Seattle Amazon workers plan walkout over return to office, layoffs
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
Define huge? Tech companies increased their headcount between 2020 and 2022 by at least double-digit percentage, Amazon included. I'm not sure how many of them are essential in top management's eyes.
My opinion is generic across all companies. I am not an Amazon employee, nor own any stocks.
You had people drive in hours from out of town (this was deep purple Texas, Houston), and you wasted their time rattling a can for a party that sucks. Worse, you never came back.
For anybody interested in real organizing today that isn't just finding handouts for the failed Democratic Machine, check out Communications Workers of America ( https://cwa-union.org/ ). They'll help you form a chapter and learn how to unionize your shop, even if it's small.
Seattle actually has a history of this. In 1919 65,000 workers in Seattle went on a general strike to support shipyard workers. I think there are few better cities across America to build up solidarity. Especially now with Starbucks and other service work getting unionized one shop at a time. Class awareness is increasing, we now have labor heroes such as Christian Smalls. We know what is possible.
There might have been leverage back in 2016, but we didn’t have the same labor class awareness and cross industry solidarity. Your ship might have sailed, but there are other ships, and more workers now organizing and taking as we speak.
When things are bad, “I can’t afford the risks of collective action, look how bad things are.”
When things are borderline, “We shouldn’t make any important decisions about collective action now, look how tenuous things are.”
Thank you Shawn - in many ways I owe my career to you!
-HR 33
This is particularly significant in software, where we have little experience with the benefits of organizing. It's an uphill fight to convince fellow workers. There have been decades of, now internalized, anti-union sentiment from owners.
Practically speaking it's not so different than how it is currently though (except maybe lower CoL areas in the same country), it's very difficult to have FTE's in foreign countries, I am in a position to feel this very much right now- either you have to do very complex accounting, become a multi-national or they have to be hired as contractors.
There's still many barriers to it being off-shored, and the kinds of companies that would do that aggressively are looking to replace you anyway.
Have you looked into other services such as "remote.com" to handle international accounting/legal?
I am curious but from the employee's perspective.
They make it a lot easier honestly, walking you through the various hoops, but you are still a contractor which means you must handle your own employee benefits (healthcare etc), social contributions, submit your own taxes (in countries where this is not commonly on the employee this is annoying) and ensure that you are set up as some form of business entity yourself.
In my case that would mean either setting up a one man company or being a “sole trader” under Swedish law.
for PnL purposes as an employer, you would be considered a contractor.
How many people were all excited about a "random" guy in a small town in Sicily creating a key-value database a few weeks back?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35871462
That's globalization, folks.
The frupidity used to be a huge sore spot, but being honest, is no longer a part of the culture.
Sure, there are no catered buffets or massage chairs, but the old inflexible rigid frupid systems are all gone. Engineers get top of the line M1 Macbooks, nice monitors and good chairs. The desks are all adjustable sit/stand, not doors. You can get and expense whatever software you need. And yeah you gotta fly coach but nobody is going to bite your head off for expensing some peanuts from the mini bar at your hotel.
Only to be then shipped a base M1 Macbook with 8 gigs of RAM anyway!
Mid 2022, my (brand new) manager received a rigorous scolding for holding a team event where the team (spread out across East Coast and West Coast) met in a single location (Seattle; where majority of the team was) for a couple days of team building (i.e., working in the same office, going out to lunch).
Frupidity may not be the correct word. Perhaps miserly is more appropriate.
also, just to make sure it's clear to anybody reading about remote vs non-remote. remote doesn't mean no meatspace meeting ever allowed. remote team members are not under chess king rules. we did meet IRL. for some jobs it was just 1 week in 10 months. (thanks COVID) but otherwise it can be a lot more. (1 week every quarter kind of makes sense, but so does anything that members are up to - especially if they live close to each other.)
From the abstract: Findings show that early career artists have the least social capital, established artists have the most, and late career artists begin to lose social capital unless they actively maintain it.
It is clear who is stopping them from working from home, but who is stopping you from going to the office?
This happened to me once. The team was in NYC, and I wasn’t so I was coming to the office uselessly. I do like coming into the office since it’s easier to turn onto and way from work with travel as a context switch but that aspect made it worthless for anything else.
Please take a deep breath and consider the extent to which your unwillingness to even acknowledge the existence of people who don't share your opinion may harm, rather than help, your cause.
> People want to work in the office with other people. If they go and end up working alone because their team is remote, then there is no point.
The author would crave for others to be present to satisfy their whim of not only wanting to go to work, but also dragging others reluctantly there. It's worthy of a walkout
At the least, you have to reorganize teams so the office staff have other team members who are also in-office and not remote.
If you can’t do that then you are better served with going all remote in my opinion.
This is not a zero-sum game. It is possible for everyone to get what they want.
At overall software-industry level? Yes.
At individual company level? It is much better to have uniform policies for the entire org. Either be completely remote, or completely in-office, or if you want hybrid then mandate the days when everyone must be in office.
