15 ms·

Amazon to Close 4 of Its 5 US Call Centers, Shifts to Work-from-Home

130 points by taubek 4y ago

mmastrac 4y ago
I think we're getting very close to a commercial office real-estate collapse in North America, and all the ensuing chaos that comes along with that. Commutes will plummet, houses will need space to work, neighbourhoods may need more services as people "stay local".
- pessimizer 4y ago
  A better way to look at it is as a large permanent general productivity gain. If you wonder how a falling population can manage to take care of its seniors, it's by wringing productivity out of technology when we can.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- steveBK123 4y ago
  There's already a micro version of this happening in NYC the last 18 months. Residential neighborhoods that are normally dead on weekdays daytime are suddenly filled with people while midtown/fidi office areas are significantly quieter. There's already been impact to relative apartment rents, especially with younger people who are picking neighborhoods based less on commute time and more on lifestyle. I can imagine a lot of NYC commuter suburbs will see similar effect. People I know in tech in NYC with high paying jobs have moved deeper into suburbs, banking on being WFH more than in-office. In before-times, fully in-office, workers were commuting 60+% of the 365 days of year (after removing weekends/holidays/vacations/sick days) Even in a median 2-3 days in-office case, people could be commuting as few as 20% of days of year. Spending 90min/way on the train but only 20-25% of calendar days starts to feel manageable if you were previously doing 60% of your days on the train for 60min/way.
  - xbmcuser 4y ago
    Yeah it was interesting to see https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup commercial estate videos how large portion of real estate is up for rent in NY but as the house of cards is built on cheap mortgage or black money no one is willing to bring down rent. Even NY government is unwilling to as that would mean they would loose billions in property taxes. But as interest rates rise landlords will come under pressure to sell the properties or lower the rent so that they can at least meat interest payments which will result in lower valuations and margin calls.
- rabuse 4y ago
  I'm all for it, honestly.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  I’m so bearish on commercial real estate I’m hibernating in a cave and I’m not going to feel comfortable investing until I see it crash to earth. The fact the pricing is staying as high as it is, that’s nothing but total madness. Work from home isn’t going to stop. We’ve been desensitized to how ridiculous the status quo is. Like driving to a callcenter so you can be next to people shouting at their phone as you stare straight forward at a computer screen before going home.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  I don't like density. I understand where pro-density people are coming from, but I think there is a max density where people lose too much freedom. Getting rid of commutes and letting everyone have a smaller required radius is a big winner. It's a winner for pollution, for transportation and for family/work balance.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
yrgulation 4y ago
A sensible approach. On site work is a thing of the past. We need more remote people for a higher quality of life, less pollution and improved mental health. I appreciate there are those without friends or family that want to fill in the void with coworkers but your coworkers are simply not there for that.
- Nux 4y ago
  > but your coworkers are simply not there for that. Yes they are, many of them would be there in a similar situation. The work place colleagues is the main pool one draws "friends" from nowadays in very many cases.
  - dfee 4y ago
    You may be right, but that’s a sad ordeal: your boss is an arbiter of your social interactions? That’s not healthy for you (those people), not for society, and especially not for local communities.
  - chrsig 4y ago
    No, they're not. And no, I'm not. And no amount of using coworkers as a crutch for not having a private social life will change that. There are plenty of reasons why many can't welcome coworkers into your private life. It's a huge discrimination risk. Aside from that, coupling social needs with employment needs creates a form of codependence with the workplace. You have more incentive to stay at a job that is mistreating you because you'll lose your friends if you leave. Maybe some people are ok with those dynamics, but I'm personally not, and I'll not have my colleagues forcing it upon me.
    - starkd 4y ago
      Perhaps, but that's not the way many people actually live. Maybe you would seek out alternates to socializing, but the institutions that once did that are dying or long dead.
      - 4y ago
pradn 4y ago
This will also make it harder to unionize. Historically, having your coworkers together in one place was a prerequisite for collective action. If call center workers are atomized, even a thin hope of that will perish.
- coffeeblack 4y ago
  I don’t think so. All that is needed is a different way to organize. Unions need online social networks for workers to meet and communicate. That would make it impossible for companies to stop unionization.
  - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    IIRC, Ralph Nader once proposed a .union TLD that would mirror each employer's .com domain. If you worked for Amazon, you'd know to go to amazon.union to find out about the company union, or if it didn't exist, about unionizing activities. I'm sure there would be many implementation details that would need to be worked out, but it seemed like a pretty good way to empower labor at each company.
    - koheripbal 4y ago
      That would give monopoly power to one union. Monopolies always abuse their power.
      - oplaadpunt 4y ago
