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Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
- horns4lyfe 2y ago“We’re better when we’re together” So stop offshoring “No not like that”
- BabarKhanJaved 2y ago[flagged]
- pavel_lishin 2y ago[citation needed]
- Eric_WVGG 2y agoWhat's the reasoning here? Housewives and househusbands gossiping at the quilting bee?
- ydlr 2y agoThey are allowed to work from home the rest of the time.
- redleggedfrog 2y ago:^D Best first post evar.
- neofrommatrix 2y agoExtremely apt and true for Amazon
- more_corn 2y agoHa. That’s funny. I had a friend go work there years ago. He came back because they worked him like a dog.
- psunavy03 2y agoThe past four years have really been an astonishing example of the executive class being hit over the head with a good idea, picking themselves back up, and carrying on as if nothing ever happened based purely on their own prejudices and egoes.
- binarytreez11 2y ago[flagged]
- darth_avocado 2y agoIt's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed. It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
- jrs235 2y agoNext step will be to let go of people to rehire people on a team to be in the same location. This will all be in another attempt to help push salaries down. It's stupid in my opinion and will kill productivity and velocity in the near and mid term.
- zhyder 2y agoI agree that seems like the next step, but how will that help push salaries down? I thought remote work would do that much more, coz many employees would move to less expensive areas in the same country and new hiring would focus on lower-income countries. This cost savings from remote work is what I expected to push adoption of remote work more, and I'm surprised by this reversed trend.
- psunavy03 2y agoBecause people find out that remote work makes it hard to exercise power and control, and some people get off on exercising power and control, empirical data and fiduciary responsibility be damned.
- darth_avocado 2y agoMore like fi-douchery
- spondylosaurus 2y agoI went through a round of layoffs last year from a company doing this. But not only do they still have multiple cross-continent HQs (so now they just have multiple "local" teams!), they're also struggling to re-fill some of the roles they cut. Turns out it's easier to source people with certain niche talents when you don't limit yourself to one or two metro areas.
- toomuchtodo 2y agohttps://code-cwa.org/organize https://code-cwa.org/organize
- clayhacks 2y agoThanks for this. I really want more software engineers to see the benefits of unions. Yes we’re paid well but there’s more to life than a paycheck
- toomuchtodo 2y agoFrom first principles, it is the only way for these workers to have more agency and not be treated as disposal feedstock, and as a high empathy human, I would like them to have more agency and be less controlled (if they would like it; the choice is theirs).
- snapcaster 2y agoWhat do you envision a union doing for software engineers? like what's the 3 sentence pitch for joining?
- LaffertyDev 2y ago"A union of Software Engineers lets us collectively bargain for better working conditions, such as flexible working locations, reducing PTO request denials, and work-life balance conditions."
- Clent 2y agoLook at how well you're being treated now without a union. Look at how well union workers are treated versus their no union worker equivalents. Imagine how much better you'd be treated if there was a union versus your current no union status.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoI'm pretty confident that the vast majority of union workers are expected to work from their employer's business premises. Workers should unionize if they're being mistreated, but it's not a magic wand that means I can get whatever working conditions I'd like.
- DataDaemon 2y agoWhat about CO2?
- ekianjo 2y agocollaboration will solve everything hé said
- lotsofpulp 2y agoEventually, the goal is to have everyone live in an apartment building in the city and walk to work. That is far less CO2 than people living far away from infrastructure and services in detached single family homes and driving everywhere in their unnecessarily large vehicles.
- DataDaemon 2y agoAh, I see, 15-minute towns - the idea directly from the green EU.
- CamperBob2 2y agoMore like Kowloon, the OG 15-minute city. Naturally the execs will live far away, next door to the urban planners.
- user3939382 2y agoSo the goal is to have everyone live in noisy environments totally detached from nature?
- QuinnyPig 2y agoWhy would a company who recently added "strive to be the earth's best employer" care about a little thing like that?
- karmakurtisaani 2y agoThey really announced that? They really have no self-awareness, or they've decided to fully embrace this whole double speak thing. Why not even both.
- pton_xd 2y agoI think this was a pretty obvious end-goal when they required everyone to relocate back to Seattle and go in 3 days a week. As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there. How is that a sustainable corporate culture?
- throwanem 2y agoOnly by virtue of throughput.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoThere is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.
- jackyinger 2y agoActually I heard from a friend that worked there that eventually Amazon will run out of people to hire in the US who haven’t previously worked at Amazon, tho this includes warehouse workers.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoLook at their H1B visa data and hiring in India (at least with regards to corp jobs, not US warehouse workers). They absolutely could find these folks in the US who don't need sponsorship. https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=amazon https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=amazon > Amazon H1B Salary 2024 > 5848 records found; Median Salary is $144800. 7 percents of the salary are above $200K, 38 percents of the salary are between $150K and $200K, 43 percents of the salary are between $100K and $150K, 11 percents of the salary are less than $100k Is this H1B visa fraud? Good question for USCIS and Congress. How Amazon feels about worker rights and regulation, as well as regulation as a whole, is a bit of a known quantity at this point. https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-fraud/combating-fraud-and-abuse-in-the-h-1b-visa-program https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...
- jarsin 2y ago> We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way I have fond memories around all the the childish politics, favoritism, and fights caused by desk assignments.
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- josefritzishere 2y agoNever has a white-collar office needed so desperatelyl to be unionized.
- omegaworks 2y agoWhy would they unionize when most of their comp is stock? The fear mongering, uncertainty and doubt stoked by their CEO's fully-owned press[1] would tank their stock value. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/business/media/jeff-bezos-washington-post.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/business/media/jeff-bezos...
- t3rabytes 2y agoBezos isn't the CEO, and hasn't been since 2021.
- nielsbot 2y agoSo they can fight back against before forced into the office 3 days per week? People have democracy in the personal lives, but not in the workspace. Unions give the workers democratic power so they can collectively make demands of the business owners. They can also demand a greater share of profits.
- phendrenad2 2y agoSerious question: why is stock more valuable than cash at this moment?
- thousand_nights 2y agoi can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer this capitalistic yearn for endless growth is such a parasitic meat grinder they write these memos with "touching" stories, i started from the bottom here, 27 years, amazon is my life, blah blah, as if anyone, pardon my french, gives a flying fuck
- neofrommatrix 2y agoWhen it comes to Amazon, you are allowed all the French you can use..
- tivert 2y ago> i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer It might not be that they're "out of touch" but rather they just don't care. Sort of like slaveholders back in the day, who often complained about how their slaves were lazy and how unjust it was that the slaves weren't giving their all.
- rty32 2y agoExactly. Whether you can figure out your daycare situation with 5 day RTO is at the bottom of the long list of things Andy Jassy cares about. Even if you are an L6 -- a senior position that takes years to achieve within Amazon -- that means nothing to the CEO. Probably the same if an L8 decides to leave. So what? There are so many L8s in the company, let's just hire someone else. See this at Apple -- https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/17/ian-goodfellow-joins-deepmind-google/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/17/ian-goodfellow-joins-de... -- even if you are a DIRECTOR. Once you realize that the corporate, especially large ones, don't give a ** about your life, you'll have a clear(er) view of how the world actually works, and what you might want to do with your life. And because of this, I kind of cherish my relationship with my manager. I am an IC and he is a bottom level manager. There is still a lot "human" aspect of this, and he actually cares about me taking time off etc. He himself fears layoffs. You can't say the same when you go up the ladder. The only things senior management cares about are product, revenue and efficiency (maybe a few more). Employees are nothing but replaceable tools. The higher up, the less they are about individual employees.
- tra3 2y agoColor me surprised.. > the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy More quiet firing? > also plans to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer managers in order to “remove layers and flatten organizations,” Combined with not so quiet firing? > Jassy took the helm and instituted widespread cost cuts across Amazon, including the largest layoffs in its 27 years as a public company. Cost cuts worked great for Boeing. Can't wait to see Amazon stock go through the roof.
- allenrb 2y agoSo AMZN wants to have layoffs without using the word?
- dbliss 2y ago"So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.." .. manager layoffs coming too.
- walrushunter 2y ago[dead]
- suslik 2y ago> manager layoffs coming too. A large pharma company which I worked for until quitting in July went through a similar process this year. The goal was also to reduce the manager / IC ratio - organizational efficiency and span of control, they called it - but in most instances it were ICs who were laid off while their managers were simply relegated to ICs.
- Yizahi 2y agoLayoffs AND fuck with human lives at the same time, what could be more arousing for the chief director of directors or whatever. :)
- bananapub 2y agowait, european offices don't even have assigned desks? it's all hotdesking?
- rsynnott 2y agoSurely you mean "agile desk arrangements"! (What a euphemism) That would actually put me off working for Amazon (though, I mean, there's a lot that would). I like working from an office, but I did _not_ like the hot-desking that I had to do post-pandemic because our office wasn't big enough (my employer eventually let people who come in frequently get assigned desks, and it's been a huge quality of life improvement).
