Comment by rybosworld 4 days ago
Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense.
Might be an extreme take but, I think engineers have some onus to stop agreeing to work there, lest the amazon corporate culture spreads further.
WFH would have worked before Covid as well. Covid just forced the hands of most companies. So no, there hasn't been some breakthrough that has made WFH possible within recent years.
> we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now
For a lot of people, yes. The reason why there is so much outrage around RTO mandates is because:
1) WFH offered a massive quality of life improvement
2) There is essentially no evidence that in office workers are more productive (or vice-versa)
When executive teams, (many of whom work remotely themselves, as often as they'd like), try to reverse the quality of life advancement that WFH offers, without an evidence backed reason for doing so, workers get angry.
It's the equivalent of a parent saying "because I said so". Except these aren't children that Jassy and others are speaking to.
> Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now?
I think we are going further and further away from "the future".
In 1964, Arthur Clarke said that "I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand." and "Men will no longer commute, they will communicate." [1]
I would think that a future where people aren't limited by where they live is desirable and not commuting to office is a way to achieve this.
Covid was a way for companies to realize that many jobs don't really need physical presence in an office. And maybe we should invest in technology that makes more jobs remove so that even brain surgery could be so. But it seems like instead of Covid being the impetus for change, things are reverting, as if non-remote is the normal state of affairs.
Maybe it is the natural state, but it's a sadder world because of it.
[1]: https://fortune.com/2024/05/29/arthur-c-clarke-space-odyssey...
You have it backwards- it hadn’t made sense from the invention of the internet until 2020. I point to “teleworking” being a legitimate thing even before the internet was mainstream as evidence that the traditional office is a relic from the 40s and 50s typewriter factories.
My dad has been working from home since the 1980s. He worked for AT&T, selling telepresence products. He told his boss "how can we expect our customers to believe in these products if we don't?" And they let him work from home forever
Hilarious to watch Zoom return to office in the last two years.
It's not some big or recent development, effective WFH has been possible since ADSL matured for many, it just took a while for that to be commonly understood.
Yes, it has. We spent 4 years working from home with no loss in productivity, and now we're being dragged kicking and screaming back into the office to satisfy the KPIs of some business degree loser and his fragile ego. Offices suck. A lot of people here talk about the commute, but the office itself sucks, too.
I'm really not sure what people were expecting, honestly. Of course things would always revert back to the mean.
Amazon has been a known "do not work there" employer for a very long time. At least since 2008 in my recollection.
Yes there are people here who consistently post on Amazon threads that they enjoy working there. I even know a couple such people personally. But it's always with the disclaimer "you need to be in a good team". OK but is there a field in the offer letter that denotes "Good_team: TRUE". Nope.
So you can like the idea of competing in "The Hunger Games" while trying to write and fix code. Or not..
They pay too well to say no if you don't have any other competing offers. For some roles they pay too well even with competing offers. It's literally life changing money for a lot of people.
I'm just about to hit 2 years and was planning to leave anyway around that point, which is typical, but now there's going to be a sudden increase in the competition for remote jobs that I wasn't anticipating.
> but it’s not like it’s inherently bad
Sure it is. We can directly measure the impact of this.
Amazon has approx. 35,000 software engineers. Assuming a commute of total 1 hour a day (very generous of me), that's 35k extra hours of human labor wasted a day. Assuming an average lifespan of 613,620 hours, that's about 1 entire human lifespan lost every 17 days.
We could also measure the carbon impact, too. 1 hour of driving releases about 4 pounds of CO2 into the air. This is about 70 tons of carbon a day, or 25.5K tons of carbon a year.
Or maybe we can measure deaths? Assuming a commute daily of 30 miles, that's about 1 million miles traveled a day. The rate of traffic deaths is about 1 for every 100 million miles traveled. So, every hundred days, Amazon indirectly killed one of their employees, or about 3.5 dead employees a year.
And we can go on and on. Point being, yes bad things are bad and yes, when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences. This isn't like deciding what drink to get at McDonald's.
OK but what if the output of the company being in the office is enough to offset that?
Like is Apple “better” for the world if they worked from home and never made the iPhone?
Or what if there are people who want to work in an office with other people who want to work in an office and are willing to trade some CO2 and small risk of death to do so?
Can’t the people who believe remote work is bad quit and get a job somewhere else? Should be simple since remote work is so obviously inherently good.
I get that this is going to be like playing tennis against a wall because HN has such a hard-on for remote work that they’ll never admit that in-office work has benefits that remote work lacks and that a company that requires in-office work isn’t inherently evil.
> OK but what if the output of the company being in the office is enough to offset that?
Ok and what if it rains gold from the sky and poverty is cured forever? Are we just saying things now? Because I have absolutely no reason to believe this is the case, and Amazon is dead-set on not giving me a reason.
> Or what if there are people who want to work in an office with other people who want to work in an office and are willing to trade some CO2 and small risk of death to do so?
In practice, not a viable position. RTO only works if you force other people to go to the office when they don't want to. Because the office, itself, is actually useless. It's just a building. The office is desired for the people in it. Meaning, such a position is one born of control. The same is not the case with WFH. Meaning, WFH does not care where you are. RTO cares a lot about where you are. One is intrinsically easier to swallow therefore, because one by its very nature orients itself towards freedom. This is undeniable.
> isn’t inherently evil.
I never said a company is inherently evil. Amazon is, for other reasons.
You said that RTO doesn't have any real downsides. Keyword "real". Well, that's not true - it has many REAL downsides. As in: lives lost, habitats harmed, climate destroyed. It's real enough we can measure it. If you don't particularly like this I don't know what to tell you, it's just the way it is. CEOs and other execs are so detached from the real world. But when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences.
It made sense starting from when the concept of an office was established until mid-2020. Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now? That too considering every other industry besides tech is already doing it?