Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
(cnbc.com)1498 points by jbredeche 10 months ago
1498 points by jbredeche 10 months ago
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.
“We’re better when we’re together” So stop offshoring “No not like that”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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
> If you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely. This was understood, and will be moving forward as well.
This is Amazon having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can work remotely 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background.
I found this paragraph to be somewhat galling since, like, if you're sick you shouldn't work at all, you should be focussing on getting well. Ditto if your kid is sick. Raising one or more whole other human/s is a super important thing. One result I saw from the pandemic is fathers doing more of the childcare, and what full-RTO like this fundamentally does is shift that dynamic back to where it was before.
Shame on Amazon.
There has been a shift since the 9-5 meant you leave your laptop at work, and were virtually unreachable.
Next, you were reachable so managers especially also bothered you at 7PM (I even sometimes had meetings at a FAANG). In exchange, employees got the freedom often to work in their desired 40 hours as long as things got done.
Now, companies want it both ways where you come in 9-5 AND they want non office hours productivity as well. Somehow we've forgotten the paystubs and employee offer letters say "40 hours of work"
Been working remote since before COVID and this hasn't ever been a thing for me. I just don't reply after hours. At one gig where I ended up being laid off (it was Playboy) I would stress about not doing this or that but in the end my performance had nothing to do with it. They sold the store I was working on and that was that. Of course the 401k "match" that took 24 months to vest was entirely worthless. Now I don't even consider any equity that doesn't vest immediately as part of my TC.
These companies don't care about you at all. Put in your hours and always keep looking for the next thing.
> I just don't reply after hours.
I'm a freelancer/independent contractor.
Every time I start a new gig, I make sure to answer private messages few hours later, and never outside the 8AM/8PM timeframe or during weekends. Ever.
I also make it black on white on contracts that I don't do meetings before 9AM or later than 5PM.
I immediately set a habit for people that I might be AFK and that I never ever answer work-related stuff in the weekends.
As months go by I start answering when I see it/have time, rather than purposefully delaying and occasionally I answer a message or a chat in the weekends if I lurk on the channels. Hell, sometimes I even did some work on the weekends too if some deadlines are close (I am still bound to the success of my clients after all) and make up for it when rhythms are lower.
But in the beginning I make sure to always set a tone where I'm just not there online and ready to answer 24/7.
I did the opposite years ago. I would make it a habit for people for always being up and ready, so when I had to do something (from preparing lunch to bathroom breaks) people would instantly assume I was working less or cared less.
I don't do the mistake anymore. Professional? Always. Connected and ready all time? As little as possible.
In the UK anywhere I tried to become an employee in the last 5 years also asked me to sign the "I am ok to work more than 40 hours" addendum, and it was a condition with the offer.
I've had that in contracts, but have always crossed it out. I suggest you do the same.
No employer I've seen has ever questioned it, they know it'd be illegal for them to actually force you to opt-out your of your rights. If they put it in writing that it was a conditional part of employment they'd be in hot water.
They're just hoping you just sign away your rights "for free" so to speak.
This is the default in the Netherlands for many office jobs as well. Usually in the form of 'Subclause 2: The nature of the job may demand work beyond the stated hours in subclause 1. If this occurs, no additional payment shall be made'.
Never had a job where that wasn't a clause in the contract.
These kinds of clauses seem toothless to me.
If a potential employee isn't willing to agree to work more than 40 hours they either don't take the job, or take the job but refuse to work those extra hours and risk being fired. Being fired is never fun, but the employee is still better off ignoring the contractual obligation there if it was a deal breaker anyway.
As I understand it, before it went off in a huff, the UK was the only European country which allowed a _general_ opt out of the working time directive (many allow it for medical workers, and sometimes for other emergency workers). Accordingly, of course, many if not most UK employers obtain such an opt-out.
To be fair, I've had the same thing but never had an issue just working my contracted hours
Before that it was the BlackBerry (my experience), and before that something else (presumably the pager, telephone, telegram, man on horseback?).
I just think it’s important we are all deliberate about what is important to us and therefore what we agree to. If the precedent is set early, it helps tremendously, in my experience.
