I moved states just before the return-to-office order at Amazon, so I quit
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I think I'm not alone in dreading working from home and being by myself in the office is not much better. What I really want is to work with other people at the same place.
People who demand their coworkers come into the office though- well, it's not something I've personally seen, but it would make me think the person is a bit of a control freak.
A company where remote work is the exception (you need to wait for a parcel one day or something like that) appeals to me much more than a hybrid model. A full remote job I'd only consider it I were desperate.
Woe betide you if you try that even sat next to me in an open plan office. Your convenience is not my top priority when I have other things I want to be doing. There’s a reason that noise cancelling headphones are such a common sight in such places.
You still spend lots of times in meetings in front of your computer, can't take those meetings in person, often can't solve quick issues on the way to lunch, and can't socialize with the people you are working with (which leads to getting to know people much quicker which IMHO makes working with people a lot easier).
Companies with bad cultures are going to have bad times regardless, culture definitely has to be managed. It is possible to build a remote or hybrid culture that works though.
It's obviously all doable, but some people find that setup impersonal and annoying. Meanwhile, I have no trouble going to the office. It's nice to get out of the house, walk a bit. See other people going to work as well in the public transport. It all feels good to me.
Everybody at home and using online chat tools to connect and work together works great, having your coworkers sitting next to you so you can have spontaneous meetings about technical details works great. But having two in the office and one online is awkward.
Maybe we should separate into fully remote and fully at the office companies.
For the record, WFH works great for me, but I also appreciate our one day per week at the office where I can see (nearly) all of my coworkers in real life.
I think the rub is that often the office crowd, in order to get their office, have to drag the remote crowd with them otherwise they're not getting what they want out of the office experience.
Personally speaking, I will never work in an office again. I get more done working from home, I video chat with my colleagues all the time - even pairing, I meet up with them in cool places 2-4 times a year, and I have way more time for gardening, house projects, pets, and my partner without a 1-4 hour commute in a 24 hour day.
There might be a good business opportunity: Offer a "staff" of paid actors to go into a business, and walk around, having hallway and water cooler conversations, maybe drawing on whiteboards, and imitating the "buzz" of a robust office environment. That way, the people who like the office can bask in the ambience of a busy office, without having to force employees into the office that have no interest in that ambience!
I do wonder however if the COVID lockdowns and WFH made the remote work market worse. The amount of remote positions available skyrocketed but so did the amount of people wanting to work remotely. Now, the combination of layoffs and RTOs might make finding a remote job harder than it was before the pandemic - amount of remote jobs shrank and the remote talent pool grew. Would love to see some data / opinions on that.
And even if they mostly prefer the office, they might not like the heavy-handedness with which management is pushing through RTO right now - who knows what else they might force next that directly affects them?
As such, everybody is kept on somewhat shaky grounds with these ever-changing decrees, and the people the companies should be most motivated to keep are best suited to leave.
Maybe find some of those people that like it so much, and go to a coworking space together then? I'm pretty sure the company would be OK to reimburse.
No need to burden the company with renting an entire office for everybody, or force it onto others, when just some of you need a shared office.
Bonus: each subset of colleagues can find co-working spaces in areas that conveniences them, instead of a single forced upon everybody company-wide office location.
The people who want to go to the office to escape the spouse they don’t get along with are consistently the worst employees in my experience.
"Dude, you have small kids. Why are they not seeing their dad, who is working 9am-7pm or worse?"
Take myself as an example. I live alone, in a small apartment. My home "office" is a corner of my living room. I'm not "rich" and unfortunately cannot currently get a place big enough to have a dedicated room for an office. As a result, over a long period of time of working from home I end up getting the feeling that I'm living at work. In general, I prefer a strict home-vs-work separation, so going to a physical office elsewhere to work over the longer term helps me.
Other reasons include that some other people who prefer working from an office outside their home may just in general like the in-person social aspect that comes along with it.
