Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy | Hacker News Reader

Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

cnbc.com

115 pointscebert178 comments

I said this in another thread on this topic, but this was one of the key reasons I left Amazon in 2021. I knew this was coming.

It was clear from tech survey (company-wide very long survey on all topics) that devs did not want to be in the office. Yet there was an email from leadership that said "We know you all can't wait to be back in the office". This bizarre dichotomy where we know they know we don't want this, but they're saying we do want this.

The stock was reaching new heights every day; things were going great; the was no reason to change back at all. Amazon senior leadership were taking their culture of data-driven-everything and ignoring it because they like it better that way.

Meanwhile the were lots of employers who had "full remote" in the job listings. So I started applying to them and never looked back.

Instead of spending 50 minutes getting to the office this morning, I spent that time playing with my daughter. I'm not giving this up.

I'm sorry but there's no correlation to AMZN's stock price reaching all-time highs. 1) The entire world was caught in a two-year pandemic and caused e-commerce to exceed retail spending virtually overnight (See: SHOP, BIGC, etc)... and 2) The fed printed an asinine amount of money that dislocated the market from reality.

Your work-from-home team had nothing to do with either of those two massive tailwinds.

The point is that the company wasn't going to make big invasive moves while the stock was up.

Sure, but was the company tanking because we were all working from home?

No?

All I'm saying is that the company was operating just fine despite everyone being remote. There wasn't a financial reason to do it, and probably lots of good financial reasons not to (sell the offices, reduce overhead that way).

Yeah, it strikes me as odd that Amazon is a company whose success is absolutely predicated on having a minimal physical presence, yet their leadership has become obsessed with getting their employees to work in a physical office.

Like, what if we could do all this over the internet?

I can understand they want it. What I can't stand is their doublespeak and complete inability to openly address the issue. "Yes, we understand you prefer remote work but we prefer to have an eye on you and control you more" is a fair statement. "We know you all want to come back" just makes me furious.

If the stock goes up, you will not give credit to remote work.

If the stock goes down, you will blame remote work.

> The stock was reaching new heights every day; things were going great; the was no reason to change back at all. Amazon senior leadership were taking their culture of data-driven-everything and ignoring it because they like it better that way.

Why is the real reason for this? It's not clear to me from reading the articles.

There is one mention about how innovation happens more often when people are in the office. I very much doubt that, specifically because if it were so, they would mention numbers/data that this is based on.

I personally work from home 2-3days/week. When I have a good idea I just write it down in our wiki, mention it in slack, maybe grab the phone or just wait until the next meeting to explain it. The best ideas typically need some back and forth, some thinking time, a discussion here or there etc. until they really start to materialize.

Because bad managers feel disconnected when they aren't physically colocated with their employees.

> Why is the real reason for this? It's not clear to me from reading the articles.

Same reason why every study of open offices show that they're bad for productivity but managers and executives can't stop building them.

The managers have an emotional need for it, the data doesn't matter.

Good people always have other options. That's something employers often forget.

Of course the survey would show that devs don't want to be required to come to the office. Everyone wants the flexibility to choose. If you asked them if they want to move to 4-day work weeks I'm sure most devs would say yes. In the end you need to balance between what the employees want and what's reasonable for the company.

How is requiring staff to spend hours of unpaid time in commutes reasonable? In practice since working 70% from home I have more energy, more ideas, am less tired at 5he end of the day... Looks reasonable to me.

They need to live closer to the office if they don't want to spend hours commuting. I agree fully in-person is overkill. But 2-3 times a week is reasonable.

No one should be surprised by this. I interviewed at AMZN and the online quiz was basically "Which delivery driver would you fire in this scenario" and the 1-on-1 interviews were with people who when I asked what you like about AMZN replied "the stock price". If you take a job at AMZN you are treated like a cog in the machine. And that is fine if that is what you want.

Not that I am surprised by this event, in fact I remember reading that the original RTO was about December.

Regardless, I don't think that such generalizations are particularly useful. I have been given multiple different descriptions of what it's like to work there, wlb and so on, and it seems to depend entirely on the org.

Like any big corporation, your personal experience depends on your luck, because there are so many groups and things to do. However in general the experience is miserable.

Well to be fair, you’re never more than a cog in your employer’s machine. That’s the whole point in having employees.

I think that's an overly cynical view. While employees exist ultimately to serve the company's goal, good companies will also work to support the employee's goals in return (e.g. time away from work, time to develop skills, general happiness, etc.).

Yeah, but for some reason tech people seem to think they're the only cogs that matter.

They really thought companies were going to move heaven and earth just to make their personal comfort and convenience a priority.

I’ll never forget the article (WashPo, I think) about their corp culture from a few years back that said seeing someone crying at their desk was normal, expected, and unremarked upon.

At what level in the org chart? In consulting at the managing director level and up breakdowns are not unusual. People have their limits and respond differently. I’ve see my boss in tears and she’s as hard as a coffin nail.

