Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
(cnbc.com)1490 points by jbredeche 4 days ago
1490 points by jbredeche 4 days ago
> Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work!
Companies forget this. I have had coworkers quit because they couldn't deal with transport. One got stressed out of his mind because our office was close to motorway which frequently has accidents and if that happened he might not be able to pick up the kids on time. Others had to leave clients hanging because they had to leave, "daycare closes at 16:30 and it's now 16:00". Working from home it was much more frequent that clients in the late afternoon would get "Sure, give me ten minutes to pick up the kids and we'll finish this today".
I know this might be an "unpopular opinion," but after working fully remote for three years, I found myself feeling really down. I felt like a prisoner in my own home. So, three months ago, I started a new job with an office that’s 45 minutes away, and I’ve been going in every day—and I couldn't be happier! I do have the option to work from home all days if I want, but honestly, I prefer going to the office. Now, I get to see people, move around more, and when I’m at home, it truly feels different from being at work. It’s been a game-changer for me.
I went remote a few years before Covid and I felt a bit isolated, but then I realized I had too much of my social life tied up in my job. Having hobbies and interests outside of work is so much better for my mental health and I wouldn’t swap it for anything, especially a 40 min commute.
I also wouldn’t force anyone to go back to office so I could see the humm of their work. If you need that there’s co working spaces for that reason, or places which have in office options.
Large companies mandating everyone work in office is purely a flex for control and probably to save their property investments.
Sheesh, why should it be unpopular. It's called having a preference/choice. Companies telling everyone to be in the office 5 days a week 9-5 (or whatever) is removing that choice. Some like you may not mind, but for others it might be hell...
The whole "us vs them" being manufactured in "remote vs onsite" is really suspicious to me. I have never actually heard from a single person who wanted to force remote people in, or a remote person who wanted to force onsite people out of the office. It feels like the owner class is trying to build a fox-and-the-grapes narratives around the people they've forcibly RTO'd to try to get some kind of grassroots-shaped support for their forced RTO policies.
It's all about choice. I have 3 young kids. The youngest will be in school next year. At that point, I may find myself actually going to a coworking space from time to time (and if my company had an office near me, I'd go into that sometimes). I certainly don't mind the amenities and the company of my coworkers (all 2 of them that are actually physically located within a 4-hour-drive radius of me).
But for right now, being able to be full-time remote with a fully flexibly work schedule is ridiculously important and useful to me. My wife has a dentist appointment? I can sit here in the basement and pull up the kid's camera while he naps and she can just go. I can eat lunch with my kid. I can do morning drop-off when my wife needs a break from the morning kid-prep grind. It's absolutely vital and our lives would've been a mess the last 4 years without it.
Plus, besides the work-lifestyle thing, there's a question of equality of opportunity. As you can probably guess based on my above remarks, I live in BFE (five generations of my family live here, so I can't leave) and there's literally nothing that San Francisco-type SWE's would recognize as a "tech job" until you get up to Lake Michigan. My options, were I to work locally, would be to work in a place that specializes in government/enterprise contracting and "staff augmentation". If your nose is wrinkling and your brow furrowing upon reading that phrase, yes that's the correct facial expression to be making. And yes it pays what you'd expect.
But thanks to remote work, I'm working for a startup and actually getting to program an actual software product and engage with its product development and all that.
> I know this might be an "unpopular opinion,"
It should not be. I work from home 100% now, but feeling alone is a very real issue for many of us. I have friends I talk to during the day via IRC or one the phone, regular chats and video calls with colleagues and managers, family is right around the corner and I try to get out every day and talk to people.
For some the isolation is wonderful. For others, like me, it's amazing for doing focused work, but I also need people in my life. For some problem arises when their sole social circle is people they work with. If you struggle to talk to people you don't know then coworkers quickly be an "outlet" for socializing.
> get to see people > move around more > feels different from being at work
I'm not sure why one couldn't do this working remotely? Maybe these people can only socialise through work? Being passive about getting out of the house? Unable to create boundaries between work and personal life?
Working "remote" doesn't mean one has to stay at home all the time. We all have laptops and can go any where to work.
I think its having the option and being able to choose. I like going into the office. I talk to people I wouldn't normally reach out to. But I also like being able to be home for deliveries and I know my friends with kids would struggle without it.
I also like the commute. I get in early to miss the rush. I end up walking more. I have the ability to switch from work to home on the way back. After work drinks also help.
That's all based on one 30 minute train that is extremely reliable, air conditioned, and getting a seat. I couldn't do it if I had to drive or take 3+ trains.
I think the main point is flexibility. And that's why many people on both sides of the issue (those with a hard preference for WFH as well as those for RTO) tend to break out the pitchforks: every decision from up high seems to strongly favor either position.
Maybe there are many companies who do allow for flexibility, in which case everybody is happy, so you don't hear about them, since they have better things to do than "not-complain" about their situation.
I'm lucky to work for such a company, and the main issue of discussion these days is whether we like or not the new office decoration. Managers are free to decide how often their teams have to come in, and, from what I hear, their underlings did have their word to say. Some people like coming in often, others less so. But basically, it all depends on who you're working with right now, and whether it makes sense to meet in person. This seems to work great for pretty much everybody.
One does not exclude the other.
I work for a remote-only company but use a workspace almost every day. I get to chose my own “office” and the people in it, I also pick the commute I want, this one is just 5 minutes away.