- subhrm 2y agoWhy is this on page2 of HN! This should be on the front page.
- wifipunk 2y agoThey say the policy goes into effect January 2025, but I'd expect some managers will try to get their teams in sooner for appearances since in the same post he mentions reducing bureaucracy and in turn the number of managers.
- whiplash451 2y agoGiven that finding a job takes time in the current market, January 2025 essentially mean that people who don't like the policy should start looking right now.
- Macha 2y agoEspecially as Q4 is a slow time for hiring from seasonal factors alone. Companies doing layoffs in Q4/Q1 to boost numbers for whatever the end of their financial year is, holidays and stuff slowing down hiring pipelines.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558554
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- throwway120385 2y agoSuch a powerful and strong commitment to addressing climate change by making everyone drive more.
- acedTrex 2y agoAmazon is truly the arm pit of software engineering careers. One can only hope this hastens their demise.
- tivert 2y ago> Amazon is truly the arm pit of software engineering careers. One can only hope this hastens their demise. The only thing that will hasten their demise is if the government rips them a new one (which this Amazon shareholder says it should). Otherwise, absent some black swan, their demise will be slow and measured in literal generations.
- TuringNYC 2y ago1st Prediction: the rest of FAANG will quick-follow. 2nd Prediction: the rest of industry will not quick follow, unless they are in the same pay-range
- DataDaemon 2y agoOther companies will follow soon. A tough job market will allow them to do anything they want with you.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoThe Fed begins cutting rates Wednesday (25-50bps), and will land near 2.5-3% by end of 2025. Assuming traditional macro policy outcomes, the tough market is transitory (with my apologies to Powell). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-15/is-the-fed-s-interest-rate-cut-coming-too-late-to-avoid-recession https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-15/is-the-fe... | https://archive.today/5B8Tk https://archive.today/5B8Tk
- DataDaemon 2y agoFED is too late; damage has been done.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoMaybe but they’re facing political pressure from the left, like Elizabeth Warren, to basically make the economy at least look good artificially. And they may do that. Will it be a sustainably better economy? I doubt it given federal debt and what feels like shaky employment levels.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoCutting 75 basis points instead of 25 or 50 (as Warren is and others are advocating for in the letter they sent Chair Powell) isn't attempting to make the economy "look good artificially." I strongly believe it is important to demonstrate this signaling is not about optics. It is to put more effort into preserving the health of the labor market by pulling forward rate cuts the Fed will be performing regardless (with some amount of risk of inflation being a bit sticky). If you are familiar with her background, this should come as no surprise (labor > capital and other econ metrics). She's doing her job by advocating for an aggressive monetary policy stance (imho). This also aligns with Fed statements recently indicating they are willing to act to protect the labor market. https://apnews.com/article/federal-reserve-inflation-powell-interest-rates-economy-e4b649e8c38f757300bc0fa01cee74c2 https://apnews.com/article/federal-reserve-inflation-powell-... ("Powell stresses message that US job market is cooling, a possible signal of coming rate cut") > “We’re not just an inflation-targeting central bank,’’ Powell told the House Financial Services Committee on the second of two days of semi-annual testimony to Congress. “We also have an employment mandate.” > Powell told the House panel on Wednesday that to avoid damaging the economy, the Fed likely wouldn’t wait until inflation reached its 2% target before it would start cutting rates.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421
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- rwalle 2y agoAs a reminder, https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-... > Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer > Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
- neofrommatrix 2y ago"Disagree and Commit" to that argument.
- WalterSear 2y ago> Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled. https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
- DataDaemon 2y agoRead like this: you must return to the office or leave—50 waiting for your position now.
- Yizahi 2y agoOther corporate hellholes furiously taking notes and looking at the reactions. A month later: "Metoo! Metoo!"
- mensetmanusman 2y agoWall St. tightening their grip on the STEM population.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoWhat an absolutely dishonest company, lying to employees repeatedly. I’ve heard from Amazon friends that their internal survey even shows that remote work improved productivity. But their old school behind the times executives don’t care. Plus whenever I visit Seattle I’m blown away that it has worse traffic than LA, so I don’t see how it is good for them either, since employees won’t stay late to make up for the time lost to commute.
- nyxtom 2y agoI'm very close to being completely done with tech. This whole career has been stressful and the ROI is debatable
- matwood 2y agoWhat else have you done? Tech has been a godsend for me. When I started I had to wear a shirt and tie every day, and now there are a lot of WFH options out there.
- snapcaster 2y agoDid you start your career before covid? If not, didn't you already experience and endure 5 days a week in the office and not quit your career?
- SoftTalker 2y agoI worked in an office 5 days a week, wearing a shirt and tie, for 20+ years of my career. My commute door-to-door was nearly an hour each way. Most of that by train fortunately. It was just normal.
- lll-o-lll 2y agoYeah, and shit.
- rty32 2y ago...and people suddenly realize things don't have to work that way?
- t-writescode 2y ago"I worked in the mines / on the farm since I was 13, it was just normal" - until child labor laws protected the kids (mostly) "I worked 12-16 hour days in the factory" - until a lot of people fought, incredibly hard, to push that number down. People have learned in these last 4 years that they can work just fine AND have a life AND not have a commute and it can be many, many companies' "best years ever!". Inertia is a sad, but common, excuse for bad practices.
- VirusNewbie 2y agoIgnoring the RTO part, I'm always confused that a CEO implements weird sweeping changes like "we're increasing the ratio of ICs to managers by 15%". Like, if he's not happy with the productivity of his workers, shouldn't he be telling his SVPs/VPs to come up with plans, and/or hold them accountable?
- steveBK123 2y agoSounds like another stealth layoff via force attrition. Must be going well over there.
- claytongulick 2y agoThe problem with that strategy is that for the remote work crowd, the only people who stay are those with golden handcuffs or those that don't have better/other options, so you end up losing your best people to companies that are more flexible.
- steveBK123 2y agoAgreed, and not just a remote thing generally. This is why one big and well communicated cut is always better than round after round. Once your company tilts into the direction of getting worse, anyone with better options leaves. You end up with a lot of adverse selection as an employer if you take the slow burn approach.
- treesknees 2y agoNot necessarily better, at least for the company. The slow burn works out much better for them: - Gets rid of employees who were on the fence of leaving anyway - No need to pay out unemployment - No need to pay out unused PTO (depends on the state) - No need to notify months in advance (WARN act [1]) or risk heavy fines - End up with "loyal" employees in the end If they can get through the short-term pain of losing some good workers, it will eventually balance out, and the show will go on. [1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn https://www.warntracker.com https://www.warntracker.com
- xpl 2y ago> so you end up losing your best people to companies Management probably thinks they don't need the best people anymore, as mediocre employees + ChatGPT (or whatever they use at Amazon) will suffice.
- lainproliant 2y agoThis is not a good way to hire or develop the best. The best are going to go elsewhere.
- redleader55 2y agoWhere? If FAANG starts being bad, where else to go?
- yodsanklai 2y agoAre blockchain startups still a thing?
- baq 2y agoyes, if they can embed an LLM in it. otherwise, no.
- JonChesterfield 2y agoTo whatever companies will be top of the pile in a decade or two, after Google and Amazon have gone the way of IBM. Some of those will be founded by engineers who left the current FAANG setup and managed to not copy the insane parts of their previous org.
- metadaemon 2y agoThere's a life and death cycle even for companies and its important to remember that. Leaving and starting somewhere fresh seems natural.
- grumple 2y agoThere are plenty of high paying companies that aren't FAANG and aren't in the bay area. I work at one. A small software company owned by a huge non-tech megacorp. Zero people have left my dev team in the past 4 years.
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- Plasmoid 2y agoI wonder if engineers are going to start refusing to do on-call. "Sorry, it's going to take me an hour to get to the office because I'm not allowed to work remotely".
- nine_zeros 2y agoI think there should be a automatic overtime law. Every minute beyond 40 hours should be automatically billed to the company. Use the laptop spy software that companies have been conveniently using anyway to enforce this.
- geodel 2y agoHuh, there are exempt vs non-exempt employees and I believe all software employees are exempt (just like in all places I worked as FTE) which means they are not entitled to overtime pay. People here talk like they have just invented the wheel.
- progforlyfe 2y agoi don't agree with the mandate but at the very least, if they're going to do this they should absolutely exempt workers from returning to office during the periods they are on-call!
- Xeronate 2y agowhen i was there and it was 3 days a week on call definitely wasn’t exempt
- patch_cable 2y agoNor was it before the pandemic.
- harshaw 2y agowe already do that on my team- you can hardly respond to a pager in 10 minutes if you commuting. I suppose it's an unofficial policy but we never got any pushback from it.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoWhy don’t they mandate 6 day work week to compete even more…
- dh2022 2y agoSpot on based on my work experience at Amazon. Working Saturdays from home was much better because at least I did not have to interact with those psychopaths from Retail.
- algebra-pretext 2y agoSame, I've been able to focus best when finishing up something either during the weekend or when I allotted more OOTO time than I actually needed, I think it's just being in that (slightly) more de-pressurized state and no overhead of Slack pings and meetings.