It’s like blowing a head gasket in a race car. You don’t want to but it does happen.

Found it, it was NYTimes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

https://archive.is/aNhhC

>"Bo Olson was one of them. He lasted less than two years in a book marketing role and said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. 'You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,' he said. 'Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.'"

Every person I've known who worked at AMZN is just counting days until RSUs vest so they can quit. I'm sure there are good teams there, I just don't know anyone who has been on one.

Looks like Management has decided that immediate 5 day RTO will cause too many resignations all at once. Start with 3 days, then 6 months later 4 days, and finally full time RTO will spread the resignations out and reduce business disruption.

Bingo.

With over 400k tech layoffs in the last 1 year, I wouldn't be worried about resigning employees of I were a big corp.

Your top performers know they are the top performers and they know they have options. They will be the ones to move. The only factor that would deter that is golden handcuffs. They will be left with very highly paid, high performers who are not happy and mid to low performers who have fewer options or less impetus to move.

They won't be the ones to move because these companies are not stupid. They have mechanisms to save top talent by making exceptions for them and giving more equity.

I think you are giving more credit to corporations than you think. The exceptions are for top brass, not top ICs.

The coming years will have stories of regret from tech folks who arrogantly left good positions because of RTO and then failed to find WFH jobs because those were all snapped up by the very best of the best.

Nothing can bring an ego down to earth faster than to realize that of the 400k workers out there looking for work…more than half have better resumes, better interviewing skills, and a better chance to secure the jobs than you do.

that's a very shortsighted way of looking at it.

assume you are unhappy with this situation and you decide to f off. who is more likely to find a new job (especially in this economy) ? top performers or low performers?

as a company this virtually guarantees that most resignations will come from top performers. I give it 2-3 weeks before they walk this back and/or maybe go to 1-2 days per week.

Resignations are a feature, not a bug.

Sure, but they need to be spaced out. Too many people quitting at once means you can't get replacements for the positions you need trained and then those jobs don't done. Resignations are great when you can take someone from a position you don't want done at all anymore to one you still need done.

There is one caveat, though. I see a trend in the current of layoffs where the majority seem to be mid and junior positions, and at the same time FAANGS still hire seniors and other specific positions. But if you decide to go full RTO you will have a hard time getting experienced people work for you. Literally nobody from people I know would work full-time in the office (I know mostly seniors, for juniors this might be quite different for obvious reasons).

That's BS. Even pre-covid most didn't come 5 days a week.

> "Staffers who posted in the Slack channel said they were caught off guard by the announcement. Many expressed frustration that they’d have to find arrangements for child care, caregivers for aging parents, or potentially move in order to be within commuting distance of the office.

One worker said they’d recently leased a car with an annual limit of 16,000 miles assuming remote work was still an option; if they’re required to come into the office at least three days a week, they’ll exceed that limit.

Others took the company’s previous flexible work stance as an opportunity to move outside major cities to find more affordable housing and are now concerned about their commute."

Boy these employees are about to get what looks like a very expensive lesson in expectation / risk management.

> Boy these employees are about to get what looks like a very expensive lesson in expectation / risk management.

Is that really the takeaway, here?

What else is there to takeaway? They knew they weren’t working for a remote-first company. They knew what their contract said. They played a dangerous game and now they’re finally burned. You cannot collect an Amazon salary living out in Idaho or Nebraska.

Why not?

Capitalism?

Because developers in those regions can tolerate less salary due to their lower expenses, as a competitive advantage.

What if the dev in Boise and the dev in Seattle and the dev in Butte got together and agreed none of them would work for less than a certain salary?

Those developers should definitely try it.

It's a version of the prisoner's dilemma. They could do that, and they arguably should do that. But it won't scale to everyone doing that, and so it breaks down to a remote person with lower cost of living volunteering work for a bit less, in order to secure a desired position for themselves.

what if you had wheels instead of feet? there is zero mechanism for this and tech workers have shown again and again that there is not interest in a professional union.

Unions in the US have policies that tech people do not want. Often they are backed up by law, so you cannot legally form a union that gives you the good without the bad.

That would require forming a union and tech workers tend to be somewhat hostile towards unions.

Sure, I'll grab the catnip and you put the leashes on, I'm sure this will work out great.

Devs in Vancouver would benefit

So you are indirectly saying that they will form a union. Human greed will say that the developer in Seattle(or others) will not agree to it and look for a better deal for himself/herself.

Oh yea sure, and the dev in Butte will get to decide the minimum salary, so the guy in Seattle can get fucked.

Nice Union. A match made in hell.

Ostensibly because Amazon won’t allow you to because RTO policy. I guess if you don’t show up, they’ll eventually fire you.

I'm with you. The quality and value of my work does not change with regards to my physical location

While you cannot collect an Amazon salary out there - because Amazon won't pay you if you live there, you can collect a similar salary out there from other companies that just need good people and pay them well. Of course you will need to wade through the companies that figure since cost of living is less out there they should pay you less. However wages are competitive for full remote companies, so companies that allow full remote tend to not care where you live, they just pay enough to get the people they need.

