Amazon exec: it's time to 'disagree and commit' to office return despite no data | Hacker News Reader

Amazon exec: it's time to 'disagree and commit' to office return despite no data

fortune.com

76 pointssoftwaredoug171 comments

Asshole asking everybody but himself to do a hard thing, because he feels like it.

This tone-deaf entitled management bullshit is so, so exhausting. There's no way to answer his empty argument - "I just know its right". Well, good for him.

The real reason I believe? He's worried his bonus will be impacted, so he makes the easy call - casually screw everybody so he can sleep easier about his $1M christmas check.

Management makes decisions without data all the time. I understand people are personally invested, but sometimes it feels like people can't think about it, and it's all just motivated / wishful thinking.

It's a bet in a way, if they're wrong, they will be "punished" by market forces.

> they

== Everybody who does not want to go to the office, the shareholders and others involved but NOT the one making the decision based on nothing.

> if they're wrong, they will be "punished" by market forces

we live in age of monopoly, market forces no longer punish. in 1990's there were twice as many companies registered on the stock exchange as today

Disappointed this was downvoted initially, you got my +1. Corporate reality in 2023 is creeping ever closer to a Weyland-Yutani plutocratic government where "market forces" are unable to put a dent in shitty corporate behavior.

I have to fly Delta home. They cancelled my connecting flight, moved it to a day later and say "sorry, you can sleep at JFK!" The next time I fly, I've got 1/3 odds Delta will be the only one flying where I need to go.

Rinse and repeat for online merchants. This will have ZERO effect on Amazon's ability to function because employees have ZERO clout in management meetings.

What are you, a communist? The free market will fix that, any day now!

Unironically, millions of people still hold that viewpoint pretty strongly.

Many Libertarians make a point of stating it in discussion as some kind of flex even. I have no idea why, as it is basically a declaration of one's own economic ignorance, but there you have it.

People forget how much it's changed but I think that's spot on.

No I think we’ve seen clearly that management making bad decisions ends up with regular employees getting laid off.

There is no punishment for the individuals making bad bets.

Some execs feel their employees are less productive when remote. There isn't a non-gameable way to measure productivity. I can tell you with certainty who on my team is getting the most stuff done any given week or across a year, but I can't provide data as to why.

If you can't actually show it from concrete evidence, then your certainty may actually be an illusion. I have worked with busy-beaver devs who created as many issues as they fixed, in effect making no impact to the quality of the product, and with three-toed sloth types as well, who took a while to get the work done but after it was done, it stayed done.

I can show you what they got done and walk through my reasoning, but again that isn't data. The busy-beaver's metrics will probably look better despite doing nothing useful.

I think we should bid hours on tasks. If you want to undercut your teammate because they are a sheister, then you can bid it down and call their bluff. You'd need buy-in to automate the obvious stuff so sheister isn't doing make work. And you'd need buy-in to veto bad projects that shouldn't be done to begin with, aka sheister bait projects.

You can't have a team function this way normally, because everything you do relies at least indirectly on your teammates cooperating.

For me it's very easy to measure. When working remotely, I do all my tasks, and if I finish before the en of sprint, I sometimes add something from the backlog I planned to do anyway. When working from the office, I do zero tasks, because the moment someone mentions RTO I change jobs.

For you, yes. For most of my team, they're required to RTO, and they do it. Only a few people (myself included) were allowed to stay full remote, and we were told it's because we're the most productive members and also have shown no "decrease in presence" while WFH.

lol FOR NOW

they RTO and then they polish their resumes, and fill seats while they look for a new job. That's what I'd do. Office Space 'bare minimum' mode.

They already have houses with families in the Bay Area sorta near the office. They aren't going to quit just to be remote. I'm in a different situation, looking to start a family elsewhere.

there's a simple solution to this: pay more for in-office. If it is really more productive, you'll get your money's worth.

I DO NOT CARE if I am theoretically more productive in the office. My price is my WFH price, and you're paying for the amount of productivity you get when I work from home.

If you need more productivity at my depressed WFH wages and nobody will come into the office, enjoy the discount on labor and hire more bodies to make up the difference.

I am mortal and my company is not, therefore, -I- get to decide how productive I am, and the market can set an appropriate price. If you don't like the price, don't hire me! I won't be losing sleep.

Worker productivity isn't simply some fungible resource they can pay per cycle for, and there's no "I" in team. They want FTE teammates working 8/5, that's why they aren't interested in a pay-less-get-less arrangement. I've asked before why I can't take 3mo unpaid leave per year.

Last time I was looking for a job (almost exactly a year ago now) that's pretty much what I told recruiters:

"My expected salary is X; add 20% if they expect me in the office".