- apwell23 2y ago5 days in office , 2 days work from home. AWS.
- saos 2y agoIs that a soft layoff?
- cosmic_quanta 2y agoUsually I would think these are shadow-layoffs, but employees were already required to be in-office 3d/week, which means that employees were at least proximate to their office.
- vineyardlabs 2y agoI wouldn't be so sure. Proximate for 5 days in office and 3 days in office might be two different things. I got an offer from Amazon last year (ended up declining) and the HM at the time talked about how a sizable portion of the team were commuting extreme distances to work there (including by plane) on the pretense that they only had to be in office 3 days a week.
- jmclnx 2y agoI wonder if there are any exemptions. But I am sure the best talent can easilly find work at Microsoft, Oracle and or IBM without any issues.
- mywittyname 2y agoThe job market is tough out there for SDEs. Granted, I'm not top-tier talent by any means, but this past year I interviewed for like 10x as many jobs as I did in my previous 15 years of working with no luck. I even get ghosted by recruiters that reached out to me first. So, I have my doubts about easily for most people, even at these places.
- yodsanklai 2y agoFor the same level of compensation? near their home? do these company offer remote/hybrid position to new joiners? do they even hire at the moment?
- bravetraveler 2y agoAvoid businesses this large, they mimic each other/get the rough end of politics. Trading one ham-fisted set of policies for another You know how cities or even states try to compete for employer offices/headquarters? This is the other side of that.
- dmoy 2y agodup? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41559051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41559051
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- arunabha 2y ago[flagged]
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- bediger4000 2y agoWow Amazon must have metrics that show a big productivity increase in-office! I predict trouble for other tech giants that don't have these metric(s)!
- fnfjfk 2y agoMy prediction: strong remote work advocates will claim this will be catastrophic for Amazon, many critical people will leave and only those not competent enough to get a job elsewhere will stay. Office advocates will claim it will reinvigorate the culture and lead Amazon to new heights. The actual outcome will be that mostly nothing changes about Amazon’s performance or product quality.
- stuckkeys 2y agoYour statement is solid. But from What I have heard, Amazon is getting a lot of pressure from the GOV to bring in more people into the office to support local businesses which I think it is a bit vague. But yeah, they are going to lose some great talent. They are going to have a bunch of useless recruiters roaming the offices lol.
- fzeroracer 2y agoMany critical people will leave. The problem is that issues of brain drain, process devolution and lost institutional expertise are effects that only occur years after the cause. When you try and figure out why all of your internal services are down because one core server is in a bootloop and the engineer with knowledge of it all has left. Speaking from my own personal perspective, it's quite frankly scary how many teams and companies are running with skeleton crews because they've chased off a lot of competent engineers and think they can coast by with the bare minimum. Stuff like what happened to Boeing or Crowdstrike are great examples of the end result, and a lot more companies than you'd expect are operating right on the critical failure margins. The concept of redundancy has outright vanished.
- causal 2y agoIt's even more subtle than that. Things just start decaying when talent leaves- you often can't trace it to a single engineer or piece of knowledge that's lost. You'll find reasons why things broke- but you won't see the myriad ways a more talented pool of developers would have prevented it from ever breaking in the first place.
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- snapcaster 2y agoI have yet to see metrics cited by any of these announcements. Do people think that's because: a). They don't have metrics, and all the cynics are right about this being vibes based b). They actually do have the data, and it's very grim for how poorly people on average perform when WFH but don't want to share it due to sensitivity or something Like, i'm actually pro Work From Office (don't yell at me, i joined a company with this culture in place already on purpose) so i tend to believe that it's more productive for myself and the population on average but if that's true why has nobody proved it? why aren't any of these companies able to show data?
- bediger4000 2y agoI loathe going to the office I'm a critic, it's (A) vibes
- snapcaster 2y agoDo you think they have metrics showing the opposite? or just nobody even wants to look into it since leadership wants it badly?
- karmakurtisaani 2y agoNo one has metrics on anything. High performers perform well at home and in the office, but if they prefer home they'll jump ship as soon as there's an opportunity. Low performers perform badly at home and in the office, but will cling in to their position as long as possible.
- surgical_fire 2y agoIf they had metrics they would not hesitate to show them, parading those in front of employees like a victory banner. Amazon does stack ranking, they are not really concerned with sensitivity anything. They have no metrics. Metrics are for the underclass. The Leadership decides based on what they want.
- bediger4000 2y ago
- arunabha 2y agoThe cognitive dissonance from the CEO class is astonishing. From the article '“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy said in the message.' This, just a couple of years after they were falling over themselves touting the productivity of WFH.
- jppope 2y agoIts obviously not about productivity. We all know WFH is more productive (for people like who amazon hires)
- wwarner 2y agoplease prove this. i am now committed to wfh, yet to set and reach important milestones i have to buckle down and focus in the office.
- karmakurtisaani 2y agoThere is no way to prove this and you know it. However I can tell you I'm orders of magnitude happier working from home, and that makes me a better employee overall. I'm not driven by stress and resentment, but actual will to improve things and deliver.
- bbqfog 2y agoMany very productive people will not work in an office at all, thus harming productivity. When you're remote, you can hire the best.
- patch_cable 2y agoI would also be interested to know how true this is for individual productivity versus group productivity.
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- obnauticus 2y agoAt least they get to keep their two days of WFH. New policy - five days RTO, two days WFH, per week.
- indigodaddy 2y agoI chuckle but this may not be far off?
- dymk 2y agoI've had a disturbingly large number of friends cancel on weekend or late evening plans because something at Amazon broke, and they had to drive into a downtown office to fix it.
- rgblambda 2y agoYou mean Amazon can't afford on call support engineers and has to rely on free out of hours labour from its employees? That's astonishing.
- htrp 2y agoWhich LP would this policy most align to? and is there an LP that can enforce the 996?
- obnauticus 2y agoFrugality. Your cost per hour is reduced. Learn and be curious. If you’re working on the weekend, you get to do this 24x7.
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- IncreasePosts 2y agoI suppose this means Amazon wants to cut their workforce without announcing layoffs.
- everybodyknows 2y agoBingo. The other tool they use is a secretly higher perf review bar.
- pelagic_sky 2y agoI see Mayor Bruce Harrell rubbing his hands together as he slowly nods in approval of all this. Hopefully where I work doesn't try to pull this off. At least my manager would not like it one bit seeing as their commute is already 50 min one way 2 to 3 times a week. But who am I kidding, it will probably happen and then I get to sit on video calls in the office with all the people I collaborate with across the states and europe.
- wwarner 2y agowell, without people working downtown, it will be abandoned to drug addicts in a spiral of insufficient public safety resources and declining revenue. so i don’t blame him.
- hiddencost 2y agoOr maybe all of the ridiculous pressure from sky high salaries and no affordable housing led to the homeless population...
- rendang 2y agoThere's lots of "affordable housing" aka Byzantine subsidy schemes here in Seattle. What there isn't is consistent enforcement against encampments, littering, and shoplifting
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- stefan_ 2y agoAt least then you might get a mayor that works for the people living downtown than whatever suburbanites swarm it on work days.
- wwarner 2y agoThis comment cracked me up. I do live in downtown Seattle.
- nine_zeros 2y agoMandatory overtime law is in order. Every minute beyond 40 hours a week should be automatically billed to the employer.
- shaism 2y agoActually that is how it works in many companies in Germany. It has its benefits and drawbacks, like every system ;)
- duringmath 2y agoLeast you expect from workers is to show up for work.
- declan_roberts 2y agoPlease log off hacker news and get back to work.
- happytoexplain 2y agoThis seems obviously wrong - the least you expect is of course for them to accomplish the goals of their position. If that requires physical presence, then obviously that's part if the deal implicitly. But for tons of jobs, that's part of the "above and beyond" bucket. I.e. things like after-hours availability, that may improve outcomes, but actually have downsides that mean they could be net negatives depending on the specific job and the specific individuals. Aside from such executive blindness, the only other reason anybody alive still thinks of commuting and in-office work in more innocent terms is because up until very recently (generationally speaking) they were simply a physical necessity for nearly 100% of jobs, so there was nothing to be gained by dwelling on it. That changed, so the acceptance of petty suffering changed. Also, the fact that the ratio of life improvement to hard work has steadily decreased since those times motivates employees to find other means of maintaining sanity.
- behindai 2y agoPeople can resist it! Violet shift!
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421
- pknomad 2y agoGenuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then again, Amazon doesn't claim monopoly on those and one has to assume the risk of working for a place that churns people out and has upper-level management that are hostile to IC's needs/wants. Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?
- FactoryReboot 2y agoNo. Choose the other FAANG offer
- htrp 2y agoMoney.
- iosguyryan 2y agoEasily more elsewhere with less BS
- htrp 2y agoI expect eventually people will demand a premium for the BS?
