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Amazon Announces RTO for Employees
- properGander 4y agoOf course; everyone else is on the hook for the real estate and other contracts signed by genius CEOs and the experts they hand select. The rest of us just live here.
- flangola7 4y agoThe real estate is a sunk cost. It's not like they would save on workspace rent by having it occupied.
- jsnell 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838551
- 1101010010 4y ago> Jassy said he and the S-team, a tight-knit group of senior executives from almost all areas of Amazon's business, decided at a meeting earlier this week that employees should be in the office "the majority of the time (at least three days per week)." Was the meeting in a physical office? Can we expect the policy to apply to them as well as the rest of the staff? You know, to make it easier to "ask ad-hoc questions on the way to lunch, in the elevator, or the hallway" of leadership.
- _vertigo 4y agoHonestly I would be surprised if the majority (all, really) of the S Team isn’t planning on coming in every day of the week
- humanrebar 4y agoTo the same floor of the same office?
- _vertigo 4y agoNo, probably not. They’re executives, they probably have offices in different buildings corresponding to their business area throughout Seattle. Like the AWS head doesn’t need to work from the same building as the head of Consumer. But yeah, I’m not sure that they always meet in person when they meet. I have no idea about that. But I don’t think that the majority of their job function entails meeting each other, probably it entails running their division.
- pcan77 4y agonot really a big deal for them considering they have the big bucks to buy a nice home 5 min from the office, or you know, pay for a car service to drive them.
- _vertigo 4y agoYeah, that’s kind of my point. They probably love to come into the office
- marcinzm 4y agoWhen you've got a private office, a couple executive assistants, a private driver, a company paid hotel if you need to stay late and a (possibly second) house close by it becomes a much easier thing to do. edit: And of course 24/7 nannies.
- fragmede 4y agoThat seems inefficient. Just throw beds in a couple of conference rooms.
- xadhominemx 4y agoI’m sure the S-Team will be in the office almost every day.
- sirsinsalot 4y agoHonestly, the type of execs having huddles like that likely don't need work/life balance because they're 100% corporate cult company men anyway. Normal people, with normal life priorities and who find joy in many things outside the workplace seem to enjoy WFH. Their work doesn't define them. This kind of sweeping policy change without consultation of the people it affects would be an immediate resignation from me.
- kirykl 4y agoDrive to the office to sit on virtual meetings with people across the globe ? No thanks
- nathanaldensr 4y agoYou will signal your obedience and adherence to sociopathic executive management and meme-driven "leadership," peasant. /s
- librish 4y agoThere are a lot of companies making remote work work for them, and for a lot of people's lifestyles it's a huge boon. My personal experience has been that WFH has lead to an absolute grinding halt in productivity that requires any form of collaboration. A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours and any video conferencing is usually scheduled for later in the week, instead of in 20 minutes. I know a lot of people here really like the idea of several hours worth of undisturbed work, but my (again, personal) experience is that that leads to a much lower overall productivity for a team compared to one where people can easily interrupt each other to get unblocked. The biggest surprise to me is that it feels like there wasn't very much guidance or mandates on _how_ to work remotely. Instead we were all set free, and when the first iteration didn't work out it's back to the office for everyone.
- xakahnx 4y agoHave you tried calling people on the phone? This is the remote-work equivalent of tapping someone on the shoulder. It's equally helpful for companies that have multiple offices where you need to collaborate with someone not physical near you
- sokoloff 4y agoThe absolute best way to not reach me is by cell phone call. If you’re not my wife or kids, use any of the text mediums, but I’m not picking up an unscheduled call (and if you’re not already in contacts, it won’t even ring).
- DiggyJohnson 4y agoWhy?
- sokoloff 4y agoMy (personal) phone exists for my convenience and utility, not everyone else’s. I won’t answer 30 calls a day asking about my car warranty, credit card offers, insurance solicitations, and the “I’m your assigned staffing consultant and already working with some of your colleagues…” bullshit time-wasting calls just to save you a few minutes and allow you to also interrupt me. If you’re a colleague, we have slack, email, zoom, and you can look up my number and text me on my private cell number. If that’s not enough, I’m sorry.
- radicaldreamer 4y agoWFH makes it possible for some engineers (and managers) to not do any work and is often a case of "out of sight, out of mind". Without a strong way of gauging impact (a ton of hypergrowth startups and large companies are in this bucket), you can basically coast along doing minimal work. On the other hand, there are a ton of engineers who are hyper-productive when working remotely but because companies don't know how to tell them apart from those who aren't productive at all, suffer because everyone gets dragged back to the office.
- mrhands556 4y agoIn my experience all the people who are most vocal for WFH are the ones who fall into the “out of sight out of mind” bucket.
- Quarrelsome 4y agoin my experience that isn't the case at all. People who are most vocal tend to be parents or those that have a harsh commute and that isn't a clean overlap with slackers at all.
- ibejoeb 4y agoI suppose it depends on the nature of the work, but if your job entails making something, it's not an option to not do any work. You might find cases of surreptitious outsourcing, but someone is producing something. The second point is definitely a problem, though. Software engineering managers really should come to the role by way of software engineering. It's really difficult to determine the impact of a particular engineer, otherwise. Remote vs. on-premises doesn't significantly change that, though.
- dom96 4y agoWFH isn't the problem in that case, failing to gauge impact is. There is always a way to gauge someone's impact. Do you seriously walk around the office checking to make sure people are working hard to gauge impact?
- dubcanada 4y ago
- jmartin2683 4y agoI’d quit. No need for all that. Pretending like it’s 1995. I can’t imagine anything less productive than trying to work in a room full of people going about their own business.
