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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 feel

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.
      - School-Cotton 4y ago
        > A full time employee is paid for 40h per week. That’s not true, at least in the US. The amount of hours I work weekly has never been tracked at any company big or small. You’re not paid for 40 hours a week, you’re paid to keep up with the general standard of your peers. 40 hours is a very vague estimate of the time required to do so.
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.

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.
    - School-Cotton 4y ago
      > A full time employee is paid for 40h per week. That’s not true, at least in the US. The amount of hours I work weekly has never been tracked at any company big or small. You’re not paid for 40 hours a week, you’re paid to keep up with the general standard of your peers. 40 hours is a very vague estimate of the time required to do so.

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.