- behindai 2y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm4LYX3xdkU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm4LYX3xdkU
- nblgbg 2y agoReducing the number of managers is an interesting decision. I briefly worked at Amazon, and the only way for managers to get promoted is by hiring more people under them. There isn’t any other way to get promoted, which incentivizes managers to grow their teams and sometimes add features that may not make sense. Any opinions from ex-Amazonians?
- nine_zeros 2y agoHeadcount based promos is the most backwards system out there. But Amazon is too dysfunctional to change.
- _heimdall 2y agoIt can make sense when done right. If the team grows organically in response to the work, rather than work increasing to grow the team, it can make sense to reorg the team and often internal promotions can make that transition more smooth.
- nine_zeros 2y agoGoodharts Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
- aurizon 2y agoI thought this went out when the USSR fell?
- syntheticnature 2y agoThis is a common issue in large corporations.
- timmg 2y agoIsn't this (kinda) true, in general? I work at Google. Many of the "official descriptions" of various levels include "size of team" as part of the description. I think, generally, anyone in a middle management position, particularly at a growing company knows that "more people equals more advancement".
- Bostonian 2y agoI can believe that 3 days a week in the office is more productive than 0, and maybe 4 slightly more than 3, but I wonder if 5 is any more productive than 4, or if Amazon is mostly trying to reduce headcount. Are there studies on productivity vs. # of days in office for white collar workers?
- tivert 2y ago> Are there studies on productivity vs. # of days in office for white collar workers? Yes, you can cite it as "the CEO's fart."
- bbqfog 2y agoAny days in the office a week is going to filter out your talent pool to people who live by the office, thus giving you orders of magnitude less choice or opportunity to hire the best candidate.
- VBprogrammer 2y agoSo any time Amazon make any noise about doing something "for the environment" you can basically just point out they are full of shit. It probably takes a dozen electric cars to offset the carbon saving of just not going into the office.
- _heimdall 2y agoThat's a really difficult comparison to nail down and is heavily dependent on assumptions you make of the alternate reality you compare against. Does Amazon shutdown all of their office buildings completely? Do employees still leave home and work out of shared office spaces that they prefer to home or the Amazon campus? How do you factor in things like HVAC costs for individual home offices versus a main campus building? For electric cars as the unit of measure, are they new? How do you account for production costs? What power source is charging the cars?
- VBprogrammer 2y agoYes, it's was pretty flippant. I didn't expect a series analysis.
- _heimdall 2y agoThat's totally fair and nothing wrong with that. It could turn out that centralizing workers in an office actually has a lower carbon footprint (if that's the primary goal). Being flippant is most helpful when the details may be wrong but the direction is definitely right.
- maerF0x0 2y agoThere's no way, once you consider the cost of building the building and all it's contents. For ever worker that wants to work remote even part time they have to have a home office. Homes already must have toilets, kitchens, AC or Heat as appropriate, etc. In addition a worker more or less always returns home, meaning their transportation to the office is the marginal excess. So commuting alone is a source of excess carbon. You cant tell me that a building AC/Heat is going to be so much more efficient over a home AC/heat that it erases the fact we double the footprint of office + kitchen/eating space + bathroom + lobby + call rooms (which are usually extra ontop of a desk) on and on. For all the offices I've worked in as a guide its incomprehensible that a home office wouldn't have a lower carbon footprint.
- yqtjnvou 2y ago[dead]
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- bbqfog 2y agoI'm never working in an office again. Forcing WFO is the start of a death spiral you can't recover from.
- adabyron 2y agoThe irony here... "On the first topic, we’ve always sought to hire very smart, high judgment, inventive, delivery-focused, and missionary teammates. And, we have always wanted the people doing the actual detailed work to have high ownership." Then shortly later.. "We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements" So they hire smart people with great judgement who have high ownership but also treat them like incompetent workers who need to show up to the office, in their assigned seat & do their assigned tasks... And he calls this startup culture? Can Amazon even be considered a "tech" company at this point? It seems long gone are the days of innovation & growth at the cost of profit.
- malfist 2y agoButts in seats as a KPI is the definition of "Day 2 culture"
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoAs someone in a hot desking situation, I would kill for an assigned seat. I do not even have someplace to put a coffee cup. Have to pack/unpack all of my stuff daily.
- op00to 2y agoI can leave my coffee cup on my home office desk for weeks at a time if I choose.
- juunpp 2y agoSeems like the capitalists have found the way to make office workers be constantly on the edge about their job security. Pack/unpack stuff every day is hilarious.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoIt brings to mind how much easier it is to do layoffs. No longer have a desk to pack up when let go.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoReminder that Amazon is doing this for itself, and not for you.
- tippytippytango 2y agoIf they don’t lose a ton of people from this, I would bet other faangs follow suit in the new year.
- neverrroot 2y agoThe next year is long away, let’s see how o1 changes the things. The side with the upside drives the employment conditions in the end.
- benjiweber 2y agoThe irony of setting up a '“Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy' while announcing an edict enforced by centralised control to replace autonomous decision making about where & how to work.
- goostavos 2y agoThis is not the first "we're starting a committee to figure out what to do about there being too many committees" I've seen in my ~7 years here. Makes me laugh every time.
- lesuorac 2y agoThe best is when the top issues the committee finds outlast the committee.
- zeptian 2y agothis memo is one for the ages. filled with management speak.
- dbish 2y agoWell the current CEO is an MBA. Post founder, MBA days morph into this
- beachy 2y agoA long time ago I joined Deloitte to set up a local software dev. practice. A few days in I was invited to join a "bureaucracy reduction taskforce". Someone handed me a literally 12 inch thick stack of paper I was meant to read up on before the first meeting. I gave my regrets and withdrew from the taskforce (there were no repercussions - apparently a few others had noped out as well).
- DonsDiscountGas 2y agoI choose to believe that was a strategy. Invite everybody so they feel included, weed out almost everybody so it's a small group and can maybe get something done
- strivingtobe 2y ago> We want to operate like the world’s largest startup It's always amusing when a multi-decade-old, multi-hundred-billion-dollar company says stuff like this. You're not a startup. You never will be. And if you were, you probably would actually offer perks in your offices that might actually encourage people to be there. Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove multiple times. I've never seen a company where it seemed more like the leadership of the company actively despises the employees that worked for them. Between stuff like this and the incessant pushing of Amazon Q against everyone's will, it's really apparent that Amazon execs think that having to employ humans as SDE is a defect they're trying to get rid of ASAP.
- tomjakubowski 2y ago> Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove multiple times. This is crazy, seriously? Apparently no one has written a good enough two-pager arguing that gratis coffee pays for itself with increased productivity
- strivingtobe 2y agoThey have repeatedly tried to remove the free coffee perk (usually by claiming that it was only intended as a temporary thing and will be removed at the end of the year) and the only reason it has been retained this far is because for multiple years running now there was an internal uproar about it. I suspect at the end of this year they will fully remove it, uproar be damned.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoThat’s so hilariously petty. As if management was not already dictating who is in charge. Can you bring your own cup? Get the Big Gulp 4 liter thermos every day.
- rty32 2y agoThat's surprising -- I would think it is obvious Amazon doesn't care about internal uproars, and there is nothing people can do about it. Otherwise the current 3 day RTO wouldn't have happened.
- whiplash451 2y agoNot sure why they went all the way to 5 days when 4 days would have done most of the job. Anyone has insights into this?
- TavsiE9s 2y agoRIF without paying severance.
- excalibur 2y agoSo long, and thanks for all the free shipping.
- pxeboot 2y agoWhat is the best way to handle this if you are unwilling to return? Wait to get fired? Resign? Hope they make an exception for you?
- 8organicbits 2y agoRun it by your supervisor. When I worked as a developer at Amazon, pre-pandemic, I worked from home whenever I wanted, which was mostly one or two days a week. If your manager won't let you flex, consider switching teams.
- xinayder 2y agoWhat if your supervisor can't allow you remote work because policies from higher management strictly forbid it? What do you do in this case? Go to the office and not be productive?
- 8organicbits 2y agoI personally would not want to work in a place where managers had such little flexibility. I'd quit, if pushed. But Amazon wasn't like that pre-pandemic and I suspect they are returning to pre-pandemic norms so I don't think that's the case here.
- senderista 2y agoAFAICT (haven't yet discussed with my manager), managers have zero flexibility and any exception must be approved at SVP level
- 8organicbits 2y agoIsn't that how delegation works? CEO says full time is now 40 hours on-site unless the management layer below me says otherwise. The SVP would then say the same. Eventually, your manager is given discretion and you have a discussion. We likely won't see SVPs publicly sharing their internal policy, but it feels strange to assume that SVPs would be involved in the individualized scheduling of all the employees who report up to them. They have better things to do.
- rybosworld 2y agoDemanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense. Might be an extreme take but, I think engineers have some onus to stop agreeing to work there, lest the amazon corporate culture spreads further.
- mr90210 2y agoEngineers on a work visa don’t have that much leeway to strong-arm Amazon on such a decision.
