Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
cnbc.com
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Guess what? I'm going on 1 year fully remote, and I'm doing great! Turns out, all that fancy equipment can be brought home with you. We deal with a contract manufacturer, and emailing them from home is no harder than emailing them from the office. Instead of being stuck in a concrete jungle, I can go test the product out in a more realistic environment in the park across from my home. It's made me happier, healthier AND more productive. Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Who'da thunk it?
I have much better no-interruption stretches of programming which yields better results overall.
Let's stop pretending that remote work is new. I've worked remotely on and off from the beginning of my career. Majority of my mentors have been remote, at least two of whom I've never met "on real life" - one of whom shared tremendous technical experience over 18 months we worked together three provinces away, other who has taught me corporate life and consulting skills from four provinces away (I'm in Canada, think states:).
I've spent four years as ops manager recently on a troubled project and I agree thay extreme situations under shared duress can build a specific, very strong kind of bond (not the only kind, mind you!). It's just that physical presence is completely orthogonal to it.
I have a hard time believing all this concern is for "young generation and their social and mentoring opportunities". Young generation grew up with remote and social networking infused in their lives (for better or for worse, separate conversation :)! If a senior person doesn't know how to mentor or communicate remote, let's be upfront on that and discuss it openly and coach them. But let's not blame the "juniors" for that :-).
People say this, but "this is the kind of true bonding experiences with which I'm familiar" isn't the same as "this is the only way true bonding can occur." I'm certainly old enough to remember the dismissive scoffing in the '90s that true friendships are made only in person, not with people online.
As a senior engineer, I benefit from remote work. But it’s sad to see those informal lunches replaced with Zoom “coffee.”
But if you really think there is no difference between these two things then you are living in a fantasy world.
Proximity does a lot to encourage socialization between super senior people and super junior people.
Without proximity, it's much easier for either side to put off or brush off things that would be good mentorship opportunities. You don't have to go into work the next day and see your coworker face to face to explain why you ditched them on that pair coding session or whatever it may have been.
All this is just made up bullshit though.
It’s not bullshit. It’s perhaps exaggerated, and many of the “work from a desk in a specific building” people are the ones who can’t mentor them anyway, but there are benefits in
It doesn’t have to be, you can mentor people in a fully remote environment, but it’s far harder for most ok both sides - especially for young people and people on HN that think WFH means you don’t actually have to work.
I could see it be the other way around, or various factors balancing each other out. From my experience the current young generation is more willing to trade money for QoL , and quit when they feel QoL is bad, than the previous one.
How did the last 40 years of tech do it? Were the boomers that invented all this stuff resigning left and right or not have children? Did I misread history about Bill Gates sleeping in his office or did he run MS from his kitchen table?
Nowadays I go to the office (open space) only during evening hours when at most 2 hackers are there. Working from home probably not productive when you have smaller kids. Maybe good for the kids though.
Yes, Bill Gates worked like a maniac and didn't see his family. His wife took care of the kids. I think that's a terrible example to set (I wouldn't want to do it) but each to their own.
Yes, these policies are quiet layoffs.
Perhaps something of a corollary of the saying, don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. The Amazon senior folks making these decisions almost certainly have reasons. If people quit, maybe they just don't care who it is. I really wonder if they AB tested RTO. Given it is Amazon, I would put a small wager they have.
Further, the impact between middle managers and individual contributors is uneven in remote work. The article mentioned there was a desire to reduce management. Remote work was an interesting experiment IMO to show the (lack of) effectiveness of middle management. Perhaps the impact to ICs is negative, but the middle management can be more effective. Arguably that would give greater "focus" on the specific KPIs desired by the VP level. Again, would be super fascinating to know the data used by Amazon here, of if this is a rare decision truly made by fiat alone.
Others have mentioned Amazon's real estate holdings. I kinda think that is likely. Amazon made huge investments to stop leasing offices and to build and own their own offices. If nobody is there, the surrounding neighborhood is devalued, in turn devaluing the offices further. It would be s considerable loss on paper. ICs perhaps are about as effective in office under a whip compared to remote, and if some quit - then maybe all the better to reduce head count.
“Now what — I say! — what's the big idea bashin' me on the noggin' with a rollin' pin!”
My view is that offices were a thing because there was no technology to do otherwise and back then equipment was too large / expensive to be kept at employee's place.
Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.
Often the owners also have shares in the business and influence this return to office aka sustain my property portfolio nonsense
Bingo! Many companies are invested in real estate, and having the ticking time bomb of empty offices vs unsustainable office rent finally implode would be bad financially. Hence, the push everywhere to return to the office.
The benefits of being in a physical office disappeared 20 years ago. COVID accelerated the formation of globally distributed teams. To now go back to commuting 2-3 hours a day, just to do your Zoom calls from and office desk, is insanity.
My boss goes in to the office even on non-office days.
If I still lived in an apartment - ie, no separate room at the house to use as an office - I'd probably go in most days as well.
COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then
The worst part of this RTO phase is those who were previously(pre covid) afforded permanent WFH or x days WFH at the time of hiring are also forced to go to office without exceptions.
I went and got my minivan, loaded it with the contents of my lab, and took it home. Then I ordered high speed Internet service. A few days later the schools closed, and my family was all working at home. I already had some lab space at home due to my side business.
Now, I didn't really mind working from work. It's a few minutes bike ride from my house.
Oddly enough, things were happening so quickly that even being a few days or weeks ahead of the game meant that we were charting new territory within our company, which is a large multinational. For instance, with no specific location, we started collaborating beyond our original group. We improved our use of rapid prototyping services. We got a lot done despite, I think, having a more relaxed pace of work. Though I work in "hardware," what that means in this day and age is spending somewhere between 0 and 100% of your time programming. I spent a lot of time programming while looking out the window, taking a break and going for a walk, and so forth.
It was also comforting to go back, eventually. I like the people. It could get lonely at home. I'm definitely not a introvert.
(Edited to clarify: March 2020)
For someone expected to create a lot of IP, this was great.
And then management started screaming we should get back the office. Which I did enjoy... For about 1-2 days a week.
True nescessity has a way of cutting through all the usual crap.
RTO is an eyewash.
At home I am so much more productive and zero commute.
Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office (doing email, reading other docs, meetings which are always with remote folks anyway but at least they see a genuine meeting room or phone booth behind my pretty face, so I guess that counts? ;)
An added benefit of this is that it makes working from home look more productive, if they're keeping score :)
Yes, there will be some pressure pushing back and dread by corporations stuck between the ol’ rock of competition and the government-favor hard place, but it is unlikely to win out at the corporate level unless some real independent competition rises that is putting on massive pressure by not having commercial real estate capital expenditures.
A small office in a city can easily cost $1M per year, sure there are tax benefits, but they’re not benefits if you are competing with someone that does not have those expenses at all or far fewer, even after paying for team meetups that also fund a family vacation.
I don't see how real estate companies can influence companies/tenants, they don't hold much power here since everyone is shrinking or cancelling their leases
Where I work, RTO is partially Finance driven, bean counters just don't like seeing seats they paid for go empty
Same here. Leaders up the chain get a "use it or leave it" mail for office space and suddenly everyone is asked to keep those seats warm by coming in x days a week.
If leadership wants people to RTO instead of just giving up seats, then it's 100% on them.
Problem is office space doesn't work like that when the entire team is in on 'office' days to collaborate, you need the all seats. If you right size down to 60% seats (3 days office, 2 home) and have people rotate, you lose the 3 in-office collaborative days because everyday it's likely 30% of people are dialling in from home. You save 40% rent but it's closer to full remote in terms of collaboration.
Only in the short term. It left the desirable parts of the building empty. It might be possible to rent out this space. That's what happened when the company I worked for downsized the factory; they just partitioned the building and rented out the empty space.
Tldr: fear of looking bad because metrics are more important than actual results
As you may be surmising, this not only carries rather major domestic risks if pension and other domestic funds start crumbling, but it also has massive implications for foreign countries’ domestic financiers and social stability, but it also has geopolitical implications from it.
During the post housing fraud period, a rather understated change was implemented to encourage accounting to not mark real estate to market value, i.e., record what the market is willing to pay, but rather keep real estate on the books for whatever value one would like to keep it at by various methods and practices.
What that essentially affected was a cooking of the books to prevent on book from showing losses. It is essentially still going on, but especially in commercial real estate since the COVID happenings.
You now still have massive buildings essentially still totally empty, all still valued at full occupation valuation even though they are, e.g., only taking in barely enough to cover operating costs in a freeze state, i.e., minimal services.
This is where things like property taxes come in, as the properties are still assessed at fabricated values, and property taxes are used to fund the local governments, everyone with financial interests in commercial real estate (many, because it was considered very safe) are now crying for mom. It gets a bit off topic here, but I think you get the gist.
That theory is bullshit though. Yes, there are companies that stand to lose if office buildings clear out. But they're not the same companies that make the RTO decisions. The companies making those decisions could actually gain if they ditched the office buildings... facility cost is some absurdly large line item on the ledger for most businesses.
Without a clear connection between the two, I have to chalk this up to irrationality. Companies are still run by humans, and humans are irrational more often than rational. Especially with something like this, where there's no clear precedent to steer by.
But honestly, I think a lot of companies are just doing this instead of layoffs or in addition to small “don’t raise eyebrows” layoffs. Raise the pain to get attrition.
Or, as we have seen hundreds of times, it's sold at market price to a "third party" company that is actually owned by one of the board members or executives, which then rent it back to the company for a slight premium.
But this isn't the norm, and it's not happening to well-managed businesses. It's something a vulture does after the company has been struggling for years. If that happened with a Microsoft or an Amazon, or any of the companies we work for. It's silly to suggest that is the cause of widespread RTO mandates.
That being said:
Deflating a real estate bubble is painful, just ask China. By artificially keeping up demand for office spaces through unnecessary RTO, banks and governments avoid having to go through that, at least for the time being.
And yes, with (partially government-guaranteed) mortgage-backed securities and all that, large-scale devaluation of commercial real estate is going to be a huge pain.
In NYC where the vacancy situation is particularly dire, politicians have been banging the RTO drum for a while.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/wall-stre...
I find this argument uncompelling as everyone can obviously see that things changed since February 2020, and sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad. It could easily have been the correct decision to acquire more office space years back and it could just as easily now be the correct decision to divest that office space if more workers are remote, and it's not anyone's fault for not having seen into the future that there'd be a global pandemic.
Certainly nobody will blame managers for real estate decisions which were made prior to 2020. But a large number of companies revised expectations that workers would return to office as late as Q1 2023 and some even later.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/5/15/23721410/return-to-...
> sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad
Sure. In a rational world, the office space costs are sunk and everybody just moves on. But seeing that RTO just decreases competitiveness for hiring without hard benefits to show for, this indicates that the decisions are not rational. The sunk cost fallacy is easy to fall for, and that is even before considering how business leadership roles attract narcissists who have a hard time taking blame for anything.
Occams razor requires you to drop assumptions that aren't required to explain a thing. A conspiracy involves a lot of extra stuff, furthermore it is often hard to find evidence for - usually because they just don't exist. There are so many problems with them, it should really be a matter of last resort.
Conspiracies do exist of course, but I feel you should only use time to explain the world if you have sound evidence, and still be open to falsification.
The "owning class" consists of a bunch of companies managed by a revolving door of middle management and an even faster revolving door of upper management. And they don't own a damned thing.
I've worked in places where sales people were seated next to programmers, and the sales people were shouting through their phones continuously. The programmers complained endlessly about all the noise - without effect. First lockdown we had showed an increase of at least 300% productivity - hard and reliable numbers because all output was tracked voluntarily by the team (management never asked for this). Number of builds, commits, releases...everything was way up. It was quite shocking.
As soon as lockdowns were lifted managers began talking about being in the office fulltime, because it was so good to talk to each other and align your work. I remember working in a team that did 1 day a week at the office, that day we couldn't get anything done because everybody was just chit chatting all the time. Even if you wanted to - it was just impossible to focus.
Our security officer (CISO) remarked how the lockdown enabled him to think seriously about a security issue for the first time in almost two years. Isn't that tragic?
Companies are as rational as consumer behavior. You can't make this stuff up. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
The loss of programmer productivity can easily be overshadowed by gains from other parts of the business. I know it's not always the case, and nobody wants to hear that their suffering is better for the company as a whole since it devalues your work, but I would be super curious to hear why the decision was made.
Productivity is not progress, for sure. You can be very productive building the wrong thing. I've been there, wasting a year on some crap that was canned. But you need to be able to deliver and not actively frustrate your devs that want to get shit done. Otherwise the 'adapted to the market' is just a scam at best.
btw, not every dev is the same. Some actually do like being in the office, even putting on music and have lots of small talk. That's also fine, if it works for them. And I also see benefit of going to the office myself (once a week or so).
I'm pointing out the pattern of sales & management incompetently projecting their own needs and biases onto the whole company and treating devs as grunt workers, forcing them to comply with their rules and fulfill their needs regardless of how it impacts their ability to concentrate and deliver. Software development is not grunt work.
I see fulltime RTO orders as a reflection of this. Smarter management will understand what devs actually need and take that seriously. Usually this kind of management has a technical background. Office can be a part of that, sure, but wfh invariably is too, I'm convinced.
I've worked for dozens and dozens of managers in my career. Some will go out of their way to buy you the best laptop, even make you coffee and give up the best seat in the office just so that you can work in peace. Because they know that such investments in their staff will pay off. Then, others will loudly interrupt you, deny any small request out of petty resentment, and blame any and all problems on your laziness - that is if they actually show up to notice there is a problem.
Either officially, or unofficially.
What globalization did to manufacturing, remote work is going to do to knowledge work.
And in most cases, if the bosses give up on RTO, they’re going to be explicit about this. Because why not?
But I'd argue what could be outsourced profitably has been outsourced already. And countries which welcome digital nomads who "work from home" while visiting on tourist visas are getting fewer also. In fact the Thai Government launched DTV which can be seen as precursor to measure and later capture (read: tax) some of the benefits of that for themselves.
And if you think this isn’t having an effect on offered labor rates, available positions in certain countries, etc. then you’re not paying attention to the current market.
There are massive shifts to offshore work at most FAANGs actively going on right now. But it takes time.
Are there attempts to crack down/extract extra taxes? Yeah. But most are ineffective and/or don’t meaningfully change the economics. There is a lot of fat that can be trimmed/extracted from the super high peak of Silicon Valley comp (for one example).
A lot of folks in the US are just waiting to see what happens before they move, or are stuck with high mortgages.
Various aspects of the Taiwan government, including the national level, are engaging in big digital nomad pushes. Small counties like Taidong in particular have been actively exploring revitalization through incentive programs, exploratory "hacker house" type events, and engaging with NGOs in the field to advise on how they can get more digital nomads into their county.
You dont want to explain to a retiring generation of "scream it into relity"-babyboomers that there retirement plan is wonky, especially after investing fiscally conversative.
It’s time to shut up and “toe the line” as I’ve been told from regarding this kind of matter. If it chokes down to it, you could even be a specialized and expert in the field that they absolutely need; if you defy them, at least be ready to move on or even be laid off. In this kind of authoritarian system, nothing else takes priority over obedience … no matter how much your corporate “family” would be cutting itself deep in the flesh. I know this from experience and repeated observation.
But I think the truth is much simpler- the C suite is primarily made of extroverted people-persons who work better in person and think others will too.
Real estate leases and ownership is a sunk cost. Office space can be relet. And even Amazon wont make a dent in the office realestate marker (warehouses, maybe...)
They want people back in because either they think it makes the company more productive, to get people to quit rather than layoffs, or to give the appearance of doing something. Knowing Amazon they probably have some data to drive the decision too.
How is anything about those fact "inconsistant" when besides a few fringe scientists, everybody in the sector knows that for a fact.
The hours I worked and the shit I saw in that job do not compare to any other foodservice job I ever had, let alone other jobs. The tips (which you only got if you weren't on shake duty) were the only part that made it worthwhile, which meant putting on a happy-go-lucky face even if it was covered in grease, shake crap, blood sweat and tears.
A relative change in how annoying two classes of jobs are is effectively a relative change in how much they pay, so once the dust settles I'd expect the relative actual dollar pay to end up adjusting itself in response.
The only people that actually care where others work are people who realize they are ineffective at their job/their job is pointless without being able to physically bully, the rent seekers, and people who built a business out of being near another business.
I feel a little bad for the small businesses that got lucky by being near a huge office space, but most of those small businesses have been replaced by corporations and small businesses close all the time.
Your grandparents favorite restaurant when they were a kid is probably long gone and it would be nice to have an eventual restructuring of convenience businesses near homes instead of suburban parking lots and office buildings.
Do you call every request for equality as a straw man?
We couldn’t even do it during a global pandemic, deeming all sorts of people “essential” without meaningful compensation.
Your assertion is not based in any feasible reality, at least in America.
For stores in particular, if people work from home, you can move stores closer to where people live, including those who work in the stores. It's country dependent, but there's no need to have all only huge supermarkets in the outskirts of town, when very few pass through those areas. Then smaller stores closer to the population becomes more relevant.
>shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
depends on the company, but they used to stipend transportation and sometimes even car gas and repairs as a benefit. I see nothing wrong with that idea.
I've also done jobs where I had to commute into a windowless office and be at my desk at an exact time too.
I'm not going to work for in those jobs again either when WFH is a viable option.
It's a free market and I suspect that Amazon know this. I suspect that RTO is just a way to boost property usage and disguise redundancies. At the very least it means that Amazon don't know how to measure productivity properly if they only way they can ensure it is to force people to sit in a chair each day.
Parent comment asked, should people who can't work from home be paid more?
Which seems like a specific case of the more general "we should pay people more if their jobs are more difficult", so your examples would more accurately be expressed as
"should we pay sewage workers more because they deal with feces" and "should we pay commercial divers more because they are submerged in freezing water for hours each day"
If all the WFH people got this sudden improvement to their lives, what will society do to help out the people that can't? Is fairness and equality not important when it comes to the working class?
The disrespect to the lower classes from this community is unreal.
They are very effective at trimming the fat and creating peons. Also effective in stopping the corperate real estate crash that alot of important trust funds depend on.
Productivity < Compliant Workers < Stock value
I suspect that "most compliant workers" and "most creative engineers" has little overlap.
It's not quite as nice a feedback loop as ordinary web dev, but I've found a $20 webcam easily pays for itself many times over in this environment. This becomes all the more important as we start to build more advanced software functionality into our product offerings, which is where I really shine despite my undergrad in electrical engineering (I chose EE, like how aspiring writers choose to major in the classics).
Never believe a marketer telling you that you NEED marketing. Life will go on even with very limited marketing. You and your neighbors do not need it. Capitalism does not fall apart if it gets more expensive to force someone to learn about your product when they do not want to.
1. All cars have a configurable display that shows text. It is constantly scrolling through boilerplate that is not conceivably helpful to anyone, like "Don't spend too much time looking at your phone". But if you watch it for a minute or two, eventually it will briefly display the name of the next stop before going back to the boilerplate.
2. Some cars, but not all cars, have a stylized layout of the subway line embedded over the windows. There are lights running between the stops, and those lights are red if that part of the track has already been covered and green if it hasn't been. The part of the track where the train is currently located, and the upcoming stop, have some other status, which I think is an unobtrusive flashing.
The fact that this map display cannot show any information other than the current location of the car means that it shows this information at all times, making it millions of times more useful than the configurable text display that all cars have and fail to use appropriately.
But there are no ads either way. There's just the good system and the terrible system. I would argue that software to control this kind of display is a fundamentally misguided endeavor - the more controllable it is, the worse the user experience will be, because the people controlling the display are not interested in the user experience.
Why does that screen always cycle through a bunch of worthless messages that hide this information, instead of just displaying the useful information ("next stop: X") at all times?
When I say "local transit authority", I mean organizations like the BART for the Bay Area, the MTA for Chicago, or the MBTA for Boston, my home town. The graphic designers in those places are often responsible for surprising amounts of the look and feel of a city's public transport, so I'm sure they would love to hear your feedback.
MBTA related, I finally rode in a new Red Line car, are those radically different?
I can't wait to see the influx of books about this topic 10 years later.
Companies forget this. I have had coworkers quit because they couldn't deal with transport. One got stressed out of his mind because our office was close to motorway which frequently has accidents and if that happened he might not be able to pick up the kids on time. Others had to leave clients hanging because they had to leave, "daycare closes at 16:30 and it's now 16:00". Working from home it was much more frequent that clients in the late afternoon would get "Sure, give me ten minutes to pick up the kids and we'll finish this today".
Perhaps especially in the case of larger companies, sunk costs on office space may be a factor
Even worse, in many cases the costs are not entirely sunk. You might be able to get out of a lease with a penalty, if you own the buildings you can sell them. In either case its cheaper to keep a building unused than to run it as an office.
While business leaders want to think of and portray themselves as these hyper-rational actors whose every choice is either made from ingenuity or total necessity, this is obviously false and I think the prestige and optics of office spaces heavily play into the priorities of managers, especially as compared to people who do any other kind of work
Those people are world-class politicians or born super-rich. When you put a selection filter that exclusive in a population, you force every other attribute extremely close to the median.
And the median of competence on any field is much smaller than the mean.
This opens a new avenue I'd never considered: that some of the RTO pressure is perhaps due to keeping real estate prices up. Maybe there is somehow pressure from commercial landlords towards the tenants to keep the building occupied, or as you stated places that own the building don't want it to be devalued by appearing (or actually being) abandoned for years.
1) Ego/Power trip reasons: It just makes you feel like the big man to be physically lording over your minions and they miss it.
2) Class Warfare: Workers need to be kept miserable enough so they turn to mindless consumption and don't start asking any inconvenient questions.
3) Financial Conflicts of Interest: Higher Management is likely to have some real estate investments, maybe even in commercial real estate. They might be worried more about that part of their portfolio than about the company stock part.
The companies already know all about the positive time savings from not sitting in traffic commuting. But they believe that benefit is negated by employees getting less work done at home. My previous comment about employees "saving time" by working from home isn't seen that way by companies mandating RTO : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34929902
For some regions, where salaries don't match housing cost, I don't think it's unfair to ask your employer to pay half of your commute. Either you pay a salary that allows relocation, or you pay at least some of the commute time. Again it's not as if work stops just because you leave the office, if you're a developer at least.
Sort of similar, a friend of mine was fired. Ostensibly for not bringing in enough revenue/profit in a consulting business. Very few of his hours where billable, so he looked unprofitable. The issue: He was working on internal tooling, building systems that everyone else rely on to do their jobs effectively. His value was hidden in the work of others, but that's not measured.
When looking a "work from home", you rarely see companies measure job satisfaction, stress levels or even do proper exit interviews. The sort of things you need to keep on top of the keep people long term. Many customers won't report back to your boss that because you sat a your desk at home you where able to help them after your normal working hours, saving time the next day. In consulting tracking billable hours is normal, but if you don't track when and where those hours are worked, you're not going to see that some work better at the office, while others have a skyrocketing productivity boost at home.
Other times you have bosses that wants "butts in seat" because they don't trust their employees. Hell, we had a sister company where the employees sat in a fucking horseshoe configuration at the office, on the "inside" of the horseshoe, so the owner could sit at the open end at check that people where working at all times. Do you think that fucker is going to let people work from home?
The problem though is their new small business employed mostly office-type workers yet they still had that hourly/retail employee mindset. Treated their employees very poorly and had high turnover as a result. Then COVID happened and suddenly everything got better for everyone.
He was forced to trust his employees working from home and they loved it. He, of course, was high anxiety all the time worried that his employees were slacking off. I asked him, "are they not getting all the work done?" and he was very adamant that was completely irrelevant. From his perspective, if an employee was doing anything other than "work" while on-the-clock they were stealing from him. It was a pretty clear message.
As soon as COVID was over he forced everyone to come back into the office... And shortly thereafter he had to sell his business because he couldn't find anyone to work for him anymore. No idea what he's doing now but I still see people with his attitude everywhere (in varying degrees from mild to extreme).
On the plus side that guy would never ever bother his employees after work hours. Which is quite a step above employers that treat their employees as always-available serfs.
And employees will typically want companies that will cater to their every whim and pay them very well to be catered too.
Where the two meet is the labor market.
Conditions are changing, and ‘hard’ force is being applied again.
Employees know what the job will entail 99% of the time because it's their career focus. For that reason they don't really need much from their employer other than the tools necessary to do their jobs (e.g. a computer).
If you think employees in tech have just been asking for computers and money - for well over a decade and a half - then you’re living in a completely different industry than I have been.
I work for a remote-only company but use a workspace almost every day. I get to chose my own “office” and the people in it, I also pick the commute I want, this one is just 5 minutes away.
There’s a local tech Slack in my area that I keep up and I have a text group that I’ve built up over the years that sometimes grabs lunch or hits the gym. Keeps me balanced.
Counterpoint: That's an exact description of how I felt working in an office.
I also like the commute. I get in early to miss the rush. I end up walking more. I have the ability to switch from work to home on the way back. After work drinks also help.
That's all based on one 30 minute train that is extremely reliable, air conditioned, and getting a seat. I couldn't do it if I had to drive or take 3+ trains.
Maybe there are many companies who do allow for flexibility, in which case everybody is happy, so you don't hear about them, since they have better things to do than "not-complain" about their situation.
I'm lucky to work for such a company, and the main issue of discussion these days is whether we like or not the new office decoration. Managers are free to decide how often their teams have to come in, and, from what I hear, their underlings did have their word to say. Some people like coming in often, others less so. But basically, it all depends on who you're working with right now, and whether it makes sense to meet in person. This seems to work great for pretty much everybody.
I thought I'd enjoy going back to the office, until 5 days a week was enforced and I was frequently getting interrupted.
As another commenter said, nurturing a social life is more difficult when working from home, you have to be deliberate about it. I felt the office just made it more convenient to hang out, but it never really happened because I was too burned out by the work.
If you're happy with token interactions, sure. Your colleagues are right there (even talking to you while you try to work!). But IME, and from what I hear others say on HN and elsewhere, those aren't really "friends". The relationships are very superficial. How many of these people would help you move? With how many do you keep in contact when one of you changes jobs? I know exceptions exist, but those seem to be rather rare.
So, if you actually want a deeper relationship, you still have to look for it deliberately. Only now, you have even less time to do it, since you're stuck in the office for 8 hours a day and possibly a few more depending on your commute. Whereas if you're at home, if it's not practical to go have lunch with a buddy or something, at least you can deal with some of your chores that can be time-consuming, while not requiring you to interact with them continuously, like laundry, waiting for a delivery, slow cooking something, etc.
5 days on office places are silly in my book. They’ll lose anyone talented enough to get another job. I’m an in office person for the most part, but if you take away my flexibility I’m frankly just going to work for someone who gives it back to me. Why wouldn’t I want the ability to work from home when I need to pick up the kids early or similar? In my experience the best of both worlds is when you let people work where they want but try to staff your teams with half of each preference or with people in between and then label certain days as preferred in-office days. Notice how I said preferred and not enforced. I my teams it has usually developed sort of naturally, often depending on what is for lunch.
That doesn't make it reasonable to _force_ people back into offices though. Companies requiring in-office work so that the workers can experience social interaction that they don't have time for outside work sounds pretty dystopian, and arguing for that for one's own personal benefit at the cost of others feels pretty selfish to me. To be clear, I think it's totally reasonable for a company to hire someone with the understanding that they'll be in-office, but the issue with what's going on now for me is that plenty of people who were hired with the understanding that they _wouldn't_ ever have to be in an office are now being told that they need to. I'd argue that forcing someone originally hired remotely to pick between coming into the office or resigning is effectively equivalent to firing without cause, and it's disappointing that it isn't viewed that way legally.
A significant percentage of my social circle is former coworkers. I still meet up with some that I haven't worked with for over a decade. Or even several decades if you count pre-career jobs.
It'd be pretty weird for me to assume those interactions have to be token interactions.
I've been friendly with most of my co-workers, but aside from the two above, I wouldn't consider any of them "friends". As in we'd never randomly hang out outside of after-work drinks.
