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
Take this with a grain of salt but I read on a similar Reddit post the return to office is mainly due to the tax incentives the city/county/state provided Amazon for having their offices located there. The Reddit user made a claim which Amazon could only receive those tax benefits if their workers actually worked in person at the location. ---
I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.
> I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.
Holding on to what is now an outdated view of worker utilization might help them for a couple years with these tax incentives, but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit. They're going to have to pivot to having less commercial real estate eventually.
The executives must look out and see a bottomless supply of cheap engineers. And I doubt they plan on training anybody at all. It’s just a race to the bottom at this point.
> but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit.
This gets repeated a lot online but statistics don’t really support it. They will lose some number of employees but the significant majority of people just go along with RTO policies.
All of the headlines claiming employees will quit if their companies mandate RTO are based on self-reported surveys where people are asked hypothetical questions. When reality hits and people are forced to choose between their large FAANG comp or quitting, it turns out barely anyone quits.
It's a very reasonable argument. And even if it isn't something now (where Amazon gives Seattle the bird... wait, that's San Francisco that got the bird from the bird), it is something that would impact their ability in the future to negotiate tax breaks with cities.
There's also the question of even if remote work was more productive on the whole (and I believe this to be true) and that these productivity gains come from the more senior workers who are able to identify tasks that they need to complete and effectively shut the door on the office and focus ... while also being able to handle other things at home (being more productive because you can put a load of laundry in at noon or being able to get something to eat without having to go all the way to the break room)...
So, grant that on the whole productivity is higher with WFH for mid level and senior level individual contributors ... junior ICs may be suffering quietly without more direct mentorship, the listening in on ad-hoc hallway meetings, managers being able to pick up on work stress more easily.
It would be very easy to imagine a conversation at some director level (where I'm making up the numbers)... "From 2020 to 2024, we've seen the number of junior ICs advance to mid level drop from 20% to 16% compared to 2016 to 2020. This is a declining trend and when looked at year over year 2020 to 2021 had 8% advancement while 2023 to 2024 only showed 4% advancement. Furthermore, the senior ICs are comfortable in their role and the number of them moving up to management has dropped from 5% to 3% in the 2020 to 2024 time frame. If this continues, we may be looking at a lot of unsatisfied junior developers who are not progressing and a lot of satisfied senior developers and leads who would traditionally shift to the management track... well, not take that step in their career progression."
Yes, that's a just-so story. I find it to be a believable one.
So even if everything is great with remote work currently for productivity, some trends may be showing a problem years down the road where people are not improving and the company as a whole is stagnating (even more).
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(edit / addition) - from last year, that tax revenue thing with some numbers: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/community/amazon-return-to-...
I'm sure that the numbers indicate that, but it's quite a leap to pin WFH as the driving reason that the juniors not moving up and the seniors not moving into management. It's a good story, and I'm sure that's the sort of thing that top leaders in big tech are using. Except for the reporting that 60-80 CEOs got together and just decided to move, and that they aren't willing to share those concerns of low IC improvement in the communications.
If the story were true, then that'd be a reasonable thing to share in broad terms and would reduce the impact to morale as there's at least some shared, reasonable argument. Instead we get vague reasoning about energy of the workforce and spreading the corporate culture.
Everything I've seen aligns on three pillars:
* Real-estate strategy (lots of contracts and promises to commercial real-estate as well as local governments)
* Quiet layoffs (if they leave on their own, then we aren't firing!)
* Disconnection with reality (upper-management's job is harder remotely or they're bad at it, and having face-to-face conversations is really important for politics, their primary job)
There's very different metrics when dealing with a team of mostly mid and senior devs at a small shop that can carefully mentor / manage their handful of junior devs ... and one that is working on the scale that Amazon is working on.
The org with a few teams and 100 devs total works and mentors differently than how Amazon operates.
I'm seeing this in personal experience. Interns and juniors are just totally lost between Zoom meetings. They don't have the confidence to jump into busy work chats.
This is very plausible and I haven't heard it articulated quite like this before. Thanks!
Usually the tax incentives are relatively minor and are long term as well. The more important thing with the real-estate strategy is that there's a lot of capital and personal clout wrapped up in these massive building projects and investments. Amazon recently had 2 shiny new buildings built in Arlington, VA. They have a bunch of buildings that were built in Seattle. There's definitely tax incentives involved, but those tax incentives are tiny compared to the billions of capital poured into the buildings.
If anything there are tax penalties. SF makes companies pay a tax per person in a seat working in SF, so it incentivized companies to move offices elsewhere and go remote
Do they? Even when I was in office at the tail end of COVID all my meetings were on Zoom anyway.
Regardless, such a trivial whimsy like that is a horrible way to place company wide decisions.
Not to mention, Amazon has vested real estate that is massively depreciating along with the entire corporate real estate market
Right. They're blowing money on real estate. Getting a little bit of it back in the form of a tax rebate isn't going to reverse that fact.
You'd think that capitalists would be beyond excited to make the workers pay for their own workspace. Strange that they aren't.
> The Reddit user made a claim
Did they provide any links or evidence at all? Reddit is a hotbed of misinformation and claims like this proliferate and grow on Reddit with little basis in reality all the time. Unless someone can find compelling evidence that this is both true and a substantial tax credit, I would assume it’s just another product of the Reddit misinformation machine.
