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
Wow, look at the number of comments. Lots of entitlement around here. We have a saying around here, "give them a finger, and they will demand your whole hand." Fascinating how a single precedence case can raise expectations through the roof. The office will not go away, no matter how much the priviledge people rant.
Surely you mean "agile desk arrangements"! (What a euphemism)
That would actually put me off working for Amazon (though, I mean, there's a lot that would). I like working from an office, but I did _not_ like the hot-desking that I had to do post-pandemic because our office wasn't big enough (my employer eventually let people who come in frequently get assigned desks, and it's been a huge quality of life improvement).
The brain drain will continue until the stock price improves, I guess.
The four day business day is still best. In office or not.
What an absolutely dishonest company, lying to employees repeatedly. I’ve heard from Amazon friends that their internal survey even shows that remote work improved productivity. But their old school behind the times executives don’t care. Plus whenever I visit Seattle I’m blown away that it has worse traffic than LA, so I don’t see how it is good for them either, since employees won’t stay late to make up for the time lost to commute.
[dupe]
Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421
They will make everyone sit and watch “Rings of Power.”
I used to work for a company that had a lot of rules about working from home/working in office and I hate being controlled.
I just came here to say that quitting back in 2023 was the best decision I ever made.
Well, that makes sense, since Amazon has been losing money and it's stock has been underperforming ever since they went fully remote - oh, wait.
Yeah, this is exactly why I ignored every single recruiter email from Amazon during and after the pandemic years. I knew this was going to be the result no matter what promises they gave.
I wonder if engineers are going to start refusing to do on-call. "Sorry, it's going to take me an hour to get to the office because I'm not allowed to work remotely".
Snark aside, that's not how oncall works at Amazon.
The oncall person has a laptop (and perhaps a pager), and they are expected to remote connect ASAP when needed. That was the norm well before Covid; doesn't make sense to wait for a commute before responding.
But then maybe after you do the first level of triage, if it's still ongoing, then you go in to the office.
I hear a fair amount of this sentiment floating around. Not so much "I won't do oncall" but more so a deflation of moral -- if you want clock punchers, we can be clock punchers.
Setting a SEV2 to "pending" does prevent you from getting re-paged during the weekend when you're at home (where work, as I understand it, does not get done).
I think there should be a automatic overtime law. Every minute beyond 40 hours should be automatically billed to the company.
Use the laptop spy software that companies have been conveniently using anyway to enforce this.
i don't agree with the mandate but at the very least, if they're going to do this they should absolutely exempt workers from returning to office during the periods they are on-call!
Do you work on software that gets sold to customers? Often, uptime guarantees are included in contracts. If your software breaks, somebody has to fix it.
> Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support?
Because eng is the only people who know how the software works if it breaks, who else can fix it?
I would also say that good support is not trivial (this is not eng specific, it's a company wide initiative) and can be a competitive differentiator
> Is this an American corporate thing?
It's a "Our company has sufficiently-complex software that we sell to customers that pay us enough money to justify calling in one or more programmers outside of regular business hours to help handle problems that one or more of those customers considers Very Serious that our (IME often very, very knowledgeable) support staff can't figure out." thing.
In my experience its more for critical time-sensitive systems that run in off-hours (i.e. if this job fails overnight it needs to get fixed before x time or we'll be bleeding massive amounts of money).
So even if there is tiered support, they'll want an SME on some aspect of the system on-call as a fallback for higher/highest level triage.
Oncall isn't user support. Amazon (and a lot of services) are supposed to work correctly even outside of office hours and someone needs to be able to fix things. That's one downside of software as a service.
The irony here...
"On the first topic, we’ve always sought to hire very smart, high judgment, inventive, delivery-focused, and missionary teammates. And, we have always wanted the people doing the actual detailed work to have high ownership."
Then shortly later..
"We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements"
So they hire smart people with great judgement who have high ownership but also treat them like incompetent workers who need to show up to the office, in their assigned seat & do their assigned tasks... And he calls this startup culture? Can Amazon even be considered a "tech" company at this point? It seems long gone are the days of innovation & growth at the cost of profit.
As someone in a hot desking situation, I would kill for an assigned seat.
I do not even have someplace to put a coffee cup. Have to pack/unpack all of my stuff daily.
Reminder that Amazon is doing this for itself, and not for you.
I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode. Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so. Now that interest rates have wrecked the employment market they are wasting no time going scorched earth on their current remote employees. The narratives they keep shoving down peoples throats are insulting at best. They should just tell everyone they want to stand over people and feel powerful and get it over with.
I don't think revenge is the motivation, but it's hard to know what the actual motivation is. I think it's some mix of:
- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
- Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
- Belief that remote workers are more likely to jump to another company
- Opportunity to claw back a perk that can be returned in future negotiations if needed
- Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks
- Execs personally prefer employees in office for some other reason (e.g., wanting to feel powerful)
- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)
> and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
They had the exact opposite conclusions when they were pushing WFH. They also shut down comment threads and questions from internal employees asking for data backing up their more recent claims.
> Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks
If AWS starts losing employees at any serious rate, they will collapse. They already have a huge amount of products and services where the initial engineers left and where oncall/support load is absolutely brutal.
Love when the “we use data” people shut down discussions around hard metrics when it’s not convenient
An open argument doesn't automatically mean hard metrics.
Instead, both sides have to be discussing in good faith, curious about the problem, and open to a variety of conclusions.
If management has already made their decision, that's not going to happen. If employees have already decided to ignore anything that doesn't support WFH, that's not going to happen.
The greatest failure in modern debate is not honestly engaging with data contrary to the outcome one wants.
Yes, I think there's a big distinction between "Execs think being in office is better for culture/productivity" VS "Execs have data that proves being in office is better for culture/productivity."
I believe the first one is true, but not the second.
