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> S-team listened to employees, watched how our teams performed, talked to leaders at other companies, and got together on several occasions to discuss if and h

• rybosworld 4y ago
  That's the most frustrating part of these return to office announcements. The reasons for RTO are never based in rationality. It's because management has a feeling that certain things will improve. Also, it's often just a layoff in disguise.
  • thegrim22 4y ago
    To be fair, the evidence provided for why not to return to office also contains no data or numbers and is based purely on anecdotal personal opinions and feelings.
    • rybosworld 4y ago
      Agreed. There are studies around this topic. My issue is that, they are never cited when these decisions are announced.
    • belval 4y ago
      There's no evidence to provide if that's the preferred way to work, which we know because we've had a ton of internal surveys about it. People prefer working remotely, that part, at least for AWS, is not up for debate.
    • mejutoco 4y ago
      WFH has no commute. That is a fact. We can argue if that is good or bad. I think it is better to have no commute, since it is unpaid, and pollutes. To me, an unpaid, let‘s say 1h, commute is worse on principle, and requires a strong case before accepting. WFH is better by default based on this principle.
    • fernandotakai 4y ago
      i will return to office 100% of the time the day companies start to pay for commute time. they are making me spend my own time going to the office, so they should pay me for it.
      • School-Cotton 4y ago
        Are you paid by the hour? What would it mean for your job to “pay for commute time”?
        • baq 4y ago
          I can get 5h of work time with a commute or 7h without due to family reasons. Mandating the office means I quit because the final 3h of wfh after 2h commute turn my life into hell.
        • Moissanite 4y ago
          I'm salaried, but this could fit with another idea which is in the air at the moment - a reduced working week. I have been WFH since before the pandemic, but technically there is an office I could commute to. It would take me about an hour each way. If I did that Monday to Thursday, that's 8 hours - so four 10-hour days if commuting was part of my "on the clock" time. If my employer told me I had the option to make Friday a weekend day in exchange for commuting Monday to Thursday, I would strongly consider it and think of it as a reasonable compromise. I would have less convenient and more expensive days for the working week, but more time off. They get 8 fewer hours of me in front of a keyboard, but do get the supposed benefits of office-based employees.
        • oblio 4y ago
          Heh. That's not a solid argument, though. A full time employee is paid for 40h per week. So using commonly available tools we can determine the average commute time and in many countries travel time is considered work time. So on paper but generally rarely enforced, you should be able to subtract your commute time from the 40h and end up with actual work time. Everything on top being overtime and should be paid according to rates mandated legally. Except for a handful of companies and state employees, I've never seen overtime being paid, though.
  • 13of40 4y ago
    Not saying whether I believe it or not, and I personally work remote 100%, but one of the arguments for RTO is that remote work diminishes "social capital" in a company, where the social capital of a company is the combined value of all the social connections between the employees. In other words, if Bob has to fix the database and he knows that Zoe created it and is in the next cube over, he's going to be able to get through that problem a lot faster than if they've never met and he doesn't know what she works on. The idea being, of course, that at scale it could have a big impact on the effectiveness of the company. (Edit: Just to be clear, last time I saw a presentation on this, they did have actual metrics. But numbers on a slide deck should always be taken with a big grain of salt.)
    • belval 4y ago
      But that seems like a faulty reasoning, assuming I'm Bob, Slack and Email allow me to reach Zoe just as easily with the bonus that I'm not interrupting her flow. > scale it could have a big impact on the effectiveness of the company It does not though, if the culture is anything like Amazon's, Zoe will ask you to cut her a ticket instead of directly talking to her. There is nothing with in-person interactions that "scale".
      • nice_byte 4y ago
        That's not what social capital is. A message or email works differently when you have an established relationship with the other party. It's one thing when I have to do something "because the company needs it" but totally different when I'm helping a flesh-and-blood coworker. You don't build relationships and trust through jira tickets and emails, you build them through unstructured messy human interactions. They pay off later.
