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Amazon reverses course, expands work-from-home options
- benburleson 5y agoI'd bet they started running into a recruiting problem.
- sfsdfsdfsdsdf 5y agoDo they not already? I go out of my way to avoid amazon recruiters as I don't want any part of that toxic environment.
- rejectedandsad 5y agoWhat toxic environment?
- LockDownExposed 5y agoGo to Team Blind and read.
- yerwhat01010 5y ago> My brother Mike... was in the Navy on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf during the 1990s Gulf War, and later worked at Amazon, and declared after four years that Amazon was _way_ more stressful http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-marijuana.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
- khazhoux 5y agoWas that the article you meant to post? It's a Yegge mega-story. What's the connection?
- yerwhat01010 5y agoCtrl+F the quote
- khazhoux 5y agoOh! I thought your brother was in the Navy :-)
- rejectedandsad 5y agoI got promoted working 30 hours a week, maybe don’t work in tier 1 service teams?
- bg24 5y agoNice blog post. He meant it in a positive way, right?
- lhnz 5y agohttps://www.teamblind.com/post/Amazon-is-struggling-to-hire-Qsbq0MRp https://www.teamblind.com/post/Amazon-is-struggling-to-hire-...
- rejectedandsad 5y agoThese are the people that think people like me are subhuman for working at Amazon. Pass.
- thrwyoilarticle 5y ago>Folks pass the bar So give up the hazing. We all know the job's not that hard.
- rantwasp 5y agothe reality is that compensation is sh*t, even at L6 level where you are expected to walk on water. a lot (most?) people I know that worked at Amazon used that as a resume builder that allowed them to open doors and land jobs that would be harder to get otherwise.
- defaultname 5y agoThe whole of Amazon has been tarred with working conditions for their warehouse and drivers. I assume the information workers don't have to piss in bottles and go through metal detectors. However we just recently heard about Amazon hiring to fire, with an internal policy and broken pursuit-of-metrics that yields fundamental dysfunction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27111566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27111566
- someelephant 5y agoRecruiters are getting more desperate and from what I've seen offers are rising significantly. And yet it's still not enough.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y agoThey're also now calling and texting my phone directly instead of the usual inbox invasion. Absolutely desperate.
- joezydeco 5y agoAgree. I've had repeated contacts from Amazon recruiters, including multiple "hi there!" emails from the same person even though I've told them no. I'm in a remote midwestern city that might have an Amazon office but certainly not the R&D center they're recruiting for.
- 0x0000000 5y agoWeird, I just had this happen, too. AMZN recruiter reached out, I politely declined, got another message from the same person 2 days later.
- joezydeco 5y agoAt this level they're just resume harvesters. What's really crappy is they reach out to you making it sound like you're Just The Perfect Person for their role, then hand you a pile of shit you need to study to ace the interview. Guess I'm not the perfect person then or else I'd know all of this, right? Fuck that.
- noobee 5y agoNot sure why this is news - Amazon is the first company to embrace a hybrid work environment, way before the pandemic... Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday - work from the office. Saturday and Sunday - work from home.
- currio 5y ago:)
- rochak 5y agoI see what you did there. It hurts because it’s true.
- 0xy 5y agoAt least credit Blind ;)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cblconfederate 5y agoWell now alexa can be supervising them and ensure they stick to their 12 hours of work schedule
- lacraig2 5y ago:')
- xiphias2 5y agoIt may be a joke, but this kind of treating employees made it harder and harder for them to justify going through the pain of relocating close to an office with huge property prices around it.
- Cybotron5000 5y agoAgile workspace (for cats): https://www.iizcat.com/uploads/2017/08/94gwt-cat-jungle-gym-11.JPG https://www.iizcat.com/uploads/2017/08/94gwt-cat-jungle-gym-...
- colmvp 5y agoKind of a strange wording of the submitted headline, at first glance I thought it meant that Amazon was moving against work-from-home, whereas the articles explains they're going against their initial direction of forcing workers back into the office.
- WisNorCan 5y agoAnybody from Amazon know the backstory about why they really changed the approach? This doesn’t really mean anything “thinking is predicated on what we believe will be most beneficial for customers, while also trying to give employees more flexibility in their work environment and lives.”