I have a 100% remote job. But my team have decided to go at least every tuesday to the office. We are not obligued, but almost everyone comes to the office once a week just to socialize and talk about our projects and sometimes even to take a beer or two after work.
To me, feels super refreshing to talk to people when Im at the office, and to be fair Im much much less productive in the office. But makes me appreciate when Im at home and when I dont need to be in the car for 1 to arrive my home, take everything and go to the gym.
It feels like, going from time to time to the office when almost everyone is there, gives to the remote working more sense and value. And viceversa.
I think you have touch on an interesting point here... When working remotely you really need to put an effort into keeping a healthy social life balance, otherwise you end up feeling exactly as you describe. It's easy for days to go on with no "change of landscape", and that can send anyone straight to depression.
> I know this might be an "unpopular opinion,"
That's the thing, though; it's important to remember that it very much _is_ an opinion/preference. For some people, working from the office is better, for others, it's working from home, and for others it's a combination of both. There are positives and negatives to each, for both the employee and the employer.
That being said, a company limiting itself to _only_ people willing to work in the office is doing just that; limiting itself. I expect the reverse is also true; but the pool of workers to choose from for "everyone remote" is a _LOT_ bigger than the pool of workers for "everyone in the office".
@kwanbix: do you have kids? I feel that's one of the primary deciding factors for working from home. People without kids are much more flexible with their time, whereas people with (small) kids are severely more limited. Freeing up commute time and being able to do small chores like starting the washing machine creates significant happiness, which totally offsets the downsides of not seeing your co-workers (that) often.
Before kids I would also become depressed if I worked remotely full time. But today my "alone time" is already pretty much gone outside work hours so I don't mind being by myself during the day.
It's not a matter of popularity. Some people need the interaction. Others like me hate it.
This is why making it flexible is so great. You could be in the office with other people who enjoy it, while people like me don't have to.
Even before the pandemic I would often hang at the office until 10pm because I could only get work done after the others left. I would get so stressed from all the distractions around me.
90 min commute time is insane to me. That is a massive amount of time to give to your company for free. If companies want people to come back to the office, they should pay for commute time.
Before the pandemic it used to be commonly believed that even remote work shouldn't be done at home and you used to see coffee shops filled with people on laptops (and frustrating people who just wanted a table to drink their coffee and eat a pastry). Obviously during the pandemic we got used to working from home but as you say a big downside is that it removes all distinction between your work and home environment.
It's legit. Fully Remote can be seriously isolating/depressing.
Hybrid is probably the ideal; but even so I live 15m from the office and when I go in it's empty 90% of the time anyway. I don't know if I'd take a 45m commute until the kids can get themselves home from school (daily pickup/dropoff) - but I do miss 2h beer lunches on a Tuesday after closing a ticket to blow off stress.
I also enjoy the office when i'm there.
My problem is that i really hate flex desks and now you don't get your own office anymore.
But my problem is more with my home: I'm now buying a farm and i don't think it will feel the same way as it does at my flat. Its surprisingly hard to 'get out' to not feel annoyed by my flat. But i don't have a good outdoor view only a small window and i do not have a extra office space.
Same. I can't stand working in my home office at this stage. Somethings are easier when you don't have the distraction of a busy office, but many things are a lot easier / more efficient. On-boarding new staff is so much better in person.
Similarly, in the old days when I had jobs where I was expected to wear a shirt and dress reasonably smart to the office, I enjoyed getting changed into other clothes afterwards. It marked a real change between work and personal time. That gets very blurred with working from home.
It really depends on your commute. For me I take a 20 minute subway ride but could also choose an hour walk or a 30 minute bike ride. I definitely prefer my situation to working from home 5 days a week. But if I were driving an hour in traffic I'm sure I'd prefer to be remote.
if you want to see people you can work in a coworking space near where you live without the commute. I dont understand people who want to commute more than one hour a day if they have the choice not to. And even more so if you consider the environmental impact and all the stress that goes with it.
I'm lucky in that my company closed the office far from me, and consolidated on an office about 15 minutes' drive / 25 minutes' bike ride from my house.
Now, when I weigh 30 minutes of commute versus being cooped up in the same room I was in for the whole pandemic and almost lost my mind, it's easy: office whenever I can.
That said, I'd be very loathe to _have_ to come in to the office. There are whole weeks where it just doesn't work out logistically, and it's nice to be able to work from home.
I also enjoy a certain level of in-office face to face interaction but 90 minutes by car per day would be too much for me.
I think this is completely fine. Some people like working remotely, other people don't. I fully expect to see a gradual trend of companies going on way or the other over time, because hybrid really is the worst of both worlds with nobody really being happy.
I understand the need for human contact and to get out of the house. But you can achieve that working "from home", too, albeit with some consideration for confidentiality requirements[1]. Usually the place you must work from isn't defined. I work "from home", but once a week I work in the same room as a bunch of locals who also work from home.
A few advantages: 1) you have a wider pool of people to choose to co-work with, since they can have other employers, too; 2) you can choose who you want to co-work with; 3) you get to (mostly) choose which and how many hours you wish to co-work; 4) no stress about being late due to a commute or childcare commitments, since co-working hours are optional.
[1] I deliberately arrange to work on things that aren't confidential on co-working days.
So in office is better for you. What irks so many of us is that companies point to people like you and mandate EVERYONE be like that, because the C suite, whose entire lives and career have been built around having people around them assumes or decries that everyone either is, or should be, like them.
