Amazon Andy Jassy shouldn’t make RTO decisions in echo chamber of CEOs feelings
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Layoffs by another name, local city government want their tax base back, Real estate companies (not mom and pop stuff, real holding companies with reits etc) want to keep real estate from "crashing", ny/ca/ma type states don't want their white collar workers moving to low tax states and working from there , middle managers want to be seen and "preside over their kindgom" etc.
The only group not benefitting from RTO are the actual workers.
The pandemic made people stop and take stock of their lives. A lot of people realized that they were putting work first and life is too fucking short to put everything else second to work.
The tech layoffs have further emphasized the futility of putting work first. You might have put your career first but your employer sure as shit wasn't putting you first. Why live far from the rest of your family in a high cost-of-living area to have your life dominated by work if BigCorp is just going to throw you overboard at the first sign of a dip in profits? Not even a cut to save the business, just a cut to ensure that activist shareholders and top-line execs preserve obscene profits, bonuses, and salaries.
RTO is there to remind you that they control your life, right down to where you live. Be thankful to have a job or they'll take it away from you and your health insurance, too.
I don't think that's true here. A cohort doesn't have to have a particular distribution, and even if it does in this case, that doesn't mean the cohort isn't high earning relative to the rest of the population.
Add to that the fact that the job market for tech workers is extremely fluid, and I don't think unionization is going to happen anytime soon.
If there is no advantage to your job being done while being physically collocated within the US, there is no advantage to your job being done by someone in the US.
What 90% of the people commenting here don’t seem to realize is that their argument for WFH implicitly states that the fact that they were being paid more than their counterparts in cheaper locales means they were being overpaid. And yeah, some of the LCOL folks are going Amen to that, except even the lowest cost of living employees is a few times more expensive than counterparts in Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and even Western Europe.
Jobs are more likely to move from LCOL and HCOL US locations to cheaper places abroad than from HCOL to LCOL US locations because the HCOL/LCOL US cost multiple is somewhere at 1.25 to 1.5 at most, whereas the US LCOL/place abroad cost multiple is closer to 2-4x.
Time zone still makes a difference, there are very few jobs that can be completely or largely asynchronous. Then, the assumptions are that talent is everywhere, which is true if we ignore the numbers but focus only on the existence of talent (i.e., 1 talented person is enough), and that the work culture is somewhat irrelevant, i.e., what matters is throwing warm bodies, cannon fodder if you will, at the problem.
Now, anyone who has dealt with outsourced in-house IT services to India or other cheaper countries in terms of wages has quickly recognized that companies have traded paying more and having problems solved for paying less and having the problems persist. I am speaking generally and without any trace of discrimination in my thinking, I am just observing.
If you allow me an analogy, for many decades African soccer teams have been on the verge of "exploding" on the international stage, perhaps winning the World Cup (think of the Nigerian team in 1994) because of their undeniable raw talent. But we are still here, 30 years later, hoping for that victory, with the best results achieved by a Moroccan team full of players raised professionally elsewhere.
Culture is important, and not easy to transmit or acquire, especially when physically elsewhere. If I had stayed in my home country and worked remotely for a U.S. company, I would have done a much poorer job at work, due to my lack of knowledge of U.S. work culture and "proper" ways of working.
Add to that, Canada has been inviting talented migrants in bulk (good for Canada and those migrants!) and that is a recipe for disaster for high tech wages in the US. Again, asking for remote work is just digging your own graveyard.
But this claim that time zone matters isn’t even true in the way the GP thinks. If time zone does indeed matter, it strengthens the case to move the entire team wholesale to cheaper locales than keep anyone hired in the US.
Time zone is one reason. The other is about work culture, ways of culture, schools, the academic world, the media, the circle of friends that often overlaps with the circle of professional acquaintances, the expectations.
You’re literally making my argument for me. Like you say, culture is important and not easy to transmit online. Americans working remote will have no company culture whereas the Europeans and Asians (who have returned to office in much larger numbers) will actually build company and working culture and will start outperforming their U.S. counterparts. As a bonus, they won’t even cost as much.
Again, one does not need to argue that remote work is superior or inferior than in office work to see that pushing to eliminate in office work in the short period of time American workers had power in decades, was eliminating the only advantage they had that justified their higher earnings. Whether remote work is superior or not, pushing for it is a great example of turkeys voting for Christmas.
