Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
(cnbc.com)1492 points by jbredeche 4 days ago
1492 points by jbredeche 4 days ago
> How petty are the tyrants.
Having to work in an office for $300k/year is an incredibly privileged position. There are so many people that have it much, much worse, and calling it tyranny is so out of touch it's a bit distasteful. I'm not disagreeing with the points that you probably can get your work done remotely or that companies should respect their employees, but tone it down a few notches. And the organ transplant thing should be a conversation about social security and health benefits in general, it's not really a remote work issue.
Just because we have it great as tech workers and much of the rest of labor is absolutely fucked up in many ways, doesn't mean we should stop fighting to make our situations even better and use the privilege to advocate for those in worse situations.
I'm all for workers right, unionizing, and not letting companies take advantage of you. If remote work is something important for you, you should make that clear for companies that wants to hire you.
But I'm sure there's plenty of people who would gladly trade their tyranny for a well paid office job in a safe part of the world. I'd also like to add that American tech workers are pretty uniquely well off, working in an office for a fifth of an Amazon paycheck is the norm for a lot of us. Nobody likes to commute, I'm not defending unnecessary mandatory back to office policies, just adding some perspective.
The difference between someone making $50k/year and $500k/year is functionally irrelevant as compared with the C-levels. It's a rounding error to their multi-million comp packages.
There shouldn't be anything distasteful about advocating for yourself and others who rely on their labor to survive, even if they're well paid for that labor.
I didn’t ask for pity I pointed out their requirements are petty and in the labor market it’s my choice as a worker to not take their offers no matter how much money they throw around. I am fortunate that I’m in demand and make a great living. This gives me more power to refuse their petty mandates, but that in no way makes it any less petty or tyrannical. Most people don’t have my optionality but that doesn’t mean I can’t call things the way they are, because it’s petty and tyrannical for everyone everywhere who doesn’t have to be in the office but is forced to be.
There are petty tyrants in all aspects of our lives and your boss being a petty tyrant spans classes.
Saying organ transplant is a health care issue misses the point. Even with the best health offerings you have to take powerful immunosuppressives for life. People who are severely immune compromised live longer the more they can isolate from infections. But requiring them to go into a crowded open floor plan office in a company mandating presenteeism is a, risk adjusted, significantly worse trade for the immune compromised. (Speaking as someone whose wife is in this situation)
300k a year is what they get paid for making the company 3-4x as much, if not even more. If they can generate that value remotely, then being forced to waste another 1-2 hours of your life every day to go to the office should be worth even more pay.
> How petty are the tyrants.
I would consider the relationship between a company and its employees as alliance. If both have the same goal and compatible style, then they work together. Otherwise, they part ways. Tyranny is possible only with violence, while employment is at will, at least in Amazon.
I consider you wrong since an alliance presupposes a unity of interest whereas the interest of a worker (get more money, work less or maybe more nuanced: have as much control over own work as possible, have as much exposure to fruits of work as possible) is directly opposed to that of what you call the "company" or, really, the owners of the company (compel the worker to produce as much as possible, and pay as low a wage as possible to extract as much profit as possible).
Brushing this dynamic under the rug by conceptualizing it as a mutual agreement of "I will work for you for this wage" is at best glib, even if we ignore the elephant in the room that the worker doesn't choose to work since unfortunately we all need to buy food and a place to live, doesn't choose his wage since the entire labor market is practically the same and not in his power to influence nor shop for an alternative (we don't live in a text book where people can make purely rational economic choices since are born to a context and we live in places and have access to a given pool of resources etc) and lets not even glance at the lack of political alternative to this economic arrangement in this historical flash of time.
Both employer and employee want the employee succeed in helping the employer provide value to the customer. I fundamentally disagree with the first paragraph, and don't see how it can be justified without an appeal to emotion. They are not perfectly aligned, of course, but no alliance is.
And why would the employer or employee give two shits about prodividing value to the customer? You understand that employees and employers don't act out of a sense of compassion for customers? They both want to "provide value" so the customer parts with his money. They want him to part with his money since the employer wants to reproduce their capital, and the employee wants to sustain himself. How is your premise in any way a more natural framing? To the contrary it seems extremely contrived in essentially restating what I did but keeping the actual material dynamics implicit. And again who is actually providing value, the employer that recieves the revenue by virtue of owning the cafe or factory or tools, or the employee who actually valorises whatever good or service is being put on the market by virtue of his labor? What appeal to emotion are you talking about, I fail to see any.
If you need to refer to a system where those at the top don't give their reports adequate leeway to get results but instead choose to make all-encompassing proclamations about how the entire hierarchy must behave, then "tyranny" isn't so bad a word.
Money is just violence that got too old to carry a sword anymore, so the threat if violence and the threat of termination are pretty well linked. It's only different in that once the money runs out the violence will come from elsewhere.
You will have a hard time being heard over the hoards content to tear down their houses out of anger that they are not palaces.
I have an expectation of democratic rule outside of work. In work I expect to be told what to do top down. If tyranny is too strong a word, how about feudal or dictatorship or top down? Not only is this unpleasant it is information theoretical inefficient, and greatly damages espirit de corps and the development of a group dynamic that inspires the best performance people are capable of.
For me it’s at will absolutely and I won’t work there no matter how much money they offered me to go back.
For most people it’s only at will in one direction. They need the job, often for home and board, and always for insurance benefits. Saying it’s at will ignores the worker needs the benefits more than management needs the individual worker. Management absolutely uses that asymmetry to force people to do their petty whims. If you’ve ever worked for anyone else before we all know this to be true. It’s so true and pervasively experienced it’s almost vacuous to even say it.
I for one am pretty sick of the endless litany of bullshit in my career and am probably going to go it on my own again or just retire. Almost no one is so lucky as me and that’s a fucking tragedy of epic proportions.
> Who are you to tell neurodivergent employees to suffer?
I found this line telling. I’m wondering if the Hacker News crowd is biased towards the “hacker” stereotype - the socially awkward coder who likes to be left alone and crank out largely independent work.
I have a couple of folks like this in my team, and they are absolutely as good (or better) working from home, as they don’t really talk to others much or contribute in meetings anyway.
But you can’t build a team/org out of those personality types. Much of the creative work and important decisions _does_ happen face to face, let alone the ad-hoc ideation and brainstorming from being in the same space.
I don’t think it’s a requirement that everyone be in the office 5 days a week (I don’t do that myself), but I do see the negatives of letting the team work from home whenever they want and expecting to get the same level of work done over Teams/Zoom calls and email.
This is a legitimate thing to want, and I myself prefer remote work and run a distributed company...
...but I don't think it's engaging with the problems involved.
Management exists for a reason. I'm not going to speculate too hard on what that reason is, but it's a profession older than those practiced by just about anyone on this forum, found across every culture, in every part of the world, at every time in history. You could say that it's just the case that managers can abuse and extract value from their employees, and that certainly does occur, but in claiming that that's all that management is you would be arguing for the greatest market failure in the history of mankind. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, but you better have some really strong evidence if you want to argue it's remained irrational independently and in the same way across millennia.
So taking for a moment for granted that management exists and is important, its ease of execution does matter, too. And I think it's more-or-less a truism that it's a lot easier to manage a group of people who are all in a room, who you see every day, whose facial expressions and mannerisms you have a chance to read, whose casual water-cooler (water-bag? why do you have a bag of water? i am so curious) conversations you can overhear or participate in.