        I think that would fall under the implementations details for me. It'd be a nice idea to show a listing of all registered unions when going to the amazon.union domain, with further subdomains for specific unions. (xxx.amazon.union, yyy.amazon.union, etc). I don't think this would lead to any monopolization of power.
      - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
        The site could contain links to all unions that represent employees in that company. Not sure I've ever heard of any individual employee being represented by multiple unions, even if there are multiple unions covering different groups within a company, but I guess it's possible.
Someone1234 4y ago
Capitalists constantly sing the song of capitalism as an economic efficiency driver. WFH is economically more efficient for both employer and employee. It does cause a short term ground-swell as inner city businesses move back to the suburbs, but long term it isn't an increase or decrease, just a reallocation. The same pro-capitalist people are upset by WFH even while being entirely inline with their supposed beliefs, kind of showcasing that it was anti-labor all along. They're happy to benefits businesses, but the fact it may benefit employees even more upsets them greatly. Personally I'm looking forward to more locally owned bodegas and sandwich shops opening near people's WFH homes, maybe so local that some people will even walk to them during lunch and start talking to their neighbors again. We may even see people vote for more pedestrian and cycling infrastructure improvements as they start to use it more.
- Nuhhnjnjmimij 4y ago
  You criticize capitalism and then look forward to locally owned bodegas and sandwich shops, who by definition are capitalists?
  - orwin 4y ago
    I think here it's a historical materialist view on capitalism, so if you work in your shop, it's not capitalism (basically).
  - Someone1234 4y ago
    I didn't criticize capitalism. I'm criticizing online commentary.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    The comment was about how WFH is a boon to capitalists, because there are people/pundits who larp as capitalists who ignore productivity gains to bash it. It's just when some people see their religion mentioned, they get triggered.
- 1123581321 4y ago
  I sincerely don’t see the connection between capitalism and anti-WFH. To me, I see it reducing the cost of starting and running a business. It’s also very family-friendly (a lot of entrepreneurs seem to have families, especially older ones.) Is that based on a recent article or study?
koboll 4y ago
The entire industry is shifting to WFH. I can tell because of the beeps. I swear in 1 out of every 5 or 6 calls to a customer service line I hear an intermittent beep go off every few seconds in the background. I used to think it was a call center thing. But then I realized it was a smoke alarm beep. Not only is every customer service rep working from home now, but for some reason they'd rather deal with beeping than change their smoke alarm batteries.
- 1123581321 4y ago
  I’ve had coworkers like that. Tempting to ask for their address and Instacart a 9V battery…
- bluedino 4y ago
  Same but background dog barking
- Eleison23 4y ago
  A regular intermittent beep could also a be signal that the line is being recorded.
- catcherme 4y ago
  A lot of companies are still trying to make hybrid work, though it remains to be seen how sustainable that is given the stark difference in experience.
- nikau 4y ago
  Its funny, our workplace is the opposite now, the ones with lots of background noise and other issues are always met with "oh you are in the office today"
tyingq 4y ago
I'm curious what kind of big-brother productivity/spy tools they are using. Something Orwellian enough that Amazon is willing to cede having these people in the office.
- 8organicbits 4y ago
  Call center may not need much extra. Track call metrics: time to answer a call, time to resolve a call. Calls are recorded for quality, so the boss was always watching. Any action on a customer's account is logged and audited.
faeriechangling 4y ago
One of the worst things about call centres is hearing everybody else. Work from home makes more sense.
firstSpeaker 4y ago
This is a big news both because it will help people who don’t want to commute and work from home and will cause trouble for people cannot work from home (small homes, kids, noisy environments, etc.)
- rudasn 4y ago
  I've worked from home since 2011 with no issues, but having a 3 year old in the house made it impossible to focus on anything of importance.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    Wait.... if you could not focus then were you really working? this is one of the biggest drawbacks I see, people wfh having less productivity because they are focusing on their personal responsibilities and not their professional ones likely meaning co-workers are picking up the slack to get the work done.
jvanderbot 4y ago
I applaud the work-from-home option, but wish that companies would do more to have quarterly on-site events just in case, maybe even a yearly gathering that's mandatory. I'd be very interested in meeting many of my co-workers in face.
- yboris 4y ago
  Would this then require you still have to work nearby, or take a costly and time-consuming trip into the office? (I imagine it's not easy for a parent to abandon children just to fly over for a few days to see the office). Would be rather expensive for the company to fly people in and house them in hotels and feed them for seemingly (to me) little benefit :/
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Distributed teams have been getting together semi-regularly at offsites for as long as I've been working--which is to say decades. And while some people are adamantly opposed to travel of any kind, it's the norm for many professional workers, especially at more senior levels.
