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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 feel

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.
- rob74 4y ago
  Ok, well then this "3-days-per-week" solution will only be temporary on the way back to 5 days per week, because even this way, statistically you will only have 60% of your colleagues present and will still have to do video calls. OTOH, you just need to have somebody from another office, or a customer, or a contractor, or ..., so meetings where everyone is in the same room will still remain a vanishing minority.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Most hybrid implementations have managers decide on the 3 days everyone on the team shows up. Team 1 does monday-wednesday, team 2 picks a different 3 days and so on.
- krisroadruck 4y ago
  Work from office is better for people who LIKE work from office if everyone does it. The people who don't want to go specifically don't want to, to avoid those folks that want access to interrupt everyone around them. Honestly, I feel like work from office would suck less if the people who wanted it so badly weren't there. The commute would still suck but at least you wouldn't have the extroverts constantly wrecking the productivity of everyone in the blast area around them.
bradleyjg 4y ago
The only people imposing on any employees are those that are signing their checks. Don’t blame your co-workers for your boss’ decisions.
- iso1631 4y ago
  > First, employees created a Slack channel to fight against the policy. Then, a pro-office return group was formed, the outlet reported. Presumably the pro-office group is employees
  - bradleyjg 4y ago
    700 people in a company of 1.5 million. Do you think management is doing RTO because of that?
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      What number of those 1.5 million are white collar employees? I would assume the lion's share of Amazon's total employee headcount are warehouse workers and delivery drivers, jobs where the WFH vs. return to office debate isn't even a thing.
      - bradleyjg 4y ago
        The pro WFH slack group is more than 20,000 people. These 700 just seem like a weird scapegoat to focus on.
- rob74 4y ago
  Yes, but it's still one thing to say "I'm happy with my employer's new policy" and another thing to say "I'm happy with it, and I also support it being forced on others, no matter if it makes sense for them (professionally and personally) or not"...
unglaublich 4y ago
It's not about location, it's about proximity of collaboration. WfH group wants to collaborate remotely, digitally. In-office group wants to collaborate locally, in person. That is the difference. WfH group takes this opportunity away from in-office group; like in-office group takes the opportunity away from WfH. Can't have both. That's why the discussion is hard.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  The problem is the genie is out of the bottle - unless in office is enforced and required 100% of the time it's still going to be Teams calls. Even before 2020 most of the meetings I were in, even if they were in person, had a teams call going at the same time because someone had to remote in.
  - eddieroger 4y ago
    It already was this in some places, but being annoyed by it was allowed and supported because it wasn't normal. Outlook has been adding calls since it was Lync. Any office with more than one location would have a phone bridge, but we blamed the tech when it failed because it was fun, and now we've learned it works more than well enough and we should rely on it.
- fundad 4y ago
  The commute leaves no time for collaboration. Don’t talk to me while I’m at work, 3 hours of commuting leaves me with precious little productive time.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
CharlieDigital 4y ago
My strong anecdotal evidence based belief here is that remote work requires more management effort to coordinate and that's the actual cause of the friction. There's a greater need to schedule, document (generally more writing things down), and coordinate when working in a team with remote culture. (Either that, or you have a team with really strong social capital and everyone knows what needs to be done with little coordination overhead) Now management type have more work on their hands to keep everything coordinated and that's why you have this showdown.
- foepys 4y ago
  This reasoning is quickly falling apart in a hybrid model. Once a single person is not on-site, you will need to work as if everybody were remote. According to the article, Amazon is apparently is currently targeting said hybrid model.
  - przemelek 4y ago
    As long as you have some days in office for everybody it may work, but it should not be done in this way that some people are working from home, and some are working from office. Long before COVID (~8 years before ;-)) we had situation where one our colleague was in office only on Mondays, and big part of team was WFH on Friday and sometimes even Thursday & Friday, so best collaboration was on Monday, little worse on Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday almost nothing was happening
    - frumper 4y ago
      And Monday is the most popular day to call in sick.
- Adrock 4y ago
  What does “social capital” mean in this context?
  - CharlieDigital 4y ago
lockhouse 4y ago
Purely anecdotal on my part, but I’ve noticed that while many people are able to effectively work from home and be as productive as they would be in the office, there are many employees who are terrible at working from home.
- gonehome 4y ago
  +1 - it’s great for excellent people, it’s horrible for junior engineers, it’s bad for people who have trouble motivating themselves and keeping on task. There is a decent % of people that do close to nothing while working remote. It’s not black and white, there are tradeoffs and it varies based on the person imo.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    I find this strange. If someone wasn't able to get work done in the office the solution wouldn't be "OK, we all need to work from home because Gary can't get stuff done otherwise".
    - gonehome 4y ago
      That’s only one factor, though it’s not just “Gary” IME many people are in this category, the very effective remote people are less common. The junior engineer issue and the comms issue affects everyone. Companies are teams of people and you want to make the collaboration as low effort and fast as possible. In person is very good for that and I suspect better on net. It’s why companies with the leverage to push for it (Apple and Amazon, Elon Musk companies) do so - they believe it to be an advantage.
      - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        How many people do you believe were "very effective" in office? The truth of the matter is most people are "effective enough". I honestly don't know if it's actually better or it just appears better. Sure, there are times when fast communication is important, but as we see with Twitter lately it's obvious that rapid fire decisions sometimes aren't the best and while things seem very active and dynamic maybe it'd be better if communication was more considered and thoughtful. Isn't that why that whole "this meeting could have been an email" meme exists? I agree the companies believe it's an advantage, but I don't know that it is. I don't know that they know it is. Leadership definitely thinks so, and there's a ton of institutional momentum that still hasn't shifted after the last few years, but I don't that it's actually empirically better.
MattGaiser 4y ago
The pro-office people don't just want to be in office. They are unhappy unless everyone is in office.
- unglaublich 4y ago
  Yes, naturally. Do you really think in-office is about the walls, and the furniture, and the coffee machine? That's absurd. On the other hand: would you go to the office if it looked like your home? No, it's not about the physical place. It's about the interaction with your team and colleagues.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    I would only voluntarily go back to the office if the commute was similar to WFH. I don't even want to calculate how many hours of my life I've wasted on my 50 mile-each-way commute before WFH.
  - MattGaiser 4y ago
    It gets initially discussed in individual terms, like "mental separation of work and life" and "getting away from the kids and the dog." That is set the trap.
aws_ls 4y ago
From the article: "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.)" So more people want to work remote.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Just gotta make sure the people who will actually make a difference in your company are in the group you choose to go along with. Such a huge discrepancy would make me wonder which side the wheat is mostly sitting in.
deelowe 4y ago
My guess is that real drive for RTO is from commercial real estate investors who are losing money. Some of those investors hold high ranking positions at Amazon. I imagine there is also pressure from the Seattle government who have had quite the crime issue on their hands ever since covid started.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  It is funny you mention that, but it seems some companies are already making moves suggesting some level of adjustment ( commercial properties in Chicago suburbs seems to be sold at a discount, while residential properties become a hot item ). I can only point to individual instances so it is hard to call it a trend.
Mistletoe 4y ago
What seems absurd to me is people thinking they have control over what their employer wants them to do. Especially when you aren’t unionized. You do what the employer wants or you get a different job. Or you unionize so you have some actual bargaining power.
- bombolo 4y ago
  There are a lot of recruiters messaging me for remote positions lately.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  You can leave, which during the current labour shortage tends to give companies some pause.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> Why not accommodate both groups? The same reason they could never accommodate the two groups of people who respectively loved and hated open offices - the people who love it only love it because everybody is forced to participate. If it doesn't include everybody, it's not what they're looking for.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  Somehow those seem to also be the same people who love to stand in the middle of the open office and loudly converse with the sales team about what they did last weekend while you're on a call dealing with a prod outage because impossibly even in the in-open-office utopia of yesteryear if something actually really important and time sensitive was happening it'd involve people being on a Teams call.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I will respond with a quote from an old movie that was a thinly veiled criticism of the communist system. paraphrased: A: Why can't we just let them choose where they want to live? B: The issue is we want to live here and those that don't want to live here. ============== In other words, individual needs don't matter. Management clearly wants people back for one reason or another. The question is only whether 'wage junkies' will stick to their guns. I don't think I am being cynical here.
yowzadave 4y ago
As someone who works from home, and hopes to never work in an office again...I think this doesn't do justice to the Office people's argument. The Office people think the WFH people are poisoning the company culture. It's like if you had a neighbor who dumped sewage into your shared pond: "I prefer not to dump sewage into the pond, they prefer to do so, so let's accommodate both groups and allow each to do what she wants." It's important to make the case that WFH does not poison the company culture--that it can result in a more successful/effective/healthier organization. I think it requires a change in mindset and/or working patterns for certain manager types to see things this way.
- eddieroger 4y ago
  I don't agree with this, but I think the case can be made by those on The Office side that WFH does poison the culture. Culture is immutable, so any change to it recreates it. For some folks, being seen is contributing. Being able to swing by a cube and look over a shoulder is important. Taking that away takes something away from them. Again, I don't agree, I've work from home for nearly ten years now, but I see their point. I think it also threatens them, because we're challenging a norm, and change is scary. They like the office, and us wanting to WFH makes it seem like the office is bad, and they're bad for liking it. No one likes their cheese moved.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    Bosses also like being able to walk around the floor and see people working, and like the power trip of being able to physically tap people on the shoulder and pull them into a meeting. Also really puts a crimp on their dating / sexual harassment game and would force them to spend more time with the wife and the kids.
  - cafard 4y ago
    How immutable?
- metalliqaz 4y ago
  it doesn't poison the company culture, it erases the company culture.

