I think it's good that you have an independent sense of what's 'right' and 'wrong' for you to do, and you follow your internal moral compass on big decisions in your life. Your personal integrity should not depend on the integrity of who/whatever it is you're dealing with.
But I also feel that it's important not to be naive: the sad/harsh reality is that there are people and bodies and organisations out there who will exploit others, and will use their gains to further carry on exploiting.
Now obviously, "exploiting" here is paying huge salaries, shiny offices etc. but I think HN is generally in agreement that Amazon is one of those organisations that regularly oversteps the mark with employee rights/respect.
If we accept that, then I have a really hard time shaking the idea that responding to them making employees lives hard by continuing to perform above average is no different to appeasing an alligator.
What if employers exploit employees because they know there will always be employees who respond to it like this? It kind of makes sense. If we accept that, then all of a sudden "I'm doing the right thing of working hard for my own moral compass" becomes "I'm helping the bad guys because, because it makes me feel better".
Again, I'm aware that thinking about this in terms of "exploitation" and "suckers" is a little extreme, but thinking about it in terms of incentives: isn't this person letting their moral compass incentivise a behaviour they object so much to that they're looking to leave?
edit: for clarity, I do hugely respect working hard for personal motivation of "doing the right thing", and I have taken this approach before. But when I got older, and reflected, I concluded I let my own ego enable things which make the world a worse place, which is a bigger no-no for me personally. It does need to be balanced off against falling into an almost paranoia of "is this person/group just trying to exploit me".
My understanding is that in iterated prisoner's dilemma, "tit for two tats" will often outperform "tit for tat", so in its original setting that's not really the case.
Here in reality, of course, "tit for two tats" can be better exploited if it can be (easily enough) identified and there are more potential ways of doing that.
I disagree, because sometimes your integrity might justify their behavior. People do bad things because they think they're good, and they think they're good because people tell them via their actions.
Being a good employee tells amazon their employment policies are fair, and they should continue them. Therefore, IMO, you not only should be a bad employee - you have a duty to be a bad employee.
When I command my computer to remove a file, I don’t think about the morality of destroying things. I issue the command and it does it. And I know my computer doesn’t care about personal integrity as it churns through its instructions. Amazon works the same way.
These companies are all lawn mowers, just like Oracle. A lawn mower just cuts grass and does not deserve or respond to things like integrity and personal honor.
Is there some purely "amoral object like Amazon" stuff that's part of it too? Sure. But at least in my experience, folks who are just phoning it in cause real stress for coworkers and others, and that definitely relates to personal integrity.
And this is Amazon, they are normally so careful about mental suffering of coworkers... ...
The tech hubs (SF, Seattle, NYC are pretty small communities.
In a town of 50k people you'll die not knowing probably 80% of them.
Anyhow, corporations exist just as much as any other collective entity and have their own behavioral norms.
Corporations on the other hand exist purely in the mind, it's not about scale. It's just a tool, a mental framework. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juridical_person
> A juridical person is a legal person that is not a natural person but an organization recognized by law as a *fictitious* person such as a corporation, government agency, non-governmental organisation, or international organization (such as the European Union).
Also limited liability companies did not really exist until the 19th century. It's just useful abstractions above people interacting with each other. I get it's easier to live not being conscious of the bare metal, too bad people lose their humanity in the process.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)
Personal integrity must always be in play, or else it means nothing.
Don't sell yourself short.
Be a person who isn't fooled into thinking corporations are people.
One could prompt their local LLM with some psychopathic verbal abuse-- "Do it or I drill a hole in your skull!!!" -- you don't need to be nice to the LLM, it doesn't have feelings or memory, etc. The LLM doesn't deserve your kindness or benefit from it. But if you do this often can you really be sure that it will have no effect on how you treat people, or how you think of yourself?
