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Turmoil at Bezos' Blue Origin: Talent exodus after CEO push for return to office
- conspiracist 5y agoThose that do not work in the office will be replaced by those that do.
- deelowe 5y agoAccording to David Niekerk, "Jeff Bezos believes people are inherently lazy." I assume this is a huge factor in him wanting everyone back in the office.
- MattGaiser 5y agoEven if you agree with his assessment, remote work let’s employees do 1-3 hours less of work related activity (commuting).
- jleyank 5y agoI would have thought he's a "metrics" kind of guy... There's no way of judging what people outside his line of sight are accomplishing? Does he spend his whole day watching a set of monitors showing everybody at work?
- lancemurdock 5y agoyou can't put a price on the feeling I get when 5-530 hits, and I step outside my home office to see my family and start unwinding for the evening. No wasted time on commute and the options for places to live are endless. Not to mention I eat my own food on my lunch break. I miss some interaction/bonding with coworkers and certainly acknowledge that "hallway talk" helped clear up requirements but the pros of work from home life are incomparable to the cons. I will never go back to an office
- kgwgk 5y agoYou can definitely put a price, or you would have never wasted time on commute, etc.
- ziftface 5y agoI think a lot of people hadn't seriously considered the option of working from home before. Now that a lot more people have done so, they are starting to weigh the pros and cons as the parent comment is doing.
- kgwgk 5y agoSure. And one of the cons of working from home may be lower pay/increased competition. So if they are told to go back to the office and they don't want to they may need to put a price on it.
- codezero 5y agoDitto. I’ve been doing a lot of managery stuff during the pandemic and the main things I miss are the water cooler talk that greased a lot of wheels and filled in a lot of gaps, as well as helped new people onboard with many to many learning, but we will cope. What I would like, as a manager who had to do quarterly planning would be a week a month or a week per quarter for cross functional in office planning. It would help with a lot and probably be enough time in office to fill many of the real gaps being remote has left without being required full time.
- basisword 5y agoThat required office time means everyone still needs to live within a short distance of the office though. For a lot of people that defeats some of the main benefits of remote.
- Swizec 5y agoFor a quarterly 1 week meeting the company can just fly everyone in who needs to be there. They already do this for board meetings so why not important plannings? Hell, put it in a fun location and call it a retreat.
- basisword 5y agoI still think that’s a big ask. I’d bet that the group of people that want full remote also includes a large number of people who hate the idea of company retreats. I’d rather finish work at 5pm and have fun on my own terms than a week of proscribed company “fun”.
- Swizec 5y agoSure it’s a big ask but if the planning is important and you are important to the planning and it is deemed a sufficient quality of planning can only happen in person … business travel seems far too common to be worthless. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Nobody said anything about work activities after 5. You can go do whatever. But hanging out with coworkers when you’re all seeing each other for a rare or even first time seems like a pretty common whatever.
- hnlmorg 5y agoIt's a very personal decision though. For example, if I may offer up some counterarguments: > I step outside my home office to see my family and start unwinding for the evening. No wasted time on commute I find the commute (by train, I'm lucky enough to get a seat) far more effective for unwinding to be honest. And once I'm home, I'm far more engaged with the family due to having that buffer time between work and home. > the options for places to live are endless. That never actually stopped me before. Hence the commute > Not to mention I eat my own food on my lunch break. the biggest thing I miss about not commuting into London is the food. The variety, the quality, and above all, not having to cook it myself. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind cooking. But a lot of eateries do a lot better job of their signature meal than I could. That all said, I'm in no rush to go back. And when I do, it'll be a hybrid approach. Some days in and some days from home. edit: why am I getting heavily down voted for discussing personal reasons why I enjoyed working in the office? It's not like I'm telling you your opinions are wrong or that you should go back to the office. All I'm doing is voicing that there are some who do enjoy travelling into the city most days. Is it really that offensive a view point to read? Some people on here don't deserve to have moderation privileges.
- bboylen 5y agoSo this shows why flexibility is important, so you can satisfy the different preferences of employees. From the article, it sounds like the CEO wanted to get rid of remote work all together.
