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To be honest I think 3 days a week in the office is a perfectly reasonable requirement. It gives enough opportunity for people to get face to face time and to b

To be honest I think 3 days a week in the office is a perfectly reasonable requirement. It gives enough opportunity for people to get face to face time and to build the relationships they need to build whilst still offering flexibility. Should it be combined with some flexibility for edge cases? Sure, managers will always turn a blind eye when it makes sense. And part of that is you can only have flexibility if the base line is established, if 50% of workers are still refusing to come in, the only way to solve that is a mass "Show up or else". In reality in 6 months you have a quiet word with your boss and probably the flexibility will creep back. Having said that, the way we got here is less than ideal. Senior management at tech companies made a whole tonne of bad promises and poor decisions during the pandemic and they've taken no ownership of that at all. The only reason this has become so difficult is because Senior management didn't have the intelligence to say "Hey, this pandemic is a once in a lifetime event, we're going to be flexible now but we need you to know this won't last".

bluefishinit 3y ago
> To be honest I think 3 days a week in the office is a perfectly reasonable requirement. It's not reasonable because it means you have to live within commuting distance of the office.
- Civil7598 3y ago
  yeah, it's not a big deal for people that are already there or were already commuting, maybe. But there were so many people hired, told they can work remote, and now are told they must uproot their and their family's life or be without a job.
mv4 3y ago
One of the reasons I joined Amazon last year was their stance on remote work: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-force-amazon-workers-to-return-to-the-office.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc... For me to go to the nearest office will add 4 hours in commute time daily, and I would still be video conferencing in Chime - as my team is all over the world and nobody is in my office.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bsimpson 3y ago
  That's the stupid part about these RTO-by-fiat decisions. My team is in a different timezone. There is no interpersonal benefit for me dialing in from a particular office vs from wherever I happen to be. I should have the flexibility to work from an office when it suits me and remotely when it suits me. That's how it's been my whole career, and it's worked just fine so far.
  - Sylamore 3y ago
    Some companies like AT&T are taking this a step further. People who have spent their entire 20+ year careers working remote are now being told they must report to an office. And to address the inevitable hypocrisy of forcing you into an office that may not be the same office as your team, they are designating specific offices for each team and you have to relocate to that office at your own expense. Now it's obvious this is just another massive layoff in disguise for them in particular, but apparently their wave 1 impacted group (relocate this year) is somewhere about 50/50 on people committing to relocate vs effectively volunteering to get laid off.
jaimebuelta 3y ago
Well, it depends. They set the policy to say you should go work 3 days a week at the office even if you are a single member of a team in a different country. Something that's not so rare, after the pandemic and the way the teams are configured multi-region. They claimed that it will make you learn the culture, just by working in the office, but having Chime meetings with your team, etc. And there was not (as much as I know) any interest in trying to "reshuffle" teams to be more geographically closer... It doesn't really make much sense to me
y-c-o-m-b 3y ago
Your comment seems to be addressing employees that were temporarily virtual and now are required to go into the office. That's not the issue at hand here. Amazon hired employees with jobs that were explicitly stated as being permanently remote and would not be revoked. They have "Virtual Office" listed in the company directory. Those virtual employees are now being asked to relocate to areas where they must also come in 3 days a week. For example an employee working remotely for AWS in Missouri now must uproot their lives and move to Seattle despite the hiring "contract" (using this term loosely) stating the job was fully virtual.
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  Oh I totally agree - I'm actually someone who changed jobs during the pandemic and now works for a company that wants to be 100% office but hired me basically 100% remote. It was a massive fuck up, they never should've offered that. It doesn't change the fact that they are going to insist everyone comes back though, and good luck ever holding senior leadership accountable for anything. They should've thought through the implications of telling people they can literally move out into the wilderness in 2020 and what that would mean if things changed in the future. But they didn't.

bluefishinit 3y ago

> To be honest I think 3 days a week in the office is a perfectly reasonable requirement. It's not reasonable because it means you have to live within commuting distance of the office.

Civil7598 3y ago
yeah, it's not a big deal for people that are already there or were already commuting, maybe. But there were so many people hired, told they can work remote, and now are told they must uproot their and their family's life or be without a job.

mv4 3y ago

One of the reasons I joined Amazon last year was their stance on remote work: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-force-amazon-workers-to-return-to-the-office.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc... For me to go to the nearest office will add 4 hours in commute time daily, and I would still be video conferencing in Chime - as my team is all over the world and nobody is in my office.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bsimpson 3y ago
That's the stupid part about these RTO-by-fiat decisions. My team is in a different timezone. There is no interpersonal benefit for me dialing in from a particular office vs from wherever I happen to be. I should have the flexibility to work from an office when it suits me and remotely when it suits me. That's how it's been my whole career, and it's worked just fine so far.
- Sylamore 3y ago
  Some companies like AT&T are taking this a step further. People who have spent their entire 20+ year careers working remote are now being told they must report to an office. And to address the inevitable hypocrisy of forcing you into an office that may not be the same office as your team, they are designating specific offices for each team and you have to relocate to that office at your own expense. Now it's obvious this is just another massive layoff in disguise for them in particular, but apparently their wave 1 impacted group (relocate this year) is somewhere about 50/50 on people committing to relocate vs effectively volunteering to get laid off.

jaimebuelta 3y ago

Well, it depends. They set the policy to say you should go work 3 days a week at the office even if you are a single member of a team in a different country. Something that's not so rare, after the pandemic and the way the teams are configured multi-region. They claimed that it will make you learn the culture, just by working in the office, but having Chime meetings with your team, etc. And there was not (as much as I know) any interest in trying to "reshuffle" teams to be more geographically closer... It doesn't really make much sense to me

y-c-o-m-b 3y ago

Your comment seems to be addressing employees that were temporarily virtual and now are required to go into the office. That's not the issue at hand here. Amazon hired employees with jobs that were explicitly stated as being permanently remote and would not be revoked. They have "Virtual Office" listed in the company directory. Those virtual employees are now being asked to relocate to areas where they must also come in 3 days a week. For example an employee working remotely for AWS in Missouri now must uproot their lives and move to Seattle despite the hiring "contract" (using this term loosely) stating the job was fully virtual.

SilverBirch 3y ago
Oh I totally agree - I'm actually someone who changed jobs during the pandemic and now works for a company that wants to be 100% office but hired me basically 100% remote. It was a massive fuck up, they never should've offered that. It doesn't change the fact that they are going to insist everyone comes back though, and good luck ever holding senior leadership accountable for anything. They should've thought through the implications of telling people they can literally move out into the wilderness in 2020 and what that would mean if things changed in the future. But they didn't.