Remote Work's Long-Term Effects: Why Dell and Amazon Are Bringing Employees Back | Hacker News Reader

Remote Work's Long-Term Effects: Why Dell and Amazon Are Bringing Employees Back

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21 pointsduckleg29 comments

As a developer, I've been remote-only since COVID landed and you can send me back to an office out of my cold, dead hands. Or something like that. Admittedly my command of the English language has diminished slightly.

Working remotely only works if your workers have discipline. For me, the fear of no longer being able to work remotely keeps me productive; I don't want to give my employer an excuse to say I would be better onsite.

I've seen people argue that they miss the social aspect of working in an office... which for me is exactly what's wrong with the office work: you're not there to make friends.

Why shouldn't you make friends at work? Where else do you get to meet the same person 10 hours a day, 5 days a week? How do you become friends with someone if you only meet them once in a blue moon?

I’ve been working for almost 30 years across 10 jobs. I worked in office between 1996-2020. After a couple of months to at most a couple of years, those “friendships” fade.

Today, I have five people I stay in touch with that I’ve worked with. Three I stopped working with around 2016 and one I stopped working with two years ago. Oh yeah and the fifth I stopped working with in 2011. She is sleeping right next to me now - I married her in 2012.

But to answer your questions, I work for one reason - to exchange labor for money. My work self is “looking from the 1000 foot view”, “taking things to the parking lot” and “adding on to what Becky said”. My personal life is completely different.

It’s tiring having to “code switch” with coworkers because the real me is completely different.

And if you’re working 50 hours a week, you’re doing it wrong.

A thousand times this. I’m not interested in showing colleagues the genuine me. We are just temporary acquaintances until we all move on, as all work arrangements are temporary.

If someone leaves and you never hear from them again - that’s not friendship, that’s a cell mate

Supposedly, you make friends and meet them outside of work too.

Just today I have been looking through old photos of mine and saw a few pictures from a team building night in one of my previous workplaces 9 years ago. Out of around 10 people I only remembered the names of two, and then two more after some thinking. I don't keep in contact with neither of them.

Meanwhile, over the years I have managed to form connections and friendships with some people both, in office, and working remotely.

> Working remotely only works if your workers have discipline.

The same argument could be made about in-place work

Sure, but if you're undisciplined onsite they just look over your shoulder, stick you with a micromanager or install spying tools on your corporate workstation. At home you need discipline because you are your supervisor.

I missed the social spontaneity of office life, despite the negatives.

yep. As a creative I miss that random dialogues from each ideas actually emerge

Do I want to commute to the office? No, I very much do not. However, the people you know at work are your future professional network. Yes, you can do good work and be recognized for it while fully remote but nothing replaces a social bond, limited as it is, from having frequently interacted face to face with your colleagues. I can write much warmer and more fleshed out referrals for people I know something about than someone I've only seen as a square on a Zoom call.

Alternate anecdote:

Competence and being someone they want to work with again is usually enough.

I got my first remote job in 2020 working at the Professional Services (cloud consulting) department at AWS. When I saw the writing on the wall, every single customer I worked with remotely and maybe flew out to see once that had some type of opportunity was more than willing to give me either a permanent position at their company or at least a contract.

I met one of my coworkers in person maybe twice. He had left AWS a couple of months prior to be a director of infrastructure at a well known non tech F500. He said if I was interested, he would create a position for me to be over the cloud migration and infrastructure and that it would pay more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs at AWS. I didn’t take him up on his offer just because I was over the big company thing.

When I posted on LinkedIn that I had gotten another job, I had three former coworkers who had moved on reach out to me and say why didn’t I let them know. They would have brought me on their companies. These were all decision makers who could push me through without too much hassle.

I had met most of these people in person maybe two or three times.

Unless my performance really craters at my current company where I work remotely where I’m a staff architect, I can almost guarantee that anyone I reach out to that has worked with me will be more than happy to give me a referral about my skillset and work ethic.

I don't disagree with your anecdote but most of us aren't consultants, a big part of whose job is maintaining constant contact and alignment with customers and co-workers.

If you go by the classic Joel Spolsky hiring criteria, all that matters about hiring is if the person is “smart and gets things done” of course it also has to be someone you want to work with.

