11 ms·

Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

115 points by cebert 4y ago

theodpHN 4y ago
Amazon Wants 10,000+ Employee Dogs Back in Office, Facilitating Collaboration https://slashdot.org/submission/17188709/amazon-wants-10000-employee-dogs-back-in-office-facilitating-collaboration https://slashdot.org/submission/17188709/amazon-wants-10000-...
- version_five 4y ago
  I would quit immediately it I had to go to an office with a bunch of dogs in it. It's weird to me that in all the performative "inclusion" that companies get up to, they think it's ok to create a policy that will make a non-negligible portion of workers extremely uncomfortable. Their choice, personally a dog-friendly workplace is a complete nonstarter for me
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - microtherion 4y ago
    I'm very much a cat person and uncomfortable around most dogs. That said, I collaborate often with non-sighted co-workers, some of which have service dogs, which are invariably well behaved, and in the office for a good reason.
    - dgb23 4y ago
      Service dogs are more well behaved than the average person.
    - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
      big difference between a service dog and a family dog. They might as well let everyone take their young children to work.
  - badcppdev 4y ago
    A bunch of dogs just seems like you're going to have otherwise well behaved dogs getting 'yappy' and annoyed at each other. Or worse. I calculate my comfort level in an office with N dogs would decrease at a rate of N*(N-1)
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Google had a "bring your dog to work" option and I saw maybe 3 people use it at my site the entire time I was there (10 years). It's just a silly thing, because dogs (well, my dogs at least) require more interaction and free movement than they can get at an office. And if you bring your dog, now you can't go to the cafeteria for lunch, etc. and have to find someone to attend to them when you go to the bathroom or whatever. I did it once because my wife and kids were away and I felt bad for my dog alone by herself at home. Neither of us enjoyed it. I get why employers offer it -- a dog alone for hours by itself sucks. But they'd probably be better off just giving employees discounts on local "Doggy daycare" places. Anyways now I have two border collies lying on the bed in my (home) office behind me staring at me wondering why I'm not doing something more interesting than shitposting on HN.
- belter 4y ago
  [flagged]
- adlpz 4y ago
  This whole thing reads like a disturbing attempt to seem human and approachable of a soulless machine overlord. Which I guess fits AMZN well enough.
- kmac_ 4y ago
  Do the dogs wander around the offices? What about employees with allergies?
  - klyrs 4y ago
    Though owners are generally expected to keep them, dogs predictably escape containment. Humans with allergies sneeze, which startles the dogs into barking. It's ridiculous. I'd be in favor of onsite doggy daycare, not in my working environment.
  - x86x87 4y ago
    technically dogs should not wonder around. employees with allergies are usually placed on a floor with no dogs with beefy filtration systems (and there are also special no-dogs building). collaboration, amiright?
gitfan86 4y ago
No one should be surprised by this. I interviewed at AMZN and the online quiz was basically "Which delivery driver would you fire in this scenario" and the 1-on-1 interviews were with people who when I asked what you like about AMZN replied "the stock price". If you take a job at AMZN you are treated like a cog in the machine. And that is fine if that is what you want.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  Not that I am surprised by this event, in fact I remember reading that the original RTO was about December. Regardless, I don't think that such generalizations are particularly useful. I have been given multiple different descriptions of what it's like to work there, wlb and so on, and it seems to depend entirely on the org.
  - coliveira 4y ago
    Like any big corporation, your personal experience depends on your luck, because there are so many groups and things to do. However in general the experience is miserable.
- chasd00 4y ago
  Well to be fair, you’re never more than a cog in your employer’s machine. That’s the whole point in having employees.
  - WaffleIronMaker 4y ago
    I think that's an overly cynical view. While employees exist ultimately to serve the company's goal, good companies will also work to support the employee's goals in return (e.g. time away from work, time to develop skills, general happiness, etc.).
  - krapp 4y ago
    Yeah, but for some reason tech people seem to think they're the only cogs that matter. They really thought companies were going to move heaven and earth just to make their personal comfort and convenience a priority.