Even if it is true, the majority of the RTO is a transition from hybrid to 5 days onsite. I doubt they would have allowed hybrid to begin with if it impacted some hypothetical giant tax breaks.
How many tax credits do you want? https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/
It isn't necessarily about the historical tax credits... but also those potential ones in the future. Notice Seattle not having tax credits for 2022, 2023, or 2024.
I doubt it, and actually, with NYC it's the exact opposite
“Just seems a bit heartless” which, from everything I’ve read about Amazon as an employer, sounds completely on brand.
Yep. The plan to enforce this in January, after Q4 when people are busy at work (with Amazon’s Q4 peak retail sales period) and with the holidays, makes it clear that Andy Jassy intends to make this an impossible change. He just wants to force people out - maybe to do a layoff without paying severance. Or maybe it is a way to select for young people that live in downtown cores near Amazon offices, and get rid of older people or people with families. You know, people that live away from city centers, have commutes, and cannot deal with an abusive RTO policy. I hope they face lawsuits and also that talent flees.
The only reason Andy Jassy and Amazon can get away with this is because they have enough market power that they don’t have to care about consequences. In other words, they are too big to fail, and immune to the negative effects of this that may result from real competition. It’s time for them to also face anti trust regulation. As a customer, I’m going to cancel Prime and stop shopping there entirely. I don’t like rewarding companies that set illogical trends across the entire industry.
Some companies used this to reduce their headcount without having to fire people. Maybe Amazon is doing the same thing.
This is what I believe as well. It's an assuming narrative that allows them to say that it wasn't them it was the employee choice.
I think you got the messaging here wrong. He's not saying that you have 3 months to move houses, he's saying you have 3 months to move jobs.
Productivity has cratered since he implemented RTO, so to believe that this is anything but a way to get rid of employees without severance package is extremely naive.
Not to mention, employees have bought home and shifted to other cities and neighborhoods
> Just seems a bit heartless.
The writing has been on the wall for a while. Aside from that, Amazon decided to convert their workforce to work from home rather quickly, and shelled out the money and the effort in order to actually achieve that.
> Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes.
If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.
> If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.
This is being mandated for a number of employees who were hired remote as well.
Separately, why not? I generally have an expectation that I won't have to move across the country from one office to another. Especially not without some good reason. Especially not without literally any reason. Especially not if I'm going to have to foot the bill for switching houses, either disrupt my spouse's career or spend time apart, switch kids' schools in the middle of the year, .... Employers are (often) within their rights to do so, but the knowledge that Amazon does this sort of thing frequently is precisely why I work elsewhere.
> If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.
To put it another way: "Look for a remote position elsewhere and quit"
That has been the return to office dynamic since the COVID emergency stopped.
This is not necessarily true. I have had a labor attorney successfully argue constructive dismissal when remote was written into the employment agreement in an at will state (employer and employee were both in Illinois, attorney represented them on my dime, I was the one who told the employee to have the remote clause inserted into the offer letter when they were hired).
Importantly, speak to a labor attorney, depending on your situation.
I work for a consulting company in Melbourne Australia.
The Melbourne city council has started petitioning the government to force govt employees to return to the CBD for work. Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels, which means employees need to start coming into the CBD more often. Apparently this is getting serious consideration.
It's not like we home-based workers stopped going out to buy lunch on workdays. We still go to the local shops most days for coffee and food; as those shops aren't paying CBD-type rents, their food and coffee is generally cheaper and/or better quality, the service is friendlier and the local school kids have a lot more job opportunities. The past 4 years has seen a real community feel spring up around where I live, whereas before it was just another dormitory suburb where nearly all the workers disappeared during the day.
From my perspective, we moved from pre-COVID, in-office work arrangements to post-COVID, remote arrangements, and that genii is now out of the bottle. We've all conclusively proved we can be productive working from home, and any attempt to roll that back is going to hit resistance in one form or another. It's gonna take a recession where the supply of workers exceeds the demand for everyone to come back into the office each day, and even then I don't think it'll stick long term.
> Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels
It's more like downtown property prices are based on those levels, and property is leveraged, and if banks collapse do to commercial property prices plummeting, you're in for a bad time.
Also, although downtown is a very small part of the city - in many cities, downtown property taxes make up a relatively large chunk of total property tax revenues.
You either death spiral downtown property prices by keeping taxes steady while values decline, or you increase tax everywhere else to make up the difference.
Either of those options leads to a bad time for politicians.
Poor politicians.
"Government for the people by the people, unless the people don't want what they want"
I thought you were referencing this: https://youtu.be/QFgcqB8-AxE?si=mtt3UMDlNe41mnS-
> people don’t want what they want
Which makes the opposite point, funny enough. Who is the “they”
I’m not in for a bad time, the banks are in for a bad time.
Then I hope the workers don't patronize the CBD businesses and cause the collapse anyway.
Here in Canada the federal government has started forcing federal public servants back to the office. Everybody thinks it's just to prop up the capital city businesses and commercial landlords. Their union has actually called for them to buy local in their neighborhood rather than in downtown. Ottawa has a pretty terrible downtown with many businesses having awful hours like 8a.m-2p.m M-F because they got so used to relying just on civil servants.