It really doesn’t take that long to prove those traits. True working in consulting I got to do it fast. I’ve got to get to know the customer, understand their problem, deal with the organizational issues, get them to accept the solution and implement the solution.

During that time, I get to know a lot of directors and CxOs on the customers side and got a chance to meet my AWS coworkers who moved on to use their network to get better jobs as they did the same.

Just for reference, both companies - AWS and the third party consulting company I work for now are full time positions. I was only looking for full time direct hire positions.

I am one of those undisciplined ones. Routine has to be forced on me, otherwise I might find myself at 12 pm without having done any meaningful work.

Working remotely during confinement diminished my productivity significantly, measured by myself. I had to force myself to follow an imaginary schedule, because I knew in reality it is very flexible when you're at home. I tend to be at ease with disorganization, so being disciplined takes effort, and being disciplined among the amenities of your home is very strenuous.

My wife was unaffected by it, so I think I could get used to it too if needed, but I don't enjoy it as much as I thought I would.

> At Automattic, people are free to work from anywhere. What keeps them close is trust, regular meetups, and open conversations.

Using automatic as an example of a trusting, open company is an interesting choice given the public meltdowns we've seen from Matt in the past year.

Public meltdown still sounds better than a private meltdown

> Microsoft's Work Trend Index found that 65% of remote workers report feeling less connected to colleagues over time, with collaboration networks shrinking by up to 17%

Amazon in particular is only requiring people to be in an office not the office where their team is located. How does that help with collaboration?

> Career development has suffered too, with remote employees receiving approximately 8% fewer promotions than their in-office peers

This and other reasons is why I would never work for a company that wasn’t “remote first” and where everyone didn’t work remotely.

This. In office-heavy companies, the "remote guy" is one people talk about in every performance review. "They are remote, are they delivering enough value?"

With all the bad news we've been hearing in the past year, how are fully remote, or remote-first companies doing? Are there many jobs available?

I can’t find the article now. But I saw a citation that in office work is back to pre pandemic levels.

> With all the bad news we've been hearing in the past year, how are fully remote, or remote-first companies doing? Are there many jobs available?

In my experience looking for remote regular old senior enterprise Dev jobs with AWS experience last year and the year before is that every open req gets hundreds of applications (LinkedIn “Easy Apply” shows you) and I heard crickets from submitting hundreds of resumes. I had 10 years on my resume of relevant experience and I had just come off of a three+ year stint working at AWS Professional Services (full time direct hire).

In 2023, I did get two offers relatively quickly via my network and another offer by doing targeted outreach to a company based on a niche AWS service that they were looking for experience in.

In 2024, same thing, I was laid off and the day before, an internal recruiter at my current job reached out to me. While I was going through the interview process with them, I kept submitting resumes for regular old enterprise dev jobs and heard crickets again.

I did get the job I interviewed for. It is as close to a dream job as I can imagine.

For context: both times I was looking for full time strategic AWS consulting jobs specializing in app dev. The enterprise dev jobs were my plan B and what I did before mid 2020.

There’s not much of a source here, just “the best seems to be…” then advocating for hybrid, but like… what are you optimizing for?

Side note… on mobile this site really messes up the back stack which is makes for an awful UI.

What most people miss about all those remote work debate is that nothing drives this issue more than commercial real estate and our government’s subsidization of it in various ways both through direct things like write offs, indirectly through things like our economic system and government funding that incentivizes inflated balance sheets, and private sector distortions of several types in banking, financing, the whole real estate industry/sector, and even the money laundering industry that is associated with all of it.

Anyone else’s got the vibes the whole article is written or partially written with the help of LLMs?

At this point I'm assuming this is the case when I read any article online, until proven otherwise.

There is some value to working from the office on one day a week, especially iff your coworkers are also present then, and you have a dedicated desk. Working from the office daily or on multiple days a week is progressively harmful to health in so many ways. Also, offices tend to be super noisy, making it difficult to work there at all.

Combine this with yesterday’s article about body-doubling. What about “work from near home” - ie. desk at a nearby coworking space.

Can’t get distracted by dishes or laundry; working near others creates shared atmosphere; and your coworking-space compatriots are your lunch break & watercooler chat crew.

Anyone have reports on “work from near home”?

I couldn't grasp the substance of the article, it's written by an LLM perhaps? Also, the navigation hijacking didn't help either.

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