It's shocking to me to now see a narrative like what you're trying to push that labels people who want to go to the office as terrible people. Jeez, wow!
This is exactly why a lot of us DONT want to go back to the office - people holding their coworkers hostage because they don’t have a social life outside of work.
But what you're saying is NOT what the person I was responding to was saying, 'nor was it what I was responding to. I don't know if you read their post or not before replying to mine. Frankly, I'm not even sure if you even fully read my post if this is what you're zeroing in on ...
In the end it's more a financial thing IMO. When you just entered a 10 or 15 year lease right before Covid hit, you're now stuck with paying 7 years for an office you're not even using - that's objectively bad for any company's financials (and in some cases, bonuses for decisionmakers tied to stuff like "cost per employee").
The other side of rentals, the entire REIT industry, has it even worse, they're in pure panic mode: there are a lot of projects that got completed shortly before, during or after Covid... and that now lack renters while interest rates for refinancing keep going upwards as the free money ran out and central banks imposed serious rate hikes.
And if that's not enough, cities also have a problem... when people don't commute by car, they don't pay road tolls, endangering their financial calculations. When they don't commute by public transport and don't pay subscription tickets any more, the transport authorities get into financial trouble. When storefronts of bakeries, coffee shops and other ancilliary services for office drones get boarded up as no one is in the office any more to buy all that stuff, blight sets in.
Side industries are also hit: when people demand fast Internet at their homes to work efficiently or utilize other stuff such as water, electricity or trash more (because they'd have to expand their long-outdated, barely adequate service), utility providers have to invest serious amounts of money. Car insurances tied to distance driven per year lose money. The list of economic activities directly tied to an economy dedicated to people commuting from their homes to their office is really fucking long.
Hence, there are massive financial interests putting up serious efforts, both political and medial, to push for people to come back to the office even though largely only the already uber-rich profit from that.
Is that not a sunk cost? From here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
I got:
The bygones principle does not always accord with real-world behavior. Sunk costs often influence people's decisions, with people believing that investments (i.e., sunk costs) justify further expenditures. People demonstrate "a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made". This is the sunk cost fallacy, and such behavior may be described as "throwing good money after bad", while refusing to succumb to what may be described as "cutting one's losses".
Which doesn't mean some companies won't fall into the fallacy, but it's not likely to be the primary reason for RTO.
They also have a recently completed a decade long reconstruction of their campus, and yet no RTO. So what gives?
However, every employee not in the office isn't using office pens, putting wear on office furniture that will need replacement, filling office trash cans that need to be emptied by someone, burning out office light fixtures that need to be replaced, and using office toilet paper that will need replenishment.
Bringing them back to the office doesn't make the lease any cheaper, but it does make operating the space more expensive.
There's usually a break lease clause in most contracts, no? I would imagine breaking leases is pretty common in business real estate.
That commonly says that (1) the landlord must try to find another tenant, and (2) the leaving tenant has to continue paying until that happens or they reach the end of the lease.
Trying to find another tenant does not mean that the landlord has to take any extraordinary actions to do so. They just have to list the property as available and show it to people who show interest, just like they would with any other empty property they have.
Thus, it comes down to what the market is like. E.g., when I moved from Seattle I broke a lease, but my apartment was next to the University of Washington. There are always people looking for apartments next to UW so the landlord easily found another tenant.
A lot of cities right now have a glut of commercial office space available, with listings staying open for months or years. Someone breaking a lease on office space in such a city would likely finding themselves having to pay to the end of lease.
Ultimately though, I suspect return-to-office policies are not driven by current financials at all. They're driven by the emotions of senior management. Probably a combination of feelings - concern that they can't see their employees, fear (whether founded or not) that remote work is less productive, fear that some employees are doing no work and getting away with it, desire to impress someone higher up the tree who cares about presenteeism - just the usual stuff that drives big corporate decision making.
That's the definition of the "sunk cost fallacy".