That same federal government, who wants to put tens of thousands of employees on the road in commutes to their offices, is simultaneously communicating to the public that carbon fuelled climate change is an existential threat and that carbon consumption is immoral and wrong, thus requiring end use carbon taxes, and even going so far as the current party's health minister saying that families taking summer road trips is sacrificing "the future of the planet". [1]
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/10542273/holland-road-trip-questi...
The internet has allowed remote work for a long time, and in office work was dead walking until the pandemic finally put it in the ground. It needs to stay dead. These local shops don't deserve to lose their business either. if the CBD businesses want to compete, then they need to move. This is a sunk cost. You don't throw good money after bad
I think a big part of this math is avoiding huge balance sheet write downs on unoccupied real estate.
When Amazon was heavily investing in SLU in the 2010's they purchased all of their leased offices from the developer, Paul Allen's company.
It's the GE-ification of Amazon. Financial engineering with little care about employees or customers.
Then the C suite can just make coffee at home and stop eating avocado toast
This is such corporate welfare BS. I especially don’t get it for tech companies whose employees eat lunch on campus.
With big tech, I think it has more to do with real estate holdings being part of the portfolio and they would have to write down the value. Then the hedge funds where executives invest would also have to write down their real estate holdings and lose value.
I am dying for commercial real estate to be written down so hard in the US that the Federal Housing Administration buys it and converts it to public housing.
I was in the "office is a good thing" camp for a while, but having been forced now to do 3 days, then forced to move to an office an extra 20 minute commute away, I've changed my feelings on the matter. Spending 2-2.5 hrs in commute a day is a terrible experience when trying to balance a high pressure job with the rest of life.
I really miss hybrid with 1-2 days in the office. That was the best compromise all around.
Commute really is key. When I used to have a 15-minute bike commute, I voluntarily went to the office five days a week. The 30 minutes spent each day is just good exercise.
Now I take the train that's 30 minutes long each way. I don't get the benefit of exercise, the time spent is doubled, and now I'm only going to the office three days a week.
At least you can be productive ish on the train, sitting in the car for a daily dose of near death experience is even worse.
Not sure which trains you're taking but any I've been on during peak times are standing room crush, no space for laptops or working
It's really more complicated than this, because often commute has an inverse relationship with cost. The longer you commute, the more you save.
Sure, you could say going to office isn't too bad if you're 15 minutes away. But at 15 minutes away you're paying double for housing than if you were 90 minutes away. So even in the ideal scenario, RTO can be perceived as a huge pay cut.
Hybrid means I still have to live in $1000/sqft territory, but also need a home office.
I did that when I was living alone. The empty office floor on a WFH day is kind of creepy, and now it’s weird to be away for lunch voluntarily.
How is any number 0-5 based on your preference not the best compromise in your opinion? Do you gain anything when someone who would choose not to be in the office ever is there?
All the people who want to socialize at work get the office, everyone who wants the flexibility of remote work get to enjoy that. From experience, making a remote-first team work in office is just working-remote but next to one another. Once you get used to all your processes being in-chat and having 5-10 async conversations going at once while working having to like stop and have only one stream of thought is like an adhd rug pull.
Commuting over an hour each way, if you're not exageratting, is so much an outlier that it makes these discussions difficult to talk about. Same way the real estate conversations on Reddit always devolve into "sounds good from my perspective in [New York|San Francisco].
Average one-way commute time SF Bay Area: 30-45 minutes
For many, 60-90 minutes each way are not uncommon.
Your comment makes my point and then demonstrates it. I understand that hour+ commutes happen, but its the outlier or the tail of the bell graph, but in these discussions it's made to seem like every American is forced to commute an hour. SF demographics and infrastructure are also nuts, so I see it as another outlier in these discussions. I don't know how to make this point without sounding so dismissive, so I do apologize about this.
But yea, if we are talking about the impact of commuting on the individual, and the rhetorical example is a 90 minute commute in the bay area, I roll my eyes. A better example would be a HR generalist commuting 25 minutes from one Memphis suburb to a business park closer to town. Choosing a random example.
Or walk. Can't sleep or read when walking :( Podcasts are okay but doesn't fully engage me and so it's still just passing time and enduring the weather
Taking one bus and being forced to take a 30-minute break (usually reading for me) was fine, but now walking 25 minutes additionally to that same bus trip after the office moved to a new location is rather a pain. Tried taking an electric kick scooter but that slides all over the place and doesn't fit at the foot end of a bus seat so to cut down on walking I'd have to stand and babysit the device the whole ride (forfeiting the relax time); not exactly an improvement
Car is by far the quickest (about as fast as the waking time alone) but I'm not doing that on most days for climate reasons
I can sleep in my bed and I can read everywhere at home. Being forced to commute is not an advantage just because I can do both of those things in a worse way than at home.
I used to sleep on the MAX(train) in Portland on my commute. I would never do that today. Too much crazy stuff happening in Weird Portland.
Besides, the sleep you get on a train/commute is not quality sleep.
Yes. For much of the US a train isn’t even an option.
Or, to put it with less hostility, Experience has value.
This was my first thought as well. A complete lack of self-awareness.
The irony of setting up a '“Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy' while announcing an edict enforced by centralised control to replace autonomous decision making about where & how to work.
A long time ago I joined Deloitte to set up a local software dev. practice.
A few days in I was invited to join a "bureaucracy reduction taskforce". Someone handed me a literally 12 inch thick stack of paper I was meant to read up on before the first meeting. I gave my regrets and withdrew from the taskforce (there were no repercussions - apparently a few others had noped out as well).