And corporations are a lot more human than some LLM-- they're made of people, they pay people, they buy from people, they're owned by people. Abusing them can harm people, though, sure it doesn't always. You can't always tell when it will harm people, and your reasoning may not be the most unbiased when your own personal benefit is on the other side of the equation.
But even if it didn't matter, that no humans would be hurt. Do you want to push yourself towards the kind of person who will behave in an exploitive way when they can get away with it? Or do you want to be the kind of person who is confident enough in their own merit that they can play life on a slightly harder mode and walk past 'opportunities' that are less obviously upstanding?
People constantly set goals for themselves that go above and beyond what is required of them because it helps develop their skill, their character, or because their wiliness to face the challenge forms part of their identity.
In any case, I'm not judging anyone here-- just offering a different perspective.
That's taking it way too far.
I think the important factor is the kind of relationship involved, specifically how does a modern corporation like Amazon view its relationship with you. I'd argue that it's fundamentally sociopathic and exploitative, so it doesn't deserve anything better than what it gives.
Individuals and different kinds of organizations can be deserving of your integrity.
So on the moral realities of Amazon...
"What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense.
This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money.
Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'
...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
I thought you meant ‘immoral’, and do believe that word is probably correct, but objectively ‘amoral’ is accurate according to https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/amoral-i...
A better move would be to use the networking opportunity to find other high-performance people who don't like the BS, and form a productish-consultingish worker-owned co-op to replace the soulless, erratic corporation with a more stable, humane environment.
Some VP's still need to show headcount to justify their own jobs?
Unless their current manager is colluding with them, they would have been ranked into a pip by now.
Amazon tried to hire me back 6 months later, from multiple recruiters. My former manager and I had a good laugh that somehow I wasn’t blacklisted.
I wouldn’t worry about it, too much.
There are new people entering the industry all the time, they don’t necessarily need any one given individual again ever.
Which means you are the one with the power in the negotiation (the party with the most power is the one who needs the other the least).
So they have a codified sour grapes rule to punish people who they don't have power over? To punish people who weren't begging to please continue being allowed to work there? That is actual insanity right there.
The work equivalent to that is a URA, for a manager.
If you’re that manager and now ‘single’ (have open headcount) and looking to find someone to ‘date’, would you hire that person back, or go find someone else - even if they were a complete question mark?
If hiring managers/recruiters have more candidates than they can handle, a prior URA can impact a candidate the same way. ‘There are many fish in the sea’
Does that mean you’d never get hired back? Nah, it happens. But it isn’t likely to help.
But are any of them hiring, and what are the odds of being hired? The market is trash right now. If it wasn't, Amazon wouldn't have pulled this shit.
I am not suggesting that this is the right way to think about your situation, but that it is 'another way' to think about it. Who knows, you might end up profiting from this adversity. Wish you all the best!
Found by accident a job near my home. Small company with private office for me and unlimited home office ruling. Use home office only when I am ill. During this period I found out, that I absolutely love my private office and hate daily commuting and open offices.
Where did they say it was easy?
They said maybe try going back to the office and seeing if you like it.
Heresy here on HN, I know.
Why should an employer bear the burden of an employee's own poor decision making?
Jobs and employers aren't for life. If you uprooted and reorganize your whole life based on the circumstances of a once in a lifetime global pandemic expecting things to stay like that forever, you've done goofed.
Working in hazardous environments is outlawed (unless proper care is taken), working from the office is not outlawed. If you want working from the office to be outlawed as a health hazard you'll have to convince the government to do that as part of OHSA and labor laws but good luck getting any workers' sympathy that commuting to work in your cushy air conditioned office is not to your taste from the likes of those doing landscaping or roofing.
Otherwise we can stretch the definition endlessly to working with Windows, Agile, Scrum, Teams and Jira is a health hazard and should be also outlawed because I just don't like them, but me not liking something is not enough to make it outlawed.
Why is it a terrible reply? What should you do if you don't like your job? What's your point here?
