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Amazon is bringing back their office employees as the default operating mode; citing inefficiencies in the creative process. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/31/am

by nomy99 6y ago

Amazon is bringing back their office employees as the default operating mode; citing inefficiencies in the creative process. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/31/amazon-expects-some-employees-to-return-to-the-office-this-summer.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/31/amazon-expects-some-employee...

convolvatron 6y ago
beatings will continue until I see that creative spark light up again
- nomy99 6y ago
  I'm sorry I don't understand. What beatings/punishments?
  - Eric_WVGG 6y ago
    didn't read the article, huh?
    - nomy99 6y ago
      I did, but it seemed like a personal rant so I didn't read every bullet.
  - jtylr 6y ago
    I believe it's a reference to the phrase "The beatings will continue until morale improves" - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/371325/origin-of-the-beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/371325/origin-of...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - fridif 6y ago
    The one where they make you waste 2 hours of your day traveling in potentially dangerous/uncomfortable/inconvenient circumstances so that you can physically sit a desk and do the same thing you would do at home, all in the name of optics.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jhayward 6y ago
    I believe the parent is most likely referring to all the costs that are externalized on to the employee related to e.g., commuting; the office-induced inefficiencies related to lack of control of one's work environment; poor communication that relies on face-face happenstance vs intentional and document oriented exchanges; and the executive-induced mal-control syndrome, such as 'if I can't see you you aren't working' kinds of things.
bluefirebrand 6y ago
Is Amazon really a model company? With all of the horror stories about their warehouses I have to imagine the offices aren't great either. Like I would expect them to be as miserable as Amazon leadership thinks it can get away with.
- tanseydavid 6y ago
  >> Is Amazon really a model company? It depends. If you are a shareholder then it is a model company. If you have to work there, then not so much.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  From what I've heard there are nice parts of Amazon (as an office employee), but that on the whole they don't really see it as a priority. There's the fairly normal things like charging for lunch at the office canteen (fine, but for a big tech company this is a little different), the slightly odd things like charging for parking at their office (seems like an easy win to not bother?), and then there's the downright crappy ("your role entitles you to 4GB RAM in your laptop, even though Excel needs much more, if you want more buy it yourself"). I think there are better companies to use as role models for creating a good working environment.
- shados 6y ago
  A lot of the big companies (Amazon, Google, etc) are pretty poor model for...almost everything. While they may have been great at some point, they're largely carried by a few segments of their businesses and can no longer really fail. Google is mostly carried by their success in ads, and most of the non-ads things they pump out + the way they do it, is mediocre at best, extremely inefficient at worse. Their technological innovations are mostly meant to support these inefficiencies. Sure some stuff they do is cool, but they do a LOT of stuff. Most isn't. The same applies to all these other companies.
jherdman 6y ago
I can't help cynically read that as challenges with management, not the creative process itself.
- nomy99 6y ago
  Can be a combination of management and the technology available. Zoom is great, but I do feel handicapped sometimes during brainstorming sessions.
Pokepokalypse 6y ago
Can't say I'm surprised by this. You'd think that the world's larges cloud provider, would have the tooling and policies in place to deal with this issue (creative inefficiencies). Because that's literally what they're asking their customers to deal with when they sign on to the concept of cloud-computing.

by nomy99 6y ago

convolvatron 6y ago

beatings will continue until I see that creative spark light up again

nomy99 6y ago
I'm sorry I don't understand. What beatings/punishments?
- Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  didn't read the article, huh?
  - nomy99 6y ago
    I did, but it seemed like a personal rant so I didn't read every bullet.
- jtylr 6y ago
  I believe it's a reference to the phrase "The beatings will continue until morale improves" - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/371325/origin-of-the-beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/371325/origin-of...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- fridif 6y ago
  The one where they make you waste 2 hours of your day traveling in potentially dangerous/uncomfortable/inconvenient circumstances so that you can physically sit a desk and do the same thing you would do at home, all in the name of optics.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jhayward 6y ago
  I believe the parent is most likely referring to all the costs that are externalized on to the employee related to e.g., commuting; the office-induced inefficiencies related to lack of control of one's work environment; poor communication that relies on face-face happenstance vs intentional and document oriented exchanges; and the executive-induced mal-control syndrome, such as 'if I can't see you you aren't working' kinds of things.

bluefirebrand 6y ago

Is Amazon really a model company? With all of the horror stories about their warehouses I have to imagine the offices aren't great either. Like I would expect them to be as miserable as Amazon leadership thinks it can get away with.

tanseydavid 6y ago
>> Is Amazon really a model company? It depends. If you are a shareholder then it is a model company. If you have to work there, then not so much.
danpalmer 6y ago
From what I've heard there are nice parts of Amazon (as an office employee), but that on the whole they don't really see it as a priority. There's the fairly normal things like charging for lunch at the office canteen (fine, but for a big tech company this is a little different), the slightly odd things like charging for parking at their office (seems like an easy win to not bother?), and then there's the downright crappy ("your role entitles you to 4GB RAM in your laptop, even though Excel needs much more, if you want more buy it yourself"). I think there are better companies to use as role models for creating a good working environment.
shados 6y ago
A lot of the big companies (Amazon, Google, etc) are pretty poor model for...almost everything. While they may have been great at some point, they're largely carried by a few segments of their businesses and can no longer really fail. Google is mostly carried by their success in ads, and most of the non-ads things they pump out + the way they do it, is mediocre at best, extremely inefficient at worse. Their technological innovations are mostly meant to support these inefficiencies. Sure some stuff they do is cool, but they do a LOT of stuff. Most isn't. The same applies to all these other companies.

jherdman 6y ago

I can't help cynically read that as challenges with management, not the creative process itself.

nomy99 6y ago
Can be a combination of management and the technology available. Zoom is great, but I do feel handicapped sometimes during brainstorming sessions.

Pokepokalypse 6y ago

Can't say I'm surprised by this. You'd think that the world's larges cloud provider, would have the tooling and policies in place to deal with this issue (creative inefficiencies). Because that's literally what they're asking their customers to deal with when they sign on to the concept of cloud-computing.