Amazon employees are fighting on Slack about returning to the office
entrepreneur.com
entrepreneur.com
Presumably the pro-office group is employees
No idea how large that group is. Maybe it's zero. Maybe this is exclusively moneypeople doing moneypeople stuff with their spreadsheets.
2 days to fix a gennuine bug or 4 day weekend?
For a 300k dev with a team working on tight deadlines that's meaningful.
In person still has the same problem but it gives a quantum of more accountability like helping identify those mooning with multiple remote jobs.
If a dev isn't performing well go through the PIP protocol and then fire them. If a dev IS performing well but you're afraid they might be working two jobs is it really a problem (and if so, why)? This is the sort of thing that'll shake itself out over time and feels like fear mongering more than anything. People screwed around in the office and took way too long to do things too, they just had to be sneakier.
WfH group wants to collaborate remotely, digitally. In-office group wants to collaborate locally, in person.
That is the difference.
WfH group takes this opportunity away from in-office group; like in-office group takes the opportunity away from WfH.
Can't have both. That's why the discussion is hard.
There's a greater need to schedule, document (generally more writing things down), and coordinate when working in a team with remote culture. (Either that, or you have a team with really strong social capital and everyone knows what needs to be done with little coordination overhead)
Now management type have more work on their hands to keep everything coordinated and that's why you have this showdown.
"Social capital is what gives companies momentum. And social capital is what makes companies robust. It means that time is everything because social capital compounds with time. So teams that work together longer get better because it takes time to build the trust you need for openness and candor. And it’s time that builds better value."
Brian Chesky of Airbnb also talks about this as "culture" [1]:
"Why is culture so important to a business? Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial. And if we have a company that is entrepreneurial in spirit, we will be able to take our next “(wo)man on the moon” leap. Ever notice how families or tribes don’t require much process? That is because there is such a strong trust and culture that it supersedes any process. In organizations (or even in a society) where culture is weak, you need an abundance of heavy, precise rules and processes."
[0] https://www.npr.org/2015/10/02/443412777/is-the-professional...
[1] https://medium.com/@bchesky/dont-fuck-up-the-culture-597cde9...
I wouldn't say that, it just requires better juniors.
You can't do as much hand holding remotely but remote mentoring is definitely possible. But it requires employees that have above average communication skills and an ability to debug and investigate themselves.
These abilities aren't cheap but pretty much required to pass a serious Engineering/CS program. The difference is just night and day.
> Things which were solvable in office by going to someones desk are now in need of coordinating some meetings
Or a well written email.
> Stupid things like drawing something on whiteboard is impossible.
It just works on my iPad.
There is a decent % of people that do close to nothing while working remote. It’s not black and white, there are tradeoffs and it varies based on the person imo.
It’s why companies with the leverage to push for it (Apple and Amazon, Elon Musk companies) do so - they believe it to be an advantage.
I honestly don't know if it's actually better or it just appears better. Sure, there are times when fast communication is important, but as we see with Twitter lately it's obvious that rapid fire decisions sometimes aren't the best and while things seem very active and dynamic maybe it'd be better if communication was more considered and thoughtful. Isn't that why that whole "this meeting could have been an email" meme exists?
I agree the companies believe it's an advantage, but I don't know that it is. I don't know that they know it is. Leadership definitely thinks so, and there's a ton of institutional momentum that still hasn't shifted after the last few years, but I don't that it's actually empirically better.
Though I wouldn’t bet on it.
The real question there is: Are the minor issues associated with working remotely so bad that it is better to
force everyone to risk their lives on the roads every day (including in snow and other bad weather which exacerbates road death rates 100% purely because of employer demands to come in anyway)
destroy the environment with all of that unnecessary exhaust,
give asthma to their neighbor's kids,
harm parent/child relationships due to work schedules being out of sync with school schedules and work/commute demands leaving little time for parents to properly interact with their kids,
pass flu and cvoid around to everyone,
cause unnecessary deaths among their parents and grandparents,
drive up housing costs in specific areas causing homelessness as well,
and otherwise add layers of stress and unhappiness to every person's daily existence?
Or might it be better to just solve the few issues with collaborating in a remote work setup like we already did for the office?
I don’t care about the other stuff, imo it’s not relevant (putting aside I don’t really agree with your characterization). That said, I also think some of the issues are not so minor (remote is a lot harder for junior people starting out in their career).