Not sponsored, I encourage you and anyone else who suffers from clothing-drain to try different brands too. Stretchy, breathable, and clean/crisp looking work best for me.
Sizing up also doesn't work for women - we look slovenly then unless we go tailor everything which is more time and $.
I prefer being able to work in a sports bra and sweatpants.
They’re aware. What a strange comment. Are you mad?
Edit: you have more nipples than I do, and I’ve never felt compelled to talk about it until right now.
I was using hyperbole as a rhetorical device to point out some of the absurdities of professional dress codes - I would have thought that was evident from context. Imagine a man who worked in a building that doesn't allow shorts even though it lacks A/C; he might make a comment along the lines of 'god forbid the customers know we have legs.' Or men who are in professions where they have to wear full suits in the summer.
I talked about it because my femaleness is directly relevant to why I feel uncomfortable in professional clothes since the biggest reason is bras, which men don't wear.
I'm a woman. I have breasts. They impact my life in some ways. Sometimes that impact is relevant to a discussion - in my case, it's a factor in why WFH is more comfortable. I have sensory issues that are probably familiar to the numerous people on HN and, since HN is generally full of curious people who have a cultural disdain for doing things 'just because' or following uncomfortable social norms for no reason, I shared a variable that may not have been considered because a lot of people here actually like being introduced to data they hadn't incorporated to their worldviews yet.
If you can't grok hyperbole, I'd recommend looking up some middle school Language Arts lessons.
Also, sexuality =/= gender, and mentioning that I have breasts and that they're a statistically unusual size isn't 'exerting' anything any more than Yao Ming complaining about clothes/shoe shopping would be. If you can't hear someone talk about their body without sexualizing them, that's a you problem.
My bra size isn't even manufactured/sold in my country, and at one point in my life I was a size that was so rare one company in the world made it.
And this is without getting into non bra issues like my shoulders being much smaller than my bust by size and while some alterations are possible, changing the shoulders requires essentially redoing the entire garment if that can be done on a garment at all. Truly fitting professional clothing would essentially require bespoke or made to measure clothes and I'm not rolling in money. (And even if I was, I'd prefer to spend it on weird tinkering hobbies like the rest of you.)
The clothes that fit me best off the rack involve substantial amounts of stretch and are too casual for the workplace. (Mostly tops; skirts are very easily altered).
In my 10+ years working in offices, I made exactly one friend (someone who I see outside of work).
I would rather not commute and spend that time with actual friends, more quality social interaction over quantity.
(YMMV of course)
One of those things where I’m happy to hang out with a friend for an hour so if I’m already out, but travelling there only to return after an hour is less attractive.
We haven't really hit a true recession yet, esp for the laptop class. I think you will see more of this.
Well, it turns out that these specific German business cases, which are hard enough for the average German developer to understand, are even harder to explain to someone if there's an additional language barrier between them. Most people using that software don't speak English, so there's always a proxy between the developers and the stakeholders.
I could write a lot about this (I actually deleted two very long versions of this comment here already), but I really would not recommend that any company recruit too many people from outside of its own country, apart from a few exceptions where that fits the business model. Having some diversity in your team structure can help, but as with most things, too much is not good. But many companies will have to learn that for themselves. I have already seen some that did not survive that lesson.
1. WFH is amazing and just as good for productivity and back-to-office is just a flex by evil managers.
2. WFH is bad for global productivity and so we need back-to-office.
Seems pretty straightforward that if #1 is right, then full-remote companies will have a massive competitive advantage, and the issue should be adjudicated decisively once more companies implement b-t-o.
You’re assuming a fair world. It isn’t. As an employee the game is rigged against you.
But also unlike many, I believe that that weight, whatever it is, to be overwhelmed by the colder calculation of profit, growth, etc.
If our corporate overlords could get it done with 50% of the present workforce fully remote, they would, happily. Even better if they were in Bangladesh. Which is another reason to be careful what you wish for.
I had coworkers at Amazon who never lived near any office and were hired with the understanding that they'd always be remote. After several years, they were told to "return" to an office that they never worked in before hundreds or thousands miles away or to resign (without severance of course, since it's "voluntary", and of course refusing to quit or move would lead to firing "for cause"). Are you saying that this is okay because it's Amazon, and their employees don't need to be treated as fairly as anywhere else, or are you arguing that this should be allowed anywhere? I can't imagine why this would be reasonable at any company, but I can't tell if this is an anti-Amazon sentiment or just a consistent opinion that seems crazy to me.
Wouldn’t that be some constructive dismissal, or am I misunderstanding the US labor law?
When I was laid off through the PIP’s way just before the 2022 official layoffs, the first thing I questioned was if they were firing me for no cause, and I collected both Amazon’s severance and the government mandated severance for non-cause dismissals.
Speaking as someone who would have to be dragged back to an office, it's obvious that the in office group would win out. Bonds are weaker in the remote group and your type A ladder climbers will be overrepresented in the in office group.
So hybrid office is probably going to lead to all in office. Especially in these difficult economic times as workforces stagnate or shrink in these companies.
So, yeah, I think there was some pre-COVID middle ground but you probably have a fairly large percent of people mostly coming into an office and a fairly small percent doing so--which of course tends to reinforce both behaviors. (And it grew a lot in a distributed manner as well which probably made getting everyone together physically all the time less relevant.)
There was this intersection of COVID and don't spend money that isn't NECESSARY. And the result was basically everything on Zoom. I actually spent a lot of my own money to attend some conferences to maintain some contact with people.
That's not the case with WFH setups. WFH scenarios do not care where people are. They could be in the office, in a stairwell, or on the beach.
So one position is inherently one of control, and the other is one of freedom. Maybe that's controversial to say, but to me it's plainly true.
Some that are hybrid optional list themselves as (remote), but do so fully remote companies.
"If anyone has an office in a building, then everyone must have an office in that building and must be forced to work there."
And I just don't follow that. Why must it be this way? So that the office is full?
If so, then: If having the office full every day is an important metric and WfH interferes with that metric, then the problem is not that the people make choices.
Instead, it is that the office is larger than it should be.
Yep, but rather than admit that having too big an office is a mistake, they double down on it and try to force employees back into the offices. For a certain type of personality, pushing the negative ramifications down to subordinates is easier than admitting that they need to solve the actual problem.
If you let people "choose" and 99% choose to always work from home, do you think that's gonna fly? I don't. I think the in-officers would be very upset about that because that's not enough people to make their in-office experience how they like it.
No matter how you slice it, such a position is one born of control. You have to force some people's hand in where they work.
"I need to have people around me to do my best work, and you are going to be one of them -- no matter how much that fucks you up."
I have some thoughts: Things change. Or at least, things can change. Or at least, things should be allowed to be able to change. (Usually.)
There was certainly a time when a news reporter worth their salt would never be very far from the office unless they were engaged in field work -- after all, the office was where the calls/faxes/wires/twice-daily mail/walk-in stories showed up, where the archives and typewriters and other business machines happened to be located, and where the copy editors and printers also were located.
But these days: A news reporter can potentially assemble their story from wire sources wherever they are. They can get a whiff of a scoop and be on an airplane to get closer to the source rather quickly, and can even continue to write their story and communicate the whole time that they travel. Sending a draft for review or editing is as simple as sending an email -- and this can be done without wires from just about anywhere on earth.
They don't need to go to the office anymore to find a scoop, or to report the scoop -- extroverted, or introverted, or whatever, and that's been increasingly the case for a rather long time.
And that's a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, I think. (Now, if only regular news would simply cease just regurgitating stuff they found on social media and actually get a scoop for themselves...but I digress.)
So, in the past few years: For reasons, we've broadly discovered that some people can do much of the same with engineering tasks at home, and that some appear to even be able to be more productive (in a dollars-vs-quality-output fashion) at such things without ever (or at least, without regularly) setting foot in a centralized corpo office. Some even report an increase in the quality of their life in general when they have this freedom to work...from wherever.
I think that this is a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, too.
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If an extroverted engineer requires people to be around in order to [try to] do their best work and live their best life, but some/most/all of their peers are working remotely because they found their own happy place, then: That's a conflict of goals.
Perhaps the correct resolution for the conflict is that the extroverted engineer should find a way to apply their abilities in tasks/careers where other people are both inherently and necessarily present, instead of one where other people may have broadly chosen to work in relative solitude or one where people are forced to be present in the office even when that isn't ideal for them.
I mean: Some of us introverts in many fields have been seeking increased aspects of solitude and freedom of movement for a long, long time -- and lately, we can achieve that more easily in a far broader selection of trades. That's good for introverts, and introverts are people too even if they're not necessarily very vocal about it.
But when that's incompatible with an extrovert's own proclivities, then: Perhaps things have simply changed, and perhaps the extrovert may need to change with them if they require people to be around to try to most-effectively live their own best lives.
If 10% of the workforce loves pizza and the other 90% is lactose intolerant should we order pizza for the office every day and just let 90% of it go to waste? This is only really a discussion because working in an office was the norm for so long.
It shouldn't be, but it is for many.
Most times I mention online preferring to not work remote I get people calling me some sort of corporate shill, or worse.
(Or the posts just get downvoted to oblivion by people who can't articulate their objection more meaningfully than that!)
> Companies telling everyone to be in the office 5 days a week 9-5 (or whatever) is removing that choice.
The problem is that it is genuinely hard for a company to support both (and/or flexible mixes) well, and if you ask for a little of the old way it becomes a tribal binary us-vs-them thing. I work in the office most of the time because I prefer to keep work and home separate, and I find I work better that way, but I'm still working on a remote team because practically everyone else is remote. We have a day-per-week policy (well, more of a string suggestion) but most people ignore that.
> It's called having a preference/choice.
Unfortunately while people are usually all for being flexible when being flexible means doing things the way they prefer, being flexible in both directions is rarer than it should be. For instance: I dislike phone calls and video calls, to the point of significant anxiety, but trying to get people to just send me an email or IM instead has been an uphill struggle with some. Of course I'll clench my arse and take part in a call when it is the best way to deal with a situation (as it sometimes really is) or because there is no choice (perhaps it is dictated by a client, or those up high), or the dailies and other regulars (calls that are habit/routine are less of a problem) but otherwise I much prefer to communicate in person (“in person” in person, not virtual in person) or by text mediums.
If I leave this tech job, or lose it for any reason, I think I'll have to retrain for a different industry, even if that means taking a hefty pay cut, heck even if that means mind-numbing minimum wage work. Working on a remote team is not great for my mental health, and it very much seems to have become the norm. Luckily in current DayJob we have found some sort of balance that works well enough, and I've been here long enough (and I'm sufficiently good at what I do) to be inconvenient to dispose of, and the people who wouldn't take the hint about not wanting to take a call for a chit-chat are no longer here, but at some point that might all change.
I'm not sure why one couldn't do this working remotely? Maybe these people can only socialise through work? Being passive about getting out of the house? Unable to create boundaries between work and personal life?
Working "remote" doesn't mean one has to stay at home all the time. We all have laptops and can go any where to work.
Unless you have dozens of friends already the likelihood is you’ll often be alone after work.
Thankfully I’ve made my friends and have a family but if I was just starting out I don’t think I’d even have met the people that are close to me. My friends are mostly from work or work friends of my college friends.
People often say to that “just get hobbies”. Well, hobbies are often done with friends or are introduced to by friends.
I think this WFH epidemic was an opportunity to enlighten a lot of people. There are many, many people (myself included), who were husks of human beings. Alive, technically, but not living.
We work, we eat, we sleep. We had money, but at the end of the day we were losers. I knew this to be the case when I realized what I looked forward to what dinner. Eating a meal was the highlight of my day, and the highlight of every day. And then the weekends I stayed in, exhausted from work.
When people lost the office, it was an opportunity for them to realize they had absolutely no life. No friends, no socialization, no passions, no desires. Some realized that and took control of their life, and others took offense to that realization and demanded the office back.
It was very much a matrix red pill versus blue pill situation. Live in lalaland on autopilot? It's tempting.
Not even close. Hobbies are done in groups, which can be stood up in your local area. This shit was figured out in the 1700s FFS, with no internet, with no online message boards to coordinate preferences, with no real choice in WHO they interacted with.
We invented "third places" like coffee shops, where average people could show up, buy a coffee, and chat with literal strangers, where you would often get into discussions about philosophy, politics, this newfangled "science" stuff, and all sorts of topics, usually involving people guessing about things they didn't even have a right answer to. But that didn't matter because the point was to interact with strangers.
The scientific method was literally a bunch of wealthy people exploring a brand new hobby by finding each other in "journals" (basically hobby magazines), sending each other snail mail, and chatting about their different experiments.
Companies have decided they can just stop supporting an open environment, and charge you for the right to exist, and now we don't have a third place in the US, because nobody has the time or money or energy to socialize after work, because work takes so goddamned much out of us.
So no, please do not force me, who has a perfectly functional social life and several great friend groups for life, just because you don't know any other way to meet people. That's not my problem and forcing me into the office so you can take advantage of the requirement that I am there to socialize with me is not an okay solution.
Work doesn't pay me to be your friend.
Now I live on the other side of the province, and holy shit is it hard. I've been here for over 6 years and I haven't been able to maintain a single friendship. I could try harder, for sure, but that's my point. It was effortless before, and now it feels like being social takes serious work.
I still work from home, and I've settled into a quieter way of life. It's nice, I enjoy it. That said, I'm not surprised others don't.
Well, anywhere I can be sure no external person can see what I'm doing on screen. So a cafe will work if I can sit in a corner with my back to a wall. And even then, I'm giving up my tooling to make work easier on myself and more productive, like a nice, large monitor. Coworking spaces let me alleviate the second part, but the first problem is even more pressing there: now, everyone around me must be expected to understand what I'm doing, and thus is a bigger danger to my companies data security.
It's not for possible for everyone, though, and the bar is not "is any IP loss realistic" but rather "what are the policies my employer demands", independent of if they are sensible or not. Make sure you're not getting caught breaking company policy, kids :P
This is why making it flexible is so great. You could be in the office with other people who enjoy it, while people like me don't have to.
Even before the pandemic I would often hang at the office until 10pm because I could only get work done after the others left. I would get so stressed from all the distractions around me.
As is sitting in an area and seeing who everyone goes to ask questions, and even overhearing the discussions.
So someone can learn how to phrase questions, what are useful types of questions to ask, what types of questions get someone told to ‘do their own research’ vs gets in-depth help, etc.
For a junior, that is very valuable because they often literally don’t even know where to start.
For someone with more experience, they often either already know all these things, or know how to find them out pretty quickly even without the help of watching what is happening, yeah?
I always maneuver myself into such a place that I have something to work on for myself.
Not all offices are like that, though! It takes some awareness & outgoingness from leaders and experienced folks, but it is possible to cultivate a socially engaging remote work environment. At my current employer, there seem to be two ingredients: 1) management and mentors who will happily talk about stuff that isn't work-related, and 2) an annual retreat where you do get to meet all of your coworkers in-person, in an environment where bonding is the main purpose.
A few advantages: 1) you have a wider pool of people to choose to co-work with, since they can have other employers, too; 2) you can choose who you want to co-work with; 3) you get to (mostly) choose which and how many hours you wish to co-work; 4) no stress about being late due to a commute or childcare commitments, since co-working hours are optional.
[1] I deliberately arrange to work on things that aren't confidential on co-working days.
It should not be. I work from home 100% now, but feeling alone is a very real issue for many of us. I have friends I talk to during the day via IRC or one the phone, regular chats and video calls with colleagues and managers, family is right around the corner and I try to get out every day and talk to people.
For some the isolation is wonderful. For others, like me, it's amazing for doing focused work, but I also need people in my life. For some problem arises when their sole social circle is people they work with. If you struggle to talk to people you don't know then coworkers quickly be an "outlet" for socializing.
I don't think I'd enjoy it at all if I didn't have so much family and loved ones around, just sitting in an apartment all day by myself. What interaction you have with co workers with so much fewer social cues can hurt more than it helps, really.
I'll bet you many managers in favour of RTO feel exactly like this when they work from home, and base their decisions on the way they feel.
Another dimension to that spectrum is a development of a working cohort. Essentially a half dozen people or more that hire each other at new jobs and move together from company to company. A true best case there us to meet a potential co-founder.
Though, I have had a remote colleague whome we spent days on video calls together working on a problem. I am not sure remote is in-office is actually mutually exclusive. The people willing to spend 5 hours on a call peer coding with you might be the same that you actually become friends with in office
Popular
> Amazon tells
Sucks
To me, feels super refreshing to talk to people when Im at the office, and to be fair Im much much less productive in the office. But makes me appreciate when Im at home and when I dont need to be in the car for 1 to arrive my home, take everything and go to the gym.
It feels like, going from time to time to the office when almost everyone is there, gives to the remote working more sense and value. And viceversa.
You can come in every so often (weekly) without issue (or by choice).
When you're forced to come in every day, that becomes different.
My problem is that i really hate flex desks and now you don't get your own office anymore.
But my problem is more with my home: I'm now buying a farm and i don't think it will feel the same way as it does at my flat. Its surprisingly hard to 'get out' to not feel annoyed by my flat. But i don't have a good outdoor view only a small window and i do not have a extra office space.
I also wouldn’t force anyone to go back to office so I could see the humm of their work. If you need that there’s co working spaces for that reason, or places which have in office options.
Large companies mandating everyone work in office is purely a flex for control and probably to save their property investments.
It's a hidden layoff.
The less productive are the ones dragging their feet, coming up with excuses to stay home and hide as much as possible from peer scrutiny.
Almost like best engineers enjoy coming and working with the team, while the worst dread it.
Again, sample of one, so take with the grain of salt, do not draw generic conclusions, etc.
I do know excellent engineers working solely remote. Not on my team though, and they are freelancing contractors. Different organizations, different dynamics.
The high-profile RTO places tend to hire in bulk for programmers that will do as product tells them. Weeding out people who value quality over conformity is a goal.
I’m curious what you mean by this.
At best, it signals the company is done with growth and is going for a high-profit, low investment (including low innovation) policy.
But if it's the second one, well, you'd be stupid and my best possible explanation up there doesn't apply anymore.
Yup! Remote workers need to realise this, and build up a local social life.
Or worse, the middle management is given authority to give these mandates, and are in their highest level of incompetence and use it as a "power move".
You need social interaction, so go out and get social interaction.
I don't. So why should employment cater to you rather than me?
It's all about choice. I have 3 young kids. The youngest will be in school next year. At that point, I may find myself actually going to a coworking space from time to time (and if my company had an office near me, I'd go into that sometimes). I certainly don't mind the amenities and the company of my coworkers (all 2 of them that are actually physically located within a 4-hour-drive radius of me).
But for right now, being able to be full-time remote with a fully flexibly work schedule is ridiculously important and useful to me. My wife has a dentist appointment? I can sit here in the basement and pull up the kid's camera while he naps and she can just go. I can eat lunch with my kid. I can do morning drop-off when my wife needs a break from the morning kid-prep grind. It's absolutely vital and our lives would've been a mess the last 4 years without it.
Plus, besides the work-lifestyle thing, there's a question of equality of opportunity. As you can probably guess based on my above remarks, I live in BFE (five generations of my family live here, so I can't leave) and there's literally nothing that San Francisco-type SWE's would recognize as a "tech job" until you get up to Lake Michigan. My options, were I to work locally, would be to work in a place that specializes in government/enterprise contracting and "staff augmentation". If your nose is wrinkling and your brow furrowing upon reading that phrase, yes that's the correct facial expression to be making. And yes it pays what you'd expect.
But thanks to remote work, I'm working for a startup and actually getting to program an actual software product and engage with its product development and all that.
I have. lots of people get a lot of their social interaction from work.
The genie offers them one wish each
The Irishman says 'sure i'd give anything to be back in galway, stuck in a snug, with a pint of porter' and <poof> he's gone.
The scotsman is amazed and roars 'take me back tae glasgae!' and in a similar puff of smoke is gone.
The englishman, looks around and says 'I say, its going to be awfully lonely around here without those chaps around, can you bring them back please?'
- buying a house you never see the inside of while the sun is up
- buying a car whose purpose is making the two hours every day you spend commuting a bit less miserable
Now, when I weigh 30 minutes of commute versus being cooped up in the same room I was in for the whole pandemic and almost lost my mind, it's easy: office whenever I can.
That said, I'd be very loathe to _have_ to come in to the office. There are whole weeks where it just doesn't work out logistically, and it's nice to be able to work from home.
Hybrid is probably the ideal; but even so I live 15m from the office and when I go in it's empty 90% of the time anyway. I don't know if I'd take a 45m commute until the kids can get themselves home from school (daily pickup/dropoff) - but I do miss 2h beer lunches on a Tuesday after closing a ticket to blow off stress.
That's the thing, though; it's important to remember that it very much _is_ an opinion/preference. For some people, working from the office is better, for others, it's working from home, and for others it's a combination of both. There are positives and negatives to each, for both the employee and the employer.
That being said, a company limiting itself to _only_ people willing to work in the office is doing just that; limiting itself. I expect the reverse is also true; but the pool of workers to choose from for "everyone remote" is a _LOT_ bigger than the pool of workers for "everyone in the office".
When everyone can choose what work best for them! We are not the same - and face to face meetings have their huge benefits from time to time anyway.
Except for those poor souls working for Amazon.
Similarly, in the old days when I had jobs where I was expected to wear a shirt and dress reasonably smart to the office, I enjoyed getting changed into other clothes afterwards. It marked a real change between work and personal time. That gets very blurred with working from home.
I actually try to dress 'properly' even when working from home. I know most people find it silly, but I feel I work better when wearing 'work' clothes.
Before kids I would also become depressed if I worked remotely full time. But today my "alone time" is already pretty much gone outside work hours so I don't mind being by myself during the day.
I did feel somewhat isolated when I first started working remote. I also moved to a new city at the same time, and I didn't have much to do... besides work. I had to force myself out into the world a bit, and it got a lot better. It helps that I found myself in a community where I could easily find things that I found appealing.
No, they don't. It's intentional.
Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff. And if someone doesn't quit, they're likely to put up with a whole lot of other grief too. Unpaid extra work (to cover the people who quit), not asking for raises, etc. It's purely money-saving and to instill fear.
In the 20th century, IBM and the Welch era brought in a lot of tools to extract the most from employees like the "up or out" mentality or simply firing the bottom 5-10% of employees every year.
Tech has simply reached that point. You are a replaceable cog. Tech is now in permanent layoffs culture to suppress wages. Laying off 5% of the workforce every year is now a permanent fixture of your company.
Personally, I think engaging in layoffs means you, as an employer, have demonstrated there is insufficient need and you are ineligible to sponsor a work visa in any broadly related area for 24 months. "Broadly related" here means if you layoff a software engineer, you can't sponsor another software engineer. I don't care if one does C++ and the other does Python. I guess you'll have to train somebody.
That might be a thing, but I can only speak from personal experience, and I'm an area of the world where there's still a pretty big shortage of IT workers, so it doesn't make sense to drive them away.
The employer is simply filling a role. They're looking for someone sufficient. They don't need to be perfect in this process.
It's the same here. You are replaceable. Never forget that. You may be thinking the company is losing a good employee. And they might be. But it doesn't matter because keeping particular employees is almost the goal. There are very few people who are truly irreplaceable.
If out of 20 employees, one quits over the RTO mandate then their work gets spread around the other 19 who now do 5% more work for less money because they're not asking for raises and there's no severance to pay. It's win-win-win.
The company would rather understaff and underpay to any other outcome.
More that they assume (or demand) the worker is going to pay this cost on their behalf.
And since pick-up is at 4:30, it means I have to leave the office at 3:00 at the absolute latest, lest I incur significant monetary penalties - as well as the ire of the people who care for my child - for late pick-up.
So sure, if you want me in the office for five hours a day - one of which is going to be taken up by going to lunch with my coworkers, since face-time is so important - I'll be there.
Unless there are significant delays, which there usually are, in which case I'll be there for maybe four hours a day, because I'll also have to leave early since delays in the morning frequently mean delays in the evening.
Or to complain about the significant monetary penalties you'd have to pay, when it's surely easier to pay those on your salary than theirs.
And used someone else being worse off than you to justify being right about it.
Having said that, complaining is free. We both can do it.
they don't care about your commute at all. "if [c-level exec] can make it to the office every day, so can you" not to mention that, said exec does not in fact make it to the office every day
I was steering myself towards remote work since it was technically unfeasible. I worked from home in the late 90's setting up a removable hard drive with data and two computers taking that (office + home), but that WFH was beyond the 40h / week, I had to go in 9 to 5 still. I liked the tasks, so it was exciting.
Then technology improved, chose a position where the pay was only acceptable but I had the chance of working from different places, city, country, so no chance of going in to the office! This was the 2010's.
Then chose an on-site work in a rich country so after getting to know and trust each other I'd have the theoretical possibility of working from a cheap country remotely on a very good salary (or something between the two for mutual benefit). Unluckily I had a stoneheaded and actually very incompetent COO coming from decades of secretarial position in a uni unable to comprehend working elsewhere than in an allocated (rubbish) chair at a particular (rubbish) desk in a cheap office (being cold in winter so my poor female colleagues sat in coats) far from amenities, from 9 to 5. This was her sole understanding what work is, the poor soul. So after some time trying (suffering, fighting) for remote dominant settings I handed in my resignation (they headed a wall anyway with that poor incompetent COO) into the nothing. Having some months of rest before picking up something new. That was 2019 December. Oi! : )
Now I work with colleagues - working on the very same codebase - from 3 continents spanning 18h of time zones, most of them never met. This is nice!
But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.
Also, HN posts may have selection bias. Perhaps people who perform better in office do not want to admit it. Perhaps people who work in the office don’t have time or the opportunity to post on HN as often.
Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted. When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.
Not really. At a company the size of Amazon teams are often in other buildings, if not other cities or countries entirely. The zoom calls continue unabated.
If you have 3 days of office, you'll always be in Zoom calls because at least some of the team members will be at home.
>Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted.
I mean, there's many reasons an otherwise unwarranted RTO happens. Maybe there's executive conspiracies, but the simplest two reasons are
1. We're still in layoff mode and RTO is a soft layoff without paying out severance. Especially to people that are physically unable to move back
2. managers and executives are in fact not rational actors. They can make decisions based on vibes, or because they need to make some shakeup (any shakeup), or because some other executive made a decision and they are mimicking. I would not take their decisions as gospel. Otherwise they would have shown some shred of evidence of productivity loss (which they cannot, because again: many tech companies have record revenues).
Low reward, high risk.
They would also show data for increased productivity from ending full remote and going back to the current 3 days in office if they had it, instead they claim it's the case but won't let you see the data. It's just bullshit corporate talk
No company wants to show confidential metrics on employee productivity to the world. Yet, many companies have recalled employees. Maybe you think every single of these companies are incompetent and stupid? Or the HN go-to conspiracy theory that executives own real estate and want it to recover?
Most likely Amazon has zero data supporting the argument that WFH is less productive and probably has data to the opposite. They went from 'we're super data-based, data-oriented and objective' (which was a joke to begin with) to the complete opposite on this topic.
> When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.
The reality is you have no idea what you're talking about, you have no data to back up your claims, you just can't resist licking the boot.
That being said, you shouldn't confuse your personal hallucinations as the opinions of Amazon execs.
Now, I think you might want to take your own advice :)
the only reason executives really dislike remote work, is because as "face people" they have never had a place for it. It doesn't benefit them in any way, so how could it possibly benefit anyone else? they have never had a position like yours. they both deeply understand that no one is like them, and bizarrely believe that everyone works like they do and benefits from working in the office.
I have worked closely with executives throughout my career and the only common thread between them all is the intense hatred for telecommuting. I have never met an executive which understands it well enough to understand its place in their work environment. These same executives frequently called me after hours asking for work to be done immediately; work that could only be done in the office because that's where all of my digital tools were located and where the network connectivity was, etc. Zero recognition that one of those things could solve the other.
Well, it's that, or they just want to be dicks and give out orders. That could be it, too.
It's probably 50% of each. "executives get benefits, plebes do not."