- paxys 2y agoIt made sense starting from when the concept of an office was established until mid-2020. Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now? That too considering every other industry besides tech is already doing it?
- op00to 2y agoHuh? I have friends that work in engineering, accounting, and purchasing that are all at least partially if not 100% wfh. Plenty of other industries have given up on 5 days in the office.
- typewithrhythm 2y agoIt's not some big or recent development, effective WFH has been possible since ADSL matured for many, it just took a while for that to be commonly understood.
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoI'm really not sure what people were expecting, honestly. Of course things would always revert back to the mean.
- rybosworld 2y agoWFH would have worked before Covid as well. Covid just forced the hands of most companies. So no, there hasn't been some breakthrough that has made WFH possible within recent years. > we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now For a lot of people, yes. The reason why there is so much outrage around RTO mandates is because: 1) WFH offered a massive quality of life improvement 2) There is essentially no evidence that in office workers are more productive (or vice-versa) When executive teams, (many of whom work remotely themselves, as often as they'd like), try to reverse the quality of life advancement that WFH offers, without an evidence backed reason for doing so, workers get angry. It's the equivalent of a parent saying "because I said so". Except these aren't children that Jassy and others are speaking to.
- nextworddev 2y ago"Everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out" is the biggest myth. Practically the majority of middle management I knew at AMZN didn't do anything. Source: ex-AWS
- harshaw 2y agomaybe. In my case my big project was cancelled and my engineers borrowed to work on an away team. So yeah, not super productive after that. But other times it was very busy and rewarding.
- codingwagie 2y agoManagers at Amazon just enforce dates and identify the underperformer on their team.
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoThat... doesn't strike me as the the worst activities for management to work.
- artyom 2y agoThis is true. Not only management, but a bunch of the so-called SDEs that are only there to say "we're investigating" every time there's an issue while they all wait for the guy who knows the system to wake up in his timezone. There's people that's overworked and stressed out, tho, but those are the minority that do the actual work. I'd say it's an 1 out of 10 ratio at best, being conservative. This is all because every single project is scoped, designed and implemented with the only goal in mind: your own promotion. Same applies for hires, you don't hire roles, you hire _the structure you need to be promoted_. Source: same.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fortylove 2y agoI left Amazon a few years back because this ending was the inevitable outcome. Amazon had a chance to reinvent themselves as the scrappy startup that they claim to want, but instead they went full IBM.
- xyst 2y agoAmazon is just filled with B-grade, MBA losers now. Just like IBM. So, not surprised.
- zeptian 2y agoBeing ex-IBM, i can relate. Basically, the management class despises SDE worker class, and thinks of them as overhead. Recent statements by the aws head about chatGPT replacing SDEs is along the same lines. SDEs are tools that just do what mgmt tells them. mgmt holds the decision-making and all the cards. periodically there is a whipping (pipping) in the form of a layoff to keep the troops in fear.
- mattgreenrocks 2y agoI’m curious: what, in your experience, was the root cause of this contempt? Other skilled professions can make decent money as SDEs do. Is it a love/hate thing? Feeling like the tools could easily not need them if they had sufficient gumption and will?
- zeptian 2y agoyou touch on a raw nerve that could be the subject of a long post. in summary, the attitude of management in many large companies is that code is just work that needs to get done, and any engineer who can type on a keyboard can do it equally well (cue in ai-coder). so, the smarts is embedded in defining requirements and managing execution of said-code which resides in management. The problem with this is many-fold. 1) it encourages a culture of top-down decision making including technical decisions and the person making designs is not the one doing the work 2) as tech evolves, the org is unable to catch up since the decision makers are the elite few. in short, a manufacturing line mentality where the supervisor holds the cards and workers are tools.
- yodsanklai 2y agoWhat's the remote policy at other FAANGs?
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoI’ve seen all the sides of remote work now. The only people that are offended by Musk’s comment are the being he was talking about. “You can pretend to work somewhere else” Remote work is awesome for some people. But if you don’t admit that a great number of people are scamming it - then your opinion is just as invalid as their obviously defensive position.
- thrtythreeforty 2y agoNah. I wrote critical boot code for brand new silicon from home. Took my team from "behind" to "changing how people did chip bringup." Without ever seeing them in person for literal years. Can be done. And yeah, that comment rubs me the wrong way.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoYea, cool. You aren’t the point. If you can’t see and admit the massive abuse from most people - obviously except for you - then there is no discussion. Everyone is always so quick to say how great THEY are and can’t ever even sort of discuss the reality of abuse because that position threatens their goal. It is obtuse self-interest and disingenuous. Those comments rub me the wrong way.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago> It is obtuse self-interest and disingenuous. Those comments rub me the wrong way. That is pretty much all arguments for WFH. It's always "oooo I'm so much more productive" and occasionally "I can do errands and stuff now"... but never does it get more reflective than that. It might be great for the individual but for the team level and higher, it's probably not great at all. Plus... I personally know a non-trival number of people who made some seriously boneheaded short-term real estate purchases in the peak 2020 insanity assuming they'd be doing this WFH forever. The amount of privilege these people had doing that while so many non-tech people got screwed over by their governments... makes it very hard for me to really feel sorry for people having to go back into the office. It was always supposed to be temporary no matter what anybody told them.
- keeptrying 2y ago[flagged]
- ixfo 2y agoMy experience is that working in an office is _much_ worse for distraction. Even if you're lucky enough not to be in open plan, the shoulder taps and quick chats easily demolish any chance of focus for me. At home I can knuckle down for a few hours and deal with something complex easily.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y agoPersonally, I am somewhere in the middle. I use in office days to catch up on gossip I would not have gotten otherwise. The amount of work I actually manage to finish seems higher, but I wonder if it is simply because of how some of my work is structured. Honestly, I don't think I care that much. I am practically checked out now. I can't imagine I am the only one. I also can't imagine this change making a difference.
- delecti 2y agoYeah, 100% agreed with this. My team is currently 1 day/week (Thursdays) in-office, and for both better and worse, there are conversations that happen which wouldn't otherwise. A lot of great things come out of those conversations, but also I can reliably write off getting work done that day.
- jacinda 2y agoThat might also be because you're not in the office every day, people use those days to talk more (scarcity bias). I'm in-office 5 days per week and because we don't have this scarcity of time, there are lots of periods of quiet. When I wasn't in person all the time at this and other jobs it was exactly as you described. The biggest advantage of being primarily in person is actually that we have fewer meetings. I don't have to schedule 30 minutes on Zoom with someone and if I pop over for a question (when I see the person isn't in deep focus and can contextually grab them which is fantastic as well). If it takes 5 minutes to come to a decision, great - if we need to go over to the whiteboard and take 2 hours to flesh something out; also works.
- Animats 2y agoOnly 5 days? Why not 996 working?
- MisterBastahrd 2y agoAny company that tells me I have to be in office 5 days a week is a company I am never bringing home a laptop for. If the place burns down because it isn't adequately staffed outside of normal working hours, so be it.
- FrankoDelMar 2y agoSo long as they don't take my stapler.
- senderista 2y agoYou're definitely bringing your laptop home when you're oncall.
- MisterBastahrd 2y agoI'm never going to be on call. It is a condition of my employment. If you've let them abuse you like that, then it's on you. That isn't to say that if something needs to be overseen because a part of our infrastructure needs updating that I won't volunteer. But being mandated to babysit systems? No, absolutely not.
- tinyhouse 2y agoI worked at Amazon pre-covid and the funny thing is that even then Friday was WFH for at least 50% of the office.
- dividefuel 2y agoIt'll be interesting to see how soon the other big tech companies follow suit and do the same. Cynically, I wonder to what extent that forced RTO has been directly coordinated between these companies VS copycatting each other.
- Eumenes 2y agoDoes this include AWS employees? This could be a boon for GCP, Azure, and the other infra/cloud companies. Lots of great talent there. Amazon.com, eh, they'll find warm bodies to maintain the spring boot services and Jsps.
- kbos87 2y agoI've worked at two companies that are heavy on former Amazon leaders. As leaders do (and should!) they are often sharing stories of how they approached similar problems in their past roles. What I find to be interesting is how different people across time weave the same caveat into everything they say about their time at Amazon - some version of "...but keep in mind, that isn't the kind of culture we are trying to build here."
