Amazon employees: 'I'd rather go back to school than work in an office again'

Hobbies. Groups. Classes, MMA/Self Defense classes, computer clubs, local singles groups. you want to not be isolated.. trust me.

You could always take the time you save by not commuting and go outside for walks or a drink at a bar or what not. I make a point of walking to the local farmers' market a couple times a week now to spend some time around people, get a meal, etc.

I've been working remotely since 2015 essentially and here's my perspective on overcoming the feeling of isolation. In order from highest to lowest impact:

- Not commuting gave me more time to do physical activities socially. Tennis with neighbors / friends in my town. A group spin class.

- More time to embrace serendipitous hobbies in person with friends (or excuse to meet strangers in my town). New Nepalese restaurant with promising reviews? Randomly go with a friend on a Wednesday. New coffee shop? Try out their pourover to see if they know what they're doing!

- Try working from near home. Coworking space, coffee shop, etc. Workbar offered pretty affordable part-time coworking rates last I checked? Cal calls this "work from near home" - https://calnewport.com/thinking-outside-the-home/

- Meet a life partner who also works from home 1-2 days a week! We've enjoyed random 3 PM walks, making breakfast together, etc.

- Remote work works best with results oriented work environment / culture. So feel free to do a tea tasting or go watch a movie in the middle of the day - https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/09/want-to-boost-your-productiv...

- Do 1 completely casual Zoom meeting with a coworker every week, even if you don't directly work together.

The 9-5 commuting lifestyle makes it easy to "bundle together" lots of habits that solve for isolation, time to wind down / prep for the day, and for many a workout routine (workout before or after work in a nearby gym).

When you work from home, these are all "unbundled" so you have to re-assemble the things that matter to you yourself. More freedom but more responsibility :)

I see this sort of question whenever this topic comes up, and I think it's interesting that there's a baseline assumption of a false dichotomy between "in-office interactions with employees of the same company" or else "isolation", as though those are the only two options (which is understandable, since American culture is pretty skewed towards defining people by their jobs -- the classic problem where people tend to answer "what do you do?" by talking about their job).

I've been working hybrid or fully-remote on and off since about 2009 (with "fully-remote" being my state since about 2019). I get quite a lot more time to spend around people who are close to me -- friends, family, my community -- precisely because I'm not driving 60 miles round-trip every day anymore.

Encountering this same type of dichotomy in my adult context is kinda amusing to me personally, since I encountered it often as a kid, too; I grew up homeschooled, and heard the same baseline assumption (but with "employees at the same company" swapped out for "students at the same school") presented in another frequent question: "but how do you kids ever socialize with other people?"

In reality, I was often involved in daytime extracurricular activities (and weeknight/weekend ones) that had me working, volunteering, field-tripping, or just hanging out alongside multiple groups of adults and other kids on a regular basis.

Living in community can happen by choice, not just by [employer || school] coercion; it just requires that you make that choice.

One thing I tried at first was to organize a shared workspace for friends, where we'd get an office somewhere near our homes, rather than downtown, and come in to the same shared space so we could hang out and shoot the shit. It was very hard to settle on the right location that wouldn't just create a new commuting challenge for everyone, and office space (and parking) is not cheap. I eventually found an okay spot, but COVID quarantining put an end to that. I imagine office space is cheaper now, but I have not had a strong urge to try again.

I do agree that it's isolating. But only during work hours. After work, and on the weekends, I see people a lot more than I did when I was in the office. Overall, I feel like I get more social time than before, but it's with people and in situations I choose. And I also get a lot more breaks in between, which I like.

6% unemployment is a pretty normal rate for an economy. Historically the US is usually above 5% [1], and the current rate is 4.2%, so 6% is only slightly above the national rate.

I don't doubt that you've had trouble finding work, but I don't think the unemployment rate is the reason, or even the symptom. Particularly since it sounds like you are looking for remote only, and the ratio of seekers to jobs (a sort of "unemployment" measure, given that people may settle for in-office jobs if they can't find a remote one) for remote software may be very different than a 6% rate.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/

>>I added up all that time I was spending sitting in traffic and it totaled an entire month of my life just sitting in traffic. My year was essentially 11 months long, not 12.

Even with people using WFH to drop/pick up kids from school, even with afternoon naps, WFH turns out to be a more productive option just for this reason alone- commute/transit.

Commute time, and overall office shenanigans pretending to be productive or busy when you are clearly not(often just sitting in meetings saying nothing) are the top reasons why most people prefer WFH.