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    Expensive to travel relative to what? A developer salary is probably at least 90k, so that's a 1% cost to get someone on site for a few days, all expenses paid. Now look at the big companies, devs make 4x that and don't require any extra accomodations for travel.
tiffanyh 4y ago
I wonder if Amazon is using Amazon Connect to allows agents to answer these calls remotely. https://aws.amazon.com/connect/ https://aws.amazon.com/connect/
- kondro 4y ago
  They probably use it in their call Centres.
conqrr 4y ago
If Amazon is doing it, its the data that's telling that its more efficient cost-wise. They are still one of the most ruthlessly efficient tech companies out there. They are definitely NOT doing it to make it better for employees, but it happens to be a pro for employees too in this scenario.
- sfvegandude 4y ago
  Amazon has spent the last decade or so perfecting employee surveillance, and now home surveillance. They don't need people to be onsite anymore because they can just watch people at home.
gorbachev 4y ago
This is fantastic news for the call center employees. I'm not sure it's good news for customers who call for support, though. From my personal experience there's a pretty high chance the call will be disrupted by something. Kids, pets, toilet flushing, personal calls, someone ringing the doorbell, whatever. The absolute worst I've experienced was a call with someone who was taking customer service calls outside on her cellphone. The heavy wind feeding into her microphone combined with an already not so good cellphone reception did not make a good customer service experience.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  > The absolute worst I've experienced was a call with someone who was taking customer service calls outside on her cellphone. The heavy wind feeding into her microphone combined with an already not so good cellphone reception did not make a good customer service experience. That seems very okay. We'll adjust. Also there's plenty potential for technology to solve actual issues for humans (one human not wanting to have to sit at the desk all day, the other wanting to have good phone support), which is a great thing.
azinman2 4y ago
It’s always a mixed bag, but with the increase in work-from-home culture will come with a number of down sides for society - loneliness, a significant drop in weak bonds which significantly shrinks one’s social networks, local economic shrinkage as support businesses close (janitors, lunch spots, suppliers, etc), and a loss of general sense of belonging or even loyalty to your employer. Of course there are many obvious upsides which I’m sure HN readers will quickly defend and say they’d never be anything but remote again. That’s great when you have a choice, but when you’re a call center worker you have a low likelihood of having so much choice and autonomy over your not-quite-white-collar life. As far as a call worker goes, the inability to easily commiserate with coworkers on shitty calls, even between calls, I’m certain will lead to higher attrition and lower happiness. Humans need social support.
- spicyusername 4y ago
  Definitely agree that the change will come with some immediate social drawbacks. I wonder if, after 10 or 50 years, you'll start to see different social structures materialize to fill the void left by losing the second place of the office.
  - rnk 4y ago
    120 years ago, people still went to their 'worksite' every day. For some it was in a city, but for a huge number maybe it was on your own farm (thinking of the us). People coped. Isolation was a problem then too.
    - nyokodo 4y ago
      > People coped. Isolation was a problem then too. 120 years ago family and neighbors would just show up. Communities weren’t compromised of strangers who only slept there. Maybe we’ll adapt by getting to know our neighbors and being less exclusionary about our homes as time goes on.
  - Larrikin 4y ago
    I hope Meetup is replaced or fixes their problems. When moving cities or just traveling anywhere for a significant time it was an invaluable tool for meeting people with any kind of similar interest. But COVID crushed it, I don't know the financial particulars, but host I've talked to found it became particularly hard to continue groups that didn't have obvious financial backing (tech meetups that company's pay for to scout workers) or extremely passionate members willing to bear the cost. I got lucky my previous city had extremely passionate members for my favorite group, but my new city is smaller and I think the fees have either killed the old group or are preventing a new group from forming
3qz 4y ago
Can call centre employees afford their own workspace? I hope this comes with a big raise. Mom’s kitchen table is going to get busy!
chucklenorris 4y ago
I'm surprised that Amazon of all gave up the "handcuffed to the desk" approach to management in favor of work from home. Apparently the cost of rent and infrastructure is bigger than the last 1% they could squeeze out of their workforce. Middle managers must have an existential crisis right now /s
WheatMillington 4y ago
Do WFH employees get compensated for exchanging office amenities for personal? Desk space, electricity, internet, coffee, etc?
- nikau 4y ago
  where i live you can claim a lot of that stuff on tax
- nu11ptr 4y ago
  Speaking as someone who has been WFH for the past 10 years: No, not typically, although I did get like $25/mo. credit for Internet at my past job. To be fair, I sought WFH it was not forced on me - they would have preferred I been in the office. It might be different if your position is specifically WFH.
- albntomat0 4y ago
  There's definitely a tradeoff of having to buy your own desk and coffee, but not having to pay the transport costs and time of commuting.
nikau 4y ago
I'm amazed more WFH for call centres wasn't a thing pre-pandemic. 20+ years ago definity extenders let a person working from home have a digital pabx extension like in the office and shared the network link with their PC - perfect for call centre work as you had quality audio the same as in the office.

