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It 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 centr

It 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 ago
We'll see how that works for them
ghaff 5y ago
Three 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 ago
Amazon 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 ago
  Remote 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.

outside1234 5y ago

We'll see how that works for them

ghaff 5y ago

Three 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 ago

Amazon 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 ago
Remote 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.