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.

rob74 4y ago
Ok, well then this "3-days-per-week" solution will only be temporary on the way back to 5 days per week, because even this way, statistically you will only have 60% of your colleagues present and will still have to do video calls. OTOH, you just need to have somebody from another office, or a customer, or a contractor, or ..., so meetings where everyone is in the same room will still remain a vanishing minority.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Most hybrid implementations have managers decide on the 3 days everyone on the team shows up. Team 1 does monday-wednesday, team 2 picks a different 3 days and so on.
krisroadruck 4y ago
Work from office is better for people who LIKE work from office if everyone does it. The people who don't want to go specifically don't want to, to avoid those folks that want access to interrupt everyone around them. Honestly, I feel like work from office would suck less if the people who wanted it so badly weren't there. The commute would still suck but at least you wouldn't have the extroverts constantly wrecking the productivity of everyone in the blast area around them.

bradleyjg 4y ago

The only people imposing on any employees are those that are signing their checks. Don’t blame your co-workers for your boss’ decisions.

iso1631 4y ago
> First, employees created a Slack channel to fight against the policy. Then, a pro-office return group was formed, the outlet reported. Presumably the pro-office group is employees
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  700 people in a company of 1.5 million. Do you think management is doing RTO because of that?
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    What number of those 1.5 million are white collar employees? I would assume the lion's share of Amazon's total employee headcount are warehouse workers and delivery drivers, jobs where the WFH vs. return to office debate isn't even a thing.
    - bradleyjg 4y ago
      The pro WFH slack group is more than 20,000 people. These 700 just seem like a weird scapegoat to focus on.
rob74 4y ago
Yes, but it's still one thing to say "I'm happy with my employer's new policy" and another thing to say "I'm happy with it, and I also support it being forced on others, no matter if it makes sense for them (professionally and personally) or not"...