Why? There are ample examples than not where this is not applied. Significantly compensation
If all your organization processes are set up to work well for on-site, then the effectiveness of the remote people in your organization will hurt; if all your organization processes are set up for remote interactions, then the overheads of that don't make sense for the on-site people sitting next to each other; and if some units are fully on-site and some are fully remote, each with different style of working, then you might as well have two separate organizations with vendor/contractor relationship, that would be more efficient as their collaboration anyway have to be managed that way.
One common remote work thought is “you get more heads down time”
I’ve found almost the opposite. You have to be way more regular about engagement with each person. I would do 20 min meetings with every team member, every week. Team lunches over zoom twice a week, daily standup (1 min per person, plus breakout rooms for further discussions), Friday afternoon optional game days, etc. I always just hung out on a video conference, all day; similar to when people game.
In an office I can walk around the block with you and chat. In a remote setting I have to schedule some time and keep you engaged. It’s a long distance relationship, takes more time, and effort… much harder to sustain
That said, I’d set aside budget and offer it anyone wants to organize. If they did it they got a free meal, they’d get to start at 2pm, and could purchase games/activities.
Except that the parent commenter is expecting others to be available to them without regards to other people's working patterns.
And it is harder. For example, it's way easier to see when a junior dev is lost when you can see pain in there face from across the office instead of hoping it shows in one of the check-in meetings.
in person you just drag a laptop over but remote you have a call, share a screen, carve out time. not necessarily more disruptive, but sure feels like more effort, and now involves multiple apps sucking up bandwidth and potentially logging everything you say.
Also physically schlepping a laptop around to show someone is way more work than a simple screen share....and in either scenario here you're needing to 'carve out time'.
The truth and my point was that as a remote manager you have a lot more input requirements. Basically; you need constant touch points with every person. These comments also point out the challenges in that, don’t want to over do it either.
(1) Leadership & management are actually two distinct roles that are often conflated
(2) how do you lead a team without talking to them?
Your comment is fair-ish, but I think misses the mark. You have to balance touch points and removing blockers, with attitudes like “I want heads down time to work”. In an office you can walk pass, see someone struggling and offer to help. In a remote setting you need regular check ins.
For what it’s worth here, I described maybe 2-4 hrs a week of meetings. How is that a burden? Lol that overhead of planning & engagement (5-10%) dramatically (like 1.25 - 2x) productively. It results in less waste and a more motivated / engaged team, if done properly
This is exactly what I love about remote work.
Being able to schedule activities ahead of time and avoid my flow being interrupted makes me so much more productive.
I and the people I work with also like to organise meetings back to back. We spend our mornings getting through all our meetings by 11am, and then we've got the whole day to get work done without any interruptions.
That is from the people's manager perspective. From the perspective of an IC, the lack of all that extraneous engagement means we have more time to write code.
I know people who are RTOing to be on video conferences all day. Not a fun way to live.
There is a sweet spot for "amount of process" that makes individuals and teams the most productive. Note, I didn't necessarily say happiest, and the productivity may not be sustainable indefinitely but we all know there is a certain sweet spot. Too much process kills productivity. "Can I just please leave this fucking meeting and start writing code?". No process also sucks. "Oh shit, you built that API? I thought I was supposed to be building that"
But just the right amount unblocks everyone and lets teams build stuff efficiently.
The trouble is "the right amount" is different by person, by team, and by project. So the most important thing of any process is to have it be constantly re-evaluated and adjusted as the team and work evolves. But I think we've all been there on a team when things just glide and try to recreate that for the rest of our careers.
I think the same is true for remote work vs in-office work. Sure, on the right task working from home is positively ethereal compared to an office filled with interruptions. But on a long enough timeline, and especially if you are part of the creative process of engineering (ie not just "converting requirements into code" but helping define the requirements, and contributing to the full product, which good companies incentivize their engineers to do), then you do want to be in person with your teammates for at least part of the time. Juniors need access to Seniors to ask questions sitting next to each other or even pair programming. And there is nothing quite like iterating on a design with a peer at a whiteboard compared to a remote session.
Balanced effectively by good teams, a mixture of in-person and remote work is probably the most efficient answer for most teams.
The problem is:
1/ It doesn't happen automatically, much like refining a process, figuring out this balance is going to require much tuning and adaptation. And a top-down company-wide mandate for the same process is the opposite of empowering that for teams bottoms-up.
2/ It has meaningful consequences for people's lives - things like where they reside, and how they commute. Whatever improvements come with a hybrid work environment are probably lost by the candidates you lose who refuse to move, and the sacrifices people have to make in the rest of their lives.
If you think middle managers stand to lose due to remote work, you have no clue why middle managers exist in the first place. Remote work increases the importance of that role, in fact.
> Pure software dev jobs are very easy to do remotely
Have you actually done meaningful software development? For a specific example - designing a complex system is definitely hard to do remotely. Put 3-4 key people in that project in front of a whiteboard and you will get a much better outcome. I have been managing remote teams for >3 years now and have flown in my teams from all over the world to a single location on multiple occasions. Every single time, the feedback was that whiteboard sessions were awesome and helped move the project forward significantly.
Have you actually done meaningful software development? I'm sorry for the tone, it's just that you're presenting a completely unqualified argument based on your own personal experience and then claiming OP hasn't done software development.