- hnlmorg 5y agoIndeed. I've seen some companies say they want people back in 100% of the time but I've seen others close their office and have all their employees work remotely 100% of the time. I feel both are toxic policies to place on your entire workforce and the best approach is flexibility because different employees will have different preferences and needs. Thankfully there are a good number of companies (in the UK at least) who are allowing their employees to make this decision themselves.
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- kiba 5y agoThe article isn't about remote work, but about Blue Origin's utter failure to thrive.
- rewma 5y agoFrom the article's summary: > The central sticking point, and cause cited by many people who recently left, was Smith’s strong push this year for all Blue Origin employees to return to the office. This is without a doubt about Blue Origin's call to return to office.
- downrightmike 5y agoRTO is just so 20th century
- BobbyJo 5y ago> the pros of work from home life are incomparable to the cons The pros are mostly yours, and the cons are mostly your employers. The labor market is finally shifting to the laborers having the leverage :)
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- shrimpx 5y agoMostly in digitized white collar work.
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- jbhouse 5y ago"the cons are mostly your employers" I'm not sure I would even agree with this. I have a better monitor setup at home, a quieter place to work and think, and I'm spending less of my day in pointless conversations for the sake of politeness. My employer simply gets more out of me when I work from home AND turnover is reduced. I think the pros outweigh the cons for employers, even if they don't care at all about their employees and even if we weren't in a tight labor market
- ashtonkem 5y agoYou're measuring the cons in terms of labor productivity, which I am no longer convinced is what is driving executive behavior. Frankly, I think that executives get a big ego boost seeing hundreds of workers working in an office of their design, and they miss that. I think that's why their arguments for returning to the office come across as ... strange and unpersuasive; they don't actually have a productivity based argument for returning to the office and they're trying to shoe horn one in anyways.
- gpm 5y ago> and the cons are mostly your employers. This sounds like nonsense to me. If there are cons to the employer, that means I'm worth less and can demand less salary - the market might take a bit to adjust for that, but probably not long. It means that I'm going to be working for a less successful company, which is a lot less fun. Employers and employees are usually in a mostly cooperative relationship, this adversarial view of it just strikes me as wrong. (And no, before someone accuses me of being biased, I do not and have never run a company or anything like that)
- pavlov 5y agoI feel the opposite and would gladly go back to the office. It’s hard to keep working after five when the kids are home and making their usual racket. But it’s also hard to disconnect because the line between work and home is nonexistent. The free breakfast and lunch at the office were much better than anything I can make or buy myself. Talking to random coworkers during the breaks made me feel more like part of something. I didn’t even mind the “standing in a packed subway car” part that much. That’s just city life; I want more of it again.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoI'm with you 100%. You would think CEOs would might notice the bump in productivity in awake workers? Spending 2-3 hours going to an office most people despise, and listening to that clueless middle manager yap must alienated a lot of workers? An alienated worker gets back in weird ways. I was thinking the genie is out of the bottle, and they will never bring us back, but no. They can't wait until they can bring us back though. (Maybe using Global Warming as an excuse to stay home? Not commuting must be better for the earth? It will be decades before we see 90% electric.)
- shapefrog 5y agoSure, but your job isnt Astronaut and the "office" isnt meant to be Space rather than what used to be the guest bedroom and is now the "home office".
- datavirtue 5y agoThis. I don't know any senior engineers who want to work in an office. They know that the second they go back it is going to suck one way or other. I watched office space last night and was reminded of all the little tics and annoyances of being in an office. I had some good times in the office, but they will remain just good memories.
- SergeAx 5y agoI don't know. When I changed work, first thing after passing a probation I rented a nice place 20 minutes by walk from the office (10 minutes by taxi in case of hurry or a bad weather). And I am totally okay with eating catered food. It is not haute cuisine, but it's free and readily available, so I may have two 15-minutes breaks instead of one hour lunch and call it a day half an hour earlier.
- COGlory 5y agoIt sounds less like this is about remote work, and more like this is about everyone there hating the CEO. And boy does the article do a good job of making him sound like an arrogant, micromanaging prick.