I think I saw it mentioned in an old HN thread once, but I'd like to see a study between the WFH desire and its relationship with (a) commute times, and (b) commuting method: walking, cycling, driving, urban transit, commuter rail, etc.
If your commute was a 15-30 minute (one-way) bicycle ride, how different would you feel about going into the office more often?
I live in Toronto, Canada, and in the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled to work everyday from March to December (rain or shine, as long as the streets were clear).
See perhaps the video "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Also the Oh The Urbanity! channel, a couple who live in Ottawa/Montreal:
* https://www.youtube.com/@OhTheUrbanity/search?query=winter
Anyway that depends entirely on how specialized your specialized equipment would be. I had a quick browse of your profile, it looks like you're a firmware engineer so I assume what you have is a few thousand worth of electronics hardware like oscilloscopes and that other magic stuff that firmware people have so nothing that would break the bank or fall outside of your homeowner's insurance, but you get what I mean.
That said, most non-hardware IT people have laptops nowadays that they are expected to take home, I've got two current-day macbooks so that's at least six grand of hardware sitting at home, plus the rest. I should double check my insurance <_<. At least the macbooks themselves are covered by my employer's insurance.
> The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy.
So on top of all the hustle of end of year, everyone will need to frantically prepare for return to office one day into the new year. Just seems a bit heartless.
Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes. I just don't understand the need to force RTO so drastically.
The writing has been on the wall for a while. Aside from that, Amazon decided to convert their workforce to work from home rather quickly, and shelled out the money and the effort in order to actually achieve that.
> Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes.
If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.
To put it another way: "Look for a remote position elsewhere and quit"
That has been the return to office dynamic since the COVID emergency stopped.
Importantly, speak to a labor attorney, depending on your situation.
Never trust HN for legal advice. Not an attorney, not your attorney. I highly recommend engaging an attorney, both prior to and during acceptance of an offer, and when separated from an org. If you don’t, you’ve already lost, and I write these comments so others don’t lose.
The job was offered, in writing, remote; rto was a material change to the agreed upon working arrangement. While labor rights and protections in the US are flimsy, they do exist.
Speaking from personal experience, not having access to unemployment can definitely be life changing.
This is being mandated for a number of employees who were hired remote as well.
Separately, why not? I generally have an expectation that I won't have to move across the country from one office to another. Especially not without some good reason. Especially not without literally any reason. Especially not if I'm going to have to foot the bill for switching houses, either disrupt my spouse's career or spend time apart, switch kids' schools in the middle of the year, .... Employers are (often) within their rights to do so, but the knowledge that Amazon does this sort of thing frequently is precisely why I work elsewhere.
I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.
Holding on to what is now an outdated view of worker utilization might help them for a couple years with these tax incentives, but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit. They're going to have to pivot to having less commercial real estate eventually.
This gets repeated a lot online but statistics don’t really support it. They will lose some number of employees but the significant majority of people just go along with RTO policies.
All of the headlines claiming employees will quit if their companies mandate RTO are based on self-reported surveys where people are asked hypothetical questions. When reality hits and people are forced to choose between their large FAANG comp or quitting, it turns out barely anyone quits.
The vast majority of any large organisation are in the second category, so your statement is 100% correct.
Whether the organisation loses something because the first category leaves, is open to debate. I think they would.
[0] because they now have the experience (and option at other organisations) of working from home full-time, which reduces their exposure to corporate bullshit and pointless meetings.
The people who are there to “solve interesting problems” are there to do so for pay. But, they can also get paid by other employers, who can offer more sensible employment terms.
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/nearly-half-of-dells...
- https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220523-the-workers-qu...
- https://theconversation.com/bosses-are-increasingly-forcing-...
- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/company-heads-ho...
- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/rto-m...
On the other hand, stats supporting the idea that working from office increases productivity are dubious at best, I've seen one which said 10% better productivity, but that could be offset by the lower costs of remote work. Maybe you can provide some research that convinced you otherwise?
> Allowing flexible working and working from home creates a more productive, loyal workforce
There's also the question of even if remote work was more productive on the whole (and I believe this to be true) and that these productivity gains come from the more senior workers who are able to identify tasks that they need to complete and effectively shut the door on the office and focus ... while also being able to handle other things at home (being more productive because you can put a load of laundry in at noon or being able to get something to eat without having to go all the way to the break room)...
So, grant that on the whole productivity is higher with WFH for mid level and senior level individual contributors ... junior ICs may be suffering quietly without more direct mentorship, the listening in on ad-hoc hallway meetings, managers being able to pick up on work stress more easily.
It would be very easy to imagine a conversation at some director level (where I'm making up the numbers)... "From 2020 to 2024, we've seen the number of junior ICs advance to mid level drop from 20% to 16% compared to 2016 to 2020. This is a declining trend and when looked at year over year 2020 to 2021 had 8% advancement while 2023 to 2024 only showed 4% advancement. Furthermore, the senior ICs are comfortable in their role and the number of them moving up to management has dropped from 5% to 3% in the 2020 to 2024 time frame. If this continues, we may be looking at a lot of unsatisfied junior developers who are not progressing and a lot of satisfied senior developers and leads who would traditionally shift to the management track... well, not take that step in their career progression."
Yes, that's a just-so story. I find it to be a believable one.
So even if everything is great with remote work currently for productivity, some trends may be showing a problem years down the road where people are not improving and the company as a whole is stagnating (even more).
----
(edit / addition) - from last year, that tax revenue thing with some numbers: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/community/amazon-return-to-...
The org with a few teams and 100 devs total works and mentors differently than how Amazon operates.
If the story were true, then that'd be a reasonable thing to share in broad terms and would reduce the impact to morale as there's at least some shared, reasonable argument. Instead we get vague reasoning about energy of the workforce and spreading the corporate culture.
Everything I've seen aligns on three pillars:
* Real-estate strategy (lots of contracts and promises to commercial real-estate as well as local governments)
* Quiet layoffs (if they leave on their own, then we aren't firing!)
* Disconnection with reality (upper-management's job is harder remotely or they're bad at it, and having face-to-face conversations is really important for politics, their primary job)
Have you had the time to do anything to assist? Have you brought this up with the folks who should be mentoring or managing these people? Mentoring is still mentoring, whether or not one happens to be breathing the same air as the fellow one is mentoring.
IME one HUGE benefit of moving what would be one-off watercooler chats to one-off chats in a '#watercooler' channel (or whatever) is that one no longer has to be on-site and socially connected in order to get most of the benefits of the rumor mill. Making all that side chatter searchable across the whole company does WONDERS for cross-team functionality and awareness.
People don't feel confident jumping in to a chat stream. In real life you see a newbie standing around and a normal human tries to actively include them and explain things. Nobody looks at the thousands of idle chat handles and tries to explain what's going on to all of them.
Did they provide any links or evidence at all? Reddit is a hotbed of misinformation and claims like this proliferate and grow on Reddit with little basis in reality all the time. Unless someone can find compelling evidence that this is both true and a substantial tax credit, I would assume it’s just another product of the Reddit misinformation machine.
Even if it is true, the majority of the RTO is a transition from hybrid to 5 days onsite. I doubt they would have allowed hybrid to begin with if it impacted some hypothetical giant tax breaks.
It isn't necessarily about the historical tax credits... but also those potential ones in the future. Notice Seattle not having tax credits for 2022, 2023, or 2024.
Regardless, such a trivial whimsy like that is a horrible way to place company wide decisions.
You'd think that capitalists would be beyond excited to make the workers pay for their own workspace. Strange that they aren't.
The only reason Andy Jassy and Amazon can get away with this is because they have enough market power that they don’t have to care about consequences. In other words, they are too big to fail, and immune to the negative effects of this that may result from real competition. It’s time for them to also face anti trust regulation. As a customer, I’m going to cancel Prime and stop shopping there entirely. I don’t like rewarding companies that set illogical trends across the entire industry.
Sadly it's the most competent that leave first and fastest.
Productivity has cratered since he implemented RTO, so to believe that this is anything but a way to get rid of employees without severance package is extremely naive.
They're expecting subpar Q4 results.
I really miss hybrid with 1-2 days in the office. That was the best compromise all around.
Now I take the train that's 30 minutes long each way. I don't get the benefit of exercise, the time spent is doubled, and now I'm only going to the office three days a week.
Sure, you could say going to office isn't too bad if you're 15 minutes away. But at 15 minutes away you're paying double for housing than if you were 90 minutes away. So even in the ideal scenario, RTO can be perceived as a huge pay cut.
I’d assume with hybrid you could always go in.
All the people who want to socialize at work get the office, everyone who wants the flexibility of remote work get to enjoy that. From experience, making a remote-first team work in office is just working-remote but next to one another. Once you get used to all your processes being in-chat and having 5-10 async conversations going at once while working having to like stop and have only one stream of thought is like an adhd rug pull.
Taking one bus and being forced to take a 30-minute break (usually reading for me) was fine, but now walking 25 minutes additionally to that same bus trip after the office moved to a new location is rather a pain. Tried taking an electric kick scooter but that slides all over the place and doesn't fit at the foot end of a bus seat so to cut down on walking I'd have to stand and babysit the device the whole ride (forfeiting the relax time); not exactly an improvement
Car is by far the quickest (about as fast as the waking time alone) but I'm not doing that on most days for climate reasons
Besides, the sleep you get on a train/commute is not quality sleep.
For many, 60-90 minutes each way are not uncommon.
But yea, if we are talking about the impact of commuting on the individual, and the rhetorical example is a 90 minute commute in the bay area, I roll my eyes. A better example would be a HR generalist commuting 25 minutes from one Memphis suburb to a business park closer to town. Choosing a random example.
The Melbourne city council has started petitioning the government to force govt employees to return to the CBD for work. Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels, which means employees need to start coming into the CBD more often. Apparently this is getting serious consideration.
It's not like we home-based workers stopped going out to buy lunch on workdays. We still go to the local shops most days for coffee and food; as those shops aren't paying CBD-type rents, their food and coffee is generally cheaper and/or better quality, the service is friendlier and the local school kids have a lot more job opportunities. The past 4 years has seen a real community feel spring up around where I live, whereas before it was just another dormitory suburb where nearly all the workers disappeared during the day.
From my perspective, we moved from pre-COVID, in-office work arrangements to post-COVID, remote arrangements, and that genii is now out of the bottle. We've all conclusively proved we can be productive working from home, and any attempt to roll that back is going to hit resistance in one form or another. It's gonna take a recession where the supply of workers exceeds the demand for everyone to come back into the office each day, and even then I don't think it'll stick long term.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/10542273/holland-road-trip-questi...
It's more like downtown property prices are based on those levels, and property is leveraged, and if banks collapse do to commercial property prices plummeting, you're in for a bad time.
Also, although downtown is a very small part of the city - in many cities, downtown property taxes make up a relatively large chunk of total property tax revenues.
You either death spiral downtown property prices by keeping taxes steady while values decline, or you increase tax everywhere else to make up the difference.
Either of those options leads to a bad time for politicians.
"Government for the people by the people, unless the people don't want what they want"
> people don’t want what they want
Which makes the opposite point, funny enough. Who is the “they”
With big tech, I think it has more to do with real estate holdings being part of the portfolio and they would have to write down the value. Then the hedge funds where executives invest would also have to write down their real estate holdings and lose value.
I am dying for commercial real estate to be written down so hard in the US that the Federal Housing Administration buys it and converts it to public housing.
When Amazon was heavily investing in SLU in the 2010's they purchased all of their leased offices from the developer, Paul Allen's company.
It's the GE-ification of Amazon. Financial engineering with little care about employees or customers.
A few days in I was invited to join a "bureaucracy reduction taskforce". Someone handed me a literally 12 inch thick stack of paper I was meant to read up on before the first meeting. I gave my regrets and withdrew from the taskforce (there were no repercussions - apparently a few others had noped out as well).
I don't think teachers, cops, sanitation workers, or iron workers can realistically do their jobs at home
I would never want their jobs over mine.
It's a race to the bottom because of the visa worker situation. People will wake themselves up at 3AM on a saturday because shitty tooling made something in prod break.
Many of my friends are visa workers, but if you're working with people living in fear of deportation, it tends to fuck up the work life boundary across the board
FWIW those were recently completely outlawed: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/.... In theory you can happily sign a noncompete and promptly ignore it. Unlawful contracts are unenforceable.
That does not diminish the value of unions, though.
Also some of Harris's donors are pushing her to get rid of Lina Khan. Even if she wins, the rule might not stay around
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/09/05/ftc-noncompete-ru...
> Nearly one in five workers in the United States are bound by a noncompete agreement preventing them from finding a new job or starting a business in their field when they leave their employer. Noncompetes are currently governed at the state level, and as a growing body of research shows that noncompetes suppress wages, reduce job mobility, and stifle innovation, states are moving rapidly to restrict them. Currently, four states ban the use of noncompetes entirely and 33 states plus DC restrict their use.
As explained by the FTC, "A district court issued an order stopping the FTC from enforcing the rule on September 4. The FTC is considering an appeal. The decision does not prevent the FTC from addressing noncompetes through case-by-case enforcement actions." (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/features/noncompetes)
what if this kind of person gets to union leadership and just accepts a bad deal to visa workers?
what about a pro-back-to-the-office (and there are tons of people here that are 100% for RTO policies) workers? if they get a majority, they can vote that union workers have to go back and that's it.
2) I already do that. Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never felt pressured to answer a work message unless there was a legitimate fire.
3) Non-competes are already illegal in California, which I imagine has the most SWEs in the US.
I'm all for unions, but I already see the pushback here. Visa situations definitely suck though.
This so radically clashes with my experience it makes me wonder if I've had a crazy lucky career or if people have a hard time setting boundaries.
At all the companies I've worked for, I've never once felt like I was obligated to answer a message outside of work hours. Also non-competes are more or less completely unenforceable. And finally... working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
Now all of this is omitting visas. I've never had to deal with that and likely never will. But for US citizens working in tech I don't see how a union helps you at all.
Don't think US citizens are sitting in luxury. Your company will fire you and replace you with cheaper replacements in an instant.
You can replace code monkeys, but you can’t replace people who can use code to solve real business problems on time and under budget.
or else, at this point there would be no domestic jobs period
I'm not sure of what part of industry you're coming from. For me, it's backend web services + data pipelines for a large corporation
Often overtime work is expected. Deployments always happen late in the evening because of there's a diurnal traffic pattern. Oncall is unavoidable and the expectation they have is that regardless of when you get paged, you have to wake up and respond to it
control your workplace. Same reason for joining a union anywhere. Collective bargaining gives workers agency and real power, which any free person should prefer over sitting in a golden cage.
And while I get the feeling that most HN commenters feel some sort of misplaced injustice due to this, but the thrill of the game is part of the fun to me. I’d rather that than factory work where I can guarantee my skills will never position me to rise above my station.
The tech industry is so unique in this and it blows my mind how people just want to throw it all away.
What you're describing is an idealized free labor market. In actuality, you are not in fair competition with other laborers because the labor market isn't a free market.
I’ve done quite a bit of negotiation in my career and ended up with many perks and pay bumps that weren’t schedule or written down.
What I’m describing is my actual real life experience.
Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. One in a million, a diamond in the rough.
Even if this were true (it's not), IF you banded with fellow super duper awesome laborers you would necessarily have more bargaining power. It's just logical. If losing you is X bad, then losing 3 of you is X * 3 bad. Given X is some positive number, which is bigger: X or 3X? 3X, of course, so you have much more leverage.
What you need to keep in mind is you have absolutely 0 point of reference. You can't say "well I have a ton of leverage!" when you've never been in a SWE union. You haven't, have you? Okay, so what are you comparing against? Nothing, right?
And even though you have nothing to compare against, you still believe you're correct? With no basis? I'd check your hubris.
At any rate, I disagree. I don’t like the idea of someone controlling my work prospects for a tiny bump in pay. I’m more than capable of negotiating my own pay.
Fact is, I have enough leverage to be happy with where I’ve gotten in life and I think there’s enough like-minded people like me that (hopefully) we’ll never have to put this theory to the test.
Mama’s special laborer will keep on doing this own thing.
You're not, you've merely deluded yourself into believing it. What I'm telling you about leverage isn't an opinion, it's objective. You, objectively, factually, have significantly less leverage by yourself.
> I think there’s enough like-minded people like me
Unfortunately, you are correct. There exist swaths of people at the intersection of selfish and delusional. The unfortunate thing is, you're not even particularly good at being selfish. If you were, you'd recognize often the best way to propel yourself forward is to help others too.
You believe that, by depriving other's of money, there will be more for someone as special as you. Even a few years in corporate America will prove, without a doubt, this isn't the case.
To your point directly: successful contract negotiation almost exclusively depends on what leverage you have relative to the counterparty; your skill as a negotiator matters very little if your employer isn't incentivized to come to the table (ex. imagine even an extraordinarily persuasive Amazon SWE trying to get themselves exempted from the RTO mandate in the OP). IDK what your employment situation is, but in my experience isolated employees typically have very little leverage, and therefore very little basis to successfully negotiate a better contract, a more favorable RTO policy, etc. Regardless of whether the upside risk is guaranteed or not (and I disagree that it is guaranteed), its magnitude is likely quite small if you are negotiating alone (maybe during the hiring phase you can pick up an extra 10K salary or get classified as remote, but good luck repeating that success year-over-year). The idea of bargaining as a large group (ie. as a union), rather than individually, is that you have far more leverage together than apart, and that's the most relevant factor when dealing with a big corporation like a FAANG. It's less a question of upside vs downside risk and more a question of opportunity cost: what can you get for yourself alone, vs. what can you get for everybody if you all stand together. Looking at the data, standing together is generally the more profitable approach: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/union-workers-wealth-compar...
How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
Your mental model operates under the assumption that you are paid for your individual performance. This leads you to believe organizing is suboptimal. But, the data does not show individual performance is tied to compensation, therefore you're arguing against a model based on a meritocracy fallacy and an incomplete mental model. You might also overweight your own performance vs that of others, in the same way that a majority of drivers believe themselves to be better than the average driver.
Understandably, it is hard to internalize that we are not special, that performance is hard to measure, and that organizations communicate something different than reality. "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
"I am a gambler and I don't want my upside restricted" is more honest than "the profession shouldn't organize because a small cohort will miss out on outsized comp that they can work hard and are recognized for." Also, importantly, you asked "how would a profession ... benefit" when you really mean just the folks at the top of the income distribution, not the entire profession. One might also consider that pay transparency laws exist because of well known and researched pay inequity issues across wide swaths of the economy.
> When asked about the rationale for the size of their paycheck, both workers and executives overwhelmingly point to one factor: Individual performance. And yet research shows that this belief is false and largely based on three myths people have about their pay: that you can separate it from the performance of others; that your job has an objective, agreed-upon definition of performance; and that paying for individual performance improves organizational outcomes. Instead, your pay is defined by four organizational forces: power, inertia, mimicry, and equity. The bad news is that these dynamics have reshaped the economy to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The good news is that, if pay isn’t some predetermined, rigid reflection of performance, then we can imagine a different world in terms of who is paid what, and how. -- Jake Rosenfeld, a top scholar of the US labor market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy
https://hbr.org/2021/02/youre-not-paid-based-on-your-perform...
Whats next? You're going to be telling me Patrick Mahomes is in a union too!
This is not how management sees software devs.
Devs are fungible resources that can be allocated where the urgency/importance is and regardless of individual attributes.
I refused to go back for those three days in the hope that nobody who matters will notice, yet they made line managers snitch on people and I was fired with notice because the agreement with the worker's council was "legally binding" and no exceptions could be made. So for me personally the involvement of the union sealed my fate into unemployment.
Unions are not a panacea, it leaves individuals without anything to bargain outside of the lines of agreements already established, and while some professions might benefit from them, I think unions for high skill jobs are not a good solution.
For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous:
- You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
- Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
- One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
- The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Essentially, many of the things that make startups—and the innovation that comes with them—great will be pushed aside for a one-size-fits-all model that, to me, feels more like a utopian ideal than a reasonable solution for tech. Many of these concerns also apply to larger companies too.
I’m open and willing to being proven wrong about all of this though!
I agree for start-ups. But Amazon is not a start-up. Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
Considering the points I made, you mind elaborating on the pros and cons you see? (I’d like to understand this perspective.)
When a firm is small, i.e. below Dunbar’s number, that intra-firm communication is implicit. Above that, however, at least some communications must be mediated. Unless one wants pure fucking chaos, that mediation requires formalised communication. We call that system bureaucracy.
Once you have bureaucracy, you’ve lost the benefits of implicit communication. A large firm must thus either lose that culture entirely or constrain it to the top of the firm: elite group of fewer than 150 people, often much fewer, who have the flexibility to operate outside the bureaucracy and the camaraderie to trust each other with that power. (Or, again, pure fucking chaos. Almost every generation has shining examples of business leaders who want a big workforce with no bureaucracy.)
The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions. They need the power to act, but ones with a trigger finger will put their companies (and themselves) out of business. The question is whether they’ll do it faster than the current crop of founders and VCs. Given the current state of Silicon Valley, I’m up for giving it a try.
> The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
This was helpful. Thank you. I have some more thoughts, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to push this topic further given the divergence from the original post.
> Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions.
I’ve always gotten the vibe that unions are inherently antagonistic, but that’s just my view as an outsider who’s never had to deal with one personally, so I could be entirely wrong about that.
Respectfully: who the fuck cares how far the current topic in a subthread has diverged from the original one? Let the conversation go where is interesting to the folks having it and trust in folks reading the conversation to nope the fuck out if they lose interest.
For a long time I'd have a reflex "uh oh" response when unions were mentioned in HN discussions, because they arguments would get too snarky and contentious, but I appreciate the tone you've set. Or maybe the HN crowd is getting older and a little less likely to spend time on snark, too.
That’s not patronizing. Thank you.
Honestly, I expected to simply be dunked on and downvoted into a dead comment, so I think it’s great that there are at least some folks who are willing to engage in good faith and have the conversations most would rather not have! That’s how we all grow.
Unions aren't like the bar association, it's not obligatory across the industry, or even the same company. Literally today Boeing is on strike in WA but not in South Carolina, exactly because only the WA employees are union.
Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.
Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:
Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.
> Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.
> Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:
> Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.
Your entire focus here is compensation, which wasn’t my focus in everything I listed.
It wasn't your focus in everything you listed, but it was in two out of the four of them... which certainly isn't nothing:
> - Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
> - The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Every actual tech union that exists is a great advertisement for not unionizing.
Software wasn't unionized, but the pipefitter were, the welders I met were, unions were a very heavy presence.
> You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
Those pipefitters were very tight-knit, never saw them on the job debating contracts. They took a pride in their work that from an outsider seemed kinda strange, saying things like “welp, gotta go help Tyler make his next million.” (Tyler being the CEO and heir of the family business.)
I also know a former teacher who was head of her school's branch of the teacher's union, her teachers were relatively tight-knit, she did describe her particular job as handling and filing complaints and stuff, not so much contract negotiation though.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
At USE, merit became more important, not less. if you were getting a raise, you had to be able to justify to every other part of the company “hey why is she getting a raise and my people are not.” At Google it was “who can play the perf game best and talk the best talk,” at USE it was “my people made Tyler an extra hundred thousand, what did your people do.” The teacher friend, I didn't ask, but it might be a moot point because during the Bush administration all publibly-funded schooling in the USA was transitioned to hard metrics and student outcomes, so it surely stands against your point but you would also surely say that it's not a representative sample?
> One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
So the shop floor did have some very specialized roles. If you are a Master Welder, then the entire rest of the shop floor is basically set up to provide you the illusion that all you have to do to make Tyler money is to show up and weld every piece that is fed to you and inspect it and sign it. Someone else at the Cutter station will make sure that the pipe was cut the right length, someone at Tack-Up will take care of making sure that your parts are already tacked together so that you don't have to hunt around for parts. Stuff like that. But the rest of the folks just wear 10 hats over the course of a day. Like until you have met people who work with their hands like woodworkers, you don't quite have an appreciation for how much freedom one has to just make little tools or racks or a holding enclosure, just welding together some little crane because you got sick of having to sometimes hold this thing for a minute or two while others slid things into place. I want to say at one point they casually dropped “yeah we rebuilt these doors on the loading bay last month, so that we could load another skid into our trucks sometimes.”
Freedom to do stuff, they had! And with teaching, I mean, they load you with so much work that there's no time but aside from the exact minutes of when a class is in your room, the teacher had creative freedom to teach in any way they wanted (and they needed this freedom because any given class has vastly different students with different learning needs). One personal contribution I made: “trashketball,” students could perform tasks on paper to earn the right to throw it into the trash to win either 2 or 3 points off their team. (A different teacher needed an approach to build a kinetic fun activity into their curriculum.)
> Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Like I don't think this comment would have gotten me decked or anything if I’d said it to one of these construction workers, but it may have ended several conversations with “yeah I don't work with Chris, that guy's a prick.” I think that the teachers would agree that their hard work and unique contributions are deeply undervalued, but they would blame the taxpayer and the embezzlement-adjacent acts of some school administrators for most of that?
Unions do not lock down job roles, or enforce collective bargaining, or any of the rest of it, if their members don't want it.
Unions are like the anti-HR. Exactly like when the other side of a negotiation lawyers up, you want a lawyer on your side of the table. Unions are the HR person on your side of the table.
I'm a startup founder and I can definitely see a point where we'd encourage union membership. I want my staff to be happy and productive. I'd love to have someone I could talk to regularly who was very much a representative of my staff. Of course I'd continue talking to all of them individually as well, but having a single person tasked with telling me any bad news would be great.
"Top performers" and "10x engineers" is largely a myth nowadays. It existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
As a sidenote, most often when you see a "top performer" you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
But that's the exact kind of talent who you'd want in a union as leverage, and those people only have to lose with normal union benefits.
>you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
This is a nitpick distinction, but I think a "genius" is different from a 10xer. A genius approaches the world in an untraditional way and seems to consume re-interpret content in ways I wouldn't be able to replicate with years of dedicated practice.
a 10xer is in the name: they feel 10 times more productive as an engineer. Those few people I consider 10xers are ones who aren't just great at delivering entire subsystems by themselves, but great at communicating the idea, and maybe even selling you their pitch. Those aren't necessarily important qualities for a genius, but they are necessary to function in a company.
(and ofc these aren't mutually exclusive. Though I have yet to meet a genius who I feel is also a 10xer. Having such a different interpretation of the world and being able to translate it to us mortals is a truly gifted person).
And ofc if you give someone special treatment in a union (and they aren't a leader themselves), you kind of ruin the whole point of a union and are just a middleman.
Comments about the existence of 10x engoneers aside..
It's a wild take that we live in a world where all OOP frameworks are gone and besides a few people working on self-driving cars we're all working in React...
I think I have a few colleagues to notify.
"But there’s no clear evidence that these mandates improve financial performance. A recent study of S&P 500 companies that was conducted by University of Pittsburgh researchers found that executives are “using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.” Those policies result in “significant declines in employees’ job satisfaction but no significant changes in financial performance or firm values,” they concluded." (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/return-to-office-mandate...)
>we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture;
They believe there are advantages to being fully in-office because they have observed these things. Zero mention of actual data to back up their beliefs and observations despite substantial industry data verifying that remote and hybrid work environments are more beneficial on almost every level.
I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then again, Amazon doesn't claim monopoly on those and one has to assume the risk of working for a place that churns people out and has upper-level management that are hostile to IC's needs/wants.
Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?
If all/most employers start mandating a return to office then we'll find out where people really stand on the issue. Will they suck it up and work from the office to keep their generous paychecks? Will they stand on principle and try to find another employer who will let them work remote and who they like working for in other respects? Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms? Have they already saved FU money and will just retire?
This could all be fixed within 1 day if government would mandate companies to pay you for the duration you're away from home for work (including travel time).
It would fix pollution, traffic jams, housing shortages, fake employee shortages, mental/stress issues and potentially even declining birth rates.
But I guess "because boss says so" is a more important argument to not fix all of those things.
That said, I think it's more like if you're expected to work 40 hours per week, and your employer mandates you come into work an hour each way, then you should either be expected to work 32 productive hours -- or you should be compensated for 48 hours. But I guess this has always been the difference between exempt and non-exempt employees.