It's purely a question of competition: I knew I could land a remote job paying X, and did, so I had no incentive to incur extra costs and lost time to go into an office unless I was paid extra for it. I ended up turning down several offers where people didn't get the memo and thought they could talk me around. In the end I was right about my market rate WFH.

That sounds about right and similar to what I experienced last time I was looking for backup offers. You won't convince an in-office team to take a new remote employee, but you can find partially-remote teams (sometimes even within the same company), only they will offer less money.

Also, my pay was automatically reduced 10% when I went remote, not because they expect less work from me but because the market rate is different now. Not bad actually.

I'm my case I found a company where almost everyone in including the C-suite is almost entirely remote and is spread everywhere. I'd be very cautious about taking a job where being remote isn't the norm because it makes it a lot of extra effort to avoid being sidelined. In that case I might prefer going in.

Yeah, if most are in an office then you can't even trust them saying your job will remain remote. It's mixed where I am. C-suite is partially remote. Some higher-ups aren't remote, but they're in a separate city from my team. Managers on my team used to never come to the office, but lately they have been. And even in-office people are only there 2-3 days a week.

I think the biggest thing reducing my risk is the mix of office locations at this point.

WFH lets you escape crazy high real estate markets. Asking people to RTO in the Bay Area or Seattle should come with a much higher salary to make up for the gigantic housing cost difference.

Even further-out suburbs and small towns near those places can be half the cost or less, not to mention going to the Midwest or the inland West like loads of people have done.

Looking at what pay cut you get moving to each place, it mostly correlates with cost of living like you said, but not exactly.

It’s hard to measure productivity in a non-gameable way at scale no matter where people are. Manipulative social climbers excel at faking productivity in person.

Right, but they can tell how productive their workforce is overall.

This is exactly what it is in some cases. Bonus. I know about a company where execs bonuses are now based also around how many people they can get back to the office. Of course they are pushing for it.

OK I'm being naive here so educate me - surely the company wants people to produce more, so they need to create those conditions. If they bring people in, some will leave and impact productivity. So management should be careful about pissing off workers - especially with language like this exec has used - they should be doing what works and letting people have flexibility and choices.

As I said I'm being naive, so I am missing something from their way of thinking.

The deep Twitter cuts were a prime example of number of employees / productivity being orthogonal metrics. Sure, they lost a lot of advertisers and suffered some technical issues because of the transition, but it wasn't nearly as bad as everyone had predicted (myself included).

The advertiser loss might turn out to be fatal, but I would argue that was more due to a change in the direction of the company (and leveraging it up with much more debt) rather than personnel loss, per se.

They are cooking the frog. First 1 to 2 days, then as long as you're in 50% in a month. Now 3 days. Most of the people rant but give up at the end and some go elsewhere. The ones who do what they want and work from home do just that. Execs are happy when they can show 50% compliance overall so they get the bonus.

Something is very wrong with Amazon management.

They have an employee who has been with them for years, currently kidnapped by Hamas to Gaza[1]. They won't even acknowledge it.

It's a crazy thing not to acknowledge, not even in internal forums.

1: https://www-geektime-co-il.translate.goog/amazon-aws-employe...

Reminds me about how India 2016 demonetization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonet... where the argument was this will curtail black money with no data to support over a decision that affect billions of people. There were deaths related to this “I think so” moments

IMO with layoffs and RTO these companies have shown us their priority is to manage towards mediocrity and predictable business model over excellence/innovation. Those who can will leave. But that won’t hurt the company IMO, who will get plenty of “good enough” folks to join the ranks to keep the lights on.

I suspect eventually this will bite them. It already bit Google with ChatGPT who decided their priority was executing on a search business over other ways of accessing information.

But these are juggernauts companies that can f around a long time before they find out.

> IMO with layoffs and RTO these companies have shown us their priority is to manage towards mediocrity and predictable business model over excellence/innovation.

To be clear: that's always been the case.

Large enterprises prioritize predictability over excellence. That's the entire point of bureaucracy: you add a floor a the expense of also having a ceiling.

For sure. Though pre-covid, I wouldn't say many of these companies (at least perception wise) thought of themselves in those terms. They were perceived as the cool-hip tech companies that constantly disrupt industries... Now that veil has lifted.

Google fell behind ChatGPT well before they laid anyone off, forced RTO, or anything like that. They fell behind Zoom before the pandemic even happened. Having an "engineer-driven" company doesn't mean it executes well on products.

There's so many issues with large companies demanding people to return to the office, so it's at least somewhat refreshing to hear "do it because I said so", but this just isn't going to work in the long run. The toothpaste can't be put back into the tube. And this is because anyone who worked in-person at the office of a large tech company knows it's markedly worse.