        • sinity 4y ago
          > You don't build relationships and trust through jira tickets and emails, you build them through unstructured messy human interactions. They pay off later. Assuming you're neurotypical.
  • Moissanite 4y ago
    What makes it particularly irksome is how Amazon fashions itself as a data driven company, requiring reams of evidence from employees to get promoted - but that doesn't apply to the S-team and their decisions, because they are obviously just applying the "Are right a lot" LP!
    • oblio 4y ago
      What makes you think they don't have data? It's just data they can't share because it's not morally palatable.
    • gorgoiler 4y ago
      > The announcement comes after [the company observed data from] nearly three years of experimenting with different models of hybrid and fully remote work
      • Moissanite 4y ago
        Data which they haven't shared. Don't you think that if it was convincing, they would gleefully publish it?
    • rajin444 4y ago
      Does anyone actually buy data driven? Seems like a great methodology to adopt if you need to absolve yourself of responsibility for your failures. Most questions people try to apply “data driven” to are so ridiculously complex I’d need to see some incredible methodology and ground breaking understanding of human behavior to put any faith in them. There’s just too many unknowns and confounds. Data driven is great when you’re monitoring computer performance, but that’s a domain humans have nearly built from the ground up. And even then it can still be very hard to utilize that data. Trying to apply the same to systems we barely understand seems fraught with error.
    • bart_spoon 4y ago
      Is there a company that doesn’t fashion itself as “data driven” these days? The term lost all meaning a long time ago.
  • thdespou 4y ago
    Yeah I'm expecting another round of layoffs from Amazon soon.
  • concordDance 4y ago
    In my experience WfH is perfectly fine for the old hands, their productivity goes up due to lack of commute. However, it's absolutely awful for onboarding juniors and knowledge transfer. Normal churn hits you MUCH harder if you are remote and even if you have a good documentation culture (hah, that's a tiny minority) there's a lot of intangible knowledge that doesn't get written down.
    • viraptor 4y ago
      So you tell your juniors and seniors to communicate. I'm spending some time every week talking to either juniors or peers about things they're learning. If your seniors don't initiate teaching and your juniors don't ask enough questions... That's not an issue with a remote system.
      • concordDance 4y ago
        "Tell them to communicate" is much less effective than having an environment that makes it natural and encourages it. E.g. the reason way more people are fat now is not because being slim isn't possible or because willpower has gone down, its because the environment is different. You can just tell people to eat less or you can make eating healthily and less easy. Given the state of the fresh grads and the company culture in my previous company, wfh is much worse onboarding.
        • greedo 4y ago
          "An environment that makes it natural and encourages it." In 24 years of IT, I've never seen this unicorn environment.
          • concordDance 4y ago
            My previous company managed it with the expectation that people take regular breaks and pick someone to take that break with.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • jensensbutton 4y ago
    I can't believe people are really on here thinking that zero data was considered and it's just a bunch of execs going off random "feels".
    • Mikushi 4y ago
      If they have data, share it, in the absence of said data we can only assume it's poppycock. Exec teams do that all the time, work on feel, why should we believe it's any different here?
    • LightDub 4y ago
      It must have been sh1t data then if you can use that data to impose the same policy on all people. And yes, I can believe that. With few exceptions, the execs with power are focused on sales. They couldn't give a sh!t about WFH. In fact, the reason this is probably an issue at all is because one too many of these same execs got p!ssed that they had no one to turn to help change an email setting or a printer cartridge and they had no idea how to do it. Not knowing sh!t gets old real quick (translation: "inefficient working practice which we need to do something about"). But I'm not bitter.
    • blueside 4y ago
      Of course data was used, but you may have the order of operations wrong; execs often make the decision before the data.
• mabbo 4y ago
  By summer of 2021, just after that "We all know how excited you are to be back in the office" email, I made my exit from AWS. The senior leadership have survey after survey saying that their employees mostly prefer remote work. They have data showing they're still doing just as well as ever. They don't care. They just like it better that way, and fuck all y'all who don't agree. Meanwhile, my new employer literally sold off most of their offices and has contracts saying no one ever has to work from an office again.