Remote work has trade-offs, and like any trade-off, it's in principle legitimate for someone to decide the upsides outweigh the downsides. They might be wrong about the trade-offs they choose to make, but that's not the same thing as being a petty tyrant - it's just running into the limitations of your judgment, which is a very ordinary human thing to do. If you want to convince people to run remote teams, you need to figure out what the trade-offs they're concerned about are and address them, not pretend they aren't there at all.
As someone who spent half his career in executive management of globomegacorps management is for the most part total bullshit.
Every global company is already working remotely because teams are spread out everywhere. Even if your team isn’t your dependencies are. The more senior you get the more you work on zoom these days. Before the pandemic it was in conference calls.
In fact the half assed in office approach is worse because not everyone is on the same foot. The remote offices from the leaders don’t get to have the on mute influence with the leader. When the call ends the people in the local room with the leader have a little meeting to make the real decisions. That’s grossly inefficient and unfair, to the point it’s started to make me sick to my stomach when I see it happen and I refuse to book rooms for in the office meetings.
In fact a role I had prior to the pandemic was figuring out how to shut down most offices of a megacorp to save money. We called it “bring your own office.” We analyzed deeply the interactions and determined in a global corporation the percent of time we make better decisions in office was less than 20% or 1 day a week. When the pandemic hit our predictions came true. But our elderly CEO couldn’t understand how the strategy he agreed to to save money would work once his ideological hackles got raised so he mandated everyone return 5 days a week even tho we were then 5 years into the bring your own office plan he agreed to. There were no metrics or reason other than, basically, he likes working in the office because it made him successful in his career and he can’t conceive that anyone could do anything different.
There are people who work better in the office and having a small office with plenty of high quality meeting areas and private places to work is smart. Management should allow knowledge workers to work the way they work best and figure out how to maximize team efficiency as managers are required to do. It’s a hard job. I know. I’ve done it. But RTO is a short cut that fails to recognize the incredible inefficiencies inherent in the approach, especially in a global company.
This isn't about pettiness. Amazon has a significant investment in commercial real estate in downtown Seattle. The foot traffic supports a thriving ecosystem of shops, restaurants, and housing. When the employees aren't coming to the these buildings, that extended non-Amazon environment withers and impacts city politics.
Amazon employees must return to the office because otherwise downtown Seattle decays even further.
On the other than people working at home frequent their neighborhood businesses more leading to broader economic activity. Downtown can take care of itself and can become relevant for a better reason than people are forced against their will to be there. I shed no tears over this - cities evolve over time as we as humans change in structural ways. It’s time to move on.
Downtown did just fine before Amazon too. And they need to realize Amazon has no loyalty to downtown seattle and depending on them alone is stone cold dumb. See Detroit.
Bro you were making more money than most people ever will. Unclutch your pearls. That's not tyranny. An annoyance at best.
I'm very close to being completely done with tech. This whole career has been stressful and the ROI is debatable
I've been doing it nearly 20 years, and I'm very done with it. But I need to save for retirement and I don't have anything else I want to do more. So I'm just apathetically collecting a paycheck.
If you focus on the career part, you can increase your network and find a much less stressful position. Last two gigs I've had I wasn't even on call (lol, imagine!), and found remote work. So better opportunities are out there if you work at it.
Where are your retirement savings that inflation is outpacing it? If it's in 401k's or IRAs then shouldn't the stocks in that be keeping up with inflation (mine are). Even bonds should be outpacing inflation this year at least. And real estate has been insane the past 5 years and done so much better than inflation.
For what its worth, "I've been burned out for years but need to collect a paycheck... so I've been taking remote work" isn't a good reason for companies to prefer hiring remote. That's actually a perfect description of how the same individual might have worse differential performance while WFH. The reason for the preference to WFH is also the reason for businesses to prefer RTO.
Did you start your career before covid? If not, didn't you already experience and endure 5 days a week in the office and not quit your career?
I worked in an office 5 days a week, wearing a shirt and tie, for 20+ years of my career. My commute door-to-door was nearly an hour each way. Most of that by train fortunately. It was just normal.
"I worked in the mines / on the farm since I was 13, it was just normal" - until child labor laws protected the kids (mostly)
"I worked 12-16 hour days in the factory" - until a lot of people fought, incredibly hard, to push that number down.
People have learned in these last 4 years that they can work just fine AND have a life AND not have a commute and it can be many, many companies' "best years ever!".
Inertia is a sad, but common, excuse for bad practices.
>Inflation has outpaced everything
True, while tech salaries may seem great, when you factor in inflation, well the earnings are not much. Needless to say people in the non-tech sectors have it terrible. The 'middle' class is a rapidly thinning.
For sure, that's why i asked. Was curious if it was due to not wanting to go back or not wanting to experience something they never have before
What sucks is that other companies will follow Amazon because “Amazon did it”. Other company I worked at went to a “hybrid model” to be followed at the end of last year. Ended up “silent quitting” by using up all of my PTO and sick time which allowed enough time to get my bonus and find a new job. Of course I was put on a PIP but by that time I was already gone, lol.
Silent quitting is a great way to permanently ruin your reputation. Even if you never get a job there again, you could never ask your coworkers or management for a job. Silent quitting is indistinguishable from being a bad employee.
From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results. If companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality up while not paying rent I’m sure they would, it’s just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet.
Edit: My experience with WFH has to do with software development. It may work for other fields, however WFH often attracts the wrong kind of employee which is why I don't do it anymore. If you can't be bothered to drive 10 minutes into work you probably aren't that motivated and you probably won't stay that long.
> From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work.
Apparently, it does work with thousands of consultants and contractors, and it did work during the years of lockdowns. We didn’t see any productivity decrease, generally speaking. But we all know the whole back-to-office thing is just because C-levels want to justify the grants from banks, investors, etc., by showing a “working office with people in there.” Middle managers wanted it back because, as it turned out to everyone, they were useless, so it was a justification for their positions. Additionally, real estate landlords lobbied to push it back because, without rent income, they wouldn’t be able to pay it back to the banks. The government has its reasons too, because it’s easier to focus on building small hubs and maintaining infrastructure for these offices instead of starting to work on rural areas. It ultimately shifts the power dynamics from the government, landlords, and banks to the average person, and that was an absolute no-no direction for them and had to be killed early on.
>From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results. If companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality up while not paying rent I’m sure they would, it’s just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet.
There is good thing called stock based compensation.
Because why would I want to sabotage MY money?
Of course it aint perfect.
It’s cute that you think most people can afford to live 10 minutes from work in cities.
> From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results.
What a terrible take. I've been remote for 7 consecutive years at a couple of companies and I was always invested in their produce. You know why? Cause they gave me RSUs so I actually cared about the value of the stock. Nothing to do with being remote or not.
> From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work.
Your inability to WFH is not shared by most people. Sounds like you were the one quiet quitting by default (even if not realizing it).
I'd be willing to bet that it's closer to 10 minutes than an hour (over/under 40 minutes) for most Americans. The full 60 minute AVERAGE commute is still pretty rare. These conversations make it seem like the norm. In my mid-size city, my colleagues commute from 3-50 minutes a day. Average is probably 25-30 minutes.
Depends on the city, but fortune-500 types tend to be located in very busy cities. So there is a bias here. The average American isn't working in a fortune 500 office. Commuting to the average McDonald's is certainly shorter than commuting to the average Amazon office. There many millions of people in food service - Amazon employs 35,000 SWE.
I don’t care about references from that dog shit place filled with micromanagers and corporate grinders working on projects that have no meaning and add zero value to company and the world. Hence, silent quitting. RTO just gave me the push to move on from the bullshit.