Perhaps culture and productivity is actually better in office. I'm remote and would like to keep it that way, but that's also an hypothesis to consider (Occam's razor). These big corps claim they're data driven, so perhaps that's what their data is saying.
Truth it, it depends on the type of person, type of team, type of work and most importantly trust.
There are definitely lots of great & honest homeworkers but also know plenty who go on dates or work on their startups secretly.
Why would all of the forced RTO companies not share the golden data that proves their point?
My company was
- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
> Eng was a cost center, so the business side didn't understand and thought it unfair.
- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
> Eng was happy for attrition to meet a strategic goal of 50/50 India hiring
- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)
> Opposite: during the initial switch (we had a mgmt change later too), they found ppl were active more hours on slack, had better silly metrics like code commits, prs, pr reviews. Not the best measure, but since no one knew they were looking, likely to be relatively accurate. They were very confident in this posture.
> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
This is something that banks and commercial real estate owners would want, but it is highly unlikely to be motivating the companies actually using the space.
1. If they lease the space, they don’t care about the building values, and in fact would prefer for them to sink so that they can renegotiate leases or move to cheaper buildings.
2. If they own the building, then forcing your own employees into it does relatively little to influence its value, because the value of buildings is determined by the market, ie. the sale prices of similar buildings in similar locations. If buildings around you sell for peanut due to low demand, yours won’t sell for higher just because it’s full. You’d need everyone else to cooperate, and this kind of coordination problem is extremely hard.
3. Even if forcing employees into offices was beneficial from the perspective of real estate values, or at least people responsible for managing real estate inside the companies, the fact of the matter is that these people ultimately don’t have enough pull to enforce such a critical policy change. No CEO in his or her right mind will decide to sign off on return to office mandate based on any real estate value projections. The potential gain here is really trivial relative to changes in employee productivity or increases in turnover.
> - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
I think this is the reason, but its more nuanced than this. Management finds in-office employees easier to manage. They are more likely to attend meetings, participate in team communication, give status updates, etc. There's much less of a question around "is this person doing the work" if you can see them doing something that looks like work in the office. If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
Management of remote employees is a huge information gathering exercise - very little of the above information is proactively surfaced to you, and instead you have to go looking for it. Frankly, it's just a lot more work for managers.
I realize the above may not be fair to employees, or that the perceptions of managers accurately resemble the truth - just stating what I think is going on.
> They are more likely to attend meetings ... give status updates, etc.
Weird. If I missed meetings and failed to give status updates (especially ones where my update was explicitly requested) my manager would go find out what the fuck was wrong with me.
> If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
After more than four years of most software folks doing remote work, if your team hasn't established a solid protocol for doing IMs, voice/video chats, and email communications then your management has been fucking off and management deserves all the remote-communications failures they're getting. So, for the rest of this discussion let's assume that management hasn't been fucking off and you actually have a solid communications protocol.
If a coworker is regularly blowing off messages, then that's something that their manager NEEDS to know about. (And it's likely that if they're blowing off messages, they'd also be fucking off if their ass was in a company-provided seat.) However, if a coworker is failing to reply because they're working on something else that's more important then this is another thing that their manager needs to know about and consider reprioritizing your, their, or both people's tasks.
Frankly, I find the "get someone's attention with an IM (whether direct or in a team chat channel) or email" mechanism to be far, far, far better than having someone shatter my chain of thought by coming over to physically interrupt me. I know when I can't handle interruptions, so I can configure my software to not interrupt me. Others can't possibly know when I can't handle interruptions, so they can't help BUT to interrupt me during those periods.
- Upper management wants to reserve remote perks for themselves. Otherwise what's the point of being upper management without perks.
Like a private plane to commute from California to Seattle every week to work in office!
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/starbucks-ceo-commute-priva...
it's really an indictment of management, whose inability to learn how to manage a remote workforce means that they default back to the idea of management by walking around that they learned at HBS
if your management tree is a bunch of ex MBB consultants, you absolutely have this problem whether you believe so or not
It is. My favorite story as an immediate aftermath of post-covid was a middle manager complaining that he 'had to throw away his toolset' ( code word for being able to threaten people into compliance ). Management and executive class have been skating by and, having completed my MBA not that long ago, I can categorically say that some reckoning is due.
> - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
fwiw I talk to a lot of execs/board members and the belief here is genuine, whether or not workers agree with it. Most other execs I've talked to have wanted to pull the trigger on full RTO for years but have been afraid because they know it's a hugely unpopular decision. With a major player like Amazon doing it now, it's suddenly a lot easier to justify to employees. I suspect by 2026 fully-remote jobs will be about as common as they were pre-COVID, which is to say they exist but are an exception, not the norm.
> - An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word. Layoffs = we want to cut spending to improve our cash position/burn rate/etc. It's more accurate to say it's a way to get rid of people who aren't "dedicated" for lack of a better word, without a ton of paperwork. The idea being that if someone hates the company enough that showing up to an office 5 days/week will make them quit, you're better off replacing them.
> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now
> this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word
Well, it's not quite the same as the forced relocation to Alaska, but if you're taking away a hugely popular perk and forcing people back to spending a couple of hours a day commuting, then you have to realize you are going to lose people, even if you rationalize it as a loyalty or team spirit test.
Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ... the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones who are unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as pissed off employees.
I find it very unlikely that we return to prepandemic work culture. Too many people value more flexible arrangements and so many people will trade compensation for quality of life and many companies will find it a competitive edge that gives than access to great workers who would otherwise take more money from full time RTO companies.
Maybe. A lot of people have to be in-person and a lot of people can't just casually trade off compensation for coming into an office if that's an option. There's probably more flexibility in general though some of that is as much about mobile communications as post-pandemic.