"Hey, I commited to paying for something I don't need. I better force and inconvenience myself to use it then, despite this not having ANY difference in my having to pay the amount anyway".
But I'm not sure it makes sense. Why is it that CEOs were totally fine saying "oops we done goofed and overhired, sorry gotta do some layoffs now" when post-pandemic inflation hit, but they're not comfortable altering or nuancing their strategy in response to what we learned about remote work during the pandemic?
I think this is a just-so story. There's more layers to this onion.
IMHO, all the amount of issues correlated with RTO are far more complex than an onion. I'd rather compare it with a wool cloth, everything is linked tightly with everything, and the tensions that came from Covid have left some parts permanently deformed.
Seating staff level engineers next to the desktop support row, or C-suite admin row, and other loud areas with no virtuous "informal learning" overlap was the norm at my last company.
You also get to sit near idiots who want to debate politics all day or talk about the latest TV shows and sportsball. A day in the office without top of the line noise cancelling headphones is essentially a negative productivity day.
CEOs want to treat many of us like cattle into pens.
Altering their plans on RTO to fit the needs of the workers is an expression of power in the hands of those workers.
They periodically keep asking people to come in more while actually not even having enough desks in 2 of our major offices.
The desk shortage is bad enough you have to beg for consultant desks and every couple months we get a mass mail ordering everyone to stay home next week to accommodate some visitors.
So on the face of it, would seem that our company is at full utilization of office space given COVID era remote hiring & hoteling, and yet they still want to nag. They really just want employees in "how high sir?" mode, with tears in our eyes.
If companies don't have any financially viable ways to offload the real estate costs they have to weigh the pros and cons. Remote work comes with its own expenses, from software licenses only needed for remote teams to home office stipends and team off sites. None of these are required obviously, but expected by most remote workers in large tech companies.
I expect it turns into a bit of an actuarial process, trying to estimate how many quality employees you will lose versus the additional expense and potential inefficiencies of remote.
Theres also the fact that this is a perfect excuse to cut a number of employees without officially doing layoffs. If you over hired for a few years while the money rolled in you might be happy for an excuse to see people leave.
That's my point: they can't, not with the financing options they have. REIT are virtually stuck.
Not that I care much, I just wanted to offer a consolidated explanation for the whole RTO push crap of the last months.
If your goal is to force employees to come back, and many of them quit as a result, now you don't have employees to fill your empty office with and you still owe the same money for the lease. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see that coming.
> when people demand fast Internet at their homes to work efficiently or utilize other stuff such as water, electricity or trash more (because they'd have to expand their long-outdated, barely adequate service), utility providers have to invest serious amounts of money. Car insurances tied to distance driven per year lose money.
Sorry, what? The water company is hurting because I flush the toilet a couple extra times a day on one side of town instead of the other? What extra garage am I producing sitting in my office? An extra wrapper from some lunch? The power that they use in the office almost certainly comes from exactly the same source as the power used by your home.
And the whole point of pay-by-the-mile insurance is that you get it because you don't drive very much and want to save money. The insurance companies that don't get paid more when you drive more are the ones that hurt, because you're more likely to get in an accident and you're not paying extra.
None of these "side industries" are hurting, and they probably haven't even noticed.
The problem is usage patterns. Residential, sparsely populated districts have lower diameter water mains and sewage pipes, lower electricity feed capacity, small garbage cans with (bi-)weekly pickup, and often times not even enough Internet uplink for people to watch Netflix in decent quality.
High density office districts are the exact opposite, and utilities make quite the amount of money on them.
The only one that seems to apply is garbage, and possibly the internet pipes.
Do you think the weekends don't exist?
Stuff mentioned is chiefly state or city owned in Europe and works in different ways. There are no toll booths outside of motorways, the roads are free. People commute by public transport, which is mostly not private. Utilities also; although open market exists, it's always the main company (in most cases owned by country) and alternatives.