I choose to believe that was a strategy. Invite everybody so they feel included, weed out almost everybody so it's a small group and can maybe get something done
Thanks for this. I really want more software engineers to see the benefits of unions. Yes we’re paid well but there’s more to life than a paycheck
From first principles, it is the only way for these workers to have more agency and not be treated as disposal feedstock, and as a high empathy human, I would like them to have more agency and be less controlled (if they would like it; the choice is theirs).
Unions seems to make sense but if you see how greedy they are, striking in the best economy in the world and in the history of the world — where people's economic situation is better than anyone else on the planet ever was in history — then you have to wonder if there is not something wrong there. I think I would consider them if they could be less greedy.
I would really like to see some anti price gouging legislation in the US that take these greedy unions to task.
> I really want more software engineers to see the benefits of unions.
How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
Probably the same way it does with groups like actors and writers?
> your value to the company scales very directly with your talents
This is not how management sees software devs.
Devs are fungible resources that can be allocated where the urgency/importance is and regardless of individual attributes.
> How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
Your mental model operates under the assumption that you are paid for your individual performance. This leads you to believe organizing is suboptimal. But, the data does not show individual performance is tied to compensation, therefore you're arguing against a model based on a meritocracy fallacy and an incomplete mental model. You might also overweight your own performance vs that of others, in the same way that a majority of drivers believe themselves to be better than the average driver.
Understandably, it is hard to internalize that we are not special, that performance is hard to measure, and that organizations communicate something different than reality. "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
"I am a gambler and I don't want my upside restricted" is more honest than "the profession shouldn't organize because a small cohort will miss out on outsized comp that they can work hard and are recognized for." Also, importantly, you asked "how would a profession ... benefit" when you really mean just the folks at the top of the income distribution, not the entire profession. One might also consider that pay transparency laws exist because of well known and researched pay inequity issues across wide swaths of the economy.
> When asked about the rationale for the size of their paycheck, both workers and executives overwhelmingly point to one factor: Individual performance. And yet research shows that this belief is false and largely based on three myths people have about their pay: that you can separate it from the performance of others; that your job has an objective, agreed-upon definition of performance; and that paying for individual performance improves organizational outcomes. Instead, your pay is defined by four organizational forces: power, inertia, mimicry, and equity. The bad news is that these dynamics have reshaped the economy to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The good news is that, if pay isn’t some predetermined, rigid reflection of performance, then we can imagine a different world in terms of who is paid what, and how. -- Jake Rosenfeld, a top scholar of the US labor market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy
https://hbr.org/2021/02/youre-not-paid-based-on-your-perform...
What do you envision a union doing for software engineers? like what's the 3 sentence pitch for joining?
No more unpaid overtime. The right to ignore work messages outside of business hours. No more noncompetes
It's a race to the bottom because of the visa worker situation. People will wake themselves up at 3AM on a saturday because shitty tooling made something in prod break.
Many of my friends are visa workers, but if you're working with people living in fear of deportation, it tends to fuck up the work life boundary across the board
Mine is: "Why negotiate alone? Your employer has an army of lawyers and HR types to prepare your contract. If you and a bunch of coworkers pool your resources you can benefit mightily by hiring someone to sit on the other side of that table."
"A union of Software Engineers lets us collectively bargain for better working conditions, such as flexible working locations, reducing PTO request denials, and work-life balance conditions."
My company tried at the start of the year to get everyone back in the office. The worker's council (which is not entirely a union, but very close to it) negotiated for the everyone a three day a week RTO.
I refused to go back for those three days in the hope that nobody who matters will notice, yet they made line managers snitch on people and I was fired with notice because the agreement with the worker's council was "legally binding" and no exceptions could be made. So for me personally the involvement of the union sealed my fate into unemployment.
Unions are not a panacea, it leaves individuals without anything to bargain outside of the lines of agreements already established, and while some professions might benefit from them, I think unions for high skill jobs are not a good solution.
And, just because we're paid well doesn't mean we can't be paid better.
This might be an unpopular take here, but from my perspective, the downsides of introducing unions in tech for software engineers far outweigh the benefits. I understand why unions can work for certain industries, but I just don’t see how they’d be a net positive for tech.
For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous:
- You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
- Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
- One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
- The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Essentially, many of the things that make startups—and the innovation that comes with them—great will be pushed aside for a one-size-fits-all model that, to me, feels more like a utopian ideal than a reasonable solution for tech. Many of these concerns also apply to larger companies too.
I’m open and willing to being proven wrong about all of this though!
When you hear about unions in software, stop thinking about auto-workers and think about NBA players instead:
Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.
Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:
Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.
> When you hear about unions in software, stop thinking about auto-workers and think about NBA players instead:
> Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.
> Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:
> Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.
Your entire focus here is compensation, which wasn’t my focus in everything I listed.
I think your model of how unions work has been heavily influenced by negative publicity.
Unions do not lock down job roles, or enforce collective bargaining, or any of the rest of it, if their members don't want it.
Unions are like the anti-HR. Exactly like when the other side of a negotiation lawyers up, you want a lawyer on your side of the table. Unions are the HR person on your side of the table.
