Comment by ryukoposting

Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign? After all older people have more responsibilities outside of work like children and cannot work through Amazon’s meat grinder or do things like support brutal on call cycles. They’re also the ones with bigger commutes and other barriers to RTO, since they probably live away from city cores to buy houses and have space for a family. Meanwhile young people who live in the middle of downtowns in apartments that are near their work probably are unaffected by this kind of change.

Same here. I can do all my family errands when I want and plan around them. The best part, at least with the company's interest, is that I work when I feel most productive. Usually 3 hours in the morning, along with a few hours in the evening, I even often work weekends like this. And guess what? During these programming periods, I'm at my most productive. Force me into an office where I'm forced to synch with the office's schedule, and met with constant noise and interruption from others, and my productivity is maybe half.

Same here, thanks to me working from home my wife has been able to return to work (she's a teacher) which has given us more income (and less costs!) and massively improved our financial position!

RTO definitely helps reduce workforce and keep the most complaint workers.

I suspect that "most compliant workers" and "most creative engineers" has little overlap.

> Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.

Bingo! Many companies are invested in real estate, and having the ticking time bomb of empty offices vs unsustainable office rent finally implode would be bad financially. Hence, the push everywhere to return to the office.

The benefits of being in a physical office disappeared 20 years ago. COVID accelerated the formation of globally distributed teams. To now go back to commuting 2-3 hours a day, just to do your Zoom calls from and office desk, is insanity.

> Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.

My boss goes in to the office even on non-office days.

If I still lived in an apartment - ie, no separate room at the house to use as an office - I'd probably go in most days as well.

If that were true, I would expect a lot of smaller CEOs hiring away talent that likes to work remotely.

But I think the truth is much simpler- the C suite is primarily made of extroverted people-persons who work better in person and think others will too.

Well I mean, look back to the Covid mandates - if employees were compliant than, I see no reason why management wouldn't think they would be compliant now. Having worked middle management in the corporate world - corps are self-selecting, all the people I have met there who have been around 10-20 years already internalized their state a long time ago. My direct boss was quite transparent about this, once referring himself as "a slave for 18 years".

> if we can believe the inconsistent propaganda in that regard

How is anything about those fact "inconsistant" when besides a few fringe scientists, everybody in the sector knows that for a fact.

I love a conspiracy but I dont see how the incentives align.

Real estate leases and ownership is a sunk cost. Office space can be relet. And even Amazon wont make a dent in the office realestate marker (warehouses, maybe...)

They want people back in because either they think it makes the company more productive, to get people to quit rather than layoffs, or to give the appearance of doing something. Knowing Amazon they probably have some data to drive the decision too.

> COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then

The worst part of this RTO phase is those who were previously(pre covid) afforded permanent WFH or x days WFH at the time of hiring are also forced to go to office without exceptions.

I live in Wisconsin, so 30-60 minutes of cycling year-round is a non-starter. I'd much rather take public transit, since then I can read a book or daydream.

If there's a $100,000 oscilloscope, then it's there to get used. Specifically, it's there to allow the >$100,000/year engineer to get their work done more quickly. And the engineer is there because the company thinks they're giving >>$100,000/year in value.

Yes, the scope can be taken home. That is both physically possible, and there's plenty of rational employers who would rather have the lab equipment at home with the WFH engineers adding value than in the lab collecting dust. Even if it means some of the equipment needs to be duplicated.

And taking lab equipment home doesn't mean sneaking it out in Jonny Cash's big lunchbox [1]. For some employeers it can be as simple as "hey boss, can keep the logic analyzer at my home office?" while others might have a more formal sign-out process. There are no doubt other employers where the answer is always "no", but in general it's completely possible to take equipment home without stealing it.

The idea of taking expensive things home isn't limited to the tech sector either. Consider trucking - it's common for employee truck drivers to take their $500,000 trucks home.

[1]: https://genius.com/Johnny-cash-one-piece-at-a-time-lyrics

Things are pretty specialised and RF before you need a 100K oscilloscope. I have a 500MHz DSO, 16 channel logic analyser, 10 digit GPS locked frequency counter, 5 digit bench multimeter and a 2GHz AWG and I think it's not even 10K.

(I'd love 250K of test equipment all the same LOL).

Funny - in my case, I owned a nicer oscilloscope than my company was offering me anyway. Neither is worth more than a couple grand. I acknowledge that more expensive equipment exists, but I'll come back to that.

> There are insurance considerations too - your house burns down with $250k worth of test equipment inside, who is paying for that?

My employer already has insurance on their equipment, and I already have insurance on my equipment. I see no problem here.

Even if there was a problem, why do you expect ME to be saddled with the burden of a problem that clearly exists between my employer and their insurer? Why should I (and thousands of others) pay the cost of 20 hours a week in commuting, when my company and the insurance provider could spend a couple hours to fully think through their terms?

> There is a lack of critical thinking when it comes to extreme WFH arrogance.

I recognize that not everyone can work remote. At the time the shutdowns began, I was working for a defense prime in an airgapped lab. Obviously, I couldn't bring my equipment home. But, in that case, there was a reason for onsite work - national security. For most devs, there simply isn't a similar justification for onsite work.