Or worse, the middle management is given authority to give these mandates, and are in their highest level of incompetence and use it as a "power move".
you're not alone in this. I thought i would love WFH but it turns out I need some social interaction even though i dread it.
But this is not an acceptable reason to chain people like me, who have functional social lives, to your needs.
You need social interaction, so go out and get social interaction.
I don't. So why should employment cater to you rather than me?
> Companies forget this.
No, they don't. It's intentional.
Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff. And if someone doesn't quit, they're likely to put up with a whole lot of other grief too. Unpaid extra work (to cover the people who quit), not asking for raises, etc. It's purely money-saving and to instill fear.
In the 20th century, IBM and the Welch era brought in a lot of tools to extract the most from employees like the "up or out" mentality or simply firing the bottom 5-10% of employees every year.
Tech has simply reached that point. You are a replaceable cog. Tech is now in permanent layoffs culture to suppress wages. Laying off 5% of the workforce every year is now a permanent fixture of your company.
Personally, I think engaging in layoffs means you, as an employer, have demonstrated there is insufficient need and you are ineligible to sponsor a work visa in any broadly related area for 24 months. "Broadly related" here means if you layoff a software engineer, you can't sponsor another software engineer. I don't care if one does C++ and the other does Python. I guess you'll have to train somebody.
> Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff.
That might be a thing, but I can only speak from personal experience, and I'm an area of the world where there's still a pretty big shortage of IT workers, so it doesn't make sense to drive them away.
In hiring threads there's disconnect people have because the employer's goals and the potential employee's goals are different. Candidates often think the employer wants the best employee so will bemoan things like whiteboard coding because some people don't do well in that situation. They're correct about that but wrong about the employer's goals.
The employer is simply filling a role. They're looking for someone sufficient. They don't need to be perfect in this process.
It's the same here. You are replaceable. Never forget that. You may be thinking the company is losing a good employee. And they might be. But it doesn't matter because keeping particular employees is almost the goal. There are very few people who are truly irreplaceable.
If out of 20 employees, one quits over the RTO mandate then their work gets spread around the other 19 who now do 5% more work for less money because they're not asking for raises and there's no severance to pay. It's win-win-win.
The company would rather understaff and underpay to any other outcome.
Also 2 x 60m commuting + 15-45m (depending on circumstances) of preparation for the office before leaving. So much waste of one's life!
I was steering myself towards remote work since it was technically unfeasible. I worked from home in the late 90's setting up a removable hard drive with data and two computers taking that (office + home), but that WFH was beyond the 40h / week, I had to go in 9 to 5 still. I liked the tasks, so it was exciting.
Then technology improved, chose a position where the pay was only acceptable but I had the chance of working from different places, city, country, so no chance of going in to the office! This was the 2010's.
Then chose an on-site work in a rich country so after getting to know and trust each other I'd have the theoretical possibility of working from a cheap country remotely on a very good salary (or something between the two for mutual benefit). Unluckily I had a stoneheaded and actually very incompetent COO coming from decades of secretarial position in a uni unable to comprehend working elsewhere than in an allocated (rubbish) chair at a particular (rubbish) desk in a cheap office (being cold in winter so my poor female colleagues sat in coats) far from amenities, from 9 to 5. This was her sole understanding what work is, the poor soul. So after some time trying (suffering, fighting) for remote dominant settings I handed in my resignation (they headed a wall anyway with that poor incompetent COO) into the nothing. Having some months of rest before picking up something new. That was 2019 December. Oi! : )
Now I work with colleagues - working on the very same codebase - from 3 continents spanning 18h of time zones, most of them never met. This is nice!
Ok, so why is that. I can't seem to find any reasonable explanation as to why they forget it. Especially considering that data absolutely does not seem on the side of RTO. What's your theory?
Because they measure the wrong things or is completely driven by sentiment.
Sort of similar, a friend of mine was fired. Ostensibly for not bringing in enough revenue/profit in a consulting business. Very few of his hours where billable, so he looked unprofitable. The issue: He was working on internal tooling, building systems that everyone else rely on to do their jobs effectively. His value was hidden in the work of others, but that's not measured.
When looking a "work from home", you rarely see companies measure job satisfaction, stress levels or even do proper exit interviews. The sort of things you need to keep on top of the keep people long term. Many customers won't report back to your boss that because you sat a your desk at home you where able to help them after your normal working hours, saving time the next day. In consulting tracking billable hours is normal, but if you don't track when and where those hours are worked, you're not going to see that some work better at the office, while others have a skyrocketing productivity boost at home.
Other times you have bosses that wants "butts in seat" because they don't trust their employees. Hell, we had a sister company where the employees sat in a fucking horseshoe configuration at the office, on the "inside" of the horseshoe, so the owner could sit at the open end at check that people where working at all times. Do you think that fucker is going to let people work from home?
>I can't seem to find any reasonable explanation as to why they forget it.
The companies already know all about the positive time savings from not sitting in traffic commuting. But they believe that benefit is negated by employees getting less work done at home. My previous comment about employees "saving time" by working from home isn't seen that way by companies mandating RTO : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34929902
I think there's a few factors at play:
1) Ego/Power trip reasons: It just makes you feel like the big man to be physically lording over your minions and they miss it.
2) Class Warfare: Workers need to be kept miserable enough so they turn to mindless consumption and don't start asking any inconvenient questions.
3) Financial Conflicts of Interest: Higher Management is likely to have some real estate investments, maybe even in commercial real estate. They might be worried more about that part of their portfolio than about the company stock part.