That’s this person’s fault for choosing to live an hour from the office. I’ve always realized how stupid commuting is and the longest commute of my adult life (I’m currently 41) has been a 30-minute bicycle ride.
Now the people who live an hour from the office want less work or more pay than me? I say just fire them instead.
Or just let everybody negotiate the deal they want for themselves and let them price in their cost of commute or whatever into their ask. If somebody who lives an hour away wants to work 20% fewer hours or make 20% more money, let them shoot their shot and ask for it.
Do you expect people who change jobs to only work at employers they're proximate to - or to sell their homes each time? What if moving means the kids have to change schools? Or a married couple, do they both have to change jobs?
My employer happened to move offices, so my 10 minute walk turned into 45-60 minutes multi-modal. Does that mean I should be fired for their decision to move to a lower cost jurisdiction when I can provide the same value? In that case am I just being fired for not asking "how high?"
I think in practice it ends up being "is this a hot job market or not" and if yes, then the employee gets to dictate, and if not the employer does. This doesn't really resolve the underlying issue though.
I think a simpler model is just to allow employees to expense commute costs at the ~IRS rate. If the employer doesn't want that they can choose to hire only people nearby. If they move offices they should factor that into their cost estimates. But what do I know, maybe they should just fire everyone ;)
No, but if you think you can ask for more money for providing the same value, good luck to you. Or you might’ve been lowballing yourself up to this point and you’ll get a yes. Who knows.
> I think in practice it ends up being "is this a hot job market or not" and if yes, then the employee gets to dictate, and if not the employer does. This doesn't really resolve the underlying issue though
I guess I just don’t see an underlying issue. If you want something ask for it and then decide what to do when you get your answer. That’s the resolution.
> I think a simpler model is just to allow employees to expense commute costs at the ~IRS rate.
You can do this already! Submit an expense report to your employer. If you’re valuable enough, I guarantee it’ll get paid. If you’re not, it won’t. If you think, “But I am that valuable and it still didn’t get paid” then you’ve learned you’re not as valuable as you think.
There is no line. You are responsible for your choices.
> Do you expect people who change jobs to only work at employers they're proximate to - or to sell their homes each time? What if moving means the kids have to change schools? Or a married couple, do they both have to change jobs?
I expect people to take actions that make sense for them. Everybody’s different. I don’t like the idea of a long commute so I chose to live in a dense city and look for work near where I live. I’d be willing to move for the right job but I wouldn’t be willing to commute an hour for it. If I can’t make that work, it’s not the right job.
If you absolutely detest the idea of a long commute then you will only look for jobs close to where you live or you’ll move when you get a job that requires a long commute (in this case, renting probably makes more sense than buying).
If you think, “I’d never move to be closer to work, that’s nuts,” then it turns out you don’t detest long commutes as much as you thought you did.
But it sounds like you are bringing up the exception rather than the rule so don’t know what to tell you there.
Jobs move. My Mom's company moved from San Diego to Denver. She quit.
Be careful what you wish for. The most likely result of this would be companies simply letting go any employees that had a commute longer than X minutes. And of course all the remaining employees would now say their commute takes X minutes too, to get the maximum subsidy. E.g. I currently bike, which takes 15 minutes, but I could easily walk and make it take 40 minutes instead, to get a nice bonus to my current pay.
I usually schedule my in-person meetings in a block, come in for that, then go back home to do my coding. It's nice to get a change of scenery.
I am far less efficient this way of course since I lose 90-120 minutes a day, but if that's how my employer wants me to spend my time... I guess that's why they call it "compensation."
Further to that point people who are indispensable and absolutely want/need remote work have their managers and even 1-2 level above in confidence to get their demand fulfilled like always before.
This leaves majority of employees who hate these rules but no leverage or wherewithal to get what they want from management which has no reason to listen.
> Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms
A few of course can but to most no one including Amazon will pay that kind of money for writing API which calls API which calls API.. This is what most people do at the end of day.
Retirement sounds most reasonable for people who have earned and saved enough and not trying to reach or compare to earnings of directors, VPs and above.
Naturally, some would question the wisdom of making people, who can quit, quit, but I get the feeling that the management,as a group, is pissed off about the whole WFH.
They're not firing workers who simply ignore the mandates and continue to work remotely anyway. Cutting workers with institutional knowledge and experience is a bigger loss than whatever lesser productivity there might be from not being in-person. Workers actually have the upper hand here and they're using it.
It's like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy - the companies are saying "I declare RTO" but nothing happens.
"I declare RTO" can only work if you have critical enough mass of employees who believe the bluff and actually come into the office. This is definitely an area where a workforce that is organized and works together could hold out forever, but the tech worker mantra is "unions bad" so collective action is difficult.
Citation needed. They may not be literally firing people for simply ignoring the mandates, but they sure as hell putting a mark on your performance record (at least at one big tech company).
IIUC one of the reasons for the original RTO mandates was to get people to leave (either willingly or through perf review pressure).
Putting aside quality of life (though I agree that is a huge consideration) -- even when people show up to the office, they are on Zoom calls most of the day.
Really people forced into office for no reason should at least be given share of the gain they make for the owners.
But note that Apple is on a similar glide path as Amazon with respect to return-to-office.
Probably, but also costs are quite a bit lower (they're much closer to Denver CoL if you can believe that). We have a pretty good amount of startups and a lot more "bigger" non-tech companies than you'd expect.
I agree on the funding trough, but I think that's really the macro-economics at play. Midwest is pretty well shielded from that, so I'm kinda happy I'm here for the time being.
Seattle is basically a great place to work for a satellite office of one of the tech behemoths, but the actual hacker / enthusiast scene seems to have pretty much dried out. Seattle's Linux user's group died in 2020 and never came back, as an example.
Madison had much better makerspaces and more of them, despite being a much smaller city. Madison was also small enough that you ended up connected to a lot of really smart people coming out of the university's CS / biomedical departments which seemed to sustain a pretty vibrant med-tech startup ecosystem.
Edit to add: If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.
The whole Seattle scene imploded in 2020.
I'm looking for the same thing, maybe we can compare notes!
I've been going to the Capitol Hill Tool Library lately, which is my local makerspace. The space is small but they have a lot of traffic and people are generally very friendly and helpful. Also they have woodworking tools which I would never have in my apartment.
In terms of makerspaces specifically I imagine the limiting factor is rent. When rent is too high you end up with a smaller space and less cash left over for equipment.
Out of curiosity I looked at the cost of a rental industrial space in SoDo and the prices absolutely blew my hair back.
Oh, I'm not familiar with that one. What's it called?
I spent a lot of hours welding, using the wood shop, and working on my car there.
That said, Seattle does also have a good collection of "minor" companies, such as PACCAR, Expedia, Zillow, Tableau, F5. And I think Apple also has an office in Seattle (although probably really small).
Unless you want to work for one of the "brands", there are some good choices in Seattle.
The upside is you don’t have to live in the Bay Area! Couldn’t pay me enough to move down there.
I'm actually worried, as a resident of the Portland metro, about this, because I'm getting closer and closer to the point where my salary is large enough that fewer and fewer businesses can employ me just at my current compensation let alone raises etc.
I'm actually worried I have a large set of golden handcuffs on my hands here
Adding on thoughts:
One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).
I will add that I learned a TON from AWS, and got to practice much of it too. It's the best boot camp one could ask for regarding general skill development imo (not particular frameworks etc but like, the theory and practice). There's also some things I miss like the weekly ops review and the general engineering culture, especially when it came to explicitly listing service limits, API specs, and cost up front in your design. Oh, and I honestly miss the docs culture. Quip wasn't as good as Google docs but the actual docs themselves and process of authoring them were SUPER valuable.
Coding wise, CDK was so much better than terraform (once we moved to CDK from lpt+cfn, which was way worse imo). Smithy and open API are neato too (@smithy externally everyone uses thrift it seems, but the overlap of functionality/use cases isn't identical).
Probably the biggest thing I miss was bones (kind of successor to octane), which is kind of like yeoman or create react app but would include so so much of the excellent internal tooling of ci/CD approval actions. I don't know of a real external equivalent, but would love to have one. If you ever see a Breland Miley or Ian Mosher apply to your company, HIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. (There was another really solid guy on that team but their name escapes me at the moment, and here's hoping I got the spelling right)
Oh, also isengard is still easier to use than okta or AWS organizations to manage accounts imo.
It's basically panel 2 from this:
Beyond the initial publication of the doc, the peer review process is much more sane than trying to review a bunch of power point slides. Similarly, it's much much easier to refer to a well written document when it comes time to implement or reevaluate an idea than going over some power point slides and maybe an associated recording, to say nothing about searchability, discoverability, and maintainability of an actual written document vs PowerPoint slides.
Also, idle side speculation: I wonder how much (if any) one of the underappreciated early employees @ Amazon had a hand in proselytizing this, given she (MacKenzie) is an author.
- You can't take calls from cars
- People leave 2 bullshit comments like "justification needed" for participation points and then go drink coffee instead of actually reading the doc or googling for said justification
- People waste inordinate amounts of time writing docs for things that could be discussed in 10 minutes
I’m very much a writing kind of person when it comes to organizing my thoughts and I worked at a place where we did a ton of written documentation kind of like this. Then I left there and worked remote with a different company whose CEO, when I sent him an email, would pick up the phone and call me. We would then have the 10 minute conversation you’re talking about here. I came to love it because it’s true, a short focused conversation can be a huge timesaver. Since then, I’m often really frustrated by vendors and partners who steadfastly refuse to get on a call, when it’s very obvious to me that a quick call would be a far better use of time than endlessly going back and forth on email.
With certain people I can work like that. With others that I don't trust, have seen don't shoddy work, don't communicate well, then write a doc and we'll discuss it.
egos in engineers need to die.
And possibly post-commute fatigue and not being able to get anything done after 1.5 hours on the road in the morning.
Also, keep in mind that it isn't just the commute time. For a 1-hour commute I also need to prepare for the 1-hour commute, which includes making and packing up a lunch (because many offices have no cafeteria or no options that I'm able to eat), packing up my electric toothbrush and water flosser (because I need to brush 3 times a day for my braces and they won't let me leave shit at the office). Others need to deal with feeding pets, blah blah. For people with train commutes they need to deal with uncertainty in traffic just getting to the train station, so they have to leave an extra 15-20 minutes early and kill time waiting for the train on the platform because the next train won't come for a fucking hour (this is America), and leave time to line up to buy the goddamn parking ticket for the train station.
For the past 2 years people were able to roll out of bed and into a meeting, grabbing something from the fridge on the way. That's why stuff was efficient. Now we're going back to an inefficient world with the same high expectations of an effecient world.
Counting the time to get dressed and brush your teeth towards the office is comically absurd, in my opinion, even if I take your point. THAT SAID good luck with the braces I don't miss the constant brushing. That would make me want to WFH. Cheers
For an example of the latter, it's the people who can stomach a long commute three days a week but not five.
What about if someone wants to know what was discussed? You end up telling and retelling the same thing over and over again to get people in the loop, vs pointing to the doc and its remarks. (Depends on the subject of course)
Unfortunately most of the doc culture is people trying to convince each other within the same team that we need XYZ even when everyone with half a brain already knows it. Like "we need more GPUs to get shit done" should be a 10 minute call, not a PRFAQ.
The path I took was to just start doing it and expecting it for critical topics within my team (which was around 200-250 people when I started it). It takes several iterations to get good at it and the first few feel like it’s quite foreign and even wasteful. (It puts a lot more work on the author, by design.)
Eventually, it escaped just my group and (with support from others, including the CEO, who liked the process after seeing some of the documents that I or others shared with them) and is now fairly common in the corporate center for our standardized processes, though not nearly as standardized as I perceive Amazon to be in its use.
Basically: start doing it and stick to it for at least 5 complete cycles. Make sure that influential people (not necessarily org leaders) are public in their praise of well-constructed and effective documents.
It's a simple shift where people have to do their homework instead of just yeet something over the fence. You want to solve X? Present us with three options and we'll talk about it. You want to introduce Y? But we already use X to solve that, present us with new insights and the justification to spend the time on it.
It's far from perfect and it requires buy-in and (self) discipline, but it's still better than what happened before. Because some companies are still paying the debt of hype-driven development even though the people that introduced it are long gone.
This looks interesting and relevant:
- https://github.com/projen/projen
- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/getting-started-with-pro...
Looks Amazon official. Okay, I'm hype, this will be fun to play with.
Was this something you knew was coming or did this behavior surprise you? I realize enshittification really ramped up over the 2010s but I have a hard time last remembering when I expected a company to aim for customer satisfaction over squeezing more revenue. Maybe tiktok? (Which has since enshittified in many ways.)
The rest hurts a lot, though. It's not fun to watch the culture of a company you once had pride in sour and rot.
What I meant by this is, in my personal opinion, there were a bunch of half baked products they should have just not mentioned at reinvent because said products never really materialized or had significant usage oncerns for a long, long time after the announcement.
The pressure to announce more and more at reinvent while the quality of what was being announced dropped was the specific feeling I'm talking about.
Sorry kind of on a caffeine high and brain isn't working too well right now. I'm also reluctant to throw shade on the products/teams I'm thinking of because I didn't work on them and I don't want to give them any heat, but I'll say it was in the 2017-2019 era I felt it start to change.
I think it contrasts with the really cool launches like Lambda, Aurora, API Gateway, Sagemaker, etc that has just come out before then.
Yea, I can certainly see this making one feel claustrophobic.
Pipelines, BT and Isengard are absolutely what I'll miss the most as well (I handed in my resignation notice last week, prior to all this RTO2.0 kerfuffle)
You can't have a mentality of working on something forever in AWS, unless it is S3/RDS/EC2, those forever systems. People are fighting to create new codenames for new products, PRFAQ all the time, etc.
Does this approach work? Maybe, but definitely at a cost. It creates many half-assed products that one acknowledgement away from turning off its life support. And many grifters and land grabbing attempts to create some glue services just to back on the hot new trends. Yes, I am talking about the AI stuff. It is embarrassing how little Amazon has to show for, while spending billions, all because the in fighting and internal sabotaging kills its chance before it can see the light of the day. Epic level failure if you ask me.
When I started I lucked into a situation where I was one engineer a "team" of two. We didn't have a manager and were reporting to the director of our department. He only had about an hour a week to meet with us. We spent a lot of time fixing broken stuff that we'd inherited (a task that I actually found kind of fun), and soon our ops load started going down. We eventually got another engineer and a manager who was willing to prioritize fixing the root causes of our on-call tickets.
During black-friday-week of my second year there we had essentially no operational issues and spent our time brainstorming future work while we kept an eye our performance dashboards. We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy". Our manager called that a win.
Even back then Amazon had the reputation for being a brutal place to work and for burning out engineers, but I rather liked it. I ultimately left because my wife hated living in Seattle.
What the hell? Hope you told him off, not his job or his business. Weird.
And, like I said it was only semi scolded: he came to me and quietly said something like, "you guys don't seem very busy", which I took to mean "why are you loudly brainstorming future work when the guys in the next row of cubes over haven't slept in 36 hours?"
My answer was, "All our stuff is working."
It was attached to a similar anecdote about someone being yelled at for crafting a well-oiled system.
Sorry for an obligatory: there is no such thing as a root cause.
That said, that matches my general experience too (I left about 9 years ago). Unless the S-team specifically calls them out for any particular metric, it's not going to get touched.
Even then they'll try and game the metric. Sev2 rate is too high, let's find some alarms that are behind lots of false positives, and just make them sev3 instead, rather than investigate why. No way it can backfire... wait what do you mean I had an outage and didn't know, because the alarm used to fire legitimately too?
That major S3 collapse several years ago was caused by a component that engineers had warned leadership about for at least 4-5 years when I was there. They'd carefully gathered data, written reports, written up remediation plans that weren't particularly painful. Engineers knew it was in an increasingly fragile state. It took the outage for leadership to recognise that maybe, just maybe, it was time to follow the plan laid out by engineering. I can't talk about the actual what/why of that component, but if I did it'd have you face palming, because it was painfully obvious before the incident that an incident was inevitable.
Unfortunately, it seems like an unwillingness to invest in operations just pervades the tech industry. So many folks I speak to across a wide variety of tech companies are constantly having to fight to get operations considered any kind of a priority. No one gets promoted for performing miracles keeping stuff running.
I had a quick search to find my favourite article on this one, it might be https://willgallego.com/2018/04/02/no-seriously-root-cause-i... as it demolishes Five Whys but https://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/02/10/each-necessary-but-on... is a classic
Im ex AWS and the internal tools _try_ to get away from the myth of human error and root cause. But its difficult when humans read and understand in a linear post hoc fashion.
That said, I rather like it. It's straightforward to explain to people, they very quickly "get" it, and it gets them thinking along the right lines.
I genuinely believe there is no such thing as a root cause. The reason I believe that is both grounded in personal experience, and in the 40+ years of academic research that demonstrates in far greater detail that no failure comes about as a result of a single thing. Failure is always complex, and that approaches to incident analysis and remediation that are grounded in it are largely ineffectual. You have to consider all contributing factors if you want to make actual progress. The tech industry tends to trail really far behind on this subject.
A couple of quick up-front reading suggestion, if I may:
* https://how.complexsystems.fail/ - An excellent, and short, read. It's not really written from the perspective of tech, but every single point is easily applicable to technological systems. I encourage engineers to think about the systems that they're responsible for at work, their code, incidents they've been involved in, as they read it. Everything we deal with is fundamentally complex. Even a basic application that runs on a single server is complex, because of all the layers of the operating system below it, let alone the wider environment of the network and beyond.
* If you're willing to go deeper: "Behind Human Error" ISBN-10: 9780754678342. It's a very approachable book, written by Dr Woods and several other prominent names in the academic research side in to failures.
My favourite example to use when talking about why there's no such thing as a root cause has been the 737-MAX situation. Which has only become more apt over time, as we've learned just how bad that plane was.
With the original 737-MAX situation, we had two planes crash in the space of 5 months.
If we follow a root cause analysis approach, you'll end up looking at the fact that the planes were reliant on a single sensor to tell them their angle of attack (AoA). So replace the single sensor with multiple, something that was already possible to do, and the planes stop crashing. Job done. Resilience achieved!
That doesn't really address a lot of important things, like, how did we end up in a situation where the plane was ever sold with a single AoA sensor (especially one with a track record of inaccuracy)?
Why did the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) keep overriding pilot input on the controls, which it didn't do on previous implementations of MCAS systems? Why was the existence of the MCAS system not in the manuals? Why could MCAS repeatedly activate?
If the MCAS hadn't behaved in such a bizarre fashion, where it kept overriding input, it's arguable that the pilots would have been able to correct its erroneous dropping of the nose. If you're sticking with a "root cause" model, there's a pretty strong argument that the MCAS system was the actual root cause of the incident.
Given the fairly fundamental changes to the controls, and the introduction of the MCAS, why were pilots not required to be trained on the new model of plane? Is Boeings attempts to avoid pilots needing retraining the actual root cause?
Why was an MCAS system necessary in the first place? It's because of the engine changes they'd made, and how they'd had to position them in relation to the wings that tended to result in the planes nose wanting to go up and induce a stall. The MCAS system was introduced to help with counteracting that new behaviour. Was the new engine choice the root cause of failure?
and so on and so forth..
If you look at the NTSB accident report for the 737-MAX flights, it goes way deeper, and broader in to the incident. It takes a holistic view of the situation, because even the answers to those questions I pose above are multi-faceted. As a result it had a long list of recommendations for Boeing, the FAA, and all involved parties.
Those 2 crashes were the emergent property of a complex system. It's a symptom. A side effect. It required failures in the way things were communicated within Boeing, failures in FAA certification, failures in engineering, failures in management decision making, the works.
No one at Boeing deliberately set out to make a plane that crashes. A lot of the decisions about how they do things are reasonable, and make some sense, in isolation. But they all contributed together to make for a system to which it became a question of "when" and not "if" a major disaster would occur.
If resilience and incident analysis just focuses on a singular root cause, the systems that produced the bad outcome, will continue, and will inevitably make more bad decisions. The only thing that would improve is that they would probably never make a decision to sell a plane with a single AoA sensor.
As we've seen over time, the whole broken system has resulted in a lot of issues with the MAX, beyond that sensor situation.
While I get what you mean, I think most people who've been in the situation know what I'm talking about. The same alarms are going off constantly and you keep doing the expedient thing to make them stop going off without investing any effort into stopping them from going off again in the same situation in the future.
Of course there is a chain of causes, and maybe you need to refactor a module, or maybe you need to redesign an interface, or maybe you need to throw the whole thing away and start over -- we did all those things in different situations while I was there -- but there's a point at which looking at deeper causes loses value because those causes are not in our power to fix and we're left to defend against those failures: a system we rely on is unreliable; machines and networks go down unexpectedly; a lot of people have poor reading comprehension so even good docs are sometimes useless; we are all sinners whose pride and sloth sometimes leads us to make crappy software and systems; etc.
To see "it's not worth it to make $420k as an L6 Amazon engineer" is super interesting
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
Then you learn how long it takes for that "420k" comp to manifest (typically about 2-3 years from hire if all goes well, longer if the market is down). At least your annual increase in time off is looking good by then!
Well, assuming you make it that far. Whoops, did you forget to document how awesome you are and insure your manager sees it too? Or just make a 'blameless' mistake during an oncall rotation that made everything in the UK available at a steep discount? Sorry, ______, guess it's PIP time. We hope you succeed! Just don't look too hard at the success rate.
And then, your average successful tenure of 3-5 years is up, and you get to look back at the intense stress, distrust of your boss/coworkers, impact to your relationships, and the toil on your family. Suddenly, the offers pouring in are looking better and better, even if the comp isn't as great.
FWIW, the first 3-6 months tend to be great though!
It's like big brother where someone on your team will be pipped each quarter and you need to make sure it's not you. When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.
Yep, lots of idea-snatching, not crediting each other, teaming up to not including a particular team member to try to ensure that team member is the one that gets PIP
This is untrue for Amazon, at least in the US. Your total compensation is guaranteed for the first 4 years. If your total compensation in your offer was 500k, you'll get ~500k per year.
The first two years you're paid in cash so it'll match the offer exactly, the final two years you're paid in RSUs (stock based) with the stock price calculated at the time of the offer. Your salary may vary due to stock price. Historically it's gone up, not down, and this is how people have made 600k+, for example, as a senior engineer there.
Starting from year 2-3, you'll receive new stock grants that will vest in the years after 4 if you stay that long.
Source: I've received offer letters.
Also keep in mind Amazon is headquartered in Seattle, which is far from a cheap area, and of the 5 submitters to levels.fyi for sde3 Seattle new hires in the last 6 months, the range is 250k-425k.
Take into account that an L6 who started from L4 normally has the scope and competence of a Staff engineer at Google, it makes sense to me.
If all you wanted was money, you could do even better by going into finance or OpenAI and work your life away until you can't anymore. It's just not sustainable for most people long term, no matter what the pay is, which itself is less than many contemporaries in the same "class".
Perspective.
"hah you think retail is hard, imagine working for a drug gang in Africa! You'd go back to retail in a snap!"
Stress is stress. It makes you unwell. The remuneration isn't the point.
Stress isn't less stressful just because you get to take a holiday afterwards. A broken leg doesn't hurt less when you break it because you have health insurance.
Sure,the duration of the stress may differ, but that's a different variable too.
Can a millionaire experience the same or higher levels of stress than a cashier? Absolutely. Can a cashier and millionaire be in a position of high, inescapable stress for prolonged periods? Yes.
Stop comparing relative hardship based on your own bias... Unless you promise to never complain about anything you eat or drink ever again because of "starving African children"
GP just explained how, though. Higher remuneration = eventual recovery period. Focusing on the stress is only human, so you can't be faulted for that, but considering the comparative situations holistically, it is objectively more advantageous to get paid more for similarly, or perhaps even more, stressful situations.
Its almost universal that we will deal with more crap for more money. Some people wont, but most will.
There is a line for everyone though where the shit is too much for any salary.
Being on-call at these companies is equivalent to making work your first priority in life every few weeks. That is a big sacrifice.
So fucking true. They also treat their employees like shit generally, and prefer to hire externally for higher level positions - causing existing engineers who are closely familiar with the systems to quit and replacing them with higher-paid new hires, who have no context or familiarity with the service/product in question. I worked there for a few years on some fairly important, foundational services, and it was incredible that they had almost no-one around who initially built these services... 50% of the job was oncall, 40% was reading and trying to understand huge amounts of undocumented code that no one was familiar with... I felt like I was back to working on legacy banking systems.
Please, everyone, if there has to be a choice, save us (civilization) not them (the CEOs). Please. Think critically.
I personally know a SDM looking to leave now because he said he was basically told to fire one of his reports who was performing fine, or he would be the one fired. I've read stories of "hire to fire" where they hire ICs with the intention of letting them go in 6-12 months so another member of their team doesn't have to.
Culture is self-serving, hunger games style. Management is cut-throat and not empathetic at all.
The NYTimes did a big expose about the toxic culture of working at Amazon, and Bezos' public response was literally along the lines of "we move fast and know that our competitive culture is not for everyone. Our employees are up for the challenge and we are proud of what we accomplish."
In fact, during the hiring boom in 2020-2022 their reputation of SWE ICs was so bad that they were having trouble hiring. Many (myself included) would receive 1-2 emails from different recruiters desperately trying to get us to apply. We all knew to stay away.
The sad part is that many of the toxic managers and even ICs have infiltrated much more of FAANG (and big tech) and with the economic recession especially in tech, Amazon's cut-throat management styles like "performance culture" and PIP quotas have been happening in many other places now.
if you're more ambitious and/or genuinely enjoy building things, new product teams are the place to be. you don't have to deal with approval hell so much, but the dates are more aggressive and managers will do anything to hit them. this is where you learn what "building the plane while flying it" means.
I find people exaggerate how bad it is, but you definitely need to be good at reading the room to stick around.
i’ve got recruiters saying i can go back without a real interview because i left less than a year ago and i might go back. it’s really not any different than any other programming job i’ve had.
[1] 10 days for the first year
- 4 weeks (20 days) of PTO if you were there for 6 years or more, plus
- 6 "personal" days
- in Seattle at least, 3 sick days
Holidays were pretty bad (I don't think MLK jr day was a holiday until like 2021), but personally I'd rather be able to chose my own time off than have random enforced "rest days/development days" and enforced week long vacations when all the hotels and flights are full or pricey and traffic is terrible.
Come to think of it, some of my best work was done in the quiet times of Christmas/New Years when everyone else was gone and I was thus left without distractions. Lots of fun prototyping and project bootstrapping memories.
For me, 4 weeks is too good to lose. I'd go to Amazon only if I can't find another company to give me at least as much immediately.
Here in the UK for a full time employee the minimum by law, regardless of how long you've worked at a place, is 28 days. For all full time employees.
I think I'm on 32 now, and sick leave doesn't come out the holiday allowance, that's absurd!
Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix.
Justify your existence every quarter or catch a pinkslip. Wicked good payouts, though -- roommate in college ended up there and was straight up cash. He loved it until he didn't and vanished promptly.
In terms of the rest, only Netflix, meta, snowflake and roblox (why?) might have offered better, but the wlb in the first two is similar to amzn, and i didn't like the outlook of the latter two.
Every time I talk to a roblox recruiter it's something about how they have 70mm monthly recurring users and they're "building the platform to build games on" or something, but they're a total ghost in the mainstream media. I don't see the value proposition. Maybe they're the next "it" social media company as the users turn 16-21. Whatever they're doing, they pay full price for talent, allegedly.
Apparently kids LOVE the shit out of them... them and Fortnite. An assload of kids paying a couple (or couple dozen (and some Twitch/whatever streamers paying several hundred to a few thousand)) bucks a month adds up.
Based on what little I've seen of it, it all seems like budget Garry's Mod to me... which is something that I bet that kids these days have never heard of.
But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new design in a service that saves hundreds of millions of dollars per month or day, is something that really scratches my engineer itch.