It’s not that execs have investments but if a company spends hundreds of millions of dollars on half-empty buildings, they look bad and are losing money on the investment.
Yeah. What I've seen personally is that normalizing rarely coming into an office means that a lot of people essentially stop coming in even if maybe coming in half the time and doing off-sites actually makes a lot of sense. People just make coming into an office an exceptional event and if other people they know aren't there, why bother? Latterly, if I came into my nominal work location 30 minutes away, I would not know or work with a single person there.
And it may even be understandable to the degree that they end up moving a couple hours away so now it's a huge pain for them and their co-workers to get together. You don't need commercial real-estate conspiracy theories.
> This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now.
Amazon's main shareholders are Vanguard and the like, that for sure also have big commercial real estate investments.
>This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now
What you're replying to doesn't specify commercial.
If you know any executives, you know they own multiple homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.
Plus this isn't even about individual executive investments. It is about corporate investments, and duty to shareholders.
> If you know any executives, you know they own multiple homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.
I don't understand how the massive rise in residential real estate prices from 2020 to 2022 shows any dots between RTO and home prices being connected.
Look people, those foosball tables are a major investment.
Major.
US tax codes prevent hiring software devs. No one is going to hire US software devs ever again. (Good voting guys!).
https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/12/19/the-tax-change-that-s-...
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act law of 2017 that created this mess was passed during the Trump admin and went into effect in 2022:
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accountin...
Just in case folks weren't sure who the parent comment was accusing.
(Parent was telling folks not to vote for Trump, right?)
> Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so.
They are in 'avoid responsibility and blame all misses on circumstances outside their control' mode. Remote work is the perfect excuse for incompetent management in big tech.
Good theory. Killing remote seems the first line of defense in covering.
Kind of killing the golden goose though. If this was the plan then it would be better to NOT force a return to office and just keep blaming everything on WFH over and over with a little "millennials/Z just don't want to work anymore" sprinkled in.
This sounds much more likely to me than the revenge narrative.
I think it's more the few bad apples that spoil the bunch.
Have you heard of over-employment? There are people working 2-3 full-time jobs, pulling over $500k, while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.
There are a ton more that are working one job, but likewise giving very little output. It's harder to catch those folks in the act when they don't physically have to be present in the office.
While in office can be less productive in a fair amount of aspects it can also be more so in others. It isn't always some sinister plan from above.
Labor costs have risen greatly post-lockdowns, so companies expect to see a return on their money, more so in a rapidly tightening labor market.
> It's harder to catch those folks...
I don't understand this; if they aren't producing what's expected of them, that's noticeable, and a problem. If they are producing what's expected of them, that's good, and what's it matter what they're doing with their time?
For the first time in my career I feel able to actually perform to the expectations set for me as remote staff. I don't have to invent busy work to do while I'm waiting on another team, I can just go do laundry.
If management doesn't have faith that their team's output is what it "should be" that's a separate problem from being in-office.
I think it's harder to quantify realistic work outputs in some settings, especially if work outputs have been skewed in recent years by people cooking the clock. In others I think they have observed a drop in work output. With the formerly very loose labor market I don't think there was much they could do about it before, but now they see RTO as an option to rein it in. I think if both sides of the equation more consistently approached things in a reasonable manner then both sides would be better off.
That sounds like a management problem to me. If they can't tell that someone's output is that low, then clearly they need to switch their goals for what they consider "productive."
I don't know what you think "management" does, but it's not just being a panopticon on making sure every individual employee is performing to their expectations.
In the same environment that is affecting SDEs right now, managers are more and more being asked to do more individual contributor actions, while increasing their span of control.
They have their own work to do, primarily in how they report progress and vision UPWARDS. Most IC's don't realize but depending on their skip level, managing "upwards" may be requiring more than half of a manager's time.
So sure, they know if the overall team work gets done. And they absolutely know their top and bottom performers. But in the middle? Lots of room for variability. Is someone good even if they're not coding becaue they seem to be unblocking others? Is someone good if they're not talking to anyone but cranking out tons of code? This is where most performance management time ends up going to.
And in no point in today's culture, does it account for the possibility of catching people that are moonlighting or coasting.
When you hire managers, some percentage of them won't be solid. And even the best managers have to balance giving someone a chance vs spotting abuse.
In these bigger companies it is very time consuming and difficult to fire someone. In some it is nearly impossible for a manager, and they can't replace the headcount until they do.
There's a real tradeoff between employment stability and managerial oversight in companies at scale.
Not if they can just force enough people to RTO and the ones who won't leave. If we don't organize against this, and negotiate as individuals with our individual managers, we can only sit back and observe this happen to us and our peers.
That's why we have to have spyware on everyone's computers! How else could we possibly measure productivity?
I used to hate the over-employment thing, because I suspected it was making my own job harder while I do someone else’s job. But I get it now. Workers can only be punished so many times for being passionate, interested, and trustworthy before they say “ok, let’s do things your way” to management, and start to play the game that the system has pushed them into.
If you want to treat your employees as cogs in a machine, constantly frustrate well intentioned shows of initiative, remove their job security and treat them as interchangeable and discardable.. then you should expect them to do exactly and only what they are told rather than looking around for the best way to help. If you can’t keep them busy & don’t really understand what they do well enough to supervise or evaluate the work, and you slashed wages for the same job to half what it was a few years ago.. hell yes they are getting another job and laughing if you’re upset about it.
Interestingly to me, there’s still many who believe tech is some sort of utopia of meritocracy where everything is logical and sound, because (relatively) high labor rates.
It’s always been a factor of ROI for the roles vs competitive labor market rates. Tech tends to operate closer to business leadership than many industries so many get this idea of being modern clerics or something and being part of the nobility class in organizations when again, really we’re often some of the most despised in the labor force as a necessary evil that must be paid (relatively) high where at every turn cost optimization experiments are attempted at our expense.