I do hobby projects that delve into some complex low level techniques (because my day job is kind of boring tech and this scratches that itch for me). I've stumbled across a global community, meaning none of us have ever met face to face, and have had the best collaboration I've ever had with any other developers. It's especially better than the collaboration I get with my coworkers, who are all just doing their job with varying levels of enthusiasm (which is as it should be, it's just a job after all).
The idea that you need a whiteboard and to see somebody's face to effectively collaborate is an antiquated ideology in the present day. We have: Zoom, Discord, Github, Figma, Slack, Teams, etc etc. These all allow effective collaboration with other people without ever needing to see their face.
> Every single time, the feedback was that whiteboard sessions were awesome and helped move the project forward significantly.
Great. And you can just as easily screen share over Zoom and draw on a tablet. There is no magical ability that a whiteboard and in person meetings have over meeting virtually.
And all this to say, in person sessions can be great and collaborative too! But your conjecture:
> For a specific example - designing a complex system is definitely hard to do remotely. Put 3-4 key people in that project in front of a whiteboard and you will get a much better outcome.
Is not a tautology.
Put 3-4 key people in that project in front of a whiteboard, and you may get a better outcome. The world we live in does not operate in absolutes, and the more I learn the more I realize that being dogmatic about any approaches or opinions is usually dumb. There's always an exception to the rule, and, in fact, there's usually several exceptions to "the rule".
Nope - not "just as easily".
> The world we live in does not operate in absolutes, and the more I learn the more I realize that being dogmatic about any approaches or opinions is usually dumb.
I agree with this take. Speaking of dogma and absolutes, I wonder what's your take on GP's comment: "Pure software dev jobs are very easy to do remotely".
Now with that perspective of pragmatism, I believe job of C-suite is to strike a balance between what's good for everyone on average. There would be some who are actually productive with fully-WFH and those who want fully-RTO. Which is why we are seeing a return to a hybrid approach. WFH a few days and RTO for a few days. The key is to mandate RTO days uniform across the org to ensure that benefits of RTO are actually realized.
Typical software jobs absolutely do not "hold the means of production".
The aforementioned "means of production" likely includes years of work from an entire sales team in order to land paying customers in the first place. What good are the "means of production" when no one is buying your product?
Cool, you built a useful piece of software... are you ready to pay a cool million to your sales people to actually get it out the door? No? Well then you don't own the means of production. You own a pipe dream.
How about paying for all of those cloud servers that your customers run on? When you write code does it also automatically pay your cloud server bills? Guess what, those servers are required to actually run the god-granted code that you put on this earth.
In a way you're both right - software developers (usually) don't create/design/sell the entire product end-to-end, but they no doubt are a critical piece of the process. That gives them leverage.
Uh, none. Just like no one would sell vacuum cleaners if there weren't companies that actually manufactured vacuum cleaners. As with any other product that is being massively manufactured though, you still need to sell it to someone when you actually have it.
You might similarly ask, how are all of these plumbing companies going to stay in business without plumbers? Well, it's because plumbers typically work for plumbing businesses. Just the same as how software developers typically work for software companies.
Unless you are just trying to grift people, which a disappointingly large percentage of the tech/Silicon Valley/startup crowd are totally cool with.
I would argue that software that exists with no one to sell it is actually MUCH less valuable than a salesman with nothing to sell, because someone has poured countless hours of blood, sweat and tears into that code, and without a salesperson that developer will receive a terrible return on their investment.
A salesperson with nothing to sell on the other hand is simply a salesperson looking for a job. They have not expended the hours creating a product that will never sell.
How is "the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it" relevant?
When a developer spends time on code that no one ever pays money for, whoever is employing that developer has lost money, probably a lot of it.
When a salesperson sits at home unemployed, it costs the company who will eventually employ them nothing.
How in the world are you trying to claim a sunken cost fallacy in this case? Did you respond to the wrong post? I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here.
Never seen that happen. Software that exists with no one to sell it just doesn't get sold.
On the other hand, a salesman with nothing to sell is Bill Gates when he signed on to provide MS DOS for IBM.
In fact, if you look over the history of this industry, success has, with few exceptions, always been sales-first, then development effort.
It's why we prioritise MVP: do the minimum necessary that we can sell, so that the dev effort is not wasted. At it's core, MVP would involve absolutely no development at all.
Your point, correct me if I'm wrong, is that software is more the commodity and sales is differentiable?
I wonder how this stacks up against other software that yielded massive public utility, like UNIX, or the internet.
At this point in time ... well, yes.
Just about any software that a business needs is, at this point in time, already written, with few exceptions.
For almost any MVP, at this point in time, you can gauge market interest using something that already exists.
> I wonder how this stacks up against other software that yielded massive public utility, like UNIX, or the internet.
Those were different times, and even those different times things like UNIX were mostly differentiated only by sales-efforts of the hardware vendors.
There was a time when people had to be sold on the idea of the internet being at all useful. It had to be sold.
The aforementioned "means of production" likely includes years of work from an entire sales team in order to land paying customers in the first place.
that's the means of sales.