And from our survey results, our completely US based teams reported higher team cohesion (and demonstrated better performance) than teams with a mix of nationalities.
Unless a company is willing to completely relocate offshore, there is always going to be an advantage for US based developers. And as long as a company is targeting primarily US consumers, their is an advantage to being located here.
Either:
a) workplace culture is hard to transmit online, in which case you’d need in-office for new workers
b) workplace culture can be transmitted online, in which case foreign workers can be integrated well into the company (even if this process takes decades)
Working remotely does not mean being in a cave since birth and communicate with a radio with your manager and co-workers.
There are some cultures, and I come from one of them, who are different, and let's limit ourselves to work culture informed by the culture of the country at large, from the U.S. work culture. For instance, Indian culture is very hierarchical, more title-oriented than the U.S. work culture, and largely people don't like--or straight-up refuse--to admit they don't know something.
For example, expectations may come from work, but not from your work, but from the work of others not at similar workplaces (the "work culture" more in general). One of the (mildly) "shocking" cultural moments I experienced when I first came to the U.S. more than a decade ago was that shops were mostly open at all times during the day and on Sundays (and some supermarkets 24/7, which was very new to me).
Did it inform me, rather brutally, about the way people in the United States view work? Yes. If I had had a conversation about the same work culture living all my life in Spain, would I have been informed in the same way? No.
I met some of my professional acquaintances in tech at the gym, not at work. It is much harder to get the same exposure in Mendoza, Argentina (first name that came to my mind, I am looking for wine).
Workers pushing for work from home isn’t going to change this. If in office is a competitive advantage, companies will pay more for in office employees. If it’s not a competitive advantage, no amount of workers not pushing for WFH will cause companies to pay for offices.
If they are instead forced to offer universal wfh as a concession to the labour market, then yes, outsourcing might be more attractive.
Because a corporation needs officers and senior management. Those people are typically in the owner class who benefit from cheap labor. Owner class still prefers to live in rich urban metros.
Also hey everyone we made record profits this year! Great job! Pay raises are on hold though due to economic uncertainty. Remember, we're a family!
It's right out in the open that many companies are making enormous profits and giving out astonishing executive bonuses, at the same time as freezing salaries and layoffs.
It's not adding up, and I'm kind of just waiting to see if more people are going to become as fed up with it as I am, or if we're all just too comfortable.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/t-mobile-anno... (T-Mobile US announces $19 bln shareholder return program)
https://apnews.com/article/amazon-layoffs-jobs-cuts-jassy-0e... (Amazon cuts 9,000 more jobs, bringing 2023 total to 27,000)
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-reports-... (A year after historic loss, Amazon posts $6.7 billion quarterly profit)
Youth unemployment rate in France was 17-18% in 2022. Even today, it is 16% - https://tradingeconomics.com/france/youth-unemployment-rate
Seems like existing workers are being protected at the cost of new entrants. Utterly predictable, since companies will be hesitant to set up shop in France because of onerous process of firing low performers.
I started my career at a large defense contractor. This was long ago, back when one had a mail cubby to receive memos and the link. I remember receiving one memo that stated: 1. The company didn't hit the metrics needed to trigger profit-sharing with the employees 2. The executive team had different metrics which were hit, so they'd get bonuses
It was a good life lesson for 22 year-old me.
Maddening.
"The beatings will continue until the morale improves!"
I think it was from an old Steve Yegge post on Google Plus?
I remember it being well established a lifetime ago when I was serving in the armed forces.
I'm a terrible manager. I openly admit that "real life" comes first, and constantly remind people on my team that it should for them, too. Only you know what you want and need, and the company will do what's best for itself, so it's only fair that you do the same for yourself.
There's no inherent reason commute costs are usually borne by employees, it's just tradition--and perhaps what is/isn't an appealing alternate-compensation expense under tax-code.
In comparison, lets imagine someone already making $80k/yr, a 40-mile heavy-traffic roundtrip commute taking 2 hours (1.25x time) and adds $10 in daily gas... That's about +22.5k in costs.
So yes, in direct math it's probably not as big, but having a physical office probably satisfies other hard-to-quantify priorities of corporate executives, such as personal prestige, sense of control, and how things look to investors.