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rejectedandsad 5y agoIt basically matches Apple now. Im thinking it’s based on internal surveys (you do one every day when you log in, and there have been a lot of questions about remote work) and real estate costs - can accommodate more people with hot desking if two orgs don’t overlap their 2 wfh days.
- tolbish 5y agoBut why change policy now? It just seems like they are begrudgingly following suit rather than genuinely wanting something nice for their employees.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago...to...compete?
- hairband 5y agoI think Amazon is having trouble hiring and retaining talent. Given the horrible covid situation in India, the L1 Visa pipeline must have dried up. And their reputation has taken quite a hit given all the stories about PIP and the political/toxic culture, so no experienced engineers wants to go join a place like that. I guess, this is them panicking.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoI think Facebook embracing remote work has started a cascade. You now have a FAANG company that is embracing remote work, and the other companies stand to lose a decent amount of talent to them, so are forced to change what their tune.
- grogenaut 5y agoPersonally I don't think the remote part matters, it's the paying SF money regardless of location that is the draw. I've also had a few FAANG companies ghost me when I said I was not interested in moving to the bay in the last month. 2 from Google, one from FB.
- agentofoblivion 5y agoI work there and wouldn’t call this a “reversal”, but rather a clarification on details. They’ve been taking about when they expect people to come back but haven’t said anything about work from home options. Sounds like they’ve settled on a guideline.
- CoastalCoder 5y agoI'd expect a certain amount of posturing from both employees and employers regarding this. I.e., it's a point of contention, and there's an incentive to bluff. Each side wants to make the other side fear the consequences of demanding more than the labor market will bear.
- dijit 5y agoThe title makes it sound as if they were going to expand flexible working and are now not: the article says the opposite, that remote working is being embraced.
- dang 5y agoOh, I see. Ok, title edited to be less ambiguous now. Submitted title was "Amazon reverses course in expanding work-from-home options".
- skunkworker 5y agoI think a comma is needed in the submitted title. The article title is better "Amazon reverses course, joins other Seattle tech companies in expanding work-from-home options"
- eganist 5y agoI'm assuming the original title didn't fit: > Amazon reverses course, joins other Seattle tech companies in expanding work-from-home options A better contracted title than the current one ("Amazon reverses course in expanding...") would be: > Amazon joins other Seattle tech companies in expanding work-from-home options or if that doesn't work, > Amazon reverses course, expanding work-from-home options @dang
- nightpool 5y agoIs there a better way to get attention for a misleading title? Is flagging the story (or this comment?) appropriate?
- eganist 5y agoGood idea; it didn't cross my mind.
- dang 5y agoI don't see what's wrong with the submitted title? The limit is 80 chars, so it had to be shortened, and dropping the reference to Seattle is the obvious way to do that; it's in the headline because the publication is a regional one. Edit: oh, I see - it's because of the problem explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27469696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27469696. Edited now.
- nsonha 5y ago"Amazone backtracks, open to work from home"
- lkrubner 5y agoAs a consultant, I've been helping startups with their hiring process, and I've noticed, at this point, even very junior engineers, just starting, are expecting flexibility of schedule, and many are looking for work from home options. (I am not saying this is good or bad, I'm only noting it.) At some point in the past I think there was a bit more of an attitude that one had to "pay one's dues", at least for a few years, but now there is more of an assumption of work from home options being available. And even though Amazon is, typically, hiring a more experienced engineer, and paying more, than the startups I've consulted with, this is certainly the right move for them. It's good for a company to offer flexibility and to be very clear about exactly what is being offered.
- riknox 5y agoI've started a new job remotely this year with quite a few junior engineers in the team, and I'm definitely finding it's much harder to mentor and make sure that they're taking the right paths while solving a problem than it was in the office. Flexibility is undoubtedly a good thing, however like you I think there is an element of paying your dues that is perhaps missing in the current environment.
- femiagbabiaka 5y agoWhat does paying your dues mean and how does it make you more effective in your opinion?