130 points by taubek 4y ago

I think we're getting very close to a commercial office real-estate collapse in North America, and all the ensuing chaos that comes along with that. Commutes will plummet, houses will need space to work, neighbourhoods may need more services as people "stay local".

pessimizer 4y ago
A better way to look at it is as a large permanent general productivity gain. If you wonder how a falling population can manage to take care of its seniors, it's by wringing productivity out of technology when we can.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
steveBK123 4y ago
There's already a micro version of this happening in NYC the last 18 months. Residential neighborhoods that are normally dead on weekdays daytime are suddenly filled with people while midtown/fidi office areas are significantly quieter. There's already been impact to relative apartment rents, especially with younger people who are picking neighborhoods based less on commute time and more on lifestyle. I can imagine a lot of NYC commuter suburbs will see similar effect. People I know in tech in NYC with high paying jobs have moved deeper into suburbs, banking on being WFH more than in-office. In before-times, fully in-office, workers were commuting 60+% of the 365 days of year (after removing weekends/holidays/vacations/sick days) Even in a median 2-3 days in-office case, people could be commuting as few as 20% of days of year. Spending 90min/way on the train but only 20-25% of calendar days starts to feel manageable if you were previously doing 60% of your days on the train for 60min/way.
- xbmcuser 4y ago
  Yeah it was interesting to see https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup commercial estate videos how large portion of real estate is up for rent in NY but as the house of cards is built on cheap mortgage or black money no one is willing to bring down rent. Even NY government is unwilling to as that would mean they would loose billions in property taxes. But as interest rates rise landlords will come under pressure to sell the properties or lower the rent so that they can at least meat interest payments which will result in lower valuations and margin calls.
rabuse 4y ago
I'm all for it, honestly.
faeriechangling 4y ago
I’m so bearish on commercial real estate I’m hibernating in a cave and I’m not going to feel comfortable investing until I see it crash to earth. The fact the pricing is staying as high as it is, that’s nothing but total madness. Work from home isn’t going to stop. We’ve been desensitized to how ridiculous the status quo is. Like driving to a callcenter so you can be next to people shouting at their phone as you stare straight forward at a computer screen before going home.
vorpalhex 4y ago
I don't like density. I understand where pro-density people are coming from, but I think there is a max density where people lose too much freedom. Getting rid of commutes and letting everyone have a smaller required radius is a big winner. It's a winner for pollution, for transportation and for family/work balance.
newaccount2021 4y ago