- ashtonkem 5y agoChances are it's both. When you have a bad boss, there's always one triggering incident that's the "straw that breaks the camels back".
- kiba 5y agoJeff Bezos need to put his ego in check, fire Mr. Smith, and run the company himself or find someone who can.
- MattGaiser 5y agoWe are at the point where demanding a return to office is basically demanding 1-3 hours of overtime compared to other options.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoEasily 5 to 10+ hours in NYC suburbs, not to mention the volatility of public transit.
- cm2012 5y agoI think he meant 1-3 per day
- lotsofpulp 5y agoOh yes, then I agree. I assumed they meant per week since federal US overtime is defined per week.
- arrakis2021 5y agoAs a big supporter of wfh for others, I’m personally not a fan. My home is my sanctuary. It’s for sleep, rest, family and pleasure. It is modeled entirely around being comfortable. I don’t want to hear my coworkers voices in my home. Or my manager. Or anything else work related. It gives me great anxiety and pain to hear my work in my apartment, and the feeling like I can never truly “leave” work. And I love my work and my team and the company. To me there is nothing more alarming than the corporate overlords invading my home. And yet this is being applauded by many of my peers. Time will tell. I think the work from home obsession is the “open office space” debate of our generation.
- yao420 5y ago> the work from home obsession is the “open office space” debate of our generation. There is not much of a debate, open offices are hated by knowledge workers and pushed by managers and accountants for cost reasons. I get the same feeling from those pushing back to office policies, they want control of employees under the guise of sparking ‘water cooler talk’.
- heavyset_go 5y ago> There is not much of a debate, open offices are hated by knowledge workers and pushed by managers and accountants for cost reasons. I get the same feeling from those pushing back to office policies, they want control of employees under the guise of sparking ‘water cooler talk’. The return to offices is also pushed for cost reasons. Employers made billions of dollars in investments in commercial real estate, signed multiyear leases, and have executives, board members and shareholders that are invested in commercial real estate, as well.
- intricatedetail 5y agoThere are creeps in the management also supporting it because they like to watch people especially women. It's disgusting.
- heavyset_go 5y agoPre-pandemic, I worked remotely, but rarely from home. In normal times, nothing is forcing you to work from home in particular if you're working remotely.
- moneywoes 5y agoIs the work life balance at Blue Origin akin to Amazon?
- rodgerd 5y agoIt sounds that way: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/former-blue-origin-employees-decry-safety-and-sexist-culture-at-the-company/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/former-blue-origin-e...
- intricatedetail 5y agoWage slave engineers are starting to wake up? Talent is well underpaid and treated like commodity.
- imglorp 5y agoThe no-remote mandate is just a symptom. The root cause appears to be Smith. > broad internal distaste for Smith [...] reflected in the job site Glassdoor, which shows that just 19% of employees approve of Smith’s leadership. That’s sharply below the approval for other space executives, as Glassdoor shows 91% of SpaceX employees approve of CEO Elon Musk and 77% of United Launch Alliance approve of CEO Tory Bruno.
- ryanSrich 5y agoGood. Insisting on forced commute is like insisting that horses are superior to motor vehicles. It’s living in the past. The sooner these companies are punished the sooner we can move on. If you work for a company that’s making you go back to the office AND you have other work options, I’d highly recommend quitting.
- tayistay 5y agoUsual comments about whether people prefer WFH or not. It doesn't matter. We need to stop driving cars so much, and most American cities have lousy transit.
- throwme159 5y agoSome people like driving cars and having lunch with their coworkers.
- tayistay 5y agoYou like commuting in your car in rush hour? Drive your car for fun on the weekend. Walk to meet friends at a cafe.
- Waterluvian 5y agoI began a 100% remote job almost four years ago. I decided that being remote was worth maybe 20% of my salary (as in I’d take a 20% paycut if that’s what it took to keep working remote in a future job). It’s honestly closer to 50% now that I’ve been doing it for years. It completely alters what having a career and raising a family is like. You’d have to give me a boatload of money to go back to the office because wow does that arrangement steal so many invaluable memories and times with my family.