I'm a startup founder and I can definitely see a point where we'd encourage union membership. I want my staff to be happy and productive. I'd love to have someone I could talk to regularly who was very much a representative of my staff. Of course I'd continue talking to all of them individually as well, but having a single person tasked with telling me any bad news would be great.
> For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous
I agree for start-ups. But Amazon is not a start-up. Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
> Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
Considering the points I made, you mind elaborating on the pros and cons you see? (I’d like to understand this perspective.)
Why would a startup have a Union?
Unions aren't like the bar association, it's not obligatory across the industry, or even the same company. Literally today Boeing is on strike in WA but not in South Carolina, exactly because only the WA employees are union.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective
"Top performers" and "10x engineers" is largely a myth nowadays. It existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
As a sidenote, most often when you see a "top performer" you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
> it existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
Comments about the existence of 10x engoneers aside..
It's a wild take that we live in a world where all OOP frameworks are gone and besides a few people working on self-driving cars we're all working in React...
I think I have a few colleagues to notify.
I mean, I know some 10x-ers. They are super super rare, yes. Becuase you don't just take a 3 month bootcamp and start working in fields like graphics, compilers, HPC, etc. Jobs that require very strong math fundamentsl and an ability to not just reason with software but understand the limits of hardware as well.
But that's the exact kind of talent who you'd want in a union as leverage, and those people only have to lose with normal union benefits.
>you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
This is a nitpick distinction, but I think a "genius" is different from a 10xer. A genius approaches the world in an untraditional way and seems to consume re-interpret content in ways I wouldn't be able to replicate with years of dedicated practice.
a 10xer is in the name: they feel 10 times more productive as an engineer. Those few people I consider 10xers are ones who aren't just great at delivering entire subsystems by themselves, but great at communicating the idea, and maybe even selling you their pitch. Those aren't necessarily important qualities for a genius, but they are necessary to function in a company.
(and ofc these aren't mutually exclusive. Though I have yet to meet a genius who I feel is also a 10xer. Having such a different interpretation of the world and being able to translate it to us mortals is a truly gifted person).
Hi! I worked at US Engineering, an MEP subcontractor. This means that when you're building a building, they will hire a general contractor (GC), and that general contractor will be responsible for the overall building and rake in the big bucks—but they'll bid out the MEP -- whether Electrical lines or Mechanical ducts or Plumbing out to a subcontractor, and those margins can get pretty thin, like 5% profit. That needs to cover all of the overhead of office jobs, it needs to cover legal because the final phase of construction is inevitably litigation, etc.
Software wasn't unionized, but the pipefitter were, the welders I met were, unions were a very heavy presence.
> You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
Those pipefitters were very tight-knit, never saw them on the job debating contracts. They took a pride in their work that from an outsider seemed kinda strange, saying things like “welp, gotta go help Tyler make his next million.” (Tyler being the CEO and heir of the family business.)
I also know a former teacher who was head of her school's branch of the teacher's union, her teachers were relatively tight-knit, she did describe her particular job as handling and filing complaints and stuff, not so much contract negotiation though.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
At USE, merit became more important, not less. if you were getting a raise, you had to be able to justify to every other part of the company “hey why is she getting a raise and my people are not.” At Google it was “who can play the perf game best and talk the best talk,” at USE it was “my people made Tyler an extra hundred thousand, what did your people do.” The teacher friend, I didn't ask, but it might be a moot point because during the Bush administration all publibly-funded schooling in the USA was transitioned to hard metrics and student outcomes, so it surely stands against your point but you would also surely say that it's not a representative sample?
> One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
So the shop floor did have some very specialized roles. If you are a Master Welder, then the entire rest of the shop floor is basically set up to provide you the illusion that all you have to do to make Tyler money is to show up and weld every piece that is fed to you and inspect it and sign it. Someone else at the Cutter station will make sure that the pipe was cut the right length, someone at Tack-Up will take care of making sure that your parts are already tacked together so that you don't have to hunt around for parts. Stuff like that. But the rest of the folks just wear 10 hats over the course of a day. Like until you have met people who work with their hands like woodworkers, you don't quite have an appreciation for how much freedom one has to just make little tools or racks or a holding enclosure, just welding together some little crane because you got sick of having to sometimes hold this thing for a minute or two while others slid things into place. I want to say at one point they casually dropped “yeah we rebuilt these doors on the loading bay last month, so that we could load another skid into our trucks sometimes.”
Freedom to do stuff, they had! And with teaching, I mean, they load you with so much work that there's no time but aside from the exact minutes of when a class is in your room, the teacher had creative freedom to teach in any way they wanted (and they needed this freedom because any given class has vastly different students with different learning needs). One personal contribution I made: “trashketball,” students could perform tasks on paper to earn the right to throw it into the trash to win either 2 or 3 points off their team. (A different teacher needed an approach to build a kinetic fun activity into their curriculum.)
> Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Like I don't think this comment would have gotten me decked or anything if I’d said it to one of these construction workers, but it may have ended several conversations with “yeah I don't work with Chris, that guy's a prick.” I think that the teachers would agree that their hard work and unique contributions are deeply undervalued, but they would blame the taxpayer and the embezzlement-adjacent acts of some school administrators for most of that?
There is no way to join w/o having a job at a union shop. I want a union I can join no matter where I work and that can help me find a new job. Why isn't this the model?
Unions have their own incentives, and they expand slowly using existing union shops as leverage. Can't really hold much power over any one company if it's 2 people are shop A, 10 and B, and 200 at C. A would just drop them and only hire non-union, while B would make negotiations hard.