I especially liked "if you were on the road seeing customers" as if they're reluctantly granting an RTO exception to people meeting with customers and those employees should be thankful for it.
I think it's more instances like "if you're traveling and you get back to your home city at 9am don't feel like you need to be in the office by a certain time, just WFH that day." Obviously if you're traveling as part of your job you're not going to be working from the office during that travel.
FWIW in other countries you not only get paid sick leave by law but also paid leave when your kid is sick (only for one parent usually but the idea is that it doesn't matter whether you're sick yourself or have to care for a sick kid because the kid can't be expected to take care of themselves).
You don't fix this with corporations having better policies out of the kidness of their heart, you fix it with laws. The reason corporations were moving everything to remote work during the pandemic was that in many places travel was severely restricted and they needed to ensure the operation of the business in the case of a full lockdown. Now that that's no longer an urgent risk, they're rolling everything back because the benefits to the business don't outweigh the drawbacks and everybody else doing it makes it an easier sell (just like the wave of mass layoffs).
I was at a large manufacturing software company where the CEO came out with a return to office mandate early on except it didn't apply to anyone in my chain of command. My director lived in an RV and worked from that travelling. Every VP above worked from a remote location, so I asked. I was told they all had other arrangements. I left within a month.
Yeah. My reaction to the leadership for this kind of mandate would be: you first. Release your badge-in metrics for the C-Suite, then progress down the chain from there. They can all afford houses right next to the office, as well as nannies and private schools and a house on the coast. So when the highest paid employees show they’re in office 5 days a week for a single quarter, then let’s talk.
I doubt this would be the case. The L10s get to wfh from there vacation homes while the L5s get commutes.
> if you're sick you shouldn't work at all
Well it depends how sick you feel. Personally, if I only have a cold, I prefer working (from home) over hanging on the couch and watching Netflix all day long. If I'd have to come to the office I'd report ill though, also because I don't want to contaminate my colleagues.
If you are happy about your relationship with work such that you would prefer to do it rather than rest, then what I have to say next is not relevant to you. For others whom this might not be the case: You need rest. If your only or primary form of rest is Netflix on the couch, such that you feel you “should” work instead, you might consider if other forms of rest might be better for you.
Rest benefits you and your employer. Working while ill is a sure path to burnout. Burnt out employees are less productive and more likely to quit.
It’s okay to not grind 25/8.
It's my personal preference and it has worked for me in the last 25 years, but everybody's different and it might not work for everybody.
Note that doing nothing does not necessarily mean that you relax. Working at home at your own moderate pace might make you recover faster. But again, what works well for somebody might not work well for someone else.
Huh; my org seems to be pretty lenient in that regard - if you are ill or book time off on a day you meant to be in the office it's fine.
That doesn't work for a lot of people due to workload, but that is a separate problem
> This is Amazon having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can work remotely 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background.
This isn't really different than startups offering "unlimited" time off. That's just
> This is Company XYZ having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can take time off 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background.
I think it's widely known that "unlimited" time off is a scam, and people with "unlimited" PTO actually take less time off then their peers who have to accrue PTO the old fashioned way. And yet sometimes I still see people who are enthusiastic about it.
Congratulations, you work for a very nice company.
I would not listen to their PR there is no reasonableness being applied to these rules.
I hurt my knees back in May and tried to get HR to make an exception for me. They shot it down because they said I didn’t have enough documentation. They wanted more paperwork, which meant I had to make another doctor’s appointment. Getting a doctor’s appointment these days takes weeks, so I never managed to get the exception.
How much leeway you get totally depends on your L8 Director. If you’ve got a strict L8, good luck—this policy isn’t going to be applied reasonably. They’re actually looking at badge reports that show how many hours you’re in the office, and managers will call you out if you’re just “coffee badging.”
If you think this kind of thing doesn’t happen, just take a look at Blind. There’s no logic to how these rules are applied. Meanwhile, if you go to an L8/L10 meeting, try counting how many people are actually in the office. It’s a joke, especially when all the <L7 exceptions have been pulled.