- kerkeslager 2y agoThere's a lot of back and forth about whether it's more efficient to work from home or from the office. There are arguments to either side. I'll say, when I'm working with a team, I'm far more effective working from the office, because communication is simpler. A lot of the ways in which people point out that in-person work is ineffective aren't actually problems with in-person work. For example, people complain about "attendance periods" where workers are expected to be present for 8 hours even if there's not 8 hours of work to be done, but this can easily be duplicated with remote work, where people are expected to be online for 8 hours. Micro-managing employers who prioritize control over productivity might have slightly fewer ways to micro-manage remotely, but remote work is really only a band-aid to that problem, not a solution. Ultimately, my conclusion from a few decades of working on teams is that given effective management, in-person is more effective. And here's the thing: I don't care. Working from home is worse for the team but it's better for the worker. Decade after decade workers have become more productive, and decade after decade workers are paid less and less of a percentage of the benefits of their labor[1]. The ability to work from home is one of the few concessions employers have (begrudgingly) made to workers in the last few decades, and it's nowhere near enough. Employers should be forced to give up productivity to improve workers' lives, and if they want the productivity (and/or control) of in-person work they should be made to pay more for it. I'm tired of seeing the whole conversation about this being about what is more productive. Workers aren't seeing any of the benefits of being more productive, so there's no reason for workers to care what's more productive. That's basic incentives: if you don't like that, you don't like capitalism. [1] https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-growing-employer-power-have-generated-a-productivity-pay-gap-since-1979-productivity-has-grown-3-5-times-as-much-as-pay-for-the-typical-worker/ https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...
- oblio 2y agoAwesome point!
- spacemadness 2y agoI feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode. Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so. Now that interest rates have wrecked the employment market they are wasting no time going scorched earth on their current remote employees. The narratives they keep shoving down peoples throats are insulting at best. They should just tell everyone they want to stand over people and feel powerful and get it over with.
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y agoImagine being a billionaire CEO and still having to bend over backwards to give “perks” to entitled engineers! Think of those years and years of suffering that must put a CEO through! To be at the top of the mountain - and still beholden to little people! That is the worst kind of injustice. And the joy - the relief! - of finally being able to treat the engineers with the same contempt you feel for your customers. It must feel GLORIOUS.
- WorkerBee28474 2y agoDo you think that Amazon treats its customers with contempt?
- CamperBob2 2y agoI mean, how else would you explain the product search UX on amazon.com?
- collingreen 2y agoAbsolutely! There are many stories of them shutting off services for and then directly competing with their customers in both the software and the retail space.
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y agoUsing legal loopholes to avoid accountability for selling people unsafe products from Chinese drop shippers is the height of contempt. https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/east/2019/06/04/528240.htm https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/east/2019/06/04/528240...
- r0m4n0 2y agoSuper commuters are going to start sweating. I work with people that commute from DC to NYC and a few times a week is doable. 5 times is impossible
- Exoristos 2y agoNot impossible. You just are home only on the weekends. Years ago, I used to commute from Pennsylvania to NYC by train. Spent the week nights in NYC.
- raverbashing 2y agoHonestly, this lifestyle is extremely stressing, and to go back to it just due to the whims of a higher-up seems very frustrating My polite way of saying "f.ck that sh.t". I wouldn't do it
- xinayder 2y agoMy company just pushed for a 3-day at the office week, now that Amazon is going back to full time at the office, I think it's only a matter of weeks before higher management decides that it's time to return to the office. We don't have enough space for everyone and a lot of the workers are located 1h away from their office. And yet, higher management is being so opaque about this mandated return to office scheme.
- 24currynigger 2y ago[flagged]
- anonreeeeplor 2y ago[dead]
- Blackthorn 2y agoYeah, this is exactly why I ignored every single recruiter email from Amazon during and after the pandemic years. I knew this was going to be the result no matter what promises they gave.
- technick 2y agoThis explains why the aws sales engineer assigned to my account updated his linkedin last week to looking for new opportunities. He lives a few hundred miles in the middle of no where.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoThe brain drain will continue until the stock price improves, I guess.
- blitzar 2y agoNice they let employees work from home 2 days a week.
- ahurmazda 2y agoHopefully it’s a win-win for most. If you are happy with RTO, rubbing-shoulders with peers, you should be happy. If you are a startup looking for bright engineers, quite a few will be in the job market shortly. Good way to distribute talent imo
- iLoveOncall 2y agoExcept for the 95% of employees who don't like to come to the office?
- dopylitty 2y agoI can’t tell if this applies to AWS as well but companies that have gone on all in on cloud hosted infrastructure should probably come up with an exit strategy pretty quickly given Amazon’s general flailing. You really don’t want your important systems being underpinned services run either by disgruntled employees about to quit or by the bottom of the barrel types who have no choice but to stay even when treated like this.
- anothernewdude 2y agoI hear a bunch of companies are thinking of moving everything back to the office.
- trallnag 2y agoEverything? Employees and the servers?
- anothernewdude 2y agoI guess I'll follow suit and go back to on-premises.
- ivraatiems 2y agoA note for engineers looking for jobs, based on this and about a thousand similar posts: If you joined a "remote" company that went remote during the pandemic, no, you didn't. Look for companies that went full-remote before 2020, or after ~2022. Otherwise, it can't be trusted.
- ryukoposting 2y agoCompanies that went full-remote around 2020-2021 are more likely to try to drag people back into the office, but I wouldn't suggest that you don't interview with those companies. The best thing you can do is get to the finish line, get the offer sheet, and demand that your position as a full-time remote worker be written into your agreement with the company. FWIW I know someone who did exactly this with a defense prime, and the crazy fella actually won the battle with HR when they tried to bring everyone back into the office. Worst case scenario, they say "no," you decline the offer, and you've sent a clear message to management. It might feel like a few hours of wasted time, but we as industry practitioners have the power to make this a normal interaction between a prospective hire and a stubborn corporation.
- gsk22 2y agoThis might work, but it also guarantees you will be first on the chopping block when layoffs come around. I have seen this happen first-hand multiple times: any employee with a special arrangement that doesn't meet what the executive team desires will be let go at the first chance, even if they are a huge asset to the company. Not to say you shouldn't try that approach. Just that you'll have less job stability.
- el_cujo 2y agoAgree 100%, even if you can manage an exception it does not look good to be the odd man out. It's easy to imagine people like this being the initial "easy choices" when layoff discussions happen. Not saying people should just roll over, but if you can manage an exception and see work from home as a requirement, I'd view that as your opportunity to maintain employment while looking for a company that takes remote work seriously
- nvarsj 2y agoI was in the "office is a good thing" camp for a while, but having been forced now to do 3 days, then forced to move to an office an extra 20 minute commute away, I've changed my feelings on the matter. Spending 2-2.5 hrs in commute a day is a terrible experience when trying to balance a high pressure job with the rest of life. I really miss hybrid with 1-2 days in the office. That was the best compromise all around.
- kccqzy 2y agoCommute really is key. When I used to have a 15-minute bike commute, I voluntarily went to the office five days a week. The 30 minutes spent each day is just good exercise. Now I take the train that's 30 minutes long each way. I don't get the benefit of exercise, the time spent is doubled, and now I'm only going to the office three days a week.
- justanorherhack 2y agoAt least you can be productive ish on the train, sitting in the car for a daily dose of near death experience is even worse.
- dbetteridge 2y agoNot sure which trains you're taking but any I've been on during peak times are standing room crush, no space for laptops or working
- schmorptron 2y agoUnionize!
- kazinator 2y agoSo, those employees who feel like working six days or more per week are free to make those days remote? How nice! If you work -1 remote days, and 5 in-office days, you can achieve the four day work week!
- karaterobot 2y ago> “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy wrote. “That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration (you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems), and a shared commitment to each other.” When I hear a C-level saying they want to operate like a startup, the text processor in my head just replaces that with "we've decided to cut a lot of you, and work the rest like dogs". My condolences to everyone at Amazon whose lives are being turned upside down by this stupid decision, although I guess you knew the company you were working for. Come to think of it, most of the startups I've worked for were WFH. None of them had assigned desks.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xyst 2y agoWhat sucks is that other companies will follow Amazon because “Amazon did it”. Other company I worked at went to a “hybrid model” to be followed at the end of last year. Ended up “silent quitting” by using up all of my PTO and sick time which allowed enough time to get my bonus and find a new job. Of course I was put on a PIP but by that time I was already gone, lol.
- guywithahat 2y agoSilent quitting is a great way to permanently ruin your reputation. Even if you never get a job there again, you could never ask your coworkers or management for a job. Silent quitting is indistinguishable from being a bad employee. From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results. If companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality up while not paying rent I’m sure they would, it’s just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet. Edit: My experience with WFH has to do with software development. It may work for other fields, however WFH often attracts the wrong kind of employee which is why I don't do it anymore. If you can't be bothered to drive 10 minutes into work you probably aren't that motivated and you probably won't stay that long.
- raverbashing 2y ago> From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. Your inability to WFH is not shared by most people. Sounds like you were the one quiet quitting by default (even if not realizing it).
- xyst 2y agoI don’t care about references from that dog shit place filled with micromanagers and corporate grinders working on projects that have no meaning and add zero value to company and the world. Hence, silent quitting. RTO just gave me the push to move on from the bullshit. > From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work Corporate profits tell another story > People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results Anecdotal. What backs up this claim? Just your personal experience? What’s your data? > companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality up while not paying rent I’m sure they would, it’s just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet What do you think happened during COVID-19… Have seen many companies reduce their corporate building costs due to shift to remote work. In some cases, it was eliminated entirely the following year.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lopkeny12ko 2y agoBefore the pandemic, everyone was working in-office 5 days a week. The pandemic is now over. Why is it so controversial to return to what everyone was already doing previously? Kudos to Jassy for being a leader in this space.