"Build it and they will come" is not how it works. There is a reason why very successful sales people often make more money than tech workers.
But yeah, not the greatest timing…
Sure it is, if you're unionised!
I've seen decades of comments, even here on HN, from devs who say that unions are not necessary for software development.
Welcome to the future, I guess?
Maybe, but in my view unionising is the first step on the way to establishing something similar to what doctors or lawyers or accountants have.
I don't think it is possible to get to "Certified Professional Software Engineer" without first having "Union of Accredited Software Developers".
And therein lies the biggest problem in establishing Professional Licensure: you cannot allow uncertified members. The medical, accounting, engineering and legal professions gatekeep like mad, with the first gate being "complete this degree or equivalent", and the second gate being "write these exams", with various smaller hurdles after that (malpractice insurance, annual dues, etc).
I'd love professional licensure in our industry, but it's not going to happen.
1. If US people wouldnt want to RTO, these jobs will be moved out to India. You can get to hire 3 people for same pay and they are happy to work. Or you can definitely hire pretty good engineer with half cost and same output
2. Unlike labour work, you are not competing with local people or can benefit from unions. You are competing with world and there are lot of people who are ready to grab it with same business outcome
You mean just like the other thousand times people said this over the decades?
Now many people are gung ho on solving these problems to enable wfh. And I personally view that as indirectly solving a lot of the reasons that international offshoring failed.
Even things like challenges with taxes and local labor laws - there are now brand new companies to address exactly that.
In the end the only barriers will be timezones, and even that the aforementioned async flows seek to address.
People keep saying “they tried outsourcing for decades and it failed, it’s a bluff” as if nothing has changed. Lots of stuff changed like improved video tooling. But perhaps the biggest change by far would be the remote first culture people are trying to build. Pre-Covid, every single FAANG company was office-centric to a degree. Bringing in international teams and integrating them would be effectively impossible. Remote first changes that.
Hacker news has so many wfh zealots you won’t even see much discussion around it since people tire of getting downvoted. But worth noting in my experience talking to IC SWE it’s closer to 70/30 preference for remote but based on online convos you’d think it was 99/1.
I personally quit a FAANG job with FAANG comp precisely because my org went remote first. The culture was alienating, the camaraderie was zero, incident management was a coordination nightmare , documentation for onboarding was a mess, and best of all, all my new teammates were Brazilian but since they were contractors they didn’t do on-call.
Management absolutely plans to replace Americans with much cheaper foreigners but there’s still just so much friction with remote-first. The only reason this big outsourcing push might work this time is because of the number of Americans hellbent on overcoming the challenges of remote work and simplifying their own eventual redundancy.
In the United States we have -zero- mandatory minimum paid vacation or holidays. Your employer could require you to come in and work to push a product out. You cannot do that in most other countries.
Like with these kind of remarks I start to wonder how seriously you're aware of with countries and holidays outside of the US.
Returning to a team that was all (more or less) in the same time zone has been amazing for my sanity.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/12/us-corporat...
Edit: spelling
2nd edit: noting these are not tech specific jobs, but the trend is there.
I have been in exactly this situation many times in recent years. My go-to would have been a team of co-located contractors in London. As soon as WFH became the norm, paying 40-60% of the rates in Eastern Europe or cheaper areas of the UK was a no brainer.
Any small gains they can make through arbitrage are eaten by time zone issues, communication issues, legal issues, etc when working across huge distances.
Yes there are trade offs, but wage arbitrage hasn’t gone away.
I think making an accurate comparison is very complicated, and if we looked at a large number of factors the wage arbitrage advantage would shrink. I think the seeming "wage arbitrage opportunity" is partly due to mis-assessment of the "sameness" of the contractors being compared.
For example, the average software engineer on the US coasts is much more likely than a software engineer in the US midwest to have gone to a top tier university, and although that doesn't guarantee they are better, there may be some advantage. The extra depth of knowledge or extra grit to grind through a slightly harder education might not show up in an interview or even on an average day's work, but might show up sporadically in ways that save or create significant amounts of money.
(To use a more obvious example, if a bootcamp coding school graduate and a graduate from Stanford both pass a coding interview, and both write a similar amount of "similar-seeming" code on an average day, I still suspect that when hard problems arise, or more sophisticated architecture or algorithms are needed, the Stanford or other top-school graduate is going to more reliably solve the problem and in a long-term better way.)
Similarly, they might live in a tech hub where they are constantly learning new technologies, or the general pace of their life and work might be ever so slightly higher. They might spend more of their free time getting better at their profession. Anyway, I won't try to provide an exhaustive list of possible differences, but these are some things I see that aren't usually accounted for.
the claim that it's gonna hurt the US in the long run is almost certainly false, because ironically the long-run US economic and foreign policy goals are constantly hindered by its own protectionist policies.
these policies are the same ones that lead to countless fuckups when it turns out that the US is both "too big to fail", but also still smaller than the world (Puerto Rico, Jones Act, name a more iconic duo; oh right, subsidies forced quasi-monopoly for baby formula and only 3 factories nationwide; oh right, granting WTO MFN status to China without requiring and enforcing reciprocation)
long run America is forced to deal with a lot of unstable allies because they are not integrated economically sufficiently. no shared fate no shared interest, etc.