Most people on the planet do jobs they don't like, welcome to reality. Otherwise we'd all be racecar drivers, twitch streamers, musicians and painters and get paid for our hobbies, but that's not how it works for most people.
We do a job not because we always like it or like everything about it, we do it to pay for food, shelter and if money allows, to afford hobbies and leisure that make life nice. Venting on the internet won't improve societal issues or issues you have at your job, it's still up to you to change your situation to what fits you because nobody will do it for you.
That's not true - you just talked about OSHA. What did they do before that? They did what you advocate - they left, or maybe lost a hand or two. Then we got this codified and boom! Now somebody else does it for you (thank god).
It's not just about like/dislike. There are real impacts. Thousands of tons of CO2, lives lost in car accidents, countless human lifespans wasted on a commute. These are real impact that you, yes YOU, will face head on.
Also your approach seems to be to just accept whatever employers throw at you. Have you considered that they might be colluding (in a sense) to deprive you of options?
I would like to know a rational reason why I should spend so much of my day travelling.
Where do you see me saying such a thing?
>I would like to know a rational reason why I should spend so much of my day travelling.
Companies say it's for "better collaboration". You would do it if you had no other options if every potential employer would require you to be on site depriving you of remote options, but because the market is in your favor giving you options, it's difficult for you to empathize with the other situation.
Your solution appears to be "choose a different employer" without any hint of "demand more from the current employer".
> You would do it if you had no other options if every potential employer would require you to be on site depriving you of remote options, but because the market is in your favor giving you options, it's difficult for you to empathize with the other situation.
You assume something that's not the case. I am of the opinion that everyone who can, should have this option regardless of the market situation and I think it's terrible people are forced to commute. It's like paid leave or health insurance - an achievement in workers' rights.
That's only what you implied, not what I said. If simply demanding stuff from your current employer would just work then there wouldn't be so many unhappy workers everywhere. But that's not it works in the real world. The only language employers understand is the "F you, I quit" part.
>I am of the opinion that everyone who can, should have this option regardless of the market situation
That's nice but how do you propose that to happen? Did you see any workers rioting on the streets to have remote work as a guaranteed labor right? No? Then you can forget about it.
All rights and perk that labor currently has, like the 8h workday, free healthcare, paid vacation days, paid sick leave, have been won only through blood and conflict. It's not like your government is ever gonna hold a referendum and ask workers how many paid vacation days do you want to have and everyone gets to choose. If you want change you need to fight for it, physically with violent force, otherwise you'll be at the mercy of the "free market" which may or may not be in your favor depending how the wind blows. Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever. The covid years were a fluke.
Which I think is very unfortunate, because working from home is a huge benefit to people who want to, while not being an actual cost to employers (in my opinion, not in theirs).
The part I'm struggling to understand, and please be honest here, is you almost sound a little smug that people are being made to return to the office. Maybe you have a good reason for that, or maybe I'm misreading your tone?
Of course it does - at least wherever unions exist.
> Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever.
That's defeatist. There are ways beyond violence and you're allowed to negotiate the terms of your employment.
I occasionally got perks from my employers because I was the only person who asked.
Also there's the less popular route - voting. Where I'm from actually helped over the years.
> Have you thought of playing along and see if you would actually like going back to office full time
That is not a thought experiment. That is a "uproot your whole life" experiment.
I genuinely miss seeing my pals at work and eating lunch with the gang. I genuinely do not miss the commute, the struggle to get things done with a million distractions around me, not having my dog sleeping in her basket underneath my desk in my home office, and seeing my kids before and after school.
There, thought experiment concluded. I didn’t like it.
It's actually not, if you stop and consider the true cost of working and commuting to an office. It's just we're conditioned NOT to consider the true cost, so we externalize a bunch of the costs.
For example, you don't consider the CO2 from your car, or the time spent driving, or the risk of death. If you factor in just the time spent driving, suddenly smoking a pack a day is better for your lifespan than being in an office.