Not the parent poster, but companies want people who will deal and cater to their needs, not people who will whine and complain about (even very real) issues.
And employees will typically want companies that will cater to their every whim and pay them very well to be catered too.
Where the two meet is the labor market.
Conditions are changing, and ‘hard’ force is being applied again.
> Companies forget this.
More that they assume (or demand) the worker is going to pay this cost on their behalf.
When my employer tried to make us come back to the office, I flat out told them - school dropoff is at 8:30, the next train is at 8:50, so the earliest I can be in the office is 10, if every train arrival is precisely synchronized, which it never is.
And since pick-up is at 4:30, it means I have to leave the office at 3:00 at the absolute latest, lest I incur significant monetary penalties - as well as the ire of the people who care for my child - for late pick-up.
So sure, if you want me in the office for five hours a day - one of which is going to be taken up by going to lunch with my coworkers, since face-time is so important - I'll be there.
Unless there are significant delays, which there usually are, in which case I'll be there for maybe four hours a day, because I'll also have to leave early since delays in the morning frequently mean delays in the evening.
I'm also in a supposedly "hardware" role. Early in March 2020, the people in my group were all watching the data that were becoming available. My boss came into our work area and said: "You guys can all see what's happening. Let's clear out of here, then we'll figure out what to do."
I went and got my minivan, loaded it with the contents of my lab, and took it home. Then I ordered high speed Internet service. A few days later the schools closed, and my family was all working at home. I already had some lab space at home due to my side business.
Now, I didn't really mind working from work. It's a few minutes bike ride from my house.
Oddly enough, things were happening so quickly that even being a few days or weeks ahead of the game meant that we were charting new territory within our company, which is a large multinational. For instance, with no specific location, we started collaborating beyond our original group. We improved our use of rapid prototyping services. We got a lot done despite, I think, having a more relaxed pace of work. Though I work in "hardware," what that means in this day and age is spending somewhere between 0 and 100% of your time programming. I spent a lot of time programming while looking out the window, taking a break and going for a walk, and so forth.
It was also comforting to go back, eventually. I like the people. It could get lonely at home. I'm definitely not a introvert.
(Edited to clarify: March 2020)
I was in a role that did require a lot of talking, in a large health tech company. Oddly enough Covid was a great leveler for the org and I found myself reaching out to people across the world and learning about how Africa leads in certain market areas because of their straight-to-mobile attitude (midwives are fully mobile with cloud connected ultrasound devices in their backpack), I connected with India and that one guy in our team from the US promoted from on a laptop in a corner to a full meeting member. Shortly he was showing his home and we hung out after meetings.
For someone expected to create a lot of IP, this was great.
And then management started screaming we should get back the office. Which I did enjoy... For about 1-2 days a week.
The craziest thing I saw was a digitalization project that was on planning for months and scoped to take a year bwith a sizable team be realized by 3 people over the weekend.
True nescessity has a way of cutting through all the usual crap.
Same here: I work on speech for a big company and working from the office is terrible. I had to squat the restroom 3 times yesterday so I could work (talk to my phone!)
At home I am so much more productive and zero commute.
Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office (doing email, reading other docs, meetings which are always with remote folks anyway but at least they see a genuine meeting room or phone booth behind my pretty face, so I guess that counts? ;)
> Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office
An added benefit of this is that it makes working from home look more productive, if they're keeping score :)
I suggest you dispel of this notion that the players in this game have any sense of rationality or logic about this topic. There are massive (many trillion) commercial real estate interests at play here that totally trump all productivity, health, and even the holiest of holy climate change benefits. I don’t think people quite understand the real order of priorities and issues related to remote working. The big corporations are under both pulling and pushing pressures from the government and interests that control it to “put butts in seats” in big commercial real estate. They don’t care about anything else and they are throwing around money and fear to whip everyone into shape.
Yes, there will be some pressure pushing back and dread by corporations stuck between the ol’ rock of competition and the government-favor hard place, but it is unlikely to win out at the corporate level unless some real independent competition rises that is putting on massive pressure by not having commercial real estate capital expenditures.
A small office in a city can easily cost $1M per year, sure there are tax benefits, but they’re not benefits if you are competing with someone that does not have those expenses at all or far fewer, even after paying for team meetups that also fund a family vacation.
I'm a software lead for passenger information systems on public transit. What that means is: The little screen that shows you what your next stop is, and the little voice clip that plays "Next Stop: Braintree" or what have you.
It's not quite as nice a feedback loop as ordinary web dev, but I've found a $20 webcam easily pays for itself many times over in this environment. This becomes all the more important as we start to build more advanced software functionality into our product offerings, which is where I really shine despite my undergrad in electrical engineering (I chose EE, like how aspiring writers choose to major in the classics).
> I'm a software lead for passenger information systems on public transit. What that means is: The little screen that shows you what your next stop is
Why does that screen always cycle through a bunch of worthless messages that hide this information, instead of just displaying the useful information ("next stop: X") at all times?
Great question! The short answer is "Beats me, ask your local transit authority." They're generally the ones who call the shots on what actually gets shown on those displays, and we are the folks who implement that downstream.
When I say "local transit authority", I mean organizations like the BART for the Bay Area, the MTA for Chicago, or the MBTA for Boston, my home town. The graphic designers in those places are often responsible for surprising amounts of the look and feel of a city's public transport, so I'm sure they would love to hear your feedback.