... of course it's unlikely to "solve" geopolitics in a 7AM HN post, but worrying about offshoring IT jobs is like trying to cordon off the best seats on the deck on the Titanic as the water rises.
Because interview process in bigtech has been subverted by people benefiting from it and who are already skilled in it. I bet absolute majority of people that I worked with and considered them very good couldn't solve knapsack problem on whiteboards in 15 minutes, don't know Z algorithm by heart and won't be able to correctly project Amazon leadership principles with (made up bullshit) examples from their previous jobs.
Or "working class"
I even know people that make sub 100k in the Bay Area that bought their own homes after 10-15 years of saving.
So yeah, I think you're completely wrong.
I remain a renter. Dump it all into stocks and hope for the best!
There's a reason why a significant number of millennials and below are cheering on for a housing bust and it's because it's possibly the only way we can afford a home.
I lived in Texas for four years. A house in the ass end of nowhere costs $150k-200k. It also comes with a two hour commute to get to my then-office, has literally nothing nearby and I would've been on my own during the next major freeze event.
What if Bezos said "y'know what, I'd good with AMZN at $10MM market cap, I'm all set"? There'd be no jobs at Amazon. And no one to complain about the jobs at Amazon.
I would venture to guess that none of your Axis of Excess is particularly motivated by money. They do what they do because they enjoy the game. The game of global corporate titan. Money is an abstract metric that lets them keep playing.
But most tech workers aren't like that. They are relatively easily replaceable in comparison.
There are plenty of US programmers making way less than FAANG wages happy to take those jobs.
Turning it around - would you also take a paycut, or even clawing back bonuses or past income if the company starts losing money?
Yeah, well, thoughts like that only come from a context in which there is zero understanding of the realities of business and what it takes to profitably run one. I always find this interesting. Not sure if people just say this kind of thing to just be one of the bro's or because they really believe it. I hope it isn't the latter.
A while back one of my kids had a college-level business class in high school. Their final project was to put together a full presentation, financials and a pitch to get a loan for a mid size bakery ($5MM/year gross revenue).
He was absolutely astounded to learn just how difficult it was to make money in that business. When his team started on the project they pretty much assumed that with $5MM/yr the owner was just raking it in. It was nothing less than hilarious when he came into my office one day to tell me he could not believe what it took to be in business and make money. He had a revelation few people have. He had it at 15 years of age. Most adults don't have a clue about this their entire lives.
VC's? They risk millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. And, guess what? Most of their bets might lose money or barely make any. People only see success, they never stop to consider and internalize what it took to get there.
CEO's? Try running a non-trivial company and see how it goes. Heck, even a medium company can put you in the hospital! My prior startup did that to me twice in ten years.
Our country would derive great benefit from delivering real financial education before we launch young adults into the world. Ignorance has consequences. Generational consequences.
CEOs are hardly the only ones with health issues from their jobs. Hell Amazon specifically is so insanely bad about this that Bernie has basically been taking just about them in regards to an exploitive employer that leaves people disabled.
Maybe we shouldn't be normalizing unsustainable work that creates health problems for people, whether at the CEO or the regular worker level.
First, that isn't universally true. Also, the term "VC" is often used to mean "investors". I think I can say that the history of most businesses does not start with VC's that manage hundreds of millions of dollars not belonging to them.
Business is hard, very hard. There are very few dorm-to-unicorn stories like Facebook. Even then, the Facebook story isn't about pink unicorns and lollypops for everyone from day one.
That's the major fallacy in these ideologies that vilify business. They don't come from a framework that really understands what is entailed in running and funding a non-trivial organization and making it successful in a globally competitive market.
> Maybe we shouldn't be normalizing unsustainable work that creates health problems for people, whether at the CEO or the regular worker level.
Suggestion: Go work at a farm for a summer.
I don't know of any competitive job of any kind that does not bring with it stress. Let's be careful not to manufacture fantasies. It's the "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" idea. I know someone who is theoretically worth nearly $800MM who has problems the average office worker would not want to ever have to face on a daily basis. The grass isn't always greener. It seldom is.
To add to that from a personal anecdote. I started a business back in 2000. It was a hardware/software business. I was locked in my garage 18 hours a day, 7 days a week for 18 months before I could ship our first product. Six month after shipping, and with some sales in the bank, I decided to get a new car. My old car had 200K miles and I could not even consider upgrading it before.
I was talking to a neighbor a couple of weeks after that.
He said something like "Wow! You must have hit the jackpot. Did you get a new job?". You see, from the outside, nobody sees the 18 hour days, 7 days a week, 18 month effort, struggle, pain, suffering, sleepless nights, crying, self-doubt, family problems, financial risk, etc. All they see is Martin driving a new car he did not have for the last five years. That's all they process. They have no clue, at all, none, of what it took to get there --and to stay there.
as for working on a farm, I'd actually say that's making my point. we should be trying to automate this work away so that folks don't have to grind it out like it's the 1200s. probably not too stressful tho
Nope, not at all. Some days it was 20 (rarely). When you have to do the job of 5 engineers the only path is to be extremely well organized, driven and be willing to put in the time.
