6 ms·

Amazon employees are fighting on Slack about returning to the office

64 points by taubek 4y ago

blakesterz 4y ago
Over 700 people joined a pro-return-to-office group. Its description says employees need to "Think Big" about the return to office policy. (By comparison, the pro-working remotely channel has around 28,000 members.) Do any of the folks in the "pro-working remotely channel" worry about getting in any kind of trouble for speaking out?
- arpa 4y ago
  there is a certain safety in numbers.
- mattbee 4y ago
  There must be plenty who wouldn't mind being shown the door, and have other options. So if that was a new issue with working for Amazon, and a potential deal-breaker for them, it would be worth having a go.
- enempi 4y ago
  It seems like the vast majority of the 28k people are just there to observe and not actually saying anything. I don’t think simply joining a slack channel is an endorsement of anything.
- rob74 4y ago
  I mean, if some are happy with the policy of going back to the office for three days per week or more, good for them! I just don't understand why they (and the company) want to force this on everybody else too, regardless of whether it makes sense for them personally or not? Or whether it makes sense for the company for that matter - I'm working for a smaller but still pretty global company and currently am working with only 1 (one) person from my local office, the rest are all from other offices. But still, I only got an exemption from the 3-days-per-week rule (which apparently many employers want to impose as the new "new normal", probably to be followed by a full five days per week next year) for personal reasons, not for business reasons...
  - judge2020 4y ago
    > I just don't understand why they (and the company) want to force this on everybody else too, regardless of whether it makes sense for them personally or not? While some of these people are interested in forming interpersonal relationships with anyone in-office, the main benefit to in-office work is actually meeting with your team to work on problems and have the freedom to ask offhand questions.
- 0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
  It speaks volumes that joining "pro-remote" feels risky but joining "pro-office" does not. Feels like an old-fashioned anxiety at this point.
- hijinks 4y ago
  it's funny because in like 2004 when I worked in an office, I'd rather send someone a message on something like IRC then go over and talk to them in person.
reportgunner 4y ago
Seems like a misstep that Slack allows this.
- Rallen89 4y ago
  Allows what exactly? Communication? Or user created groups? seems like you have a problem with the human condition not slack.
irusensei 4y ago
> "I look forward to the prospect of seeing more of my [unwilling] coworkers in the office," one [nagging, sociopath] person reportedly wrote in the channel.
- serverholic 4y ago
  [dead]
- unglaublich 4y ago
  How is that different from forcing in-office people to work with you remotely, digitally? It's the same thing.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Because that gives the game away of what the in-office people actually want. Remote people want to work remotely. Full stop. If the only thing in-office people wanted was to work in an office it would be no issue — they have an office. But that’s not it, they want to be in an office and conduct meetings entirely in-person. Wfh people are expressing a preference for where they work based on what makes sense for their life situation. In-office people are expressing a preference for how and where everyone works. If I came into the office, put on headphones, only talked work things on Slack and called into all my meetings that were down the hall I suspect it wouldn’t count.
    - unglaublich 4y ago
      ... People that want to meet in the office don't give a damn about the office space. If they could all bring a lunchbox and a laptop, they would prob. be just as happy to work from a park, or your home instead. It's not about the space, it's about the physical proximity, and the sharing of events, ideas and knowledge with colleagues.
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I’m kind of confused here: why can’t we just have teams self select? There are apparently over 700 people self selecting into a channel for in office advocacy: form teams out of them based on their roles and let them have their in-office teams, with relocation assistance as necessary to put them in commuting distance to the same office.
- aynyc 4y ago
  You really don't want to do self select within a corporation, it creates a lot of friction; especially the self selected groups are basically in opposition to each other.
- kitanata 4y ago
  I say we put ‘em all on a rocket ship and send em to another planet. Middle management are the ones who want to go back (mostly). Let ‘em go. Won’t be long before they are using tree leaves as currency.
  - jaclaz 4y ago
    Like the golgafrinchans? https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchans https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchans
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  The issue is that the people who perform poorly when working remote are often the most likely to select WFH if given the choice. WFH has become somewhat of a refuge for people trying to avoid interaction and work, which is the root problem driving other teams to want them back in the office. In a perfect world we’d have a way to accurately evaluate everyone’s remote work and painlessly dismiss those who can’t handle it. In the real world, it’s not so easy at scale. I personally work remote and on remote teams, but the successful ones were all hired and built as remote from the start. Whenever I’ve been on a team that started in-office and then tried to switch to remote, a significant fraction of the company ends up failing to adapt, avoiding work, failing to respond in a timely manner (e.g. replying 1-2 days later to simple requests), or otherwise just abused the situation. This quickly ruins remote work for everyone.
timcavel 4y ago
[dead]
bilekas 4y ago