This is academic for me. I have an amazing job at a company all-in on WFH to the point we just downsized a physical office we were underusing. I hate seeing my colleagues get dragged back to legacy offices for no compelling reason though.
Making decisions is not foolish, even if they disagree with your idea of how they should be made. I quit my previous job over RTO, leaving a great team at a cool company. It was a conscious decision with pros and cons carefully weighed.
I took a nearly 50% cut about 5 years ago (a few months before the pandemic) to join a smaller company with a much less stressful environment and a very flexible WFH policy, and I don't regret it at all.
I just got a 3 month freelance gig (Netherlands) and even that requires full time on-site for absolutely no reason other than "boss says so". There's also a housing crisis going on and they wonder why they have an open vacancy for literally 6+ months.
I guess it's better to watch it burn than to allow WFH.
Employees have a legal right to work from home, so far as is reasonable in their circumstances and their employer's. There is legislation and jurisprudence on that, which makes it a lot less soft than it at first appears. The boss can't just say 'no'.
A company can, for any reasonable reason, decline the request.
I would think, generally speaking, you have the right to request anything of anyone anywhere. Do those laws do anything?
It's fairly toothless in most jurisdictions since businesses can just say it's unreasonable and not elaborate.
For instance, requesting sex in exchange for money is illegal in most places.
Requesting someone commit a crime on your behalf in exchange for money or other compensation as well (conspiracy, usually).
Several other examples too - requesting someone fix their prices, agree to not compete with you in exchange for the same, etc.
Sorry but that’s a fantasy. I live in Germany and that is 100% not the case here. You might be able to negotiate it if you are an especially valuable employee but normally no chance
I and my entire department still work mostly from home, with 2-3 days/month onsite. Pre Covid this would have been unimaginable, now there are multiple departments operating this way
We're just making shit up now, huh
Which to me is the sane option.
I do know atleast a few other companies where I worked at or have friends working at in the Netherlands with similar WFH setup.
It's been 10+ years since I did freelance, but I was fully remote then too, FWIW.
i guess there are a lot of companies have not yet found a way to manage wfh for overall satisfaction, which massively burdens morale and hence they face the decision of doing something or watch it burn.
I mentioned unionization on my personal social media account and was approached by legal that I should “consider my public statements about my job carefully.”
It is well known that Amazon hires organizations like the Pinkertons to break up unionization efforts at all levels, even going as far as to bait union supporters into signing fake union interest forms on false pretense and then attrition-fire individuals who signed by giving them no hours, pushing them into ineffective or frustrating conditions, PIPs, etc.
For that and other reasons, Amazon knows they can do what they want.
I would love for labor to get a win, but it’s easy for me to say since I don’t work at Amazon. Someone else should bell the cat.
Because the people most likely to unionize are exactly the people Amazon dosn't care that much about. If you are a star performer, you are paid gobs of money and treated like royalty. If you're even a decent employee, you make tons of money and are given lots of leeaway.
It's the rest who are the loudest complainers.
Also, Amazon is never going to count hours, so people are going to do the same thing they are doing now - come in for a few hours and peace out.
Understand your leverage: job marketplace bargaining power stems from your willingness and ability to do the latter, while structural bargaining power stems from your willingness and ability to strike and/or engage in sabotage.
The Alphabet Workers Union has been fighting against RTO mandates for a while now, AFAIK. Not super successfully, but they've gotten some extensions and delays a few times.
If the policy requires S-Team approval, it could be hard at the SDE 3 level, though it should be much easier at the PE level.
If your Director is willing to go to bat, and you have a track record, it’s not unachievable.
TBH, the policy is likely not aimed you…
Though I will say…back in my AWS days, I did gain a bunch from being able to drop into Mark Brooker’s office and ask questions about distributed systems.
I didn’t get always like it… but I learned a lot from it.
If you have a solid performance argument in your favor, make it and see what happens.
Worse case, they say “no” and you leave anyways.