yrgulation 4y ago

A sensible approach. On site work is a thing of the past. We need more remote people for a higher quality of life, less pollution and improved mental health. I appreciate there are those without friends or family that want to fill in the void with coworkers but your coworkers are simply not there for that.

Nux 4y ago
> but your coworkers are simply not there for that. Yes they are, many of them would be there in a similar situation. The work place colleagues is the main pool one draws "friends" from nowadays in very many cases.
- dfee 4y ago
  You may be right, but that’s a sad ordeal: your boss is an arbiter of your social interactions? That’s not healthy for you (those people), not for society, and especially not for local communities.
- chrsig 4y ago
  No, they're not. And no, I'm not. And no amount of using coworkers as a crutch for not having a private social life will change that. There are plenty of reasons why many can't welcome coworkers into your private life. It's a huge discrimination risk. Aside from that, coupling social needs with employment needs creates a form of codependence with the workplace. You have more incentive to stay at a job that is mistreating you because you'll lose your friends if you leave. Maybe some people are ok with those dynamics, but I'm personally not, and I'll not have my colleagues forcing it upon me.
  - starkd 4y ago
    Perhaps, but that's not the way many people actually live. Maybe you would seek out alternates to socializing, but the institutions that once did that are dying or long dead.
    - 4y ago

pradn 4y ago

This will also make it harder to unionize. Historically, having your coworkers together in one place was a prerequisite for collective action. If call center workers are atomized, even a thin hope of that will perish.

coffeeblack 4y ago
I don’t think so. All that is needed is a different way to organize. Unions need online social networks for workers to meet and communicate. That would make it impossible for companies to stop unionization.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  IIRC, Ralph Nader once proposed a .union TLD that would mirror each employer's .com domain. If you worked for Amazon, you'd know to go to amazon.union to find out about the company union, or if it didn't exist, about unionizing activities. I'm sure there would be many implementation details that would need to be worked out, but it seemed like a pretty good way to empower labor at each company.
  - koheripbal 4y ago
    That would give monopoly power to one union. Monopolies always abuse their power.
    - oplaadpunt 4y ago
      I think that would fall under the implementations details for me. It'd be a nice idea to show a listing of all registered unions when going to the amazon.union domain, with further subdomains for specific unions. (xxx.amazon.union, yyy.amazon.union, etc). I don't think this would lead to any monopolization of power.
    - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
      The site could contain links to all unions that represent employees in that company. Not sure I've ever heard of any individual employee being represented by multiple unions, even if there are multiple unions covering different groups within a company, but I guess it's possible.

Someone1234 4y ago

Capitalists constantly sing the song of capitalism as an economic efficiency driver. WFH is economically more efficient for both employer and employee. It does cause a short term ground-swell as inner city businesses move back to the suburbs, but long term it isn't an increase or decrease, just a reallocation. The same pro-capitalist people are upset by WFH even while being entirely inline with their supposed beliefs, kind of showcasing that it was anti-labor all along. They're happy to benefits businesses, but the fact it may benefit employees even more upsets them greatly. Personally I'm looking forward to more locally owned bodegas and sandwich shops opening near people's WFH homes, maybe so local that some people will even walk to them during lunch and start talking to their neighbors again. We may even see people vote for more pedestrian and cycling infrastructure improvements as they start to use it more.