The biggest justifiable reason for not wanting to go back to the office is ridiculous commutes, incredible rent prices and depending on the role the lack of necessity. It should be up to the teams themselves to decide, once the work is done and there is nothing missed, I don't know what the hangup is from companies. My cynical self says companies just want to make sure they can squeeze more out of their workforce or prioritize less 'essential' qualities like 'social cohesion' within the workplace. Role depending obviously, these qualities are usually just frustrating for people looking to actually just get on with work and their job.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  No the biggest justifiable reason is still covid lol. High risk due to disabilities and age is super common; even in tech not nearly everyone is young and healthy.
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    You must be past retirement age for Covid to be a risk factor more than flu is (especially well vaccinated), so it might not be the strongest argument anymore. I myself strictly mask up in cases where folks have traveled and have never tested positive, but I don’t think it’ll be easy to convince others that they should take this as seriously as I do.
    - sneak 4y ago
      That's just risk of death. Risk of other neurological sequelae are high even in those who are young and fully vaccinated. I know many people under 50 who were vaccinated who lost smell or taste for most of a year, or had other cognitive dysfunction for weeks afterward.
      - random314 4y ago
        > I know many people under 50 who were vaccinated who lost smell or taste for most of a year, or had other cognitive dysfunction for weeks afterwar I am not going to take your word for this, lol. Personally, I know many people who weren't vaccinated who have cognitive dysfunction - and unvaccinated people who also experienced death.
todd3834 4y ago
This whole debate seems so absurd. Some people want to go back and some people don’t. Why not accommodate both groups? Why is it the return to office group feels the need to impose their preference on the other. The WFH group seems fine to let the in office group go in if they want… We’ve already proved that both approaches can work.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I think some (but certainly not all) in-the-office people only realize their desired context if everyone else is there to populate the office and give them easy access to co-workers. For some (not all): what's the point of being in the office if it has few of the people they need to interact with? No idea how large that group is. Maybe it's zero. Maybe this is exclusively moneypeople doing moneypeople stuff with their spreadsheets.
  - brador 4y ago
    Uncomfortable truth is it's practically impossible to measure developer productivity vs. peers remotely. 2 days to fix a gennuine bug or 4 day weekend? For a 300k dev with a team working on tight deadlines that's meaningful. In person still has the same problem but it gives a quantum of more accountability like helping identify those mooning with multiple remote jobs.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      > In person still has the same problem but it gives a quantum of more accountability like helping identify those mooning with multiple remote jobs. If a dev isn't performing well go through the PIP protocol and then fire them. If a dev IS performing well but you're afraid they might be working two jobs is it really a problem (and if so, why)? This is the sort of thing that'll shake itself out over time and feels like fear mongering more than anything. People screwed around in the office and took way too long to do things too, they just had to be sneakier.
- derwiki 4y ago
  Work from office is better when everyone does it. Those on my team who choose to work from the office end up not seeing another teammate the whole day, and just dial into all their meetings.
twodave 4y ago
Fighting? This isn't fighting. This is called "being heard".
mr_beans 4y ago
There’s an interesting circularity to real estate values in downtown Seattle since Amazon owns so many offices there. GREF wields an outsize power inside Amazon so methinks they’re advocating for hard RTO it to stop cratering the value of all their assets.
shmatt 4y ago
There seems to be a lot of hype online on how Amazon employees are doing something never seen before, when in reality Apple employees were fighting a lot harder, going to the press openly giving their names Ian Goodfellow, chief of Machine Learning quit while writing a letter the sole reason of quitting is RTO And yet Apple employees are all in office today. Amazon cares even less about their tech employees, their vesting schedule and PIP culture is proof of that. People barely survive a couple of years before jumping ship or getting fired, do they think management cares about them not wanting to RTO? Amazon have the highest turnover rate in FAANG, they really never seemed to try to fix it. Im sure theyll be happy to show more people the door in the name of following Andys orders
- eddieroger 4y ago
  From what I heard, though, Apple was never ambiguous that the office was the future, and once a threshold was hit (pandemic "over", vaccines, whatever), the office would again be the norm. Google was the same way in a cold email I got from them a year or so ago. I don't know what Amazon said, but if they at all left the door open to not returning, then shame on them and this is what they deserve.
rexreed 4y ago
Employees should fight for something that is of value to them, not their employers. Maybe there's a fear of losing their job when they aren't seen in the office? Or maybe the fear is if that they are the only ones in the office, they are more noticeable, so there's safety in numbers. If more of the herd is there, then it will be less obvious the ones who stand out. I for one am glad I work for myself.
wtcactus 4y ago
"One person wrote that their new car had a mile limit of 16,000 a year; they leased it considering a lack of commute." It seems to me that the amount of pampering expected by these employees is going a bit too far. It's a job, the employer defines their policies (EDIT: abiding by the local laws) and you decide if you want to continue working there or go and find a new job. That's it, that's how it works in a free society.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- colordrops 4y ago