Amazon and AWS really have the potential to be a great place to work, but leadership just squanders it. That's what makes announcements like this even more painful.
So many modern experiences that are built into our improved quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers, low friction same-day delivery, far greater access to online services including education and financing, just wouldn't exist (or at least not as quickly) if weren't able to cut down so many old-school structures and replace them with much more efficient and available alternatives. Getting to create a transformation in digital infrastructure and logistics at that level is just nuts. And there's still plenty to do. The money is great too; a far better result for me financially than the startups I worked at.
But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs.
If that resonated, and you have an opportunity to join Amazon towards the middle or advanced stages of your career; definitely try to do it. I interviewed several times at Amazon to get in. But if you are at the earlier stages of your career; choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join. That will make a bigger difference.
A Mex programmers subredddit r/taquerosprogramadores has plenty of stories about that.
Maybe it's just the structure AZ has established for Mexico. No idea.
If it helps you, I have one counter example handy: I have had an excellent Indian manager.
Racism emcompasses a bit of a different scope, including policy, institutional structures, and norms, of which stereotypes is directly related to norms and can be indirectly influential on the others.
However, the comment I originally reacted to would be definitely qualified as being "raciste" by most French speakers (and be illegal in France)
As for the legal part, calling all people of a given origin "bad managers" is definitely illegal here in France (once again, speaking only about what I know of)
If we were to believe that structural racism was the only kind of racism, we'd be forced to conclude that people can't be racist because people aren't structures.
But it's precisely the opposite as structures are composed of people and racist people are often the reason we have structural racism.
I even had a great indian engineer who emigrated from India (his parents are still there) who actually complained about Indian work culture.
It's like myself when I complain about mexican culture (for work, ethics, corruption or mediocrity)... I know that not everyone is like that, but shit where I'm from (southeast Mexico, Campeche) you'll be lucky to find someone that breaks the stereotype.
And I've several friends still there.. I just don't like the education and vslues society imparts us there
My hypothesis is that a part of what you're observing is just some form of 'survivorship bias' - changing jobs with visas isn't easy (been there done that) so folks are more willing to 'bend' to the culture being driven internally than just moving out (esp. with the long wait times).
At some point, its hard to distinguish the people from the culture, and what came first, but that's a different conversation.
However...
>choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join
I love my team, and even my organization that I work with. Multiple people on my team have stated that ours is the best team they've ever been part of in their career. But I don't love my company. I'm still at Amazon because even though my company is actively pushing me away, the love and enjoyment working with my team has been enough to get me to stay. So your advice here really strikes a chord with me, and I wish I could echo it.
Unfortunately, this advice isn't actually tenable, because no matter how great your team is, it's only one company leadership decision away from being ripped apart. I've watched this happen multiple times now, and this announcement is going to make it happen again. Caring less about your company just doesn't work when your company has shown multiple times that they are willing to throw away your team like that.
And yes, your team is one decisions away from being ripped apart, or you are one manager change away from being very sad. I'm sure many of us have been there before: From top of a stack rank to bottom due to a manager change, with minimal in-team changes.
So you can try to care about your manager as little as you want, but the changes will happen to you eventually. Embrace that you are going to have to change teams or quit companies, because no love for your company is going to help.
If anything, what this should teach is to aim for a specific level of company growth: Grow too fast, and you might as well be at a different company in 8 months. Grow too slow (or shrink!) and there's no advancement, and it's all internal politics, as the L7 who has been here for 10 years is probably not leaving, because they know that nobody else would hire them at that level.
Yes, you seem to have benefitted greatly, but your examples of efficiency and availability are flawed. For example:
"apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences": I don't see any benefits. When Youtube recommends for the billionth time a stupid soccer short because I previously watched one soccer short, I want to scream. Also, privacy or lack thereof.
"hailing a cab virtually": made possible due to full-time workers who have none of the benefits of full-time workers, in other words, exploitation.
"a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers": One word that encapsulates the other side of your "bonkers level of selection"--Temu.
"low friction same-day delivery": Made possible due to our reliance on fossil fuels
"far greater access to online services including education and financing": I'm not sure about the financing part. Education? Yeah, if I want to learn about something like video-editing. But I could've bought a book on that in the past and probably learned it much more in depth. If I wanted to learn something like German Idealism, not so much.
I think your pocket book has benefitted immensely, but all of the other benefits don't seem like benefits to me on a macro level. But kudos to you for doing so well and believing the world partakes in your good fortune.
And that’s OK - you don’t have to work at Amazon! But the implication is that the OP has the “wool over their eyes,” so to speak, and I think that’s unfair. They’re allowed to love their job and find it impactful, even if you don’t. :)
It’s possible I misread this somehow, so if that’s the case, apologies in advance.
As they say, ignorance is bliss.
Nicholson was still the bad guy.
aka "its a wall to wall hustle that will never get better, and when it comes to trade-offs, you're the one making them"
how can an outsider possibly do this?
...but you definitely can once you're in.
Luckily, in my time here, it has seemed like managers with this egregious behavior tend to get forced out of the company. However, they do insane amounts of psychological damage while they're here. Some teams have faced real tyrants :(
I do my research if the company has a ping-pong table or cafetaria I am not going to apply.
But I can see how that would not be for everyone. And I did see people who were more customer/outcome oriented really struggle.
You were an inspiration and a wonderful example of the calibre of talent Amazon has.
I especially remember the ease with which it appeared you navigated informally between teams, building relationships and bridges to help the company and fellow engineers. Although I'm sure it was actual work, it was still inspiring.
Happy to hear you're still there and found love.
People on blind say facebook is pretty similar with the hire to fire culture
Meta pays better but it's too long a drive from where I live to put up with the reduction in WLB.
When I interviewed at Azure (hiring event where I talked to 3+ TLs) I was not impressed at all, which is quite a contrast to when I interviewed at GCP. Maybe I got unlucky!
Ironically dogs live pretty royal lives in America.
“The Department of Justice estimates that American police officers shoot 10,000 pet dogs in the line of duty each year.”
It’s sad enough that we’ve armed, trained, and funded a militant force with no care for the wellbeing of the people they are meant to protect, regularly abusing their power to harm people for their sick pleasure. The fact that we’ve also trained this near-terrorist organization to kill dogs for the sport of it is even more disappointing. I’m all for the existence of a police, of course, but we need a serious mass-firing and restructure.
If you're entry-level and will put up with anything just to get Amazon on your resume.
Additionally there are some on work visas which if at the event of a layoff, they have to find work within months otherwise they have to move back. Amazon is the last one to consider given the amount of employees there (1.5M) which screams the following:
1. Hire advanced roboticists into Amazon.
2. Build and train the robots against the employees in the customer support and warehouses areas.
3. Gradually replace them and do a soft-layoff.
They won't be going after programmers for now, but Amazon will try to find a way to do more with less, given the staggering amount of employees there which is a red flag and motivates them to automate many jobs with robots to reduce costs.
Though how much of that is hiring for expansion and hiring because they churn through people is a different question.
That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough.
What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results.
This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.
There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry.
Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.
MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market cap.
AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up. They’re profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the executives are focusing on increasing those to match its trillion dollar market cap.
It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B market cap.
That said, your reply is a bit of a non sequitur. The thread is largely about answering the question of "why do you work at Amazon?", and I haven't seen anyone saying the answer is because of how much money Amazon makes. I also haven't seen anyone say they quit because Amazon appears to be on the same financial trajectory as GE or Boeing.
I bet you a tonne of people would agree that there's a culture shift away from valuing the experience of the boots-on-the-ground operational folk at all of those companies, which is why they don't want to work there.
SQS and Cloud watch were legit to, although cloud watch metrics are a bit aged and logs were really difficult to use until insihhts came into place
Also Glue, while it has some tenancy issues and rough edges, takes a bunch of work out of managing a datalake
Oh and Aurora + Aurora serverless weren't as flashy but from an ops perspective game changing at the time
Cloudformation is definitely showing it's age and I hate writing it compared to CDK, but it was also pretty game changing at the time. I don't know if it was the first infrastructure as code language, but it definitely kick-started the revolution.
Shipping is fast and prices are good, but you’re never quite sure you ordered the right size / color / edition.
What current companies do you consider to be both successful and have this culture now?
It's brought up a lot on HN. Heck, the evolution from 'fun, small, engineer company makes through product then everything changes when it becomes larger, more corporate' is almost a Hollywood cliche now (films like Blackberry, tv like Halt and Catch Fire).
This exists among the ICs class, too. "The bar" is under active manipulation so that they sit higher amongst the sea of low performers.
Like the amazing story where a L7 insisted rewriting a python-based CLI tool in Rust, all in the name of performance even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?
What's more amazing is that the manager of the team thought that was an L7 scope and a great achievement.
I'm not sure why this detail is relevant. The CPU it consumes is still CPU. Hypothetically, if a rewrite saves $100 million annually in compute, why does it matter that the majority of its time isn't spent in compute? It's still $100 million.
> then saving that tiny bit of CPU actually saved no money
this doesn't follow
> since it was already riding on the spare capacity of other investments
nor does this
Take for example a CLI that downloads and verifies the Bitcoin blockchain. It may spend most of its time downloading blocks, but it spends a ton of time calling SHA256 to verify those blocks. Similarly with a tool that downloads and checksums large files like Docker images.
If you have a fleet of 650K developer machines all running this util, then at some point it becomes cost effective to optimize the CPU usage.
Whether that point was reached in this example is not something I know. It seems like the L7 and their manager believed it was. But OP believes it wasn't. Either way, we don't know from OP's description of the situation.
Rewrites to save compute resources are done pretty frequently at huge companies. It's a relatively easy source of projects for high level engineers because they can see the fleet-wide metrics and have figured out how to choose projects that have clear dollar value in their performance write-ups.
Could an L7 have wasted a bunch of time on a fruitless project? Of course. Could an L7 have wasted a bunch of time on a fruitless project at a notoriously cutthroat and frugal company AND be super proud of it? That seems much less likely since they have to show some numeric impact at that level, but I obvious still possible. Would their manager then also be proud of it? That seems even less likely.
So when the only description of the project also accurately describes a large class of valuable projects (i.e. decrease fleet-wide cost of a ubiquitous tool) I was genuinely curious if there was more to the story.
I've been here about the same amount of time. Also L4-L6. I'll echo your "empire building" comment. That, above all else, seems to be the root of the evil. Managers need "scope" to get promoted. They get scope by building an empire. That leads to programs and initiatives and new processes without any connection to customer value. They only exist to be a line item on a promo doc. It is a topic of endless and open complaint that ICs get sucked up into some manager's "promo project."
The big shift seems to be that only a subset of people are talking about producing value. The majority are talking about being seen as producing value.
I do appreciate the other major theme of the announcement today: removal of bureaucracy and pointless layers of management. I'm hoping this will lead to a collapse of some of these silly little empires/kingdoms that L7-L8s have built up for themselves in the past 6 years.
I agree with that, I think earlier in the timeline there was enough work of large scope / complexity / impact that it was obvious and self-fulfilling (ie: go work on big customer ask / initiative -> get promoted). When the influx of middle management came, people started looking for ways to stand out and carve out their own teams under themselves. Multiply this across the entire company..
Amazon on the other hand, is toxic but has corners, so the coasting opportunities exist and some of the orgs are incredibly bloated with not too much to do.
Sort of. Partner engineers got hit hard with forced retirement packages in the first wave of interest rate hike fueled layoffs.
This is surprisingly more difficult than it seems. You could go by VC fame, but even those have only a 10-20% hit rate, with a decent chance you end up at Juicely or whatever.
You could go by VC dollars raised, but that often sets you up for sales-driven companies rather than true engineering-rich cultures.
You could go for obvious stand-out products (OpenAI, Claused) but you notice there arent that many positions except in rare cases.
Am I over-simplifying this?
If anything, someone at that level earns so much money, and has so much unvested stock waiting for them, that even if they grow tired of the work, or disagree with its direction, they are unable to leave for something more fulfilling.
Being forced into the office 5 days a week might be enough to force you to reconsider though?! Maybe?!
Does the average L7 person architect those services significantly, or just kinda maintain them? It's almost crazy to think about any old AWS employee (granted L7 is up there) conceiving those things, they've had such a massive impact on the ability to build things on the internet.
Organizational toxicity, like the original 3 day RTO and now 5 day RTO change, is the bigger problem. My L8 and L10 both learned of the 5 day RTO change at the same time as everyone else, meaning the S-Team made a decision and didn't give a heads up to anyone - probably because they don't care about feedback or data. Organizational toxicity also takes the form of stack ranking, URA metrics, and changes to promotion requirements over the last year to make them more difficult at all levels.
I'm coming up on my 2 year mark and more than ready to find something else, but it seems like fully remote security roles are pretty competitive right now.
that's not the type of person that should work at Amazon. The place is best for people who are driven, works hard, cares little about backstabbing others.
Clarify. Your current 3x salary job is better than Amazon, but it's in-valley/high-stress?
I was part of the Amazon Luna team and Devices org.
Yes oncall is super rough, yes people are very demanding. Internal documentation sucked.
But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it.
As long as you could justify the customer value managers and execs were pretty open to experimentation and trying out new approaches.
I also was lucky enough to have a very technical oriented manager, he had a great long term vision of where he thought we needed to go and the technical chops to guide us there.
The approach is definitely not for everybody nor the only one that can work in a company like Amazon but I think it did fit with my own values (if that makes any sense).
Some other random things I miss not in any particular order:
- Strong document oriented culture, it is expected of you to dive deep into certain areas while at the same time communicating them effectively
- smithy
- While CDK started out clunky pretty amazing high level constructs were available later.
- Full access to AWS, pretty easy for you to experiment and prototype.
- Both internal FF tooling and the AWS options were quite good.
This is one of those terms that drive me nuts, because actual ownership implies revenue/profit sharing, decision making, and property rights.
Sounds like you're getting all the responsibilities of ownership, but none of the tangible benefits.
I'd argue that most startups have little financial tie to the product too for all but the first couple of contributors due to all the complications that wind up going into startup funding. If you can only realize any value from your equity with 1:10000 odds, your expected ownership is 1/10000 of whatever you actually got in equity.
I've interviewed with them three times, all before 2020. It seemed like a cult held together by the sunk cost fallacy.
I don't care about it's historic term for stocks that went up. Today, we use it to refer to the "elite" of the tech industry. The "FAANG" should refer to the tech giants with the best pay/WLB ratios. Amazon is not even close to that anymore, and frankly never really was.
For me in particular, it was a remote opportunity (still is as far as I know since it is considered part of the sales organization) and they paid top of band for my specialty - enterprise app dev + AWS.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212
Working at AWS was the best thing that happened to my finances and my career.
Leaving AWS was the best thing that happened to my mental health
1. I've got like $110k vesting this November. After that it starts to dry up quickly. $50k in May 2025 and another $50k in November 2025. After that it's basically nothing, unless my PCS next year comes with some re-up. 2. The remote work exception is indefinite, but i'm worried that if I'm one of a few remote employees on a big team that are all mostly in-office, I'm not going to really get as many opportunities otherwise.
Long story short, I think my time at Amazon is coming to an end soon, but I'm still sticking around for now.
Lets say your pay band is 100-200k. A new hire is theoretically better than 50% of their team, so they join at an HV3 and make 180k. If they receive HV3 at OLR, their total comp target (TCT) remains 180k. If it is their first OLR, they are probably not getting any additional RSUs because the cash-based comp of the first 2 years means they are already at their TCT.
If they made TT, their TCT goes to 200k and they would receive additional RSUs to reach that pay.
If they were HV2 or below, they would not get additional RSUs and their TC would slowly fall from 180k to 160k or below. If it fell below the HV2 level of 160k they would get some RSUs later to bump them back to TCT.
Amazon also assumes the stock will go up 15% year over year, so when RSUs are granted over a multiyear time horizon, you receive less based on assumed growth that would make you reach your TCT.
I was rated TT this year and got <2.5% base increase and no stock, though I'm still under 2 years so I have vesting through 2026. It still feels shitty though, and part of why I'm looking to leave sooner rather than later.
It kind of depends on the person. I've seen people go from Amazon to Google and they want to go back to Amazon because they are bored. Some people just thrive in high pressure environments. Also everything is pretty team dependent at FAANGs, you could end up at a bad team at any of them.
As leaders do (and should!) they are often sharing stories of how they approached similar problems in their past roles. What I find to be interesting is how different people across time weave the same caveat into everything they say about their time at Amazon - some version of "...but keep in mind, that isn't the kind of culture we are trying to build here."
Look for companies that went full-remote before 2020, or after ~2022. Otherwise, it can't be trusted.
The best thing you can do is get to the finish line, get the offer sheet, and demand that your position as a full-time remote worker be written into your agreement with the company.
FWIW I know someone who did exactly this with a defense prime, and the crazy fella actually won the battle with HR when they tried to bring everyone back into the office.
Worst case scenario, they say "no," you decline the offer, and you've sent a clear message to management. It might feel like a few hours of wasted time, but we as industry practitioners have the power to make this a normal interaction between a prospective hire and a stubborn corporation.
Not to say you shouldn't try that approach. Just that you'll have less job stability.
Seems like most these types are building niche products (e.g.: tailscale) and not just SaaS or CRUD-with-AI ?
But Amazon is too dysfunctional to change.
I work at Google. Many of the "official descriptions" of various levels include "size of team" as part of the description. I think, generally, anyone in a middle management position, particularly at a growing company knows that "more people equals more advancement".
I'm only 20% joking here...
Do feel free to suggest a better way to compare two managers that doesn't fall into worse situations than "scope".
Measuring scope to evaluate performance is like saying developer who works on most number of tickets/bugs is the highest performer.
We know that's not true and we also know how it can and will be fudged(w.r.t managers its increasing un-necessary headcount).
If we are able to come up with a solution for developers it shouldn't be too difficult for managers too.
it's not like FAANGs are strapped for teams. Managers can just mnage horizontally instead of needing to hire more people to "prove themselves" (especially when the hiring process is absurd these days).
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...
An equally important update was reducing number of managers which nobody seems to care about :-)
So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.Just anecdotal ofc but over my career having worked for 14 managers.
Half of them were eventually fired.
Most of them sucked at rallying teams, mainly because who the f is going to follow a doofus cringe lord?
2 managers stand out to me in my career. I’m really good friends with one of them that I’ve been in contact with for over a decade now.
Most were basically checkbox checkers who sucked at engineering and faked their way into “people management” only to be found out that they just plain suck as employees. I actually checked LinkedIn just now of a few of those bad ones and they work at small companies and have made no upward progress. Not surprised honestly.
Keep in mind I worked at a pretty good place, not a noob tier place.
Basically, the management class despises SDE worker class, and thinks of them as overhead. Recent statements by the aws head about chatGPT replacing SDEs is along the same lines.
SDEs are tools that just do what mgmt tells them. mgmt holds the decision-making and all the cards.
periodically there is a whipping (pipping) in the form of a layoff to keep the troops in fear.
in summary, the attitude of management in many large companies is that code is just work that needs to get done, and any engineer who can type on a keyboard can do it equally well (cue in ai-coder). so, the smarts is embedded in defining requirements and managing execution of said-code which resides in management.
The problem with this is many-fold. 1) it encourages a culture of top-down decision making including technical decisions and the person making designs is not the one doing the work 2) as tech evolves, the org is unable to catch up since the decision makers are the elite few.
in short, a manufacturing line mentality where the supervisor holds the cards and workers are tools.
It becomes apparent as you move higher up the IC ladder that technical work becomes slightly taboo. And it is precisely because of the attitude that the actual work is something for line employees, not them. This belief is passed down not overtly, but through gentle nudges: "you could fix that in 15 minutes, but is that really maximizing your impact?" Or the ever-present, "but how does this improve your promo packet?"
It all feels like a giant psyop on staff engs to constantly gaslight themselves into immolating themselves to the god of Impact. Little wonder they exhibit much higher rates of burnout: they're told to be responsible for things without the full range of authority.
I was $TOO_OLD when I learned that most of the actual coding on Google's systems was done by L4/L5's.
Just come work in small companies that respect their employees. Good talents are hard to find.
I can never actually find this study, but it's similar to a study showing companies that moved their headquarters to Connecticut instead of staying in downtown NYC actually perform worse as they lose employees that have an option to stay in NYC and not uproot their lives. The mediocre ones that cannot find another job end up moving.
And the market answers. They've been doing it for quite some time and their stock is in an all time high.
Practically the majority of middle management I knew at AMZN didn't do anything.
Source: ex-AWS
There's people that's overworked and stressed out, tho, but those are the minority that do the actual work. I'd say it's an 1 out of 10 ratio at best, being conservative.
This is all because every single project is scoped, designed and implemented with the only goal in mind: your own promotion. Same applies for hires, you don't hire roles, you hire _the structure you need to be promoted_.
Source: same.
Transport is the second most important source of greenhouse gas emissions, after electricity and heat.
I'm not sure if large office spaces are more energy efficient than home offices.
Person two: this is slavery and you're a commie. I want muh freedom to be forced to drive 2 hours a day!
Are you seeing how this isn't a reasonable response? Like, at all?
> We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day.
https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...:
Might be an extreme take but, I think engineers have some onus to stop agreeing to work there, lest the amazon corporate culture spreads further.
> we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now
For a lot of people, yes. The reason why there is so much outrage around RTO mandates is because:
1) WFH offered a massive quality of life improvement
2) There is essentially no evidence that in office workers are more productive (or vice-versa)
When executive teams, (many of whom work remotely themselves, as often as they'd like), try to reverse the quality of life advancement that WFH offers, without an evidence backed reason for doing so, workers get angry.
It's the equivalent of a parent saying "because I said so". Except these aren't children that Jassy and others are speaking to.
I'll never do the 5 days in the office again.
I think we are going further and further away from "the future".
In 1964, Arthur Clarke said that "I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand." and "Men will no longer commute, they will communicate." [1]
I would think that a future where people aren't limited by where they live is desirable and not commuting to office is a way to achieve this.
Covid was a way for companies to realize that many jobs don't really need physical presence in an office. And maybe we should invest in technology that makes more jobs remove so that even brain surgery could be so. But it seems like instead of Covid being the impetus for change, things are reverting, as if non-remote is the normal state of affairs.
Maybe it is the natural state, but it's a sadder world because of it.
[1]: https://fortune.com/2024/05/29/arthur-c-clarke-space-odyssey...
Yes there are people here who consistently post on Amazon threads that they enjoy working there. I even know a couple such people personally. But it's always with the disclaimer "you need to be in a good team". OK but is there a field in the offer letter that denotes "Good_team: TRUE". Nope.
So you can like the idea of competing in "The Hunger Games" while trying to write and fix code. Or not..
I'm just about to hit 2 years and was planning to leave anyway around that point, which is typical, but now there's going to be a sudden increase in the competition for remote jobs that I wasn't anticipating.
Why not?
Sure you might not like it, but it’s not like it’s inherently bad. It’s just a decision and it might have a bad outcome, but it might not.
Sure it is. We can directly measure the impact of this.
Amazon has approx. 35,000 software engineers. Assuming a commute of total 1 hour a day (very generous of me), that's 35k extra hours of human labor wasted a day. Assuming an average lifespan of 613,620 hours, that's about 1 entire human lifespan lost every 17 days.
We could also measure the carbon impact, too. 1 hour of driving releases about 4 pounds of CO2 into the air. This is about 70 tons of carbon a day, or 25.5K tons of carbon a year.
Or maybe we can measure deaths? Assuming a commute daily of 30 miles, that's about 1 million miles traveled a day. The rate of traffic deaths is about 1 for every 100 million miles traveled. So, every hundred days, Amazon indirectly killed one of their employees, or about 3.5 dead employees a year.
And we can go on and on. Point being, yes bad things are bad and yes, when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences. This isn't like deciding what drink to get at McDonald's.
Like is Apple “better” for the world if they worked from home and never made the iPhone?
Or what if there are people who want to work in an office with other people who want to work in an office and are willing to trade some CO2 and small risk of death to do so?
Can’t the people who believe remote work is bad quit and get a job somewhere else? Should be simple since remote work is so obviously inherently good.
I get that this is going to be like playing tennis against a wall because HN has such a hard-on for remote work that they’ll never admit that in-office work has benefits that remote work lacks and that a company that requires in-office work isn’t inherently evil.
Ok and what if it rains gold from the sky and poverty is cured forever? Are we just saying things now? Because I have absolutely no reason to believe this is the case, and Amazon is dead-set on not giving me a reason.
> Or what if there are people who want to work in an office with other people who want to work in an office and are willing to trade some CO2 and small risk of death to do so?
In practice, not a viable position. RTO only works if you force other people to go to the office when they don't want to. Because the office, itself, is actually useless. It's just a building. The office is desired for the people in it. Meaning, such a position is one born of control. The same is not the case with WFH. Meaning, WFH does not care where you are. RTO cares a lot about where you are. One is intrinsically easier to swallow therefore, because one by its very nature orients itself towards freedom. This is undeniable.
> isn’t inherently evil.
I never said a company is inherently evil. Amazon is, for other reasons.
You said that RTO doesn't have any real downsides. Keyword "real". Well, that's not true - it has many REAL downsides. As in: lives lost, habitats harmed, climate destroyed. It's real enough we can measure it. If you don't particularly like this I don't know what to tell you, it's just the way it is. CEOs and other execs are so detached from the real world. But when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences.
I literally never said this. Obviously some people perceive it to have downsides. Some may believe these downsides are 100% objective.
> Because the office, itself, is actually useless.
Like I actually did say, like tennis against a wall.
> RTO only works if you force other people to go to the office when they don't want to.
You are correct here and I don't think this is a bad thing. People have agency and can get new jobs if they find the office so distasteful and care about the climate so much.
I just explained to you, in clear terms, some objective outcomes. These aren't make believe - you actually have to spend time and money to get to an office. I'm sorry, there's no way around that. Teleportation has not yet been invented.
> You are correct here and I don't think this is a bad thing.
You could make the argument this isn't a bad thing, but one thing is undebatable: the arguments aren't on equal footing. An argument for RTO HAS TO, necessarily, articulate a pro-control argument. A WFH argument does not, and that's the difference.
That's why one argument is easy for people to swallow and the other isn't. RTO is inherently anti-freedom, and people don't like that. Even some people who like working in an office don't like that.
> office so distasteful and care about the climate so much
This is a strawman, and I'm starting to feel like a broken record. Once again, I'm not referring to these more wishy-washy arguments.
It would be in your favor if pro-WFH arguments were just based on feelings. Unfortunately, they're not - they're based on real costs. Time is a real cost. Driving is a real cost.
These aren't small costs. By choosing to go RTO I wouldn't be surprised if each employee takes, at least, the equivalent of a 10% salary deduction. Now this is difficult to argue in favor for, which is why you don't. Unfortunately choosing to orient your position that way makes it lose credibility, which is what Amazon has faced when they refuse to bring any data to the conversation.
Is a restaurant charging you money for a meal a downside? A cost isn't a downside for everyone. For me it's an investment in going to where I'd rather work.
> RTO is inherently anti-freedom, and people don't like that
A decree to work remotely is also inherently anti-freedom it's just that you happen to like that anti-freedom outcome. The people who prefer to work in an office with other people are having their freedom taken away here. And the “just choose what works for you” approach doesn’t solve the issue of working with people who not also in the office.
Whether a company opts for hybrid/remote/office/some combination there are going to be people who dislike that decision. And again, that decision is under no circumstances objectively bad to everyone. There are drawbacks and benefits to each and the company makes their choice. You can definitely say, “I hate that choice!” but “That choice is bad!” is just not true in every case.
Incorrect, and I'll explain why. Remote work DOES NOT imply anything about how, or where, you have to work.
You can commute to an office and work at an office with remote work. 100%, that is an option.
What remote work says is you can't FORCE people to come to an office for your own personal pleasure. This isn't anti-freedom, it's literally the opposite.
RTO has the opposite implication. You returning to office doesn't actually matter. You, personally, don't actually care about yourself in the office. You care about other people being in the office. Because the office itself has no value, it only has value if the other people are there.