The union could flip hiring by making finding good candidates easy for a company by having their members pre-vetted, eliminating the need for vetting interviews completely. Hiring is a huge pain point and addressing it would, IMO, go a long way. And they wouldn't necessarily need to focus on employer negotiations as their members would find job hoping easy due to skipping all the vetting interviewing giving them leverage as individuals.
I feel like union would be much more symphathetic if they do this, and they can coexist with capitalism instead of being hostile activism. But this way they'll just be another corporation, with its pros and cons. Also programmers seems to be uncomfortable with the concept of formal vetting.
Citing an article from MIT Sloan Management Review:
"But there’s no clear evidence that these mandates improve financial performance. A recent study of S&P 500 companies that was conducted by University of Pittsburgh researchers found that executives are “using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.” Those policies result in “significant declines in employees’ job satisfaction but no significant changes in financial performance or firm values,” they concluded." (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/return-to-office-mandate...)
>When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.
>we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture;
They believe there are advantages to being fully in-office because they have observed these things. Zero mention of actual data to back up their beliefs and observations despite substantial industry data verifying that remote and hybrid work environments are more beneficial on almost every level.
The companies are getting tax breaks. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
I've worked at two companies that are heavy on former Amazon leaders.
As leaders do (and should!) they are often sharing stories of how they approached similar problems in their past roles. What I find to be interesting is how different people across time weave the same caveat into everything they say about their time at Amazon - some version of "...but keep in mind, that isn't the kind of culture we are trying to build here."
A note for engineers looking for jobs, based on this and about a thousand similar posts: If you joined a "remote" company that went remote during the pandemic, no, you didn't.
Look for companies that went full-remote before 2020, or after ~2022. Otherwise, it can't be trusted.
Companies that went full-remote around 2020-2021 are more likely to try to drag people back into the office, but I wouldn't suggest that you don't interview with those companies.
The best thing you can do is get to the finish line, get the offer sheet, and demand that your position as a full-time remote worker be written into your agreement with the company.
FWIW I know someone who did exactly this with a defense prime, and the crazy fella actually won the battle with HR when they tried to bring everyone back into the office.
Worst case scenario, they say "no," you decline the offer, and you've sent a clear message to management. It might feel like a few hours of wasted time, but we as industry practitioners have the power to make this a normal interaction between a prospective hire and a stubborn corporation.
This might work, but it also guarantees you will be first on the chopping block when layoffs come around. I have seen this happen first-hand multiple times: any employee with a special arrangement that doesn't meet what the executive team desires will be let go at the first chance, even if they are a huge asset to the company.
Not to say you shouldn't try that approach. Just that you'll have less job stability.
Agree 100%, even if you can manage an exception it does not look good to be the odd man out. It's easy to imagine people like this being the initial "easy choices" when layoff discussions happen. Not saying people should just roll over, but if you can manage an exception and see work from home as a requirement, I'd view that as your opportunity to maintain employment while looking for a company that takes remote work seriously
Yup, and I think the only guarantee for a remote-first workplace is if the whole company ( or at least the whole engineering dept. ) is spread out enough that there is no possible plan for an in-office setup.
Seems like most these types are building niche products (e.g.: tailscale) and not just SaaS or CRUD-with-AI ?
While layoffs can be pretty horrible, getting a severance package (or even just a "severance package" in the style of not being allowed back to work during the WARN Act period), can be a pretty good deal and/or vacation that you've needed.
Most companies in the US are hiring workers at-will. There are no contracts and anyone can terminate employment for any reason. I don't think that would work in the United States for most non-contract roles. It might work for contractors and for people in Europe.
I joined a company in late 2020 that had gone remote at the start of the pandemic, and this crossed my mind. The deciding factor for me? The founders had since moved to different locations across the US. That put their money where their mouth was more than anything.
Reducing the number of managers is an interesting decision. I briefly worked at Amazon, and the only way for managers to get promoted is by hiring more people under them. There isn’t any other way to get promoted, which incentivizes managers to grow their teams and sometimes add features that may not make sense. Any opinions from ex-Amazonians?
Isn't this (kinda) true, in general?
I work at Google. Many of the "official descriptions" of various levels include "size of team" as part of the description. I think, generally, anyone in a middle management position, particularly at a growing company knows that "more people equals more advancement".
Headcount based promos is the most backwards system out there.
But Amazon is too dysfunctional to change.
Goodharts Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Once organizations get to a sufficient size, increasing your "scope" is the only metric left to compare. You could compare revenue, but the easiest way to get more revenue is to increase the amount of work that falls under your purview. You could compare profitability, but then you encourage everyone to make the most expensive products they can get away with and your company fails. You could compare productivity, but there is no scientific way to do that, and funding the research required would bankrupt you and your company fails. You could do it by vibes, but the snake oil salesman will sell you garbage and your company fails. You could do it by seniority, but then you stagnate and your company fails. You could do it at random, but then none of your managers would bother trying and your company fails.
Do feel free to suggest a better way to compare two managers that doesn't fall into worse situations than "scope".
So, there is no objective way to measure performance of a manager ? It sounds similar to measuring the productivity of developer.
Measuring scope to evaluate performance is like saying developer who works on most number of tickets/bugs is the highest performer.