  Surprised this is the top comment. It's so oversimplified as to be absurd. What employers are allowed to do is heavily limited. There are countless laws on the books restricting employers in the US. And in many countries in Europe there are far more restrictions. Does that make us not free societies? I don't think so. Companies at scale have a lot more leverage that individual employees so unions and laws are needed to keep them in check. Whether this particular complaint about a lease is in the realm of legal limits is unlikely but you have conflated two issues.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    There is a lot of that sentiment on corporate fora ( which includes linkedin ). The general spirit is condescending and words used tend to include keywords like 'entitlements'. It makes me think its a coordinated propaganda effort. I am actually debating starting a project tracking this ( I almost did at the beginning of pandemic after the ridiculous 'commute is your zen time' messaging ).
  - judge2020 4y ago
    It's not actually the top comment; HN puts new comments at the top for a few minutes to give them a chance to shine in case it has the information needed to actually dethrone the most upvoted comment.
- judge2020 4y ago
  > It's a job, the employer defines their policies (EDIT: abiding by the local laws) and you decide if you want to continue working there or go and find a new job. I mean, sure, but it's in employees best interest to voice their opposition for policies that will cause them to incur hardship. The time commitment alone is insane - commuting is probably the biggest waste of time anyone can incur, especially when a 30 minute commute with no traffic turns into an hour or 1.5 hour commute with traffic, which only got worse as more and more companies reinstated their in-office policy in 2022 and beyond. For anyone with an hour commute, they end up wasting 20 days a year sitting in a car.
commandlinefan 4y ago
They're fighting on here, too, just like they used to fight about how great open offices were before we all started working from home.
tarotuser 4y ago
As much hand-wringing is being done here, this ship has sailed. Remote work is a magnitude better than butt-in-seat-teams-calls-remotely any day. And by having people spread out is also like load balancing your workforce in case of geographic badness. But in my experiences, the ones who suffer the worst are the extroverts who crave human attention at a workplace. And these also tend to be upper management. But being able to close those stupidly expensive skyscraper rentals is also amazing. Might actually free that space up for living, and better rates!
gonehome 4y ago
We’ve started using gathertown where I work and it gives you a bit of the best of both worlds (minus the nice in person social lunch type of thing). We’re fully distributed/remote. With gathertown or something like it I think you can get close to in office collaborative productivity, but without it I don’t think you do on net. In person people more naturally collaborate and discuss problems, cycle times are faster (IME). Remote could be great if people were good at pushing async comms and were easily available during working hours, but that’s rarely the case imo. People seem more reticent to jump into a call when remote than to talk in person (among peers). I predict remote companies to be less competitive on net. It’s possible the hiring advantages could overcome that, but I’m skeptical.
agolio 4y ago
Nothing really new in this piece of “news” then.
alpos 4y ago
>"By arbitrarily forcing return-to-office without providing data to support it and despite clear evidence that it is the wrong decision for employees, Amazon has failed its role as earth's best employer," one employee wrote, according to the report. Both this and open floor plans were never about data. This is about control. Nearly all employers, especially all of the oldest and largest will steadily pull their workforce back into offices where the bosses can satisfy their egos with the notion that seeing their people work makes them in charge. They don't just want to get things done. They want to see the buzzing activity of the office and feel like they are in control of it. And this will happen in spite of any protests from the employees. By now most companies, especially tech companies, are well practiced at forcing undesired changes on large groups of people. They even have most of their customers actually paying to be spied on. Something no one would have accepted even 15 or so years ago. So long as the company is arranged as a hierarchical power structure, this will be the way. That's the whole point of talk about things like "culture" as well. The reader may take note that, between companies in a supply chain, there is no talk about or desire to control culture even though those companies clearly depend on each other to do their business at least as much as they depend on their respective employees. Only within the company does anyone seek to control and define "culture". That is because setting company culture is means of controlling employee behavior. And it only applies to those who signed employee contracts. Consultants, general contractors, support staff, and vendors are almost always treated more as real and self-determinant humans than the employees the company leaders seek to control. In short, your boss doesn't see you as a peer or as a fully capable rational agent. They see you as a ward under their care. This is a side effect of the power imbalance created by the structure of the company. Isn't it strange that almost everyone on earth desires to live under a democracy more than a dictatorship but when it comes to the interactions that will dominate most of their days for most of their lives, somehow people are okay signing up to work under a dictatorship? ...And anyone still under the illusion that Amazon is or was ever earth's best employer might want to try talking to the delivery drivers and warehouse workers.
cupachabra 4y ago
This is an extremely important issue to consider when it comes to remote work. It's imperative to find a balance between giving developers the flexibility they need and setting expectations for productivity. Unfortunately most managers are ill equipped to navigate different working styles

