Staffers unload on Amazon 'leadership' after return-to-office for desk shortage | Hacker News Reader

Staffers unload on Amazon 'leadership' after return-to-office for desk shortage

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> many still spend large parts of the day on video chats they could have done from home

This has been my experience of "in the office" post-pandemic. I end up on a video call for almost every meeting anyway. And being on a video call meeting in an open-plan office with an internet connections that's trying to serve 10s of video calls is a considerably worse experience than being on one in quiet environment with an internet connection that only needs to serve 1 or 2.

Being in an office when other people are on video calls can also be quite unpleasant.

My wife's company returned to the office. Even if all or most of folks on a video chat are at her location, everyone takes the call from their own cubicle or office anyway. So she never interacts with anyone in person even while in person at the office.

"Oh are you in? One minute, I'll come down and sit with you"

This is not a hard problem to solve if she wishes to.

If there are only two people on the call, sure.

It's harder when not everybody is physically present, because there are 1 or 2 people either working from home, or from a different office, or who are external to the company and are working from their company's office.

Even when I go to the office I prefer taking video calls than in-person meetings anyway.

I find in-person interactions a lot less effective. Video calls force people to not stray from the subject and be more concise.

That's a rather sad office. Maybe I'm just lucky, but my experience is that if you're in the office, you will meet people and have casual chats with them.

avoiding video calls is not why they did RTO so not sure how that's relevent. They are just sick of ppl walking their dogs, going to the "dentist" , doing laundry, taking a nap, cooking lunch, going to the post office, going to afternoon spin class and still logging off at 5pm. And these are not even half the things i do on weekly basis.

Source?

My guess is either apocrypha, rhetoric, or experience with people who aren’t doing their jobs, which in my experience isn’t most people working from home.

In my decade+ of working from home I’ve personally only encountered one or two people who fit the offered description. Most people do their work, irrespective of daily schedule.

Are these things a problem? All of this was promised by capitalism.

The problem isn't what the things are, it's what they aren't.

So now people spend their time on their phone or on "HN" or both. Much better.

When people want to avoid work, it is not glueing them on an office chair that will change the attitude.

Let's pretend that people actually work when they are in the office.

It's a lot easier to procrastinate in the office, actually, when everybody just assumes you are working just for being there.

At home I actually feel more pressured to show results from what I am doing.

The physical environment things makes sense, but uplink contention isn't an inherent feature of office buildings. It means that someone goofed and underprovisioned your infra.

The physical environment thing isn't an inherent feature of office buildings either. But space for people to have individual offices, sufficient meeting rooms and video conferencing equipment for all meetings to be able to use one), and internet connections that can handle significant numbers of video calls are all expensive.

The entire point of the article is about underprovisioned infrastructure.

This was my experience even before COVID. Most of my meeting were video calls due to time zones and different offices.

The last time I worked in an office, I spent half of my time working alone at my desk, or in a video call. I can't remember ever having a significant non-video call meeting. It got to the point where most days none of the folks in our corner of the open office even talked to each other. What was I spending 2 hours a day commuting for? Sure the office was extremely nice, but the whole thing was a farce.

Later on I asked to transition to fully remote, which was denied as I didn't have a track record of working remotely. Ignoring this torturous, flawed logic, I pointed out that I had effectively been working remotely the entire time I was there, but it fell on deaf ears.

I soon left and have been working remote ever since. I'll never go back, and I'll never have to. Turns out there are tons of more sane remote friendly employment opportunities out there than there are in-office jobs in my city.

Why does everyone claim to have an hour commute? That’s a significant outlier.

Having recently driven through downtown Toronto at rush hour for an in person office visit, I could see how an hour would be easy to rack up, because I’ve done it. One day at the end of the workday, it took me 20 minutes to get from my parking garage, around a single city block, and to the highway on ramp. Never again.

You’d be surprised how many people that work in Manhattan offices have 1hr+ long commutes.

In the is Seattle area you’re likely spending 30-45 min to go 10-15 miles. 20 miles is easily an hour.

I invite you to visit Bangalore or any city in India.

Unless you are a career beginner and living in a shared one room "paying guest" arrangement closer to office or you are upper management earning enough to afford an apartment closer to office ... you are more likely living in an affordable apartment (that still costs you your life savings and 20 year mortagage) and commuting through horrendous trafic for 2-3 hours each day. This is me.