[0] https://blog.naiop.org/2018/05/top-trends-and-metrics-to-wat...
[1] https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/wa/se...
If employees are happier and more efficient working from home, it satisfies the priorities of all the above parties. If RTO makes people unhappy and either less productive OR makes them not want to work for that employer, it goes against the incentives and priorities of all the above parties.
I agree, I added a correction because I think it's off by a factor of 12 due to month-vs-year price quotes.
That also means the office-rent cost is significantly less than if the employer began paying for employee commutes.
[3] https://www.squarefoot.com/leasopedia/dollars-cents-much-cos...
All CRE listed as price per square foot are per year prices.
Companies are already indirectly paying via increased wages due to a smaller supply of possible hires, the difference is that it's harder for them to see and agree when an office+commute is inefficient. (Or at least, inefficient when ignoring hard-to-measure things like executive prestige or investor-relations or local tax breaks.)
A significant number of employers do allocate budget and incur expenses for employee commuter benefits. And unclaimed commuter benefits results in cost savings for the employer, I'm not really sure I understand the point being made here.
I find it very easy to believe the straight-forward motive given; that leaders are concerned by the impacts of remote work on collaboration, innovation, mentorship and other kinds of productivity that come through group work. That's been my experience too.
At the same time, I think remote work can be very successful, maybe even more effective than traditional office work, but it almost certainly takes skills and practices that are attuned to that way of working. It's not unreasonable to believe that an entire workforce wouldn't simply adapt to that in the long term in just a 3 year time frame driven by a pandemic.
The question is what's the reason to increase from 3 days to 5 days? My guess is that unlike other tech companies, Amazon has high offline presence especially with a global logistic network. They are pressured by the local governments and other parties that if they don't mandate 5 days rto to prop up the cities, they are gonna lose many benefits or deals. So it's probably cheaper for Amazon choose 5 days rto instead.
It's not the perfect medium because it requires living in some of the most expensive real estate markets on the planet. How much does a house for a family of four cost by your office?
The policy is that Remote workers are still remote. Only non remote workers are required return to office.
RTO is a new policy, they could simply have continued to allow employees to work from home.
Or are you talking about let everyone going remote? That's transitioning into a fully remote company which is not happening
This was the state of things before the RTO mandates. The whole company was remote until they started demanding people come in 3 days a week.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
My original post was about typical 3 days(hybrid) vs Amazon's 5 days(fully onsite). My stand is that hybrid is fine for certain people and positions if the people think that it's worth it. If you don't like it, that's fine. I never said you have to take non remote positions. I was only commenting on the Amazon's fully onsite issue anyway
Amazon's stock hit an all time high during this period. They chose to take that arrangement and modify it, now they have worker discontent (and a lower valuation).
I actually don't need to drive into the city for a day event but it still takes me 2 hours to take the train and subway.
This applies to the entire United States if everything that could were to go fully remote. Why hire someone for 6 figures in <a US state> when you could hire someone in Brazil to do it for 40% of the salary?
Essentially, US workers have spent the last 2 years screaming at CEOs that no, they’re idiots, there is absolutely no benefit to physically collocating employees in the US and they should not have paid them anymore.
Turkeys voting for Christmas.
So the two goals are incompatible: saving costs on real estate necessarily means spreading people's WFH days out such that no more than 60% of the company is in the office on any given day, but then you don't really get the 'easy to talk to people, have meetings and build culture' effects that RTO is supposed to kick off.
We are looking at the same thing but through different lenses. It is true that most of the current management layers are inept at managing remote workforce effectively. But they are capable of managing an in-office workforce - that's how they got promoted in their positions in the first place (mostly).
Guess what is easier decision for the decision makers - change their own skillset and habits, or force everyone back to office?
Funny you mention Vancouver, which I used to live in and, talking to tech folks there, it was routinely called the "H1B holding pen" at the time - the place tech companies would hire folks and bring them to work at US wages while awaiting visa paperwork to head down to, say, Redmond or San Francisco. And BC famously has a huge brain drain to WA and CA on account of - you guessed it - salaries, and those folks often never went back to Canada. Back to: the talent concentrated here and demands a certain wage.
That depends on the worker’s goals. If your goal is to have work/life balance or “personal” productivity then, yeah, I empathize. But there is more investment I put back into my team when I’m in person. It’s not just my code output. I find it very hard to mentor young engineers remotely.