ragnot 4y ago
It's pretty much a layoff in disguise at this point.
- CharlieDigital 4y ago
  If it were, they'd just go for the full 5 days in office. That would be a very easy way to lop off a bunch of folks.
  - x86x87 4y ago
    nah. you don't want all the people to leave at once.
- ericmay 4y ago
  Potentially, and I'm sure they'll make exceptions for this but generally these moves cause your "best and brightest" to leave or to start looking since they have options if they are concerned about stability.
eggy 4y ago
It is for a three-day return-to-office, not full time. Given the state of the economy, I'd be worried about just quitting. It seems during the pandemic tech workers went for broke and took car leases and moved away banking on being able to WFH for a long period of time. I wonder if Amazon made it clear WFH would not be permanent or an option. There are plenty of tech workers who would like to work at Amazon if a bunch quit. Those who quit will still be stuck with their new housing and car lease arrangements anyway. Personally, I am freelance again (not in software/tech), but I voted for a return to the office. Our engineering firm (entertainment engineering - structural and mechanical) was not doing as good quantitatively as my peers thought we were doing as we WFH. Plus, a lot of people were actually happy after the fact when they started to realize they had taken for granted the face-to-face interaction at work and for some without self-discipline, the motivation to get up and working without too many home distractions.
- belter 4y ago
  Last week I had to deliver an onsite at a company who insisted on doing at their location. You see the thing is...I have been curing a strong feverish cold, but was good enough to go. We were all 15 on a tiny cozy meeting room for 3 days. I am fairly certain half of this team will cook my virus and will feel miserable and might stay in bed next week...Am I guilty ?? ;-)
  - brainzap 4y ago
    yes
  - FigurativeVoid 4y ago
    Yes
  - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
    Is a soldier guilty for shooting towards the enemy? Office authoritarians know they're causing this kind of risk in an abstract sense, I say let them reap what they sow.
  - trpv 4y ago
dsm4ck 4y ago
Looks like Management has decided that immediate 5 day RTO will cause too many resignations all at once. Start with 3 days, then 6 months later 4 days, and finally full time RTO will spread the resignations out and reduce business disruption.
- ragnot 4y ago
  Bingo.
- zapdrive 4y ago
  With over 400k tech layoffs in the last 1 year, I wouldn't be worried about resigning employees of I were a big corp.
  - ActionHank 4y ago
    Your top performers know they are the top performers and they know they have options. They will be the ones to move. The only factor that would deter that is golden handcuffs. They will be left with very highly paid, high performers who are not happy and mid to low performers who have fewer options or less impetus to move.
    - tinyhouse 4y ago
      They won't be the ones to move because these companies are not stupid. They have mechanisms to save top talent by making exceptions for them and giving more equity.
      - ragnot 4y ago
        I think you are giving more credit to corporations than you think. The exceptions are for top brass, not top ICs.
  - kcplate 4y ago
    The coming years will have stories of regret from tech folks who arrogantly left good positions because of RTO and then failed to find WFH jobs because those were all snapped up by the very best of the best. Nothing can bring an ego down to earth faster than to realize that of the 400k workers out there looking for work…more than half have better resumes, better interviewing skills, and a better chance to secure the jobs than you do.
lr4444lr 4y ago
What region is this in? All?
- coev 4y ago
  us-west-2 and all the others
plandis 4y ago
Seems like a great idea… If your intention is to get people to quit without needing to lay them off and pay out severance.
- x86x87 4y ago
  yes. a great idea if you want people to work just hard enough to not be fired while they are looking for their next gig.
mamonster 4y ago
> "Staffers who posted in the Slack channel said they were caught off guard by the announcement. Many expressed frustration that they’d have to find arrangements for child care, caregivers for aging parents, or potentially move in order to be within commuting distance of the office. One worker said they’d recently leased a car with an annual limit of 16,000 miles assuming remote work was still an option; if they’re required to come into the office at least three days a week, they’ll exceed that limit. Others took the company’s previous flexible work stance as an opportunity to move outside major cities to find more affordable housing and are now concerned about their commute." Boy these employees are about to get what looks like a very expensive lesson in expectation / risk management.
