, it’s up to the employees to sell the company on WFH…and then be able to deliver measurable results exceeding expectations.

> We are incredibly lucky we are in a field that has a high demand for strong engineers, so you should be able to find what you are looking for.

And we should play our cards well while we have some leverage.

One reason people complain is because, all else being equal, an RTO call is effectively a pay cut.

If the context was Amazon saying "we're cutting all SDE salaries 10%, because its better for the business", would you consider complaining to be entitlement?

The opposite is true. Employees are the ones ultimately doing the work and know what value they add. As they see it, they'd have to make outsized sacrifices to return to the office. Businesses have not provided any compelling reason to come back to the office, the actual workers doing the work know how little value it adds to their own stand-alone job. Raising the subject of maintaining remote work rather than pursuing opportunities elsewhere is collaboration, ironically the argument they put forward for RTO. It's a small concession from the company for the benefit of increased productivity, if that's not the reason then the company should explain it and sure as hell, it will need to be a compelling one.

Employees often have a pretty inflated understanding of how much value they truly provide an organization. Your only slightly more valuable than your replacement sitting in the wings, and only then it’s for a relatively short period of time.

Employees need to be providing the compelling reason to the company about why WFH is better.

Despite what you think, a happy worker is a productive worker. Also people tend to look for meaning and purpose in their day to day job. Naturally they're going to be upset, when they're asked to do something that does not help them do the job, inconveniences their lives outside work and contradictorily goes against a fundamental principle of working, being productive.

The problem tech workers have in the the whole WFH vs RTO debate is that the worker is not arguing from a position of strength. There is a long history behind productive in office work for tech and a short history behind remote work for tech. Whatever productivity gains the worker perceives WFH gives them are either not measurable, not large enough to be noticed by the employer, or not worth other considerations and challenges the employer has to contend with.

For example, if some positions within the organization cannot be performed remotely—as an employer, do I still single out one class of worker to provide a perceived benefit for what may or may not amount to a minor productivity perception gain generally only noticed by the employee? Sure that group is marginally happier, but given time and distance between the WFH and RTO, will the employees just return to the new normal? Usually. However, if I give in and allow WFH do I create a morale problem among other workers who do not have access to that benefit just to kowtow to a group of employees that may (or more likely may not) leave but could be replaced quite easily by equivalent people who do not make that demand?

You make a good point, in a way it's a race to the bottom. The same could be said of any worker right that is not legally enshrined.

If you want to make the case that workers have no power, and they’re always a replaceable cog, then certainly the only course of action is for them to pursue obtaining power under the protection of the federal government and the NLRB.

Wxactly where did I say that they had no power? I was speaking about an individuals perception of their value being greater than it actually is, especially if the point of contention is not a point of contention for other waiting candidates that can do their job.

However, to your point—even a union has convince an employer why WFH is in the employer’s best interest to get the benefit.

I work at Amazon. Every single person I regularly collaborate with is in a different time zone.

Also at Amazon currently. Similar situation; I have coworkers across all timezones in the contiguous US.

It's a great opportunity for employers to pick off Amazon's best developers. Start making them offers!

It’s another layoff really. Just less expensive. Some people will leave for whatever reason. Then, when the cycle completes Amazon will go full RTO. I’m betting it will happen by the start of Q4.

or... the brain drain begins and is so serious that Amazon cancels this whole RTO charade. it could go either way. one thing is for sure: it's not going to be 3 days. that's just something that acts as a throttle so people that are on the edge stay hoping that it's only 3 days.

I think the brain drain scenario is highly unlikely. Maybe before the bottom fell out on the stock price and maybe before the latest industry layoffs. But now? Most people will go back to the office.

Hah. People are not goldfish. They will remember and will jumo ship given a better opportunity. One does simply not forget the flexibility WFH brings.

I’m 52. I can assure you that most people are indeed goldfish. They may not forget the flexibility, but on a time series chart stability ranks much higher.

I've already shared my negative Amazon experience on HN a couple of times, so I wasn't going to comment on this article, but this line caught my eye:

"Amazon’s positions on diversity and inclusion..."

As someone with ASD who worked at Amazon for over two years, I can say that Amazon's stated positions on diversity and inclusion are absolute bullshit. My last manager violated my reasonable accommodations in every conceivable way for over a year and HR did NOTHING about it. In fact, they somehow warped the universe by doing less than nothing.

I now work at another FAANG company and the difference is night and day. My current manager is actually a manager with real management skills and the company treats me exceptionally well. If I were an engineer looking for a big-tech job, I'd skip that second A in FAANG and save myself a whole lot of misery and frustration.

No way in hell that Amazon is going to risk losing its tax kickbacks by not meeting their location numbers.

Isn't Return to Office just a front to have engineers quitting by themselves instead of layoffs?

Hello Peter... what's happening? Yeah.. I'm also gonna need you to go ahead and RTO on Sunday, too, m'kay? If you could go ahead and do that from now on, that'd be great..

Please Andy. Listen to your Devs. Make it 1 day mandatory at worst.

Good, anyone that requires me to go to an office for something that I can do as effectively or more effectively from home should not be able to have a job.

If people being in the office is somehow more valuable, then pay them more than remote workers and see what fraction want to be remote vs non remote. Capitalist solution to the problem for all the hardcore “let the market find the solution”.

You can RTO all you want, your top talent will just find the benefits they value with a different employer.

Amazon has over 1.4 Million employees. Looking at this article, 14,000 joined a slack channel to complain. So only about 1% is pushing Andy Jassy about this. Should we assume the remainder (~99%) is OK? If so, this is yet another instance of a small group of people strategically using regular/social media to amplify a minority position which the majority doesn't support.

1.5, but probably over a million of those are FC workers who are not on slack cuz they're running around the warehouse.

There are just over 400,000 office employees WW

So it's closer to 3.5%, and the announcement was only posted Friday morning before a long weekend so that's likely to grow.

Why would you assume the remainder is OK with this? Joining a slack channel isn't a referendum.

A collective 1% pushback is pretty big as far as activism goes. It's also way more than 1%, since no where near 1.4 Million of those employees have slack access.

from people that [still] work there it's 22k at the end of today

Andy likes people in the office. For team based creation its critical for productivity - sorry but its true. But Alas I fear that this is also an HR tactic to lay off people without paying severance.

Whats missing from the current media narrative is the deals done per manager. Nothing is really ever "company wide". people worked from home before covid. based on manager discretion

Rumors are those are now under PIP

I mean, according levels.fyi AMZ pays 400K+ total compensation. I don't think that would be too hard to fill up the office with the willing office.

But your cost of living goes up if you have to commute and/or live close enough to use public transportation to get to the offices.

The cities FAANG companies are located in don't seem to be exactly cheap.

I think median salary for full time employment in Seattle is surely below 100k and yet people live there somehow. 4x of median should be great, no?

A quick google search shows that median income seems well above 100k

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-media...

https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/Housing/Proper...

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/seattlecitywash...

Household slightly above, however levels.fyi is about individual compensation.

Not everyone is an individual. Does that take into account a family that they might be supporting?

I am not the only one that thinks Seattle is expensive - not sure why you are so adamant it is not.

https://www.quickenloans.com/learn/most-expensive-cities-in-...

https://www.kiplinger.com/real-estate/605051/most-expensive-...

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/10-most-expensive-cities-for...

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