Note, such companies do count what country you live in. You will make different amounts in US, India, Germany, and Mexico. For legal reasons people who live in a different country are not equivalent to each others.

"similar salary"? Be realistic – a random startup is not going to give total comp similar to Amazon... you need to find another remote-friendly FAANG to get that, and I don't know if any of them are even hiring right now, let alone hiring full-remote

I suppose an overly optimistic employee could have thought that remote work is supported by the data, therefore it would be likely for Amazon to adopt it.

At least part of the takeaway here has to be that employees themselves bit as hard on the "Covid=new paradigm" idea as the employers themselves, and that now they are getting burned for it, just like the employers themselves.

Lowest resolution takeaway perhaps

"what do you mean i can't collect silicon valley salary while working from Montana?"

Why would that be unreasonable when making Silicon Valley profits for my employer?

Because salary is not determined by how much profit you make but by the demand of your labour in the market.

Newsflash-- the "market" is becoming less constrained by geography.

Pointless snark aside, this is correct. But it is still constrained by geography and it's not all that surprising that employers would like to constrain it a bit more than it is. So this move makes total sense, and pretending that there is no correlation between your location and what you can command in salary is farcical.

Why would you think that puts upward rather than downward pressure on wages?

Right. So salary will trends towards rural Montana salary not SF or Seattle salary.

Once US employers give up on the idea of office work entirely and start looking into cheap east European developers, you‘ll be in for a world of hurt.

I can‘t deny their expertise and quality of work, and they‘re starting to constantly outbid anyone on work for hire platforms

And how do you think that will affect SF and Seattle salaries?

Seemingly not if companies are moving back to in-person. Can't be in person at Amazon in Montana.

Salary is never a function of profits, it’s a function of market rates for the skills you provide. Plenty of developers will make Silicon Valley profits for a company, some will even do it very cheap because they hail from regions where their cost of living is dirt cheap.

Edit: you can downvote me all you want, doesn’t make it less true.

Because the reasonable thing for your employer is to pay less to someone else - someone who gets them even higher profits.

It's not, but it's a corporation not a workers' co-operative.

They'll get someone to do the same thing from Islamabad like Digital Ocean.

Wouldn't it be just as likely to pay Montana salaries to people even if they choose to live in Silicon Valley? A lot of people arguing for ability to work from anywhere don't realize they are now essentially competing with the entire world, or at least the entire population of engineers in their timezone.

We already know we are competing with workers from all over the world. Go to Bengaluru, India or other IT-centric cities and marvel at how many silicon valley names you see on the skyscrapers, each of which has thousands of workers. This has been the paradigm since at least the early 00s. Remote-first may have accelerated it but it didn't bring it about.

IT workers have been competing with the entire world since the late 90s.

This is a relatively neutral effect because I also have more choices of employers as a result. It's just a merging of labor markets. If anything, remote work is a net positive for everyone involved (and actually, everyone): less wasted time, money and emissions, fewer reasons for everyone to be living all bunched up in expensive cities.

Because your Warsaw coworkers are making the exact same profits for that exact same employer, yet paid much less.

Seeing SV people whine about this is quite offensive, and a little bit racist.

I don't think they are asking to not take a cost of living adjustment. I think they are asking to be able to work somewhere in the world other than Seattle.

If the company was willing to pay SV salaries to hire someone what does it change for the company if the worker is not in SV, specifically?

That it can hire the same guy for less in Nebraska.

couldn't it do that before they hired them for more in SV?

Not if they wanted someone local who would come in to an office.

And that's the issue at play here, isn't it? The hiring was done when work was remote, paying SV rates for that, then the company decides to move the goalposts and now there's this weird justification being played to side with the company.

Take off your company-man hat, does it make sense to you as a worker?

AFAIK, the default expectation at most places was that the pandemic wasn't permanent and eventually people would be back in person.

> Take off your company-man hat, does it make sense to you as a worker?

I don't tend to analyze things along "class struggle" lines. Obviously, as a worker, I would prefer to make as much money and have as good of work conditions as possible, but I don't necessarily think any deviation from that is "unfair".

This sounds like circular reasoning to me. “You can’t collect an SV-level salary working remotely from the Bay because the company could just hire someone from Nebraska, and the company won’t pay him an SV-level salary because he’s not located in the Bay.”

Do you also find this circular reasoning: “You can’t get paid SF rates for a haircut when your barbershop is in Nebraska because people will find a cheaper option and people getting haircuts in Nebraska won’t pay SF rates because they are not in SF”?

Exactly, I hate the policy of paying based on region (I won’t work for those companies)

You’re providing X value, and the company needs to make >X, often by some multiple mX profit so to speak.

My costs are my business, and I shouldn’t be punished for making different life choices.