- eckza 4y ago
  > Boy these employees are about to get what looks like a very expensive lesson in expectation / risk management. Is that really the takeaway, here?
  - xwdv 4y ago
    What else is there to takeaway? They knew they weren’t working for a remote-first company. They knew what their contract said. They played a dangerous game and now they’re finally burned. You cannot collect an Amazon salary living out in Idaho or Nebraska.
    - Adraghast 4y ago
      Why not?
      - brk 4y ago
        Capitalism?
      - xwdv 4y ago
        Because developers in those regions can tolerate less salary due to their lower expenses, as a competitive advantage.
unity1001 4y ago
Dumb. Covid is endemic now and it makes everything more difficult for everyone. Talking, thinking, concentrating are the first things to get hit by any mild covid infection. Hauling people's asses to office even one single day a week will skyrocket infection rates and hurt productivity in a way nothing else can.
- trpv 4y ago
  Would like to see some data on this. I don’t know of anyone who’s gotten Covid since… summer or so?
  - ppg677 4y ago
    I got Covid for the first time last month. Anecdotally I know at least a dozen more who also got it for the first time this past December/January.
  - louistsi 4y ago
    Because no one tests anymore. Source: Have COVID. Picked it up during a week of working in an Amazon office, funnily enough.
  - eddieroger 4y ago
    I know someone with an active infection right now. Also a decently well known podcaster in the Apple space had it in the last week or so. It still exists, but no one tests and everyone's over it. You're right about wanting data, but don't hold your breath for it, and it's still definitely going around.
    - trpv 4y ago
      That makes sense. When I got Covid just over a year ago, I didn’t bother testing or reporting it, just stayed home. Interestingly enough, I know a couple people who were sick and tested positive for the flu but not Covid this winter
- Lendal 4y ago
  That's why we spent all that money on free vaccines for the entire population. People who don't want to take the vaccines can now complain about a problem that they created, high infection rates. This story is all about how our greed loves to create problems and then we get to complain about the consequences, and get sympathy. On all sides.
qwerty456127 4y ago
Studies have found that employees thrive when they spend 23-40% of their time in the office.[1] This also is a very personal thing dependong on living conditions (also on personality type like introvert/extrovert, ADHD etc.). People with kids, small homes etc. will probably enjoy returning to the office. I valued my office workplace very much as long as we lived in a single-bedroom apartment but started hating going to the office as soon as we moved to a bigger apartment with a separate office room where I have put a big desk, a similarly big monitor (a 4K I use in 100% scale so it does the job of 4 monitors in terms of usable area and even better). [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90845555/its-time-to-embrace-the-40-office https://www.fastcompany.com/90845555/its-time-to-embrace-the...
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  I think it's a classic case of designing for the average being terrible for the plurality. People are different. If someone like yourself prefers an office environment it's great if the employer can provide one, costs permitting. I'm sure I wouldn't 'thrive' any number of days in an office no matter what my manager says after nine weeks.
- ShrimpHawk 4y ago
  The study[1] was based on starting from 100% Office randomizing the amount of days people worked from home and was measured by email quantity, quality, and manager performance reviews. A better wording would be "employees send more and better emails when working from home 60-77% of the time". To fully understand the problem you need to study going from WFH to RTO and productivity. Multiple studies have shown the benefits of 100% WFH[2]. Hybrid and RTO is being pushed primarily by management not employees. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4068741 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4068741 [2] https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivity-statistics/ https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivi...
  - bluGill 4y ago