As an engineering manager, I found it quite easy to see the contributions of remote engineers and had no trouble evaluating what was going on. I wonder about the structure of some companies

Personally I do not enjoy any geographical constraint, and anyway I do not enjoy biking when it rain, when it's too hot/humid-cold etc. So I have ZERO reasons trying to "enjoy" something imposed just to keep up the urban model needed by big capital...

WFH allow spread living, allowing a more human society of SMEs, the only who die in this models are the giants, and that's will (not would) be good riddance.

The Amazon contracts specially say five days a week in office, and always have. Even through the pandemic. The work from home was always a "trust us".

So it's not constructive dismissal because they are just enforcing the already existing contracts.

Yes. But the ones who leave are also likely the ones who are paid better. To a certain kind of exec, that might be a net win.

Since Luxottica operates by having a monopoly on eyeglasses and charging exorbitant rates, expensive skilled workers are probably not high on their list of needs.

They didn't care. They had one person supporting the old platform, which was written in a weird mix of Ruby on Rails and PHP, which also had the entire copy in code, so every single promo was code and needed a code push. Anyway, I was hired to migrate to Magento Enterprise. We first migrated Ray-Ban in no time, then migrated some other online properties, and then finished migrating the Oakley site. Rarely would you see the migration of a large e-commerce website happening so smoothly, as Oakley had a lot of requirements that needed custom code, but it was done on time and budget. But, I guess the Italians decided they are just an eyewear manufacturer. They chose (without telling us) to eliminate Oakley's Web Team, responsible for most Luxottica brands' online presence. So, they engaged the entire organization and we had more than a month of reviewing different enterprise e-commerce platforms, then we had to vote after we carefully reviewed all platforms, had long Q&A sessions with the vendors, etc. So, the votes overwhelmingly picked vendor A. But the manager-from-hell told us unofficially that he doesn't have only platform B on his resume, and he overwrote the voting for tens of people. Then, he presented a close-to-him consulting company, which used people on work and L1 visas to reimplement everything into platform B. When I said "harassment," I meant even physical harassment, making comments about people's looks and posture, verbal abuse, calling people offensive names, etc. So, one by one and in groups, everybody left. I was checking the various properties - it took them over 3 years to finally implement the new platform; meanwhile, they were using the old, buggy, and maintained by a single-person platform!

Oakley used to a dream place to work! We had a secret bar inside (called "The Engine Room"); we had a Russian armored personnel carrier, which we called "tank", which was driving employees around the HQ; we had all kinds of competitions, some sponsored by Red Bull, too, huge employee discounts for eyewear and apparel (which included all Luxottica brands, including some of the super expensive brands). I remember one iconic employee was leaving, and he was very much into boats, so Oakley bought a boat, created a small pond, let the boat float in the pond, and then ran it over with the APC just for fun! Oakley used to wave the Jolly Roger flag and was getting fined monthly by the city of waving it above the US flag. If I'm not wrong, the fine was more than $5,000. We also used to have a gun and shoot it across the road into the wilderness. In the outside cafeteria, some crazy scientists were melting and burning all kinds of metals - I think once they managed to burn a huge hole in the concrete even. It was crazy, but after Luxottica took over, slowly, all this went away! I found this website, which captures some of the old Oakley [0].

[0]: https://www.pinkbike.com/news/oakley-factory-2010.html

When American corporations have an endless amount of applications from China and India, American workers have no bargaining power. Which makes working conditions worse

Not OP, but my take is that it’s really not great for American workers or immigrants.

For immigrants, their ability to stay in America is predicated on maintaining a good relationship with their employer. If they have a spouse in the US who isn’t American, an interruption at work is a huge problem. And navigating the legal immigration system (USCIS) is a nightmare.

As an aside, when people list “immigration” as an election issue, I wish they were talking about USCIS. It sucks. They are slow, unresponsive, and their instructions are ambiguous. People pay thousands of dollars to lawyers to help them navigate it. Oh and you have to send everything via snail mail.

For American workers, the main problem is that our ability to organize depends on the threat of withholding labor. If companies can prevent unionization it makes it pretty much impossible to negotiate with companies. Working conditions and salary are two of the main things workers would collectively negotiate but can’t.

Also, there are many instances of H1B workers being paid far below market rate. You can check H1B salaries online. One blatant example I found was an “AI scientist” being paid $75k in San Jose, CA by Zoom. San Jose is basically Silicon Valley and has one of the highest COL in the US, and an AI Scientist is an expert who should be paid handsomely.