I'm extremely curious about the nationality and residence of a person who uses Braintree (a town in Essex UK with a silly name) as an example but purchases things in dollars
Braintree is also a town near Boston in the United States:
No way! I had assumed it was too silly for North America, like Pratts Bottom or Twatt
Thank you for your work! I always wondered how those worked, and where the info came from, on top of what it runs on etc -- moreover I love seeing software built that directly improves people's lives :)
Try copenhagen. They use the screen for ads and flash the name of the next stop for a couple of seconds between ads.
I'm a game dev and traditionally console devkits were the most guarded secret in the world, you had to have special locks in your office, only keep them away from the windows with areas with controlled access etc etc etc. Luckily during the pandemic the requirements have relaxed and I can work from home and have console devkits at home, turns out it's not such a big deal. Devkits just brick themselves if they don't have regular access to home servers anyway.
I'm in a similar situation, but no hardware involved. Just the flexibility to juggle the kids at pick up times is godsend.
I have much better no-interruption stretches of programming which yields better results overall.
Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign? After all older people have more responsibilities outside of work like children and cannot work through Amazon’s meat grinder or do things like support brutal on call cycles. They’re also the ones with bigger commutes and other barriers to RTO, since they probably live away from city cores to buy houses and have space for a family. Meanwhile young people who live in the middle of downtowns in apartments that are near their work probably are unaffected by this kind of change.
Career focused younger people have also been adversely affected by wfh for the last few years in a big way. All the mentorship and networking opportunities have withered. The non career focused younger people are living it up though.
How do we know there would be a selection for younger people? Someone with a family is perhaps less inclined to change jobs. Someone older is more likely to have health issues or a dependent with health issues, which is an even stronger disincentive to change jobs. It is still not a great job market AFAIK, quitting at the moment is not going to guarantee a new job is available.
Perhaps something of a corollary of the saying, don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. The Amazon senior folks making these decisions almost certainly have reasons. If people quit, maybe they just don't care who it is. I really wonder if they AB tested RTO. Given it is Amazon, I would put a small wager they have.
Further, the impact between middle managers and individual contributors is uneven in remote work. The article mentioned there was a desire to reduce management. Remote work was an interesting experiment IMO to show the (lack of) effectiveness of middle management. Perhaps the impact to ICs is negative, but the middle management can be more effective. Arguably that would give greater "focus" on the specific KPIs desired by the VP level. Again, would be super fascinating to know the data used by Amazon here, of if this is a rare decision truly made by fiat alone.
Others have mentioned Amazon's real estate holdings. I kinda think that is likely. Amazon made huge investments to stop leasing offices and to build and own their own offices. If nobody is there, the surrounding neighborhood is devalued, in turn devaluing the offices further. It would be s considerable loss on paper. ICs perhaps are about as effective in office under a whip compared to remote, and if some quit - then maybe all the better to reduce head count.
Do you know of any statistics that back this?
I could see it be the other way around, or various factors balancing each other out. From my experience the current young generation is more willing to trade money for QoL , and quit when they feel QoL is bad, than the previous one.
> Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign? After all older people have more responsibilities outside of work like children
How did the last 40 years of tech do it? Were the boomers that invented all this stuff resigning left and right or not have children? Did I misread history about Bill Gates sleeping in his office or did he run MS from his kitchen table?
Same here. I can do all my family errands when I want and plan around them. The best part, at least with the company's interest, is that I work when I feel most productive. Usually 3 hours in the morning, along with a few hours in the evening, I even often work weekends like this. And guess what? During these programming periods, I'm at my most productive. Force me into an office where I'm forced to synch with the office's schedule, and met with constant noise and interruption from others, and my productivity is maybe half.
Same for me, and my mood is worse from having to reset when I'm thinking through a tricky architecture problem and Foghorn Leghorn in the next office is talking at the top of his lungs on speakerphone.
Same here, thanks to me working from home my wife has been able to return to work (she's a teacher) which has given us more income (and less costs!) and massively improved our financial position!
Instead of announcing mass layoffs, tech companies use RTO orders.
They are very effective at trimming the fat and creating peons. Also effective in stopping the corperate real estate crash that alot of important trust funds depend on.
Productivity < Compliant Workers < Stock value
RTO definitely helps reduce workforce and keep the most complaint workers.
I suspect that "most compliant workers" and "most creative engineers" has little overlap.
My friend's job pays him enough he could lease his own office near where he lives. He has all the "toys" he needs, space for his own research and he doesn't have to waste time to commute.
My view is that offices were a thing because there was no technology to do otherwise and back then equipment was too large / expensive to be kept at employee's place.
Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.
Often the owners also have shares in the business and influence this return to office aka sustain my property portfolio nonsense
> Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.
Bingo! Many companies are invested in real estate, and having the ticking time bomb of empty offices vs unsustainable office rent finally implode would be bad financially. Hence, the push everywhere to return to the office.
The benefits of being in a physical office disappeared 20 years ago. COVID accelerated the formation of globally distributed teams. To now go back to commuting 2-3 hours a day, just to do your Zoom calls from and office desk, is insanity.
> Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.
My boss goes in to the office even on non-office days.
If I still lived in an apartment - ie, no separate room at the house to use as an office - I'd probably go in most days as well.
My "office" is a converted deep (e.g. bedroom) cabinet, with a sliding keyboard tray and some shelves sawed out. My chair rolls in and fits within it, so the whole thing can be closed off when not in use. And that's because I want a large fixed screen. I think as people stay WFH, people will find ways of packing office spaces into smaller spaces. But people will also take advantage and move further out to get more space.