- ryukoposting 2y agoBecause working in an office at most tech companies sucks, and now that it isn't the norm, there's no good reason to accept that it should be. If you work in-office for an American tech prime, there's a good chance your office is in one of the following cities: SF, LA, Seattle, NYC, Chicago, Houston, DC. Commuting in all of these cities is absolutely miserable. It benefits neither you nor your employer to spend multiple hours per day not working, not tending to personal matters, but simply getting to and from a job you could just as easily do at home. If you're a parent, working from home makes it easier to be present as a parent. Commuting can be exhausting, and the energy saved by working from home can be put towards your kids. It makes the logistics of everyday tasks easier. Because I no longer piss away 20 hours a week on the L going into downtown Chicago, I now have 20 more hours per week to work out, do the laundry, buy groceries, and cook healthy meals. This is a flat-out benefit of remote work that simply cannot be offered by any employer that demands in-office work. Paychecks can't buy time. Tech companies are also are prone to the most backwards forms of "modern office design," which universally result in a distracting and uncomfortable work environment. There's also research to suggest that they result in higher rates of illness among workers [1]. So, even if your commute doesn't suck, there's a good chance your office does suck. None of this is to say that you shouldn't be allowed to work in an office if you want to. I sure as hell don't. I'm happier, healthier, and more productive than I ever was in an office environment. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10269830/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10269830/
- adamredwoods 2y agoBecause as humans progress, so must our working conditions. The onus of working in the office is ALL on the employee: - getting to the office (commute time is never paid time) - figuring out a mode of travel (parking, gas are rarely paid, transit sometimes) - child / senior care (major cost for parents) - biology issues (quality of bathrooms, quality of kitchen, bringing items to/from work, flatulence, illnesses)
- npalli 2y agoThe actual announcement https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy-latest-update-on-amazon-return-to-office-manager-team-ratio https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy... An equally important update was reducing number of managers which nobody seems to care about :-) So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.
- Olreich 2y agoStrategic of them to include the 5-day a week to hide the 15% managerial layoffs. 1 in 8 managers need to be converted into ICs. The average manager has around 8 ICs with the "two-pizza team" ideal, so that means 2% overall layoffs. Not huge, but managers generally cost more than ICs, so there's likely outsized salary impact. Organizational changes will surely reduce productivity as everyone gets shuffled too.
- moomoo11 2y agoI honestly wonder how useful most managers are.. Just anecdotal ofc but over my career having worked for 14 managers. Half of them were eventually fired. Most of them sucked at rallying teams, mainly because who the f is going to follow a doofus cringe lord? 2 managers stand out to me in my career. I’m really good friends with one of them that I’ve been in contact with for over a decade now. Most were basically checkbox checkers who sucked at engineering and faked their way into “people management” only to be found out that they just plain suck as employees. I actually checked LinkedIn just now of a few of those bad ones and they work at small companies and have made no upward progress. Not surprised honestly. Keep in mind I worked at a pretty good place, not a noob tier place.
- rsynnott 2y agoI mean, how long does the average manager stay at Amazon? If the average tenure is four years, say, then more or less all they have to do to achieve the above is to stop hiring managers for the next two quarters.
- unicornhose 2y agoThankfully they can still work from home the other two days.
- cactusplant7374 2y agoThat made me laugh. Thanks.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lijok 2y ago> “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy wrote. Who’s “we”?
- sankyo 2y agoIt is great when claim everything works better when we are all in the same office together and then expect you to get online in the off hours because of an outage, or work with teams from other offices 3 timezones away on a project, or work with offshore to save money.
- snakeyjake 2y ago[flagged]
- ljm 2y agoTo be fair, I wouldn’t want to go to the office to work with you either
- snakeyjake 2y agoProbably for the same reason the janitors and warehouse guys talk to me every time we pass each other, but not the software guys.
- ezekiel68 2y agoYeah, honestly this looks like a poorly-disguised mass layoff.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoAs a former senior person at aws although I left on good terms I will never return there and this stuff cements the deal for me. I need a company that respects my decisions on how I do best in my career and not surveil of police my work style. As long as I am a trusted leader who delivers results that customers need why does anyone care where my bag of water is physically located? Who are you to tell neurodivergent employees to suffer? People who had an organ transplant to expose themselves to death? How petty are the tyrants.
- hintymad 2y ago> How petty are the tyrants. I would consider the relationship between a company and its employees as alliance. If both have the same goal and compatible style, then they work together. Otherwise, they part ways. Tyranny is possible only with violence, while employment is at will, at least in Amazon.
- benoau 2y agoTyranny is pissing in a bottle lest ye be fired for malfeasance. Now the rest of the workers can experience it!
- kriops 2y agoTyranny can only be enacted through force. Your example (while definitely unpleasant) is not an example of force. Find another word.
- monadINtop 2y agoIf I dont go to work I starve. If I organise with my colleagues for a more favourable contract I will be removed by security guards. If we protest this we will be arrested by police. Are you able to only recognise force the moment blood is being spilled?
- kriops 2y ago
- op00to 2y agoI am not looking forward to the influx of ex-Amazon folks in the industry at large. The ones I have worked with have been difficult to work with, having no interest in opinions outside of their own.
- dudul 2y agoI never hire any former Amazon or Facebook. I've worked with some when I was an IC, I even hired a few before I knew better. Never had a positive experience.
- op00to 2y agoEx googlers seemed much easier to work with. But Amazon - yeesh.
- monkaiju 2y agoI had exactly this experience at a previous job. I hadn't seen anyone with such confidence. Even worse he was a self-described 'devops' guy that would tell you he wasn't a 'good coder' but would then strong arm the entire dev team on architecture decisions. I think about it regularly and while I've seen a lot of overconfident phonies, none of them stuck out quite as much as he did...
- mmrryy 2y agodiscussion in Blind: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Amazon-5-days-RTO-yQTXm6YQ https://www.teamblind.com/post/Amazon-5-days-RTO-yQTXm6YQ
- gravitronic 2y agoAt least they can work from home the other two days!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ycic 2y agoIf you can't be at your desk on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Monday. Coming soon from Amazon.
- alistairSH 2y agoAre Amazon teams co-located? My team is global. My customers are global. When I go to the office, I still spend >5 hours/day on Zoom. The only reason I go in is to get out of the house.
- giantg2 2y agoOnly a matter of time before my company pushes 5 day RTO. Now is the time to do it while the market sucks.
- ryukoposting 2y agoAs a firmware engineer, my job demands more "in-office-y" stuff than most other engineers on HN. I have specialized equipment. Hardware. I need to interface with manufacturing. So on. Guess what? I'm going on 1 year fully remote, and I'm doing great! Turns out, all that fancy equipment can be brought home with you. We deal with a contract manufacturer, and emailing them from home is no harder than emailing them from the office. Instead of being stuck in a concrete jungle, I can go test the product out in a more realistic environment in the park across from my home. It's made me happier, healthier AND more productive. Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Who'da thunk it?
- varispeed 2y agoMy friend's job pays him enough he could lease his own office near where he lives. He has all the "toys" he needs, space for his own research and he doesn't have to waste time to commute. My view is that offices were a thing because there was no technology to do otherwise and back then equipment was too large / expensive to be kept at employee's place. Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money. Often the owners also have shares in the business and influence this return to office aka sustain my property portfolio nonsense
- deepspace 2y ago> Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money. Bingo! Many companies are invested in real estate, and having the ticking time bomb of empty offices vs unsustainable office rent finally implode would be bad financially. Hence, the push everywhere to return to the office. The benefits of being in a physical office disappeared 20 years ago. COVID accelerated the formation of globally distributed teams. To now go back to commuting 2-3 hours a day, just to do your Zoom calls from and office desk, is insanity.
- tbrownaw 2y ago> Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money. My boss goes in to the office even on non-office days. If I still lived in an apartment - ie, no separate room at the house to use as an office - I'd probably go in most days as well.
- killingtime74 2y agoSoon it will be 6 days a week
- drawkbox 2y agoLooks like they have until January to change to fully on-site. That isn't much time to make life changes that allow using 2+ hours extra per day that was typically remote. > The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy. So on top of all the hustle of end of year, everyone will need to frantically prepare for return to office one day into the new year. Just seems a bit heartless. Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes. I just don't understand the need to force RTO so drastically.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoSome companies used this to reduce their headcount without having to fire people. Maybe Amazon is doing the same thing.
- jtriangle 2y agoIt's a great way to create layoffs without having to spook investors by laying people off.
- squigglydonut 2y agoThis is what I believe as well. It's an assuming narrative that allows them to say that it wasn't them it was the employee choice.
- FuckButtons 2y ago“Just seems a bit heartless” which, from everything I’ve read about Amazon as an employer, sounds completely on brand.