More broadly there was an investigation by the EPI on this trend of underpaying workers below prevailing wages:

https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...

It's kind of how scabs destroy the bargaining power of a union. When you have a group of people desperate enough to work under conditions others won't do, you can optimize for that group of people and just ignore complaints.

Have you ever worked at a high paying tech company? Most are > 80%

Wikipedia says in 2022 there were 4.4 million software developers in the USA. H1bs are ~85,000 added per year. Say over the last 20 years, every h1b slot was filled (by software developers), they never left the USA, and remained on h1b without becoming permanent residents or citizens. That would be 1.7 million H1b software developers currently working.

In reality a large amount become permanent residents or leave. However, FAANG and FAANG-adjacent are probably only around 1 million employees (not including Amazon's non-AWS workforce, but including non-USA employees). Still, FAANG+ are unlikely to be typically anywhere near 80%+ active H1b visa employees. Maybe AWS is a standout exception.

Now, how many software developers in FAANG+ are not born in the USA might be a very different story.

As someone that works at AWS this is absolutely not true lmao

And there are managers that understand this and those that don't.

I quit programming and became a photographer and writer. I'd just look everywhere. I've found the key to being happy in a job seems rather unrelated to the work and more related to the work conditions.

Plus, I still get to use programming at my job to do random tasks like code small wordpress plugins and generated some automated HTML. It's a lot more fun than maintaining large codebases for me.

Delete this comment now before the rest of the MBAs get ideas.

In seriousness there a number of them who believe WFH is a favor to employees and not just the best option all around.

>I get an excellent salary but would be happy with 50% of it if asked to RTO.

Same. No amount of perks or camraderie will ever make up for getting 25% of my waking life back from commutes.

Amazon doesn’t “run” (control) any market. They have a hand in retailing, logistics, web services, media, etc, but in each one, there are notable competitors.

Not unlike other conglomerates, like Berkshire. But AWS’ big profit margins give Amazon a big upside.

is that what Amazon is doing? “create a website”?

> To be honest forcing your employees into the office looks really desperate.

To some of us, but not everyone. It may look less desperate than layoffs. It can be postured as happening for any number of strong-handed reasons and be called an act of powerful leadership, even if it's just desperate and stupid. Besides, other huge companies have done it already.

Well they can create a cloud to work remotely… /s

Yup. Most factory workers are playing the worlds tiniest violin for all the privileged laptop class having to go back to the office.

That would indeed be a victory. Look at the status quo.

It would give any employee the choice to have 2 days remote at least, which is a victory.

> I really wish we could avoid this tone of petty superiority.

I wish it wasn't an effective strategy to minimize downvotes. But my anecdotal experience is that it helps! My comment was in the negatives when I edited to add that line.

Does that apply in this case? Amazon is moving from 3 days to 5 days in Seattle. If you moved to Montana, that was already a problem.

I think this comment really highlights the costs and culture around RTO. You're essentially admitting that going RTO can easily be the equivalent of a 50%+ reduction in Salary.

I've found that typically RTO proponents are not very honest about the true cost of their position. Not the cost of driving, the cost of lost time, and especially not the cost of high COL areas that offices are typically in. I think some of this dishonesty stems from self-preservation. As in if they admit the cost, they have to admit they're getting shorted, and nobody wants that for themselves.

If moving "to the sticks" was such a viable cost saving strategy, it seems to me you're burning Salary for the sweet, sweet opportunity to join a Teams call in the office. If anything, these types of comments illuminate the potential hard benefits of a WFH job.

> RTO drives away top performers who have the option to go anywhere.

Where is the proof that all "top performers" want to WFH?

Still -- seems a lot ?

Well, in some ways WFH made offices more soul-sucking because it's a lot of shared desks now. Personal desk, locker, plants, other custom office clutter, a door and so on were nicer.

Amazon's current answer.

Companies or their managers sometimes get a reality check after some confident answer like this. Not as often as we employees would like, but still. Remember those people who tought there was a worldwide market for about 5 computers? Or those who invested with SBF, because playing computer games during high level meetings is proof of... something?

They are also scrapping hot desking.

> I'm not sure where Amazon lies on that scale

The issue is Amazon is a huge company, so even if you're working in an office you're still practically "remote" from most other workers. So when you need to work together, you have to do it the remote way, ala zoom.

I’m implying that is Jassy’s thought process.

I think they’re gonna be just fine outsourcing it overseas for half the price.