    If a significant number of people you work with are in the office regularly, then you have to be in the same office as them to thrive. If you want an environment where full remote work is possible then you need to ensure at least 80% of the people do not go to the office at all in any given month. If you get above 20% of the people going to the office on anything approaching a regular basis, those people will start talking to each other, and since face to face conversations are so much easier they will leave other people out of the decision process. With extra effort you can work anyway, but it needs special effort. I know of teams that have team meetings with everyone at their desk, headphones on all called into the same call. Those in the office get annoyed by the weirdness of hearing their neighbor speak and then a moment later hearing the same in their headset, but they have learned to tune that out and only listen to the headset because that is the only way for the one remote person to stay involved.
Xcelerate 4y ago
It isn’t clear to me from the different articles on this; does RTO apply even to fully remote employees that live far from any Amazon office? E.g., does an applied scientist in North Dakota have to move near an office or resign? Can a VP make exceptions? And if required to relocate, what is the time period to do so?
blntechie 4y ago
Honestly, many of the employees and scenarios quoted in the article comes out like they were because of people making decisions without forethought. Do note they are still earning more than 95% of the population and will come out as entitled for readers who are not really attuned to the tech scene.
mabbo 4y ago
I said this in another thread on this topic, but this was one of the key reasons I left Amazon in 2021. I knew this was coming. It was clear from tech survey (company-wide very long survey on all topics) that devs did not want to be in the office. Yet there was an email from leadership that said "We know you all can't wait to be back in the office". This bizarre dichotomy where we know they know we don't want this, but they're saying we do want this. The stock was reaching new heights every day; things were going great; the was no reason to change back at all. Amazon senior leadership were taking their culture of data-driven-everything and ignoring it because they like it better that way. Meanwhile the were lots of employers who had "full remote" in the job listings. So I started applying to them and never looked back. Instead of spending 50 minutes getting to the office this morning, I spent that time playing with my daughter. I'm not giving this up.
- pxlpshr 4y ago
  I'm sorry but there's no correlation to AMZN's stock price reaching all-time highs. 1) The entire world was caught in a two-year pandemic and caused e-commerce to exceed retail spending virtually overnight (See: SHOP, BIGC, etc)... and 2) The fed printed an asinine amount of money that dislocated the market from reality. Your work-from-home team had nothing to do with either of those two massive tailwinds.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    The point is that the company wasn't going to make big invasive moves while the stock was up.
  - mabbo 4y ago
    Sure, but was the company tanking because we were all working from home? No? All I'm saying is that the company was operating just fine despite everyone being remote. There wasn't a financial reason to do it, and probably lots of good financial reasons not to (sell the offices, reduce overhead that way).
    - ryandvm 4y ago
tinyhouse 4y ago
I agree with Amazon and most employees should be happy about it. Here's why. 1. Any org at Amazon is very big. Without seeing others in the office it's extremely difficult to understand what other groups are doing if everyone is fully remote. It doesn't matter if your immediate coworkers are distributed. Remote work is great for much smaller companies where it's easy for them to prevent silos within the company. 2. Three times a week means you still have the flexibility during the week. Many of these people don't realize that fully remote means they can be easily replaced. The in-person requirement gives them some job stability if they are in a region with good opportunities. I see it with startups, so many of them look for cheap engineers elsewhere. Many hire contractors in Europe. If you bring unique skills you'd be fine. But most don't add more value than an engineer in Ukraine with decent English besides a better time zone. Do you think you'll get paid $200K more just because you're in the same time zone? Hell no.
- ncsurfus 4y ago
  Nobody on my team will be in the same office. Almost all the folks I need to interact with on our current/future projects will be in different office.
  - tinyhouse 4y ago
    I mentioned that in my comment. Maybe for someone like you it's enough to come twice a week. It's important for you to make connections with people in your org even if you're currently not working with them on the same project. Otherwise you end up with many silos which is bad for the company.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hatchback 4y ago
I definitely will not go back to the office; I would be gladful if they offer VRP instead of resignation