This is why RTO is hard to swallow. Because a select few, like yourself, believe you have the right and privilege to dictate where everyone else should work, purely for your own benefit. Because you personally enjoy working in an office, you believe everyone should be forced to as well at your whim.
Your preference of collaboration relies on other people physically being where you want them to be. The same is not true for WFH. If you disagree, I encourage you to go to the office by yourself. You'll quickly realize you don't care for the office, you care for forcing people to be in the office with you.
No, I can assure you it is correct. It DOES imply that I am not guaranteed the thing I want which is to work in an office solely with other people in that office. This is the same that an RTO decree does not guarantee that people will be allowed what they want — which is to work remotely.
Both groups don’t get the thing they want when the company puts them in the situation they don’t like. They’re exactly the same thing.
> Because you personally enjoy working in an office, you believe everyone should be forced to as well at your whim.
Again, no, never said this.
I said that a company deciding that a RTO strategy is best for them is fine. A company choosing to work remotely is fine. But if you dislike the choice your company makes, either learn to live with it or get a new job.
Neither decision is bad. It just depends on which side of the foaming-at-the-mouth aisle you sit.
> Because you personally enjoy working in an office, you believe everyone should be forced to as well at your whim.
Again, this is the same thing as the remote worker believes. Because they enjoy working with other remote workers they believe everyone should be forced to as well at their whim.
> If you disagree, I encourage you to go to the office by yourself. You'll quickly realize you don't care for the office, you care for forcing people to be in the office with you.
I actually work at a 100% remote company and do go to an office everyday (albeit one I rent for myself). Have been doing it since 2021.
From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results. If companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality up while not paying rent I’m sure they would, it’s just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet.
Edit: My experience with WFH has to do with software development. It may work for other fields, however WFH often attracts the wrong kind of employee which is why I don't do it anymore. If you can't be bothered to drive 10 minutes into work you probably aren't that motivated and you probably won't stay that long.
> From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work
Corporate profits tell another story
> People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results
Anecdotal. What backs up this claim? Just your personal experience? What’s your data?
> companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality up while not paying rent I’m sure they would, it’s just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet
What do you think happened during COVID-19…
Have seen many companies reduce their corporate building costs due to shift to remote work. In some cases, it was eliminated entirely the following year.
They claim to support improving DEI for neuro-divergent and mobility-impaired folks, where WFH would be a massive improvement in their ability to contribute without being required to commute into the office which might present challenges for them.
They claim to support sustainability and achieving carbon neutrality, but forcing employees into the office burns significant fossil fuels and puts wear on vehicles and increases pollution since the majority of the workforce winds up driving a car to work. They will increase this measurable impact by 60%+ by mandating another 2 days of office-work per week.
Much more likely, there are motives to doing this change that are not aligned with data and stated goals. That could either mean nefarious goals or lacking data. But it's more likely nefarious goals, since WFH didn't seem to be hurting anything according to all the data anyone has been able to tell. I'd expect someone to be able to come up with plausible ways that WFO is better than WFH in a data-oriented manner, but it really does seem to be down to personal preference for individuals on how they like to work. Who knows, maybe Andy Jassy really likes to work in-office and thinks that anyone saying they don't is lying and lazy. We have as much evidence for that as everything else that's been conjectured.
What I can say and have been saying is that in my experience, it doesn’t work. It attracts employees who don’t understand the mission and people who want to do as little work as possible. If it works for you that’s great, but to attribute the move back to offices as some nefarious plan to waste money fundamentally misunderstands how businesses work. It also makes me wonder if you’re exactly the kind of employee I don’t want to hire
There is good thing called stock based compensation.
Because why would I want to sabotage MY money?
Of course it aint perfect.
Apparently, it does work with thousands of consultants and contractors, and it did work during the years of lockdowns. We didn’t see any productivity decrease, generally speaking. But we all know the whole back-to-office thing is just because C-levels want to justify the grants from banks, investors, etc., by showing a “working office with people in there.” Middle managers wanted it back because, as it turned out to everyone, they were useless, so it was a justification for their positions. Additionally, real estate landlords lobbied to push it back because, without rent income, they wouldn’t be able to pay it back to the banks. The government has its reasons too, because it’s easier to focus on building small hubs and maintaining infrastructure for these offices instead of starting to work on rural areas. It ultimately shifts the power dynamics from the government, landlords, and banks to the average person, and that was an absolute no-no direction for them and had to be killed early on.
What a terrible take. I've been remote for 7 consecutive years at a couple of companies and I was always invested in their produce. You know why? Cause they gave me RSUs so I actually cared about the value of the stock. Nothing to do with being remote or not.
Life is too short to not give a damn.
How would this happen, exactly?
Depends on the reason for the PIP.
Sometimes folks who get put on them are bad fits for the demands of that particular job at that particular company and would do (and end up doing) stellar elsewhere.
Sometimes folks get put on them to try to ward against theoretical anti-ageism/anti-racism suits fired off in response to an upcoming layoff.
And SOMETIMES folks get put on them because of stack ranking... where managers are obligated to push out a certain number of people every single year.
I've seen scenarios one and three personally, and scenario two seems totally plausible because there's no intelligence/competence test required to become a business owner or manager... so such folks make all sorts of dumbass mistakes.
If you're the sort of person who automatically passes over someone because their previous manager thought poorly of them, then that explains so much about you opinions expressed in this subthread.
Since then, I do not believe people got into these willingly or unwillingly, eg: due to real performance reasons. Strictly speaking on the performance or technical work wise, not company decision driven…
Even in the example above, due to the management decision, employee performance suffers. It is not up to the employee; that they do not perform by their choice.
Nice strawman. It's closer to an hour for a lot of people, though (especially with employers that value cheap rent over being in a good part of town).
Quick edit: You're right though, it is cheaper there. Looks like you can get a 3-bed-2-bath there for the same price as the 1-bed-1-bath in the area I'm referring to. Hell, there's a 2-bed-1-bath for $40k and a 5-bed-2-bath for $140k.
Quick edit 2: Forgot to check the distance, that area's around 40 minutes from the Loop by car, an hour by bus, and 1:15 by bike.
Your inability to WFH is not shared by most people. Sounds like you were the one quiet quitting by default (even if not realizing it).
So? Plenty of people are bad employees and they're actually trying. Who cares if you, or I, am a bad employee for selfish reasons?
"I worked 12-16 hour days in the factory" - until a lot of people fought, incredibly hard, to push that number down.
People have learned in these last 4 years that they can work just fine AND have a life AND not have a commute and it can be many, many companies' "best years ever!".
Inertia is a sad, but common, excuse for bad practices.
WFH did not seem normal to most employees or employers until they were forced into it, and forced to make it work. I can't think of any other way we'd even be talking about it if the pandemic lockdowns hadn't happened.
True. To nearly every goddamn programmer in the world it was clear that the tech to make WFH work for programming jobs (and similar) had been in place since the mid 1990s, at the latest.
The fact that millions of people had to die in order for the suits to use the tech in place is heartbreaking.
It's also quite painful that the suits are trying to claw back the thing many of us been quietly screaming for for ~thirty years and that we've all proven over the past ~four years generally works really well.
It sucks so much.
True, while tech salaries may seem great, when you factor in inflation, well the earnings are not much. Needless to say people in the non-tech sectors have it terrible. The 'middle' class is a rapidly thinning.
If you focus on the career part, you can increase your network and find a much less stressful position. Last two gigs I've had I wasn't even on call (lol, imagine!), and found remote work. So better opportunities are out there if you work at it.
I would consider the relationship between a company and its employees as alliance. If both have the same goal and compatible style, then they work together. Otherwise, they part ways. Tyranny is possible only with violence, while employment is at will, at least in Amazon.
Now the rest of the workers can experience it!
Same problem with several of the replies sibling to yours.
Now do I think it is tyranny? No. I agree that there should be another word used.
Citations:
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56628745 "Amazon apologises for wrongly denying drivers need to urinate in bottles"
Brushing this dynamic under the rug by conceptualizing it as a mutual agreement of "I will work for you for this wage" is at best glib, even if we ignore the elephant in the room that the worker doesn't choose to work since unfortunately we all need to buy food and a place to live, doesn't choose his wage since the entire labor market is practically the same and not in his power to influence nor shop for an alternative (we don't live in a text book where people can make purely rational economic choices since are born to a context and we live in places and have access to a given pool of resources etc) and lets not even glance at the lack of political alternative to this economic arrangement in this historical flash of time.
Money is just violence that got too old to carry a sword anymore, so the threat if violence and the threat of termination are pretty well linked. It's only different in that once the money runs out the violence will come from elsewhere.
For most people it’s only at will in one direction. They need the job, often for home and board, and always for insurance benefits. Saying it’s at will ignores the worker needs the benefits more than management needs the individual worker. Management absolutely uses that asymmetry to force people to do their petty whims. If you’ve ever worked for anyone else before we all know this to be true. It’s so true and pervasively experienced it’s almost vacuous to even say it.
I for one am pretty sick of the endless litany of bullshit in my career and am probably going to go it on my own again or just retire. Almost no one is so lucky as me and that’s a fucking tragedy of epic proportions.
Having to work in an office for $300k/year is an incredibly privileged position. There are so many people that have it much, much worse, and calling it tyranny is so out of touch it's a bit distasteful. I'm not disagreeing with the points that you probably can get your work done remotely or that companies should respect their employees, but tone it down a few notches. And the organ transplant thing should be a conversation about social security and health benefits in general, it's not really a remote work issue.
More like $98k/year on average
But I'm sure there's plenty of people who would gladly trade their tyranny for a well paid office job in a safe part of the world. I'd also like to add that American tech workers are pretty uniquely well off, working in an office for a fifth of an Amazon paycheck is the norm for a lot of us. Nobody likes to commute, I'm not defending unnecessary mandatory back to office policies, just adding some perspective.
The world has many problems and we have to deal with them and with our own. The people that are in this forum are incredibly privileged. I don’t think it helps any kind of argument to keep bringing it up though.
Actually yes, I do think we all should be very grateful for that and other conveniences we get to have because of all the hard working men and women that make it possible. To take them for granted is being spoiled IMHO. You think the people that fix our water pipes, service our electrical grid, or grow our food would agree that tech workers that can't work in their pajamas from home live under any kind of tyranny? There are Russian missiles destroying those very things 1000 km from here everyday, and you want to defend calling back to office policies tyranny? Please get some perspective, everyone have problems but there are different degrees of them.
> That tech workers have privilege?
Yes we do, and a lot of it. Does that mean we should keep quiet when we're treated poorly? No, of course not. Everyone has had a boss they didn't get along with, or company policies they didn't agree with. Use words like tyranny if it makes you feel better, but don't expect everyone else to agree with such hyperbole. You don't even have to look for suffering outside of the US either, there's plenty of Amazon warehouse workers or delivery drivers that would love to switch places with AWS employees for half their pay, even if they would need to commute.
There are petty tyrants in all aspects of our lives and your boss being a petty tyrant spans classes.
Saying organ transplant is a health care issue misses the point. Even with the best health offerings you have to take powerful immunosuppressives for life. People who are severely immune compromised live longer the more they can isolate from infections. But requiring them to go into a crowded open floor plan office in a company mandating presenteeism is a, risk adjusted, significantly worse trade for the immune compromised. (Speaking as someone whose wife is in this situation)
There shouldn't be anything distasteful about advocating for yourself and others who rely on their labor to survive, even if they're well paid for that labor.
Amazon employees must return to the office because otherwise downtown Seattle decays even further.
Seattle needs to hedge.
...but I don't think it's engaging with the problems involved.
Management exists for a reason. I'm not going to speculate too hard on what that reason is, but it's a profession older than those practiced by just about anyone on this forum, found across every culture, in every part of the world, at every time in history. You could say that it's just the case that managers can abuse and extract value from their employees, and that certainly does occur, but in claiming that that's all that management is you would be arguing for the greatest market failure in the history of mankind. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, but you better have some really strong evidence if you want to argue it's remained irrational independently and in the same way across millennia.
So taking for a moment for granted that management exists and is important, its ease of execution does matter, too. And I think it's more-or-less a truism that it's a lot easier to manage a group of people who are all in a room, who you see every day, whose facial expressions and mannerisms you have a chance to read, whose casual water-cooler (water-bag? why do you have a bag of water? i am so curious) conversations you can overhear or participate in.
Remote work has trade-offs, and like any trade-off, it's in principle legitimate for someone to decide the upsides outweigh the downsides. They might be wrong about the trade-offs they choose to make, but that's not the same thing as being a petty tyrant - it's just running into the limitations of your judgment, which is a very ordinary human thing to do. If you want to convince people to run remote teams, you need to figure out what the trade-offs they're concerned about are and address them, not pretend they aren't there at all.
Every global company is already working remotely because teams are spread out everywhere. Even if your team isn’t your dependencies are. The more senior you get the more you work on zoom these days. Before the pandemic it was in conference calls.
In fact the half assed in office approach is worse because not everyone is on the same foot. The remote offices from the leaders don’t get to have the on mute influence with the leader. When the call ends the people in the local room with the leader have a little meeting to make the real decisions. That’s grossly inefficient and unfair, to the point it’s started to make me sick to my stomach when I see it happen and I refuse to book rooms for in the office meetings.
In fact a role I had prior to the pandemic was figuring out how to shut down most offices of a megacorp to save money. We called it “bring your own office.” We analyzed deeply the interactions and determined in a global corporation the percent of time we make better decisions in office was less than 20% or 1 day a week. When the pandemic hit our predictions came true. But our elderly CEO couldn’t understand how the strategy he agreed to to save money would work once his ideological hackles got raised so he mandated everyone return 5 days a week even tho we were then 5 years into the bring your own office plan he agreed to. There were no metrics or reason other than, basically, he likes working in the office because it made him successful in his career and he can’t conceive that anyone could do anything different.
There are people who work better in the office and having a small office with plenty of high quality meeting areas and private places to work is smart. Management should allow knowledge workers to work the way they work best and figure out how to maximize team efficiency as managers are required to do. It’s a hard job. I know. I’ve done it. But RTO is a short cut that fails to recognize the incredible inefficiencies inherent in the approach, especially in a global company.
I found this line telling. I’m wondering if the Hacker News crowd is biased towards the “hacker” stereotype - the socially awkward coder who likes to be left alone and crank out largely independent work.
I have a couple of folks like this in my team, and they are absolutely as good (or better) working from home, as they don’t really talk to others much or contribute in meetings anyway.
But you can’t build a team/org out of those personality types. Much of the creative work and important decisions _does_ happen face to face, let alone the ad-hoc ideation and brainstorming from being in the same space.
I don’t think it’s a requirement that everyone be in the office 5 days a week (I don’t do that myself), but I do see the negatives of letting the team work from home whenever they want and expecting to get the same level of work done over Teams/Zoom calls and email.
Maybe for you. This is not a universal experience.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-15/is-the-fe... | https://archive.today/5B8Tk
https://apnews.com/article/federal-reserve-inflation-powell-... ("Powell stresses message that US job market is cooling, a possible signal of coming rate cut")
> “We’re not just an inflation-targeting central bank,’’ Powell told the House Financial Services Committee on the second of two days of semi-annual testimony to Congress. “We also have an employment mandate.”
> Powell told the House panel on Wednesday that to avoid damaging the economy, the Fed likely wouldn’t wait until inflation reached its 2% target before it would start cutting rates.
I sometimes wonder if Warren is playing 3D chess. I assume she is far smarter than me on these topics but her proposals often make no sense to me. She also never gives good logic to the public behind them, even on long form one on one interviews with someone sympathetic to her cause interviewing her.
Fed also really did not want to cut rates this close to the election. They want to be neutral but they've done a great job of forward guidance & reacting to the data.
With respect to the national debt, neither party really has a great track record over recent years, in my opinion. It ballooned under Donald Trump as well. Neither party is particularly inclined to reduce it since it has yet to cause any real problems. To “fix” it you’d have to cut spending and also raise taxes. Nobody seems to want to undertake those actions.
If money pours back into VCs and they turn on the spigot again, you'll absolutely see the market change. Will it be significant? Maybe not in the grand scheme of things, or maybe it will, but to act like interest rates don't matter at all is silly.
Well yeah but why were they suddenly overstaffed? It wasn’t some kind of collective paranoia. It was interest rates. With low interest rates, investors want you to prioritize growth. With high interest rates, its profitability.
It's easy to measure short-term impact (we cut a bunch of people, we're saving money, we're more profitable) but it's very hard to measure the medium to long term impact of these cuts.
Note I'm not arguing these cuts are the wrong strategy, I'm arguing they have absolutely no clue.
To me it seems we have alot of the former (several food places that specialize in lunch are closed monday and tuesday due to not enough employees) but the latter is tough right now.
But the general unemployment metric is solidly good.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-unemployment-hits-6-amid-ove....
I wonder what's the number of developers today compared to say, 2014, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 2x if not 3x.
under what pretense can you assert that it'll drop another 200-250bps by the end of 2025?
We likely won't see SVPs publicly sharing their internal policy, but it feels strange to assume that SVPs would be involved in the individualized scheduling of all the employees who report up to them. They have better things to do.
Now companies have implemented tons of metrics and monitoring right from the top. So individual manager have little leeway in giving employees any flexibility.
Be wary of who and what you trust. There are proper remote gigs, don't risk it IMO.
edit: To be clear, this wasn't at Amazon or even part of FAANG. I took my own advice and went elsewhere, seeing the writing on the wall.
If you continue to not come in enough, your manager gets assigned a task to have a conversation about firing you or getting you in the office regularly.
If you continue to not come in enough, you're fired and it doesn't look good for your manager.
I mean this company has devolved into one that spies on its workforce so much that it can, and will penalize drivers who sing along to the radio.
Job market is bad right now. Probably why AWS felt they could do this currently.
I might consider negotiating for lower pay to continue working, or try to work towards some sort of deal like that. But I'm not sure if that would actually be better than a potential severance and unemployment considering the a firing could still be on the table and would only make the severance and unemployment lower.
As an engineering leader, I have had some success and traction with non-engineers by re-framing the debate in this way.
I wrote these ideas up as a blog post earlier this year:
Broad work vs deep work https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0165-broad-work-vs-deep-wor...
Less task-oriented stuff--general office chatting--doesn't work quite the same though.
[0]: Corridor Creativity: https://matthewsinclair.medium.com/0124-corridor-creativity-...
I'm a core/elder Millennial and there's a wide gulf in how I communicate in a Teams chat with my immediate team versus how I communicate via email to an external party. I find that a lot of Gen X+ people bring a really sterile, HR approved vibe to all their digital communications and then complain there's no way to build relationships. (Not all - my supervisor is a Gen X former teacher and he manages informal digital communication fine, as do the few Gen X and Boomer coworkers who've been online for decades.)
For your amusement and/or relatable-angst, a comic: https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/boomer-shooters
My team is global. My customers are global.
When I go to the office, I still spend >5 hours/day on Zoom. The only reason I go in is to get out of the house.
It's always amusing when a multi-decade-old, multi-hundred-billion-dollar company says stuff like this. You're not a startup. You never will be.
And if you were, you probably would actually offer perks in your offices that might actually encourage people to be there. Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove multiple times.
I've never seen a company where it seemed more like the leadership of the company actively despises the employees that worked for them. Between stuff like this and the incessant pushing of Amazon Q against everyone's will, it's really apparent that Amazon execs think that having to employ humans as SDE is a defect they're trying to get rid of ASAP.
This is crazy, seriously? Apparently no one has written a good enough two-pager arguing that gratis coffee pays for itself with increased productivity
I suspect at the end of this year they will fully remove it, uproar be damned.
Can you bring your own cup? Get the Big Gulp 4 liter thermos every day.
In the original RTO email they even pointed the importance of employee spending money in the surrounding restaurants to support the downtime economy as if I should feel personally invested in spending 30$/meal on an overpriced burger for lunch.
Do they have coin/card operated machines then or just no coffee at all?
We also have free tea and hot cocoa.
In most places employees will also bring a Nespresso machine so you can bring your own pods which is somewhat better.
Writing all that I feel like it will come off as extremely entitled. I just want to stress that I personally don't mind much, but having worked for other tech companies, it's definitely at the bottom in terms of "free stuff".
I did it pretty often as it was a nice thing to do and a good way of meeting people who were waiting for the coffee.
So I ordered canned soup, on Amazon, to be shipped to the office mailroom. Then picked up the soups and kept them in the drawer by my desk.
Not that we get great coffee here. It's one of this pod/packet machines. But, it does various teas and some cold drinks as well (fruit/herb infused stuff). So, it works for my second coffee, or a hot cocoa when it's cold outside.
We also get free lunch on T/Th, but that's a new thing since COVID (to entice people back), so I'm not counting on it being around forever. But for now, it is a nice perk and encourages some of that chit-chat the executive class tells us is so critical to making them more money.
My polite way of saying "f.ck that sh.t". I wouldn't do it
A large pharma company which I worked for until quitting in July went through a similar process this year. The goal was also to reduce the manager / IC ratio - organizational efficiency and span of control, they called it - but in most instances it were ICs who were laid off while their managers were simply relegated to ICs.
Surprise surprise.. ... not really .. when it comes to Amazon.
This is not a structural problem but a cultural one. Sure, you can address it by changing the org structure, but 15% fewer pre-meetings to pre-meetings sounds like a drop in the ocean. In my experience, pre-meetings are a result of low-trust environments.
I wonder where CEOs are getting the input to drive these decisions forward. Has there been significant research lately suggesting that working from the office is better, or do they just rely on their gut feeling that the office feels more productive when people are present?
"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time." - Tyler Durden
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxqnx/dont-mess-with-us-web...
As such, within a company, employees are attentive to, and take care of, the interests and needs of those who control their job security.
So for example, HR cares about management, not employees.
In this case, with RTO, we see that managers run a company, and they attend to their own needs; and their need is to be able to control and monitor their staff, because managers are held responsible for outcomes. This is inherent in a hierarchical arrangement of power. Managers then fundamentally attend to their own interest, which means having employees at home. The face this is not necessary, and is absolutely non-optimal is every way except for maximizing managerial control and monitoring, is irrelevant, as managers here are attending to their own interests.
This is exactly the problem the Soviet centralized economies faced, when they were trying to improve economic efficiency. Managers were responsible for meeting plan targets, but to be more efficient the system as a whole needed decentralization, but managers had every incentive under the sun to maintain maximum control (useless and efficiency destroying as it was), and so decentralization never occurred.
Speaking from my own personal perspective, it's quite frankly scary how many teams and companies are running with skeleton crews because they've chased off a lot of competent engineers and think they can coast by with the bare minimum. Stuff like what happened to Boeing or Crowdstrike are great examples of the end result, and a lot more companies than you'd expect are operating right on the critical failure margins. The concept of redundancy has outright vanished.
Quality inertia is what's preventing stuff from crashing down instantly, but it'll eventually be the case. It's just a matter of when the last guy that's worth their role leaves.
Most "SDEs" attracted by past big money have below-minimum reading skills, can't write code, can't troubleshoot, can't debug anything even if they life depends on it. They were hired to form a particular structure for the manager two levels above to be promoted.
When Elon fired everyone, people said Twitter would collapse, but they’ve been technologically ok. They may be struggling on the business end but that’s more likely to be caused by the owner telling advertisers to fuck themselves and by him tweeting racist conspiracy theory stuff rather than any problems with their infra.
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> Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer
> Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
a). They don't have metrics, and all the cynics are right about this being vibes based
b). They actually do have the data, and it's very grim for how poorly people on average perform when WFH but don't want to share it due to sensitivity or something
Like, i'm actually pro Work From Office (don't yell at me, i joined a company with this culture in place already on purpose) so i tend to believe that it's more productive for myself and the population on average but if that's true why has nobody proved it? why aren't any of these companies able to show data?
Amazon does stack ranking, they are not really concerned with sensitivity anything.
They have no metrics. Metrics are for the underclass. The Leadership decides based on what they want.
Among many other articles.
A simple search would have given you the answer.
More likely the policy is being pushed for some combination of:
- Increased attrition
- Intangibles that management believes in
- Expected modest productivity gains they think are worth the downsides
- Reducing worker leverage
c). They don't feel strongly about WFH vs remote, but getting a bunch of employees to quit is a great way to reduce headcount and then fill any necessary positions from the pool of endless candidates likely to work for less. Normally this is a poor move because they would lose employees who are already onboarded, and hiring is typically more expensive, but Amazon has always been more than happy to let go of experienced employees as part of their sacrifices to the pip gods. Normally this would also be a bad idea because the employees you lose would be the employees who are in highest demand, so likely their best employees. But with 50 candidates waiting in the wings for every rockstar they lose, they figure they'll likely be able to pull more diamonds out of the rough, and even with hiring and onboarding, their long-term expenditure will be less than if they hadn't triggered an exodus.
98% of the people responded negatively to the change in our remote work flexibility when we heard about it. Higher management continues to ignore that 98% of its productive workforce is not happy and the good engineers WILL leave the company.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
It'd be extremely difficult to study properly; there _have_ been studies, giving answers in both directions, but they're very easy to poke holes in due to confounding factors.
That isn't to say that if something needs to be overseen because a part of our infrastructure needs updating that I won't volunteer. But being mandated to babysit systems? No, absolutely not.
I have fond memories around all the the childish politics, favoritism, and fights caused by desk assignments.
We could all switch to Linode tomorrow and forget AWS existed the day after.
It's a bit of an obvious statement, I do admit.
We don't have enough space for everyone and a lot of the workers are located 1h away from their office. And yet, higher management is being so opaque about this mandated return to office scheme.
I never imagined Amazon could be a place to coast and collect a paycheck until they fire you. Bet there's a ton of 2-job 1-person incomes right now. The company culture is rotten and the leadership principles don't have any meaning.
Hopefully where I work doesn't try to pull this off. At least my manager would not like it one bit seeing as their commute is already 50 min one way 2 to 3 times a week. But who am I kidding, it will probably happen and then I get to sit on video calls in the office with all the people I collaborate with across the states and europe.
What are managers going to do with critical engineers who are delivering? Fire them? They will have another job doing their individual contributor work in a week. There's a real shortage of individual contributors with skills and the ability to deliver consistently.
On the other hand, if you are in one of those political mid-career positions that mostly involves communication, coordination, impressions, etc., then yeah, the org doesn't need you as much as you need the org so you better haul your ass back to work.
I love my home setup. It’s better than my office setup. But my office has faster fibre than I’ll ever get at home and I can get more done.
It’s ok for both to be good for different things.
Entirely remote or in person isn’t ideal. I maintain both a home and work. Just when I think I might not need one I get reminded.
Too much of anything or one can limit or stall your growth and lead to all those feels of why do you feel you’re standing still when you’re sitting at home all the time, or just the same office.
Companies have to be designed to be distributed, or suck at it. Distributed is a better word I find than remote (disconnected) or virtual (those contributions aren’t real)
Having a mix of activity and locations to
Are there studies on productivity vs. # of days in office for white collar workers?
Yes, you can cite it as "the CEO's fart."
It seems that "being okay to commute to work daily" or even "enjoying work in an office" is a skill that is rapidly getting lost, like coding in Cobol.
Cobol developers can basically set their own hourly rates and still get hired, so I hope that we few "like-to-go-to-the-office" people will be able to do the same soon....
So: who actually enjoys going to the office daily, like me?
a) My manager has zero problems with remote working and has found the team to be just as productive. AFAIK, my manager also doesn't waste time posting on HN.
b) Are you SURE we're rarely hearing from managers? It's often that people don't bother to mention whether or not they're a people manager... because why the hell would you?
c) In ANY sufficiently large software business, you WILL have some-to-many geographically distributed teams. If your geographically distributed teams work fine with their asses in company-provided seats, then they can nearly always work fine in with their asses in worker-provided seats.
I suppose the best you can do is just use the commute cost in your calculations of what your compensation is worth. I made a lateral move to a company that offers hybrid work. The irony is the company I came from was all in office, but I worked exclusively with people outside of my office so I would drive to work just to interact with people on MSTeams.
In the Americas most people are still fixated on owning a car.