Business leadership doesn’t like you, they like that the things you can do can be wielded to scale their and the organizations wealth higher than most roles, because tech scales. That’s about it, IMHO at least.
> while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.
This is the tax for dysfunctional organization and bad management, it has nothing to do with office presence. Most people who work less than expected don’t work elsewhere and have very different reasons for that. They can continue doing that in the office: if their manager didn’t notice low productivity in remote setting, very likely this won’t happen in the office too.
Reminds me of the famous Reagan "welfare queen" story about someone showing up in Cadillac to use their food stamps. Did it happen, probably. Is it widespread, it is representative of most people on food stamps. Of course not.
Same situation here. Of course it's happened, some people have taken advantage of remote work. So what's the manager's excuse for not catching this?
> Reagan "welfare queen" story about someone showing up in Cadillac to use their food stamps. Did it happen, probably.
Real person, but absolutely not representative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor
Reagan was taking it mostly from a single case, about which he then made up a bunch of shit, because reality wasn’t bad enough for him:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor
He also liked to imply that people living large on welfare & benefits fraud (which, already not really a great description of what was going on even in this exemplar case) was widespread and not, you know, a thing he knew about from a single case because the woman was caught and charged with crimes. What an asshole (Reagan, I mean—well, her too, I suppose).
Basically this lady was committing fraud in just about every possible way she had access to, and welfare was just one of them. She then, maybe, kept doing it after release from prison, if you read between the lines a little (though mostly estate and insurance fraud, not welfare, if she was still committing fraud)
If you can get your work done in only a few hours and you are not marked as a low performer and fired something horribly wrong with your job expectations and your management.
If they can complete the sprint in a few hours, I don't see why they can't do that. Executives typically hold multiple board positions and they are perfectly fine for that.
>I don't see why they can't do that.
Because they report to the person who says they can't.
Maybe that person should say something else instead.
they had a 3 days a week in office policy, that should be sufficient to catch the people you are talking abut
"A handful of employees might not be performing to spec, and we can't be bothered to find a good way to measure that, so let's screw over hundreds and hundreds of good employees instead" is still basically malice.
How does any worker manage that? Your output is, you're saying, a few hours out of 40 in a week. That's impossible for someone actually doing something -- surely only managers can get away with that.
If a manager thinks someone is doing that, fire them as your belief is that person is not contributing. Do their job yourself in the time you would have spent managing them, get a bonus for cost savings.
>Labor costs have risen
Call us when C-suite wages drop back to the comparative levels they were even 10 years ago.
Workers got a wake-up call. Capitalist still want to shackle them and beat the work out of them whilst they run off with the money.
Massive wealth gaps can't end soon enough.
>It's harder to catch those folks in the act when they don't physically have to be present in the office.
Maybe look at output? My experience is in call center/helpdesk. Either someone takes calls and tickets or they do not, very noticeable.
If the company really wants, there is software like Teramind and Aktivtrak that screenrecords and keylogs.
I don’t care how long anyone works. If you work 5000 hours but don’t produce anything useful, you’re no good to me.
I know exactly who gets work done. I can easily check the git repos and I’m at the standups. Some people are straight up negative value but cannot be fired. It’s impossible to fire anyone.
Firing happens all the time. Do you just mean at your company nobody ever gets fired?
False equivalence. The issue you describe is an issue of setting goals and measuring output.
This feels like a strawman. How many people are working multiple jobs? How many are doing it effectively enough to not get caught nor fired for poor performance? And, if they are able to somehow juggle multiple jobs without performance/NDA issues, then is it really a problem?
I know someone who worked at Google and Dropbox both at the same time. He was an intermediate level developer. But he managed to do both pretty much without stress.
> It's harder to catch [remote workers]
Yeah... that feels like it should be true - obviously they're harder to monitor because you can't see them! - but I think if you really think about it it isn't.
I think the number of people actually working more than one job is very small. So you're really talking about people slacking off, and that's just as easy to do in the office. Unless your boss is literally next to you anyway.
I used to read Reddit all the time at work.
Absolutely, it's a silly argument. I knew plenty of people who slaked off in-person, most managers aren't literally standing behind you watching your screen. It's IMO a bad metric anyway, I'll read Reddit, HN, watch Youtube, etc. when I'm "supposed" to be working because I need to take a break, and I get more than enough done and work enough hours that it doesn't impact my work.
The things you can't hide are having no meaningful update for stand-up every day, not completing any cards, not participate in conversations/planning, etc. If's that not catching up to them then that's on management for not paying attention.
It’s not justice towards the employer, but justice towards your peers, both those who you work with directly, as well as those who are negatively impacted because you took a job that could have been someone else’s.
If you want to have multiple jobs at the same time, there is a vehicle available for that, it’s called “consulting”.
I don’t think anyone should have loyalty towards their employer - you should be free to jump ship to a better gig whenever you want, in the same way they are free (in the US) to let you go at their convenience. But taking multiple full time jobs is wrong, imo.
Yes,revenge(or rather a desire for reversion to the previous norm) might be part of the reason, however there might be another aspect which makes it more urgent for the execs
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 genuinely terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible before people start to organize. The weak job market just makes it easier and the upcoming interest rate cuts might dent that advantage a bit.
All—every one of—the non-tech office workers in my social circle at this point are at least hybrid with a more remote days than in-office.
And almost none of my social circle is tech, so this sample is a fair proportion of all the people I know. Four different industries, and government, state and federal. All at least hybrid-mostly-remote, and about a third fully remote. Still, this long after the pandemic. Most aren’t high-earning, either, so it’s not that they have remarkably high personal leverage or something.
It’s to the point that non tech office workers I know aren’t going back to full-time in the office unless the pay difference is enormous. WFH is too valuable.