- riknox 5y agoI think a lot of the skills you learn around how you interact with people in a professional setting, developing a sense of when to ask someone for help vs. work through a problem yourself, and how to develop software professionally. I've found that we have a lot more work taken down a wrong path because it's not as easy to check in on someone remotely without it coming across as micromanagement of more junior developers. I appreciate that a fair portion of that "blame" lays with the more senior members, but I've at least found that some things that would easily be resolved face to face, or with the kind of coffee break chat you get in person, have festered on longer than they necessarily should have.
- slt2021 5y ago8am-5pm - work from office 5pm-2am - work from home thank you amazon for flexible work arrangements!
- rejectedandsad 5y agoI genuinely have never heard anybody have to work this much at Amazon. I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve had to work more than 9 hours a day (it’s once, 3 year tenure).
- mancerayder 5y agoDoesn't that depend on how high on the hierarchy you are and whether you're doing infrastructure work versus a more laid back product or sales role?
- rejectedandsad 5y agoI know people at AWS, Alexa, Prime Video, PeopleTech and they all have roughly the same experience. I have heard this at Facebook though, where 9-to-9 is more typical, but you know, you don't see people complaining about that online.
- hairband 5y agoWhile the above may have been a joke, its not a secret that work life harmony and culture are perhaps the worst aspects of Amazon (talking of the corporate side of course, not including warehouses)
- rejectedandsad 5y agoThe biggest problem is we aren't compensated well. I only make $200k as a mid-level engineer.
- cloverich 5y agoThe weird part about the wide range of pay across the country and companies is, I cannot tell if this is a joke or not.
- null_object 5y agoNot strictly on-topic, but I’m wishing we could adopt the term ‘flexible-location’ instead of ‘work-from-home’. I feel that the latter can convey a mental image of a person lounging at home in their pajamas, drinking a chai latte while ‘dabbling’ occasionally in work, while the former more accurately describes what I’m hoping the future of (former) office work will be: something not bound to a single, company-controlled, indoor location.
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago> a person lounging at home in their pajamas, drinking a chai latte while ‘dabbling’ occasionally in work This is literally what a lot of people want though.
- DoingIsLearning 5y agoThis is literally what a lot of managers think a lot of people want. People act (on average) with a lot more good faith than most corporate entities. If, as a manager, you are unable to infer that this is happening, then in all probability that person would be doing the same 'dabbling' if they were co-located. (Just with a higher effort of looking busier).
- throwaway6734 5y agoMy anecdotal evidence is that the majority of people in my network are not working anywhere close 8 hours. I don't think they're less productive than they were in the office.
- ghaff 5y agoThat's probably because they were rarely heads-down for 8 hours in the office either.
- throwaway6734 5y agoabsolutely
- LockDownExposed 5y agoNo surprise, the amount of autists being accepted in society is growing and growing, they prefer to stay at home(as seen in the comments in the WFH articles).
- someelephant 5y agoAnd so begins the race to the bottom. It's just a few days in the office now but in time workers will be given complete control over where they work.
- PunchTornado 5y agoIf you can do your job from anywhere, somebody from anywhere can do your job. That's the risk.
- treespace88 5y agoAbsolutely, with the productivity gains I wonder if the world will need less developers.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y agoSure that's the risk but fortunately that's not reality. If anything, the job opportunities are so numerous now because companies are no longer geographically restricting themselves, finding a job is going to be much easier in an already saturated (software development) market. I've seen salaries of my peers getting remote jobs increase by 50% across the board, it's kind of insane right now.
- someelephant 5y agoThere are many risks to offshoring as well. The accidental and irreversible 500 million dollar wire from Citibank for example.
- throwaway2037 5y agoWhat if this happened from the New York City headquarters? Or London, Frankfurt, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland, etc. Would you still post it? This comment feels at little bit discriminitory.
- jdmichal 5y agoRealistically, this has barriers in legal and tax implications. Employing someone in the EU has an entirely different legal and tax burden than employing someone in the US. For large companies, guess what: They were already doing this anyway. My last company had a dozen major tech sites around the world. But for small companies, like my current one, this is an effective barrier. And it even happens between states in the US, typically on a smaller scale.
- jnet 5y agoI’m curious are all these companies going to cover the costs of setting up and maintaining home offices?