In my area 15 y.o business space lease doesn't exist. My family company had a 5 year lease contract in the 90s. Nowadays owners want even lesser contracts because the property market is very volatile and prices tend to surge up and not down. This creates problems for normal living space rental, because most of people do not want long term tenants. They want to raise the price every year.
Although these kind of models suffer losses in quarantine, they don't suffer managerial loss of profit and they don't have same goals. The point of a city owned bus transport company is to exist and provide decent service for lowest amount of money. There is not a "this is not feasible for me anymore, not bringing enough profit" situation.
Note, I'm German (living in Munich) myself, but most of the problems are valid here just as well. Public transport for example... the Deutsche Bahn, Berlin's BVG or Munich's MVG, they all have complained that they continued service during covid at a ridiculous expense and didn't get reimbursed for a large part of the expense, and on top of that now the Deutschlandticket is cutting into income even more.
I know of lots of European cities where you have to pay to drive into the city.
People commute by public transport
Again, while less common than in the US, commuting by car is incredibly common in Europe as well. I can see one of the main roads into my city from my window and it is bumper to bumper traffic every morning and afternoon.
Can you give me example of private highways (like in Texas) in EU? Is it even possible for a private entity to gather land and build road in Europe? As far as I followed (no expert on the topic), it's always state that buys land and then gives concession to the private operator, that's sometimes done for motorways.
Yes commuting by car is common worldwide but there are no megapolises in Europe that have acute public transport issues, example L.A. area.
Nothing is absolute of course, but EU is far more friendly towards non-car usage than USA. You can set a range between best and worst. Worst would be rural mid America and Balkan/eastern parts of the EU, where you need a vehicle 100% if you want to be on time on destination. Best part of the EU would probably be Benelux where you can move with train/bike combination seamlessly everywhere. That part has no analogy in USA.
Amazon is a different beast - as they're more like Walmart and less like Google and Apple.
The rest of the big tech companies people actually want to make at have ~40% profit margins, and <5% of expenses come from office space. If their offices are underutilized by 50% - that's a rounding error.
And beside Microsoft - basically none of the big tech companies have anywhere near enough space.
You've got people make $800k with less space than people who work in universities making $30k.
> When you just entered a 10 or 15 year lease right before Covid hit, you're now stuck with paying 7 years for an office you're not even using
This is priced in. The “cost per employee” metric you cite or hypothesize will stay the same regardless of whether it’s used or not. Also companies that do use this metric for bonuses are outdated. As such this is a “me” problem.
> other side of rentals, the entire REIT industry, has it even worse, they're in pure panic mode:
They wouldn’t be in “panic mode” if American cities weren’t built with these mono-zones, single purpose use (ie, “commercial only” zones, “resident only” zones, SFH only zones).
> enough, cities also have a problem... when people don't commute by car, they don't pay road tolls
Cities don’t give a shit about whether or not you take toll roads. That money is sent to the toll operator which is often sent to the state OR a private entity. Not using local road infrastructure is actually a benefit as maintenance is reduced and city workers can focus on other items. City can also defer replacing expensive local roads for just a bit longer.
> When they don't commute by public transport and don't pay subscription tickets any more, the transport authorities get into financial trouble
I guess people only take the bus for getting to and from work… For everything else, TAKE THE CAR!!1
Sadly, for many Americans this is a reality.
Again, this is a direct result of poorly designed cities around car centric transportation. Cars as the only means for getting groceries, getting to/from entertainment districts, general living.
> When storefronts of bakeries, coffee shops and other ancilliary services for office drones get boarded up as no one is in the office any more to buy all that stuff, blight sets in.
Wouldn’t be a problem in a mixed-zoned region. Walkability is key.
> when people demand fast Internet at their homes to work efficiently or utilize other stuff such as water, electricity or trash more (because they'd have to expand their long-outdated, barely adequate service), utility providers have to invest serious amounts of money.
Urban density is what pays for a large portion of these services. It’s when cities are forced to increase coverage for suburban and low density areas is where it begins to fall apart. This has been happening for decades and long before the “remote worker” demand.