> I'd actually say that's making my point > probably not too stressful tho
I guess I didn't make it clear enough. I used farm work as one of the simplest and oldest types of work in history. It is hard work. I would not dare say it isn't stressful.
My greater point is that what you are asking for simply does not exist. You are not going to be able to remove stress from work, no matter where people are working, at the field, a factory, warehouse or the office.
A couple of decades ago I got what I thought was my "dream job". I was miserable for six months, when I left. I could not wait to find something else. I thought my prior work was stressful and the new job would be wonderful. It sure taught me a different perspective on my assumptions.
Oddly enough, the 18 hour days didn't send me to the hospital. I did have weird thoughts during that time, like "This is like being in prison".
I did what I had to do. Part of it is about ethics and responsibility. In this case, to my family.
My wife had just graduated as a doctor. We had enough money to set-up her practice free and clear and enough backup left over for her to take 6 to 10 months to get up to speed.
I also had this idea to start a technology company. This would burn through the cash we had --all of it-- and likely require more.
So, one nice Sunday morning, over coffee, we had a relaxed discussion about the options ahead. A third option was to buy a bunch of homes (this was over twenty years ago), rent them out and make money on appreciation, etc.
Well, my wife said she wanted to go work for various clinics and get experience before setting up her own practice (twenty years later, she is happy where she landed). She also thought I would not be happy being a landlord. I'm just not built that way. I have a drive to create and learn, not fix plumbing. She was right. So, she said, just go ahead and do the startup.
I stressed that a hardware startup would absolutely burn through 100% of our savings an likely require more. To her credit, she has always trusted me and my hairbrained ideas. So, off we went head-first into that adventure.
That was a "Failure is not an option" scenario. I could not fail her and my kids. We didn't have enough money to hire mechanical and software guys to take some of the load. So, I had to be everything. Electronics, embedded, FPGA, firmware, layout, mechanical, manufacturing, desktop software and more. Hence the 18 hour days.
That is not a way to live. I have only done that once in my life. Probably never again. Yet --and this is also something a lot of people do not understand-- the motivation was NEVER money or getting rich. Not even close. I can't remember ever thinking about that. Sure, I wanted to make money. It would be dumb not to. Yet, money can't motivate someone to work like that. No, there has to be passion to achieve something difficult and a sense of responsibility to others. That could be investors or your own family. In my case it was the latter.
I did what I had to do in order to ensure success.
The hospital visits came much later. Around 2008, when the economy collapsed, and the business I worked so hard to build to a nice company of twenty employees collapsed right in front of my eyes because the music stopped and there were no chairs to sit on. We had millions of dollars in orders cancelled. We had an acquisition offer in the multiple tens of millions of dollars on the table (from a company most would recognize) for technology I developed. And all of it, 100% came to a grinding halt when the economy took a shit. That's what put me in the hospital the first time. Just stress and dehydration after I decided to take a brake and go rowing.
That was a very dark period. The only think that kept me together was coming home to my kids and wife. I could have panic attacks driving back home and they would evaporate instantly when I opened the door.
Black swan event? Yeah, I'd say so. I guess. Don't know.
Two years later I ended-up in the hospital again after exhibiting at our last tradeshow before I had to shutdown the company. The hope of closing a nice deal at the show (one that would keep us alive) evaporated. I went to dinner with a friend. At the end of that I didn't feel good at all. I asked him to just drive me to the hospital. Again, it was just stress and dehydration.
As all of that unfolded, again, due to a sense of responsibility and not wanting to give-up, we took out a substantial second mortgage on our home to be able to pay our employees (people were losing their jobs right and left back then) and have a shot at keeping the company going. We had to live with that decision for years to come. These are some of the reasons for which, when I read some of the comments people post about business, I just don't react well. They are ignorant comments that come from a complete lack of understanding. Business and entrepreneurship are hard. Few can understand this without a front row seat and a thousand pounds of responsibility on their shoulders.
As tragic as that was, after taking a year to get my head back on straight I wrote a few educational apps for kids for iOS and dabbled in some consulting. Oddly enough, some of the technology I had developed for that business landed me a really nice contract in aerospace. I launched a product development/technology consulting business from there. A few years later, just before the pandemic, I decided to launch yet another startup to help develop innovative technologies for indoor farming.
I guess I just can't help myself. That said, yes, the perspective is very different. And yes, I am and have always been a family guy. Always first. No matter how busy I might be. In fact, they tell me they learn more from me than from school (well, it's California...you know).
I am still doing difficult work, both for my own efforts and consulting clients, which is what drives me, yet, there are self-imposed limits borne from experience. The 18 hour days are not even remotely part of my reality. That said, I know I have the mental toughness to be able to endure such a thing, should it ever be necessary for whatever reason.
I felt I had to reply to this separately. First of all, I appreciate the pushback and criticism of my approach. No problem at all. I prefer to engage in conversation with people who can teach me something or check my position. That's the only way to learn. All too often, online, people prefer to immediately move to tossing fecal matter instead of attempting to understand.
Here's the way I look at it. Keep in mind that this isn't necessarily complete.