Yep, the tragedy is that the average tech worker has 'temporarily embaressed rockstar billionare' syndrome, and they've got it bad. They don't need collective action because their beautiful, perfect mind can do much better bargaining by themselves.
Carpenters know that they are labor and labor has value only when it takes it through collective action. Somehow tech workers haven't figured that out yet. When will tech workers catch up to carpenters? Hard to say.
I’ve thought we should mirror skilled labours in many ways for a long time but I don’t think we’ve made an inch of progress.
The way newcomers get “mentored” haphazardly by random coworkers and google/youtube/stack overflow/AI is absolutely bizarre and exceedingly unprofessional given our work has real world implications. Some sort of apprenticeship model and at least a degree of oversight would make so much sense, but… Well, we’ve got this mess instead. It’s strange.
Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time. My experience of learning from someone who’d earned their tickets was sooo much better than the self-teaching and cargo-cult leadership I endured in tech.
Despite that, I’m extremely grateful to the people who served as good mentors in my career. It made an immense difference. And while I enjoy self-teaching a lot, it’s awful to need to rely on it because your industry is practically structureless in that regard. So many days of trial by fire that could be avoided.
> Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time.
No, I expected things to work the way you think it should and I don't have a background in the trades. It's just bonkers how bad the industry training is.
I suspect (but definitely do not know) that it stems from a "Why pay to train them when someone else (or maybe they, themselves) will do it for us?" mentality that also just so happens to result in it being hard as fuck to find entry-level work.
Yep, every time an organized labor topic comes up here, all these "Captains Of Industry" show up to HN to tell us how they all think they are making well above their peers' average salary due to their specialized talent and superior negotiation skill, and could not possibly benefit from a union. "Heck, I'll one day be a tech exec myself, and then I'd totally regret supporting unions!"
> I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode
Doesn’t this sound like tribal, us-versus-them, reductive explanation for the behavior of those you disagree with?
I've always felt there was a certain amount of us-versus-them going on in the office -- though I don't think that's the main reason here.
Right now, I think it's a matter of over-hiring the last couple years. This is both a productivity and loyalty check. Anyone not coming in will either be let go, or recognized as an exception.
As for my opinion of there being a level of us-versus-them, I felt it has manifested in things like dress codes. If you're old enough, you might have worked at some place where you wear a suit. That might seem perfectly normal for higher paid management or sales, but it's just keeping people in line at the lower levels.
I've worked at a number of places where "rank has its privileges". Managers would have larger desks, offices, better computers, etc... Regardless of what was needed to do the job.
I'm certain there is a level of "I have to, so you have to", whether it makes sense or not.
Tribalism is in, nuance is out. I'm as much a fan of WFH as anyone and will never go back into an office, but posts like OP's aren't getting us anywhere—they just reinforce the idea that WFH is an immature demand of an entitled and antagonistic subset of engineers who they'd be better off losing anyway.
If it's obvious that my boss' interests are far out of line with my own and he's fine with that, "us-versus-them" is simply the truth. The fact that he can rattle off a complex-sounding but empty justification doesn't change that.
Seems plausible, from what I know of management.
Why do you think tech workers have upper-middle pay but not upper-middle social class or perks (until wfh, partially)? Tribal us-vs-them behavior. Not reductive, just what it is. Can’t let a new group rise into that class just as the MBAs and finance guys are wrapping up kicking doctors and lawyers out.
I just fundamentally disagree with your first sentence. So I guess that’s where the difference is.
I don't like this us vs them mentality. Nothing stops you from starting your own business and being on the "manager" side of things.
Cost of capital is up, productivity is down. So all companies have to work through options to increase productivity, and/or reduce costs. Companies will take different approaches to this
An easy way for "them" to stop that mentality would be to take a pay cut and show solidarity in cutting costs, and yet I don't really see that happening.
> productivity is down
according to which statistics?
And lots of capital.
Not even Elon Musk has enough in AI for example.
> Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so.
I have a contrarian view on this. People will be efficient remotely and the management can use result-oriented performance management only when the talent density is high. Unfortunately high talent density is the luxury that Amazon does not have. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of employees after all. Otherwise, Amazon's culture should be uniquely suitable to WFH. Case in point, many teams are already distributed across multiple time zones; Amazon rely heavily on writeups and asynchronous commenting; and Amazon discourage discussions with more than a handful of people.
> I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode.
Indeed this is how Cory Doctorow explains it: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/
I don't know. Have you acted any differently? Whom have you employed? Did the money come out of your pocket? What were the rules?
> Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so.
I don't know about top executives, but many managers work remotely and would rather keep it that way. Most managers are close to the leaves of the hierarchy tree and are just as powerless as ICs.
In the case of one CEO of a moderately large company who I know pretty well, they honestly do think that the energy and camaraderie of having people in an office is a positive thing and they're probably right. They're also shedding real estate and are pretty resigned to the co-located workers genie not going back into the bottle especially given changes that happened over COVID. Sure, companies can force it but they'll lose a lot of their workforce in many cases and they may not consider that a good tradeoff.
I actually don't think it is about conspiracy theories in general but more about executives trying to recreate a past that had some positive features that have evaporated. Even 15 years ago, I spent a lot of useful face-time with people which evaporated with COVID and travel/off-site budget cuts. You can deal with the latter to some degree but a lot of companies really haven't.
Yeah I can imagine that there is a bit of that going on. I imagine that there's also a bit of pent-up resentment from the pre-pandemic and pandemic era where tech workers were job hopping every couple months and demanding full remote. Now that the tables have turned, mgmt likely feels pretty emboldened.
Imagine being a billionaire CEO and still having to bend over backwards to give “perks” to entitled engineers!
Think of those years and years of suffering that must put a CEO through! To be at the top of the mountain - and still beholden to little people! That is the worst kind of injustice.