115 points by cebert 4y ago

Amazon Wants 10,000+ Employee Dogs Back in Office, Facilitating Collaboration https://slashdot.org/submission/17188709/amazon-wants-10000-employee-dogs-back-in-office-facilitating-collaboration https://slashdot.org/submission/17188709/amazon-wants-10000-...

version_five 4y ago
I would quit immediately it I had to go to an office with a bunch of dogs in it. It's weird to me that in all the performative "inclusion" that companies get up to, they think it's ok to create a policy that will make a non-negligible portion of workers extremely uncomfortable. Their choice, personally a dog-friendly workplace is a complete nonstarter for me
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- microtherion 4y ago
  I'm very much a cat person and uncomfortable around most dogs. That said, I collaborate often with non-sighted co-workers, some of which have service dogs, which are invariably well behaved, and in the office for a good reason.
  - dgb23 4y ago
    Service dogs are more well behaved than the average person.
  - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
    big difference between a service dog and a family dog. They might as well let everyone take their young children to work.
- badcppdev 4y ago
  A bunch of dogs just seems like you're going to have otherwise well behaved dogs getting 'yappy' and annoyed at each other. Or worse. I calculate my comfort level in an office with N dogs would decrease at a rate of N*(N-1)
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Google had a "bring your dog to work" option and I saw maybe 3 people use it at my site the entire time I was there (10 years). It's just a silly thing, because dogs (well, my dogs at least) require more interaction and free movement than they can get at an office. And if you bring your dog, now you can't go to the cafeteria for lunch, etc. and have to find someone to attend to them when you go to the bathroom or whatever. I did it once because my wife and kids were away and I felt bad for my dog alone by herself at home. Neither of us enjoyed it. I get why employers offer it -- a dog alone for hours by itself sucks. But they'd probably be better off just giving employees discounts on local "Doggy daycare" places. Anyways now I have two border collies lying on the bed in my (home) office behind me staring at me wondering why I'm not doing something more interesting than shitposting on HN.
belter 4y ago
[flagged]
adlpz 4y ago
This whole thing reads like a disturbing attempt to seem human and approachable of a soulless machine overlord. Which I guess fits AMZN well enough.
kmac_ 4y ago
Do the dogs wander around the offices? What about employees with allergies?
- klyrs 4y ago
  Though owners are generally expected to keep them, dogs predictably escape containment. Humans with allergies sneeze, which startles the dogs into barking. It's ridiculous. I'd be in favor of onsite doggy daycare, not in my working environment.
- x86x87 4y ago
  technically dogs should not wonder around. employees with allergies are usually placed on a floor with no dogs with beefy filtration systems (and there are also special no-dogs building). collaboration, amiright?

gitfan86 4y ago

No one should be surprised by this. I interviewed at AMZN and the online quiz was basically "Which delivery driver would you fire in this scenario" and the 1-on-1 interviews were with people who when I asked what you like about AMZN replied "the stock price". If you take a job at AMZN you are treated like a cog in the machine. And that is fine if that is what you want.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago
Not that I am surprised by this event, in fact I remember reading that the original RTO was about December. Regardless, I don't think that such generalizations are particularly useful. I have been given multiple different descriptions of what it's like to work there, wlb and so on, and it seems to depend entirely on the org.
- coliveira 4y ago
  Like any big corporation, your personal experience depends on your luck, because there are so many groups and things to do. However in general the experience is miserable.
chasd00 4y ago
Well to be fair, you’re never more than a cog in your employer’s machine. That’s the whole point in having employees.
- WaffleIronMaker 4y ago
  I think that's an overly cynical view. While employees exist ultimately to serve the company's goal, good companies will also work to support the employee's goals in return (e.g. time away from work, time to develop skills, general happiness, etc.).
- krapp 4y ago
  Yeah, but for some reason tech people seem to think they're the only cogs that matter. They really thought companies were going to move heaven and earth just to make their personal comfort and convenience a priority.

ragnot 4y ago

It's pretty much a layoff in disguise at this point.