China. I don't hate them. I hate some of the things they do. Yet, am in awe of the fact that they have worked hard for the last 50 years or so --one foot in front of the other-- to elevate their people and nation from an agrarian society to the world's second largest economy, a technological leader and the factory for the world.
They work hard. Very hard. I have done business in China. The entrepreneurial culture and desire to get work done is beyond description.
I'll give you a simple example. Last year, just before Chinese new year, I needed to have some custom aluminum extrusions made for a mid-size project. I contacted nearly 90 aluminum extruders across the US. Out of those, only about ten responded. From there only half sent a quote. All quotes were insane. The quotes took WEEKS to get.
Every single one of them put me through an interrogation process trying to understand if we were worth their while. Anyone in manufacturing knows exactly what I am talking about. The first question you get is something like "How many are going to make per year?". On top of that, people were quoting 35 to 50+ week lead times and some even asked that I change the design because they didn't have a machine that could handle it.
Enter China. I sent for quotes from about half a dozen companies. I had quotes from more companies than I contacted the very next day and a few more a couple of days later. When they didn't have a machine to handle our requirements, they simply referred the project to a competitor as a courtesy.
After a couple of emails back and forth, I wanted a factory tour before making a decision. This young lady and her coworkers gave me a full factory tour over zoom the day Chinese new year started. The place was empty. Imagine five buildings the size of a typical Home Depot. They insisted on showing me everything.
That day, I gave them the job. It wasn't a large contract. No promises of future work at all. Nobody asked me how many more or how many per year we would make. Nope. They just wanted to get the job done. And they did a great job, on time and on budget.
Getting back to the subject of millennials dialing back ambition, or not wanting to work hard. Well, that's OK. Sure. Yet, they have to understand the world isn't going to wait for them while they take a vacation. Like it or not, business is war. And to win that war people are going to have to go up against those who are willing to work smarter and harder than others.
And so, I see what our universities and educational system is doing, elevating Marxism and all the surrounding horseshit (and it is 100% horseshit proven to destroy societies) and it pains me greatly. You cannot build a future on that crap. You just cannot. We have somehow produced millions of people who really don't have a straight view of history and an even worse view of what is going on past their little world, much less thousands of miles away. They need to toughen-up and put some weight on their shoulders or the consequences will be dire.
One could very well argue we are past a point of no return. I don't know. What I do know is that this is not a formula for success. Our politicians are fighting wars for power by dividing people on a scale between dumb and dumber. They don't care, they are all isolated from reality. That's the case for the political species anywhere in the world. We should have transformed this society into one of the most rabid entrepreneurial environments in the world. Instead, we are focusing on which bathroom we should go to, how many millions of unemployed people to let walk through the border, when it is OK to kill a baby and how brilliant Karl Marx must have been --given that he built such prosperity for so many.
This is a "hold my beer" moment where serious work needs to be done. Either people toughen-up or they will after the pain and suffering that is sure to come.
Final thought. AI.
Yeah, well. Need I go there? Millennials will have to content with what's coming on that front one way or the other. Once again, reality has a nasty way to cut through the crap very quickly. What is interesting is that it is actually millennials who are going to be inflicting AI onto less-prepared millennials. That will be something to watch.
Are they referring to Amazon's Leadership Principles, or something else?
https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
Both by them leading by example and getting to have the face to face time with them.
The other thing often referenced is something of a company culture thing known as "day 1." The tldr there is bezos coined the term day 1 culture to pretend Amazon was always imitating being at launch day status (day 1) and that day 2 is ruin. MThe rto mandate is a cookie cutter example of "day 2 behavior" listed by bezos and his high level leaders.
Finally, there is the hypocrisy. Executives have tons of exemptions, reasons to bend the mandates for themselves, and the power to choose how and where they work, or influence policies involved. Meanwhile, workers have faced a brick wall when it's come to things even medical accommodations for remote. Workers have posted demands from HR forcing employees to at length detail private and embarrassing medical conditions only to auto-decline accommodations after. Workers have no ability to transfer locations that would benefit both the and the company due to red tape from the RTO edicts. Some workers, having been hired full remote, or to a location not where their direct manager resides are being mandated to move across the country due to no exemption stance taken by Amazon leadership.
I don't work at Amazon, but most of my coworkers never go to office when they don't have to (on "off" days). People prefer staying at home instead of commuting and getting stuck in traffic, isn't that astonishing?
I don’t technically need to be there to do my work, and so it makes no sense for me to spend a significant chunk of my day and salary getting to and from the office only to be met with the incessant breaking of focus that comes with open offices.
Either they are, and every company has somehow overlooked them, or they aren’t, and years of failed outsourcing experiments has shown this.
Sure, agreed, but ... if a forced-into-the-office job doesn't actually require a warm body in the office (i.e, the jobs that are under discussion), then that in-office role can be done from anywhere in the world as well.
IOW, sure, if you work from home you are proving to the employer that your job can be outsourced easily, but working from the office doesn't provide any evidence that your job cannot be outsourced.
I’ve been hearing this (and worrying about it) for longer then I’ve been working from home. Coming up on 18 years this December.