unglaublich 4y ago

It's not about location, it's about proximity of collaboration. WfH group wants to collaborate remotely, digitally. In-office group wants to collaborate locally, in person. That is the difference. WfH group takes this opportunity away from in-office group; like in-office group takes the opportunity away from WfH. Can't have both. That's why the discussion is hard.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
The problem is the genie is out of the bottle - unless in office is enforced and required 100% of the time it's still going to be Teams calls. Even before 2020 most of the meetings I were in, even if they were in person, had a teams call going at the same time because someone had to remote in.
- eddieroger 4y ago
  It already was this in some places, but being annoyed by it was allowed and supported because it wasn't normal. Outlook has been adding calls since it was Lync. Any office with more than one location would have a phone bridge, but we blamed the tech when it failed because it was fun, and now we've learned it works more than well enough and we should rely on it.
fundad 4y ago
The commute leaves no time for collaboration. Don’t talk to me while I’m at work, 3 hours of commuting leaves me with precious little productive time.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

CharlieDigital 4y ago

My strong anecdotal evidence based belief here is that remote work requires more management effort to coordinate and that's the actual cause of the friction. There's a greater need to schedule, document (generally more writing things down), and coordinate when working in a team with remote culture. (Either that, or you have a team with really strong social capital and everyone knows what needs to be done with little coordination overhead) Now management type have more work on their hands to keep everything coordinated and that's why you have this showdown.

foepys 4y ago
This reasoning is quickly falling apart in a hybrid model. Once a single person is not on-site, you will need to work as if everybody were remote. According to the article, Amazon is apparently is currently targeting said hybrid model.
- przemelek 4y ago
  As long as you have some days in office for everybody it may work, but it should not be done in this way that some people are working from home, and some are working from office. Long before COVID (~8 years before ;-)) we had situation where one our colleague was in office only on Mondays, and big part of team was WFH on Friday and sometimes even Thursday & Friday, so best collaboration was on Monday, little worse on Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday almost nothing was happening
  - frumper 4y ago
    And Monday is the most popular day to call in sick.
Adrock 4y ago
What does “social capital” mean in this context?
- CharlieDigital 4y ago

lockhouse 4y ago

Purely anecdotal on my part, but I’ve noticed that while many people are able to effectively work from home and be as productive as they would be in the office, there are many employees who are terrible at working from home.

gonehome 4y ago
+1 - it’s great for excellent people, it’s horrible for junior engineers, it’s bad for people who have trouble motivating themselves and keeping on task. There is a decent % of people that do close to nothing while working remote. It’s not black and white, there are tradeoffs and it varies based on the person imo.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  I find this strange. If someone wasn't able to get work done in the office the solution wouldn't be "OK, we all need to work from home because Gary can't get stuff done otherwise".
  - gonehome 4y ago
    That’s only one factor, though it’s not just “Gary” IME many people are in this category, the very effective remote people are less common. The junior engineer issue and the comms issue affects everyone. Companies are teams of people and you want to make the collaboration as low effort and fast as possible. In person is very good for that and I suspect better on net. It’s why companies with the leverage to push for it (Apple and Amazon, Elon Musk companies) do so - they believe it to be an advantage.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      How many people do you believe were "very effective" in office? The truth of the matter is most people are "effective enough". I honestly don't know if it's actually better or it just appears better. Sure, there are times when fast communication is important, but as we see with Twitter lately it's obvious that rapid fire decisions sometimes aren't the best and while things seem very active and dynamic maybe it'd be better if communication was more considered and thoughtful. Isn't that why that whole "this meeting could have been an email" meme exists? I agree the companies believe it's an advantage, but I don't know that it is. I don't know that they know it is. Leadership definitely thinks so, and there's a ton of institutional momentum that still hasn't shifted after the last few years, but I don't that it's actually empirically better.

