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
>Training yourself to work a solid 8 hours at the office without distraction should allow you to leap over others who've gotten lazy sitting at home.
What in the corporate HR flyer is this?
"We think you need a hallmonitor to actually work, also you'll appreciate that we give you one"
I returned to office years ago. I need the ability to move hardware between employees with less than a day turnaround. But you will never convince me for a second that loosing my private office was an improvement.
My experience is that working in an office is _much_ worse for distraction. Even if you're lucky enough not to be in open plan, the shoulder taps and quick chats easily demolish any chance of focus for me. At home I can knuckle down for a few hours and deal with something complex easily.
Personally, I am somewhere in the middle. I use in office days to catch up on gossip I would not have gotten otherwise. The amount of work I actually manage to finish seems higher, but I wonder if it is simply because of how some of my work is structured.
Honestly, I don't think I care that much. I am practically checked out now. I can't imagine I am the only one. I also can't imagine this change making a difference.
Yeah, 100% agreed with this. My team is currently 1 day/week (Thursdays) in-office, and for both better and worse, there are conversations that happen which wouldn't otherwise. A lot of great things come out of those conversations, but also I can reliably write off getting work done that day.
That might also be because you're not in the office every day, people use those days to talk more (scarcity bias). I'm in-office 5 days per week and because we don't have this scarcity of time, there are lots of periods of quiet. When I wasn't in person all the time at this and other jobs it was exactly as you described.
The biggest advantage of being primarily in person is actually that we have fewer meetings. I don't have to schedule 30 minutes on Zoom with someone and if I pop over for a question (when I see the person isn't in deep focus and can contextually grab them which is fantastic as well). If it takes 5 minutes to come to a decision, great - if we need to go over to the whiteboard and take 2 hours to flesh something out; also works.
This is definitely not true universally.
The highest earners I know are self-employed or own small businesses and were 'alone' for most of their career. This includes a craftsman who owns small machine shops for boat parts, a high-end coach and a hairstylist who provides staffing for modeling/concerts. Absolutely none of them are 'office' personnel.
I do enjoy the social aspect of the office but I find that motivation comes from within.
You've got the basic sketch right here. Better focus than the competition is indeed an advantage. Working hard to focus in an office environment - noise cancelling headphones, people walking around, suboptimal coffee and so forth - is however not better than carefully setting up a home office. It's not a remotely safe bet that the people working from home are being lazy.
Yes. I'm in my 30s now but I can't imagine having started my career out of college with a full time remote position. But quick feedback from mentors and osmosis won't work if senior engineers are all remote.
This reads like something Amazons PR team came up with. “Train yourself to work a solid 8 hours a day” what are you even talking about? Remote workers do this now and aren’t lazy. The assumptions you have are conpletely out of touch with reality and insulting.
I highly recommend anyone especially early in their careers go into a real office where you'll see your immediate co-workers on a daily basis. That said, I don't want to go in :)
> Being able to focus more than your peers will give you a leg up on the competition
Which is why i WFH. Office is literally the worst possible environment for focus.
> less lonely
Some of us prefer to PICK friends, not have them chosen for us
> facetime with important people at work for more opportunity
I refuse to work at a place where promotions work like this
This is a soft layoff not some BS productivity hack. They've also kneecapped comp.
Not sure why you got downvoted for this. There's a lot of common sense in your comment. The hate against RTO is real.
Thank you - Yes its kinda funny and very sad at the same time.
They seem to be blind to the fact that facetime is what gets you promoted along with output of hard-work.
You can't work hard at home - at least 90% can't.
All in all its good - being able to outcompete a whole bunch of people through their own delusions is probaly the easiest victory for every hard working person.
Kind of poetic really :)
Unsurprisingly, this is one of the most divisive threads I've seen on HN in a long time. Angry people left and right (working on their couch in their underwear no doubt) pettily downvoting every post they disagree with. Chill out, everyone.
I always find it amusing, reading comments from all these people who claim to be more productive working from home, or think that it works better. It proves they work in silos and contribute little.
But HN is like “no WFH good, WFO bad, me downvote you cos I fink I know wat I talk bout”
People have different work preferences; some thrive working from home, while others do better in the office. I think the strong opinions about mandated office days stem from the fact that the job doesn’t necessarily require employees to be physically present.
While jobs maybe not require someone been physically present. So far over the last 2 years seeing multiple businesses do return to office, productivity sky rocketed. Sure a few people who didn’t want to return to the office left, but turns out they weren’t that productive. People are easy to replace now.
Before the pandemic, everyone was working in-office 5 days a week. The pandemic is now over. Why is it so controversial to return to what everyone was already doing previously?