Also, if you are a stockholder, like many engineers, and if teams do in fact have more “synergy” (bleh) then it’s also good for the workers via stock based comp.
If the worker's goals aren't pro-worker then the business certainly won't be. Your goal of training others is admirable, but that can be often be remote and won't stop them from getting rid of you the moment it is convenient.
Cities like SFO with estimated 30% vacancy which primarily rely on corporate taxes will collapse!
NY doesn’t care where you live, they’ll gladly tax you and aggressively pursue said taxes no matter if you get any benefit from those tax dollars or not.
https://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/memos/income/m06_5i.pdf
The premise is:
>If a nonresident employee . . .performs services for his employer both within and without New York State,
So if you never worked in NY state, or move away from NY state, then you are not liable for NY income taxes.
At some point I expect SCOTUS will slap that law down based on the Interstate Commerce Clause but the correct challenge has not reached the docket yet. But I also expect that almost everyone that might be affected by this has just worked around the NY state law by now.
But for those of you considering working remotely for a company based in New York state you should be aware of the convenience rules. Based on my reading of them I would recommend against working remotely or ensure that the company helps you comply with the convenience laws so you don't fall afoul of them.
Every state has the right to collect tax from income earned from work performed within the state’s boundaries. Sports players and performers often pay a ton of state income tax while only working in a state for 3 hours.
Are you suggesting that people who travel to work to NY owe NY income taxes on ALL of their income, even that which was earned outside of NY?
> At some point I expect SCOTUS will slap that law down based on the Interstate Commerce Clause but the correct challenge has not reached the docket yet.
I am not so sure about this. With the South Dakota Wayfair ruling, and the proliferation of “market based sourcing” rules for determining taxable revenue, even this conservative Supreme Court does not seem to be leaning towards canceling that. Right now, if you have a business in one state (including just you working by yourself as a 1099 contractor), and sell your services to a recipient in a state with market based sourcing rules, then you will owe business taxes to the state where the benefits of your work was received, even though you never stepped foot or even shipped anything physical to that state.
See this for example:
https://www.withum.com/resources/new-jersey-legislation-impl...
> In reality, NY state demands payment from you if you so much as checked your work email inside JFK while you were waiting for a connecting flight.
This qualifies as working within the state of NY, and hence makes you liable for paying taxes on the income (from that work only). I do find it egregious that NY state would go after a worker for checking work email in an airport, but that is a separate issue from what the person I replied to had erroneously insinuated, which is that NY taxes income from work performed outside of NY, even if you move away.
Sorry, it’s not that simple. I’m not speaking about things “I’ve read”, I’m speaking from first hand experience including fighting this via attorneys. I (as well as others) have not stepped foot in the state of NY for work for an entire calendar year in the past, did not live in NY when hired nor have any even pseudo claim to residency, yet do to convenience of employer regulations, pay NY state income tax on all income from said employer.
Especially if you live and work in a state with income tax, because the Supreme Court ruled that the state where you work has the right to tax your income and other states have to give you a tax credit for taxes paid to the other state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comptroller_of_the_Treasury_of...
Does your employer show an employer ID on your W-2 for the state you work in?
Seems crazy to me that another state would allow New York to take its income tax from a person working in their state, and the federal courts to allow this to continue. Makes a mockery of the whole system.
Companies have long-term leases on their offices. Office space is the single most expensive line-item on most companies financials. They want to maximize the use of these very expensive assets, and having workers in the offices accomplishes this.
From a more practical perspective, working from home is great for more senior workers who are already established in their careers and know what they're doing, but it's hugely detrimental to the career development of younger workers, who largely learn from working alongside their older/more senior counterparts. Communicating over email, slack, zoom, etc., just isn't the same, and you can see this across pretty much every white collar domain--even programming. This is why companies have pretty much settled on hybrid schedules; it allows for the in-person collaboration while still allowing workers greater freedom in where they work.
And while you're complaining about "the workers" consider that essentially all blue-collar jobs have been on-site full-time even through the pandemic.
This is the same rationale as finishing your dinner after you're full because you don't want to "waste it." The food is still wasted; it's just wasted on needlessly making you fatter. If you don't actually need the office space to make the company run, you're wasting the same amount of money whether you force someone to sit in it or not (except when you force them to sit in it, you're not only wasting the money but burning employee morale).