And the joy - the relief! - of finally being able to treat the engineers with the same contempt you feel for your customers. It must feel GLORIOUS.
Sadly, other CEOs will be quick to follow for more days in the office or full time in office.
Much quickier than they followed for salary raises, obviously.
Yes, and then the market has an inevitable upswing and they’ve tarnished their reputations as highly desirable employers.
Coming out of this layoff wave my impression is Microsoft and Meta are static on employer desirability, Amazon slightly less desirable, and Google is now IBM 2.0.
Do you think that Amazon treats its customers with contempt?
Using legal loopholes to avoid accountability for selling people unsafe products from Chinese drop shippers is the height of contempt.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/east/2019/06/04/528240...
Absolutely! There are many stories of them shutting off services for and then directly competing with their customers in both the software and the retail space.
I mean, how else would you explain the product search UX on amazon.com?
Thinking like this doesn't help you understand the game, and if you don't understand the game, you can't play it.
And this is how we operationalize age discrimination. Note the layoffs of middle management announced at the same time. Force everyone into the office, ideally through a difficult commute into an area that it's very expensive to have a family.
People for whom this is really untenable will quit without severance. Some with difficult circumstances you can PIP out without severance. Then the rest you lay off. Congratulations now the severance bill you have to show to Wall St. is a lot smaller.
Sociopaths.
I think this was a pretty obvious end-goal when they required everyone to relocate back to Seattle and go in 3 days a week.
As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there. How is that a sustainable corporate culture?
The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.
Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're successful and consistently promoted/paid more.
This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.
>> The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.
This is a very important distinction.
At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard when you already have everything you need to be happy. This hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike, live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will cut me loose whenever they feel like it.
I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and co-workers.
I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even a few years after making several changes, I still look back with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to myself.
It's crazy to me that more people don't realize this. You're working crazy hours, have no meaningful hobbies or life outside of work... and for what? No one's going to remember that you built some nice feature in some bit of software in 100 years, or even 20. Enjoy your life, enjoy people and community and activities. You can still get paid incredibly well as an engineer, more than enough to live comfortably, and work a normal 40 hour week (or less).
People prioritize weird shit.
Exactly. I want a wife and kids and a family, and for them not to hate me. Work has always got to be secondary to that.
I think the time spent being a workaholic (I did it a little myself early on) is sometimes helpful to really increase your skills quickly. But eventually you hit a sort of skill ceiling and it's increasingly not worth it, especially considering the things you are giving up.
Nobody at your funeral is going to be giving a heartfelt and tearful speech about how great a developer you were. Ordinary people honestly don't give a shit and neither should we besides just being generally competent and able to perform our roles.
I think it's encouraged due to milestones always being set with unrealistic ECDs, so every project is always behind and there's always urgent security fixes to 'catch up' on (I work on an AWS microservice as an L4 SDE, and joined 2y ago, for context). So you work in the off-hours thinking you're 'catching up' to the work you've 'missed', when in reality that is just the expected velocity to keep pace, and being 'caught up' is an unreachable goalpost.
I personally just learned to hide lack of progress on one task behind the urgency of another new issue, or keep tasks as vague as possible so that I can slow down on some days and speed up on other days. As a result I don't think I work crazy hours, but there's just a constant, fatiguing pressure of the feeling of 'I should be catching up on work right now'.
And I only recently realized that it's degrading my ability to enjoy any time at all, whether its PTO or just after work hanging out with my girlfriend.
This is my first eng. job though and I can't tell whether its better or worse in other places, and I tell myself it's probably better than the hours required at a startup. And I feel bad complaining to my friends when they're almost all unemployed or working gig jobs. /rant
This is actually why I’m skeptical about the complaints about Amazon
I’ve never worked there but I feel like I could? The complaints sound like a baseline level of toxicity seen in many places, I have the discipline for and others dont
Amazon would still be the last of the big tech’s I would choose for those reasons, the worst vesting schedule, and RTO, but it definitely sounds relatable
I don't believe they can actually do anything about it as this "culture" comes from the very top.
I remember a few years ago an Amazon worker died in the workplace and his supervisor watched him die instead of helping him because "these were the rules" (see the related HN thread[0]). You can imagine what kind of place that is.
warehouse is very different than corporate. also "watched him die instead of helping him" is a lie. More correct would be "the supervisor walked him to medical staff instead of calling medical staff".
> also "watched him die instead of helping him" is a lie. More correct would be "the supervisor walked him to medical staff instead of calling medical staff".
The worker, who previously was asking for help and was refused any, reports a stabbing pain in the chest and ask to a doctor. He already walked to his manager a long distance and can not walk any more. The manager refuses to call a doctor and says he can walk with the worker to the doctor but doesn't help him in any way like giving a hand. So the worker tries to do his best, is walking slower and slower trying to catch his breath, and finally dies.
There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.
> There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.
Amazon is the only FAANG that regularly reaches out to me with recruiting spam, and I am not located in a sexy tech hub nor do I have an on-trend resume. I've never responded, but I imagine their recruiting pipline counts on a combination of prestige and ignorance.
Apologies for the side question here, but what is an "on-trend" resume? This is the first time (in general, on/off HN) I've seen that particular phrase.
These days that means AI, a few years ago it was crypto, python data science, or React, before that it might have been a server framework or angular.
Just whatever is considered hot.
Actually I heard from a friend that worked there that eventually Amazon will run out of people to hire in the US who haven’t previously worked at Amazon, tho this includes warehouse workers.
Look at their H1B visa data and hiring in India (at least with regards to corp jobs, not US warehouse workers). They absolutely could find these folks in the US who don't need sponsorship.
