Hacker News Reader

Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

Nearly everyone is replaceable. There is some cost, some transition pain, but everyone is replaceable. Irreplaceable employees is a management failure. This is totally going to drive out employees. But I do wonder if we have data on who is actually quitting over RTO. Is it actually their top-performing employees?

This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent… but the job market isn’t great. Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote? Amazon pays extremely well, I can’t think of many organizations that can afford to compete.

View on HN

How about this: Anyone is replaceable. Everyone is certainly not replaceable, at least not without significant pain.

It's not about the one guy that's the only guy that knows how to do something. It's about how if you decimate your workforce, cracks may very well start to appear.

And that's precisely why I'm look for the moment people realize the power of being united and say "from now ANY company mandating RTO will found next to zero workers interesting in working for them"...

Amazon isn't really a growth company anymore, they don't need the highest talent individuals to maintain market dominance. To that end they probably don't care about the "best" talent leaving for other places anyway.

> This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent

IMHO, from my personal insider experience, this is actually the goal in some places.

Best talent is often not the most cost effective talent, especially in parts of the business where the company has switched from innovating to maintaining.

Replaceable which screwed up the company and replaceable and continue same productivity are 2 different thing. The former is real and happened for millenia, the later only exist in CEO's and Wallstreet mind. When I buy stock I look out for changes to their staff (some engineers and mid managers are worth keep track of to indicate companies growth projection). Warren also famously did so. You can investigate Intel and Boeing staff movements over the years...I can guarantee you 300% their talented staff left and hence gameover for them.

Facebook has full time remote, Airbnb too.

Facebook only if you don't care about being promoted, from a pretty senior friend of mine who works there.

I don’t care about getting promoted. Sign me up!

I want to grow as a Software Engineer. And for some reason companies conflate growing as a Software Engineer with becoming a manager.

> Nearly everyone is replaceable.

At scale.

> Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote?

Smaller companies don't have this mindset and are great places to work. To them you are a person and have value unique to you, what you know and what you can provide. Everyone being a replaceable cog is an enterprise mindset that is avoidable as long as you don't require top tier pay. And small to mid-sized companies have been some of the biggest adopters of remote work and it has stuck there.

> Is it actually their top-performing employees?

People who are top-performing often have a lot more choice and flexibility, taking that away isn't going to sit well. I'm sure there will top-performers that prefer the office and they will happily go back but the others? They will start looking for new jobs.

> This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent… but the job market isn’t great

I hear this a lot and I've interviewed a number of people who said as much. Here's the thing, the people that mentioned the market wasn't good were people that we didn't hire. Not because they mentioned the market wasn't good but because they didn't pass our tests. So I'm skeptical of how much this holds true when we are talking about "top performers".

> Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote?

This is a silly statement. You must be in a bubble to think this. Money is not the only driving factor for people.

If the employee is truly that valuable, Amazon will make an exception for them. The proles will still have to come in or get fired.

You're assuming that the employee wants that exception made and doesn't see the writing on the wall.

If I were that employee, I'd take the exception, quiet quit and start looking for a better job elsewhere.

> but because they didn't pass our tests

I'd love to see what your tests consist of.

I can't post the exact tests but these aren't difficult tests, they are smoke tests and representative of the type of work we do every day (I'm not asking anyone to invert a b-tree or <insert any other stupid "look how smart we are"-type test>).

Our interview process is 4 steps:

1. Get to know you interview, talk about your resume a little, go through a set of questions we ask all applicants - 1hr

2. Very basic test where you need to fetch data from an endpoint, and render content based on what your retrieved. It's very straightforward and simple (HTML/JS), after this we run you through a real issue we ran into giving you all the background information and ask you to talk through how you would solve it (and you can ask any/all questions). We guide you as you go and it's not a "gotcha" question at all. You don't need to guess exactly how we solved it to "pass". - 2hr

3. Simple debugging test, existing HTML/JS + PHP code with a few bugs scattered through it. We are talking raw PHP here and a TLOC of <300. None of these bugs are "gotchas" either. You can find them all by looking at the logs and/or the server response (basic debugging skills for this kind of job). After this you meet some more of the team - 1.5hr

4. Meet the owners, talk compensation, etc - 1hr

Consolidate step 2 and 3 into one and cut it down from 4 hours to 1 or you’ll have a lot of people “fail” because they don’t want their time wasted (usually companies pay for extensive tests with programming). You can still kick people out during their trial period even in countries with strict labor laws too.