For meetings, the process typically was: 1. Try to book a meeting room for a group large enough, succeed about 80% of the time and scramble at the last minute other times. 2. Wait for someone to finish up their call. If someone super senior was in the room, my meeting was guaranteed to start whenever they felt like ending their meeting, which would be 5-10 minutes late. 3. Inevitably dial into a video conference because at least one member of the team is working in a different office, so not even everyone was in person anyway 4. Run out of time at the end and having to dash to my next meeting room late.

And this doesn't even account for the fact that getting quality heads-down time in an open office floor plan was nearly impossible.

Just take the good with the bad. Make in-person meetings mandatory for important events that require in-person collaboration like design sprints, brainstorming, launches, etc.

The phrase "Disagree and commit" only makes sense when two peers (or groups thereof) agree in discussing a decision in equal terms, and committing to whatever the decision is.

Of course, the way it's used here is a perversion of an otherwise useful principle.

>>> The phrase "Disagree and commit" only makes sense when two peers (or groups thereof) agree in discussing a decision in equal terms, and committing to whatever the decision is.

Where does the "disagree" part come in to it then?

You disagree while discussing, but (ideally) you agree in advance that there will be a) a mechanism for making a decision (e.g. voting, coin flipping) and b) there will be a commitment to work on the decided approach as if it were one's own.

The opposite tends to result in endless discussions: people don't get to work in their full capacity - they still seek rebuttal, sneaking in their preferred approach, etc.

Two peers is maybe too small a group. Take 5, 4 of which think one way and 1 another. A decision must be made by end of day. By the end of the day, the outlier may not be convinced, but they should "disagree and commit" to working toward whatever the decision is.

"Disagree and commit" is also the core of Lenin's "democratic centralism" (there with a claim of adhering to the idea of discussing it on equal terms first). As you say, it can make sense in small groups, but in larger groups it quickly becomes a means to demand compliance by controlling when the debate is shut down (conveniently when you have the upper hand)

Exactly, it's a tool for forming consensus when consensus cannot be reached.

Every message of this sort gives me the distinct impression that I'm being lied to. I can't shake the feeling that they have a reason, but they're not willing to tell it to us because we would dislike that reason even more than no reason at all.

That’s because if you are talking to an executive, you are being lied to

If there's an unsavory reason, I think it's one or both of:

1. Employees slack more on average working from home. Employers want people stuck in a work-only place where they're monitored. Same as how open offices replaced cubicles "for cost reasons." I've seen evidence of this at my job.

2. They're heavily invested in physical offices in particular cities already, so much that they alone can sway the same real estate market they're invested in, and it's not a sunken cost yet.

Talking to many CEO's of mid size companies, it seems to be an extension of point 2. They have received many tax incentives from the cities in which they are located, based on the employees they have there. With WFH, the cities are threatening those tax incentives.

Typically the tax incentives are deductible property tax, except sales tax, or some type of city provided R&D subsidy to help with state level taxes.

We received these back in 2010 with a 175 person game studio and we had 3 different cities pitching for us to move there. I have received outreach on even just a 5 person company. I can only imagine what cities will do with large employers.

That's an interesting anecdote. I had no idea mid-sized companies were working with cities like that.

Aldo, the CEO reports to the board, and those board members generally are going to own diversified index funds.

They have extra-company reasons for RTO.

If 1 were true and remote employees were slacking there would be data to show that. If important work isn't being done there's going to be clear evidence of that happening. I suspect it's the second reason, plus power tripping.

There's hardly such thing as data on productivity. Even if they're using some metric like time spent AFK, the execs wouldn't want to give away their methods.

IMO the answer is so boring that it defies belief.

People who like being in charge pursue jobs where they're in charge. When you're a manager and you can't look around and see your minions hard at work, you don't feel like you're in charge.

It's really that simple.

I feel the same. I mean, if I heard "I want you back so that we can control you better" or "We're afraid you are doing side jobs", I would be probably as mad at them as now, but at least I would feel some respect for them being honest.

I mean, really, why should I feel any loyalty if I know (and they know, too!) I'm lied to?

People ascribe all kinds of bad motivations (ego, stupidity, etc) to execs who want a return to office but there's a much more obvious and reasonable explanation - if your job consists of sitting in meetings all day, work is much, much more enjoyable if you're in office.

No amount of money (that anyone would be willing to pay me) could get me to sit on Zoom all day.

Except that in any size of company, your meetings are going to be conference/video calls (at least for some of the participants) anyway. Fortunately, I'm mostly not but a lot of the people I work with are on video calls most of the day.

> if your job consists of sitting in meetings all day, work is much, much more enjoyable if you're in office.

But is that someone else's problem?

Given that the people who sit in meetings all day are also the ones who have most of the power, probably yes.

