AT&T follows Amazon in demanding employees spend 5 days a week in office
fortune.com
fortune.com
The collaborative energy of hundreds of tightly-packed people trying to focus on different things together is amazing.
The office my team is in is setup so there's a long hallway that has the security corridor, then a coffee shop, then a convenience store then the elevators. Anyone coming into the office has to walk through all of these to get to the elevators to go to their floor.
Last time I was there, they'd put desks in hallway between the coffee shop and the convenience store, and they were always full.
You'd think if they were doing this for productivity, they wouldn't be sticking desks in the hallway everyone has to walk through all the time.
Okay, I want to be super clear on this one: Do you have to pay for the coffee once you pass security / they know you work there? Or is that coffee shop not part of the company and just so happens to be onsite?
Don't know about Amazon, but there are two coffee options at my employer (past security):
1. A chain coffee shop you have to pay for. No discount that I can perceive.
2. Free coffee machines.
#1 used to be extremely popular when #2 consisted of Douwe Egberts machines that used some weird coffee concentrate that made terrible and weak coffee. Now I think #1 closes early and has low staffing because the #2 got upgraded to espresso machines that use decent beans and can also do basic espresso drinks (Americano, Latte, etc).
But to answer your question, the coffee shop is not part of the company, you do have to pay for your coffee and it is past security.
It's not all that germane to the article, more of an aside, so thanks for that indulgence.
The motivation is from this old post here: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Things get shittier and shittier in a company known to be shitty to it's employees
Imagine this. You are trying to write a Python script to produce another report for your manager. You can sit anywhere in the amazing open office. You accidentally sit next to the Anti-Money Laundering team, and have to listen to that.
The next day you choose a different floor. Your manager shows up wearing a mask and says she has a flu. The rest of the day, you listen to small talk, while trying to focus on implementing the report.
Whenever you walk to the coffee machine, people stare at you and wonder who you're sleeping with.
Finally, you revolt and refuse to come in to the office. Then you don't have a job.
Be considerate of his feelings, you selfish child.
The office where I work we have a whole section of one floor that is strictly no talking and phones must be on mute. If you want silence you can sit there. I cannot imagine that we are the only company that has come up with this idea.
That being said, I still work from home when I feel like it.
Personally I find home more distracting than the office. The office is a clean work space with a desk with only my work computer and work stuff and everybody around me is also working.
Home has chores and errands and 'fun' and all kinds of other Not Work stuff to tempt me away from working. Plus once my kids come home from school, quiet concentration time is effectively over.
But as I said, I'm not advocating for mandatory return to office, and I do work at home 1-2 days a week.
It's funny how serving one's employer has become the highest duty.
Work not done? After-hours issue? Then work overtime. Kids are home? Go to the office to avoid being distracted from work.
In a company I used to work for, 2 floors were (completely) unoccupied but some were insufferable. 2 floors worth tens of thousands of dollars monthly were just completely unused whatsoever.
RTO my a$$, the strategy was and always will be displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
For some reason, the idea that RTO is caused by out of touch execs is pervasive, but I really don’t think that’s the reason. These companies need people to leave. The cheapest way to do that is for an employee to leave voluntarily after they have gotten another job. Hell, if enough people leave, you might not even have to do layoffs.
We can bitch about it all we want, but these execs know what they’re doing. They aren’t stupid or out of touch.
EDIT: I will add that I’m also curious about the long-term implications of this kind of trickery. It doesn’t seem like a good long-term solution, you can’t just order RTO and then allow remote work year after year. Everyone is going to have to find something that works long-term eventually.
Top employees often have an axe to grind, an ego to satisfy or a ladder to climb. This is the last thing a corporation wants or needs. When I was a manager in Corporate America, I was instructed to screen out overly ambitious or eager candidates. They are just too much trouble for what amounts to normally a 10-20% increase in performance over a regular candidate.
After all, I know Alice gets things done fast and to a high standard, she can be trusted to deliver important projects, and she's very familiar our most important systems.
All anyone else knows is her job title is "Level 17 Engineer", she's got a firm handshake, and she knows how to find a cycle in a linked list.
It'd be pretty absurd for me to let myself get outbid on salary by someone with less information.
* Not liking the idea of paying for office space that sits mostly empty.
* Even if they wanted to unload their commercial real estate and go fully remote, the market for that is not good.
* Local governments pressuring companies to bring employees back to offices because those employees in turn buy goods and services in the area.
The people calling the shots might also be investors in the real estate market, so have an incentive for it to not crash. :)
Signaling to stock holders that you're doing layoffs is the most important part of layoffs.
If done in secrecy it's almost useless.
Programmers have been an expensive cost to companies for awhile and it's been obvious since outsourcing attempts decades ago that CEOs would like to do whatever they can to break their backs.
Why? I don't have the impression neither Amazon or AT&T are unprofitable.
That is one of the possible ways of making "line go up".
But when I hear that a company __needs__ to make an X number of employees go, it gives me the impression they are in the red, and/or the organization will suffer great damage if they don't proceed with it. The organization doesn't even need to be a business per se.
Saying "those companies want to fire employees to increase profits" IMO is more accurate, even if a bit more verbose.
The strategy was and always will be bottom line: Displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
The mask has come off. Everyone knows that these RTO steps are indeed part of their "make work so miserable that they'll quit" strategy.
Compare this to consulting which is known for squeezing their employees to the max. They simply pay enough that there is a steady stream of new highly qualified and highly capable candidates.
I wouldn’t want to work that way but if it is as competitive to work there as they say …. I’m probably not qualified.
That said AMZN is a lot more like the old model, they never really subscribed to the Microsoft & Silicon Valley ways of doing things.
Some companies have tough working conditions in some areas of the business, and not others.