None of what I said in my toplevel comment is intended to disparage anyone with a job that demands onsite work. Note how I never disparaged anyone in that situation, nor did I disparage anyone who runs a company where people are in that situation. I merely stated how much I like my situation, with some quiet jabs at companies too stubborn to afford the same benefits to themselves and their employees. Develop some reading comprehension before you start slinging accusations of poor critical thinking.

So I see it the exact opposite way. I see a staggering level of arrogance in Amazon's move to sequester thousands of people in an office who simply don't need to be there. It's detrimental to the workers' health and happiness, it's a needless cost on Amazon's behalf, it pollutes our environment, and it does jack to improve their product. It's just a power move.

You’ve come up with the most extreme scenario to make a point. Surely most of HN is not doing cutting edge electronic engineering that requires a $100K oscilloscope as a everyday tool.

HN is not the majority. But we've seen many studies that say tech WFH has either no/minimal efficiency loss, or even has better productivity. Most tech companies in fact made record revenue (maybe profits, but hard to say) over COVID, so the business logistsics do not imply a loss in production.

>Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted.

I mean, there's many reasons an otherwise unwarranted RTO happens. Maybe there's executive conspiracies, but the simplest two reasons are

1. We're still in layoff mode and RTO is a soft layoff without paying out severance. Especially to people that are physically unable to move back

2. managers and executives are in fact not rational actors. They can make decisions based on vibes, or because they need to make some shakeup (any shakeup), or because some other executive made a decision and they are mimicking. I would not take their decisions as gospel. Otherwise they would have shown some shred of evidence of productivity loss (which they cannot, because again: many tech companies have record revenues).

Is anyone preventing those people working in the office?

> But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.

Most likely Amazon has zero data supporting the argument that WFH is less productive and probably has data to the opposite. They went from 'we're super data-based, data-oriented and objective' (which was a joke to begin with) to the complete opposite on this topic.

> When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.

The reality is you have no idea what you're talking about, you have no data to back up your claims, you just can't resist licking the boot.

To this day, I maintain that the hardest job I've ever had was being a carhop at Sonic. All the soul-crushing foodservice insanity, and oh, you're on roller skates too.

The hours I worked and the shit I saw in that job do not compare to any other foodservice job I ever had, let alone other jobs. The tips (which you only got if you weren't on shake duty) were the only part that made it worthwhile, which meant putting on a happy-go-lucky face even if it was covered in grease, shake crap, blood sweat and tears.

Moving everyone who realistically can work from home out of the offices benefits those who MUST commute as well. During COVID the roads where empty, cutting my commute in half, even during the later days where many was back at work.

For stores in particular, if people work from home, you can move stores closer to where people live, including those who work in the stores. It's country dependent, but there's no need to have all only huge supermarkets in the outskirts of town, when very few pass through those areas. Then smaller stores closer to the population becomes more relevant.

I'm of the opinion that actual hands-on labor is significantly undervalued, so yes.

Let's also spread human feces around every workplace. It's only fair, because sewage workers also have to deal with feces. Every worker should also be submerged in freezing water for hours each day, because commercial divers also do that.

Well my take, having done retail and factory factotum work when I was younger, is that I'm not going to take one of those jobs ever again.

I've also done jobs where I had to commute into a windowless office and be at my desk at an exact time too.

I'm not going to work for in those jobs again either when WFH is a viable option.

It's a free market and I suspect that Amazon know this. I suspect that RTO is just a way to boost property usage and disguise redundancies. At the very least it means that Amazon don't know how to measure productivity properly if they only way they can ensure it is to force people to sit in a chair each day.

What kind of "should" is that?

A relative change in how annoying two classes of jobs are is effectively a relative change in how much they pay, so once the dust settles I'd expect the relative actual dollar pay to end up adjusting itself in response.

I would argue so what? There are low and high paying jobs that require people to be in person and low and high paying jobs that can be fully remote. Why should it matter to one group where the other group works? I'm sure the pediatric surgeon isn't complaining about having to work from the office.

The only people that actually care where others work are people who realize they are ineffective at their job/their job is pointless without being able to physically bully, the rent seekers, and people who built a business out of being near another business.

I feel a little bad for the small businesses that got lucky by being near a huge office space, but most of those small businesses have been replaced by corporations and small businesses close all the time.

Your grandparents favorite restaurant when they were a kid is probably long gone and it would be nice to have an eventual restructuring of convenience businesses near homes instead of suburban parking lots and office buildings.

Why? There's no option to work from home in those positions, so there's no need to pay them extra to work on site. Seems kinda like a roundabout way of asking for better wages for non-office workers.

Sure, why not? Minimium wage in California is still not a "living wage".

>shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?

depends on the company, but they used to stipend transportation and sometimes even car gas and repairs as a benefit. I see nothing wrong with that idea.

In my country it is already visible. New entry level corporate white collar jobs are scarce, and they pay like half or one third of entry level blue collar jobs, which there are plenty of. Just a few years ago it was the other way around.

I keep seeing this line of "reasoning". You realize that me being at home makes your life marginally _better_, don't you? There's one less car on the road creating traffic and pollution. There's one less guy in the line at starbucks. There's more real estate opening up for purposes besides mindlessly filling offices. But you'd rather make your own life marginally worse as long as it makes mine significantly worse.

Yes, yes we should.

That's a straw man if I ever saw one.

Yes, they should.