CharlieDigital 4y ago
If it were, they'd just go for the full 5 days in office. That would be a very easy way to lop off a bunch of folks.
- x86x87 4y ago
  nah. you don't want all the people to leave at once.
ericmay 4y ago
Potentially, and I'm sure they'll make exceptions for this but generally these moves cause your "best and brightest" to leave or to start looking since they have options if they are concerned about stability.

eggy 4y ago

It is for a three-day return-to-office, not full time. Given the state of the economy, I'd be worried about just quitting. It seems during the pandemic tech workers went for broke and took car leases and moved away banking on being able to WFH for a long period of time. I wonder if Amazon made it clear WFH would not be permanent or an option. There are plenty of tech workers who would like to work at Amazon if a bunch quit. Those who quit will still be stuck with their new housing and car lease arrangements anyway. Personally, I am freelance again (not in software/tech), but I voted for a return to the office. Our engineering firm (entertainment engineering - structural and mechanical) was not doing as good quantitatively as my peers thought we were doing as we WFH. Plus, a lot of people were actually happy after the fact when they started to realize they had taken for granted the face-to-face interaction at work and for some without self-discipline, the motivation to get up and working without too many home distractions.

belter 4y ago
Last week I had to deliver an onsite at a company who insisted on doing at their location. You see the thing is...I have been curing a strong feverish cold, but was good enough to go. We were all 15 on a tiny cozy meeting room for 3 days. I am fairly certain half of this team will cook my virus and will feel miserable and might stay in bed next week...Am I guilty ?? ;-)
- brainzap 4y ago
  yes
- FigurativeVoid 4y ago
  Yes
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  Is a soldier guilty for shooting towards the enemy? Office authoritarians know they're causing this kind of risk in an abstract sense, I say let them reap what they sow.
- trpv 4y ago

dsm4ck 4y ago

Looks like Management has decided that immediate 5 day RTO will cause too many resignations all at once. Start with 3 days, then 6 months later 4 days, and finally full time RTO will spread the resignations out and reduce business disruption.

ragnot 4y ago
Bingo.
zapdrive 4y ago
With over 400k tech layoffs in the last 1 year, I wouldn't be worried about resigning employees of I were a big corp.
- ActionHank 4y ago
  Your top performers know they are the top performers and they know they have options. They will be the ones to move. The only factor that would deter that is golden handcuffs. They will be left with very highly paid, high performers who are not happy and mid to low performers who have fewer options or less impetus to move.
  - tinyhouse 4y ago
    They won't be the ones to move because these companies are not stupid. They have mechanisms to save top talent by making exceptions for them and giving more equity.
    - ragnot 4y ago
      I think you are giving more credit to corporations than you think. The exceptions are for top brass, not top ICs.
- kcplate 4y ago
  The coming years will have stories of regret from tech folks who arrogantly left good positions because of RTO and then failed to find WFH jobs because those were all snapped up by the very best of the best. Nothing can bring an ego down to earth faster than to realize that of the 400k workers out there looking for work…more than half have better resumes, better interviewing skills, and a better chance to secure the jobs than you do.

lr4444lr 4y ago

What region is this in? All?

coev 4y ago
us-west-2 and all the others

plandis 4y ago

Seems like a great idea… If your intention is to get people to quit without needing to lay them off and pay out severance.

x86x87 4y ago
yes. a great idea if you want people to work just hard enough to not be fired while they are looking for their next gig.