- ___luigi 5y agoYes, many companies did that. In our company, we were allowed to take any device/desk to home. In Switzerland, Gov asked companies to pay % of rent. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/court-decision_companies-must-pay-share-of-rent-for-employees-working-from-home/45781126 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/court-decision_companies-must-p... The only exception was Germany. There is ongoing discussion that Remote workers should pay a (*5% tax*) for having flexibility/option to work from home. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/deutsche-bank-proposes-a-5percent-tax-for-remote-workers-post-pandemic.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/deutsche-bank-proposes-a-5pe...
- ludamad 5y agoThe only reason it makes sense is that flexibility is a privilege and privilege is afforded for those who can sustain a tax, generally. Seems awful for call center employees who are not given an office, though
- CoastalCoder 5y agoI've been toying with the idea of starting a side-business of setting up home offices. I'm a WFH software developer, and I have some experience with residential construction and soundproofing. I'm considering teaming up with a full-time building contractor to start targeting this niche market.
- rreyes1979 5y ago15+ years remote consultant here. I have never stepped into an office for work during this time. All work from home (sometimes cafes). I can confidently say that most of the time, I've been considered one of the most productive workers on the teams I've been involved with. There's nothing that prevents productivity on remote work that can't be handled with the right tools, skills and attitude. More so, once you (and your team) learns to handle it, working from home can be even more productive than working on an office (worked on an office for the first 5 years of my career and those were a lot less productive). Ask me anything.
- FreezingKeeper 5y ago> There's nothing that prevents productivity on remote work that can't be handled with the right tools, skills and attitude Firstly, congrats! It's something I'm working towards myself, and the pandemic looks like it will be a significant opportunity to try and achieve it. However, perhaps you're minimising your expertise here and the learnings and experience that the employer and the worker need to go through to make it work. Anything to share here?
- SPascareli13 5y agoOk, I'll ask the big question: How do you deal with politics? Specially when you are the only remote person in the team. Do you feel you have a disadvantage to someone that works in person when it comes to being recognized and growth?
- brixon 5y agoThey are a consultant, so they just move on to the next client and let the perms deal with the politics.
- sudhirj 5y agoThe nature of the work changes automatically when you’re this remote (I am too). Results start to matter much more than how people experience you (although that’s pretty important as well). You’ll get given work that has clearly defined inputs and outputs, or given goals that have defined or obvious success measures. This allows you to bypass the politics situation pretty well. Interact professionally with the people you need to, get your work done, and get your social and drama needs met elsewhere, like with real friends and family :-P
- k__ 5y agoI've started working from home 2014 and people laughed at me or were downright hostile. I had to start feelancing and work with international companies to find people who didn't expect me to come to an office. Good to see this change now.
- theoblank 5y agoI co-founded a startup that was fully remote for 6 years and then hybrid for another few years (our NYC office had at least 1/2 of employees in-person full time). I did a bunch of interviewing and hiring for remote software engineers during this time (interviewed 100+ people). One of the main things I tried to assess was whether or not the person was a good fit for working remotely (essentially, they needed to be very good at self-motivating their productivity). Some people's personality just doesn't work as well in an isolated, work-from-home environment. In my opinion, this is going to be a new realization many companies (large and small) are going to come to in the next year and will have to deal with accordingly. It's also unfair to people who were potentially thriving at their jobs when in-person full time, but may now be struggling to maintain the same productivity remotely. I think it's inevitable that things will shift slowly back towards full-time in-person workplaces.
- ghaff 5y agoI think it's also possible that things will drift to both ends of the spectrum. Something like 3-in/2-out feels like one of those uncomfortable middle grounds. OK. So workers get a bit more flexibility. But the downsides: - Companies can't really save on real estate unless you do scheduling and hot desking which seems like an ugly solution. - Workers can't really increase their commute times much but have to keep a reasonable working area at home. - Schedules will only overlap for meetings etc. if there's a lot of coordination - Either remote people on a given day will get left out or some of those in-person will resent having to work as if everyone is remote even though they're in-person themselves.
- theoblank 5y agoYeah, and there's a whole skillset required for overcoming a lot of these downsides and the whole company has to proactively work to overcome them. I also wonder how many companies will get bit by leadership (CEOs, engineering team managers, whoever really) not working as well in a remote environment.