If remote employees tend to produce a lower multiple, that’s fine. Just provide a salary at the reduced rate. Should be the same everywhere though, imo this is unfair hiring practices

I should add, it’s up to the employee what they’d accept. I had a few awesome job offers from Europe, but they couldn’t even come close on salary. That’s fine, didn’t work out, still respect them as it was the same salary everywhere

It’s about market prices. If you can find someone to overpay market rates to you then more power to you. But I know of 0 companies that do. I’ve worked for remote first companies that specifically didn’t hire in expensive areas so they could find more affordable talent. This is how markets work.

Sure, the market is global though.

I always approach each conversation the same. I won’t interview until we discuss potential salary range. If it’s within a range I’d accept for the work, we interview. The argument I’ve made in negotiations is always similar - if you’re willing to pay X (regardless of location), it should matter more about what I can offer in return. If you’re penny pinching to try and cut that employee cost 10-20% have at it. I know my worth and can provide significant multiples over that. I guarantee I can provide the same level or more productivity as a remote engineer in New York as I do in the rural south.

> Sure, the market is global though.

It can be in certain cases but not in all. I may have to hire someone with a certain clearance for example. Or, we don't have a business subsidy setup globally. Or we have TZ preferences because of communication issues. As a manager I wouldn't want to hire someone half way across the world because my 1-on-1 time with them would always be awful for one of us. So I don't.

You are of course free to set your own market rate. I think it's great you want to discuss salary expectations up front because there's no point in everyone wasting their time. At a smaller company you'll have a better chance of getting sway with it, but keep in mind they tend to pay below market rate anyways.

At a medium to large company they source data which describes for certain roles what market rate is. We know this because companies participate in giving this anonymized data so we can slice it up by region as well. From this we can calculate a "comp ratio" and your salary will gravitate towards 1.0, which is perfect market price for your role in your region. This is how budgets are set. Every region is put into a bucket (premium, average, bargain for example) and priced by that bucket. We can then open a role in "average or below" regions, for example if we don't want to pay extra. We tend to want to offer below 1.0 so we have room for negotiation and also for merit increases.

> I guarantee I can provide the same level or more productivity as a remote engineer in New York as I do in the rural south.

I don't doubt that but it's not really a surplus value theory thing here. If I could get the same person close to me VS far away for the same money then I'd hire the person close to me, which is almost always in a big city and not the rural south.

I'd think everyone in SV would be opposed to this because it's effectively bribing more people to move there.

Because it would be ridiculous to not pay market rates. The market rate for a dev in Nebraska is different than in SV. So what changes is you’re a company that overpays.

The employer is paying the SV premium because either they want the employee physically in SV for job duty reasons, or because other SV companies do, so if you're not in SV then fewer employers are trying to hire you for SV salaries, which reduces your salary offers.

If they truly don't care then why not hire two equally good people in Warsaw? It's because they do care.

SV employees do not want all remote to be equal. They would very much be on the losing side of that bargain.

One of the problems I've always had with remote work is how do you justify large differences in pay between the US, Europe, and Asia if the location of an employee is not supposed to matter?

Some people have convinced themselves that they are amongst best simply because they are paid a lot, which obviously means that they deserve the pay no matter where they are. So they can just work remotely, because it doesn't change the value they produce, right?

And look I'm all for extracting maximum pay from employers, but it's a bit delusional to not realize that it was mostly because they were in silicon valley/the west coast that the pay was so high. Not because they were literally leagues ahead of everyone else. I'm sure there is a much higher concentration of top talent in SV, but the pay was, at least in part still, inherently due to the location.

The weird part is that it is usually highly paid techies that push so hard for fully (out of state, or even international) remote work. A position which to me is completely against our own self-interests, because it takes for granted salaries that surely won't adjust to international competition because they just...won't?

Paying people obscene wages in SV really makes them overestimate their own abilities by a large margin.

The C-Suite has been trying to outsource for 30+ years now. It doesn't work because the talent just isn't there.

There's talent, but unless the company is huge and can open a whole office, things like time zones, culture and language are very hard to overcome. And to your point, the most talented come to the US where they can make the most money.

I work with a company that has an office in Inida. It is really hard to manage people in that office, the timezone means that just to have a conversation someone needs to work bad hours. I've had to be in 5:30am meetings to catch them before them get home, other times they have put their kids to bed and then called me.

The only way you can make this work is if the people "there" are mostly self directed. that means the management needs to be able to make the right decisions when faced with a question, without calling back to "the main office". If any of the words or similar phrases are uttered it cannot work.

> And to your point, the most talented come to the US where they can make the most money.

I don't agree with the "most talented". For sure a lot of talented people move to the US as they can make more money but that's a subset of the talented people, a subset that intersects with the ones that are willing to work harder/longer, or with less social benefits, etc. I've worked with a lot of talented individuals that were unwilling to relocate to the US even though they could get much better pay, simply because they were happy enough in their societies and weren't all in chasing only money.

Different people value different things, reducing that to a simple transactional value is rather inhumane.