You work for Amazon as a delivery driver or a warehouse picker? They'll probably be breathing down your neck about performance all the time, and not paying all that well, and you'll have to stand and walk a lot, lift heavy things, and endure heat and cold, and work unsociable hours, and they'll be mad if you call in sick. Maybe they tell you you're "self-employed" and you never know how much work they'll have for you each week, you get no sick pay, no holiday, and you're subtracting the costs of your own car, fuel and insurance from your pay packet.
On the other hand, if you have a white collar job in the retail division of the business? You'll still have demanding targets to meet, and the pay might not be great - but you'll know you're going to get paid each week, you'll be working normal hours in a nice air-conditioned office, and you'll be able to take sick leave when you're sick.
And if you've got a white collar job in AWS? levels.fyi claims after a single promotion you'll be on US$275,000.
What I hear is that the pay is really good, and worth it if you can tolerate the high workloads. I assume most FAANG high performers who also are workaholics would do well in Amazon's environment.
I assume anyone who tries to fight over this will be harassed, and attempts to organize against it will be frowned on and, often, actively sabotaged.
Other posters may very well be correct in assuming this harassment through policy _is_ intentional and meant to make employees leave 'voluntarily' rather than doing a layoff.
It genuinely tells you that whoever makes these calls is running the business on ego instead of using their brains.
Same thing happened to a coworker of mine. They closed the branch for his office, mandated in office attendance, but they didn't fire him, just told him "well you'll have to come into office every weekday, nearest office is 500mi away".
Companies are now in a cycle where they want to lay off ~5% of their employees every year. Why? To suppress wages. And to get people to do more work for the same money. People in fear of losing their jobs aren't going to demand raises or say no to extra work.
RTO mandates are cheaper and easier than severance.
This has been the case in Corporate America for decades at this point. The rude shock for many on HN is that the veneer of Big Tech being rogue disruptors is gone. Working for Big Tech is getting increasingly indistinguishable from working for Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.
And it's only going to get worse.
Bezos said in an all hands one time amazon would go out of business in 50-60 years and that is happens to every company eventually. I think you get too big and too bureaucratic where everyone is just looking out for themselves because you are more worried about getting laid off or fired than you are building great products.
Just like the government: you are more worried about your re-election campaign than serving your constituents. Where those two align, great, but the priority is remaining in office.
That’s a weird thing for him to say because a) it’s patently false and b) he might still be alive at that point and would need to liquidate his AMZ holdings before everyone else who believes his prediction does.
Yes, it will take a lot more than RTO to create an innovative culture like paying more for one, but one can reasonably hypothesize that working physically together is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Now that's optimism. At least, these companies are betting it won't, and it's in their interest to work against it.
Amazon Delays RTO Mandate for Workers Due to Space
after COVID the number of companies that either did not renew commercial leases or defaulted on existing leases jumped significantly. banks saw this and quietly extended commercial leases and relaxed payment dates and penalties to stave off a crisis in 2023. Joe Biden even injected ten billion dollars in assistance to commercial real estate and publicly demanded all federal workers "return to office." the government owns its real estate by and large, so this was largely an expression of solidarity with the landed gentry.
moving into 2025...it does not appear to be working. Many corporations are not falling in line to prevent the collapse and instead are seeking short-term gains as they realize massive savings by ditching commercial landlords. productivity and worker satisfaction is also improved. even climate change is impacted positively by work from home efforts.
unpopular take: It is (financially) critically important that all workers return to the office. a crash in the commercial real estate sector would cause solvency problems for large cities dependent on cashflow from office workers. the auto sector (repair and sales) would also take a massive hit at a time when Stellantis is facing down a potential bankruptcy. the locus for most states in terms of homeless outreach and drug treatment is their city, which would receive serious cutbacks at a time when the opioid and fentanyl crises are still of great concern.
barring some sort of major shift in policy (which wont happen) at the federal level, the US economy was not prepared to move to a work-from-home model.
If I asked some superintelligent AI to create the most wrong reddit theory possible, I think it might be this one.
Large companies (small ones too) have to spend money to give you a desk. Some will even go so far as to put a price tag on it, that facilities cost is $x per square foot or whatever. If they can offload that cost onto their employee, that's win/win.
Some real estate companies might do bad if that happens... even if none of their leases are going unrenewed, it puts downward pressure on prices. But those companies have almost no overlap with the ones doing RTO. And I've yet to see that people like Jeff Bezos or whoever have any significant holdings in real estate (even if they did, the positives of remote would outweigh the negatives, and you'd just see them divest).
There are winners and losers in a remote-work world, and the people who would win are or should be happy to let the losers lose. Something else is going on.
>a crash in the commercial real estate sector would cause solvency problems for large cities
Mayoral politicians are so powerless I can't come up with a witty way to describe it. They're Vice President-levels of worthless (and not the Dick Cheney sort either). They have no influence or mojo to swing this. If this would hurt large cities (and it might), then those cities will just be hurt.
This is complete bullshit!
The strategy here is to displace American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
These companies have no problem outsourcing American jobs -- outside of the US!
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
I know it's not all unicorn farts and sprinkles. You still have right-wing civilization shredders in your political system. You have a boatload of bureaucracy, and it appears to be more difficult for a small business organically to a medium-sized business.
The strategy here is to displace American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
These companies have no problem outsourcing American jobs -- outside of the US!
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
Crazy how fast the enshittification seems to go nowadays. Ordered on a different site without problems.
You guys have an office?
Abandoned projects, AI slop, etc.
I've only ever worked for one company that had an open office plan - a big room with a bunch of desks loosely organized into teams - and I wonder if money saved on real estate is worth the productivity loss? I assume the big companies and consultancies have measured this, but I'm skeptical.