> From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work
Corporate profits tell another story
> People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results
Anecdotal. What backs up this claim? Just your personal experience? What’s your data?
> companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality up while not paying rent I’m sure they would, it’s just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet
What do you think happened during COVID-19…
Have seen many companies reduce their corporate building costs due to shift to remote work. In some cases, it was eliminated entirely the following year.
As I mention, this is just from my personal experience. I would expect Amazon doesn't make a decision like this without significant internal data, there is a lot of money to be saved if someone figures out how to do work from home.
> ruin your reputation
How would this happen, exactly?
Say you saw an acquaintance get put on a performance improvement plan and then leave the company, would you want to recommend them for a job at a new company if they asked? If you were the manager who witnessed an employee fail to complete basic tasks, would you refer them to new positions?
> ...would you want to recommend them for a job at a new company if they asked?
Depends on the reason for the PIP.
Sometimes folks who get put on them are bad fits for the demands of that particular job at that particular company and would do (and end up doing) stellar elsewhere.
Sometimes folks get put on them to try to ward against theoretical anti-ageism/anti-racism suits fired off in response to an upcoming layoff.
And SOMETIMES folks get put on them because of stack ranking... where managers are obligated to push out a certain number of people every single year.
I've seen scenarios one and three personally, and scenario two seems totally plausible because there's no intelligence/competence test required to become a business owner or manager... so such folks make all sorts of dumbass mistakes.
If you're the sort of person who automatically passes over someone because their previous manager thought poorly of them, then that explains so much about you opinions expressed in this subthread.
I’m invested in my company because they pay me. If you think there’s anything else you’re deluded. Just give people RSUs if you’re so worried about that.
Other companies will follow soon. A tough job market will allow them to do anything they want with you.
The Fed begins cutting rates Wednesday (25-50bps), and will land near 2.5-3% by end of 2025. Assuming traditional macro policy outcomes, the tough market is transitory (with my apologies to Powell).
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-15/is-the-fe... | https://archive.today/5B8Tk
If you're counting on this for a recovery, you're in for a bad time. Remember, the drop is quick, the recovery is slow as molasses. It's going to take so so so much more for things to turn around and I doubt we will ever see the 2020-2022 days of high salaries and full remote again. I hope and pray I'm wrong, but after nearly 20 years in tech, my gut says we are in for some hard times ahead.
Plus there is latency on the supply side. A lot of people were drawn by the crazy compensation starting about 10 years ago and accelerating during Covid, so that there is a huge amount of new developers out there. Plus due to the internet and mobile devices we're all more connected so the existing pipelines in developing countries are all also pointed at developed countries, bringing in even more supply.
I wonder what's the number of developers today compared to say, 2014, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 2x if not 3x.
Big tech companies have been making record profits year after year and their share prices are at record highs. Competition in the tech job market isn't due to Fed policy, it's because companies figured out that they were overstaffed and could afford to lose the headcount. That isn't going to change moving forward regardless of what the interest rate is.
You think they all magically figured out they were overstaffed at the same time? It's 100% herd mentality. They're cutting because everyone else is cutting, just like they went on hiring sprees because everyone else was doing the same.
It's easy to measure short-term impact (we cut a bunch of people, we're saving money, we're more profitable) but it's very hard to measure the medium to long term impact of these cuts.
Note I'm not arguing these cuts are the wrong strategy, I'm arguing they have absolutely no clue.
It's unreal how people think tech leaders are geniuses when they keep doing this stuff. Oops we overhired but I take "100% responsibility" however the staff will take 100% of the punishment by being laid off. All while spending $32 billion on legless VR worlds that nobody wants or driving social media giants into the ground. It's Gell-Mann amnesia. Remember how dumb their last decisions were, by their own admission.
A lot of well funded VC startups poached liberally from big tech. A lot of VC money dried up (and some is now dry powder) because of higher interest rates.
If money pours back into VCs and they turn on the spigot again, you'll absolutely see the market change. Will it be significant? Maybe not in the grand scheme of things, or maybe it will, but to act like interest rates don't matter at all is silly.
> it's because companies figured out that they were overstaffed and could afford to lose the headcount.
Well yeah but why were they suddenly overstaffed? It wasn’t some kind of collective paranoia. It was interest rates. With low interest rates, investors want you to prioritize growth. With high interest rates, its profitability.
It's never going back to the level of the pandemic again. It might improve... but those days are over forever. They were hiring people as SWEs who could hardly read and write.
Tech market is interest rate sensitive, broadly speaking.
Not so fast. "Strangely, America’s companies will soon face higher interest rates" by The Economist [1] explains why Fed cutting rates will not translate into easier money for US companies.
Maybe but they’re facing political pressure from the left, like Elizabeth Warren, to basically make the economy at least look good artificially. And they may do that. Will it be a sustainably better economy? I doubt it given federal debt and what feels like shaky employment levels.
I find the “remote vs onsite” debate to be a little bit misguided. I try to reframe it as a balancing act between “broad work” and “deep work”. The difference being that broad work is the kind of thing that needs collaboration and interaction and deep work needs focus and singular attention.
As an engineering leader, I have had some success and traction with non-engineers by re-framing the debate in this way.
I wrote these ideas up as a blog post earlier this year:
Broad work vs deep work https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0165-broad-work-vs-deep-wor...
Now that we're in the spiffy sci-fi year 2024 with video calls for all, I find that 90% of the "collaboration" work benefit is achievable remotely. (Like a co-debugging session.)
Less task-oriented stuff--general office chatting--doesn't work quite the same though.
I think the main thing you miss with 100% remote working is what I call "corridor creativity" [0]. As good as working from home is (or can be), I do miss the serendipity of walking past someone in a corridor, having a quick chat, drawing something on a whiteboard, and then continuing on about my day. In a fully remote world, I need to organise a meeting (over Zoom) for just about every interaction, which ends up being quite a chore and far less than serendipitous.
[0]: Corridor Creativity: https://matthewsinclair.medium.com/0124-corridor-creativity-...
It's possible to have this remote. The communication style of gen z and younger is entirely remote and also for younger millennials. But in a remote setting there has to be complete trust "in the chat". Just like in office you have to be open to allowing communication and ideas to be voiced. You also have to allow for impromptu video calls which can be disruptive but it's the same at a desk in office. I remember having to put up signs "do not disturb" that people promptly ignored. It's the same but different. My opinion is that what is happening now is just an uncomfortable generational shift. There is a very wide age range in the tech workforce because it's not limited by physical ability.
What is the best way to handle this if you are unwilling to return? Wait to get fired? Resign? Hope they make an exception for you?
If I was absolutely not willing to return. I'd probably continue working, maybe even more, smarter, or harder than currently. And attend everything I can virtually. Make it known that I exist and my work matters and they need me. Continue working. If they make any threats to fire me, I work towards an exception. If no exception is granted, probably just get fired and hope for a severance.
I might consider negotiating for lower pay to continue working, or try to work towards some sort of deal like that. But I'm not sure if that would actually be better than a potential severance and unemployment considering the a firing could still be on the table and would only make the severance and unemployment lower.
Yeah, good luck persuading an SVP to approve an exception for you.
The best thing you could do, if you're working at Google, Meta or Amazon is to always be looking, or any other publicly traded company for that matter. They prune people whenever they feel like it. If shareholders aren't happy, this typically happens roughly every three months.
> Wait to get fired? Resign?
Job market is bad right now. Probably why AWS felt they could do this currently.