Is it? Back when I was commuting from Boise -> Nampa (a suburb where a lot of folks live) leaving at rush hour it'd easily take me a minimum of 45 minutes to get home. They've done some upgrades since so it might be better now, (I blessedly don't have a reason to find out). Plenty of folks were going to Caldwell (even further out).

I don't have firsthand knowledge but it would surprise me to learn the big tech hubs are better.

An outlier in which direction? If you have to make even one transit connection, it's hard to average less than an hour.

In the United States the average commute time is under 30 minutes.

The vast majority of Americans live in suburbs and the door-to-door from their suburban rancher to the office by car is 15-20 minutes.

If, in the United States, your commute is over one hour you are an extreme outlier in the "wtf are you thinking?" direction.

> wtf are you thinking

1. Wanted to buy a house (everywhere closer is either a ghetto or 100k+ more and usually both).

2. Not going to spend 6 additional months job hunting to micro-optimize commute.

All GP and I are trying to point out is that the average commute, depending on city, is somewhere between 15-40 minutes and is normally distributed.

> If, in the United States, your commute is over one hour you are an extreme outlier in the "wtf are you thinking?" direction.

In a post-pandemic world the "what they were thinking" may well have been that had 2 years when they weren't permitted to work in an office, and made decisions on the basis that this would continue.

My dad moved to an entirely different city 8 hours away from where he was originally living (although in his case he checked that he would allowed to continue working remotely before moving (which he has been able to), and was close to retiring anyway).

All GP and I are trying to point out is that the average commute, depending on city, is somewhere between 15-40 minutes and is normally distributed.

Can you provide any statistics to show that it's an outlier?

Quite common in most European cities, it suffices to have at least one change of transport.

in LA, it’s 45-60+ minutes to drive anywhere. work if you’re lucky. groceries. gym. social activities.

I’ve had 3 hour commutes in Chicago suburbs too.

Austin and the Bay Area are awful too. Did all of them.

Now I live in a town where it’s no more than 15 minutes to anything.

Double check me, but every source I can find says the average commute time in Los Angeles for working professionals is bang on 30 minutes.

Where is this magical place that also has in-office well paying tech jobs?

One answer could be survivorship bias.

Only the people who have long commutes are going to make comments about it, and thus every comment makes it seem like every person is saying they have an hour commute.

When in reality the people with short commutes don't comment on it.

I had a similar experience, but my employer was fortunate to have our lease expiring in late 2020, so we just took the dive into being all-remote. Since then, I've had direct reports from the UK to Oregon. I live in a major city with a lot of talent, but being able to increase our pool to a global search has been amazing, and I think we all get more done by working from home.

> Employees at Amazon’s Toronto office said their personal belongings have repeatedly been stolen from their desks.

This is the stupidest thing to do, presuming the Toronto offices are similar to SLU. There are cameras everywhere and if someone is stealing, all it should take is 15 minutes of footage review and a notification to HR to terminate them.

Hence, they're probably not being "stolen" as much as someone being like "there's someone else's stuff here where I either thought my desk was, or on this desk which I want to claim for my own, so I will move this other person's stuff elsewhere."

Stolen implies intent, "removed" does not.

Unless the employees have recovered their property or found a perpetrator, they (and we) can only speculate as to the intent behind their disappearance.

That’s true. What’s the relevance of this obvious fact?

First assumption is that there is a miscommunication between GREF and a team about desks being permanent or "hotel" setup, and most of this stolen stuff is in lost & found or a locker or something like that. But a scratched itch for those seeking a reason to not RTO, for sure.

I just left Amazon because of RTO. Have worked out of various offices across EU and NA, including Toronto… and Toronto was by far the worst. Partly because Amazon does not own the entire building, and partly because of issues such as space constraints.

Also as a fun side note, when they gave assigned desks for RTO5, they were assigned by last name. Not by team, but by name, so everyone ended up separated from their actual team… great for collaboration lol.

if there aren't enough desk do you think there's enough bandwidth to handle all the "where's my shit" reports/issues?

Getting more desks is probably not a bandwidth issue but a logistics issue. Putting more support people on it is not going to speed up the trucks shipping the desks.

IIRC the Bangalore office only had cameras at the entries and exits, not over employees' desks. Might be some privacy thing.

I thought the Amazonian spirit was to just go to the hardware store and buy a door and some angle brackets and make your own desk?

Actually, you're supposed to order them on Amazon.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/how-to-build-your...