For most it is working because talent is not what they are looking for, but cheap labor. I saw companies that prefer to pay 3 people in India to deliver less than 1 person in UK just because they want to have people in low cost locations no matter what the productivity is. They believe most/all people are equal in skills and output, it is linked to the the "equality" part of DEI.

That is the opening question leading to "why hire anyone in USA or Western Europe when Asia exists?"

> That is the opening question leading to "why hire anyone in USA or Western Europe when Asia exists?"

Because good software engineering is 20% good programming and 80% good communication.

We, as an industry, already tried the offshoring strategy in the mid-2000s and quickly realized the cost savings of salaries were offset by the communication barriers. At least for projects where the quality of the output actually matters. You still see a ton of offshoring for projects where the result doesn't matter so much, like government IT contracts.

If Amazon/Google/etc had any data supporting that you could successfully get devs in Bangalore to code stuff up at $2/hour, they'd be doing it.

You can still save salary by hiring Europeans who speak english well enough. The average Swede or German has little communication problems in English and costs about a third as much as the average US Dev

Your average German developer as good as your great developers in India, and cheaper. If you want low quality engineers in India there are a lot of them for cheap, but if you care about quality, those people have moved to positions that are willing to pay more for quality.

Most of the average in Germany being better than India is in Germany there are many opportunities for bad engineers to self select into something not engineering. However the nature of India is bad engineers will persist as engineers because there is nothing else they can move to that is better than being a bad engineer.

Not sure the average German software engineer costs 1/3 of the USA one, but I am sure Germany is still in Western Europe and considered a high cost location. The average German still makes 2-3 times more than the average Bulgarian or Romanian, Indian or Costa Rican.

Yup. The company prefers people in the US in general, and SV in particular. That's why it "bribes" people to move there to work.

If you leave, then of course you should no longer be bribed to work there.

Should we pay less to people without children or dependent family members, given that their cost of life is smaller? What about paying less to non-smokers, since their healthcare needs will be smaller?

Not sure if you're making my point, or arguing against it.

The employer has been paying a premium for having employees local. Now employees are getting upset because they're losing the premium. As if they are some dirty European or Indian. It's actually quite offensive to hear these complaints from US employees.

Your not supposed to do that but just the same I would not discuss marriage or family in an interview.

Where I always ran into trouble was child care.

I had one boss who moved his parents to the US from China to raise his son, often commented that he never raised a finger to raise his child, expected everyone else to do the same. He had no sympathy for child care needs.

My next boss raised two kids in NYC, knew all the hoops you had to jump through, was very accommodating of child care needs and schooling.

Completely different experiences.

The value extracted from a worker is not a function of their location. SV salaries are for technical ability and competence. And I like Montana so no offense to you folks out there, but sure, pay provincial salaries and get provincial work quality.

Then why are exactly the same workers in Poland being paid much less?

SV employees are overpaid. They are being paid to work in SV. Because no sane person would want to live in San Francisco, Menlo Park, Cupertino, or Mountain View.

And the people doing the exact same work in Warsaw, with the exact same skills and performance, are being underpaid.

I have no sympathy for the people on the SV side of this equation.

> Then why are exactly the same workers in Poland being paid much less?

Ask for more and if you think you are being undervalued look elsewhere.

> Because no sane person would want to live in San Francisco, Menlo Park, Cupertino, or Mountain View.

This sort of (extreme) caricature strikes me as a form of coping, to be honest, and doesn't really reflect well on your mindset. "no sane person", seriously?

> Ask for more and if you think you are being undervalued look elsewhere.

I have a hard time following your logic here.

The only way to get a SV salary has been to move to SV, because that's the only place the companies are willing to pay it. They'll want you there so much that they will pay the cost of moving, pay for a relocation consultant, pay for three months of hotel while you look, pay for immigration, visas (visas are not cheap), give an extra lump sum just for "extra costs you'll incur moving".

Yet you think that it's possible for someone in Poland and India to just go "yeah, can I get the cash equivalent of all that, and also the SV salary?".

I agree that remote work logically is remote work. But it's not that SV employees used to be paid "just right" and everyone else was a sucker. SV employees were and are overpaid.

> "no sane person", seriously?

It's hyperbole, sure. But survey after survey shows that even internal transfers within a company (say moving from the Poland office to Bay Area) makes for people who hate where they live, but they do it for the money.

So the company is paying (bribing) people to move to SV against their will. Just like they're paying salary at all for you to do other things you wouldn't otherwise do.

Compare this to finance. People who leave my company generally go to finance, because it pays 50-100% more. But then you work in finance. And if you already make $300k then (empirically) another 50% won't make you think finance is worth it. Some do leave. Just like some do move to SV. But they don't like it.

Clearly the company wants people to live there. Clearly people don't want to. So if you don't do it, why should you be paid to live there?

[p.s. I don’t think we have an argument to be honest. You are arguing facts on the ground, and I am arguing that these facts are distortions that need to be addressed. Peace out. (I sometimes get irritable in the morning. Appy logies fellow code slinger.)]