Run it by your supervisor. When I worked as a developer at Amazon, pre-pandemic, I worked from home whenever I wanted, which was mostly one or two days a week. If your manager won't let you flex, consider switching teams.
The director told my manager that I could ignore it, then the director was made to move out of the house he just built!
Be wary of who and what you trust. There are proper remote gigs, don't risk it IMO.
edit: To be clear, this wasn't at Amazon or even part of FAANG. I took my own advice and went elsewhere, seeing the writing on the wall.
That's not the case anymore. There are teams that run badge tracking systems to make sure you're badging in every day, for enough hours and ping your manager if you've not been in enough.
If you continue to not come in enough, your manager gets assigned a task to have a conversation about firing you or getting you in the office regularly.
If you continue to not come in enough, you're fired and it doesn't look good for your manager.
Bizzare. When I was at AWS I'd IM my manager that I was working from home and he'd say, me too. There would be no need to ping the manager about my location, he knew. Amazon had such a big retention problem, and I hear they still do, that I'd doubt a manager would fire a good performer over work location. They had some tempting retention offers when I resigned. Amazon fires low performers aggressively, so avoid being in that category, on-site or otherwise. Sounds like it's completely changed?
Jassy dreams of having the same control and spying over corporate employees as he does over the warehouse workers.
I mean this company has devolved into one that spies on its workforce so much that it can, and will penalize drivers who sing along to the radio.
Yes thats the key. Before pandemic it was under radar, team could set their own policy, people do not come at all, people come for few days in week, few hrs in a day. All would work if manager is okay.
Now companies have implemented tons of metrics and monitoring right from the top. So individual manager have little leeway in giving employees any flexibility.
I personally would not want to work in a place where managers had such little flexibility. I'd quit, if pushed. But Amazon wasn't like that pre-pandemic and I suspect they are returning to pre-pandemic norms so I don't think that's the case here.
Are Amazon teams co-located?
My team is global. My customers are global.
When I go to the office, I still spend >5 hours/day on Zoom. The only reason I go in is to get out of the house.
Except for the 95% of employees who don't like to come to the office?
It is great when claim everything works better when we are all in the same office together and then expect you to get online in the off hours because of an outage, or work with teams from other offices 3 timezones away on a project, or work with offshore to save money.
Why don’t they mandate 6 day work week to compete even more…
Same, I've been able to focus best when finishing up something either during the weekend or when I allotted more OOTO time than I actually needed, I think it's just being in that (slightly) more de-pressurized state and no overhead of Slack pings and meetings.
This is not a good way to hire or develop the best. The best are going to go elsewhere.
To whatever companies will be top of the pile in a decade or two, after Google and Amazon have gone the way of IBM. Some of those will be founded by engineers who left the current FAANG setup and managed to not copy the insane parts of their previous org.
There's a life and death cycle even for companies and its important to remember that. Leaving and starting somewhere fresh seems natural.
Ok, but how do I find these types of jobs in my metro area?
Depends how badly you want the "big bucks". Non-FAANG software jobs still pay good money. Maybe not "I own a yacht" money, but definitely "I own two new cars and a 5 bedroom house" money.
10 years into my non-FAANG career and I own a basement suite and a bicycle. Any tips for better-paying non-FAANG companies I might look into?
Hard to say without a lot more detail on location and specialization. All I know is software engineering in DC metro pays well enough to live comfortably. If you’re working a .gov contract on a TS/poly, even better.
> We want to operate like the world’s largest startup
It's always amusing when a multi-decade-old, multi-hundred-billion-dollar company says stuff like this. You're not a startup. You never will be.
And if you were, you probably would actually offer perks in your offices that might actually encourage people to be there. Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove multiple times.
I've never seen a company where it seemed more like the leadership of the company actively despises the employees that worked for them. Between stuff like this and the incessant pushing of Amazon Q against everyone's will, it's really apparent that Amazon execs think that having to employ humans as SDE is a defect they're trying to get rid of ASAP.
I like working there, but Amazon definitely has the worst in-office accomodations. No snacks, no free coffee, for-profit (like 4-5$ for a chocolate bar) vending machines on every second floor, no cafeterias in most building and when they have one it's a hole-in-the-wall that microwaves stuff (except Seattle).
In the original RTO email they even pointed the importance of employee spending money in the surrounding restaurants to support the downtime economy as if I should feel personally invested in spending 30$/meal on an overpriced burger for lunch.
When I worked at Amazon, I also was tired of paying for expensive lunches available nearby. But I didn't always have time to make pack lunches.
So I ordered canned soup, on Amazon, to be shipped to the office mailroom. Then picked up the soups and kept them in the drawer by my desk.
Super tangential please accept my apology. Do you have any insight on why one of the biggest companies in the world can’t create a dark mode on their app after 10 years?
They have these big dinner-style machines that you can use to brew a large batch of coffee and then put it in large thermos, but honestly the taste is pretty bad (but it is free!) and it requires you to babysit the process.
We also have free tea and hot cocoa.
In most places employees will also bring a Nespresso machine so you can bring your own pods which is somewhat better.
Writing all that I feel like it will come off as extremely entitled. I just want to stress that I personally don't mind much, but having worked for other tech companies, it's definitely at the bottom in terms of "free stuff".
I was an intern at Amazon in Seattle in 2018 and full-time from 2019-2021. Coffee was definitely free back then although someone had to brew it for the office.
I did it pretty often as it was a nice thing to do and a good way of meeting people who were waiting for the coffee.
It is incredibly insulting they want to use guilt of not spending like a good consumer as another tool in their sociopathic toolbox.
> Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove multiple times.
This is crazy, seriously? Apparently no one has written a good enough two-pager arguing that gratis coffee pays for itself with increased productivity
They have repeatedly tried to remove the free coffee perk (usually by claiming that it was only intended as a temporary thing and will be removed at the end of the year) and the only reason it has been retained this far is because for multiple years running now there was an internal uproar about it.
I suspect at the end of this year they will fully remove it, uproar be damned.
That’s so hilariously petty. As if management was not already dictating who is in charge.
Can you bring your own cup? Get the Big Gulp 4 liter thermos every day.
Holy crap, not even coffee? That's so laughable.
Not that we get great coffee here. It's one of this pod/packet machines. But, it does various teas and some cold drinks as well (fruit/herb infused stuff). So, it works for my second coffee, or a hot cocoa when it's cold outside.
We also get free lunch on T/Th, but that's a new thing since COVID (to entice people back), so I'm not counting on it being around forever. But for now, it is a nice perk and encourages some of that chit-chat the executive class tells us is so critical to making them more money.
Honestly, this lifestyle is extremely stressing, and to go back to it just due to the whims of a higher-up seems very frustrating
My polite way of saying "f.ck that sh.t". I wouldn't do it
Usually I would think these are shadow-layoffs, but employees were already required to be in-office 3d/week, which means that employees were at least proximate to their office.
I wouldn't be so sure. Proximate for 5 days in office and 3 days in office might be two different things. I got an offer from Amazon last year (ended up declining) and the HM at the time talked about how a sizable portion of the team were commuting extreme distances to work there (including by plane) on the pretense that they only had to be in office 3 days a week.
Read like this: you must return to the office or leave—50 waiting for your position now.
> pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings
This is not a structural problem but a cultural one. Sure, you can address it by changing the org structure, but 15% fewer pre-meetings to pre-meetings sounds like a drop in the ocean. In my experience, pre-meetings are a result of low-trust environments.
I wonder where CEOs are getting the input to drive these decisions forward. Has there been significant research lately suggesting that working from the office is better, or do they just rely on their gut feeling that the office feels more productive when people are present?