64 points by taubek 4y ago

Over 700 people joined a pro-return-to-office group. Its description says employees need to "Think Big" about the return to office policy. (By comparison, the pro-working remotely channel has around 28,000 members.) Do any of the folks in the "pro-working remotely channel" worry about getting in any kind of trouble for speaking out?

arpa 4y ago
there is a certain safety in numbers.
mattbee 4y ago
There must be plenty who wouldn't mind being shown the door, and have other options. So if that was a new issue with working for Amazon, and a potential deal-breaker for them, it would be worth having a go.
enempi 4y ago
It seems like the vast majority of the 28k people are just there to observe and not actually saying anything. I don’t think simply joining a slack channel is an endorsement of anything.
rob74 4y ago
I mean, if some are happy with the policy of going back to the office for three days per week or more, good for them! I just don't understand why they (and the company) want to force this on everybody else too, regardless of whether it makes sense for them personally or not? Or whether it makes sense for the company for that matter - I'm working for a smaller but still pretty global company and currently am working with only 1 (one) person from my local office, the rest are all from other offices. But still, I only got an exemption from the 3-days-per-week rule (which apparently many employers want to impose as the new "new normal", probably to be followed by a full five days per week next year) for personal reasons, not for business reasons...
- judge2020 4y ago
  > I just don't understand why they (and the company) want to force this on everybody else too, regardless of whether it makes sense for them personally or not? While some of these people are interested in forming interpersonal relationships with anyone in-office, the main benefit to in-office work is actually meeting with your team to work on problems and have the freedom to ask offhand questions.
0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
It speaks volumes that joining "pro-remote" feels risky but joining "pro-office" does not. Feels like an old-fashioned anxiety at this point.
hijinks 4y ago
it's funny because in like 2004 when I worked in an office, I'd rather send someone a message on something like IRC then go over and talk to them in person.

reportgunner 4y ago

Seems like a misstep that Slack allows this.