Before the pandemic, my experience of the open office at Spotify, Skype, or other places I visited was: never enough conference rooms, whenever I tried to talk to people I would get shushed (my voice is not quiet) and almost everyone listens to headphones all day anyway.

Open office configurations have never been a particularly good way of working. They became popular because they are cheap.

I think RTO really should only apply where the nature of the business requires people to engage directly. Engineers do not really need this. Also technically remote employees save companies thousands a month per head per space needed. Renting an office and the capacity to seat it is pricey! Bet you Spotify and Netflix save millions of dollars not paying for office space.

For my first full time job, I was a junior sysadmin. My toolset had to include LOAF floppies, one FREEDOS floppy, and a bent paper clip.

I had an office. My office. With a door.

Since then, every advance in my career raised my skill level, raised my pay, and shrank my office. First came the open office plan. Then came hot desks. Now I'm all-remote, and I mostly float around libraries and cafes when I'm not zooming.

Seriously, it's so demoralizing to be ordered to come to an open office plan where you don't even have a desk you can unload a backpack's worth of things on. (Not happening to me as I'd have to commute on the Acela.) If the powers that be want a return to the office, it's time to rethink what that means.

It's crazy how I also had a private office when I was a fresh-out-of-school 22 year old only making $55k a year, and now it seems absolutely no one has an office despite making 4-10x that at big tech companies!!

Direct link: https://nypost.com/2025/01/17/business/staffers-say-amazon-b...

What's a middle manager to do if s/he can't Lumbergh around the office?

It’s not middle management pushing for this. It’s clueless upper management.

The clueless upper management are serving their wealthy owners who have a commercial real estate portfolio that is losing them huge amounts of money unless they can get the little people back in the offices.

They are more worried about employee fraud. Commercial real estate is boned anyway.

Great many folks are completely ineffective in remote setting. Some are not but many are. Simple as that. No real estate mogul conspiracy theories necessary

Are there studies to this effect? Any empirical evidence companies can give plotting productivity decline and subsequent increase after RTO? Or is it all just vibes?

How would you even do a study like that? Besides, looking at scientific studies is not how businesses make decisions. They sometimes use studies as justification but there's a difference.

What real estate does Amazon own in this case?

Well, presumably they own the offices that their staff are returning to.

But I'm more talking about wealth funds that own commercial real estate that are also shareholders in Amazon, quietly having a word with execs about how to get the workers back in the offices.

You know, the old "you should come for a weekend to the country and meet a few people", the people turn out to be incredibly rich and connected, and all they want from you is this little favour where you get all your people back in the office. Just for a while so they have the chance to unload their commercial real estate portfolio without taking a huge loss.

Doesn’t sound very plausible to me unless you have an actual connection for either speculation. We’re talking about tens of thousands of employees here.

I've spoken to a few folks in middle management there, and some senior engineers, and it's exactly this story. So far as they can figure there aren't many middle managers actually pushing for this.

It's all senior leadership trying valiantly to recapture the "Day 1" mentality that process and procedures have beaten out of the company.

I ended up working for european part of rather big US database company that similarly started pushing RTO.

The RTO mandates were fully delivered from US HQ and from the very top, while middle management tried very hard to preserve remote work, especially as many people were hired from quite far away from office... and no, the salaries were nowhere close to justify people moving.

> I'm gonna need you to go ahead and RTO.

Senior leaders want you to submit to misery or they want you to quit. They're pissed off that workers have any leverage at all and are adamant on clawing it all back and putting workers in their place.

The dysfunction is not surprising at all, this is not about efficiency or getting your job done in the best way possible. It's blatantly a power move. Amazon is entrenched enough that even a severe decline in quality of their product won't shake them, they can afford it. Especially on the eve of the near-total corporate capture of government.

It's the era of oligarchy folks. If you collect a paycheck for a living things are going to continue to get a lot worse for you. Start thinking about how you can fight back, collaborate with other workers to start your own businesses and try to avoid the pitfalls of relentless pursuit profit at all costs leading you to where these greedy jerks are today. Build small sustainable companies that don't need to grow infinitely. It's enough to build a good product and pay 5 people enough money to live and enjoy life.

In Amazon's Bangalore office, getting rooms for meetings was hard even before Covid. When we managed to get rooms, a couple of minutes extension wouldn't be possible because someone would be breathing down our necks for their upcoming meeting.

Maybe they just didn't expect everyone to return

To be frank, this is nothing new. There were already desk shortages at four Amazon buildings in downtown Seattle pre-Covid.

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