  • peanuty1 4y ago
    > Meanwhile, my new employer literally sold off most of their offices and has contracts saying no one ever has to work from an office again. What's the name of the company?
    • baq 4y ago
      Sounds like GitHub but I’m sure there are plenty others
    • mabbo 4y ago
      It's in my profile.
  • captainkrtek 4y ago
    Are y’all hiring? :-)
    • mabbo 4y ago
      Sadly we did layoffs first (last summer) and have frozen hiring ever since.
  • malloci 4y ago
    I can only imagine the overhead expenses saved by a company embracing the full wfh option in this manner. Of course, so many large companies were in the process of building large new buildings / campuses as the pandemic hit, so I can also see this as a way to ensure those large investments aren't seen as a waste.
• fer 4y ago
  > return to the office to get your focused work interrupted At least in my team people are gonna keep using Chime for meetings, and Slack/mail for exchanges, blocking slots on Outlook for themselves because they understand the importance of focused work. Just we'll all be at the office instead. Big success! Personally I go to the office every day, but I also liked the office not being another crowded mess. Even our L7s don't really come often to the office. The whole thing is extremely stupid.
  • belval 4y ago
    Not to out myself too much, but my Amazon office is a mix of SDE and TAM. When in office I get to enjoy "Jim" talking to a customer while I'm trying to work. "Brad" opening the windows because he's wearing a suit (customer meeting) in the middle of the Canadian winter and 4 people having a loud meeting at their desks because there are not enough phone booths for everyone. All the desks are "agile" so if I have another member of my team we need to find a spot with two free desks. That's what I'm working with here. So it angers me deeply that they could even suggest that this is in anyway better than my home office with a good mic and webcam.
    • fer 4y ago
      Ours is perfect to balance people at the office and remote. It literally feels like made on purpose for hybrid work. Meeting rooms have gigantic screens, smart cameras that focus on whomever is talking, good sound and connectivity. There are many assigned desks but most aren't, and it's no problem because it rarely gets crowded. There's always place for when people come from other sites, and there's always an empty room nearby for focused work, phone calls, improvised discussions and what not. I'd say it's on average at 30% capacity Now if people have to come back, I'll hate it. There's no point in the screens and sound, nothing is spacious anymore, most desk will be assigned, rooms will be taken up and we'll start navigating floors, and everything will become a drag like any other crammed up workplace.
• kcplate 4y ago
  > How about justifying return to office with hard numbers showing that we've fallen short on those points instead of just handwaving that "it's better" Because they don’t have to do it. They define your work environment and have for basically forever since there were employers and employees. At what point in that history has a worker ever made the demand “I am not showing up to where you say my job is at” and kept that job? You have the problem backwards. It’s not up to the employer to justify their decision to RTO to the employee, even though many do. Even if the reason is a feeling. It’s up to the employees to sell the employer in this case. If your employer hasn’t bought your justification, you have failed to persuade them.
  • belval 4y ago
    > At what point in that history has a worker ever made the demand “I am not showing up to where you say my job is at” and kept that job? You wrote your comment as if I am implying this is illegal or something. Of course they don't have to give me any justifications, hell they could fire me tomorrow as well. However, they do need workers and Amazon, as opposed to Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc... is not "hip", "cool" or "startup-esque". Their prestige is lower than the competition, their grind is harder, and as a consequence they bleed a lot more SDE than other companies. Most SDEs at Amazon are mercenaries, they are there for the money, stocks and resume padding with entire team being <2 years at Amazon. In that context, unless they are certain that every other FAANG-like company will RTO at some point soon, they will bleed even more employees and it will have a serious impact on product launches.
    • ruralthinker 4y ago
      Maybe they are fine with the attrition.