Working remote-only is doable for a senior-level employee with an established career, but it will kill a younger employee's career. A lot of things happen in person that can't be replicated through emails, slack, etc.
I do think it's quite hilarious that all of the older employees are claiming that their younger counterparts are doing just fine now that RTO is happening but just months ago were claiming that these newer hires were lazy or incompetent when WFH was at its zenith.
Is it? Not payroll? Expensive commercial real estate in the US rents for $80/sq ft/year (source: https://www.matchoffice.com/news/rental-rates-for-commercial...). Tech workers are generally factored in at using 250 sq ft (source: https://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee...). So, $20k per year, per employee for rent in the most expensive cities in the country. How can that possibly be more expensive than payroll?
Are certain cities (like NYC) taxing unoccupied office space? If so, how much? This information is much more convincing than a claim that companies are enforcing RTO to make middle managers feel like they are "presiding over their kingdom".
But don't get it twisted, everyone sees through your HR cornballs pretending a food truck coming by once a week is worth a 2 hour commute everyday.
Looking around the world, all the up and coming areas are mega-metro areas from Tokyo to Bangalore and from Sao Paulo to Shanghai. Or are you generalizing from a tiny handful of Americans who may be going to midwest / rockies after Covid?
Driving from the suburbs in most American areas to a city is an hour each way.
Now we're on the other side of it and they've basically all admitted they just massively fucked up. So what's next? A thoughtful and long term strategic discussion about how we organise distributed teams (because let's face it, most of these teams are distributed geographically even if they're all office based), a serious discussion about how workers are willing to trade some level of flexibility for compensation and loyalty?
Nah, instead we're going to insultingly insist that all our workers are lazy assholes and tell them "Forget the deal we made, you can't trust our word. See you on monday".
Also, Bonus points as Andy Jassy to just whenever someone points out your doing something with absolutely no evidence it's correct just shout "Yeah well AWS!". Beyond parody.
Marissa Mayer ended WFH at Yahoo for exactly that reason:
https://money.cnn.com/2013/02/25/technology/yahoo-work-from-...
If you're CEO of a company that's shitty to work for, you have to suspect that everyone except the middle managers and suckups is just phoning it in. Literally.
Edit: all you people taking issue with this are just preaching to the converted (each other). I'm talking about what CEOs think, not what actually is.
Please.
That's definitely worth your commute to the office and better than working from home, right?
I once read a claim that all work is done by the square root of the total company head count. Honestly, that does not feel too far off from reality.
And together, there is likely to be a big overlap between the most useful employees and the ones who have the easiest chance of leaving. Lose sqrt(employees) of people for any reason where they self select - e.g. cancelled bonuses, deathmarch project, austerity measures, return to the office - and it’s likely to hurt disproportionately.
There is either work not done, or work finished. If work isn’t being finished, then people aren’t working. If it is, then people are working. That’s all you need to know.
If you can get away with "not really working" remotely, you will also get away with "not really working" in the office.
Initially he sat at his desk all day reading newspapers and books, ready to do any work he was asked to do. Eventually he got bored and started up his own one-man business that he operated from the office. All the while he continued collecting a salary and benefits from the big company. This had been going on for two years when I left the company.
My manager and my skip level manager both seemed quite aware of what was happening. But this guy was in another division of the company, so they didn't think it was their problem to solve.
The lesson... for a big enough company, you can be just as invisible in the office as you are at home, but the office gives better plausible deniability.
Your last sentence is right on, though.
Most of the people I know who shifted to WFH from in-office during COVID ended up buying places in cities outside of the "urban" radius, and now feel like they are randomly being forced back due to nth-order repercussions around overpaid pandemic hires and shortsightedness from executives who spent all of 2020-2021 remarking in memos how successful and wonderful WFH was for everyone.
In my opinion, it's not that people don't want to work in offices. It's that cities are hostile places for work, period. Companies can start by covering 100% of moving expenses, guaranteeing safety inside and around corporate offices, and offering in-office daycares/preschools for free just to start the conversation.
However, I don't understand why WFH isn't a discussion entirely between the manager and the employee. Why is this something that's being mandated from high above like the Ten Commandments. If someone wants to WFH and the manager is okay with it, and the employee can justify it with performance reviews, why does anyone care?