mamonster 4y ago

> "Staffers who posted in the Slack channel said they were caught off guard by the announcement. Many expressed frustration that they’d have to find arrangements for child care, caregivers for aging parents, or potentially move in order to be within commuting distance of the office. One worker said they’d recently leased a car with an annual limit of 16,000 miles assuming remote work was still an option; if they’re required to come into the office at least three days a week, they’ll exceed that limit. Others took the company’s previous flexible work stance as an opportunity to move outside major cities to find more affordable housing and are now concerned about their commute." Boy these employees are about to get what looks like a very expensive lesson in expectation / risk management.

eckza 4y ago
> Boy these employees are about to get what looks like a very expensive lesson in expectation / risk management. Is that really the takeaway, here?
- xwdv 4y ago
  What else is there to takeaway? They knew they weren’t working for a remote-first company. They knew what their contract said. They played a dangerous game and now they’re finally burned. You cannot collect an Amazon salary living out in Idaho or Nebraska.
  - Adraghast 4y ago
    Why not?
    - brk 4y ago
      Capitalism?
    - xwdv 4y ago
      Because developers in those regions can tolerate less salary due to their lower expenses, as a competitive advantage.

unity1001 4y ago

Dumb. Covid is endemic now and it makes everything more difficult for everyone. Talking, thinking, concentrating are the first things to get hit by any mild covid infection. Hauling people's asses to office even one single day a week will skyrocket infection rates and hurt productivity in a way nothing else can.

trpv 4y ago
Would like to see some data on this. I don’t know of anyone who’s gotten Covid since… summer or so?
- ppg677 4y ago
  I got Covid for the first time last month. Anecdotally I know at least a dozen more who also got it for the first time this past December/January.
- louistsi 4y ago
  Because no one tests anymore. Source: Have COVID. Picked it up during a week of working in an Amazon office, funnily enough.
- eddieroger 4y ago
  I know someone with an active infection right now. Also a decently well known podcaster in the Apple space had it in the last week or so. It still exists, but no one tests and everyone's over it. You're right about wanting data, but don't hold your breath for it, and it's still definitely going around.
  - trpv 4y ago
    That makes sense. When I got Covid just over a year ago, I didn’t bother testing or reporting it, just stayed home. Interestingly enough, I know a couple people who were sick and tested positive for the flu but not Covid this winter
Lendal 4y ago
That's why we spent all that money on free vaccines for the entire population. People who don't want to take the vaccines can now complain about a problem that they created, high infection rates. This story is all about how our greed loves to create problems and then we get to complain about the consequences, and get sympathy. On all sides.

qwerty456127 4y ago

Studies have found that employees thrive when they spend 23-40% of their time in the office.[1] This also is a very personal thing dependong on living conditions (also on personality type like introvert/extrovert, ADHD etc.). People with kids, small homes etc. will probably enjoy returning to the office. I valued my office workplace very much as long as we lived in a single-bedroom apartment but started hating going to the office as soon as we moved to a bigger apartment with a separate office room where I have put a big desk, a similarly big monitor (a 4K I use in 100% scale so it does the job of 4 monitors in terms of usable area and even better). [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90845555/its-time-to-embrace-the-40-office https://www.fastcompany.com/90845555/its-time-to-embrace-the...

SuoDuanDao 4y ago
I think it's a classic case of designing for the average being terrible for the plurality. People are different. If someone like yourself prefers an office environment it's great if the employer can provide one, costs permitting. I'm sure I wouldn't 'thrive' any number of days in an office no matter what my manager says after nine weeks.
ShrimpHawk 4y ago
The study[1] was based on starting from 100% Office randomizing the amount of days people worked from home and was measured by email quantity, quality, and manager performance reviews. A better wording would be "employees send more and better emails when working from home 60-77% of the time". To fully understand the problem you need to study going from WFH to RTO and productivity. Multiple studies have shown the benefits of 100% WFH[2]. Hybrid and RTO is being pushed primarily by management not employees. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4068741 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4068741 [2] https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivity-statistics/ https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivi...
- bluGill 4y ago
  If a significant number of people you work with are in the office regularly, then you have to be in the same office as them to thrive. If you want an environment where full remote work is possible then you need to ensure at least 80% of the people do not go to the office at all in any given month. If you get above 20% of the people going to the office on anything approaching a regular basis, those people will start talking to each other, and since face to face conversations are so much easier they will leave other people out of the decision process. With extra effort you can work anyway, but it needs special effort. I know of teams that have team meetings with everyone at their desk, headphones on all called into the same call. Those in the office get annoyed by the weirdness of hearing their neighbor speak and then a moment later hearing the same in their headset, but they have learned to tune that out and only listen to the headset because that is the only way for the one remote person to stay involved.