Rallen89 4y ago
Allows what exactly? Communication? Or user created groups? seems like you have a problem with the human condition not slack.

irusensei 4y ago

> "I look forward to the prospect of seeing more of my [unwilling] coworkers in the office," one [nagging, sociopath] person reportedly wrote in the channel.

serverholic 4y ago
[dead]
unglaublich 4y ago
How is that different from forcing in-office people to work with you remotely, digitally? It's the same thing.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Because that gives the game away of what the in-office people actually want. Remote people want to work remotely. Full stop. If the only thing in-office people wanted was to work in an office it would be no issue — they have an office. But that’s not it, they want to be in an office and conduct meetings entirely in-person. Wfh people are expressing a preference for where they work based on what makes sense for their life situation. In-office people are expressing a preference for how and where everyone works. If I came into the office, put on headphones, only talked work things on Slack and called into all my meetings that were down the hall I suspect it wouldn’t count.
  - unglaublich 4y ago
    ... People that want to meet in the office don't give a damn about the office space. If they could all bring a lunchbox and a laptop, they would prob. be just as happy to work from a park, or your home instead. It's not about the space, it's about the physical proximity, and the sharing of events, ideas and knowledge with colleagues.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago

I’m kind of confused here: why can’t we just have teams self select? There are apparently over 700 people self selecting into a channel for in office advocacy: form teams out of them based on their roles and let them have their in-office teams, with relocation assistance as necessary to put them in commuting distance to the same office.

aynyc 4y ago
You really don't want to do self select within a corporation, it creates a lot of friction; especially the self selected groups are basically in opposition to each other.
kitanata 4y ago
I say we put ‘em all on a rocket ship and send em to another planet. Middle management are the ones who want to go back (mostly). Let ‘em go. Won’t be long before they are using tree leaves as currency.
- jaclaz 4y ago
  Like the golgafrinchans? https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchans https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchans
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
The issue is that the people who perform poorly when working remote are often the most likely to select WFH if given the choice. WFH has become somewhat of a refuge for people trying to avoid interaction and work, which is the root problem driving other teams to want them back in the office. In a perfect world we’d have a way to accurately evaluate everyone’s remote work and painlessly dismiss those who can’t handle it. In the real world, it’s not so easy at scale. I personally work remote and on remote teams, but the successful ones were all hired and built as remote from the start. Whenever I’ve been on a team that started in-office and then tried to switch to remote, a significant fraction of the company ends up failing to adapt, avoiding work, failing to respond in a timely manner (e.g. replying 1-2 days later to simple requests), or otherwise just abused the situation. This quickly ruins remote work for everyone.

timcavel 4y ago

[dead]

bilekas 4y ago

The biggest justifiable reason for not wanting to go back to the office is ridiculous commutes, incredible rent prices and depending on the role the lack of necessity. It should be up to the teams themselves to decide, once the work is done and there is nothing missed, I don't know what the hangup is from companies. My cynical self says companies just want to make sure they can squeeze more out of their workforce or prioritize less 'essential' qualities like 'social cohesion' within the workplace. Role depending obviously, these qualities are usually just frustrating for people looking to actually just get on with work and their job.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
No the biggest justifiable reason is still covid lol. High risk due to disabilities and age is super common; even in tech not nearly everyone is young and healthy.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  You must be past retirement age for Covid to be a risk factor more than flu is (especially well vaccinated), so it might not be the strongest argument anymore. I myself strictly mask up in cases where folks have traveled and have never tested positive, but I don’t think it’ll be easy to convince others that they should take this as seriously as I do.
  - sneak 4y ago
    That's just risk of death. Risk of other neurological sequelae are high even in those who are young and fully vaccinated. I know many people under 50 who were vaccinated who lost smell or taste for most of a year, or had other cognitive dysfunction for weeks afterward.
    - random314 4y ago
      > I know many people under 50 who were vaccinated who lost smell or taste for most of a year, or had other cognitive dysfunction for weeks afterwar I am not going to take your word for this, lol. Personally, I know many people who weren't vaccinated who have cognitive dysfunction - and unvaccinated people who also experienced death.

todd3834 4y ago

This whole debate seems so absurd. Some people want to go back and some people don’t. Why not accommodate both groups? Why is it the return to office group feels the need to impose their preference on the other. The WFH group seems fine to let the in office group go in if they want… We’ve already proved that both approaches can work.