You are having a hard time because you already have your little thesis in hand regarding “SV salary” and are not listening to what I am saying.

I am saying that you as an engineer are providing quite a lot of value in today’s world and if the collective you are unable to take the necessary measures to negotiate value for value employment agreements with international corporations, it does not invalidate the fact that a competent SWE working in location X (given that X is effectively and practically accessible to employer) is creating a given measure of units of labor and intellectual value that is independent of location X.

I do not agree that SV salaries were excessive. Have you seen lawyer rates? All they do is jaw bone. We are creating the very fabric of tomorrow’s societies. We are creators and builders. What is excessive is the greed of the C Suites. They should be spreading those corporate profits wider, and yes, pay equivalent pay to whoever is pulling their weight.

Yes, they should have expected shitty behavior from Bezos and Co.

My take is that this is a cover mass layoff. Amazon is enforcing this now in the hopes that people like these folks resign voluntarily. Another mass layoff would make their share price drop again.

My impression has been (since Musk’s public shitting on Twitter employees, including hinting at not honoring severance agreements) that the collective C-suite has arrived at a “managerial” solution to a variety of HR related matter, including extracting even more value from technical workers. This may have been an emergent phenomena but imo Musk definitely fired the starting gun from a very public platform and with a very magnified voice (since twitter issues were being painted as ‘political’ and not ‘political economy’).

>mass layoff

Yeah, could be. They know there will be attrition because of this; the labor market is still really favorable to workers, and there's plenty of remote work.

I remember years ago when Garmin relocated its dev team from San Jose to Overland Park, Kansas -- paid relo! -- and lost a ton of devs in the process. Not many folks in San Jose are going to jump at the chance to move to Kansas, so they mostly ended up hiring locals in Kansas.

And, shockingly!, the software quality in Garmin devices started plummeting soon after. Weird.

> And, shockingly!, the software quality in Garmin devices started plummeting soon after. Weird

Long time Garmin user here

Have not noticed a drop j on n software quality.

What specific metrics would you put forward to back up your assertion?

As the saying goes extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Got Garmin stock?

I'm not in the habit of accepting homework assignments from randos on forums, but:

Garmin bike head units went from rock solid and reliable to deeply sketchy and prone to losing sync, losing rides, and just flaking out around the same time (roughly the evolution from the x00 series of devices to the x10, e.g. 500 to 510, 800 to 810, etc). This was well documented in industry press, and a super common observation to make in the cycling groups I ride with.

Ten years ago, it was nearly a Garmin monoculture on the rides I'd do. One by one, my pals got pissed off about how flaky the devices were getting, and that led to a drastically reduced Garmin footprint.

Now, Wahoo has a demonstrably bigger presence, and Karoo/Hammerhead is creeping in, too. If Garmin had kept their quality up, that wouldn't have happened. GPS tech was theirs to lose.

You really have to go out of your way to lease at 16k - they default to 12 and they'll really push you for 10 - not to mention that 15 is the default so you have to ask them to do pricing specifically for that number.

I commuted 5 days/week with a 12k/yr lease and still had plenty of miles left over. This person will definitely need to move closer to get rid of the lease.

> In October, Jassy said Amazon would leave it up to individual managers to decide how often workers would be required to come into the office, which marked a sharp reversal from its earlier goal of returning to an “office-centric culture.” [1]

Risk management perhaps, but if your leaderships says it will be up to your manager and your entire org up to L8 (base SDE is L4) is working remotely then it seems like a reasonable assumption.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...

The big question is: will Amazon afford to pay those people Silicon Valley wages? Because the bar moved from 2019 to now. In the past the salary paid by Amazon could cover the high expenses, not anymore. Especially because their stock is dropping like a rock, and a large part of their compensation is stock based. Amazon compensation was already known to be on the lower scale compared to other FAANG. People will even accept working for a bad company if they're making enough money. But they will hardly do this if the salary makes no sense.

There might also be an additional effect here. When people start to leave because of this policy, the salaries almost _have_ to go up to retain people and get new hires.

Studies have found that employees thrive when they spend 23-40% of their time in the office.[1]

This also is a very personal thing dependong on living conditions (also on personality type like introvert/extrovert, ADHD etc.). People with kids, small homes etc. will probably enjoy returning to the office.

I valued my office workplace very much as long as we lived in a single-bedroom apartment but started hating going to the office as soon as we moved to a bigger apartment with a separate office room where I have put a big desk, a similarly big monitor (a 4K I use in 100% scale so it does the job of 4 monitors in terms of usable area and even better).

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90845555/its-time-to-embrace-the...

I think it's a classic case of designing for the average being terrible for the plurality. People are different. If someone like yourself prefers an office environment it's great if the employer can provide one, costs permitting. I'm sure I wouldn't 'thrive' any number of days in an office no matter what my manager says after nine weeks.