What all these discussions about home vs office work largely miss (I’ve seen a few tangential mentions) is that so much of this debate has a far different priority driving it than people think, it’s both capital investments and system pressure to keep the house of cards standing that is driving all meaningful measure of this issue and corporations/CEOs are willing to sacrifice the aloneness and even productivity and profitability of their employees in order to maintain the overall system and serve the central planners in the government that are pressuring them to get the commercial real estate house of cards stabilized by utilizing the floor space … even climate change and destruction of the planet’s climate (if we can believe the inconsistent propaganda in that regard) be damned.
It’s time to shut up and “toe the line” as I’ve been told from regarding this kind of matter. If it chokes down to it, you could even be a specialized and expert in the field that they absolutely need; if you defy them, at least be ready to move on or even be laid off. In this kind of authoritarian system, nothing else takes priority over obedience … no matter how much your corporate “family” would be cutting itself deep in the flesh. I know this from experience and repeated observation.
If that were true, I would expect a lot of smaller CEOs hiring away talent that likes to work remotely.
But I think the truth is much simpler- the C suite is primarily made of extroverted people-persons who work better in person and think others will too.
Well I mean, look back to the Covid mandates - if employees were compliant than, I see no reason why management wouldn't think they would be compliant now. Having worked middle management in the corporate world - corps are self-selecting, all the people I have met there who have been around 10-20 years already internalized their state a long time ago. My direct boss was quite transparent about this, once referring himself as "a slave for 18 years".
I love a conspiracy but I dont see how the incentives align.
Real estate leases and ownership is a sunk cost. Office space can be relet. And even Amazon wont make a dent in the office realestate marker (warehouses, maybe...)
They want people back in because either they think it makes the company more productive, to get people to quit rather than layoffs, or to give the appearance of doing something. Knowing Amazon they probably have some data to drive the decision too.
Telematics HW during peak pandemic. Went from an Group office who's top eNPS opportunity was remote work requests - It went from not letting the Services guys telecommute in once a day to the hardware guys orchestrating a lab move to a new office location and enabling remote connectivity to test benches while shipping out 3 new products polling in test data from vehicles across the 50 states.
RTO is an eyewash.
I'm in the same situation, though I design more hardware - I stopped going in most days of the week and avoided those commutes when my son was born, that allowed me to spend more time with him as a toddler. When he started highschool we left the US, he's mid 30s now and I've just retired.
COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then
> COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then
The worst part of this RTO phase is those who were previously(pre covid) afforded permanent WFH or x days WFH at the time of hiring are also forced to go to office without exceptions.
> Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Who'da thunk it?
I think I saw it mentioned in an old HN thread once, but I'd like to see a study between the WFH desire and its relationship with (a) commute times, and (b) commuting method: walking, cycling, driving, urban transit, commuter rail, etc.
If your commute was a 15-30 minute (one-way) bicycle ride, how different would you feel about going into the office more often?
I live in Wisconsin, so 30-60 minutes of cycling year-round is a non-starter. I'd much rather take public transit, since then I can read a book or daydream.
> I live in Wisconsin, so 30-60 minutes of cycling year-round is a non-starter.
I live in Toronto, Canada, and in the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled to work everyday from March to December (rain or shine, as long as the streets were clear).
See perhaps the video "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Also the Oh The Urbanity! channel, a couple who live in Ottawa/Montreal:
* https://www.youtube.com/@OhTheUrbanity/search?query=winter
I'd say one counter-argument to bringing stuff home, outside of the obvious one like it being a supercooled quantum computer, is if it's valuable stuff; say you've got 100K of gear at home, who is responsible / whose insurance gets billed if it gets stolen or damaged? Does the insurance require additional security measures on your house to insure it? Who pays for that?
Anyway that depends entirely on how specialized your specialized equipment would be. I had a quick browse of your profile, it looks like you're a firmware engineer so I assume what you have is a few thousand worth of electronics hardware like oscilloscopes and that other magic stuff that firmware people have so nothing that would break the bank or fall outside of your homeowner's insurance, but you get what I mean.
That said, most non-hardware IT people have laptops nowadays that they are expected to take home, I've got two current-day macbooks so that's at least six grand of hardware sitting at home, plus the rest. I should double check my insurance <_<. At least the macbooks themselves are covered by my employer's insurance.
It's almost as if human creativity thrives when you create a low stress environment that caters to the individuals needs. I'm thinking some thing like like Jacque Fresco's - The Venus Project, but instead of radically changing how we interact with the environment through architecture. We create creative environments where humans can freely tinker, create and experiment... Some thing worth exploring further.
Yep, I'm doing firmware work from home too; I have a create with the hardware with me which I bring with me when I go to the office, which is basically never. Weird to think this was considered 'impossible' before by many.
ah-hah, but have you considered the executive's perspective on this? that perspective is "no."
the only reason executives really dislike remote work, is because as "face people" they have never had a place for it. It doesn't benefit them in any way, so how could it possibly benefit anyone else? they have never had a position like yours. they both deeply understand that no one is like them, and bizarrely believe that everyone works like they do and benefits from working in the office.
I have worked closely with executives throughout my career and the only common thread between them all is the intense hatred for telecommuting. I have never met an executive which understands it well enough to understand its place in their work environment. These same executives frequently called me after hours asking for work to be done immediately; work that could only be done in the office because that's where all of my digital tools were located and where the network connectivity was, etc. Zero recognition that one of those things could solve the other.