I'd love to see what makes you think think almost everything that matters to most people for most of their lives is irrelevant to the question of how people live and work on a daily basis. Please elaborate if you will.
Since you disagree with my characterization, I'd also be happy to consider what you think I have misattributed there.
Overall the point is simply that you are not working with a steady state system here.
Whether one mode of working confers a competitive advantage probably has more to do with how much effort has been put behind streamlining that process. If that is indeed the case, then you might find yourself saying this about any change to any process that doesn't just wipe the market and create a whole new competition environment.
There's no good reason to throw our hands up and say there's nothing we can do to make one or the other situation work better, especially when the benefits are great, numerous, and include increased productivity overall.
For example:
“Are the minor issues of working in the office so bad that you’d force everyone to isolate devoid of human contact during a period of increasing loneliness and depression?”
“When you’d hurt a fresh graduates career prospects further cementing people already established in their careers in positions of power”
“By having people spread out instead of together we increase the carbon costs of supporting all these areas inefficiently instead of all in one place and that’s bad for the environment!”
Etc. Etc.
I find the useful way to discuss is to narrow in on the core issue (is working from the office an advantage or not) vs. ancillary effects that we can debate unproductively forever depending on who can rhetorically make shit up that sounds better.
Ultimately it’s this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...
And ultimately if it is a decisive advantage to be in the office (not obvious to me, but I suspect it is in most cases) then the market will force it anyway.
On the other hand: would you go to the office if it looked like your home? No, it's not about the physical place. It's about the interaction with your team and colleagues.
"Over 700 people joined a pro-return-to-office group. Its description says employees need to "Think Big" about the return to office policy. (By comparison, the pro-working remotely channel has around 28,000 members.)"
So more people want to work remote.
Such a huge discrepancy would make me wonder which side the wheat is mostly sitting in.
The same reason they could never accommodate the two groups of people who respectively loved and hated open offices - the people who love it only love it because everybody is forced to participate. If it doesn't include everybody, it's not what they're looking for.
paraphrased:
A: Why can't we just let them choose where they want to live? B: The issue is we want to live here and those that don't want to live here.
==============
In other words, individual needs don't matter. Management clearly wants people back for one reason or another. The question is only whether 'wage junkies' will stick to their guns. I don't think I am being cynical here.
The Office people think the WFH people are poisoning the company culture. It's like if you had a neighbor who dumped sewage into your shared pond: "I prefer not to dump sewage into the pond, they prefer to do so, so let's accommodate both groups and allow each to do what she wants."
It's important to make the case that WFH does not poison the company culture--that it can result in a more successful/effective/healthier organization. I think it requires a change in mindset and/or working patterns for certain manager types to see things this way.
I think it also threatens them, because we're challenging a norm, and change is scary. They like the office, and us wanting to WFH makes it seem like the office is bad, and they're bad for liking it. No one likes their cheese moved.
Also really puts a crimp on their dating / sexual harassment game and would force them to spend more time with the wife and the kids.
It should be up to the teams themselves to decide, once the work is done and there is nothing missed, I don't know what the hangup is from companies.
My cynical self says companies just want to make sure they can squeeze more out of their workforce or prioritize less 'essential' qualities like 'social cohesion' within the workplace. Role depending obviously, these qualities are usually just frustrating for people looking to actually just get on with work and their job.
I know many people under 50 who were vaccinated who lost smell or taste for most of a year, or had other cognitive dysfunction for weeks afterward.
I am not going to take your word for this, lol. Personally, I know many people who weren't vaccinated who have cognitive dysfunction - and unvaccinated people who also experienced death.
It wasn't about the vaccine, as much as it was about the fact that covid is still very dangerous, even to the vaccinated.
I don't trust all the people I meet in the train and subway to do the same. A mask does mitigate it, but not to the levels when everyone was wearing one.
Ian Goodfellow, chief of Machine Learning quit while writing a letter the sole reason of quitting is RTO
And yet Apple employees are all in office today.
Amazon cares even less about their tech employees, their vesting schedule and PIP culture is proof of that. People barely survive a couple of years before jumping ship or getting fired, do they think management cares about them not wanting to RTO?
Amazon have the highest turnover rate in FAANG, they really never seemed to try to fix it. Im sure theyll be happy to show more people the door in the name of following Andys orders
Over 700 people joined a pro-return-to-office group. Its description says employees need to "Think Big" about the return to office policy. (By comparison, the pro-working remotely channel has around 28,000 members.)