I'd rather solve this problem by organizing the work day so that it's not meetings all day long, rather than requiring people to go to the office to waste time in presence.

Meetings all day is the job for execs, though. That's why they all favor return to office.

Really? They don't have anything better to do? What a poor career choice! In my naivety I had assumed that an exec's job was to help a company run smooth, and instead they have to sit through meetings all day long. Life is really hard on some people...

I believe we are seeing the last few "twitches" of "Office work". Work from home (for office type work) is here to stay and will never leave.

I feel loneliest, when I'm at the office. Even if just one person for a meeting is at home, EVERYONE just logs in for the online meeting. It's handier, better organized, make meeting notes together, etc, etc.

So beeing in the office for such meetings means I need to find a quiet spot, or alienate everyone in the call with a noisy mic.

And when I'm actually trying to get work done, I remember why open floor office's are hell.

No sorry, WFH is here to stay. In fact, I do believe we have crossed a threshold where it just cannot be stopped anymore.

As someone who commutes into Seattle, the Mondays and Friday where amazon people don't go in are the best

https://web.archive.org/web/20231129174929/https://fortune.c...

First time posting an archive / access link. If this link doesn’t work for anyone, feel free to hide this post. I’ll monitor and delete if it’s failing / not helpful.

Worked great for me! Thanks!

I suspect the real reason is pressure from local governments missing out on tax revenue.

> have [a] backbone, disagree, and commit

If you had a backbone and disagreed, doesn't that mean you should defy them?

Standing up and saying something is wrong still requires a backbone, even if you take it no further. There are a lot of people who won't even go that far.

Yes, but the word backbone isn't being applied to disagreeing - the people being addressed are already disagreeing. The word is being applied (dishonestly, disrespectfully, and antagonistically) to "committing".

The wording isn't really optimal. I think the intent is that you should show backbone and disagree with a plan if you don't agree with it but you should then commit if the decision ultimately goes against you.

The basic formulation originally comes from Intel. The idea is that if you don't get your way you shouldn't constantly try to force a re-examination of the decision as often happens.

It comes from Amazon's Leadership Principles (LPs) [1] which honestly feel like the vestiges of the company's heyday. The two new ones (at the bottom) were added by Andy Jassy when he took over and are a joke within the company. But here's what this post's title is referring to

> Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

> Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

[1] - https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...

In a way, we should be thrilled that the perception is that in-office work is better: less outsourcing. If i can work remove from Indiana, I can work remote from India.

I'm very surprised that the takeaway from COVID wasn't just to have people work remotely from the lowest-wage countries in the world.

In general this is not the case and that's exactly why it hasn't happened significantly for companies that embrace remote. This is one more of the remote work myths that keep getting repeated.

As someone who works in a very remote team, it's much harder to collaborate with people in very distant time zones. You can do remote work and have PLENTY of interaction over video, chat, audio etc. But you lose all of that when all the interactions are very slow and fully asynchronous.

Additionally - and that's a separate problem - doing remote work with people in other countries has an entire different set of problems. Work culture, legislation restricting hours, language barrier (even with India), etc. These problems are unrelated to remote work in general are related to outsourcing work.

> In general this is not the case and that's exactly why it hasn't happened significantly for companies that embrace remote.

Anecdote of one, but my company is fully embracing Canada and UK. We had multiple rounds of layoffs and all the new headcount is in those 2 countries.

> timezones, Work culture, legislation restricting hours, language barrier

None of that applies to Canada. And I can tell you first hand that Canadian salaries are lower than even the cheapest parts of the US. Canada is also rolling out red carpets to IT people around the world including H1B refugees, so worker supple is not an issue. Even for UK, only the timezone matters. It is very much compatible with the and work culture.

Canada offers limited outsourcing opportunities from the US perspective. Population is only a bit over one tenth of the US and there is already a significant brain drain to the US due to higher salaries and ease of moving. Canada also has strict labor regulations and a "union problem" which aren't very appealing to US companies. The UK suffers from similar problems on top of the timezone issue.

The company where I work has an office in both of these countries, but they only have a fraction of the US-based employees (and not growing in either). Most of the growth in the company is happening in the cheaper parts of the US instead.

Hmm, anecdotally in my company, we have no problem recruiting as many Canadians as we want.

And I agree: I perform certain tasks better when occasionally doing that face to face.

My employer does not however own some form of magical right for my “best performance every day all of the time forever and ever”.

Suck it up employer.

Wielding cultural values as a bludgeon from a position of authority weakens all of a company’s cultural values.

No issues with this. Get a full remote job somewhere else if you dont want to go to office.

Source: 10y+ remote exp

"This doesn't immediately impact me so I have no issues with this"

It does impact him. His employment opportunities are just as restricted by in office policies as everyone else in the industry.

