Comment by spacemadness

> 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.

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.

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.

- Upper management wants to reserve remote perks for themselves. Otherwise what's the point of being upper management without perks.

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

> - 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

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-...

Good theory. Killing remote seems the first line of defense in covering.

This sounds much more likely to me than the revenge narrative.

> 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.

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 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.

> 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?

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.

Who cares about how many hours of work they are putting in. As long as tasks are getting done on time, it shouldn't matter what I am doing with my "hours".

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.

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.

If there are employees who are putting in a few hours of work each week and management isn't able to catch it, what will bringing these same employees to the office accomplish exactly?

Employers want the employee in the office to produce the same amount of work but they want them to roam and bother others because they might be making money elsewhere? That sounds foolish.

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.

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?

> 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.

> 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.

Why doubly care if they perform well enough? Some sense of misguided justice?

I have always work remotely. I know many people who should not be trusted with work from home. Believe it or not, people are selfish, including workers, not just the managers and execs.

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 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.

The economic goals of management and labor are fundamentally at odds, so any explanation which isn't us-vs-them is going to be missing a key dynamic and motivating force of the relationship, at least to some extent.

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.

When a reasonable explanation refuses to be given, repeatedly, one begins to wonder if it exists. There's only so much "trust me bro" underlings can take before making assumptions.

I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".

Money/capital stops the worker in general or do you expect the average worker to be able to buy the firm they are working for now because wages are that good?

Productivity growth may be slowing, but it is not "down" in general. It's the highest it's ever been.

Is there a specific reason to believe Amazon would have less productivity than the rest of the economy compared with before?

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.

Is productivity down? It seems like it's just growing slower than pre global financial crisis.

> productivity is down

according to which statistics?

> Nothing stops you...

No, lots of things stop you. You can't just say "nothing stops you" and pretend it's true and work from there. Obviously, lots of things stop you otherwise everyone would do it.

This idea needs to die.

Gone are the days when you can start the next google in your garage. You need capital to compete.

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.

Do you think that Amazon treats its customers with contempt?