Amazon says workers must be in the office. The UK government disagrees

It’s a huge drag on their efficiency, in person or remote, and hurts hiring because they struggle to provide even a handful of of remote days per year in a market where every office worker I know (aside from here) is at least hybrid-leaning-remote (and most office workers I know aren’t in tech, nor is this a tech company). They have no idea that it’s bad, though.

I try to encourage public (or group) chats but I _think_ people, especially juniors or new-joiners, are reluctant to look unknowledgeable.

The problem with chat-based solutions is people get lazy in articulation. So instead of a cohesive idea it’s spread across a giant thread. And instead of actually creating a proper document, it’s easy to say, “Meh, I’ll do it later it’s in slack.” But then it never gets done, and the info is privy to only those in the conversation.

It can be good or bad either way, but there’s no substitute for in-person communication; and there’s no substitute for a thoughtfully constructed document.

Great for bad/mediocre managers, horrible for workers.

My boss at this point understands that he's often putting me in a double or triple bind, but is obligated to do so and is never going to get approval for not doing so; My attempts to acquire verbal directives as to priority are met with "figure it out" and a grin. But then he's also extremely forgiving about accountability, doesn't attempt to apply metrics, because he understands that I'm going to be working on it all day anyway.

Sometimes the bureaucratic style, enforced from the top down, is "Ask for unreasonable things in order to attain reasonable outcomes".

I do not work with life-critical systems, where this sort of thing absolutely would not fly.

Works for bosses and more importantly for customers who may not even know how to define the work properly.

There’s a balance here, as the 15 minute conversation is often a 45 minute disruption for the target and often the people around them. The other challenge is in my experience the trade off wasn’t “this information cannot be obtained any other way” but more along the lines of “it’s easier to walk over than read the documentation/make any attempt to answer the question on my own”.

Asynchronous shifts the downsides to the person asking, so people tend to have strong opinions if they tend to be on one of those sides a lot more than the other.

I fucking hate this, it's less disrupting for you but the person you asked might be like me and need another 15-30 min to get back into the same focus state they were before your question came through.

If you think it's hard to go do something else while you are waiting for a response to not lose context the same applies to the other side, it can be hard to get back into the context they were pulled from.

At least with async communication I can reply when I get unfocused or finish what I was working on, even just saying "sorry, can't answer you right now" when in a state of deep focus takes me out of that state...

It's extremely exhausting being the person who gets asked multiple times a day about things outside of the current context, switching them to answer your inquiries is not effortless, it just looks that way to you.

The packages were tailored for greenhorns, as low as possible to be enough for junior engineers to leave quickly. It was obvious again, that the return to the office for older and experienced folks will cause natural attrition and some 5% of expensive people will leave without severance package by quitting like I did. 200 got packages, 300 quit voluntarily. It was one third of workforce in that particular location. I heard it was celebrated as a success in the highest floor.

For big organizations these high performers are not important. Good presenters are what matters. Things are achieved by a mass. Sometimes having few departments to do basically the same development. Because somebody on the top of command chain didn’t align properly. Or higher ups just don’t care.

OTOH, constructive dismissal programs such as RTO preserves their access to H-1B workers.

I've read, in numerous places, that Amazon is attempting to use this as a way to alter their finances. To draw people into locations with tax advantages, reduce staff count without paying severance, etc.

Which wouldn't match my experience. It is exactly the opposite unless you count being present physically somewhere as work.

Simply being present physically counts as work now I guess.

One of our well respected product owners was always so very busy, with back to back meetings when working in office. Then we started WFH and all figured out she was a Costanza - all those meetings were her way of looking important, while everyone routed work around her.

On the other hand, some of our more neurodivergent engineers benefited from the rigidity of sitting at a desk where they are too afraid to pick up their Switch and just game.

Swings and roundabouts.

The social aspects that have nothing to do with working or productivity. What comes with that though are massive distractions that don't exist remote.

I suspect the productive workers are much more productive remote and the unproductive workers are equally unproductive. The big difference is that the unproductive workers don't have to pretend to be working like they do in the office but at least they aren't such a distraction to the productive workers.