Follow the site guidelines and refrain from bull** replies.

Would you be mad if your employer forced you to move and revoked remote work?

Because that's exactly what's happening to the thousands of COVID era Amazon employees hired under a full time remote contract.

It's fully within Amazon's rights to change the terms of the contract, just as it is with your employer, but that doesn't mean the people impacted can't complain about it, and it definitely has an effect on reputation for the stability of employment agreements Amazon offers.

I wouldn't exactly be mad, I'd quit. So far haven't had to, but I had Amazon and other offers ready in hand last year in case that was needed.

If my employer pays me more salary to compensate for the things/times I will lose by going to office, I might say yes. Else I'll find another job. They'll have to pay me severance/give notice period etc too.

Don't join companies like Amazon who will _never_ go full remote. Just because you joined a company _at a time_ when it was _forced_ to remote by external circumstances (act of God or biolab), doesn't mean you can expect that way of work to remain as it is once that circumstance is resolved.

Just like working remote has a lot of benefits, it has tons of issues. I know because I've worked 95% of my career remote. I would _never_ recommend remote to any Junior or even Senior SDE. It is bad for your career+skill growth (for some it is opposite; like me; but that's a tiny minority). And this is just one issue.

And no. No reputation/stability is harmed for companies like Amazon for this. There are plenty of people who knew these companies will RTO sooner or later; in fact it is surprising they didn't do it sooner.

Interviewing around, there's been no shortage of remote offers with good comp over the last few years. Idiots like this guy are just costing his teams good engineers. If you assume that X% of good engineers prefer WFH, no matter what you think the value of X is, he is costing his teams them, and placing them at a strategic disadvantage compared to smarter competition.

Is good comp amazon level?

I am under the impression that there are not a whole lot of companies who are salary competitive w/ amazon outside of FAANG, and most of FAANG is pushing RTO

People make decisions and prioritize what's most important to them.

IIRC, Amazon wages weren't that great to begin with.

levels.fyi shows amazon total comp within a few percent of google's for comparable roles

I left Amazon (b/c they wanted me to move to Seattle) for a remote job at a smallish startup paying 10% more. So, yes.

That's great to find one but if somebody told me they were cross shopping a bunch of full remote offers on target w/ amazon total comp I'd be surprised

Amazon sucks. I worked there years ago and it was terrible.

AWS is over priced garbage and Prime offers nothing of value.

Bezos was smart to cash out when he did.

The reality is: they have the data and the data shows that productivity is more or less the same. However, they (the execs) prefer to have everyone back in the office to keep tax incentives, real estate value and probably also because they (old school executives with strong people skills) genuinely think that in office is better.

So why isn't this an environmental/climate change issue. These corporations that want employees that can work from home to burn fuel and emit CO2 in order to travel to the office unnecessarily should be shamed for their lack of compassion and vision. These same corporations claim to be driving toward carbon neutral while simultaneously pushing for CO2 increase via their employees travel.

It’s an issue about this for sure. But also affordability, time to commute, rearrange lives, etc and other burdens to go into an office that the C-suite doesn’t contend with.

RTO/WFH becomes kind of obvious given a certain distance to the office.

If I live 10-20 mins from office, I probably go all the time. If I live 90+ minutes a visit to the office upends my life.

Only a small subset of people live close to offices. In part because cities have been poorly designed and housing costs are insane right now.

My company is forcing a one day a week RTO (badge scan requirement). I have been firm with them. My day will not be any longer and travel time is coming out of it. At home I get on at 8am and sign off at 5pm. So on my RTO day I leave home at 8am, travel to the office, scan and take a meeting or two, then head home. I still sign off at 5pm. All told, they lost an hour plus of productivity from me.

All around it's so obnoxious. Ya, my CEO doesn't mind RTO because he has grown kids, has a driver, has a home chef, etc...

I always find it fascinating the amount of large scale time waste corps are willing to commit themselves to just to prove to themselves that they are the ones running the show.

Ammoral out of touch douches like this deserve all their workers to quit and show them they are nothing without us making them all their money.

This is really what people should be hammering home. These companies are so worried about not appearing carbon neutral or sustainable that they will go to great lengths to prove they are whenever they can. Hitting them over the head with this is the only way you’ll be able to embarrass them enough to affect change.

Its not a climate change issue, I have no data to back it up but I know its not (cit)

My team is fully distributed across the globe yet they are tracking my badge swipes to an office an hour away where no one else works. The environmental impact of this just drives me nuts. Not to mention the danger to my personal well being and the cost.

They don't know how to track performance here either so I know they aren't making data based decisions.

And you're tolerating an employer who treats you like a child, why? There are so many other employers who will treat you like the adult that you are.