    • kcplate 4y ago
      Was not my intention to do that, but I posted more as a general commentary of the strange attitudes I have seen regarding RTO on HN. I get the stress of it—I have been WFH for the last 3 years and wouldn’t want the commute again. However, it almost as if on HN the prevailing attitude is one of “How dare they!?”. I just find that kind of a bold and entitled attitude.
• angarg12 4y ago
  > Andy Jassy probably never worked as an SDE if he truly thinks any of the above is motivating. No, he hasn't. He joined Amazon as a Product Manager in 97, became a Director in 2000, VP in 2002 and Sr. VP in 2006. The rest is history.
  • ricardobayes 4y ago
    Just another product manager on track to destroy a company. Chalk another one up.
    • OJFord 4y ago
      I have no idea of the extent to which it was his 'idea', but one of his products (from day -n) was AWS. I too vastly prefer remote work, (and don't work at Amazon) but Jassy has a long way to fall to have done net destruction to the company.
      • lupire 4y ago
        Product Manager means he chose features to prioritize, and pitched management. I'm sure he's quite talented. But he didn't contribute to actually building it. An architect is a genius and an artist, but is not a carpenter or a manager of carpenters.
    • NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
      We're talking about the same Andy Jassy that, with Bezos, came up with the idea for what is now AWS and grew it from a 50 person team to a $50bn business? That Andy Jassy?
• chaostheory 4y ago
  To me the decision was based on a combination of local government leaders begging for a return to office to help with tax revenue AND as a way to layoff people without a formal layoff.
• hikawaii 4y ago
  "The man who literally built AWS has no idea how to run a software company because I'm mad about RTO."
  • indogooner 4y ago
    Where did the original comment imply this?
• oblio 4y ago
  > Andy Jassy probably never worked as an SDE I think he's an MBA.
  • throwaway426079 4y ago
    Married But Available?
• karmasimida 4y ago
  Andy Jassy works for Amazon like 20+ years now. Albeit he is not an SDE, assuming he knew nothing about how software engineering works is just pure idiocracy and ignorance. He created the AWS business.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • dijit 4y ago
    He did? Thats impressive. Which parts did he write? All of it? Or, is he a salesman? Salesmen somewhat famously prefer open plan spaces.
    • karmasimida 4y ago
      U would be really lying to yourself believing writing some lines of code is more critical than making a business profitable. At his level, deciding what to do is 1000x more important than how and who to do it It is like you saying a director for a movie has no importance, because he didn’t act a minute in the movie That is a big big ego to claim
      • dijit 4y ago
        I think the main point I am trying to make here is: 1) I don’t know what his role was (and neither do you, most likely) 2) that different “types” of people work differently. in your example: imagine that everyone on production has to sit in a canvas chair all day in a warehouse because thats “how the director wants to work”. 3) If he is a businessman, which seems to be the case, then his personality type tends to favour the absolute worst type of working environments for developers.
  • rwalle 4y ago
    "pure idiocracy and ignorance" He probably knows something about running a software business but I really doubt if an MBA with little technical background knows much about software engineering.
• indogooner 4y ago
  >>> As someone working for AWS, better uptime, lower costs, and higher feature throughput. How about justifying return to office with hard numbers showing that we've fallen short on those points instead of just handwaving that "it's better" This is the most logical argument I have read on this post. Surely forcing a decent percentage even if not majority to come to office would not improve productivity. I have seen most water cooler talks which are just gossiping and not about the aha breakthrough you stumble upon when talking to a co-worker.
• lupire 4y ago
  > talked to leaders at other companies Confessing the antitrust collusion again.
• ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  > just popping by a teammate’s office later that day with another thought IME, 90% of the time this "another thought" was something inane about the Patriots or the latest major TV show. Can't say I miss it, but I guess it's a blow to the large population of office workers who had nothing better to do at work than lounge and socialize. And you're correct, Jassy's background is not technical. If Wikipedia can be trusted, he's mostly worked in marketing.