MattGaiser 4y ago

The pro-office people don't just want to be in office. They are unhappy unless everyone is in office.

unglaublich 4y ago
Yes, naturally. Do you really think in-office is about the walls, and the furniture, and the coffee machine? That's absurd. On the other hand: would you go to the office if it looked like your home? No, it's not about the physical place. It's about the interaction with your team and colleagues.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  I would only voluntarily go back to the office if the commute was similar to WFH. I don't even want to calculate how many hours of my life I've wasted on my 50 mile-each-way commute before WFH.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  It gets initially discussed in individual terms, like "mental separation of work and life" and "getting away from the kids and the dog." That is set the trap.

aws_ls 4y ago

From the article: "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.)" So more people want to work remote.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Just gotta make sure the people who will actually make a difference in your company are in the group you choose to go along with. Such a huge discrepancy would make me wonder which side the wheat is mostly sitting in.

deelowe 4y ago

My guess is that real drive for RTO is from commercial real estate investors who are losing money. Some of those investors hold high ranking positions at Amazon. I imagine there is also pressure from the Seattle government who have had quite the crime issue on their hands ever since covid started.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
It is funny you mention that, but it seems some companies are already making moves suggesting some level of adjustment ( commercial properties in Chicago suburbs seems to be sold at a discount, while residential properties become a hot item ). I can only point to individual instances so it is hard to call it a trend.

Mistletoe 4y ago

What seems absurd to me is people thinking they have control over what their employer wants them to do. Especially when you aren’t unionized. You do what the employer wants or you get a different job. Or you unionize so you have some actual bargaining power.

bombolo 4y ago
There are a lot of recruiters messaging me for remote positions lately.
MattGaiser 4y ago
You can leave, which during the current labour shortage tends to give companies some pause.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> Why not accommodate both groups? The same reason they could never accommodate the two groups of people who respectively loved and hated open offices - the people who love it only love it because everybody is forced to participate. If it doesn't include everybody, it's not what they're looking for.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
Somehow those seem to also be the same people who love to stand in the middle of the open office and loudly converse with the sales team about what they did last weekend while you're on a call dealing with a prod outage because impossibly even in the in-open-office utopia of yesteryear if something actually really important and time sensitive was happening it'd involve people being on a Teams call.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

I will respond with a quote from an old movie that was a thinly veiled criticism of the communist system. paraphrased: A: Why can't we just let them choose where they want to live? B: The issue is we want to live here and those that don't want to live here. ============== In other words, individual needs don't matter. Management clearly wants people back for one reason or another. The question is only whether 'wage junkies' will stick to their guns. I don't think I am being cynical here.

yowzadave 4y ago

As someone who works from home, and hopes to never work in an office again...I think this doesn't do justice to the Office people's argument. The Office people think the WFH people are poisoning the company culture. It's like if you had a neighbor who dumped sewage into your shared pond: "I prefer not to dump sewage into the pond, they prefer to do so, so let's accommodate both groups and allow each to do what she wants." It's important to make the case that WFH does not poison the company culture--that it can result in a more successful/effective/healthier organization. I think it requires a change in mindset and/or working patterns for certain manager types to see things this way.

eddieroger 4y ago
I don't agree with this, but I think the case can be made by those on The Office side that WFH does poison the culture. Culture is immutable, so any change to it recreates it. For some folks, being seen is contributing. Being able to swing by a cube and look over a shoulder is important. Taking that away takes something away from them. Again, I don't agree, I've work from home for nearly ten years now, but I see their point. I think it also threatens them, because we're challenging a norm, and change is scary. They like the office, and us wanting to WFH makes it seem like the office is bad, and they're bad for liking it. No one likes their cheese moved.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  Bosses also like being able to walk around the floor and see people working, and like the power trip of being able to physically tap people on the shoulder and pull them into a meeting. Also really puts a crimp on their dating / sexual harassment game and would force them to spend more time with the wife and the kids.
- cafard 4y ago
  How immutable?
metalliqaz 4y ago
it doesn't poison the company culture, it erases the company culture.