We know that's not true and we also know how it can and will be fudged(w.r.t managers its increasing un-necessary headcount).
If we are able to come up with a solution for developers it shouldn't be too difficult for managers too.
How would profitability fail the company? Too expensive products won't be bought means no profit, but if you can get away with the price, you're not failing, are you?
BS, you can measure management productivity and effectiveness.
Lazy management, ones that focus on "metrics" and "numbers" rather than actual engagement with their teams/business lines.
I'm only 20% joking here...
Goodheart's law. As well as too many cooks.
it's not like FAANGs are strapped for teams. Managers can just mnage horizontally instead of needing to hire more people to "prove themselves" (especially when the hiring process is absurd these days).
The actual announcement
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...
An equally important update was reducing number of managers which nobody seems to care about :-)
So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.Strategic of them to include the 5-day a week to hide the 15% managerial layoffs. 1 in 8 managers need to be converted into ICs. The average manager has around 8 ICs with the "two-pizza team" ideal, so that means 2% overall layoffs. Not huge, but managers generally cost more than ICs, so there's likely outsized salary impact. Organizational changes will surely reduce productivity as everyone gets shuffled too.
I honestly wonder how useful most managers are..
Just anecdotal ofc but over my career having worked for 14 managers.
Half of them were eventually fired.
Most of them sucked at rallying teams, mainly because who the f is going to follow a doofus cringe lord?
2 managers stand out to me in my career. I’m really good friends with one of them that I’ve been in contact with for over a decade now.
Most were basically checkbox checkers who sucked at engineering and faked their way into “people management” only to be found out that they just plain suck as employees. I actually checked LinkedIn just now of a few of those bad ones and they work at small companies and have made no upward progress. Not surprised honestly.
Keep in mind I worked at a pretty good place, not a noob tier place.
Another point to consider: the environmental impact of having hundreds of thousands of people commuting to work every day.
Transport is the second most important source of greenhouse gas emissions, after electricity and heat.
I'm not sure if large office spaces are more energy efficient than home offices.
Any improvement in heating/cooling efficiency will be greatly nullified by the environmental effects of commuting
And the fact that their homes are still being heated and cooled while they’re in the office too
ironic since one of their LPs is Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
> We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day.
https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...:
and the job market is likely to be flooded with even more people looking for fully remote jobs over the coming months. Should be good for some companies looking to hire remotely, but it will be tough time for job-seekers.
And I’m sure those same execs love to carp on about ask the sacrifices everyone else needs to make to stop climate change.
Yea it would be more efficient to have "living pods" essentially little chambers where the employee can sleep in after a long 16 hour day a work. The personal home emits too much energy and waste. It would be better for the employee to just go into the pod, plug in their nutritional tube, and watch netflix for a few hours before falling into an induced asleep at the mandated time as set by their work schedule.
Person one: hey driving is bad for the environment, why don't we drive less? Besides, wouldn't everyone enjoy that?
Person two: this is slavery and you're a commie. I want muh freedom to be forced to drive 2 hours a day!
Are you seeing how this isn't a reasonable response? Like, at all?
This does not make sense. Who are you talking to and what is your point?
We saw that taking all those cars off the road could really accelerate our climate goals.
Amazon found the best way to reduce their workforce. Make them switch from a perfectly fine work environment to a horrible one and wait for them to leave. You don't even have to make them come, threaten to do it.
Just come work in small companies that respect their employees. Good talents are hard to find.
Unfortunately for them it means losing highly sought after senior employees with the option to leave, and keeping those without that option.
I can never actually find this study, but it's similar to a study showing companies that moved their headquarters to Connecticut instead of staying in downtown NYC actually perform worse as they lose employees that have an option to stay in NYC and not uproot their lives. The mediocre ones that cannot find another job end up moving.
They should also remove all desks and force people to sit directly on the floor. Forget open office plan. The new trend is Minimal Office.
"Everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out" is the biggest myth.
Practically the majority of middle management I knew at AMZN didn't do anything.
Source: ex-AWS
Managers at Amazon just enforce dates and identify the underperformer on their team.
That... doesn't strike me as the the worst activities for management to work.
This is true. Not only management, but a bunch of the so-called SDEs that are only there to say "we're investigating" every time there's an issue while they all wait for the guy who knows the system to wake up in his timezone.
There's people that's overworked and stressed out, tho, but those are the minority that do the actual work. I'd say it's an 1 out of 10 ratio at best, being conservative.
This is all because every single project is scoped, designed and implemented with the only goal in mind: your own promotion. Same applies for hires, you don't hire roles, you hire _the structure you need to be promoted_.
Source: same.
Being ex-IBM, i can relate.
Basically, the management class despises SDE worker class, and thinks of them as overhead. Recent statements by the aws head about chatGPT replacing SDEs is along the same lines.
SDEs are tools that just do what mgmt tells them. mgmt holds the decision-making and all the cards.
periodically there is a whipping (pipping) in the form of a layoff to keep the troops in fear.
I’m curious: what, in your experience, was the root cause of this contempt? Other skilled professions can make decent money as SDEs do. Is it a love/hate thing? Feeling like the tools could easily not need them if they had sufficient gumption and will?
you touch on a raw nerve that could be the subject of a long post.
in summary, the attitude of management in many large companies is that code is just work that needs to get done, and any engineer who can type on a keyboard can do it equally well (cue in ai-coder). so, the smarts is embedded in defining requirements and managing execution of said-code which resides in management.
