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
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.
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.
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
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 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.
So imo this theory doesn’t pass the smell test.
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?
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!
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?
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.
At this point I just don’t see how it’s anything other than control or sunk cost of office space.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are multitudes of single office corps and even more where the predominant collaboration is with people located in the same office.
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.
* 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.
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.
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 such a good angle and comment!
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.
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.