Pressure from local govt to somehow salvage the "downtown tax base", pressure from boards of directors that are inbred with big investment funds holding most of that commercial real estate. The relatively small group of ultra-rich parasites is trying to claw back the inevitable change of decentralization. We would all be so much happier in a scheme where instead of one giant "center" our metro areas were "distributed" ie more commercial centers closer to more residential areas.
Where I used to work, their theat was less subtle:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxqnx/dont-mess-with-us-web...
It'll be interesting to see how soon the other big tech companies follow suit and do the same. Cynically, I wonder to what extent that forced RTO has been directly coordinated between these companies VS copycatting each other.
Given that finding a job takes time in the current market, January 2025 essentially mean that people who don't like the policy should start looking right now.
> manager layoffs coming too.
A large pharma company which I worked for until quitting in July went through a similar process this year. The goal was also to reduce the manager / IC ratio - organizational efficiency and span of control, they called it - but in most instances it were ICs who were laid off while their managers were simply relegated to ICs.
Within a company, employees (managers or otherwise) attend to, and take care of, their own interests.
As such, within a company, employees are attentive to, and take care of, the interests and needs of those who control their job security.
So for example, HR cares about management, not employees.
In this case, with RTO, we see that managers run a company, and they attend to their own needs; and their need is to be able to control and monitor their staff, because managers are held responsible for outcomes. This is inherent in a hierarchical arrangement of power. Managers then fundamentally attend to their own interest, which means having employees at home. The face this is not necessary, and is absolutely non-optimal is every way except for maximizing managerial control and monitoring, is irrelevant, as managers here are attending to their own interests.
This is exactly the problem the Soviet centralized economies faced, when they were trying to improve economic efficiency. Managers were responsible for meeting plan targets, but to be more efficient the system as a whole needed decentralization, but managers had every incentive under the sun to maintain maximum control (useless and efficiency destroying as it was), and so decentralization never occurred.
Are "managers" really driving the RTO mandates? Or do you really mean "executives"? Because none of the line managers or directors I work with care about RTO - they're mostly ambivalent about it (and about 50% remote or hybrid themselves). The only push for RTO here is from the very top down (ie the PE group, BoD, and C-levels).
My prediction: strong remote work advocates will claim this will be catastrophic for Amazon, many critical people will leave and only those not competent enough to get a job elsewhere will stay. Office advocates will claim it will reinvigorate the culture and lead Amazon to new heights. The actual outcome will be that mostly nothing changes about Amazon’s performance or product quality.
It won't work that way. If you look at the internal structure of amazon, you realize that majority of the good engineers have been there for 5+ years. Amazon always churned through people, causing good engineers who couldn't deal with the culture to leave within 2-3 years, and mediocre engineers getting pipped over 3-4 years.
Your statement is solid. But from What I have heard, Amazon is getting a lot of pressure from the GOV to bring in more people into the office to support local businesses which I think it is a bit vague. But yeah, they are going to lose some great talent. They are going to have a bunch of useless recruiters roaming the offices lol.
Many critical people will leave. The problem is that issues of brain drain, process devolution and lost institutional expertise are effects that only occur years after the cause. When you try and figure out why all of your internal services are down because one core server is in a bootloop and the engineer with knowledge of it all has left.
Speaking from my own personal perspective, it's quite frankly scary how many teams and companies are running with skeleton crews because they've chased off a lot of competent engineers and think they can coast by with the bare minimum. Stuff like what happened to Boeing or Crowdstrike are great examples of the end result, and a lot more companies than you'd expect are operating right on the critical failure margins. The concept of redundancy has outright vanished.
It's even more subtle than that. Things just start decaying when talent leaves- you often can't trace it to a single engineer or piece of knowledge that's lost. You'll find reasons why things broke- but you won't see the myriad ways a more talented pool of developers would have prevented it from ever breaking in the first place.
This is what's happening in my org, talented people was leaving consistently (5-6/month), things are currently maintained with skeleton crews -- the ones that are maintained, the rest are accidents waiting to happen.
Quality inertia is what's preventing stuff from crashing down instantly, but it'll eventually be the case. It's just a matter of when the last guy that's worth their role leaves.
Most "SDEs" attracted by past big money have below-minimum reading skills, can't write code, can't troubleshoot, can't debug anything even if they life depends on it. They were hired to form a particular structure for the manager two levels above to be promoted.
I agree they may decline over time, but I don’t know how to disambiguate that from the general rot of big tech companies that have been around for a long time.
When Elon fired everyone, people said Twitter would collapse, but they’ve been technologically ok. They may be struggling on the business end but that’s more likely to be caused by the owner telling advertisers to fuck themselves and by him tweeting racist conspiracy theory stuff rather than any problems with their infra.
Wall St. tightening their grip on the STEM population.
As a reminder,
https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
> Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer
> Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
> Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled.
https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
I have yet to see metrics cited by any of these announcements. Do people think that's because:
a). They don't have metrics, and all the cynics are right about this being vibes based
b). They actually do have the data, and it's very grim for how poorly people on average perform when WFH but don't want to share it due to sensitivity or something
Like, i'm actually pro Work From Office (don't yell at me, i joined a company with this culture in place already on purpose) so i tend to believe that it's more productive for myself and the population on average but if that's true why has nobody proved it? why aren't any of these companies able to show data?
You forgot
c). They don't feel strongly about WFH vs remote, but getting a bunch of employees to quit is a great way to reduce headcount and then fill any necessary positions from the pool of endless candidates likely to work for less. Normally this is a poor move because they would lose employees who are already onboarded, and hiring is typically more expensive, but Amazon has always been more than happy to let go of experienced employees as part of their sacrifices to the pip gods. Normally this would also be a bad idea because the employees you lose would be the employees who are in highest demand, so likely their best employees. But with 50 candidates waiting in the wings for every rockstar they lose, they figure they'll likely be able to pull more diamonds out of the rough, and even with hiring and onboarding, their long-term expenditure will be less than if they hadn't triggered an exodus.
Considering how much negative publicity companies see every time one of they require RTO, and yet not one has published metrics? They absolutely don't have any.
Pretty obvious when all of these CEO reports lean on nebulous “culture” benefits.
Yeah, i guess that just leads to the question of "why not?"
It's almost certainly not b. There has been enough published research showing WFH to be somewhere between a significant productivity boost to a modest decrease that such data would be a significant outlier.
More likely the policy is being pushed for some combination of:
- Increased attrition
- Intangibles that management believes in
- Expected modest productivity gains they think are worth the downsides
- Reducing worker leverage
Amazon already openly stated that there is no data to support RTO:
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
My company did a survey on this. Comparing 2021 to 2023, WFH had 15-20% more supporters than WFO, as per last year's results. They simply ignored this statistic and mandated a return to office anyways.
98% of the people responded negatively to the change in our remote work flexibility when we heard about it. Higher management continues to ignore that 98% of its productive workforce is not happy and the good engineers WILL leave the company.
What are you basing this on? Just the perception from the outside? that's my view too and while what you said makes a certain sort of sense but is also so overly complicated compared to just doing layoffs (which they have done, so not like they always avoid them)
I loathe going to the office I'm a critic, it's (A) vibes
Do you think they have metrics showing the opposite? or just nobody even wants to look into it since leadership wants it badly?
If they had metrics they would not hesitate to show them, parading those in front of employees like a victory banner.
Amazon does stack ranking, they are not really concerned with sensitivity anything.
They have no metrics. Metrics are for the underclass. The Leadership decides based on what they want.