The problem with this is many-fold. 1) it encourages a culture of top-down decision making including technical decisions and the person making designs is not the one doing the work 2) as tech evolves, the org is unable to catch up since the decision makers are the elite few.
in short, a manufacturing line mentality where the supervisor holds the cards and workers are tools.
Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense.
Might be an extreme take but, I think engineers have some onus to stop agreeing to work there, lest the amazon corporate culture spreads further.
It made sense starting from when the concept of an office was established until mid-2020. Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now? That too considering every other industry besides tech is already doing it?
WFH would have worked before Covid as well. Covid just forced the hands of most companies. So no, there hasn't been some breakthrough that has made WFH possible within recent years.
> we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now
For a lot of people, yes. The reason why there is so much outrage around RTO mandates is because:
1) WFH offered a massive quality of life improvement
2) There is essentially no evidence that in office workers are more productive (or vice-versa)
When executive teams, (many of whom work remotely themselves, as often as they'd like), try to reverse the quality of life advancement that WFH offers, without an evidence backed reason for doing so, workers get angry.
It's the equivalent of a parent saying "because I said so". Except these aren't children that Jassy and others are speaking to.
> Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now?
I think we are going further and further away from "the future".
In 1964, Arthur Clarke said that "I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand." and "Men will no longer commute, they will communicate." [1]
I would think that a future where people aren't limited by where they live is desirable and not commuting to office is a way to achieve this.
Covid was a way for companies to realize that many jobs don't really need physical presence in an office. And maybe we should invest in technology that makes more jobs remove so that even brain surgery could be so. But it seems like instead of Covid being the impetus for change, things are reverting, as if non-remote is the normal state of affairs.
Maybe it is the natural state, but it's a sadder world because of it.
[1]: https://fortune.com/2024/05/29/arthur-c-clarke-space-odyssey...
You have it backwards- it hadn’t made sense from the invention of the internet until 2020. I point to “teleworking” being a legitimate thing even before the internet was mainstream as evidence that the traditional office is a relic from the 40s and 50s typewriter factories.
My dad has been working from home since the 1980s. He worked for AT&T, selling telepresence products. He told his boss "how can we expect our customers to believe in these products if we don't?" And they let him work from home forever
Hilarious to watch Zoom return to office in the last two years.
It's not some big or recent development, effective WFH has been possible since ADSL matured for many, it just took a while for that to be commonly understood.
Yes, it has. We spent 4 years working from home with no loss in productivity, and now we're being dragged kicking and screaming back into the office to satisfy the KPIs of some business degree loser and his fragile ego. Offices suck. A lot of people here talk about the commute, but the office itself sucks, too.
I'm really not sure what people were expecting, honestly. Of course things would always revert back to the mean.
Amazon has been a known "do not work there" employer for a very long time. At least since 2008 in my recollection.
Yes there are people here who consistently post on Amazon threads that they enjoy working there. I even know a couple such people personally. But it's always with the disclaimer "you need to be in a good team". OK but is there a field in the offer letter that denotes "Good_team: TRUE". Nope.
So you can like the idea of competing in "The Hunger Games" while trying to write and fix code. Or not..
They pay too well to say no if you don't have any other competing offers. For some roles they pay too well even with competing offers. It's literally life changing money for a lot of people.
I'm just about to hit 2 years and was planning to leave anyway around that point, which is typical, but now there's going to be a sudden increase in the competition for remote jobs that I wasn't anticipating.
> but it’s not like it’s inherently bad
Sure it is. We can directly measure the impact of this.
Amazon has approx. 35,000 software engineers. Assuming a commute of total 1 hour a day (very generous of me), that's 35k extra hours of human labor wasted a day. Assuming an average lifespan of 613,620 hours, that's about 1 entire human lifespan lost every 17 days.
We could also measure the carbon impact, too. 1 hour of driving releases about 4 pounds of CO2 into the air. This is about 70 tons of carbon a day, or 25.5K tons of carbon a year.
Or maybe we can measure deaths? Assuming a commute daily of 30 miles, that's about 1 million miles traveled a day. The rate of traffic deaths is about 1 for every 100 million miles traveled. So, every hundred days, Amazon indirectly killed one of their employees, or about 3.5 dead employees a year.
And we can go on and on. Point being, yes bad things are bad and yes, when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences. This isn't like deciding what drink to get at McDonald's.
OK but what if the output of the company being in the office is enough to offset that?
Like is Apple “better” for the world if they worked from home and never made the iPhone?
Or what if there are people who want to work in an office with other people who want to work in an office and are willing to trade some CO2 and small risk of death to do so?
Can’t the people who believe remote work is bad quit and get a job somewhere else? Should be simple since remote work is so obviously inherently good.
I get that this is going to be like playing tennis against a wall because HN has such a hard-on for remote work that they’ll never admit that in-office work has benefits that remote work lacks and that a company that requires in-office work isn’t inherently evil.
Looks like they have until January to change to fully on-site. That isn't much time to make life changes that allow using 2+ hours extra per day that was typically remote.
> The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy.
So on top of all the hustle of end of year, everyone will need to frantically prepare for return to office one day into the new year. Just seems a bit heartless.
Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes. I just don't understand the need to force RTO so drastically.