If they say no, for some it puts self-imposed (imaginary) pressure to leave as soon as possible and that can lead to accepting mediocre offers.
It's better to try this only if you are someone who can give enough time for job search in case of a rejection and not rush things.
Just pick on of the competitors of the AWS product you're working on.
I do think that this is a just strategy, though. If you give 100% of what was contracted, and your colleagues know you are all in on the success of the team, your high functioning team can outlast the winds of change from HR, easy.
I don’t know where this mind worm of not using programs that were literally made for these circumstances but you are entitled to use them and should collect them.
The company pays for unemployment insurance, if they don’t want to pay their premium rates increasing they shouldn’t have fired people.
Pivoting to an unrelated thing: do you know the PM for Redshift? I don’t want to shit on the team but Redshift compared to BigQuery or Snowflake sucks.
It’s missing features both at the SQL level and the developer UX level. For example the amount of hoops one has to go through to create an external table against S3 of parquet files is far more involved and annoying than say defining one against GCS on BigQuery.
I’ve tried engaging in conversation with Amazon people on LinkedIn or otherwise to no avail.
I just want to know what the roadmap holds and if there will be more efforts to bring it to parity with its main competitors.
I figured it was a long shot to ask but considering you’re a DB focused dev I thought I’d try.
Do not mention quitting over it though, or you'll definitely go straight into the HR crosshair.
If you're done with Amazon, apply to local startups. Likely you won't get the same kind of money, but you might be happier and "you've got that on your resume".
I haven't seen a recent who's hiring post, but searching for the most recent one can help you find jobs that are hybrid or remote friendly.
Also the startup I went to after I left is fully remote and hiring, my email is in my profile.
The timing is a tricky one, though. I personally know folks who were able to demand a premium for their past Amazon work experience but that cachet will fade quickly as people start jumping ship over this stupid, regressive policy.
Just put up with it for a while -- then leave when a better opportunity shows itself.
I flew more than half the country to work for a financial institution in NY, and enjoyed it for 2 years. I got to see a different part of the country, and racked up a bunch of frequent flyer miles. Another contracted me, wanted to keep me as a FTE, I told them I wasn't moving. They hired me as a remote worker.
I'm in the UK and go to the office once or twice a week. I feel pretty lucky that our company is still very ok with remote work. But then, we're a smallish outfit and many of us put in a fair bit more than 8 hours a day. We're not forced to, but we get paid well for it, so I'm ok with that.
I'm not sure on remote devs, as honestly, biotech isn't really dev heavy (much to it's detriment). I'd look at the larger players in the space for jobs there, as they will likely be working in Canada too and may need help with local law compliance. If you're looking to switch things up, compliance is a very boring but deadly necessary sector of biotech that always needs people. I'll forewarn that the pay is less, though the stability is greater too (but not by all that much).
This may be a good site to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and to find companies looking for talent.
At the end of the day, you are going to take less salary for a greater sense of mission and purpose. It's not as bad as teaching and nursing, but you're on that slide ruler now. Negotiate hard on starting salary.
You'd be on a small (4-8) capability or service owning team, including investment strategy (quant, strat, ML, discretionary, etc.) domain lead engineers on same team.
We are small enough 'talent density' is still high, and everyone -- even non dev parts of firm -- is a builder.
But you could get a significant percentage of the business if you become a co-founder and you would basically have the pick of the bunch.
You probably don't even have to leave amazon if you can smash out a quick prototype over a weekend, then only leave if they get funding and the startup takes off.
[0]: I'm sure exceptions exist. I've never met one.
It's far better to have a stable 9-5 gig and then build things on the side intending to grow them, or at least let them validate/bake with other income and/or savings to see where they go.
if you're going to do that, launching your own SaaS product is better
Most of our engineers are WFH 3-5 days per week.
Come build systems (TypeScript, Postgres, ElasticSearch, Redis, AWS, Redshift, etc) that improve the lives of the neediest patients in the U.S. healthcare system through the power of behavioral economics.