Nobody looks into it because leadership wants to assert dominance. If some top floor, corner office, personal assistant type of person wants to see people suffering, they get to see people suffering. Cubicles, hot desking, howling ventilation and all. Commutes don't matter - the CXO might even have a driver.
No one has metrics on anything. High performers perform well at home and in the office, but if they prefer home they'll jump ship as soon as there's an opportunity. Low performers perform badly at home and in the office, but will cling in to their position as long as possible.
In software engineering we still haven't developed a good metric for output of our work, so it's hard to see how they could even have decent data. It's an open question how we can measure productivity when each task is substantially different from previous tasks.
Right, so presumably the data indicates the opposite? Or they knew better to not look for it? Confused by the whole thing
So why do something irrational that is not in the company’s best interest? Must be they want to reduce headcount, but even then, this is a poor way because the people with options will leave.
Any company that tells me I have to be in office 5 days a week is a company I am never bringing home a laptop for. If the place burns down because it isn't adequately staffed outside of normal working hours, so be it.
You're definitely bringing your laptop home when you're oncall.
I'm never going to be on call. It is a condition of my employment. If you've let them abuse you like that, then it's on you.
That isn't to say that if something needs to be overseen because a part of our infrastructure needs updating that I won't volunteer. But being mandated to babysit systems? No, absolutely not.
Companies are their people. What else does AWS have? Patents? Worthless. Name brand? Ephemeral. Server farms? Cost centers.
We could all switch to Linode tomorrow and forget AWS existed the day after.
“We’re better when we’re together” So stop offshoring “No not like that”
The only way out of this is probably unionization. Or a slow death from the inefficiency of idling or pushing out so many people who are job hunting while coasting.
I never imagined Amazon could be a place to coast and collect a paycheck until they fire you. Bet there's a ton of 2-job 1-person incomes right now. The company culture is rotten and the leadership principles don't have any meaning.
I'm really tired of seeing CEOs and the C-Suite all having three or more jobs. They really need to focus.
If they don’t lose a ton of people from this, I would bet other faangs follow suit in the new year.
The next year is long away, let’s see how o1 changes the things. The side with the upside drives the employment conditions in the end.
Hmm I am not sure what exactly is Amazon trying to solve for? I reckon only the managers know.. Moving to office-first does not solve the root cause - because it might be some other deep seated issues. If it's really about boosting collaboration and communications in a remote working culture, that requires fostering by the Management especially the company does not start with remote first culture from the get-go.
My company just pushed for a 3-day at the office week, now that Amazon is going back to full time at the office, I think it's only a matter of weeks before higher management decides that it's time to return to the office.
We don't have enough space for everyone and a lot of the workers are located 1h away from their office. And yet, higher management is being so opaque about this mandated return to office scheme.
They can "tell" employees all they want, but the engineers who really get stuff done are not going to get fired for working from home, and a bunch of them are choosing to stay remote ... or paying lip service to office days by promising to come in and then not showing up.
What are managers going to do with critical engineers who are delivering? Fire them? They will have another job doing their individual contributor work in a week. There's a real shortage of individual contributors with skills and the ability to deliver consistently.
On the other hand, if you are in one of those political mid-career positions that mostly involves communication, coordination, impressions, etc., then yeah, the org doesn't need you as much as you need the org so you better haul your ass back to work.
Having worked remotely for many years more than most people than I meet by fair margin..
I love my home setup. It’s better than my office setup. But my office has faster fibre than I’ll ever get at home and I can get more done.
It’s ok for both to be good for different things.
Entirely remote or in person isn’t ideal. I maintain both a home and work. Just when I think I might not need one I get reminded.
Too much of anything or one can limit or stall your growth and lead to all those feels of why do you feel you’re standing still when you’re sitting at home all the time, or just the same office.
Companies have to be designed to be distributed, or suck at it. Distributed is a better word I find than remote (disconnected) or virtual (those contributions aren’t real)
Having a mix of activity and locations to
I really like to think that in a year or two, I can basically make a fortune by applying for jobs that require me to go to the office every day. I actually enjoy it. I have no proper office at home (nor room to build one). And it helps me separate work from "recreation" by having dedicated (disjoint) places for both.
It seems that "being okay to commute to work daily" or even "enjoying work in an office" is a skill that is rapidly getting lost, like coding in Cobol.
Cobol developers can basically set their own hourly rates and still get hired, so I hope that we few "like-to-go-to-the-office" people will be able to do the same soon....
So: who actually enjoys going to the office daily, like me?
You wouldn't enjoy it if your commute was 3 hours total a day, or nobody you work with is also in the office (all meetings are remote) or if the lunch options were bad and overpriced, or you rent a bad apartment from a negligent landlord because even a decade into your tech career you cannot own a home in your city (Canada). Your preference for in-office is not a skill, it's a privilege that you haven't experienced how stupid and horrible in-office can be.
I see Mayor Bruce Harrell rubbing his hands together as he slowly nods in approval of all this.
Hopefully where I work doesn't try to pull this off. At least my manager would not like it one bit seeing as their commute is already 50 min one way 2 to 3 times a week. But who am I kidding, it will probably happen and then I get to sit on video calls in the office with all the people I collaborate with across the states and europe.
Or maybe all of the ridiculous pressure from sky high salaries and no affordable housing led to the homeless population...
Not sure why they went all the way to 5 days when 4 days would have done most of the job. Anyone has insights into this?
You know, I’m actually pretty surprised that there’s not more lobbying for some kind of tax incentives to promote remote work. It takes a lot of burden off transportation networks. Honestly, it’s probably cheaper than building more roads and more rail.
I suppose the best you can do is just use the commute cost in your calculations of what your compensation is worth. I made a lateral move to a company that offers hybrid work. The irony is the company I came from was all in office, but I worked exclusively with people outside of my office so I would drive to work just to interact with people on MSTeams.
Public transportation is also cheaper than building more and wider roads, but I'm not sure it's straightforward to sell this idea.
In the Americas most people are still fixated on owning a car.
In political debates in my city, public transportation is only ever talked about as a burden on the city's finances, never mind that car infrastructure costs many times more.
I can believe that 3 days a week in the office is more productive than 0, and maybe 4 slightly more than 3, but I wonder if 5 is any more productive than 4, or if Amazon is mostly trying to reduce headcount.
Are there studies on productivity vs. # of days in office for white collar workers?
> But, we rarely here the same from managers.
a) My manager has zero problems with remote working and has found the team to be just as productive. AFAIK, my manager also doesn't waste time posting on HN.
b) Are you SURE we're rarely hearing from managers? It's often that people don't bother to mention whether or not they're a people manager... because why the hell would you?
c) In ANY sufficiently large software business, you WILL have some-to-many geographically distributed teams. If your geographically distributed teams work fine with their asses in company-provided seats, then they can nearly always work fine in with their asses in worker-provided seats.
If you're good enough to work for Amazon, you're probably also good enough to start your own startup or get equally paying work elsewhere, even in the current market.
I read the internal memo shown in the article and I really dislike how casually he tries to put a positive spin on forcing everyone back into the office with zero mention of the consequences on the employees and no hard evidence on any productivity benefit.
Studies show that out of full time in office, hybrid and remote, in office is the least productive.
I expect to see an exodus of top talent from Amazon and possibly a reduction in the quality of their services.
There's only hard evidence that WFH is more productive. They would be plastering the productivity of in office work if there was any.
discussion in Blind: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Amazon-5-days-RTO-yQTXm6YQ
Am I the only one who scrolled down and read the full memo? Thats the biggest load of shit Ive ever read - like maybe seriously it is. Thats epic bullshit. I don't even think Zuckerberg could top that with his brand of AW SHUCKS WE CAN DO BETTER GUYS!