I would recommend speaking to an ADA attorney with regards to civil action, as well as potentially filing an ADA complaint with the federal government.
Not sure about Amazon, but I work for a big US corporate that is making similar noises. I suspect "sometimes" basically equates to how much your more immediate management chain wants to keep you around, because after a few steps up the chain, you're PYs and percentages rather than an individual. Your more immediate management would have targets, but if 80% of their group's hours are logged in the office, it probably doesn't show up as a red light higher up.
It's a cute joke about an unintended interpretation of what the CEO said.
Let's be real, not a single HN comment (and there's nearly 1500 here as I'm writing this one) is going to be "productive" is this discussion, especially with regard to Amazon. The biggest impact is some comment here may convince someone on the fence to quit when they might have waited a few months without it. And this joke isn't going to change that.
My wife's company does this hybrid office bullshit at a fortune 500 and they not only track the days you come in, but they will bring it up in annual reviews if it hits a certain threshold.
Who will bring it up? I've never worked at a company where managers are suddenly assholes who diligently apply unreasonable policies. My experience is committees make all sorts of policies, but unless consequences are doled out by some automated system, no on actually cares or follows the policy.
At my current company, there's a place I think I can see my reports' office attendance, but I've never actually checked it. Why would I? I'm not even a WFH zealot myself; I just don't see why I should care if they're in the office.
The managers will bring it up because they have pressure on them coming from higher up to have their reports all be compliant with the work-from-office policy, and in extreme cases, they would be expected to manage out the people who are flouting it. Not doing these things could easily result in an unsatisfactory performance rating for the manager.
What I don’t understand is why people tolerate this. Of course companies will do this and worse if people let them.
You mean an employer set an expectation, checks to see if people are meeting the expectation, and holds them accountable if they aren't? What incredible bs.
It really depends of when the expectation is set. Amazon right now has a combination of people hired when:
* Teams when working 5 days in office, but nobody checked (other than maybe your direct manager) and you could wfh if you needed it to
* Teams were completely remote
* Amazon was checking you came to the office 3 times in the week
* Amazon was checking you came to the office 3 times a week for a certain amount of time
And now the expectation is completely different to all of those. Again.
Is sick leave paid in US by law (till certain extent of course) from some employer's mandatory insurance, or some sort of corporate perk like extra paid holidays? And what about when having sick child?
Even in Europe I've seen various mix, some countries ie don't pay first 3 days of sick leave, some do but pay only some minimal compensation, some do full for X days etc. But it was never completely on the employee, meaning no pay. Covid shuffled this a bit so may be different now.
> Is sick leave paid in US by law (till certain extent of course) from some employer's mandatory insurance, or some sort of corporate perk like extra paid holidays? And what about when having sick child?
For the kinds of jobs we’re talking about here (corporate Amazon, college education required, salaried) you basically just call in sick and that’s it. You didn’t work but you still get paid your normal salary. This is the flipside of salaried work obviously — just as there may be times you work over 40 hours and don’t get additional pay, there are times when you work less than 40 hours and still get your regular pay.
Now all of this depends on circumstances like your manager, but in general, in these kinds of jobs, no one is running around tracking your sick days. If you’ve got something more substantial going on then you’ll have to take short-term or long-term disability however.
How does leave policy work in your companies? Where I work you can use that leaves quota for something else (i.e taking a vacation). So its gonna "cost money" the same way.
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.
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.
Is this move possibly motivated by what Elon did at Twitter?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Mandatory overtime law is in order. Every minute beyond 40 hours a week should be automatically billed to the employer.
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
It's like these LinkedIn awards for best company to work for mean nothing anymore!!!
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/linkedin-top-comp...
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.
> 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.
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!"
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?
> “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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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..
>> 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.
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)!
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.
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.
is there a spreadsheet somewhere that shows if a company is WFH or RTO or HYB?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ar4qcghnGjlGwZAAXdu2...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The four day business day is still best. In office or not.
They will make them sit and watch “Rings of Power.”
[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.
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.
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.
Reminder that Amazon is doing this for itself, and not for you.
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?