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=amazon
> Amazon H1B Salary 2024
> 5848 records found; Median Salary is $144800. 7 percents of the salary are above $200K, 38 percents of the salary are between $150K and $200K, 43 percents of the salary are between $100K and $150K, 11 percents of the salary are less than $100k
Is this H1B visa fraud? Good question for USCIS and Congress. How Amazon feels about worker rights and regulation, as well as regulation as a whole, is a bit of a known quantity at this point.
https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...
Apparently Amazon agrees with your friend, at least as far as warehouse workers go.
> Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021...
> In the past, that churn wasn’t a problem for Amazon — it was even desirable at some points. 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...
There was a leaked memo showing that Amazon itself is aware of this risk to their business:
https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
I thought 3 days/week would settle as the equilibrium -- enough to maintain real estate value while still paying lip service to employee wishes, and still achieving the stealth layoff of blocking full remote work.
I highly doubt that there is any truth to the narrative of real eastate value as a driver of RTO policies. The effect if there was one would be way too indirect and furthermore a classical prisoner's dilemma, as your company would benefit the most if you have the only company not forcing RTO: having the value of the real estate, while having the greates talent from remote work.
Alternatively, it can be seen as a test of where things really have landed.
> How is that a sustainable corporate culture
Take a look at the hiring market today. Not that many options.
It's scummy and imo represents bad leadership (a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached during the pandemic which caused some internal degradation as their replacements were strong but not as experienced with 0-to-1 + ), but there really aren't many other options that can pay Amazon level.
Hybrid (2-3 days in the office) solves most of your communication needs at the leadership level. 5 days is just too much.
+ A lot of the all-star PM and Eng leadership I knew of at AWS were poached during the pandemic to leadership or leadership track positions at plenty of companies (eg. Datadog, Felicis, Google, etc)
> ...a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached...
I hear a lot of complaints of Amazon management going to other companies bringing the Amazon culture with them, and turning off the collaboration, communication and innovation spigot between and even within teams with their imported leadership style. Have others seen this first-hand and seen effective counter-measures they can report upon that deflect that energy towards more positive ends?
Amazon has been Like This since long before the pandemic and the tech downturn. I was told they were Like This when I was finishing undergrad.
there were news articles about it in the Seattle Times a decade ago. headlines like "I Used To Cry At My Desk".
People want it on their resume and money.
While I knew RTO was coming, the way that it has been implemented is going to cause some huge issues that I wonder how companies are going to move forward.
Disengagement was bad pre-pandemic and how these RTOs were handled industry wide have resulted in a lot of delegating upward.
Not sure if that culture shift will impact their recruiting efforts or if they will address it before that happens.
Perhaps it being industry wide will mitigate he impact for Amazon. Losing their scaling properties would be disaster for them compared to many.
But working there has been more of a stepping stone than a career for a long time for many people.
Amazon's value proposition to potential employees is basically that it's the easiest way to break into big tech. It's an awful place to work but they hire people who can't get into to other FAANGs, pay them more than they would make outside of big tech, and give them an onramp into better employment situations after they put in 1+ years at Amazon.
I'm not them but I suspect they mean a kind of "above my paygrade/not my problem" tendency. You can defer almost indefinitely (or make other people do it for you) a lot complicated work with phrases like "we need senior/staff buy-in on the design", "I think we need XYZ team on board/cross-team management approval", "maybe the cloud platform team should be building this, not us?", "I told the architect our requirements and they'll get back to us once they makes a design".
i.e. stop using your own brain and tell the people above you they need to make the hard decisions. Especially because so many decisions technically have impacts beyond your own team, its hard for people to push back on such behaviour.
So any time Amazon make any noise about doing something "for the environment" you can basically just point out they are full of shit.
It probably takes a dozen electric cars to offset the carbon saving of just not going into the office.
That's a really difficult comparison to nail down and is heavily dependent on assumptions you make of the alternate reality you compare against.
Does Amazon shutdown all of their office buildings completely? Do employees still leave home and work out of shared office spaces that they prefer to home or the Amazon campus? How do you factor in things like HVAC costs for individual home offices versus a main campus building? For electric cars as the unit of measure, are they new? How do you account for production costs? What power source is charging the cars?
I was curious to see what o1 thought:
Order of Magnitude Assessment
"Bad" for the Environment: Emitting nearly 3 metric tons of CO₂ annually from commuting alone is significant. Potential for Reduction: Eliminating or reducing car commutes can substantially lower an individual's carbon footprint.
I didn't post all the calculations and rebuttals because I figured it would pollute the conversation but there's the nut of it.
Its interesting to see what an LLM might say here, but ultimately an algorithmic prediction of how a person would answer isn't worth much.
If sources are provided and the sources check out that's one thing, but then it doesn't need to attempt to predict a likely human response to the question.
That said, as you mentioned below the note that 17% of emissions is generally attributed to commuting is relevant if true. A person staying home, requiring more energy both for lighting, HVAC, computers, etc could potentially cancel that out. Or not, and that's really my main point above as its an extremely complex situation to attempt to model and quantify.
it also said that about 17% of a persons carbon footprint is from commuting. not sure how accurate that is but I'm going to post it anyway.
Yes, it's was pretty flippant. I didn't expect a series analysis.
That's totally fair and nothing wrong with that. It could turn out that centralizing workers in an office actually has a lower carbon footprint (if that's the primary goal).
Being flippant is most helpful when the details may be wrong but the direction is definitely right.
It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed. It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
This is my #1 pet peeve about the RTO hysteria. I don't understand in which universe the managers who decide these RTO policies live, but in the universe I live in there's ALWAYS at least one person in another location requiring us to Zoom even if everyone else spent an hour getting into the office.
It's the worst of all possible choices.
I agree that seems like the next step, but how will that help push salaries down? I thought remote work would do that much more, coz many employees would move to less expensive areas in the same country and new hiring would focus on lower-income countries.