In political debates in my city, public transportation is only ever talked about as a burden on the city's finances, never mind that car infrastructure costs many times more.
I read the internal memo shown in the article and I really dislike how casually he tries to put a positive spin on forcing everyone back into the office with zero mention of the consequences on the employees and no hard evidence on any productivity benefit.
Studies show that out of full time in office, hybrid and remote, in office is the least productive.
I expect to see an exodus of top talent from Amazon and possibly a reduction in the quality of their services.
This is Amazon having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can work remotely 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background.
I found this paragraph to be somewhat galling since, like, if you're sick you shouldn't work at all, you should be focussing on getting well. Ditto if your kid is sick. Raising one or more whole other human/s is a super important thing. One result I saw from the pandemic is fathers doing more of the childcare, and what full-RTO like this fundamentally does is shift that dynamic back to where it was before.
Shame on Amazon.
I hurt my knees back in May and tried to get HR to make an exception for me. They shot it down because they said I didn’t have enough documentation. They wanted more paperwork, which meant I had to make another doctor’s appointment. Getting a doctor’s appointment these days takes weeks, so I never managed to get the exception.
How much leeway you get totally depends on your L8 Director. If you’ve got a strict L8, good luck—this policy isn’t going to be applied reasonably. They’re actually looking at badge reports that show how many hours you’re in the office, and managers will call you out if you’re just “coffee badging.”
If you think this kind of thing doesn’t happen, just take a look at Blind. There’s no logic to how these rules are applied. Meanwhile, if you go to an L8/L10 meeting, try counting how many people are actually in the office. It’s a joke, especially when all the <L7 exceptions have been pulled.
Next, you were reachable so managers especially also bothered you at 7PM (I even sometimes had meetings at a FAANG). In exchange, employees got the freedom often to work in their desired 40 hours as long as things got done.
Now, companies want it both ways where you come in 9-5 AND they want non office hours productivity as well. Somehow we've forgotten the paystubs and employee offer letters say "40 hours of work"
As you said, the Working Time Regulations Act 1998 is the UK law implementation of the EU Working Time Directive 2003.
There are contract rates for how much overtime should be paid. Just ask to be paid.
No employer I've seen has ever questioned it, they know it'd be illegal for them to actually force you to opt-out your of your rights. If they put it in writing that it was a conditional part of employment they'd be in hot water.
They're just hoping you just sign away your rights "for free" so to speak.
As of lately, I've seen some web-based signature systems (adobe something something docusign iirc?) and with such systems crossing lines is not an option anymore.
In the esig case, you’d need to talk to HR to have the provision removed.
Yes I think that was implied by the original poster. The company has to counter-sign the modified document, which is why they always get you to sign it first, so they can review before they sign.
Never had a job where that wasn't a clause in the contract.
If a potential employee isn't willing to agree to work more than 40 hours they either don't take the job, or take the job but refuse to work those extra hours and risk being fired. Being fired is never fun, but the employee is still better off ignoring the contractual obligation there if it was a deal breaker anyway.
These companies don't care about you at all. Put in your hours and always keep looking for the next thing.
I'm a freelancer/independent contractor.
Every time I start a new gig, I make sure to answer private messages few hours later, and never outside the 8AM/8PM timeframe or during weekends. Ever.
I also make it black on white on contracts that I don't do meetings before 9AM or later than 5PM.
I immediately set a habit for people that I might be AFK and that I never ever answer work-related stuff in the weekends.
As months go by I start answering when I see it/have time, rather than purposefully delaying and occasionally I answer a message or a chat in the weekends if I lurk on the channels. Hell, sometimes I even did some work on the weekends too if some deadlines are close (I am still bound to the success of my clients after all) and make up for it when rhythms are lower.
But in the beginning I make sure to always set a tone where I'm just not there online and ready to answer 24/7.
I did the opposite years ago. I would make it a habit for people for always being up and ready, so when I had to do something (from preparing lunch to bathroom breaks) people would instantly assume I was working less or cared less.
I don't do the mistake anymore. Professional? Always. Connected and ready all time? As little as possible.
I just think it’s important we are all deliberate about what is important to us and therefore what we agree to. If the precedent is set early, it helps tremendously, in my experience.
A lot of ppl on the market means we have no leverage in discussion.
Several times in my career I've had my boss or one of my boss's peers send someone's resume to me because our tenures at another company lined up. Sometimes I knew them, and sometimes someone otherwise very well qualified for a job on the technical merits didn't get an initial interview because they were horrible to work with.
they won’t let you make yourself irreplaceable
This will work only if your manager has 62 IQ.
At my current company, there's a place I think I can see my reports' office attendance, but I've never actually checked it. Why would I? I'm not even a WFH zealot myself; I just don't see why I should care if they're in the office.
a job of a manager is to gain trust both up and down the chain. if you’re forcing your employees to do something, you’ve lost their trust.
Now let's also imagine that you already have the trust of your direct reports (I would think a lot of Amazon managers don't but that's neither here nor there). You explain a policy to them - they have to be in the office 5 days a week or Things happen, whatever they may be. This person just refuses to do it. Is the manager to just say "oh well I don't want to 'be a dictator' so I'll just let them ignore this policy?" Of course not. They'd be abdicating part of their job if they did that.
see in the example you’ve given, you’ve still placed the employee second over the business. or to put it another way, a human over money. so poof, gone is the trust if you did have any.
> see in the example you’ve given, you’ve still placed the employee second over the business
I mean yes, this is how businesses work. Of course the business is of primary importance over any individual employee, especially employees who are in violation of prioritized corporate mandates. Anytime someone is fired, for pretty much any reason including poor performance, that's prioritizing the business's needs over the individual's. But that's literally just what everyone signed up for; the business is a mission and profit-driven organization, and it puts its needs above those of any individual cog in the machine.
why do you need to see me to do my job?
Having worked from home for 20+ years, I'm in favour of remotely working more than just about anyone, but I'd be remiss to claim that said networking isn't harder remotely. I don't think it is impossible, but it is different, and not very well understood. I expect most people working from home don't engage in this much, if at all.
Now, keep in mind that the people running these companies are every day normal people who aren't particularly intelligent. They don't really know or understand how to get people working remotely to network better (or even at all). All they know is that there is some chance that if you bump into someone else at the water cooler that you might start talking, so they lean into that. Even that is not a great solution, but it is seen as being better than what happens remotely.
I assume from what description of your job you have given us that you are in a problem solving-type role (e.g. software development). There is the problem they face. Here is your time to shine!
there is none of this happening regularly enough to warrant coming in the office full time. teams are already so isolated they cannot interact much less network and converse. then you also have distributed teams, so you end up with offices that have 1 team member in them with the other coworkers working in some entirely different field with no hope of ever interacting.
so again, why do they need to see people work? this is an outdated idea
Even if it only happens just once, that's more than enough justification on the employer's side. That's a huge win.
The employee can choose if the slim chance of a win is equally valuable to them or not. It takes two to tango, as they say.
> so again, why do they need to see people work?
I like that you assume they are actually taking time to watch and not just on the golf course.
* Teams when working 5 days in office, but nobody checked (other than maybe your direct manager) and you could wfh if you needed it to
* Teams were completely remote
* Amazon was checking you came to the office 3 times in the week
* Amazon was checking you came to the office 3 times a week for a certain amount of time
And now the expectation is completely different to all of those. Again.
“(you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems)”
Somewhat telling that he’d use a congenital disorder as a metaphor for how work should be done at Amazon
Let's be real, not a single HN comment (and there's nearly 1500 here as I'm writing this one) is going to be "productive" is this discussion, especially with regard to Amazon. The biggest impact is some comment here may convince someone on the fence to quit when they might have waited a few months without it. And this joke isn't going to change that.
I may have a dual motive for wishing for you to “get well soon”, but even that is majority personal.
Even in Europe I've seen various mix, some countries ie don't pay first 3 days of sick leave, some do but pay only some minimal compensation, some do full for X days etc. But it was never completely on the employee, meaning no pay. Covid shuffled this a bit so may be different now.
For the kinds of jobs we’re talking about here (corporate Amazon, college education required, salaried) you basically just call in sick and that’s it. You didn’t work but you still get paid your normal salary. This is the flipside of salaried work obviously — just as there may be times you work over 40 hours and don’t get additional pay, there are times when you work less than 40 hours and still get your regular pay.
Now all of this depends on circumstances like your manager, but in general, in these kinds of jobs, no one is running around tracking your sick days. If you’ve got something more substantial going on then you’ll have to take short-term or long-term disability however.
You don't fix this with corporations having better policies out of the kidness of their heart, you fix it with laws. The reason corporations were moving everything to remote work during the pandemic was that in many places travel was severely restricted and they needed to ensure the operation of the business in the case of a full lockdown. Now that that's no longer an urgent risk, they're rolling everything back because the benefits to the business don't outweigh the drawbacks and everybody else doing it makes it an easier sell (just like the wave of mass layoffs).
Well it depends how sick you feel. Personally, if I only have a cold, I prefer working (from home) over hanging on the couch and watching Netflix all day long. If I'd have to come to the office I'd report ill though, also because I don't want to contaminate my colleagues.
Rest benefits you and your employer. Working while ill is a sure path to burnout. Burnt out employees are less productive and more likely to quit.
It’s okay to not grind 25/8.
Note that doing nothing does not necessarily mean that you relax. Working at home at your own moderate pace might make you recover faster. But again, what works well for somebody might not work well for someone else.
I doubt this would be the case. The L10s get to wfh from there vacation homes while the L5s get commutes.
Wouldn't be the first time, would it?
This isn't really different than startups offering "unlimited" time off. That's just
> This is Company XYZ having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can take time off 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background.
I think it's widely known that "unlimited" time off is a scam, and people with "unlimited" PTO actually take less time off then their peers who have to accrue PTO the old fashioned way. And yet sometimes I still see people who are enthusiastic about it.
it is a question of priorities, and every vacation you take suddenly requires review
Most people could work perfectly well with a bit of a cold. Then covid turned it into a virtue signal to slack off for something trivial.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/business/media/jeff-bezos...
People have democracy in the personal lives, but not in the workspace. Unions give the workers democratic power so they can collectively make demands of the business owners. They can also demand a greater share of profits.
> the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy
More quiet firing?
> also plans to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer managers in order to “remove layers and flatten organizations,”
Combined with not so quiet firing?
> Jassy took the helm and instituted widespread cost cuts across Amazon, including the largest layoffs in its 27 years as a public company.
Cost cuts worked great for Boeing. Can't wait to see Amazon stock go through the roof.
"I continue to believe that we are all here because we want to make a difference in customers’ lives, invent on their behalf, and move quickly to solve their problems."
"We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way"
"To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID." - The stock price is UP $100/share since March '19
If you didn't read the whole thing take a minute and revisit the article. NO MATTER WHAT DO NOT THROW YOUR LAPTOP OR PHONE!
Now, we get to see if 5/15/40/40 is the handcuffs its intended to be.
So, I have my doubts about easily for most people, even at these places.
You know how cities or even states try to compete for employer offices/headquarters? This is the other side of that.
Like, if he's not happy with the productivity of his workers, shouldn't he be telling his SVPs/VPs to come up with plans, and/or hold them accountable?
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/linkedin-top-comp...
These CEO's who think they are business geniuses fail to grasp that they look like morons parroting this "RTO means productivity and collaboration" nonsense which has been disproven time and time again.
They are doing this because they are just dumb people. They over hire and allow their organizations to become bloated because they know that when it's time to make their metrics look good, they just create such miserable work environments that they know they will lose some people. Next comes the layoffs.
I mean, this is ape level intelligence here. No thought required.
That can't be the case my man. Even if there was a manager for every two employees below, the number of all managers at all levels would at most be equal to the number of employees at the lowest level given that:
x (lowest level) = x/2 (first) + x/4 (second) + x/8 (third) + ...
In reality, there are way more employees per manager and the levels of management is not infinite, so the ratio of managers to employees is way less than 1.
Must be going well over there.
This is why one big and well communicated cut is always better than round after round.
Once your company tilts into the direction of getting worse, anyone with better options leaves. You end up with a lot of adverse selection as an employer if you take the slow burn approach.
- Gets rid of employees who were on the fence of leaving anyway
- No need to pay out unemployment
- No need to pay out unused PTO (depends on the state)
- No need to notify months in advance (WARN act [1]) or risk heavy fines
- End up with "loyal" employees in the end
If they can get through the short-term pain of losing some good workers, it will eventually balance out, and the show will go on.
[1]
Management probably thinks they don't need the best people anymore, as mediocre employees + ChatGPT (or whatever they use at Amazon) will suffice.
WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on. Tech employees realizing that collective action can work terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible.
However, it's likely they will exempt the right people, it just matters how hard it is to get those exemptions.
This is important to internalize. There are jobs with more downside than upside. When in such a situation, it's often best to move on at your own schedule rather than hanging on too long.
Often the % quality/quantity of work your replacement can/will do is a lot harder to quantify than the 50% less pay, so they will even take 40% of the work for 50% of the pay.
Would be better to trim in the right division/department/team/performance ranking than just.. force random increase in departures.
[0] See the last 2-3 years of businesses cutting headcount for "the coming recession" that never came.
[1] Personally I think that's the reason behind my job's recent bump to ~50% in office time from ~25%. We have a number of large buildings either owned or on long term leases that are 'wasted' if they're not forcibly occupied.
I cancelled prime years ago because if it's some mass produced chinese white label products you can get the same thing on ebay for cheaper let alone the aforementioned 3 for dirt cheap provided you don't care to wait a couple weeks.
Everyone is hawking the same slop, and although amazon can get it to me in a day, that's often not worth the premium.
When I hear a C-level saying they want to operate like a startup, the text processor in my head just replaces that with "we've decided to cut a lot of you, and work the rest like dogs". My condolences to everyone at Amazon whose lives are being turned upside down by this stupid decision, although I guess you knew the company you were working for.
Come to think of it, most of the startups I've worked for were WFH. None of them had assigned desks.
I think about it regularly and while I've seen a lot of overconfident phonies, none of them stuck out quite as much as he did...
Naturally the execs will live far away, next door to the urban planners.
Having people move between home and work drives value in car sales, public transport, real estate valuations, construction, lunch restaurants, public infrastructure projects and countless other things that generates value.
The collected services catering to commuters is larger than any single company, and society can probably not handle a decision (most office workers can work from home) that effectively bankrupts it. It needs to slowly be replaced with something else.
Except when it was for 2 years and the economy boomed, you know?
It wasn't a boom, it was a bust.
During the pandemic most governments paid through the nose to keep the economy going. The US even paid every American hundreds of dollars directly. Other countries subsidized everything from restaurants to car manufacturers.
Now that this money has to be recovered, inflation has eliminated a decade of salary increases for most workers and governments are borrowing left and right. We can't do many more years like that.
I'm not saying it's right that we force people to commute when they don't have to, but removing this part of the economy is a real problem that has to be handled.
It's like when a coal mine closes, just saying "the coal mine is no longer needed" is no comfort to the unemployed coal workers and the nearby town.
If you work -1 remote days, and 5 in-office days, you can achieve the four day work week!
this capitalistic yearn for endless growth is such a parasitic meat grinder
they write these memos with "touching" stories, i started from the bottom here, 27 years, amazon is my life, blah blah, as if anyone, pardon my french, gives a flying fuck
It might not be that they're "out of touch" but rather they just don't care. Sort of like slaveholders back in the day, who often complained about how their slaves were lazy and how unjust it was that the slaves weren't giving their all.
Once you realize that the corporate, especially large ones, don't give a ** about your life, you'll have a clear(er) view of how the world actually works, and what you might want to do with your life.
And because of this, I kind of cherish my relationship with my manager. I am an IC and he is a bottom level manager. There is still a lot "human" aspect of this, and he actually cares about me taking time off etc. He himself fears layoffs. You can't say the same when you go up the ladder. The only things senior management cares about are product, revenue and efficiency (maybe a few more). Employees are nothing but replaceable tools. The higher up, the less they are about individual employees.
You must consider their objectives and incentives... making shareholders richer makes them richer. Making employees happier doesn't. (At least in the short term...)
Not getting to the point promptly enough and painting the message to look better only makes it much worse.
Surprised it's taken companies this long - I guess it's much harder to rollback than implement this so there will be a set of companies which just suffer on growth/performance and that'll be justification enough for the next cohort to go back to allowing remote work in edge cases only.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ar4qcghnGjlGwZAAXdu2...
You really don’t want your important systems being underpinned services run either by disgruntled employees about to quit or by the bottom of the barrel types who have no choice but to stay even when treated like this.
A lot of the ways in which people point out that in-person work is ineffective aren't actually problems with in-person work. For example, people complain about "attendance periods" where workers are expected to be present for 8 hours even if there's not 8 hours of work to be done, but this can easily be duplicated with remote work, where people are expected to be online for 8 hours. Micro-managing employers who prioritize control over productivity might have slightly fewer ways to micro-manage remotely, but remote work is really only a band-aid to that problem, not a solution.
Ultimately, my conclusion from a few decades of working on teams is that given effective management, in-person is more effective.
And here's the thing: I don't care. Working from home is worse for the team but it's better for the worker. Decade after decade workers have become more productive, and decade after decade workers are paid less and less of a percentage of the benefits of their labor[1]. The ability to work from home is one of the few concessions employers have (begrudgingly) made to workers in the last few decades, and it's nowhere near enough. Employers should be forced to give up productivity to improve workers' lives, and if they want the productivity (and/or control) of in-person work they should be made to pay more for it.
I'm tired of seeing the whole conversation about this being about what is more productive. Workers aren't seeing any of the benefits of being more productive, so there's no reason for workers to care what's more productive. That's basic incentives: if you don't like that, you don't like capitalism.
[1] https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...
Companies, stop buying the most expensive real estate! Setup offices 2 towns outside a major city and encourage your employees to move to that town.
The US with its top 15 cities are all infested shitty rat holes.
Why do we continue to try to optimize existing cities, rebuilding over and over with insane expense rather than grow and invest in more, smaller cities.
That would actually put me off working for Amazon (though, I mean, there's a lot that would). I like working from an office, but I did _not_ like the hot-desking that I had to do post-pandemic because our office wasn't big enough (my employer eventually let people who come in frequently get assigned desks, and it's been a huge quality of life improvement).
Who’s “we”?
Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421
I just came here to say that quitting back in 2023 was the best decision I ever made.
Use the laptop spy software that companies have been conveniently using anyway to enforce this.
People here talk like they have just invented the wheel.
Is this an American corporate thing?
How does it work at EU/UK companies?
> Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support?
Because eng is the only people who know how the software works if it breaks, who else can fix it?
I would also say that good support is not trivial (this is not eng specific, it's a company wide initiative) and can be a competitive differentiator
I just never had to be on call for anything. I fix bugs during business hours. :)
It's a "Our company has sufficiently-complex software that we sell to customers that pay us enough money to justify calling in one or more programmers outside of regular business hours to help handle problems that one or more of those customers considers Very Serious that our (IME often very, very knowledgeable) support staff can't figure out." thing.
So even if there is tiered support, they'll want an SME on some aspect of the system on-call as a fallback for higher/highest level triage.
The oncall person has a laptop (and perhaps a pager), and they are expected to remote connect ASAP when needed. That was the norm well before Covid; doesn't make sense to wait for a commute before responding.
But then maybe after you do the first level of triage, if it's still ongoing, then you go in to the office.
sorry boss. stuck in traffic on 520/i90/insert your fav bridge
reply 90 min later.
Setting a SEV2 to "pending" does prevent you from getting re-paged during the weekend when you're at home (where work, as I understand it, does not get done).
"On the first topic, we’ve always sought to hire very smart, high judgment, inventive, delivery-focused, and missionary teammates. And, we have always wanted the people doing the actual detailed work to have high ownership."
Then shortly later..
"We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements"
So they hire smart people with great judgement who have high ownership but also treat them like incompetent workers who need to show up to the office, in their assigned seat & do their assigned tasks... And he calls this startup culture? Can Amazon even be considered a "tech" company at this point? It seems long gone are the days of innovation & growth at the cost of profit.
I do not even have someplace to put a coffee cup. Have to pack/unpack all of my stuff daily.
Think of those years and years of suffering that must put a CEO through! To be at the top of the mountain - and still beholden to little people! That is the worst kind of injustice.
And the joy - the relief! - of finally being able to treat the engineers with the same contempt you feel for your customers. It must feel GLORIOUS.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/east/2019/06/04/528240...
Much quickier than they followed for salary raises, obviously.
Coming out of this layoff wave my impression is Microsoft and Meta are static on employer desirability, Amazon slightly less desirable, and Google is now IBM 2.0.
Cost of capital is up, productivity is down. So all companies have to work through options to increase productivity, and/or reduce costs. Companies will take different approaches to this
Gone are the days when you can start the next google in your garage. You need capital to compete.
Not even Elon Musk has enough in AI for example.
Is there a specific reason to believe Amazon would have less productivity than the rest of the economy compared with before?
according to which statistics?
No, lots of things stop you. You can't just say "nothing stops you" and pretend it's true and work from there. Obviously, lots of things stop you otherwise everyone would do it.
Have you heard of over-employment? There are people working 2-3 full-time jobs, pulling over $500k, while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.
There are a ton more that are working one job, but likewise giving very little output. It's harder to catch those folks in the act when they don't physically have to be present in the office.
While in office can be less productive in a fair amount of aspects it can also be more so in others. It isn't always some sinister plan from above.
Labor costs have risen greatly post-lockdowns, so companies expect to see a return on their money, more so in a rapidly tightening labor market.
There's a real tradeoff between employment stability and managerial oversight in companies at scale.
Not at all, most of big tech literally has firing quotas... which combined with the typical incompetent/parasitic management means good engineers are fired and terrible ones stay on/get promoted.
In the same environment that is affecting SDEs right now, managers are more and more being asked to do more individual contributor actions, while increasing their span of control.
They have their own work to do, primarily in how they report progress and vision UPWARDS. Most IC's don't realize but depending on their skip level, managing "upwards" may be requiring more than half of a manager's time.
So sure, they know if the overall team work gets done. And they absolutely know their top and bottom performers. But in the middle? Lots of room for variability. Is someone good even if they're not coding becaue they seem to be unblocking others? Is someone good if they're not talking to anyone but cranking out tons of code? This is where most performance management time ends up going to.
And in no point in today's culture, does it account for the possibility of catching people that are moonlighting or coasting.
At least in the orgs I've been in, it seems to me that everyone is always aware at any given time who the "coasters" are. We have to constantly work around them / isolate them from causing damage. Hell, even Forte should give some signals.
If they can't do that, they will grasp at any reason outside their control as an excuse for why their team is underperforming, WFH is the perfect fall guy, and I can guarantee you that Amazon has no real data to back up the claim that WFH decreases productivity - in fact they published data to the opposite.
It may be the primary responsibility by plurality but it almost is never the MAJORITY of the time you spend, ESPECIALLY in big tech.
I'd say the most likely breakdown is:
* 40% managing reports and judging their performance * 30% managing upwards * 20% recruiting/hiring * 10% team vision/strategy + cross-org initiatives
I don't understand this; if they aren't producing what's expected of them, that's noticeable, and a problem. If they are producing what's expected of them, that's good, and what's it matter what they're doing with their time?
For the first time in my career I feel able to actually perform to the expectations set for me as remote staff. I don't have to invent busy work to do while I'm waiting on another team, I can just go do laundry.
If management doesn't have faith that their team's output is what it "should be" that's a separate problem from being in-office.
On a long enough time horizon, someone will pick up on this and perceive the engineer as "slow." If multiple people are doing this in the team - then the org is probably in trouble.
If everyone is spending 5 minutes working every 4 weeks... why would you hire extra people outside of contingency coverage?
If my workload is such that I can work four "full time" jobs and every one of my employers is happy with my work product, then that's nothing but great for everyone.
Again, high trust environment.
If they're performing okay during the ramp-up period, it stands to reason that they'd continue to do fine after the ramp-up period.
But again, if the employee isn't meeting standards, you fire them and find another. Turning the employment into a "jealous and paranoid lover" situation where despite the fact that the employee is meeting performance expectations, you're constantly questioning whether or not they're *GASP* doing work on the side for Another Company(!!!) does noone any favors.
If the work does produce a viable business and management just wants to squeeze more out of people then I think it is a different problem.
I agree a good business operates on trust. I also agree with other posters that the current business norms of mass layoffs during record profits, PIPs, "managing out", clawbacks, and all the other abuses have clearly shown the trust isn't there the way folks claim "the good old days" used to be.
I dont think lying about your employment, intentionally sandbagging, or cheating your employer are ethical behavior but I sure see why folks feel like being the nice guy is a surefire path to exploitation.
I personally would like to see a normalization of very different employment contracts that do a better job of balancing the two sides. I assume this means a return to strong unions (although plenty of issues there as well; certainly no silver bullet).
tl;dr With "make us enough profit and we'll probably fire you tomorrow" always looming over your shoulder I understand why loyalty to a company has dried up.
Everything in software engineering is like this. You never know when you're going to stumble into a rat's nest of unexpected complexity. Should I be on the hook to pull 100 hours this week in order to maintain a normal pace on my tickets despite the snafu? Of course not, that's ridiculous. At the same time, there is no way for my skip to verify these types of stories across 100 reports.
Replace "reasonable" with "trusting" and this is literally a restatement of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
This is the tax for dysfunctional organization and bad management, it has nothing to do with office presence. Most people who work less than expected don’t work elsewhere and have very different reasons for that. They can continue doing that in the office: if their manager didn’t notice low productivity in remote setting, very likely this won’t happen in the office too.
If a manager thinks someone is doing that, fire them as your belief is that person is not contributing. Do their job yourself in the time you would have spent managing them, get a bonus for cost savings.
>Labor costs have risen
Call us when C-suite wages drop back to the comparative levels they were even 10 years ago.
Workers got a wake-up call. Capitalist still want to shackle them and beat the work out of them whilst they run off with the money.
Massive wealth gaps can't end soon enough.
Same situation here. Of course it's happened, some people have taken advantage of remote work. So what's the manager's excuse for not catching this?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor
He also liked to imply that people living large on welfare & benefits fraud (which, already not really a great description of what was going on even in this exemplar case) was widespread and not, you know, a thing he knew about from a single case because the woman was caught and charged with crimes. What an asshole (Reagan, I mean—well, her too, I suppose).
Basically this lady was committing fraud in just about every possible way she had access to, and welfare was just one of them. She then, maybe, kept doing it after release from prison, if you read between the lines a little (though mostly estate and insurance fraud, not welfare, if she was still committing fraud)
Real person, but absolutely not representative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor
Maybe look at output? My experience is in call center/helpdesk. Either someone takes calls and tickets or they do not, very noticeable.
If the company really wants, there is software like Teramind and Aktivtrak that screenrecords and keylogs.
I know exactly who gets work done. I can easily check the git repos and I’m at the standups. Some people are straight up negative value but cannot be fired. It’s impossible to fire anyone.
Yeah... that feels like it should be true - obviously they're harder to monitor because you can't see them! - but I think if you really think about it it isn't.
I think the number of people actually working more than one job is very small. So you're really talking about people slacking off, and that's just as easy to do in the office. Unless your boss is literally next to you anyway.
I used to read Reddit all the time at work.
The things you can't hide are having no meaningful update for stand-up every day, not completing any cards, not participate in conversations/planning, etc. If's that not catching up to them then that's on management for not paying attention.
Because they report to the person who says they can't.
If you want to treat your employees as cogs in a machine, constantly frustrate well intentioned shows of initiative, remove their job security and treat them as interchangeable and discardable.. then you should expect them to do exactly and only what they are told rather than looking around for the best way to help. If you can’t keep them busy & don’t really understand what they do well enough to supervise or evaluate the work, and you slashed wages for the same job to half what it was a few years ago.. hell yes they are getting another job and laughing if you’re upset about it.
It’s always been a factor of ROI for the roles vs competitive labor market rates. Tech tends to operate closer to business leadership than many industries so many get this idea of being modern clerics or something and being part of the nobility class in organizations when again, really we’re often some of the most despised in the labor force as a necessary evil that must be paid (relatively) high where at every turn cost optimization experiments are attempted at our expense.