- reikonomusha 5y agoHow do you interview for these traits? I find that in interviews, everyone presents themselves as hard-working, self-motivated, and highly efficient. It’s not too hard to assess technical skill. But how do you assess self-motivation and good time management more objectively?
- tristor 5y agoI've been permanently remote since 2014 (with some regular office visits interspersed at a few employers along the way). My take is that working in an office is superior to working at home, so long as employees have short commutes and the office provides an environment which is conducive to productivity (e.g. private offices or well-made full height cubicles). In any other situation than that (e.g. open floor plan being the worst), remote work is massively more productive than time spent in office. It does require a cultural shift in an organization, and I do find that companies that are half-remote/half-onsite or some mixture tend to do significantly worse than companies that go all-in on remote or all-in on staying in the office because the mix always leads to remote folks being left out of important political nuances handled in the hallway and break-rooms. I don't see myself ever working for Amazon for a myriad of reasons (or most of the other FAANG companies for that matter), but I do think this issue is more complex in a large organization than many WFH advocates give it credit for. That said, I never intend to go back to an office other than for occasional visits for the remainder of my life/career.
- xwolfi 5y agoI work on a trading floor in a large investment bank in Hong Kong and I dont get what you dislike abt open floor. It's so nice to just know what's happening around you, have people rushing to you or you rushing to people, being able to yell or be yelled at. Sure there are focus phases I d love to have less distractions in, but tbh sometimes your value lies in quick response to big problems rather than long concentration to solve small ones. I worked in full height cubicles and sometimes you can spend 2 weeks without sharing something with a coworker to a point you end up having spent all you time on a silly assumption you discover made you overengineer something a dude sitting 10 meters away knew you could solve in 5 lines. Maybe we both program different kind of software and maybe need different environments ?
- CoastalCoder 5y agoI wonder if your success is some combination of: - Unusually good aptitude for handling context switches. - Unusually good skill at concentrating on your work in noisy / busy environments. - Not much time writing code that's near the limits of your abilities.
- duncans 5y agoIt could be a realisation that the pandemic - even in relatively highly-vaccinated countries - is far from over.
- azhert90 5y agoIt feels like this article completely misses the mark with its tone... Amazon didn't "reverse course" at all. The new guidance is still very much "office centric" and requires that everyone be in the office 3 days a week. And even if you do get an exception to work remotely (which will probably be extremely rare), you are still required to live within commute distance of your assigned office. That defeats the purpose of remote work for a lot of people.
- outside1234 5y agoWe'll see how that works for them
- ghaff 5y agoThree days per week, as opposed to one or maybe two, is still in the you probably don't want a god-awful commute range. I did something like that for 18 months (when I wasn't traveling) with about a 90 minute commute and it really didn't feel long-term sustainable to me. I can do a two-hour commute (especially if it can mostly be by rail) once a week or so. But much more than that and it gets pretty painful. Mind you, some flexibility is better than no flexibility but it's not remote work by any means.
- nodejs_rulez_1 5y agoAmazon could become a good place to start as a junior moving on to a proper remote work at Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc.
- liquidwax 5y ago> proper remote work at Google/Microsoft Amazon's policy is exactly the same as Microsoft. Is Google proper remote now?
- yowlingcat 5y agoRemote point notwithstanding, this is quite common, actually. Amazon's mean tenure is somewhere around 9 months and is well known for flogging their mandatory attrition curve; they also are known for having relatively forgiving hiring criteria to be constantly moving fresh blood through the system. Amazon backloads RSUs for this reason, and juniors routinely treat their employment there as a "tour of duty" before moving elsewhere, as the brand is still quite a strong stamp on the resumé. Many parts of it can be a bad place to work. But it's a huge company. There are some parts doing cutting edge work as well that you won't get access to at other companies. But to your point, the likelihood that a junior engineer will get access to that is slim, and so your assertion holds.
- kache_ 5y agoPeople voted with their feet :) It's nice being in a field where all your compatriots have leverage.
- devenson 5y agoOnce companies make the organizational changes to succeed with work from home, it will be trivial to offshore the jobs. Be careful what you wish for!