This should strictly be a performance issue, and if the employee is unproductive at home, then either force RTO on her, or fire her. It feels more like the higher-ups don't trust their own performance review system, but it seems like that's really the answer. If the manager is unproductive because of unproductive employees, then fire the manager as well. This is NOT a hard problem to solve, what it requires is accurate attention to performance on all levels. It shouldn't be a blanket edict because this is 2023 and we've already shown that WFH can definitely work for many people.
It's a foolish sunk cost fallacy.
I think the real reason lies between "butts in seats" and layoffs.
I also feel like there is a class of management that feels good about themselves by having subordinates observe them with all the trappings of their office. These are the people that want a dress code and spend money to look good at work even if nobody ever sees a customer. They have to have the bigger office -- not out of need -- to demonstrate their position. Bigger desk. They might have a better computer than developers even though they never use anything more taxing that Excel (this happened a lot more 20 years ago, less today). These people want to return to office, otherwise nobody knows how much they are in charge of.
Are they colluding to suppress wages/working conditions?
These tech companies already colluded in the past to suppress wages.
And I say this as someone who invested a lot of time and political capital trying to find good (and within constraints) virtual whiteboard solutions.
If any company actually cares about collaboration, they should give every employee a set of these. They cost a fraction of a developer's work laptop and are negligible compared to their salary. There is hardly anything that can't be done online.
But of course companies are not going to do that. They are going to instead ask you to drive one hour to the office and pay for the gas on your own money, then write on whiteboard in real buildings so that the money wasted on the lease is worth something.
They also cost a fraction of a fraction of prime office space leases...
Now, I have been called from several competitors to leave AWS for the couple of years, but I was happy with the company, projects, prospects, etc. The clusterf*ck of decisions the company made in the past several months made me finally reach out to them when the RTO was announced, and I finally quit. I am going to work from the office (hybrid) on the next job, but at least I'm not going to work for Amazon. And that sparks joy.
So yeah, many abused WFH and now the backlash is here. Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta, Zoom, Bloomberg ... all have the same conclusion: you can't trust people, at scale, to work full time from home.
These stories were posted here too! You think no exec reads HN?
I don't follow these forums where people are saying this, but your comment struck me because neither of the two things you listed are wrong, as long as the person involved is doing acceptable work. This assumes there are no requirements to disclose other jobs, no enforceable non-compete agreements, etc. The consequences for doing unacceptable work—or not doing any work at all—are well-established from before covid, and would still apply in this case: that is, if they can't do the job, fire them. I agree that it's different and perhaps scary new world for executives, but what about it is wrong?
Employees get full-time salaries to be available, well, full time.
WFH makes people hard to reach - sorry, was out walking the dog, etc. - and all the other stuff that would never fly in an office.
Not disclosing your other side gigs is a violation of most work contracts btw.
You can't "abuse" WFH. Either you're producing results that satisfy your manager or you are not. Also, any exec making decisions based on Blind posts should be fired.
A managers job is generally more team results oriented.
In my experience many managers (at all levels) like to make the "informal rounds" where they go around the office and have chats with everyone to see what they are doing (instead of e.g. Looking at tickets or waiting for the weekly meeting). That mostly stopped with WFH, so suddenly many in management felt like they are not working anymore. The thing is this absence was often helping the engineers etc to be more productive.
Just like an army without officers, amazing stuff.
Seriously, what's going on here on HN? YC has managers ffs!
It really boosts your income when your equity doubles or triples in value during the vesting period.
Why fire people and pay them severance when you can get them to quit instead?
Of course, you're going to lose the people with talent who can find other jobs - and retain the ones who can't.
But seems like a trade they are eager to make.
PR
> Just fire people and deal with the consequences.
Or why not reduce headcount and not deal with the consequences? That's what they're trying to do.
Everyone has been bitter of tech workers for the better part of a decade. You're not going to lose points with the public for treating tech workers like normal workers.
AWS has been in decline in terms of quality for years now. They aren't innovating well and even higher turnover will only make things worse. Notice how Amazon is really far behind in LLMs despite having so many research scientists on staff.
From the Fortune article:
> A whopping 80% of bosses reported that they regret their initial return-to-office decisions, according to new research from Envoy, which interviewed more than 1,000 U.S. company executives and workplace managers who work in person at least one day per week.