Nuhhnjnjmimij 4y ago
You criticize capitalism and then look forward to locally owned bodegas and sandwich shops, who by definition are capitalists?
- orwin 4y ago
  I think here it's a historical materialist view on capitalism, so if you work in your shop, it's not capitalism (basically).
- Someone1234 4y ago
  I didn't criticize capitalism. I'm criticizing online commentary.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  The comment was about how WFH is a boon to capitalists, because there are people/pundits who larp as capitalists who ignore productivity gains to bash it. It's just when some people see their religion mentioned, they get triggered.
1123581321 4y ago
I sincerely don’t see the connection between capitalism and anti-WFH. To me, I see it reducing the cost of starting and running a business. It’s also very family-friendly (a lot of entrepreneurs seem to have families, especially older ones.) Is that based on a recent article or study?

koboll 4y ago

The entire industry is shifting to WFH. I can tell because of the beeps. I swear in 1 out of every 5 or 6 calls to a customer service line I hear an intermittent beep go off every few seconds in the background. I used to think it was a call center thing. But then I realized it was a smoke alarm beep. Not only is every customer service rep working from home now, but for some reason they'd rather deal with beeping than change their smoke alarm batteries.

1123581321 4y ago
I’ve had coworkers like that. Tempting to ask for their address and Instacart a 9V battery…
bluedino 4y ago
Same but background dog barking
Eleison23 4y ago
A regular intermittent beep could also a be signal that the line is being recorded.
catcherme 4y ago
A lot of companies are still trying to make hybrid work, though it remains to be seen how sustainable that is given the stark difference in experience.
nikau 4y ago
Its funny, our workplace is the opposite now, the ones with lots of background noise and other issues are always met with "oh you are in the office today"

tyingq 4y ago

I'm curious what kind of big-brother productivity/spy tools they are using. Something Orwellian enough that Amazon is willing to cede having these people in the office.

8organicbits 4y ago
Call center may not need much extra. Track call metrics: time to answer a call, time to resolve a call. Calls are recorded for quality, so the boss was always watching. Any action on a customer's account is logged and audited.

faeriechangling 4y ago

One of the worst things about call centres is hearing everybody else. Work from home makes more sense.

firstSpeaker 4y ago

This is a big news both because it will help people who don’t want to commute and work from home and will cause trouble for people cannot work from home (small homes, kids, noisy environments, etc.)

rudasn 4y ago
I've worked from home since 2011 with no issues, but having a 3 year old in the house made it impossible to focus on anything of importance.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  Wait.... if you could not focus then were you really working? this is one of the biggest drawbacks I see, people wfh having less productivity because they are focusing on their personal responsibilities and not their professional ones likely meaning co-workers are picking up the slack to get the work done.

jvanderbot 4y ago

I applaud the work-from-home option, but wish that companies would do more to have quarterly on-site events just in case, maybe even a yearly gathering that's mandatory. I'd be very interested in meeting many of my co-workers in face.

yboris 4y ago
Would this then require you still have to work nearby, or take a costly and time-consuming trip into the office? (I imagine it's not easy for a parent to abandon children just to fly over for a few days to see the office). Would be rather expensive for the company to fly people in and house them in hotels and feed them for seemingly (to me) little benefit :/
- ghaff 4y ago
  Distributed teams have been getting together semi-regularly at offsites for as long as I've been working--which is to say decades. And while some people are adamantly opposed to travel of any kind, it's the norm for many professional workers, especially at more senior levels.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  Expensive to travel relative to what? A developer salary is probably at least 90k, so that's a 1% cost to get someone on site for a few days, all expenses paid. Now look at the big companies, devs make 4x that and don't require any extra accomodations for travel.

tiffanyh 4y ago

I wonder if Amazon is using Amazon Connect to allows agents to answer these calls remotely. https://aws.amazon.com/connect/ https://aws.amazon.com/connect/

kondro 4y ago
They probably use it in their call Centres.

conqrr 4y ago

If Amazon is doing it, its the data that's telling that its more efficient cost-wise. They are still one of the most ruthlessly efficient tech companies out there. They are definitely NOT doing it to make it better for employees, but it happens to be a pro for employees too in this scenario.

sfvegandude 4y ago
Amazon has spent the last decade or so perfecting employee surveillance, and now home surveillance. They don't need people to be onsite anymore because they can just watch people at home.