- 1101010010 4y agoMy last day at the office was almost 5 years ago, and I was one of the lucky ones with a closed-door office in a sea of "open floor" cubicles. As I walked in to the roughly 12x18' room which was occupied by 4 other people (only 2 in the year prior), I was met with a cacophony of noise as all four of them were participating in their own separate video calls, mostly with staff on the same campus (there was a massive meeting room shortage). It dawned on me then how emotionally and psychologically draining the entire routine experience had become and I turned around and went home at once. This ended up being the best decision I had ever made for my career, my family and my personal well being. I hope to never return to an office space again.
- jurassic 4y agoI didn't need any more reasons to avoid working at Amazon. Their work culture is famously toxic and their way of back-weighting the vesting schedule is perfectly constructed to make people endure abuse in the workplace. But this kind of attitude toward remote work really seals the deal. Truly an F-tier workplace.
- hashtag-til 4y agoI got an offer from them (in the Alexa/hardware group - UK), but the place looked like a cult - with all their mantras to learn for interview and stuff. I mastered it for interview and just told them some nonsense rubbish. Still went on the other phases and got an offer. After all steps, somehow I felt $ would be life changing. It wasn’t, so I did the right thing and didn’t leave the current place to go there. Looking for something slightly more normal.
- myalphabet 4y ago>back-weighting the vesting schedule is perfectly constructed to make people endure abuse in the workplace. Amazon's work culture is toxic in a lot of ways and this RTO is idiotic, but saying this about the vesting schedule just shows that you don't actually have any idea how the Amazon compensation structure actually works. There's a lot of reasons to not want to work at Amazon, but the vesting backweighting isn't one of them.
- sirsinsalot 4y agoI run a team that went remote with the COVID restrictions and have not gone back to the office. I observed: - Working from home is _different_, but we still have the same work throughput - Communication is slower, but more considered - Personal boundaries on DnD time are more closely held - Needless communication was reduced I wouldn't go back to an open-plan office for anything. Even when we were in the office, most communication was on Slack because everyone had their sound cancelling headphones on trying to control the intrusiveness of the environment. Until these managers mandating that WFH ends show some actual evidence of the benefits of being in the office, i'm going to assume this is a manager's ego not doing very well without overlooking their team. I'm sure if your job is a bit ... needless ... it feels even worse when you work from home. In the meantime, some of us have work to do.
- hashtag-til 4y agoI’m on a similar situation - managing a small team and got very similar perceptions. If my company tries to enforce more than a couple days in office, I’m jumping somewhere else.
- sirsinsalot 4y agoIt makes sense that a management structure still culturally rooted in the industrial revolution's pattern of "work houses" clings on to in-person work to justify the structure. It's quite a sweet little survival mechanism, where those whose jobs would be a bit redundant with a different setup have the power to order everyone back to the factory. I just won't have any part in it. It's time for change. It's time for work to mean something different, with boundaries applicable to the output. We're not making fabric at Victorian looms ... we're building software.
- horns4lyfe 4y agoIt’s incredible how many people here are ok with forcing people back into environment-destroying soul-crushing commutes so their co workers will be somewhat more productive and make the majority shareholders of their companies (which 99.9% of you aren’t, let’s me honest) a little more cash.
- piva00 4y agoBut they are! They got some US$ 50k-300k vesting in 5 years as a carrot, that will make them sell their soul to the owners of the other 99% of equity. I'm amazed about how many grunt workers really care about efficiency, like slaves caring about the plantation output.
- thiscatis 4y agoI think it works both ways. For every exec or manager who wants RTO for all the wrong reasons there’s a WFH worker who thinks they can coast and just collect a paycheck for doing mostly nothing. And they’re both equally messing it up for a better way of working.
- thiscatis 4y agoGood! That someone will hopefully finally look at the at “escalated business support ticket” that’s been without resolution for 7 days perhaps.
- mempko 4y agoIrresponsible for climate reasons.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoI’ve been remote most of my >20y career, and my team now is fully remote. So I’m admittedly biased in favor of remote. That said… My housemate recently started a not-remote job. They don’t go out much otherwise, and yet we’ve both been down with covid just shy of a month in. Sending people to work in person will inevitably spread this disease and others. I understand that some people are willing to take that risk for their own sake, but my housemate didn’t have a choice and neither did I. The effect of these kinds of policies for inherently remote-capable work is to prioritize whatever perceived or real benefits of physical presence over disease prevention. And the effect of that is inevitably a higher rate of spread of disease. Some jobs must be done in person, and I think we can all generally accept that. But it’s reasonable to question the impact of some other jobs which could be remote arbitrarily demanding physical presence. Whatever the reasoning, if your policy is that people who could work remote mustn’t, your policy is choosing to risk infection of those workers and people in contact with them. Choose carefully. (Of course I know no one making these policies is choosing carefully. They’re choosing to risk infecting their workers and anyone around them be it Joe Grocer or Grandma)
- squalo 4y agoCorporate tax incentives, like those Amazon gets for its Seattle offices, came with a promise that they would bring x number of jobs into the city. There are concerns in Corporate America that WFH puts them at risk of losing that free money. That's the incentive here. Not productivity.
- galleywest200 4y agoWell, traffic is about to be _even worse_.
- aaomidi 4y agoReminder that productivity went up as WFH became a thing, and plummeted as it was taken away. It's fine to like working in the office, but forcing people to is how you end up with unscalable companies and unscalable teams.
- penguin_booze 4y ago"We showed you you're disposable with our layoffs. Now we tighten the the noose to show who's the boss". -- yours affectionately, Big Tech (R).