Waterluvian 4y ago
I think some (but certainly not all) in-the-office people only realize their desired context if everyone else is there to populate the office and give them easy access to co-workers. For some (not all): what's the point of being in the office if it has few of the people they need to interact with? No idea how large that group is. Maybe it's zero. Maybe this is exclusively moneypeople doing moneypeople stuff with their spreadsheets.
- brador 4y ago
  Uncomfortable truth is it's practically impossible to measure developer productivity vs. peers remotely. 2 days to fix a gennuine bug or 4 day weekend? For a 300k dev with a team working on tight deadlines that's meaningful. In person still has the same problem but it gives a quantum of more accountability like helping identify those mooning with multiple remote jobs.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    > In person still has the same problem but it gives a quantum of more accountability like helping identify those mooning with multiple remote jobs. If a dev isn't performing well go through the PIP protocol and then fire them. If a dev IS performing well but you're afraid they might be working two jobs is it really a problem (and if so, why)? This is the sort of thing that'll shake itself out over time and feels like fear mongering more than anything. People screwed around in the office and took way too long to do things too, they just had to be sneakier.
derwiki 4y ago
Work from office is better when everyone does it. Those on my team who choose to work from the office end up not seeing another teammate the whole day, and just dial into all their meetings.

twodave 4y ago

Fighting? This isn't fighting. This is called "being heard".

mr_beans 4y ago

There’s an interesting circularity to real estate values in downtown Seattle since Amazon owns so many offices there. GREF wields an outsize power inside Amazon so methinks they’re advocating for hard RTO it to stop cratering the value of all their assets.

shmatt 4y ago

There seems to be a lot of hype online on how Amazon employees are doing something never seen before, when in reality Apple employees were fighting a lot harder, going to the press openly giving their names Ian Goodfellow, chief of Machine Learning quit while writing a letter the sole reason of quitting is RTO And yet Apple employees are all in office today. Amazon cares even less about their tech employees, their vesting schedule and PIP culture is proof of that. People barely survive a couple of years before jumping ship or getting fired, do they think management cares about them not wanting to RTO? Amazon have the highest turnover rate in FAANG, they really never seemed to try to fix it. Im sure theyll be happy to show more people the door in the name of following Andys orders

eddieroger 4y ago
From what I heard, though, Apple was never ambiguous that the office was the future, and once a threshold was hit (pandemic "over", vaccines, whatever), the office would again be the norm. Google was the same way in a cold email I got from them a year or so ago. I don't know what Amazon said, but if they at all left the door open to not returning, then shame on them and this is what they deserve.

rexreed 4y ago

Employees should fight for something that is of value to them, not their employers. Maybe there's a fear of losing their job when they aren't seen in the office? Or maybe the fear is if that they are the only ones in the office, they are more noticeable, so there's safety in numbers. If more of the herd is there, then it will be less obvious the ones who stand out. I for one am glad I work for myself.

wtcactus 4y ago

"One person wrote that their new car had a mile limit of 16,000 a year; they leased it considering a lack of commute." It seems to me that the amount of pampering expected by these employees is going a bit too far. It's a job, the employer defines their policies (EDIT: abiding by the local laws) and you decide if you want to continue working there or go and find a new job. That's it, that's how it works in a free society.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
colordrops 4y ago
Surprised this is the top comment. It's so oversimplified as to be absurd. What employers are allowed to do is heavily limited. There are countless laws on the books restricting employers in the US. And in many countries in Europe there are far more restrictions. Does that make us not free societies? I don't think so. Companies at scale have a lot more leverage that individual employees so unions and laws are needed to keep them in check. Whether this particular complaint about a lease is in the realm of legal limits is unlikely but you have conflated two issues.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  There is a lot of that sentiment on corporate fora ( which includes linkedin ). The general spirit is condescending and words used tend to include keywords like 'entitlements'. It makes me think its a coordinated propaganda effort. I am actually debating starting a project tracking this ( I almost did at the beginning of pandemic after the ridiculous 'commute is your zen time' messaging ).
- judge2020 4y ago
  It's not actually the top comment; HN puts new comments at the top for a few minutes to give them a chance to shine in case it has the information needed to actually dethrone the most upvoted comment.
judge2020 4y ago
> It's a job, the employer defines their policies (EDIT: abiding by the local laws) and you decide if you want to continue working there or go and find a new job. I mean, sure, but it's in employees best interest to voice their opposition for policies that will cause them to incur hardship. The time commitment alone is insane - commuting is probably the biggest waste of time anyone can incur, especially when a 30 minute commute with no traffic turns into an hour or 1.5 hour commute with traffic, which only got worse as more and more companies reinstated their in-office policy in 2022 and beyond. For anyone with an hour commute, they end up wasting 20 days a year sitting in a car.