The study[1] was based on starting from 100% Office randomizing the amount of days people worked from home and was measured by email quantity, quality, and manager performance reviews. A better wording would be "employees send more and better emails when working from home 60-77% of the time". To fully understand the problem you need to study going from WFH to RTO and productivity. Multiple studies have shown the benefits of 100% WFH[2]. Hybrid and RTO is being pushed primarily by management not employees.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4068741 [2] https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivi...

If a significant number of people you work with are in the office regularly, then you have to be in the same office as them to thrive. If you want an environment where full remote work is possible then you need to ensure at least 80% of the people do not go to the office at all in any given month. If you get above 20% of the people going to the office on anything approaching a regular basis, those people will start talking to each other, and since face to face conversations are so much easier they will leave other people out of the decision process.

With extra effort you can work anyway, but it needs special effort. I know of teams that have team meetings with everyone at their desk, headphones on all called into the same call. Those in the office get annoyed by the weirdness of hearing their neighbor speak and then a moment later hearing the same in their headset, but they have learned to tune that out and only listen to the headset because that is the only way for the one remote person to stay involved.

> Those in the office get annoyed by the weirdness of hearing their neighbor speak and then a moment later hearing the same in their headset

which is only a problem due to open office plans, which study after study have shown to be bad.

I'm probably one of those weirdos. Although my home office is awesome now I enjoy coming into the office. Unfortunately in the last 10 years at my company they have done everything to remove any incentive to come into the office (you no longer have your own cube you can setup the way you need it to be, you have shared "open space" style office, and reduction of seating capacity by 30% presumably to reduce tax burden. They've really created an environment hostile to productivity.

> your own cube

I stopped enjoying "going to the office" when I no longer had my own office: a room with a door and a large window to see the PNW gloom that kept me inside, working.

I don't want a shared office, a cube farm, or an open office, thanks.

Seems like a great idea… If your intention is to get people to quit without needing to lay them off and pay out severance.

yes. a great idea if you want people to work just hard enough to not be fired while they are looking for their next gig.

Amazon Wants 10,000+ Employee Dogs Back in Office, Facilitating Collaboration https://slashdot.org/submission/17188709/amazon-wants-10000-...

I would quit immediately it I had to go to an office with a bunch of dogs in it. It's weird to me that in all the performative "inclusion" that companies get up to, they think it's ok to create a policy that will make a non-negligible portion of workers extremely uncomfortable. Their choice, personally a dog-friendly workplace is a complete nonstarter for me

I'm very much a cat person and uncomfortable around most dogs. That said, I collaborate often with non-sighted co-workers, some of which have service dogs, which are invariably well behaved, and in the office for a good reason.

big difference between a service dog and a family dog. They might as well let everyone take their young children to work.

Service dogs are more well behaved than the average person.

A bunch of dogs just seems like you're going to have otherwise well behaved dogs getting 'yappy' and annoyed at each other. Or worse.

I calculate my comfort level in an office with N dogs would decrease at a rate of N*(N-1)

Google had a "bring your dog to work" option and I saw maybe 3 people use it at my site the entire time I was there (10 years). It's just a silly thing, because dogs (well, my dogs at least) require more interaction and free movement than they can get at an office. And if you bring your dog, now you can't go to the cafeteria for lunch, etc. and have to find someone to attend to them when you go to the bathroom or whatever.

I did it once because my wife and kids were away and I felt bad for my dog alone by herself at home. Neither of us enjoyed it.

I get why employers offer it -- a dog alone for hours by itself sucks. But they'd probably be better off just giving employees discounts on local "Doggy daycare" places.

Anyways now I have two border collies lying on the bed in my (home) office behind me staring at me wondering why I'm not doing something more interesting than shitposting on HN.

This whole thing reads like a disturbing attempt to seem human and approachable of a soulless machine overlord.

Which I guess fits AMZN well enough.

Do the dogs wander around the offices? What about employees with allergies?

Though owners are generally expected to keep them, dogs predictably escape containment. Humans with allergies sneeze, which startles the dogs into barking. It's ridiculous. I'd be in favor of onsite doggy daycare, not in my working environment.

technically dogs should not wonder around. employees with allergies are usually placed on a floor with no dogs with beefy filtration systems (and there are also special no-dogs building). collaboration, amiright?

It isn’t clear to me from the different articles on this; does RTO apply even to fully remote employees that live far from any Amazon office? E.g., does an applied scientist in North Dakota have to move near an office or resign? Can a VP make exceptions? And if required to relocate, what is the time period to do so?

It's pretty much a layoff in disguise at this point.

If it were, they'd just go for the full 5 days in office. That would be a very easy way to lop off a bunch of folks.

nah. you don't want all the people to leave at once.

Potentially, and I'm sure they'll make exceptions for this but generally these moves cause your "best and brightest" to leave or to start looking since they have options if they are concerned about stability.