"I continue to believe that we are all here because we want to make a difference in customers’ lives, invent on their behalf, and move quickly to solve their problems."
"We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way"
"To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID." - The stock price is UP $100/share since March '19
If you didn't read the whole thing take a minute and revisit the article. NO MATTER WHAT DO NOT THROW YOUR LAPTOP OR PHONE!
Now, we get to see if 5/15/40/40 is the handcuffs its intended to be.
An experience I’m familiar with: 1. Hired fully remote to virtual location etc. 2. A few months after joining RTO (return to office) enforced even though I’m not technically returning 3. About a year later RTH (return to team hub) announced with about 1 month for internal transfer or move to Seattle with in a few months. 4. Roughly 2 months later 5 days a week announced.
Never has a white-collar office needed so desperatelyl to be unionized.
Why would they unionize when most of their comp is stock? The fear mongering, uncertainty and doubt stoked by their CEO's fully-owned press[1] would tank their stock value.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/business/media/jeff-bezos...
So they can fight back against before forced into the office 3 days per week?
People have democracy in the personal lives, but not in the workspace. Unions give the workers democratic power so they can collectively make demands of the business owners. They can also demand a greater share of profits.
Serious question: why is stock more valuable than cash at this moment?
Color me surprised..
> the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy
More quiet firing?
> also plans to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer managers in order to “remove layers and flatten organizations,”
Combined with not so quiet firing?
> Jassy took the helm and instituted widespread cost cuts across Amazon, including the largest layoffs in its 27 years as a public company.
Cost cuts worked great for Boeing. Can't wait to see Amazon stock go through the roof.
Is this move possibly motivated by what Elon did at Twitter?
Working from home has advantages, but my boss also cancelled home-office. One big customer of us went for extensive home-office. And since then that company seems to be paralyzed. Workers there are openly doing personal stuff during video meetings. And it became impossible to get any decisions. A lot of people just don't have the discipline to work unsupervised.
I suppose this means Amazon wants to cut their workforce without announcing layoffs.
Bingo. The other tool they use is a secretly higher perf review bar.
It's like these LinkedIn awards for best company to work for mean nothing anymore!!!
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/linkedin-top-comp...
The job market is tough out there for SDEs. Granted, I'm not top-tier talent by any means, but this past year I interviewed for like 10x as many jobs as I did in my previous 15 years of working with no luck. I even get ghosted by recruiters that reached out to me first.
So, I have my doubts about easily for most people, even at these places.
For the same level of compensation? near their home? do these company offer remote/hybrid position to new joiners? do they even hire at the moment?
Avoid businesses this large, they mimic each other/get the rough end of politics. Trading one ham-fisted set of policies for another
You know how cities or even states try to compete for employer offices/headquarters? This is the other side of that.
Are we near shareholders dividends or CEO bonus and we need people to quit without paying severance? My last company did the same announcement, I acted like I didn't receive anything, instead of quitting, eventually after 8 months of "Oh didn't get it", they terminated me with severance
This is an attrition forcing tool.
These CEO's who think they are business geniuses fail to grasp that they look like morons parroting this "RTO means productivity and collaboration" nonsense which has been disproven time and time again.
They are doing this because they are just dumb people. They over hire and allow their organizations to become bloated because they know that when it's time to make their metrics look good, they just create such miserable work environments that they know they will lose some people. Next comes the layoffs.
I mean, this is ape level intelligence here. No thought required.
Mandatory overtime law is in order. Every minute beyond 40 hours a week should be automatically billed to the employer.
Ignoring the RTO part, I'm always confused that a CEO implements weird sweeping changes like "we're increasing the ratio of ICs to managers by 15%".
Like, if he's not happy with the productivity of his workers, shouldn't he be telling his SVPs/VPs to come up with plans, and/or hold them accountable?
I think it's really as simple as a big corpo just pushing their employees as far as they can, as always. we can debate on the benefits of WFH, but really in this market employees just don't have much leverage.
How does Amazon's RTO policy correspond to their mostly Asian-Subcontinent H1B workforce? Is this a strategy to get rid of those few American citizens that are still there and replace them with indentured serfs who won't argue with management?
At this point forced RTW is just a red flag and a clear giveaway about the company's execs and their culture. I think it's great they are doing this because we know who to avoid on the job market.
> Inverted triangle
That can't be the case my man. Even if there was a manager for every two employees below, the number of all managers at all levels would at most be equal to the number of employees at the lowest level given that:
x (lowest level) = x/2 (first) + x/4 (second) + x/8 (third) + ...
In reality, there are way more employees per manager and the levels of management is not infinite, so the ratio of managers to employees is way less than 1.
is there a spreadsheet somewhere that shows if a company is WFH or RTO or HYB?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ar4qcghnGjlGwZAAXdu2...
Sounds like another stealth layoff via force attrition.
Must be going well over there.
Rakuten, temu, aliexpress, etc. are probably gaining concerning market share for amazon.
I cancelled prime years ago because if it's some mass produced chinese white label products you can get the same thing on ebay for cheaper let alone the aforementioned 3 for dirt cheap provided you don't care to wait a couple weeks.
Everyone is hawking the same slop, and although amazon can get it to me in a day, that's often not worth the premium.
The problem with that strategy is that for the remote work crowd, the only people who stay are those with golden handcuffs or those that don't have better/other options, so you end up losing your best people to companies that are more flexible.
Or that management wants to make the most of the downturn in tech hiring to make sure the rank and file don't get the wrong ideas about who actually has the power. The extra attrition is probably the icing on the cake.
WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on. Tech employees realizing that collective action can work terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible.
I have made this point to my teammates. When I expressed concern about my job, several of them disagreed and said I was irreplaceable. I told them no one is irreplaceable. The company would be happier with someone who did 60% of my work getting paid 50% less. I am very good at my job in a position where being very good is no more desirable than just good enough.
> I am very good at my job in a position where being very good is no more desirable than just good enough.
This is important to internalize. There are jobs with more downside than upside. When in such a situation, it's often best to move on at your own schedule rather than hanging on too long.
Often the % quality/quantity of work your replacement can/will do is a lot harder to quantify than the 50% less pay, so they will even take 40% of the work for 50% of the pay.
I mean, anyone who hires L3s thinks this to some degree (compared to say, Netflix that has the majority of engineers L5/L6).
However, it's likely they will exempt the right people, it just matters how hard it is to get those exemptions.
Sometimes the goal is to shed some of your most expensive people to cut costs or open up some roles for churn to bring employees up. My employer occasionally does buy outs where they offer payouts to people with certain tenure at the company (and I think age combined) to leave. A few people take that then come back as contractors at even higher rates to solve the lost knowledge but that's for uncommon niches like mainframe people.
These strategies are so odd to me as companies have rigor on who they let IN, so why take an approach that has no tiger on who you force OUT?
Would be better to trim in the right division/department/team/performance ranking than just.. force random increase in departures.
One way it makes a bit of sense is to view it through the lens of avoiding the task of resolving the political dispute of where cuts should be. Business suffer internally from the same kind of paralysis governments can and sometimes market fads dictate you shed costs [0], bring people back to the office, or internal forces incentivize it because you have long term leases that look bad on paper if you're not forcing your employees into the office. [1] Ideally you'd have strong leadership to cut the right people from the right places but they're just people, often there because of other reasons so they struggle to evaluate that properly and the easy answer is to just quietly incentivize increased turn over.