Again highlighting here that car centric transportation is the main cause for these race to build suburbs. Heavily subsidized highway infrastructure is fueling the demand.
> Car insurances tied to distance driven per year lose money
This is not an issue. As a matter of fact, insurance companies hope you drive less. This deceases the likelihood of an accident and thus having to pay out. It’s when they payout claims is when they lose money. Otherwise the premiums they collects is essentially “free money”
"We bought offices so we must fill them up so the value of our offices doesn't go down."
Fuck that shit.
We've been let out of the cage that we didn't even realize we were in. Now we know. We're not going back.
I think the last sentence of my post should show what my opinion on this entire matter is. I merely wanted to provide a more detailed explanation than "CEOs be power trippin'" on why we're seeing so much RTO bullshit being pushed the last months.
As part of the ongoing internal shifts in companies, they are actually happy to see these people leave and focus on the workers that actually build their products.
From what we can see in the trends, the era of bloated HR seems to be at an end.
You know those nightmare hiring scenarios that keep getting posted on social media sites? Where companies ghost people at the offer stage, or retract offers? That's caused by incompetent talent management.
Companies that can't grow an retain talent, and the narrative that you need to job hop to grow in your career? Incompetent talent management.
This article is written from the POV of a person who was dealing with disabilities, and had challenges at work, but was still able to remain at Amazon despite several rounds of layoffs. That is a pretty solid indicator that her leadership team found her to be an effective employee.
It may not buy into the lean startup ethos, but contrary to popular belief, HR does a lot more than hiring & firing, and covering the companies butt on policy issues.
Will they? These people are also (usually) going to be the best at knowing their own value, and they can negotiate exceptions to the policy (or their managers will know their value, and get them exempted preemptively).
As a way to do soft layoffs it seems pretty ingenious.
Another factor is always housing. My spouse is on a team with a bunch of people that essentially relocated out of commute range during COVID. If you don't need to be within 45min train of SF/NYC, you can save 25-75% on housing, and probably have lower income tax rate too. A lot of these people also bought housing at 3% mortgage rates which would need to be replaced with a 7% mortgage. $200K in say PA outside Philly or CT outside Greenwich tier is absolutely killing it. $200k in Manhattan/Jersey City is permanent renter status, maybe 2 bedroom if lucky.
I'd also say that there was a 2 year peak of hopefulness that big tech jobs would become a national phenomenon.. rather than crowding all the good paying jobs into a few zip codes where you need to pay everyone a ton so they can piss all that money on overpriced housing. Yet here we are, the economy has turned and companies having the upper hand want to go back to 2019.
On the other hand, if there are advantages to collaborating in person the companies that get people back in the office may have a competitive advantage.
The culture that has grown up around remote and hybrid work in most companies is bad enough for collaboration that I bet we'll see some companies doing much better with people in the office. This isn't really because being in the office is more productive, but doing remote/hybrid poorly is worse than the average way of doing in-person work.
Nowadays I think about how much wealthy I could've been. But I'm also happy not doing astronomical amount of work. Grass is always greener on the other side. :)
$180,000 - Amazon junior (total comp)
$120,000 - 170,000 (usually straight salary) - Ohio architect with 20 years of experience
It's a very big difference. Obviously a whole different conversation when getting to L5 or whatever. We in the flyovers like to lie to ourselves that "it's not that different" and that "the COL balances it out", but the answer is no, it really doesn't. Also, many of us work 12 hour days and manage a bunch of stuff outside of our role - managing juniors, hiring, helping marketing, etc, etc. A lot wonder if it's easier to be an FTE at FAANG because that seems like it might be "just do YOUR job".
P.S. I do believe there isn't a huge skill gap a lot of the time, more of what people want to do. Some people here have been at FAANG, I have seen a lot go to FAANG, and so on. It is probably a higher average at FAANG though, with the whole bell curve shifted right a bit.