Well, it's that, or they just want to be dicks and give out orders. That could be it, too.
It's probably 50% of each. "executives get benefits, plebes do not."
similar situation here, I'm also a firmware engineer for the most part, and I thought it's very hard to make remote job to work(e.g. comparing to web developers,etc) since I need hardware access. Turns out all I need is a home lab with a few basic equipment(scopes,etc) and a few boards, worked well so far. The key is to get the job done.
Is your company hiring? This sounds like a dream job. Having a little home hardware lab.
Healthier, for how long?
I can't wait to see the influx of books about this topic 10 years later.
If there's a $100,000 oscilloscope, then it's there to get used. Specifically, it's there to allow the >$100,000/year engineer to get their work done more quickly. And the engineer is there because the company thinks they're giving >>$100,000/year in value.
Yes, the scope can be taken home. That is both physically possible, and there's plenty of rational employers who would rather have the lab equipment at home with the WFH engineers adding value than in the lab collecting dust. Even if it means some of the equipment needs to be duplicated.
And taking lab equipment home doesn't mean sneaking it out in Jonny Cash's big lunchbox [1]. For some employeers it can be as simple as "hey boss, can keep the logic analyzer at my home office?" while others might have a more formal sign-out process. There are no doubt other employers where the answer is always "no", but in general it's completely possible to take equipment home without stealing it.
The idea of taking expensive things home isn't limited to the tech sector either. Consider trucking - it's common for employee truck drivers to take their $500,000 trucks home.
[1]: https://genius.com/Johnny-cash-one-piece-at-a-time-lyrics
The thing is, when it's taking millions of dollars in equipment to fit out a lab, many engineers are all sharing that equipment. It would cost many tens of millions of dollars to buy duplicates of all that nice equipment for every single engineer to have at home, plus many of those engineers won't even have space for the equipment at home anyway! I live in a relatively small apartment with my girlfriend. We struggled during the pandemic because we don't even have space for two proper work desks. We definitely don't have a bunch of extra space for lots of lab equipment.
Things are pretty specialised and RF before you need a 100K oscilloscope. I have a 500MHz DSO, 16 channel logic analyser, 10 digit GPS locked frequency counter, 5 digit bench multimeter and a 2GHz AWG and I think it's not even 10K.
(I'd love 250K of test equipment all the same LOL).
Funny - in my case, I owned a nicer oscilloscope than my company was offering me anyway. Neither is worth more than a couple grand. I acknowledge that more expensive equipment exists, but I'll come back to that.
> There are insurance considerations too - your house burns down with $250k worth of test equipment inside, who is paying for that?
My employer already has insurance on their equipment, and I already have insurance on my equipment. I see no problem here.
Even if there was a problem, why do you expect ME to be saddled with the burden of a problem that clearly exists between my employer and their insurer? Why should I (and thousands of others) pay the cost of 20 hours a week in commuting, when my company and the insurance provider could spend a couple hours to fully think through their terms?
> There is a lack of critical thinking when it comes to extreme WFH arrogance.
I recognize that not everyone can work remote. At the time the shutdowns began, I was working for a defense prime in an airgapped lab. Obviously, I couldn't bring my equipment home. But, in that case, there was a reason for onsite work - national security. For most devs, there simply isn't a similar justification for onsite work.
None of what I said in my toplevel comment is intended to disparage anyone with a job that demands onsite work. Note how I never disparaged anyone in that situation, nor did I disparage anyone who runs a company where people are in that situation. I merely stated how much I like my situation, with some quiet jabs at companies too stubborn to afford the same benefits to themselves and their employees. Develop some reading comprehension before you start slinging accusations of poor critical thinking.
So I see it the exact opposite way. I see a staggering level of arrogance in Amazon's move to sequester thousands of people in an office who simply don't need to be there. It's detrimental to the workers' health and happiness, it's a needless cost on Amazon's behalf, it pollutes our environment, and it does jack to improve their product. It's just a power move.
You’ve come up with the most extreme scenario to make a point. Surely most of HN is not doing cutting edge electronic engineering that requires a $100K oscilloscope as a everyday tool.
The parent described the equipment as "fancy" and "specialized" which is not translated as "$500 garbage off AliExpress". There is nothing extreme about that scenario. It is in fact extremely commonplace anywhere that does serious engineering.
It’s great that it works in your case.
But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.
Also, HN posts may have selection bias. Perhaps people who perform better in office do not want to admit it. Perhaps people who work in the office don’t have time or the opportunity to post on HN as often.
Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted. When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.
HN is not the majority. But we've seen many studies that say tech WFH has either no/minimal efficiency loss, or even has better productivity. Most tech companies in fact made record revenue (maybe profits, but hard to say) over COVID, so the business logistsics do not imply a loss in production.
>Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted.
I mean, there's many reasons an otherwise unwarranted RTO happens. Maybe there's executive conspiracies, but the simplest two reasons are
1. We're still in layoff mode and RTO is a soft layoff without paying out severance. Especially to people that are physically unable to move back
2. managers and executives are in fact not rational actors. They can make decisions based on vibes, or because they need to make some shakeup (any shakeup), or because some other executive made a decision and they are mimicking. I would not take their decisions as gospel. Otherwise they would have shown some shred of evidence of productivity loss (which they cannot, because again: many tech companies have record revenues).