They've just started this enforcement. Career change takes time :)

the market is really tightening up. people love to say if you can't find a job it's b/c you're not skilled blah blah but if your making good money it may be hard to find another job at that income level.

If you're reasonably polyglot then finding a well-paying job isn't too hard - the market is already swinging back towards favoring talent and open positions are climbing (at least according to an interview I listened to the other day [1]). Of course, if you're coming from the likes of Amazon then I'd be inclined to agree: 400k+ is a rarity - but you'd probably be able to pull it off by migrating to another MOFAANG.

Edit: in addition, if you are 400k+ you'd probably enjoy the privilege of skipping the interview and even having a position opened for you.

[1]: https://rustacean-station.org/episode/cedric-sellmann/

Favouring talent? The recruiters won't know how good you are. Talent doesn't help. Recruiting is more or less random in my experience.

For upper level MOFAANG engineers earning more than 400k?

How many of these people actually exist worldwide?

Maybe try to make your advice more applicable to at least 5% of the population?

That's moving the goal posts.

The first reply was concerned about the pay scale and 300-400k are scarce but usually available. So either you are in the < 400k camp where jobs are typically available, or you are in the > 400k camp where you don't have to worry about job availability.

Overall, if your opinion is that jobs aren't available with your pay scale, have you recently searched for one?

>400k and fully remote is still not easy. Most of the obvious high payers in big tech (e.g. Meta) have required days in the office, and I can think of very few high-paying companies that don’t have N days RTO at all levels (literally only Netflix off the top of my head).

It is also not the case that such people get in without interviews. Senior+ (though largely staff+) is generally when you can make 400k and there are definitely still grueling interview loops at those levels.

This moves the goal posts yet again. I did ask the root commenter why they were tolerating being treated like a child.

Sorry, I didn’t remember the start of the thread by the time I got here. But in later comments you said “in addition, if you are 400k+ you'd probably enjoy the privilege of skipping the interview and even having a position opened for you” and “or you are in the > 400k camp where you don't have to worry about job availability”, both of which I disagree with and provided counter examples for. So, one being in the 400k+ camp does not make it any easier to find an equally well-paying job, hence toleration for being treated like a child.

Agreed. Finding remote jobs seems easy, the challenge is finding remote jobs that are interesting and pay close to my current salary.

I'd accept a 10-20% salary hit to skip my 20m commute 3 days a week, but so far the only options have been for 40%+ lower salaries or work that I am less interested in. For me that tradeoff is not worth it.

eff your personal well being but don't take it personally it's just your part of some cohort the elite have dictated must return to the office. you see we've calculated out that we sell the building at a loss of x dollars if we attempt to sell right now, and our other buildings have a couple years left on the lease and can't get out of that, plus we already pumped y dollars into renovations in this building plus we received tax breaks to come to these communities to offer you poor slobs jobs and now the mayors and governors are threatening to take back those tax breaks if we don't get buts in seats soon. Now we now some of you will leave and we've factored that into our calculus. The math says x% will leave which is totally acceptable and way cheaper than breaking leases or pissing off governors and that sort of thing. /sarcasm

Not sure why you added /s, this is exactly what’s happening.

I recall hearing 'your odds of dying in a car wreck are 1 in 18'. I'm not sure what the injured or disabled number is, but it can't be good.

Same here, I commute 3 days a week to work in an office alone. There is not a single person I work on a project with in the office. Everyone I work with is distributed from East to West coasts and larger cites in between.

> My team is fully distributed across the globe yet they are tracking my badge swipes to an office an hour away where no one else works.

Do they need to be distributed around the world or is that just an artifact of past hiring decisions?

What's the alternative? They don't want to pay a full team SV or NYC wages that's for sure. There's not many places they can just layoff and re-hire what would be tens of thousands of people. Total headcount is north of 100k. I'm not sure what it would be including contractors. Are they gonna pay support roles like scrum masters and admin assistants NYC wages too?

We have offshore resources on the team too to maintain a 24 hours global presence. Europe and India. So are we onshoring to night shifts too?

Any large company is going to have a lot of locations, both to take advantage of wage disparities and because people are often resistant to packing up and moving. Teams can sometimes be colocated but, especially with so much location-independent hiring over the past few years, the norm is that people are scattered all over the place and it's pretty hard to but the genie back in the bottle absent massive organizational and people changes. So, to the degree you communicate in real-time, you're going to be on Zoom a lot.

They already have work locations allowed per department. Mine has 3 in the US and 4 abroad, but we work with others in far more. I could see them trying to move the number of work locations allowed down by shuffling people around or laying off but that'd just be a horrendous undertaking.

Is Amazon hiring scrum masters?