commandlinefan 4y ago

They're fighting on here, too, just like they used to fight about how great open offices were before we all started working from home.

tarotuser 4y ago

As much hand-wringing is being done here, this ship has sailed. Remote work is a magnitude better than butt-in-seat-teams-calls-remotely any day. And by having people spread out is also like load balancing your workforce in case of geographic badness. But in my experiences, the ones who suffer the worst are the extroverts who crave human attention at a workplace. And these also tend to be upper management. But being able to close those stupidly expensive skyscraper rentals is also amazing. Might actually free that space up for living, and better rates!

gonehome 4y ago

We’ve started using gathertown where I work and it gives you a bit of the best of both worlds (minus the nice in person social lunch type of thing). We’re fully distributed/remote. With gathertown or something like it I think you can get close to in office collaborative productivity, but without it I don’t think you do on net. In person people more naturally collaborate and discuss problems, cycle times are faster (IME). Remote could be great if people were good at pushing async comms and were easily available during working hours, but that’s rarely the case imo. People seem more reticent to jump into a call when remote than to talk in person (among peers). I predict remote companies to be less competitive on net. It’s possible the hiring advantages could overcome that, but I’m skeptical.

agolio 4y ago

Nothing really new in this piece of “news” then.

alpos 4y ago

>"By arbitrarily forcing return-to-office without providing data to support it and despite clear evidence that it is the wrong decision for employees, Amazon has failed its role as earth's best employer," one employee wrote, according to the report. Both this and open floor plans were never about data. This is about control. Nearly all employers, especially all of the oldest and largest will steadily pull their workforce back into offices where the bosses can satisfy their egos with the notion that seeing their people work makes them in charge. They don't just want to get things done. They want to see the buzzing activity of the office and feel like they are in control of it. And this will happen in spite of any protests from the employees. By now most companies, especially tech companies, are well practiced at forcing undesired changes on large groups of people. They even have most of their customers actually paying to be spied on. Something no one would have accepted even 15 or so years ago. So long as the company is arranged as a hierarchical power structure, this will be the way. That's the whole point of talk about things like "culture" as well. The reader may take note that, between companies in a supply chain, there is no talk about or desire to control culture even though those companies clearly depend on each other to do their business at least as much as they depend on their respective employees. Only within the company does anyone seek to control and define "culture". That is because setting company culture is means of controlling employee behavior. And it only applies to those who signed employee contracts. Consultants, general contractors, support staff, and vendors are almost always treated more as real and self-determinant humans than the employees the company leaders seek to control. In short, your boss doesn't see you as a peer or as a fully capable rational agent. They see you as a ward under their care. This is a side effect of the power imbalance created by the structure of the company. Isn't it strange that almost everyone on earth desires to live under a democracy more than a dictatorship but when it comes to the interactions that will dominate most of their days for most of their lives, somehow people are okay signing up to work under a dictatorship? ...And anyone still under the illusion that Amazon is or was ever earth's best employer might want to try talking to the delivery drivers and warehouse workers.

cupachabra 4y ago

This is an extremely important issue to consider when it comes to remote work. It's imperative to find a balance between giving developers the flexibility they need and setting expectations for productivity. Unfortunately most managers are ill equipped to navigate different working styles