gorbachev 4y ago

This is fantastic news for the call center employees. I'm not sure it's good news for customers who call for support, though. From my personal experience there's a pretty high chance the call will be disrupted by something. Kids, pets, toilet flushing, personal calls, someone ringing the doorbell, whatever. The absolute worst I've experienced was a call with someone who was taking customer service calls outside on her cellphone. The heavy wind feeding into her microphone combined with an already not so good cellphone reception did not make a good customer service experience.

jstummbillig 4y ago
> The absolute worst I've experienced was a call with someone who was taking customer service calls outside on her cellphone. The heavy wind feeding into her microphone combined with an already not so good cellphone reception did not make a good customer service experience. That seems very okay. We'll adjust. Also there's plenty potential for technology to solve actual issues for humans (one human not wanting to have to sit at the desk all day, the other wanting to have good phone support), which is a great thing.

azinman2 4y ago

It’s always a mixed bag, but with the increase in work-from-home culture will come with a number of down sides for society - loneliness, a significant drop in weak bonds which significantly shrinks one’s social networks, local economic shrinkage as support businesses close (janitors, lunch spots, suppliers, etc), and a loss of general sense of belonging or even loyalty to your employer. Of course there are many obvious upsides which I’m sure HN readers will quickly defend and say they’d never be anything but remote again. That’s great when you have a choice, but when you’re a call center worker you have a low likelihood of having so much choice and autonomy over your not-quite-white-collar life. As far as a call worker goes, the inability to easily commiserate with coworkers on shitty calls, even between calls, I’m certain will lead to higher attrition and lower happiness. Humans need social support.

spicyusername 4y ago
Definitely agree that the change will come with some immediate social drawbacks. I wonder if, after 10 or 50 years, you'll start to see different social structures materialize to fill the void left by losing the second place of the office.
- rnk 4y ago
  120 years ago, people still went to their 'worksite' every day. For some it was in a city, but for a huge number maybe it was on your own farm (thinking of the us). People coped. Isolation was a problem then too.
  - nyokodo 4y ago
    > People coped. Isolation was a problem then too. 120 years ago family and neighbors would just show up. Communities weren’t compromised of strangers who only slept there. Maybe we’ll adapt by getting to know our neighbors and being less exclusionary about our homes as time goes on.
- Larrikin 4y ago
  I hope Meetup is replaced or fixes their problems. When moving cities or just traveling anywhere for a significant time it was an invaluable tool for meeting people with any kind of similar interest. But COVID crushed it, I don't know the financial particulars, but host I've talked to found it became particularly hard to continue groups that didn't have obvious financial backing (tech meetups that company's pay for to scout workers) or extremely passionate members willing to bear the cost. I got lucky my previous city had extremely passionate members for my favorite group, but my new city is smaller and I think the fees have either killed the old group or are preventing a new group from forming

3qz 4y ago

Can call centre employees afford their own workspace? I hope this comes with a big raise. Mom’s kitchen table is going to get busy!

chucklenorris 4y ago

I'm surprised that Amazon of all gave up the "handcuffed to the desk" approach to management in favor of work from home. Apparently the cost of rent and infrastructure is bigger than the last 1% they could squeeze out of their workforce. Middle managers must have an existential crisis right now /s

WheatMillington 4y ago

Do WFH employees get compensated for exchanging office amenities for personal? Desk space, electricity, internet, coffee, etc?

nikau 4y ago
where i live you can claim a lot of that stuff on tax
nu11ptr 4y ago
Speaking as someone who has been WFH for the past 10 years: No, not typically, although I did get like $25/mo. credit for Internet at my past job. To be fair, I sought WFH it was not forced on me - they would have preferred I been in the office. It might be different if your position is specifically WFH.
albntomat0 4y ago
There's definitely a tradeoff of having to buy your own desk and coffee, but not having to pay the transport costs and time of commuting.

nikau 4y ago

I'm amazed more WFH for call centres wasn't a thing pre-pandemic. 20+ years ago definity extenders let a person working from home have a digital pabx extension like in the office and shared the network link with their PC - perfect for call centre work as you had quality audio the same as in the office.