But it's not clear if 80% of the executives...
(a) regretted reducing WFH at all, or
(b) regretted certain details of how they tweaked the policy, e.g. how they communicated it, the number of in-office days required, etc., or
(c) were unhappy about their data's availability, quality, or freshness.
Unfortunately the report from Envoy [0] isn't much clearer:
> 80% of executives say they would have approached their company’s return-to-office strategy differently if they had access to workplace data to inform their decision-making.
This is one case where seeing the original questionnaire would be helpful, but I'm not finding a link to it. So it's really hard to decide if Envoy's conclusions are justified.
[0] https://envoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Workplace_Data_...
Really what these companies should be doing if they want to lure the minions back into the cages is to entice them with things like benefits and compensation increases. Making ultimatums like this is just terrible for morale, and I imagine many talented employees will leave. I don't use AWS, and hearing this kind of thing makes me less likely to want to use AWS in the future, for the same reasons I prefer not buying clothes made in sweatshops
Moats so strong that they could completely fuck over (as they have been doing for a while) their employees but will still end up okay as a business.
CEOs with moats as thin as a razor will see this as correlation though and burn their companies to ground forcing their employees to RTO.
Large investors are motivated to carefully examine the issue, with a singular focus on the company's performance w.r.t. their fund's goals.
Presumably those fund managers are somewhat dispassionate about the managements' and employees' takes on the topic, excepting for how they'll affect the company performance.
Part of me wonders if that's just broad inflationary concerns and uncertainty about the world economy, pushing for profits over everything else.
Really seems short-sighted, but, so did the "hire everything that breathes" era in the 2010s, too.
Also, unless you are a saint, your reports are lying to you because of the power imbalance. These two factors combined are the cause of lots of incredibly boneheaded business decisions.
I think Amazon (at least their retails arm) is largely coasting on its past success at this point. If another retailer came along and offered the 2023 Amazon shopping experience they would crash and burn instead of becoming the dominant e-commerce website.
So, there is a significant game theory component to Amazon's RTO position that can't be discussed publicly.
I'm sorry I mean be wrong about the details.
This seems like mostly an attrition play.
The capital class also despises the labor class. I wouldn't down-play the pure spite motive, either.
Things like some executives wife gets pulled over drunk and the police give her a ride home and a warning. The son gets caught holding and the case disappears. Homeless people in their neighborhood get told to move along to your neighborhood. That sort of thing.
It isn't. Beat cops probably aren't going to take your bribe, you have to pre-bribe the community like Amazon has so you are "too big to fail" in a sense. It's like the company town of old but built with public dollars.
Another thing to understand in asking RTO Amazon gets implicit support of city/builders/ tons of other vendors. Further it should be no surprise (but it is!) that multiple hundreds of thousand dollar a year earning employees are going to get no sympathy on their plight from public at large. So why should CEO care at all on this issue.
Funny, I read your first paragraph and thought it doesn't make sense from game-theory point of view. If Amazon wants to lower city council's power over it, the easiest thing it can do is not be dependent on Seattle (ie - if your workforce is distributed, Seattle is irrelevant)
They are dependent on Seattle and Seattle has a reciprocal dependency on Amazon. "Just" adopting a distributed workforce position means putting a large investment in real estate at risk. Why would they do that?
https://www.seattle.gov/city-finance/business-taxes-and-lice...
Some of these folks are now being told that the office they moved closer to is not a “Hub” for their organization and that they now need to Relocate To Hub.
Most engineering teams will not be colocated even after this relocation as there a multiple hubs.
There is a strong belief that Amazon will have a 5 days in office policy starting after the holidays and further Relocate To Team initiatives. The delay is to mitigate the risk of attrition affecting Peak and to get people to move before they’re told they need to be in the office 5 days (sunk cost).
A textbook lesson in how to boil a frog courtesy of McKinsey. Hopefully customers enjoy the taste of boiled frogs.
It's not just a belief and it's not just Amazon. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that "mandatory 3 days/wk RTO" will quickly morph to "recommended 5 days/wk RTO" which will then morph to "mandatory 5 days/wk RTO". The endgame is very much a return to status quo ante, i.e. full time in office; hybrid was always intended to be transitory despite the messaging.