Business leadership doesn’t like you, they like that the things you can do can be wielded to scale their and the organizations wealth higher than most roles, because tech scales. That’s about it, IMHO at least.
It was in a sense, although this is changing. Rising costs of education started to ensure that degrees are just another tool of class warfare, in the sense that you can only make money if you have money. Any well-paying and non military job category that bypasses this, caring more about talent than certification is probably getting us closer to a utopian meritocracy.
But of course, this was never a credit to the management class or the industry leadership, just an accident of timing during a growth phase plus some peculiar aspects of computing itself vs domains like say, medicine or structural engineering. Maybe it does come down to scale.
Anyway, even if the world hasn’t overproduced SWEs and info workers, the AI we’re all building works for management. So eventually AI engineers won’t be able to find AI jobs not because the AI is doing their job, but because AI filtered them out of the applicant funnel early for ranking high as mercenary, or low on conformity, dependability, or desperation, without even looking at certification count. Imagine how easy it is to flag applicants as not-desperate-enough yet to be lowballed on the offer, especially after there are only a few ways to apply for anything, and after indeed and linked in etc all decide they work for employers more than job seekers. Everyone who is talking about whether they can be replaced in their job should be much more worried about being filtered, because from the employers perspective, there’s always some reason you’re not the best hire.
Why doubly care if they perform well enough? Some sense of misguided justice?
If you want to have multiple jobs at the same time, there is a vehicle available for that, it’s called “consulting”.
I don’t think anyone should have loyalty towards their employer - you should be free to jump ship to a better gig whenever you want, in the same way they are free (in the US) to let you go at their convenience. But taking multiple full time jobs is wrong, imo.
Doesn’t this sound like tribal, us-versus-them, reductive explanation for the behavior of those you disagree with?
Right now, I think it's a matter of over-hiring the last couple years. This is both a productivity and loyalty check. Anyone not coming in will either be let go, or recognized as an exception.
As for my opinion of there being a level of us-versus-them, I felt it has manifested in things like dress codes. If you're old enough, you might have worked at some place where you wear a suit. That might seem perfectly normal for higher paid management or sales, but it's just keeping people in line at the lower levels.
I've worked at a number of places where "rank has its privileges". Managers would have larger desks, offices, better computers, etc... Regardless of what was needed to do the job.
I'm certain there is a level of "I have to, so you have to", whether it makes sense or not.
I am genuinely confused and alarmed by the rhetoric of your post. It feels beyond personal
This is condescending and aggressive. You may not have meant it that way, but it is.
--WFH proponent
This is the entire comment I replied to. What is the substance?
> I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".
Why do you think tech workers have upper-middle pay but not upper-middle social class or perks (until wfh, partially)? Tribal us-vs-them behavior. Not reductive, just what it is. Can’t let a new group rise into that class just as the MBAs and finance guys are wrapping up kicking doctors and lawyers out.
I have a contrarian view on this. People will be efficient remotely and the management can use result-oriented performance management only when the talent density is high. Unfortunately high talent density is the luxury that Amazon does not have. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of employees after all. Otherwise, Amazon's culture should be uniquely suitable to WFH. Case in point, many teams are already distributed across multiple time zones; Amazon rely heavily on writeups and asynchronous commenting; and Amazon discourage discussions with more than a handful of people.
Indeed this is how Cory Doctorow explains it: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/
more likely, it's a constructive layoff and they want to justify real estate cap-ex
WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on. Tech employees realizing that collective action can work genuinely terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible before people start to organize. The weak job market just makes it easier and the upcoming interest rate cuts might dent that advantage a bit.
Carpenters know that they are labor and labor has value only when it takes it through collective action. Somehow tech workers haven't figured that out yet. When will tech workers catch up to carpenters? Hard to say.
The way newcomers get “mentored” haphazardly by random coworkers and google/youtube/stack overflow/AI is absolutely bizarre and exceedingly unprofessional given our work has real world implications. Some sort of apprenticeship model and at least a degree of oversight would make so much sense, but… Well, we’ve got this mess instead. It’s strange.
Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time. My experience of learning from someone who’d earned their tickets was sooo much better than the self-teaching and cargo-cult leadership I endured in tech.
Despite that, I’m extremely grateful to the people who served as good mentors in my career. It made an immense difference. And while I enjoy self-teaching a lot, it’s awful to need to rely on it because your industry is practically structureless in that regard. So many days of trial by fire that could be avoided.
No, I expected things to work the way you think it should and I don't have a background in the trades. It's just bonkers how bad the industry training is.
I suspect (but definitely do not know) that it stems from a "Why pay to train them when someone else (or maybe they, themselves) will do it for us?" mentality that also just so happens to result in it being hard as fuck to find entry-level work.
And almost none of my social circle is tech, so this sample is a fair proportion of all the people I know. Four different industries, and government, state and federal. All at least hybrid-mostly-remote, and about a third fully remote. Still, this long after the pandemic. Most aren’t high-earning, either, so it’s not that they have remarkably high personal leverage or something.
It’s to the point that non tech office workers I know aren’t going back to full-time in the office unless the pay difference is enormous. WFH is too valuable.
They are in 'avoid responsibility and blame all misses on circumstances outside their control' mode. Remote work is the perfect excuse for incompetent management in big tech.
- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
- Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
- Belief that remote workers are more likely to jump to another company
- Opportunity to claw back a perk that can be returned in future negotiations if needed
- Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks
- Execs personally prefer employees in office for some other reason (e.g., wanting to feel powerful)
- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/starbucks-ceo-commute-priva...
if your management tree is a bunch of ex MBB consultants, you absolutely have this problem whether you believe so or not
They had the exact opposite conclusions when they were pushing WFH. They also shut down comment threads and questions from internal employees asking for data backing up their more recent claims.
> Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks
If AWS starts losing employees at any serious rate, they will collapse. They already have a huge amount of products and services where the initial engineers left and where oncall/support load is absolutely brutal.
Instead, both sides have to be discussing in good faith, curious about the problem, and open to a variety of conclusions.
If management has already made their decision, that's not going to happen. If employees have already decided to ignore anything that doesn't support WFH, that's not going to happen.
The greatest failure in modern debate is not honestly engaging with data contrary to the outcome one wants.
I believe the first one is true, but not the second.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/12/19/the-tax-change-that-s-...
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accountin...
Just in case folks weren't sure who the parent comment was accusing.
(Parent was telling folks not to vote for Trump, right?)
Also the corporate productivity difference is only marginally better, but I get to spend significant time surrounded by my wife and children.
I will not be in my deathbed wishing I spent less time with my loved ones. It’s interesting how RTO mandates reveal the priorities of those around us.
Your inability to separate work from non work is your problem.
If I ever have to waste 5 more minutes over water cooler chat about what someone did the last weekend I'm putting in my 2 weeks notice. I don't go to work to socialize and as far as I can tell that is the real reason people want to RTO. They quite literally don't know how to socialize outside of work and bugging their coworkers so want everyone to RTO so they have people to chat with who have no choice but to pretend to be listening and be courteous with them.
I would benefit for more interactions with my colleagues, that's certain. And I think I would have a better separation between work and life if I was working from the office.
There are definitely lots of great & honest homeworkers but also know plenty who go on dates or work on their startups secretly.
fwiw I talk to a lot of execs/board members and the belief here is genuine, whether or not workers agree with it. Most other execs I've talked to have wanted to pull the trigger on full RTO for years but have been afraid because they know it's a hugely unpopular decision. With a major player like Amazon doing it now, it's suddenly a lot easier to justify to employees. I suspect by 2026 fully-remote jobs will be about as common as they were pre-COVID, which is to say they exist but are an exception, not the norm.
> - An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word. Layoffs = we want to cut spending to improve our cash position/burn rate/etc. It's more accurate to say it's a way to get rid of people who aren't "dedicated" for lack of a better word, without a ton of paperwork. The idea being that if someone hates the company enough that showing up to an office 5 days/week will make them quit, you're better off replacing them.
> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now
What you're replying to doesn't specify commercial.
If you know any executives, you know they own multiple homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.
Plus this isn't even about individual executive investments. It is about corporate investments, and duty to shareholders.
I don't understand how the massive rise in residential real estate prices from 2020 to 2022 shows any dots between RTO and home prices being connected.
And it may even be understandable to the degree that they end up moving a couple hours away so now it's a huge pain for them and their co-workers to get together. You don't need commercial real-estate conspiracy theories.
Well, it's not quite the same as the forced relocation to Alaska, but if you're taking away a hugely popular perk and forcing people back to spending a couple of hours a day commuting, then you have to realize you are going to lose people, even if you rationalize it as a loyalty or team spirit test.
Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ... the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones who are unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as pissed off employees.
> Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ... the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones who are unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as pissed off employees.
There are lots of reasons good people quit. Good people are not universally against RTO. Many are. But many other good people stuck around at Amazon even after the mandated 3 days per week in office, and many good people will stick around with 5 days per week.
You are mixing up "quit -> best" and "best -> quit".
Amazon's main shareholders are Vanguard and the like, that for sure also have big commercial real estate investments.
This is something that banks and commercial real estate owners would want, but it is highly unlikely to be motivating the companies actually using the space.
1. If they lease the space, they don’t care about the building values, and in fact would prefer for them to sink so that they can renegotiate leases or move to cheaper buildings.
2. If they own the building, then forcing your own employees into it does relatively little to influence its value, because the value of buildings is determined by the market, ie. the sale prices of similar buildings in similar locations. If buildings around you sell for peanut due to low demand, yours won’t sell for higher just because it’s full. You’d need everyone else to cooperate, and this kind of coordination problem is extremely hard.
3. Even if forcing employees into offices was beneficial from the perspective of real estate values, or at least people responsible for managing real estate inside the companies, the fact of the matter is that these people ultimately don’t have enough pull to enforce such a critical policy change. No CEO in his or her right mind will decide to sign off on return to office mandate based on any real estate value projections. The potential gain here is really trivial relative to changes in employee productivity or increases in turnover.
I think this is the reason, but its more nuanced than this. Management finds in-office employees easier to manage. They are more likely to attend meetings, participate in team communication, give status updates, etc. There's much less of a question around "is this person doing the work" if you can see them doing something that looks like work in the office. If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
Management of remote employees is a huge information gathering exercise - very little of the above information is proactively surfaced to you, and instead you have to go looking for it. Frankly, it's just a lot more work for managers.
I realize the above may not be fair to employees, or that the perceptions of managers accurately resemble the truth - just stating what I think is going on.
Weird. If I missed meetings and failed to give status updates (especially ones where my update was explicitly requested) my manager would go find out what the fuck was wrong with me.
> If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
After more than four years of most software folks doing remote work, if your team hasn't established a solid protocol for doing IMs, voice/video chats, and email communications then your management has been fucking off and management deserves all the remote-communications failures they're getting. So, for the rest of this discussion let's assume that management hasn't been fucking off and you actually have a solid communications protocol.
If a coworker is regularly blowing off messages, then that's something that their manager NEEDS to know about. (And it's likely that if they're blowing off messages, they'd also be fucking off if their ass was in a company-provided seat.) However, if a coworker is failing to reply because they're working on something else that's more important then this is another thing that their manager needs to know about and consider reprioritizing your, their, or both people's tasks.
Frankly, I find the "get someone's attention with an IM (whether direct or in a team chat channel) or email" mechanism to be far, far, far better than having someone shatter my chain of thought by coming over to physically interrupt me. I know when I can't handle interruptions, so I can configure my software to not interrupt me. Others can't possibly know when I can't handle interruptions, so they can't help BUT to interrupt me during those periods.
- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
> Eng was a cost center, so the business side didn't understand and thought it unfair.
- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
> Eng was happy for attrition to meet a strategic goal of 50/50 India hiring
- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)
> Opposite: during the initial switch (we had a mgmt change later too), they found ppl were active more hours on slack, had better silly metrics like code commits, prs, pr reviews. Not the best measure, but since no one knew they were looking, likely to be relatively accurate. They were very confident in this posture.
Major.
I don't know about top executives, but many managers work remotely and would rather keep it that way. Most managers are close to the leaves of the hierarchy tree and are just as powerless as ICs.
I actually don't think it is about conspiracy theories in general but more about executives trying to recreate a past that had some positive features that have evaporated. Even 15 years ago, I spent a lot of useful face-time with people which evaporated with COVID and travel/off-site budget cuts. You can deal with the latter to some degree but a lot of companies really haven't.
People for whom this is really untenable will quit without severance. Some with difficult circumstances you can PIP out without severance. Then the rest you lay off. Congratulations now the severance bill you have to show to Wall St. is a lot smaller.
Sociopaths.
As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there. How is that a sustainable corporate culture?
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=amazon
> Amazon H1B Salary 2024
> 5848 records found; Median Salary is $144800. 7 percents of the salary are above $200K, 38 percents of the salary are between $150K and $200K, 43 percents of the salary are between $100K and $150K, 11 percents of the salary are less than $100k
Is this H1B visa fraud? Good question for USCIS and Congress. How Amazon feels about worker rights and regulation, as well as regulation as a whole, is a bit of a known quantity at this point.
https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...
They are getting that retention premium that won't be possible if they hire locally.
> Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021...
> In the past, that churn wasn’t a problem for Amazon — it was even desirable at some points. Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled...
https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
Amazon is the only FAANG that regularly reaches out to me with recruiting spam, and I am not located in a sexy tech hub nor do I have an on-trend resume. I've never responded, but I imagine their recruiting pipline counts on a combination of prestige and ignorance.
Just whatever is considered hot.
Take a look at the hiring market today. Not that many options.
It's scummy and imo represents bad leadership (a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached during the pandemic which caused some internal degradation as their replacements were strong but not as experienced with 0-to-1 + ), but there really aren't many other options that can pay Amazon level.
Hybrid (2-3 days in the office) solves most of your communication needs at the leadership level. 5 days is just too much.
+ A lot of the all-star PM and Eng leadership I knew of at AWS were poached during the pandemic to leadership or leadership track positions at plenty of companies (eg. Datadog, Felicis, Google, etc)
I hear a lot of complaints of Amazon management going to other companies bringing the Amazon culture with them, and turning off the collaboration, communication and innovation spigot between and even within teams with their imported leadership style. Have others seen this first-hand and seen effective counter-measures they can report upon that deflect that energy towards more positive ends?
I remember a few years ago an Amazon worker died in the workplace and his supervisor watched him die instead of helping him because "these were the rules" (see the related HN thread[0]). You can imagine what kind of place that is.
The employee can do something about it by leaving.
The worker, who previously was asking for help and was refused any, reports a stabbing pain in the chest and ask to a doctor. He already walked to his manager a long distance and can not walk any more. The manager refuses to call a doctor and says he can walk with the worker to the doctor but doesn't help him in any way like giving a hand. So the worker tries to do his best, is walking slower and slower trying to catch his breath, and finally dies.
While I knew RTO was coming, the way that it has been implemented is going to cause some huge issues that I wonder how companies are going to move forward.
Disengagement was bad pre-pandemic and how these RTOs were handled industry wide have resulted in a lot of delegating upward.
Not sure if that culture shift will impact their recruiting efforts or if they will address it before that happens.
Perhaps it being industry wide will mitigate he impact for Amazon. Losing their scaling properties would be disaster for them compared to many.
But working there has been more of a stepping stone than a career for a long time for many people.
i.e. stop using your own brain and tell the people above you they need to make the hard decisions. Especially because so many decisions technically have impacts beyond your own team, its hard for people to push back on such behaviour.
Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're successful and consistently promoted/paid more.
This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.
This is a very important distinction.
At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard when you already have everything you need to be happy. This hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike, live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will cut me loose whenever they feel like it.
I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and co-workers.
I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even a few years after making several changes, I still look back with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to myself.
People prioritize weird shit.
Not exactly related, but ... I will admit, I'm occasionally mind-boggled by family court. Male rape victims have been made to pay child support because its not the child's fault that his mother was a criminal.[1][2]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermesmann_v._Seyer 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_fatherhood#United_State...
These are the acts of calculated actors getting in on the take as incomes reduce, to lock in the income stream.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11150-020-09506-x
Similarly, once upon a time people needed to work whenever work was available so that they could secure the resources they'd need for times when it wasn't. That may still be the case in some industries. But in tech it's not like that. If anything it's the opposite. Extra work tends to just create even more extra work, which won't necessarily be compensated because you're salaried. Sure, you might get a raise or promotion, but that's not guaranteed. The reward mechanism uses gachapon mechanics. Which works out great for the company's owners in exactly the same way that loot crates are more profitable than more honest forms of game design. Whenever I see people sharing anecdotes of that one acquaintance of theirs who was a tech workaholic and was handsomely rewarded for all that extra work, it puts me in mind of a billboard for my state's lottery that says, "Only players win." Or the motivational dreck that MLM companies like Herbalife feed to their members. People seem to have trouble recognizing a scam when there are some token people for whom it actually worked out well.
And no, it's not healthy. The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser is about 20, 25 years old now, but summarizes a lot of the research on this sort of thing as of that time. Long story short, you get caught up in chasing the dragon.
The trick is that you have to know when to stop. I have a friend who ended up traveling with an oxygen machine, because she worked 80+ hour weeks for one too many months, and ignored a pneumonia.
I think the time spent being a workaholic (I did it a little myself early on) is sometimes helpful to really increase your skills quickly. But eventually you hit a sort of skill ceiling and it's increasingly not worth it, especially considering the things you are giving up.
Nobody at your funeral is going to be giving a heartfelt and tearful speech about how great a developer you were. Ordinary people honestly don't give a shit and neither should we besides just being generally competent and able to perform our roles.
I personally just learned to hide lack of progress on one task behind the urgency of another new issue, or keep tasks as vague as possible so that I can slow down on some days and speed up on other days. As a result I don't think I work crazy hours, but there's just a constant, fatiguing pressure of the feeling of 'I should be catching up on work right now'.
And I only recently realized that it's degrading my ability to enjoy any time at all, whether its PTO or just after work hanging out with my girlfriend.
This is my first eng. job though and I can't tell whether its better or worse in other places, and I tell myself it's probably better than the hours required at a startup. And I feel bad complaining to my friends when they're almost all unemployed or working gig jobs. /rant
I’ve never worked there but I feel like I could? The complaints sound like a baseline level of toxicity seen in many places, I have the discipline for and others dont
Amazon would still be the last of the big tech’s I would choose for those reasons, the worst vesting schedule, and RTO, but it definitely sounds relatable
It probably takes a dozen electric cars to offset the carbon saving of just not going into the office.
Does Amazon shutdown all of their office buildings completely? Do employees still leave home and work out of shared office spaces that they prefer to home or the Amazon campus? How do you factor in things like HVAC costs for individual home offices versus a main campus building? For electric cars as the unit of measure, are they new? How do you account for production costs? What power source is charging the cars?
Being flippant is most helpful when the details may be wrong but the direction is definitely right.
For ever worker that wants to work remote even part time they have to have a home office. Homes already must have toilets, kitchens, AC or Heat as appropriate, etc. In addition a worker more or less always returns home, meaning their transportation to the office is the marginal excess. So commuting alone is a source of excess carbon.
You cant tell me that a building AC/Heat is going to be so much more efficient over a home AC/heat that it erases the fact we double the footprint of office + kitchen/eating space + bathroom + lobby + call rooms (which are usually extra ontop of a desk) on and on.
For all the offices I've worked in as a guide its incomprehensible that a home office wouldn't have a lower carbon footprint.
Sure, that's another factor that has to be assumed in modelling. In this case, Amazon is saying people must return to the office, not that they're building new offices.
As far as HVAC goes, I can't find clear data on how efficiency compares between residential and commercial but it seems safe to say commercial is more efficient. They also are built to be much more durable, lowering inputs related to maintenance like new parts and coolant. There's also the question of energy source, commercial may have better access to renewable resources though again then you have to figure out how you went to model carbon inputs for solar panels, new infrastructure, etc.
Modelling pike this is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do accurately. That's my only point here, the details are very easy to get lost in.
I actually assume you're right about the relative efficiency (~bigger is more), but I disagree it's numerically enough to erase all the other inefficiencies of going to an office, especially the square footage multiplication. (It takes many times more sq ft to have an home+office than to just have a home)
Order of Magnitude Assessment
"Bad" for the Environment: Emitting nearly 3 metric tons of CO₂ annually from commuting alone is significant. Potential for Reduction: Eliminating or reducing car commutes can substantially lower an individual's carbon footprint.
I didn't post all the calculations and rebuttals because I figured it would pollute the conversation but there's the nut of it.
If sources are provided and the sources check out that's one thing, but then it doesn't need to attempt to predict a likely human response to the question.
That said, as you mentioned below the note that 17% of emissions is generally attributed to commuting is relevant if true. A person staying home, requiring more energy both for lighting, HVAC, computers, etc could potentially cancel that out. Or not, and that's really my main point above as its an extremely complex situation to attempt to model and quantify.
This cost savings from remote work is what I expected to push adoption of remote work more, and I'm surprised by this reversed trend.
Amazon doesn't get to use anything that isn't Amazon-built
It just goes to show how executives are either are stupid, think everyone else is stupid, or most likely some combination of both.
People aren't stupid, and they can see blatant contradictions like that.
> It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
Oh, they started before that. I haven't had a real in-person meeting since maybe 2016. It's always something like Zoom, because there's always at least one guy located at another size (and probably in an awkward time zone to boot).
Not true. I work at amazon.
It's the worst of all possible choices.
'“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy said in the message.'
This, just a couple of years after they were falling over themselves touting the productivity of WFH.
Three factors I suspect contribute to this:
1. execs/management are completely disconnected from the product of the labour they “manage.”
2. Greener-pastures effect.
3. Management attrition
Together, you have a class of people who aren’t involved in production telling everyone how to do their work. In one generation that is stuck in-office all the time they want WFH. So they work towards it and eventually we get to the pro-remote end of the cycle. Managers/execs get promoted or move on and eventually… the grass starts looking greener on the RTO side of the cycle. A new generation of managers starts working towards that.
All of this happens in the context of capital and interest rates. Lower rates and cheap property tends to favour WFH sensitive managers. High rates and expensive property favours RTO.
Past some point, what are you going to do? Fire half+ of your workforce?
Think things like quarterly and annual planning, or getting a group of cross-team engineers together for a day or a week with a whiteboard to design a new system or major improvements. Miro exists for virtual whiteboarding, and I successfully use it all the time, but for big planning I would much rather do that in person.
If you move further up the chain to the level of VPs and Execs, their entire job basically consists of attending meetings to solve problems other people can't. For them, they probably would heavily prefer working in person.
My preference is working at home with quarterly week-long trips to the office -- it's historically the best for me and I'd recommend it to anyone wherever possible.
New policy - five days RTO, two days WFH, per week.
Learn and be curious. If you’re working on the weekend, you get to do this 24x7.
Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421
The only thing that will hasten their demise is if the government rips them a new one (which this Amazon shareholder says it should). Otherwise, absent some black swan, their demise will be slow and measured in literal generations.
2nd Prediction: the rest of industry will not quick follow, unless they are in the same pay-range
But HN is like “no WFH good, WFO bad, me downvote you cos I fink I know wat I talk bout”
Engineers don’t work like that.
1/ you're saying people managers should be allowed to work from home then?
2/ Why does delegation not require RTO but writing shit at a desk does?
I have worked remotely in all of those positions.
All this talk of data and I have yet to see _anything_.
Kudos to Jassy for being a leader in this space.
If you work in-office for an American tech prime, there's a good chance your office is in one of the following cities: SF, LA, Seattle, NYC, Chicago, Houston, DC. Commuting in all of these cities is absolutely miserable. It benefits neither you nor your employer to spend multiple hours per day not working, not tending to personal matters, but simply getting to and from a job you could just as easily do at home.
If you're a parent, working from home makes it easier to be present as a parent. Commuting can be exhausting, and the energy saved by working from home can be put towards your kids.
It makes the logistics of everyday tasks easier. Because I no longer piss away 20 hours a week on the L going into downtown Chicago, I now have 20 more hours per week to work out, do the laundry, buy groceries, and cook healthy meals. This is a flat-out benefit of remote work that simply cannot be offered by any employer that demands in-office work. Paychecks can't buy time.
Tech companies are also are prone to the most backwards forms of "modern office design," which universally result in a distracting and uncomfortable work environment. There's also research to suggest that they result in higher rates of illness among workers [1]. So, even if your commute doesn't suck, there's a good chance your office does suck.
None of this is to say that you shouldn't be allowed to work in an office if you want to. I sure as hell don't. I'm happier, healthier, and more productive than I ever was in an office environment.
- getting to the office (commute time is never paid time)
- figuring out a mode of travel (parking, gas are rarely paid, transit sometimes)
- child / senior care (major cost for parents)
- biology issues (quality of bathrooms, quality of kitchen, bringing items to/from work, flatulence, illnesses)
One reason is that they aren't returning to what they were previously doing: many companies have sold off office space and have removed dedicated work spaces in favour of hybrid-friendly environments and 'hot desks'.
Because it is a lie. Teams managed themselves and trusted their members.
People who were virtual employees, or whose team was in a different location than theirs, have been let go at different points of the layoffs/RTO mandates, when they existed before the pandemic.
This is a regression to a point that never existed in Amazon's history.
The only people that are offended by Musk’s comment are the being he was talking about.
“You can pretend to work somewhere else”
Remote work is awesome for some people. But if you don’t admit that a great number of people are scamming it - then your opinion is just as invalid as their obviously defensive position.
Can be done. And yeah, that comment rubs me the wrong way.
You aren’t the point.
If you can’t see and admit the massive abuse from most people - obviously except for you - then there is no discussion.
Everyone is always so quick to say how great THEY are and can’t ever even sort of discuss the reality of abuse because that position threatens their goal.
It is obtuse self-interest and disingenuous. Those comments rub me the wrong way.
That is pretty much all arguments for WFH. It's always "oooo I'm so much more productive" and occasionally "I can do errands and stuff now"... but never does it get more reflective than that. It might be great for the individual but for the team level and higher, it's probably not great at all.
Plus... I personally know a non-trival number of people who made some seriously boneheaded short-term real estate purchases in the peak 2020 insanity assuming they'd be doing this WFH forever. The amount of privilege these people had doing that while so many non-tech people got screwed over by their governments... makes it very hard for me to really feel sorry for people having to go back into the office. It was always supposed to be temporary no matter what anybody told them.
But no COVID was truly the absolute most deadly thing on earth since the dawn of humans. Space Ebola really. So let’s shut down all of society and let a bunch of privileged laptop class workers get richer pretending to work at their fancy expensive houses with separate detached offices while all the working class stiffs get screwed thanks to societies hysterical overreaction to a fucking respiratory virus whose median age of death is higher than your average life expectancy.
Perhaps if all the incredibly privileged laptop class got kicked out of their non-essential jobs like everybody else they’d have an entirely different take on what went down the last four years. Because I tell you what, most of these folks would have changed their tune really quick once they realized how little their unemployment check would have been and how they couldn’t get a straight answer from their insane government when things would return to actual normal and they could collect a paycheck again.
Instead they basically got a paid vacation working at home while yelling at all those less privileged to “stay the fuck home” from their fancy rich fucking houses. It’s really hard to give a single fuck about these people being asked to return to the office. In a just, equitable world they should never have been allowed to continue working their non-essential job in the first place no matter where that work would have taken place. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. You want society to shut down, then you too should stop getting a paycheck. In no case should society have allowed most of the tech industry to stay operational.
Bootlicker I am indeed.
Ha. You know at well as anyone the global breakout for the flu would have lasted two days.
Aside from such executive blindness, the only other reason anybody alive still thinks of commuting and in-office work in more innocent terms is because up until very recently (generationally speaking) they were simply a physical necessity for nearly 100% of jobs, so there was nothing to be gained by dwelling on it. That changed, so the acceptance of petty suffering changed. Also, the fact that the ratio of life improvement to hard work has steadily decreased since those times motivates employees to find other means of maintaining sanity.