While some of these people are interested in forming interpersonal relationships with anyone in-office, the main benefit to in-office work is actually meeting with your team to work on problems and have the freedom to ask offhand questions.
It seems to me that the amount of pampering expected by these employees is going a bit too far.
It's a job, the employer defines their policies (EDIT: abiding by the local laws) and you decide if you want to continue working there or go and find a new job. That's it, that's how it works in a free society.
Whether this particular complaint about a lease is in the realm of legal limits is unlikely but you have conflated two issues.
I am actually debating starting a project tracking this ( I almost did at the beginning of pandemic after the ridiculous 'commute is your zen time' messaging ).
I mean, sure, but it's in employees best interest to voice their opposition for policies that will cause them to incur hardship. The time commitment alone is insane - commuting is probably the biggest waste of time anyone can incur, especially when a 30 minute commute with no traffic turns into an hour or 1.5 hour commute with traffic, which only got worse as more and more companies reinstated their in-office policy in 2022 and beyond. For anyone with an hour commute, they end up wasting 20 days a year sitting in a car.
In a perfect world we’d have a way to accurately evaluate everyone’s remote work and painlessly dismiss those who can’t handle it. In the real world, it’s not so easy at scale.
I personally work remote and on remote teams, but the successful ones were all hired and built as remote from the start. Whenever I’ve been on a team that started in-office and then tried to switch to remote, a significant fraction of the company ends up failing to adapt, avoiding work, failing to respond in a timely manner (e.g. replying 1-2 days later to simple requests), or otherwise just abused the situation. This quickly ruins remote work for everyone.
Both this and open floor plans were never about data. This is about control. Nearly all employers, especially all of the oldest and largest will steadily pull their workforce back into offices where the bosses can satisfy their egos with the notion that seeing their people work makes them in charge. They don't just want to get things done. They want to see the buzzing activity of the office and feel like they are in control of it.
And this will happen in spite of any protests from the employees. By now most companies, especially tech companies, are well practiced at forcing undesired changes on large groups of people. They even have most of their customers actually paying to be spied on. Something no one would have accepted even 15 or so years ago.
So long as the company is arranged as a hierarchical power structure, this will be the way. That's the whole point of talk about things like "culture" as well. The reader may take note that, between companies in a supply chain, there is no talk about or desire to control culture even though those companies clearly depend on each other to do their business at least as much as they depend on their respective employees.
Only within the company does anyone seek to control and define "culture". That is because setting company culture is means of controlling employee behavior. And it only applies to those who signed employee contracts. Consultants, general contractors, support staff, and vendors are almost always treated more as real and self-determinant humans than the employees the company leaders seek to control.
In short, your boss doesn't see you as a peer or as a fully capable rational agent. They see you as a ward under their care. This is a side effect of the power imbalance created by the structure of the company.
Isn't it strange that almost everyone on earth desires to live under a democracy more than a dictatorship but when it comes to the interactions that will dominate most of their days for most of their lives, somehow people are okay signing up to work under a dictatorship?
...And anyone still under the illusion that Amazon is or was ever earth's best employer might want to try talking to the delivery drivers and warehouse workers.
Remote people want to work remotely. Full stop. If the only thing in-office people wanted was to work in an office it would be no issue — they have an office. But that’s not it, they want to be in an office and conduct meetings entirely in-person.
Wfh people are expressing a preference for where they work based on what makes sense for their life situation. In-office people are expressing a preference for how and where everyone works.
If I came into the office, put on headphones, only talked work things on Slack and called into all my meetings that were down the hall I suspect it wouldn’t count.
It's not about the space, it's about the physical proximity, and the sharing of events, ideas and knowledge with colleagues.
With gathertown or something like it I think you can get close to in office collaborative productivity, but without it I don’t think you do on net.
In person people more naturally collaborate and discuss problems, cycle times are faster (IME). Remote could be great if people were good at pushing async comms and were easily available during working hours, but that’s rarely the case imo. People seem more reticent to jump into a call when remote than to talk in person (among peers).
I predict remote companies to be less competitive on net. It’s possible the hiring advantages could overcome that, but I’m skeptical.
Unfortunately most managers are ill equipped to navigate different working styles
And by having people spread out is also like load balancing your workforce in case of geographic badness.
But in my experiences, the ones who suffer the worst are the extroverts who crave human attention at a workplace. And these also tend to be upper management.
But being able to close those stupidly expensive skyscraper rentals is also amazing. Might actually free that space up for living, and better rates!