PSS If anyone has personal experience going from one of these to the other, let us know how it went for you. It seems pretty rare since there is the pay cut on one side and the leetcode hard interviews and going to the office on the other + moving and commuting 40 minutes+ every day.
No commute, less stress, lower tax brackets and cost of living, ditched one of my cars (i.e. no maintenance, no insurance, no car tax), plus way more free time. Not eating out as much and being able to cook at home has saved me a ton of money and had a net health benefit -- less calories, and less booze, too.
This is a big flaw in hierarchical organizations. If a few of your low-level workers are lazy or incompetent, it won't have a big impact on the whole company. But if a few of your executives are lazy and incompetent, it has a much larger effect.
If I were in a position that required me to go into the office I would resign asap.
I doubt my employer would do a Amazon/Grindr “move or else” on short notice but wouldn’t be surprised at a longer (6mo?) transition period.
And even if they did, the big orgs, your FAANGM types, set the scale; you're just working within it, to some degree.
Your choice is A) 190k TCO and a commute, or B) nothing... but no commute. or C) getting the market average for whatever is going in Big City Kentucky, which is like 80k for an IT role. And they might still force you to do hybrid.
RTO is dumb, but unless you're in the elite 5% of tech workers you're accepting whatever mgmt throws at you, or else you're hoping you're lucky enough to find a remote gig that's on par -- and that's rare.
Day two indeed.
If google did forced RTO, my management chain would offer that sort of exception. I probably wouldn’t take it and just leave.
Remote doesn’t work in companies that have such a top down pressure to not support remote workers.
My prediction is more enshitification for Amazon.
I am sorry what?
I'm surprised Amazon isn't a shingles factory.
The closest things I could find are Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Adjustment Disorder, Acute Stress Disorder, and Social Anxiety Disorder. But none of those quite fit the description given in the article.
There are numerous medical and mental-health conditions that become worse as a result of stress, but they're usually described more specifically, not as a stress intolerance disorder.
I would be interested in a company's ADA compliance obligations for someone who says they have a stress intolerance disorder. Is it reasonable to expect a business to alleviate anything that employee perceives as stressful?
Certain societal groups are particularly receptive to their bullshit (hint; us) and tear you to pieces if you try to tell them their "disease" is made up. It's easier to have a label for your poor psychological habits than to do the work to change yourself.
Now I'm in a gig that's WFH, with quite a few teammates also WFH, but we're effectively local to an office. There's a real possibility of my company making one of these descend on the office policies, and I will be left out of a severance package a second time. The state of worker rights is awful.
at least in the UK employers can't make unilateral contract changes
and things like working from home for 3 years (for everyone) are likely to become implied contract terms even if they're not written down
if you did want to resign as a result it seems like an easy constructive dismissal case
Not sure how legal it is to fire an employee by telling them they resigned by choice, but that's how amazon is phrasing it.
Oh, and no paper trail. Managers are told to give those instructions verbally and not in slack/email. Asking HR to confirm it and they'll tell you to call your manager.
Sad story but I'm not sure this should have been much of a surprise given Amazons announcements, eg. this in February:
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/andy-jassy-upd...
b) the article claims the RTO order was in March, but as the linked blog post shows, it was mid-February
> In March, less than a week after I moved, Amazon issued its RTO order.
Jassy announced that he thought that return to the office was best for the company in February and that RTO timetable was being planned group by group and details would be "finalized in the coming weeks".
No, but it was clear from Jassy's announcement middle of February (presumably before she actually moved) that it was almost certain she would eventually be called back to the office, hence the headline/quote that she had no idea doesn't seem credible (below). I'm arguing she continued to move knowing that there would be a very high chance she'd be called to the office and was ready to quit anyway.
> I moved states 5 days before we got the return-to-office order at Amazon, so I quit. I had no idea we'd be forced back into the office.
I think people confuse “indefinitely” with “forever”. They are not the same.