This cost savings from remote work is what I expected to push adoption of remote work more, and I'm surprised by this reversed trend.
I went through a round of layoffs last year from a company doing this. But not only do they still have multiple cross-continent HQs (so now they just have multiple "local" teams!), they're also struggling to re-fill some of the roles they cut. Turns out it's easier to source people with certain niche talents when you don't limit yourself to one or two metro areas.
I don't think so. They need the offshore sites to maintain the size of their empires without spending too much, and they need the Tier 1 US sites to keep the wheels on.
> It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed.
It just goes to show how executives are either are stupid, think everyone else is stupid, or most likely some combination of both.
People aren't stupid, and they can see blatant contradictions like that.
> It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
Oh, they started before that. I haven't had a real in-person meeting since maybe 2016. It's always something like Zoom, because there's always at least one guy located at another size (and probably in an awkward time zone to boot).
Nope, we use Quip and Slack because the Amazon equivalents were just too painful.
Nope, most teams still have at least a few members in a different time zone than the rest of the team. They all go to an Amazon office, just not the same one.
The cognitive dissonance from the CEO class is astonishing. From the article
'“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy said in the message.'
This, just a couple of years after they were falling over themselves touting the productivity of WFH.
I've worked full time remote for over a decade, with most of that as an IC but several years in management as well. It really depends on who the teammates are in the quote. You can definitely get more focus work done in a quiet environment free from distractions, such as at home. But that comes at a pretty big sacrifice for the type of collaboration that higher level ICs (Staff+) and managers often, but not always, need to do.
Think things like quarterly and annual planning, or getting a group of cross-team engineers together for a day or a week with a whiteboard to design a new system or major improvements. Miro exists for virtual whiteboarding, and I successfully use it all the time, but for big planning I would much rather do that in person.
If you move further up the chain to the level of VPs and Execs, their entire job basically consists of attending meetings to solve problems other people can't. For them, they probably would heavily prefer working in person.
My preference is working at home with quarterly week-long trips to the office -- it's historically the best for me and I'd recommend it to anyone wherever possible.
Doesn't Amazon also have offices all over the world plus remote consultants and contractors? My last year of pre-pandemic work (not Amazon) I spent working from NYC for a client in the Midwest, with developers in South America and an account team on the west coast. Executives were so proud they could staff teams from anywhere on anything to maximize labor utilization and reduce costs. I would go to the office and see none of my team. This was considered peak collaboration. I would WFH whenever I felt like it because nobody would notice. Now all of a sudden we have to be together again.
I find WFH policies go through cycles between all-remote to always-office.
Three factors I suspect contribute to this:
1. execs/management are completely disconnected from the product of the labour they “manage.”
2. Greener-pastures effect.
3. Management attrition
Together, you have a class of people who aren’t involved in production telling everyone how to do their work. In one generation that is stuck in-office all the time they want WFH. So they work towards it and eventually we get to the pro-remote end of the cycle. Managers/execs get promoted or move on and eventually… the grass starts looking greener on the RTO side of the cycle. A new generation of managers starts working towards that.
All of this happens in the context of capital and interest rates. Lower rates and cheap property tends to favour WFH sensitive managers. High rates and expensive property favours RTO.
I actually think that's generally true. But a lot of workers are distributed anyway. And, with the pandemic, a lot of additional people became even more distributed and many CEOs ended up shrugging their shoulders about a great deal of co-located work being gone for good even if they didn't really like it. That's more or less what happened where I used to work.
Past some point, what are you going to do? Fire half+ of your workforce?
I would also be interested to know how true this is for individual productivity versus group productivity.
There is no way to prove this and you know it. However I can tell you I'm orders of magnitude happier working from home, and that makes me a better employee overall. I'm not driven by stress and resentment, but actual will to improve things and deliver.
Thankfully they can still work from home the other two days.
At least they get to keep their two days of WFH.
New policy - five days RTO, two days WFH, per week.
Frugality. Your cost per hour is reduced.
Learn and be curious. If you’re working on the weekend, you get to do this 24x7.
[dupe]
Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421
Such a powerful and strong commitment to addressing climate change by making everyone drive more.
> Amazon is truly the arm pit of software engineering careers. One can only hope this hastens their demise.
The only thing that will hasten their demise is if the government rips them a new one (which this Amazon shareholder says it should). Otherwise, absent some black swan, their demise will be slow and measured in literal generations.
There's a lot of back and forth about whether it's more efficient to work from home or from the office. There are arguments to either side. I'll say, when I'm working with a team, I'm far more effective working from the office, because communication is simpler.
A lot of the ways in which people point out that in-person work is ineffective aren't actually problems with in-person work. For example, people complain about "attendance periods" where workers are expected to be present for 8 hours even if there's not 8 hours of work to be done, but this can easily be duplicated with remote work, where people are expected to be online for 8 hours. Micro-managing employers who prioritize control over productivity might have slightly fewer ways to micro-manage remotely, but remote work is really only a band-aid to that problem, not a solution.
Ultimately, my conclusion from a few decades of working on teams is that given effective management, in-person is more effective.
And here's the thing: I don't care. Working from home is worse for the team but it's better for the worker. Decade after decade workers have become more productive, and decade after decade workers are paid less and less of a percentage of the benefits of their labor[1]. The ability to work from home is one of the few concessions employers have (begrudgingly) made to workers in the last few decades, and it's nowhere near enough. Employers should be forced to give up productivity to improve workers' lives, and if they want the productivity (and/or control) of in-person work they should be made to pay more for it.
I'm tired of seeing the whole conversation about this being about what is more productive. Workers aren't seeing any of the benefits of being more productive, so there's no reason for workers to care what's more productive. That's basic incentives: if you don't like that, you don't like capitalism.
[1] https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...