Xcelerate 4y ago

It isn’t clear to me from the different articles on this; does RTO apply even to fully remote employees that live far from any Amazon office? E.g., does an applied scientist in North Dakota have to move near an office or resign? Can a VP make exceptions? And if required to relocate, what is the time period to do so?

blntechie 4y ago

Honestly, many of the employees and scenarios quoted in the article comes out like they were because of people making decisions without forethought. Do note they are still earning more than 95% of the population and will come out as entitled for readers who are not really attuned to the tech scene.

mabbo 4y ago

I said this in another thread on this topic, but this was one of the key reasons I left Amazon in 2021. I knew this was coming. It was clear from tech survey (company-wide very long survey on all topics) that devs did not want to be in the office. Yet there was an email from leadership that said "We know you all can't wait to be back in the office". This bizarre dichotomy where we know they know we don't want this, but they're saying we do want this. The stock was reaching new heights every day; things were going great; the was no reason to change back at all. Amazon senior leadership were taking their culture of data-driven-everything and ignoring it because they like it better that way. Meanwhile the were lots of employers who had "full remote" in the job listings. So I started applying to them and never looked back. Instead of spending 50 minutes getting to the office this morning, I spent that time playing with my daughter. I'm not giving this up.

pxlpshr 4y ago
I'm sorry but there's no correlation to AMZN's stock price reaching all-time highs. 1) The entire world was caught in a two-year pandemic and caused e-commerce to exceed retail spending virtually overnight (See: SHOP, BIGC, etc)... and 2) The fed printed an asinine amount of money that dislocated the market from reality. Your work-from-home team had nothing to do with either of those two massive tailwinds.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  The point is that the company wasn't going to make big invasive moves while the stock was up.
- mabbo 4y ago
  Sure, but was the company tanking because we were all working from home? No? All I'm saying is that the company was operating just fine despite everyone being remote. There wasn't a financial reason to do it, and probably lots of good financial reasons not to (sell the offices, reduce overhead that way).
  - ryandvm 4y ago

tinyhouse 4y ago

I agree with Amazon and most employees should be happy about it. Here's why. 1. Any org at Amazon is very big. Without seeing others in the office it's extremely difficult to understand what other groups are doing if everyone is fully remote. It doesn't matter if your immediate coworkers are distributed. Remote work is great for much smaller companies where it's easy for them to prevent silos within the company. 2. Three times a week means you still have the flexibility during the week. Many of these people don't realize that fully remote means they can be easily replaced. The in-person requirement gives them some job stability if they are in a region with good opportunities. I see it with startups, so many of them look for cheap engineers elsewhere. Many hire contractors in Europe. If you bring unique skills you'd be fine. But most don't add more value than an engineer in Ukraine with decent English besides a better time zone. Do you think you'll get paid $200K more just because you're in the same time zone? Hell no.

ncsurfus 4y ago
Nobody on my team will be in the same office. Almost all the folks I need to interact with on our current/future projects will be in different office.
- tinyhouse 4y ago
  I mentioned that in my comment. Maybe for someone like you it's enough to come twice a week. It's important for you to make connections with people in your org even if you're currently not working with them on the same project. Otherwise you end up with many silos which is bad for the company.

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hatchback 4y ago

I definitely will not go back to the office; I would be gladful if they offer VRP instead of resignation