> danger to my personal well being and the cost

I don't know what your personal situation is, and you don't have to go into any detail, but how/why is coming to the office affecting your personal well being?

driving every day is more dangerous than not driving every day. job is basically saying take a small chance to be injured every day that we don't have to insure to keep your job.

> driving every day is more dangerous than not driving every day

Can't disagree there. Do you also do thing like having groceries/shopping delivered to your place of residence, to avoid having to leave the house. Or do you still walk/commute/drive/travel to things that most would consider part of everyday life?

of course i drive/bike/walk in daily life. the risk is proportional to miles traveled. adding 10-50 a day compared to 10-50 a week is quite a bit. is that snark

Not to mention the lost time of everyone commuting. There is likely hundreds of human lives worth of time wasted every day due to commuting, then there are the actual lives lost in traffic accidents... driving is one of the most dangerous things we do.

Because they don't actually care. They just want butts in seats so they can get tax incentives. Attrition is a bonus to lower employee costs.

Amazon offices are typically located in transit-accessible places, aren't they? People choosing to live in places where they need a car to do anything are the "problem" here...

This sounds like “victim” blaming.

Amazon, like other big companies, hired people during Covid telling them it was a fully remote job. Now these companies are telling the same employees to now come into the office.

Why blame employees here?

Did they tell them it was fully remote indefinitely? Sure, I guess if people believed that then that can be unfortunate for them, but if they lived out in the boonies,they most likely they have a huge CO2 footprint anyway unless they never leave their home, making the climate change argument seem slightly disingenuous to me...

> Did they tell them it was fully remote indefinitely?

Yes. I was hired during COVID and the recruiters kept telling me that the job will be remote forever. They also told current employees that they can feel free to move and work remotely and to let them know if they change states for tax reasons.

I asked for that in writing and they gave it to me in writing.

Well, that's pretty messed up then!

Have you actually taken a bus into Seattle? It's not much of a choice between the $1.5M house near the office and the $350k house twice the size 40 minutes away.

There are no houses that cheap 40 minutes from Seattle...

Port Orchard has some in the 400-500 range, but the ferry commute isn't ideal.

I've only been to Seattle a few times (though I did ride the bus downtown from the airport before the airport Link was built). My understanding is that Seattle has a robust suburban commuter bus and ferry network (though admittedly, a lacking commuter rail network...).

Here in Chicago, I believe Amazon has offices at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Center_(Chicago) which is a place where driving makes very little sense.

Have you seen a transit map of Seattle? I'm guessing not by that comment.

I asked this question. They told me RTO is carbon neutral. They had complicated models but the gist of it was that the efficiency of heating and cooling one office is less carbon than everyone at home doing it for themselves and that people at the office are forced to run errands more efficiently resulting in an equal number of car trips.

They weren’t interested in counter arguments about how with the other people at home the house has to be heated/cooled anyway.

I wonder if their numbers factor in the hundreds of SUVs idling for hours as they creep through rush hour traffic…

I think their carbon calculations also assume that nobody closes those now nearly empty offices. If they do... then there is no way for it to be carbon neutral. RTO is the clear winner.

Because the Democrats are the party of climate change mitigation and their fantasy is everyone being forced to live in an urban shoebox, renting everything, utterly dependent on the state until they die.

I hate to point out the obvious, but expecting vision and compassion from the guys who make their workers pee in a bottle and work their factory workers to death is like expecting COP28 being hosted by oil sultans to focus on actual climate change policies.

They want you in the office, overworked, overcommuted, no time to think for yourself. They want you tired and in a constant loop. How dare we ask our corporate overlords for their reasons and for data? We are supposed to postpone having a life, free time, friends, family, and spend hours of our days traveling in air polluting metal containers to an office to do work that we can easily do from home. If that demoralizes you, you aren't hustling enough.

Corporations brought to you the great Pacific Garbage Belt, global warming, alcohol and smoking marketing, the opioid crisis, the cost of living crisis, at least one or two wars, and possibly the end of mankind.

We should not be astonished by these greedy amoral husks of humans' lack of vision and compassion. We should hold them accountable for their evil and bring them to down their knees and remind them that without workers, they are nothing.

A tax credit based on work from home days per employee would do more for emissions reduction than many other more expensive options.

Because claiming to care about climate change is greenwashing bullshit that sounds good in PR statements and self important fart smelling events that CEOs attend, but in the end is a box-ticking exercise.

No one measures the environmental impact of unnecessarily forcing office workers to the office, the press doesn’t ask corporate leaders about their hypocrisy, so leaders just force workers back the consequences be damned.

Are employees who work remote taking more vacations and having a higher impact because of air travel? As long as everyone is getting paid just as much, it seems like the environmental impact would be the same.