It is for a three-day return-to-office, not full time. Given the state of the economy, I'd be worried about just quitting. It seems during the pandemic tech workers went for broke and took car leases and moved away banking on being able to WFH for a long period of time. I wonder if Amazon made it clear WFH would not be permanent or an option. There are plenty of tech workers who would like to work at Amazon if a bunch quit. Those who quit will still be stuck with their new housing and car lease arrangements anyway. Personally, I am freelance again (not in software/tech), but I voted for a return to the office. Our engineering firm (entertainment engineering - structural and mechanical) was not doing as good quantitatively as my peers thought we were doing as we WFH. Plus, a lot of people were actually happy after the fact when they started to realize they had taken for granted the face-to-face interaction at work and for some without self-discipline, the motivation to get up and working without too many home distractions.

Last week I had to deliver an onsite at a company who insisted on doing at their location. You see the thing is...I have been curing a strong feverish cold, but was good enough to go. We were all 15 on a tiny cozy meeting room for 3 days. I am fairly certain half of this team will cook my virus and will feel miserable and might stay in bed next week...Am I guilty ?? ;-)

yes

Yes

Of course you are guilty of putting others at risk of catching your virus, and you seem perfectly aware. Did you tell them that you were possibly infectious? If this is some kind of joke I don't understand it.

Now you are on to something. Is company management guilty when forces the employees onsite, knowing many could be infectious but not know about it yet?

You know the difference.

Yeah

Is a soldier guilty for shooting towards the enemy? Office authoritarians know they're causing this kind of risk in an abstract sense, I say let them reap what they sow.

Of course you are and pardon the pun but the winky face bullshit is sickening. You know you are, you know you should have cancelled, but these are strangers so who cares right?

I forgot this is HN...

"Should you go to work when you have a cold?"

"Given that coughs and colds are so common, it would be impractical to take time off work with every viral infection," says Dr Daniel Fenton, clinical director at the walk-in GP clinic, London Doctors Clinic.

https://patient.info/news-and-features/too-stick-to-work-com...

Nah, they'll be fine

How will you feel if one of your colleagues is autoimmune and you cause them long term damage? You likely had a choice to either stay home if you were feverish but could have at least worn a mask.

How do you think I got the cold :-) A home grown virus lab?

Honestly, many of the employees and scenarios quoted in the article comes out like they were because of people making decisions without forethought. Do note they are still earning more than 95% of the population and will come out as entitled for readers who are not really attuned to the tech scene.

Dumb. Covid is endemic now and it makes everything more difficult for everyone. Talking, thinking, concentrating are the first things to get hit by any mild covid infection. Hauling people's asses to office even one single day a week will skyrocket infection rates and hurt productivity in a way nothing else can.

Would like to see some data on this. I don’t know of anyone who’s gotten Covid since… summer or so?

I got Covid for the first time last month. Anecdotally I know at least a dozen more who also got it for the first time this past December/January.

Because no one tests anymore.

Source: Have COVID. Picked it up during a week of working in an Amazon office, funnily enough.

I know someone with an active infection right now. Also a decently well known podcaster in the Apple space had it in the last week or so. It still exists, but no one tests and everyone's over it. You're right about wanting data, but don't hold your breath for it, and it's still definitely going around.

That makes sense. When I got Covid just over a year ago, I didn’t bother testing or reporting it, just stayed home. Interestingly enough, I know a couple people who were sick and tested positive for the flu but not Covid this winter

That's why we spent all that money on free vaccines for the entire population. People who don't want to take the vaccines can now complain about a problem that they created, high infection rates.

This story is all about how our greed loves to create problems and then we get to complain about the consequences, and get sympathy. On all sides.

Almost nobody cares about COVID anymore, only people with health issues.

Public transportation, malls, festivals, concerts, etc, are always packed. Returning to office won't make a difference.

I definitely will not go back to the office; I would be gladful if they offer VRP instead of resignation

What region is this in? All?

us-west-2 and all the others

I agree with Amazon and most employees should be happy about it. Here's why.

1. Any org at Amazon is very big. Without seeing others in the office it's extremely difficult to understand what other groups are doing if everyone is fully remote. It doesn't matter if your immediate coworkers are distributed. Remote work is great for much smaller companies where it's easy for them to prevent silos within the company.

2. Three times a week means you still have the flexibility during the week. Many of these people don't realize that fully remote means they can be easily replaced. The in-person requirement gives them some job stability if they are in a region with good opportunities. I see it with startups, so many of them look for cheap engineers elsewhere. Many hire contractors in Europe. If you bring unique skills you'd be fine. But most don't add more value than an engineer in Ukraine with decent English besides a better time zone. Do you think you'll get paid $200K more just because you're in the same time zone? Hell no.

Nobody on my team will be in the same office. Almost all the folks I need to interact with on our current/future projects will be in different office.

I mentioned that in my comment. Maybe for someone like you it's enough to come twice a week. It's important for you to make connections with people in your org even if you're currently not working with them on the same project. Otherwise you end up with many silos which is bad for the company.

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