- ajkjk 5y agoEvery single article on HN that is remotely related to WFH has the same two camps coming out to.. state their case.. again.. to the crowd. Group (1) loves WFH and can't understand how anyone would ever want to work in an office and will only work remotely from now on if they can. Group (2) hates WFH and desperately needs the interactions an office provides and will be quitting any job that permanently works from home. These two groups are two totally different types of people. They will never understand each other. It is probably not productive for each of them to keep rehashing their stances to each other. I don't know what the relative ratios of the two are, but I imagine we're gonna live in this two-types-of-employees world forever and ought to get used it. And we should probably stop belligerently pontificating to each other; nothing is going to change and it is just going to keep being a cycle of failing-to-communicate.
- draw_down 5y agoYes, I don’t understand why they still do it. The story is about a company in turmoil over this issue and someone posts a big long thing about how much they love being around their family all day. What is the point?! It has basically nothing to do with the rocket company.
- microtherion 5y agoI have been nearly 90% WFH, on a different continent from my office, for more than 10 years now. But I feel those last 10% of in-person interaction are important for team chemistry, so not having had the opportunity to meet the rest of the team for more than two years now (before COVID, there were family related reasons) has been rather difficult for me.
- hellohntoday 5y agoMe too... Not 10 years but about 4. I can't imagine not WFH but finally I'm starting to see that I should probably force myself to do some physical interaction. I guess the brain didn't evolve for us to sit alone all the time, as much as I love that
- zxienin 5y ago
- oxplot 5y agoOh wow! 4000 people and still hasn’t reached orbit? WTH are these people doing?!!! I didn’t actually realize how large a workforce they had.
- alwaysanon 5y agoI am a solutions architect for one of the cloud providers. Pre-COVID, in-person meetings were the vast majority - and most were me travelling to the customer. While, often, that was a walk or Uber across the centre of town - it also, all too often, was getting on a plane for like a 1-2hr meeting. So, what happens from here with my job has the added complexity of "will the customer both be in the office AND want me to visit them". In some cases customers have been in the office but they have banned anybody external from coming in. In others some of the staff are there but then some aren't - and so since some will be on VC anyway it is almost better for me to VC with them to ensure an equal experience. And, actually, I have found the more senior/tenured somebody technical at the customer is the more likely it is that they'll be the ones WFH and on the VC - with the more junior in the office - and so properly catering to the remote staff is usually the better call. Our office was VERY open plan with staff jammed in like sardines with no assigned desks (we have lockers) and was designed to be a stop-over between customer site visits. So much so that they had to limit capacity at 50% with COVID to give people a bit of space between each other. And so, ultimately whether I can work from home is dependent on what the customers want - as going to our office and taking back-to-back VC calls in open plan is kind of dumb. Before this last lockdown in Australia I was going in one day a week to have lunch & coffees & beers with my colleages - as I did miss that. The internal stuff. But one day a week was really enough for that as long as all the people who I wanted to hang out with standardised on the same day of the week. I am not really sure which way it'll go. Will customers be in a big hurry for me to go to them - especially if it means I am on a plane of potentially infected people, get in a Uber and take it right into their office? As much as I do miss the magic that sometimes happens when everybody gathers around a whiteboard - I really hope not... Speaking of that - I am surprised how a couple years into this the remote collaboration/whiteboarding stuff really hasn't improved. We all should have iPads with Apple Pencils and be able to get close-is to that in-person white boarding by now?
- marcind 5y agoDear alwaysanon, I humbly invite you to try ShareTheBoard (https://sharetheboard.com https://sharetheboard.com) We believe you shouldn't need an iPad/apple pencil to conduct remote whiteboarding. With some handy CV/ML/Math your laptop is all you need to share legible content with remote viewers and even let them contribute to your board. Check it out and let me know your thoughts, please. Thanks in advance.
- madengr 5y agoThey hired a Honeywell manager; WTF did they expect?
- paulus_magnus2 5y agoJust make the commute time (for employees) count as paid time - you're being available to yout employer in the end.
- cglace 5y agoSo you would pay an employee more the further they chose to live from the office?