Kudos to Jassy for being a leader in this space.
> Why is it so controversial to return to what everyone was already doing previously?
One reason is that they aren't returning to what they were previously doing: many companies have sold off office space and have removed dedicated work spaces in favour of hybrid-friendly environments and 'hot desks'.
Because as humans progress, so must our working conditions. The onus of working in the office is ALL on the employee:
- getting to the office (commute time is never paid time)
- figuring out a mode of travel (parking, gas are rarely paid, transit sometimes)
- child / senior care (major cost for parents)
- biology issues (quality of bathrooms, quality of kitchen, bringing items to/from work, flatulence, illnesses)
> Before the pandemic, everyone was working in-office 5 days a week. [...] Why is it so controversial [...]?
Because it is a lie. Teams managed themselves and trusted their members.
People who were virtual employees, or whose team was in a different location than theirs, have been let go at different points of the layoffs/RTO mandates, when they existed before the pandemic.
This is a regression to a point that never existed in Amazon's history.
Because working in an office at most tech companies sucks, and now that it isn't the norm, there's no good reason to accept that it should be.
If you work in-office for an American tech prime, there's a good chance your office is in one of the following cities: SF, LA, Seattle, NYC, Chicago, Houston, DC. Commuting in all of these cities is absolutely miserable. It benefits neither you nor your employer to spend multiple hours per day not working, not tending to personal matters, but simply getting to and from a job you could just as easily do at home.
If you're a parent, working from home makes it easier to be present as a parent. Commuting can be exhausting, and the energy saved by working from home can be put towards your kids.
It makes the logistics of everyday tasks easier. Because I no longer piss away 20 hours a week on the L going into downtown Chicago, I now have 20 more hours per week to work out, do the laundry, buy groceries, and cook healthy meals. This is a flat-out benefit of remote work that simply cannot be offered by any employer that demands in-office work. Paychecks can't buy time.
Tech companies are also are prone to the most backwards forms of "modern office design," which universally result in a distracting and uncomfortable work environment. There's also research to suggest that they result in higher rates of illness among workers [1]. So, even if your commute doesn't suck, there's a good chance your office does suck.
None of this is to say that you shouldn't be allowed to work in an office if you want to. I sure as hell don't. I'm happier, healthier, and more productive than I ever was in an office environment.
because its a regression. WFH is better for a lot of folks. It saves time and money. Being forced back to office is like taking a pay cut as well as wastes 2 hours each day.
I’ve seen all the sides of remote work now.
The only people that are offended by Musk’s comment are the being he was talking about.
“You can pretend to work somewhere else”
Remote work is awesome for some people. But if you don’t admit that a great number of people are scamming it - then your opinion is just as invalid as their obviously defensive position.
Nah. I wrote critical boot code for brand new silicon from home. Took my team from "behind" to "changing how people did chip bringup." Without ever seeing them in person for literal years.
Can be done. And yeah, that comment rubs me the wrong way.
Yea, cool.
You aren’t the point.
If you can’t see and admit the massive abuse from most people - obviously except for you - then there is no discussion.
Everyone is always so quick to say how great THEY are and can’t ever even sort of discuss the reality of abuse because that position threatens their goal.
It is obtuse self-interest and disingenuous. Those comments rub me the wrong way.
> It is obtuse self-interest and disingenuous. Those comments rub me the wrong way.
That is pretty much all arguments for WFH. It's always "oooo I'm so much more productive" and occasionally "I can do errands and stuff now"... but never does it get more reflective than that. It might be great for the individual but for the team level and higher, it's probably not great at all.
Plus... I personally know a non-trival number of people who made some seriously boneheaded short-term real estate purchases in the peak 2020 insanity assuming they'd be doing this WFH forever. The amount of privilege these people had doing that while so many non-tech people got screwed over by their governments... makes it very hard for me to really feel sorry for people having to go back into the office. It was always supposed to be temporary no matter what anybody told them.
This seems obviously wrong - the least you expect is of course for them to accomplish the goals of their position. If that requires physical presence, then obviously that's part if the deal implicitly. But for tons of jobs, that's part of the "above and beyond" bucket. I.e. things like after-hours availability, that may improve outcomes, but actually have downsides that mean they could be net negatives depending on the specific job and the specific individuals.
Aside from such executive blindness, the only other reason anybody alive still thinks of commuting and in-office work in more innocent terms is because up until very recently (generationally speaking) they were simply a physical necessity for nearly 100% of jobs, so there was nothing to be gained by dwelling on it. That changed, so the acceptance of petty suffering changed. Also, the fact that the ratio of life improvement to hard work has steadily decreased since those times motivates employees to find other means of maintaining sanity.
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