[0] See the last 2-3 years of businesses cutting headcount for "the coming recession" that never came.
[1] Personally I think that's the reason behind my job's recent bump to ~50% in office time from ~25%. We have a number of large buildings either owned or on long term leases that are 'wasted' if they're not forcibly occupied.
Agreed, and not just a remote thing generally.
This is why one big and well communicated cut is always better than round after round.
Once your company tilts into the direction of getting worse, anyone with better options leaves. You end up with a lot of adverse selection as an employer if you take the slow burn approach.
Not necessarily better, at least for the company. The slow burn works out much better for them:
- Gets rid of employees who were on the fence of leaving anyway
- No need to pay out unemployment
- No need to pay out unused PTO (depends on the state)
- No need to notify months in advance (WARN act [1]) or risk heavy fines
- End up with "loyal" employees in the end
If they can get through the short-term pain of losing some good workers, it will eventually balance out, and the show will go on.
[1]
Yes so that was one round of shaking people out, and didn't have a sufficient effect clearly.
Reminds me of an old Russian joke, whose punchline is "why think, I just have to shake harder!"
> “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy wrote. “That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration (you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems), and a shared commitment to each other.”
When I hear a C-level saying they want to operate like a startup, the text processor in my head just replaces that with "we've decided to cut a lot of you, and work the rest like dogs". My condolences to everyone at Amazon whose lives are being turned upside down by this stupid decision, although I guess you knew the company you were working for.
Come to think of it, most of the startups I've worked for were WFH. None of them had assigned desks.
Commuting is probably pointless for a large number of individual office workers as well as their employers, but the busywork of commuting generates so much economic activity and value to society that it can't be killed overnight.
Having people move between home and work drives value in car sales, public transport, real estate valuations, construction, lunch restaurants, public infrastructure projects and countless other things that generates value.
The collected services catering to commuters is larger than any single company, and society can probably not handle a decision (most office workers can work from home) that effectively bankrupts it. It needs to slowly be replaced with something else.
> the busywork of commuting generates so much economic activity and value to society that it can't be killed overnight
Except when it was for 2 years and the economy boomed, you know?
>Except when it was for 2 years and the economy boomed, you know?
It wasn't a boom, it was a bust.
During the pandemic most governments paid through the nose to keep the economy going. The US even paid every American hundreds of dollars directly. Other countries subsidized everything from restaurants to car manufacturers.
Now that this money has to be recovered, inflation has eliminated a decade of salary increases for most workers and governments are borrowing left and right. We can't do many more years like that.
I'm not saying it's right that we force people to commute when they don't have to, but removing this part of the economy is a real problem that has to be handled.
It's like when a coal mine closes, just saying "the coal mine is no longer needed" is no comfort to the unemployed coal workers and the nearby town.
I had exactly this experience at a previous job. I hadn't seen anyone with such confidence. Even worse he was a self-described 'devops' guy that would tell you he wasn't a 'good coder' but would then strong arm the entire dev team on architecture decisions.
I think about it regularly and while I've seen a lot of overconfident phonies, none of them stuck out quite as much as he did...
They really announced that? They really have no self-awareness, or they've decided to fully embrace this whole double speak thing. Why not even both.
Eventually, the goal is to have everyone live in an apartment building in the city and walk to work. That is far less CO2 than people living far away from infrastructure and services in detached single family homes and driving everywhere in their unnecessarily large vehicles.
Ah, I see, 15-minute towns - the idea directly from the green EU.
More like Kowloon, the OG 15-minute city.
Naturally the execs will live far away, next door to the urban planners.
So the goal is to have everyone live in noisy environments totally detached from nature?
>> Amazon said each team will review their structure as part of the process, and that it’s possible they’ll identify roles that are no longer required.
i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer
this capitalistic yearn for endless growth is such a parasitic meat grinder
they write these memos with "touching" stories, i started from the bottom here, 27 years, amazon is my life, blah blah, as if anyone, pardon my french, gives a flying fuck
> i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer
It might not be that they're "out of touch" but rather they just don't care. Sort of like slaveholders back in the day, who often complained about how their slaves were lazy and how unjust it was that the slaves weren't giving their all.
Exactly. Whether you can figure out your daycare situation with 5 day RTO is at the bottom of the long list of things Andy Jassy cares about. Even if you are an L6 -- a senior position that takes years to achieve within Amazon -- that means nothing to the CEO. Probably the same if an L8 decides to leave. So what? There are so many L8s in the company, let's just hire someone else. See this at Apple -- https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/17/ian-goodfellow-joins-de... -- even if you are a DIRECTOR.
Once you realize that the corporate, especially large ones, don't give a ** about your life, you'll have a clear(er) view of how the world actually works, and what you might want to do with your life.
And because of this, I kind of cherish my relationship with my manager. I am an IC and he is a bottom level manager. There is still a lot "human" aspect of this, and he actually cares about me taking time off etc. He himself fears layoffs. You can't say the same when you go up the ladder. The only things senior management cares about are product, revenue and efficiency (maybe a few more). Employees are nothing but replaceable tools. The higher up, the less they are about individual employees.
They've been successful by, been selected for, being "out of touch". Why would they stop now?
> i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer
You must consider their objectives and incentives... making shareholders richer makes them richer. Making employees happier doesn't. (At least in the short term...)
Exactly... we don't need the fucking nonsense of how he made an agreement with his wife on a napkin and other personal shit in his life.
Not getting to the point promptly enough and painting the message to look better only makes it much worse.
When it comes to Amazon, you are allowed all the French you can use..
I guess I'll follow suit and go back to on-premises.
Some companies have used this "technique" to reduce their headcount without having to fire people. Maybe Amazon is doing the same thing.
Wow Amazon must have metrics that show a big productivity increase in-office! I predict trouble for other tech giants that don't have these metric(s)!
Remote work leads to less productivity, this isn't really doubted by anyone not working remotely. At-will employment means either party is free to walk away for reasons like this and that's exactly how it should be.
Surprised it's taken companies this long - I guess it's much harder to rollback than implement this so there will be a set of companies which just suffer on growth/performance and that'll be justification enough for the next cohort to go back to allowing remote work in edge cases only.
Purely observation from team members leaving and browsing the #remote-advocacy channel over the last two years, but the 3-day mandate and the relocations have already pushed most people who can (and want to) quit, to quit.
Every discussion about RTO is missing a big point, it's not being in an office that everyone hates, (even though it's generally worse than home), it's the commute to and existence of downtown cores.
Companies, stop buying the most expensive real estate! Setup offices 2 towns outside a major city and encourage your employees to move to that town.
The US with its top 15 cities are all infested shitty rat holes.
Why do we continue to try to optimize existing cities, rebuilding over and over with insane expense rather than grow and invest in more, smaller cities.
I can’t tell if this applies to AWS as well but companies that have gone on all in on cloud hosted infrastructure should probably come up with an exit strategy pretty quickly given Amazon’s general flailing.
You really don’t want your important systems being underpinned services run either by disgruntled employees about to quit or by the bottom of the barrel types who have no choice but to stay even when treated like this.
As a former senior person at aws although I left on good terms I will never return there and this stuff cements the deal for me. I need a company that respects my decisions on how I do best in my career and not surveil of police my work style. As long as I am a trusted leader who delivers results that customers need why does anyone care where my bag of water is physically located? Who are you to tell neurodivergent employees to suffer? People who had an organ transplant to expose themselves to death? How petty are the tyrants.