It could be. I sense that it's simply because the overall productivity/creativity is down but HN posters are disproportionately pro-WFH. This creates an echo chamber where people here are constantly confused why RoT is a thing.
You often hear about HN posters complaining that when they do go into the office, they’re just having Zoom calls in the office instead. That’s what Amazon is trying to fix here. Everyone in office 5 days a week.
> But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.
Most likely Amazon has zero data supporting the argument that WFH is less productive and probably has data to the opposite. They went from 'we're super data-based, data-oriented and objective' (which was a joke to begin with) to the complete opposite on this topic.
> When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.
The reality is you have no idea what you're talking about, you have no data to back up your claims, you just can't resist licking the boot.
And you do? You’re a lot smarter than Amazon execs it seems. /s
Should we be giving 25% raises to grocery store and retail workers who don’t have the option of WFH? Lots of people don’t work in an office and still have to commute, shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
To this day, I maintain that the hardest job I've ever had was being a carhop at Sonic. All the soul-crushing foodservice insanity, and oh, you're on roller skates too.
The hours I worked and the shit I saw in that job do not compare to any other foodservice job I ever had, let alone other jobs. The tips (which you only got if you weren't on shake duty) were the only part that made it worthwhile, which meant putting on a happy-go-lucky face even if it was covered in grease, shake crap, blood sweat and tears.
Hardest job I had was a part time job working the cash register. Standing in one spot for hours on end, extremely repetitive, mind numbingly boring when not handling people, it was torture for me. I still get irrationally angry how most supermarkets don't give their workers a seat.
I was a cook at Sonic who occasionally helped with carhopping. I couldn't skate but tried to learn. It's hard work! I raise a cherry limeade in your honor.
For me it was newspaper delivery kid. You worked 7 days a week with only Xmas off - rain/snow didn’t matter. I got the papers at 5am, folded them and bagged them and was on my route by 545. Delivered them on my bike and then rode to school at 7am. And then once a month had to go door to door to collect the money, which was a pain. But no other way to make $100/month at age 11.
Moving everyone who realistically can work from home out of the offices benefits those who MUST commute as well. During COVID the roads where empty, cutting my commute in half, even during the later days where many was back at work.
For stores in particular, if people work from home, you can move stores closer to where people live, including those who work in the stores. It's country dependent, but there's no need to have all only huge supermarkets in the outskirts of town, when very few pass through those areas. Then smaller stores closer to the population becomes more relevant.
I'm of the opinion that actual hands-on labor is significantly undervalued, so yes.
er... you're not really following the logic of the parent comment.
Parent comment asked, should people who can't work from home be paid more?
Which seems like a specific case of the more general "we should pay people more if their jobs are more difficult", so your examples would more accurately be expressed as
"should we pay sewage workers more because they deal with feces" and "should we pay commercial divers more because they are submerged in freezing water for hours each day"
Is it so hard to understand the frustration of people who can't work from home, when the work from home people celebrate the joys of WFH including 2 hours not spent commuting (I used to sit on a bus 1.5 hours each way to work in retail).
If all the WFH people got this sudden improvement to their lives, what will society do to help out the people that can't? Is fairness and equality not important when it comes to the working class?
The disrespect to the lower classes from this community is unreal.
Well my take, having done retail and factory factotum work when I was younger, is that I'm not going to take one of those jobs ever again.
I've also done jobs where I had to commute into a windowless office and be at my desk at an exact time too.
I'm not going to work for in those jobs again either when WFH is a viable option.
It's a free market and I suspect that Amazon know this. I suspect that RTO is just a way to boost property usage and disguise redundancies. At the very least it means that Amazon don't know how to measure productivity properly if they only way they can ensure it is to force people to sit in a chair each day.
I would argue so what? There are low and high paying jobs that require people to be in person and low and high paying jobs that can be fully remote. Why should it matter to one group where the other group works? I'm sure the pediatric surgeon isn't complaining about having to work from the office.
The only people that actually care where others work are people who realize they are ineffective at their job/their job is pointless without being able to physically bully, the rent seekers, and people who built a business out of being near another business.
I feel a little bad for the small businesses that got lucky by being near a huge office space, but most of those small businesses have been replaced by corporations and small businesses close all the time.
Your grandparents favorite restaurant when they were a kid is probably long gone and it would be nice to have an eventual restructuring of convenience businesses near homes instead of suburban parking lots and office buildings.
Sure, why not? Minimium wage in California is still not a "living wage".
>shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
depends on the company, but they used to stipend transportation and sometimes even car gas and repairs as a benefit. I see nothing wrong with that idea.
I keep seeing this line of "reasoning". You realize that me being at home makes your life marginally _better_, don't you? There's one less car on the road creating traffic and pollution. There's one less guy in the line at starbucks. There's more real estate opening up for purposes besides mindlessly filling offices. But you'd rather make your own life marginally worse as long as it makes mine significantly worse.
If anything, it’s a whataboutism, but still an interesting question to consider. What do you think about offering better compensation to in-person service employees?
As a firmware engineer, my job demands more "in-office-y" stuff than most other engineers on HN. I have specialized equipment. Hardware. I need to interface with manufacturing. So on.
Guess what? I'm going on 1 year fully remote, and I'm doing great! Turns out, all that fancy equipment can be brought home with you. We deal with a contract manufacturer, and emailing them from home is no harder than emailing them from the office. Instead of being stuck in a concrete jungle, I can go test the product out in a more realistic environment in the park across from my home. It's made me happier, healthier AND more productive. Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Who'da thunk it?