Strictly within the context of the private world however, I don't know.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...
But like you say, any corporation worth its salt can find ways to get rid of problem employees without violating the letter of the law even when it's not already planning big layoffs.
Do they plan to return after lunch?
My sense is if they think the work can be done remotely, it will be done in a low cost location. It’s too easy to say “You’re not here, you’re fired. Let’s move it to Iowa/Liverpool/India.”
Now one only has to add social justice, marriage equality, immigration policy and saving the whales, and the mission of making it impossible to understand what it is about will be accomplished.
Dudes, it's OK to be upset by just RTO, you don't have to bring the whole list every time.
Climate change, gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, BLM, #metoo, those are all integral to a modern union. And raising those among your labor concerns has proven to be effective in building up the solidarity required for meaningful action.
Maybe if they were more about the workers and less about the wokers, they had more willing members.
I think that is a holiday for most in the US no?
What is it you think unions are doing, that they don't need to do now?
Back before the National Labor Relations Board unions were unregulated and collective action was unprotected. Unions were more like activist groups (think if BLM had a leadership structure and memberships). During strikes unions had to build solidarity and convince every worker to join. Strikers had to physically prevent scabs from entering the workplace, often with violence. Now it is simply illegal to scab. With today’s militarized police there is no way we could return to the era before NLRB and hope for success.
We can, and we should organize outside of unions, but the goal should ultimately be to form a union, and benefit from all the protections you get from having one.
Numerous strikes were "broken" by law enforcement, various "national guards", and "strike breakers" shooting into crowds of strikers. On multiple occasions 50 or more were killed, and hundreds injured.
For now all they can do is complain about having to go to an office to be a spoiled, overpaid tech worker. If I had that job I would be keeping my mouth shut and enjoying the paycheck, but to each their own I suppose.
Frankly, I don’t get this drive to RTO. The only gain is face to face meetings might improve productivity (in some people). The downside is increased pollution due to commuting - even with EVs you are wearing out tires increase the amount of micro plastics in the environment, wearing out their batteries, and wasting electricity.
Even without RTO, people will still leave for other jobs if the grass is greener on the other side. If anything, WFH makes it easier for someone to go job hunting and do interviews.
If the environment is your downside to RTO - you’re reaching.
The loss in productivity when someone does 2 hours in traffic a day is probably a more compelling argument. Companies also have to stock their pantry, hire more office management, renew their office space leases.
> 2 hours in traffic a day
I'm starting to wonder if demanding that commute being paid work time would be a reasonable tradeoff (that I wouldn't take myself). If being at the office is part of the job description, then commuting logically follows as a job function.
At the moment, employers are ripping into employees time at the monetary expense of employees. Should we just live closer? Sure! Let's talk about compensating employees for property prices and home security.
Because sitting in traffic pissing your life and time away is #worthit.
Because being able to eat a healthy lunch you make youself is lame.
Because going to the office to attend virtual meetings on Chime is the best.
The thing is, the incompetents who are not experts in org politics get sidelined/moved out, and the ones who remain relevant are experts who keep rising with the singular goal of building their fiefdoms. They would sell the company for pennies if they could get 2 more promotions.
By now there are enough incompetent people at VP and director levels in most companies. There is no way to identify performers from the CEO level, and at VP and director levels the incentives are to find the people best for yourself, not for the company.
If that's true, it'd add insult to injury, for the people who were interested in the better FAANGs... but got turned off by the stack of months' worth of prep materials that FAANG in-house recruiters would send to candidates, for their kabuki theatre of interview processes.
One of my recent theories about the interview processes promoted by FAANGs is that they (by accident or design) tend to neuter students against becoming upstart competitors. Think of all those students in school who could have time for side projects, considering startups, developing skills that woudl be useful in startups... and instead FAANGs have trained students to conceive of the very skills as passing the FAANG interview rituals, and to spend their spare time practicing for those rituals. Not only are those students less likely to start a startup, but startups that happen still have to find the workers who are amenable to thinking like creative engineers, and working as a team focused on a shared goal, despite all the FAANG-like messaging to young developers that has infected CS departments and broader industry.
The interview process is flawed, but it did prevent totally incompetent candidates. Now instead of being replaced with an alternative which measures something else, it has just been watered down.
Tech workers on the other hand, say engineers, can easily get a high paying FAANG job without a 4yr degree - just spending time grinding leetcode or a coding bootcamp. Not to mention the RSUs, office perks like free lunches, WFH, on site laundry and daycare, flexible time off, no set work hours… come on
It is prima facie absurd to say that tech workers can "easily" get a job at FAANG; if it were that easy to work at FAANG surely the 50%[0] of Software Engineers who make less than $121k or 75%[0] of Software Engineers who make less than $152k would simply do so.
[0]: https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope...
There are people who work at FAANG without a degree, but that's the absolute minority. Most people have spent years on a formal education, many of which have a master's or even PhDs.
WFH perks like lunch, laundry, and daycare.
"Jeff Bezos, the Amazon (AMZN) founder and world's wealthiest man, said Tuesday after flying to the edge of space that he planned to award $100 million each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef José Andrés."