> Consolidate step 2 and 3 into one and cut it down from 4 hours to 1 or you’ll have a lot of people “fail” because they don’t want their time wasted

That’s not been our experience at at all. We did not have a single candidate drop out of their own accord. Our interview process is not long and the coding is minimal (most the people we hired finished in less than half the allotted time, even that can be attributed to stress, these aren’t hard tests).

> usually companies pay for extensive tests with programming

2hrs of coding is not “extensive” by any stretch of the imagination. This isn’t a 4-8hr+ take home test.

> You can still kick people out during their trial period even in countries with strict labor laws too.

Spoken like someone who has never hired/managed. Firing, even with cause, is never quite so simple. I’ll gladly take a couple hours (HOURS! You act like I’m asking for weeks of people’s time) to confirm they will be a good fit upfront instead of going through the onboarding and off-boarding hassle. Not to mention it’s a super asshole move to hire people that are considering letting go just because it makes for an easier interviewing process. Honestly that’s kind of fucked up, especially if they are leaving another job to come work for you. I would absolutely fire someone new if they lied or if their work ethic did not match what they said/did in the interview process (probably after a couple warnings) but hiring with a high chance of firing? No, I won’t do that just to save a couple of hours upfront.

It’s not even firing, it’s “not continuing employment after the trial period formally agreed to in the contract and national law” in my country. There’s nothing dishonest or fucked up about it. There is also no legal hurdle.

Meanwhile your candidates go to multiple companies, spend “just” 4 hours at each uncompensated, without any guarantee to get hired. You should be aware that there are a lot of HR departments doing window shopping as well as issuing fake job openings due to legal reasons when they already have an internal candidate due to nepotism.

> Here's the thing, the people that mentioned the market wasn't good were people that we didn't hire.

Well of course. The people that got hired wouldn’t think it’s bad. But objectively, the number of open jobs has declined and layoffs have increased. Mathematically, it’s worse. And if you were employed at Amazon, you had one of the “best” jobs (on paper) in corporate America, so most things would look “worse”.

> This is a silly statement. You must be in a bubble to think this. Money is not the only driving factor for people.

Money absolutely is a driving factor for most people. If you’re working at Amazon already, you’re not doing it for the culture and good vibes, you’re probably doing it for the money. Maybe you’re doing it because you can have the impact of hundreds of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of users. All the “RTO quitters” that are hoping to move for greener pastures won’t find many companies paying 500k to someone with <10y of experience. There aren’t that many businesses that have so many individual products generating so much revenue, nor do many customers or traffic.

> Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote?

Are you serious? Try the entire tech industry except Amazon and Apple.

Is Amazon even desirable to work for? (I'm not even including their recent RTO policy)

Everyone in the industry knows Amazon has very poor work life balance (and a brutal on call load). It's even in that letter you get from Jeff Bezos when you apply: "You can work smart, hard, or long. At Amazon you don't get to pick just two."

If you are fresh out of college, get a couple years in to get it on your resume.

For anyone else, if you are in the Seattle area I don't see why you wouldn't just work for Microsoft. Microsoft does pay the worst out of all the big tech companies (until you get to L67+), but the work life balance is so much better, and allows fully remote.

Not even close, a lot of places are hybrid and there's a valid concern that we'll see more tech companies (large and small) follow in Amazon's lead just because Amazon did it first.

Currently trying to leave Amazon and it's been a slog to even get an interview for anything fully remote despite a decade of experience.

While I agree with the "are you serious?" part, there are plenty of other companies that are backtracking on remote work, including quite a few small and/or early-stage startups that I see posting in the monthly "Who's Hiring" threads here on HN.

I know of no studies that show that RTO mandates improve any measurable statistic for a company, and remote work has done wonders for my commute and well-being, so I will no longer consider working for a company who does not have a majority of its employees working remotely. I'm a staff engineer with a couple decades of experience. My current company is 100% remote and it's lovely.

Stripe

Reply on news.ycombinator.com