Remote work necessitates bigger houses by needing a separate room for home office. People also tend to gravitate to suburbs, exurbs or rural areas and buy bigger homes. So I am not really sure how the equation works - you gain the carbon saved in commute, but you lose the carbon due to the higher footprint of larger homes. Would love to see a scientific study here.

(August 3, 2023)

> I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.

Yup. Sounds about right. Data-driven to hell and back. Once the employment market recovers Amazon is going to be screwed big time.

Well, given that Amazon execs have made so many bad decisions with data, it might be he's right to call for this one without any supporting evidence whatsoever.

If you have no choice, you have no choice and that's too bad. The bright side is that eventually the job market will come back and there will be plenty of remote positions again, the cat's out of the bag and when the job market is hot they'll have no choice but to complete for talent. So if you have to go back, just go back until the next cycle and then dump this turd of a company for a better one.

What I don't understand is all these companies are having their best profits ever since the pandemic with their employees mostly working from home.

Why exactly are they looking for ways to screw that up?

“I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better”

I’d like to see this asshole waste 2h every day in public transport and get less work done because of a noisy open-plan office.

I suspect he drives to work. Or is driven to work.

Just like I knew it was right to decline an Amazon interview. Except I have data like this.

Another day, another reason to tell Amazon recruiters to pound sand.

People need to stop using data as an excuse for making decisions, or apologizing for not having data, or arguing about the lack of data as an excuse for maintaining a status quo. As entrepreneurs, as managers, as individuals we make decisions with no perfect data all the time. It's called dealing with risk.

Sure you could get a sense for how much active coding time or whatever BS metric you can track, and look at correlation with WFH, but that stuff is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. How's new grad onboarding affected? How's team culture and conflict management affected? How is dealing with difficult health challenges affected? Working remotely is a big shift with likely long term longitudinal effects on an organization that are hard to predict. You can't A/B test or analyze your way out of every single decision there. So I respect people making decisions without data on this, that's what they're being paid the big bucks for. As I'm sure they will respect my decision to leave the minute the terms of the arrangement no longer suits me, which will add a data point of N=+1 somewhere.

It's ok to ask to see the data if you're curious. But people are often asking for data not out of curiosity but just because they disagree with the consequences of a decision that affects them. I think that's disingenuous. You could deploy a team of data scientists to tell me that the org will definitely be 5% more productive if everyone worked from some office an hour away, and it wouldn't really matter to me. I still prefer having a remote work option and I won't commute more than 40 min to work. We don't need to ask for data about things we don't like, we can just disagree and either commit or create the attrition outcomes that will drive different behaviors in the future.

Disagree and Commute

If they're doing this with no data they are probably doing everything else with no data.

Based on the fucking clown show I see behind the scenes at AWS from a big customer perspective, it appears it's squeaky noses and big feet right up to the top.

Edit: they have data they're just ignoring it because it doesnt support their conclusio.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles

> Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

In this context, “leaders” is (at least) aspirational, and meant to include all employees. I have a good deal of experience with the LPs, though I can’t claim to be an expert in evaluating the merits of their various applications. Particularly with this one, as it appears to be sort of encouraging situations that are more likely lead to discord and conflict. I would venture that, in my experience, this one is one of the more highly prone to differing interpretations among individuals. The times I have seen it used, or examples broadcast of its value, it is used in the spirit of starting or engaging in a good faith discussion, and at some point concluding a time box to the discussion by one party asking another to disagree and commit. In other words, two well-intentioned parties that both have meaningful contributions to the discussion (and represent that they understand the other party also has meaningful contributions) reach an impasse and know they need to get past it. By invoking disagree and commit, they both agree to commit their full energy and attention to the same concluded direction, work to see the success of that path, and (usually) discuss as an after action lessons learned, so that future disagreements of a similar nature can point to the data / conclusions to make better decisions. Again, I don’t know I have the best understanding of this LP, and it has not come up often for me personally, so I welcome feedback here from others with experience.

This is completely independent from my opinion on this particular issue, which I will omit. It does differ somewhat from the representation in the reporting:

> In other words, once any company decision is made, workers are expected to fall in line, even if they disagree with it

Well, at least he's honest

Define "office"

"Because I said so" is the beloved argument of narcissists throughout time. Get in line folks, office rush hour is gonna be a doozy.

This is from August, c'mon

Lots more recent discussions:

2 months ago

I moved states just before the return-to-office order at Amazon, so I quit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37641660

2 weeks ago

Amazon to staff: Come into the office or your promotion is at risk https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38278074

Classic corporate bullshit, smellier than usual since it comes from a company that claims to be data-driven.

> I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.

well, if that’s the new bar…

don’t have data to back it up, but, i know that not only is he wrong, he’s a sociopath.

And that from the same companies that insist on open office spaces? Shocker! /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com