- akira2501 2y ago> Just seems a bit heartless. The writing has been on the wall for a while. Aside from that, Amazon decided to convert their workforce to work from home rather quickly, and shelled out the money and the effort in order to actually achieve that. > Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes. If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.
- 39896880 2y ago> If you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely. This was understood, and will be moving forward as well. This is Amazon having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can work remotely 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background. I found this paragraph to be somewhat galling since, like, if you're sick you shouldn't work at all, you should be focussing on getting well. Ditto if your kid is sick. Raising one or more whole other human/s is a super important thing. One result I saw from the pandemic is fathers doing more of the childcare, and what full-RTO like this fundamentally does is shift that dynamic back to where it was before. Shame on Amazon.
- thepasswordis 2y agoStrategic ambiguity.
- malfist 2y agoAmazon _always_ engages in "house always wins" games with ambiguity. They want it both ways
- awsguy123 2y agoI would not listen to their PR there is no reasonableness being applied to these rules. I hurt my knees back in May and tried to get HR to make an exception for me. They shot it down because they said I didn’t have enough documentation. They wanted more paperwork, which meant I had to make another doctor’s appointment. Getting a doctor’s appointment these days takes weeks, so I never managed to get the exception. How much leeway you get totally depends on your L8 Director. If you’ve got a strict L8, good luck—this policy isn’t going to be applied reasonably. They’re actually looking at badge reports that show how many hours you’re in the office, and managers will call you out if you’re just “coffee badging.” If you think this kind of thing doesn’t happen, just take a look at Blind. There’s no logic to how these rules are applied. Meanwhile, if you go to an L8/L10 meeting, try counting how many people are actually in the office. It’s a joke, especially when all the <L7 exceptions have been pulled.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoSome companies have used this "technique" to reduce their headcount without having to fire people. Maybe Amazon is doing the same thing.
- dboreham 2y agoWell I'm sure Bezos will appreciate that this is a nice A/B test: will Amazon end up losing business to remote friendly competitors. My guess is: eventually yes. Considering selling some of my AMZN now.
- jgalt212 2y agoTons ICs on here saying how great and productive remote is for them. But, we rarely here the same from managers. Of course, there are more ICs than managers, but the skeptic and manager in me is suspicious of remote work (in the general case).
- simoncion 2y ago> But, we rarely here the same from managers. a) My manager has zero problems with remote working and has found the team to be just as productive. AFAIK, my manager also doesn't waste time posting on HN. b) Are you SURE we're rarely hearing from managers? It's often that people don't bother to mention whether or not they're a people manager... because why the hell would you? c) In ANY sufficiently large software business, you WILL have some-to-many geographically distributed teams. If your geographically distributed teams work fine with their asses in company-provided seats, then they can nearly always work fine in with their asses in worker-provided seats.
- sub7 2y agoRemote work leads to less productivity, this isn't really doubted by anyone not working remotely. At-will employment means either party is free to walk away for reasons like this and that's exactly how it should be. Surprised it's taken companies this long - I guess it's much harder to rollback than implement this so there will be a set of companies which just suffer on growth/performance and that'll be justification enough for the next cohort to go back to allowing remote work in edge cases only.
- aussieguy1234 2y agoIf you're good enough to work for Amazon, you're probably also good enough to start your own startup or get equally paying work elsewhere, even in the current market. I read the internal memo shown in the article and I really dislike how casually he tries to put a positive spin on forcing everyone back into the office with zero mention of the consequences on the employees and no hard evidence on any productivity benefit. Studies show that out of full time in office, hybrid and remote, in office is the least productive. I expect to see an exodus of top talent from Amazon and possibly a reduction in the quality of their services.
- downrightmike 2y agoThere's only hard evidence that WFH is more productive. They would be plastering the productivity of in office work if there was any.
- iamnotsure 2y agodemand the impossible
- ShufflerL 2y agoHmm I am not sure what exactly is Amazon trying to solve for? I reckon only the managers know.. Moving to office-first does not solve the root cause - because it might be some other deep seated issues. If it's really about boosting collaboration and communications in a remote working culture, that requires fostering by the Management especially the company does not start with remote first culture from the get-go.
- adamredwoods 2y ago>> Amazon said each team will review their structure as part of the process, and that it’s possible they’ll identify roles that are no longer required.
- FpUser 2y agoAll it really takes is one coordinated action. They can just tell those execs to go and fuck themselves. If done by everyone then Amazon would have no options but to oblige. Unfortunately people are rarely capable of thi.
- hud_dev 2y agoWhen you’re too cheap to pay severance and too chickenshit to have layoffs
- nfRfqX5n 2y agoL6’s got no raises and now this. Gonna see a lot of good people leave I think
- smcleod 2y agoI don't know how true it is I've heard that the ratio of managers to engineers has been increasing over the last few years, if that's true this policy lines up with what we've seen from management-heavy / inverted triangle org cultures
- jarpschope 2y ago> Inverted triangle That can't be the case my man. Even if there was a manager for every two employees below, the number of all managers at all levels would at most be equal to the number of employees at the lowest level given that: x (lowest level) = x/2 (first) + x/4 (second) + x/8 (third) + ... In reality, there are way more employees per manager and the levels of management is not infinite, so the ratio of managers to employees is way less than 1.
- neycoda 2y agoFuck this. What good is an office if it's just to babysit adults like they're in a daycare center?
- wannacboatmovie 2y agoUnsurprisingly, this is one of the most divisive threads I've seen on HN in a long time. Angry people left and right (working on their couch in their underwear no doubt) pettily downvoting every post they disagree with. Chill out, everyone.
- EricDeb 2y agoI'd rather see more forced RTO than more off/near-shoring at this point as sad as that is to say.
- pm90 2y agoThe original sin of Amazon has always been how it treats its warehouse staff. There is just no way you can isolate that to one part of your org. Eventually some sociopath will see what they can get away with and decide to apply the same principles to everyone.
- jnaina 2y agothis seems like a calculated move to thin the crowd knowing how unpopular this full RTO is going to be, after the massive over hiring during Covid.
- ayakang31415 2y agoIs this move possibly motivated by what Elon did at Twitter?
- razzleddazzle 2y agoThey will make everyone sit and watch “Rings of Power.”
- razzleddazzle 2y agoThey will make them sit and watch “Rings of Power.”
- 23B1 2y agoPairing this move with the belt-tightening is mutually-supporting fires.
- neycoda 2y agoIf they're gonna require us to go back to the office, it better come with an office bonus.
- OfficeChad 2y ago[dead]
- vouaobrasil 2y agoI used to work for a company that had a lot of rules about working from home/working in office and I hate being controlled. I just came here to say that quitting back in 2023 was the best decision I ever made.
- redmajor12 2y agoHow does Amazon's RTO policy correspond to their mostly Asian-Subcontinent H1B workforce? Is this a strategy to get rid of those few American citizens that are still there and replace them with indentured serfs who won't argue with management?
- aceshades 2y agodoes anyone have any advice for finding remote roles?
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- casenmgreen 2y agoWithin a company, employees (managers or otherwise) attend to, and take care of, their own interests. As such, within a company, employees are attentive to, and take care of, the interests and needs of those who control their job security. So for example, HR cares about management, not employees. In this case, with RTO, we see that managers run a company, and they attend to their own needs; and their need is to be able to control and monitor their staff, because managers are held responsible for outcomes. This is inherent in a hierarchical arrangement of power. Managers then fundamentally attend to their own interest, which means having employees at home. The face this is not necessary, and is absolutely non-optimal is every way except for maximizing managerial control and monitoring, is irrelevant, as managers here are attending to their own interests. This is exactly the problem the Soviet centralized economies faced, when they were trying to improve economic efficiency. Managers were responsible for meeting plan targets, but to be more efficient the system as a whole needed decentralization, but managers had every incentive under the sun to maintain maximum control (useless and efficiency destroying as it was), and so decentralization never occurred.
- alistairSH 2y agoAre "managers" really driving the RTO mandates? Or do you really mean "executives"? Because none of the line managers or directors I work with care about RTO - they're mostly ambivalent about it (and about 50% remote or hybrid themselves). The only push for RTO here is from the very top down (ie the PE group, BoD, and C-levels).
- technick 2y agoGo add up all the time you've wasted, sitting in traffic or getting ready to go into the office, it'll sober you up quickly. "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time." - Tyler Durden
- ta988 2y agoAmazon found the best way to reduce their workforce. Make them switch from a perfectly fine work environment to a horrible one and wait for them to leave. You don't even have to make them come, threaten to do it. Just come work in small companies that respect their employees. Good talents are hard to find.
- squigglydonut 2y agoThey should also remove all desks and force people to sit directly on the floor. Forget open office plan. The new trend is Minimal Office.
- softwaredoug 2y agoUnfortunately for them it means losing highly sought after senior employees with the option to leave, and keeping those without that option. I can never actually find this study, but it's similar to a study showing companies that moved their headquarters to Connecticut instead of staying in downtown NYC actually perform worse as they lose employees that have an option to stay in NYC and not uproot their lives. The mediocre ones that cannot find another job end up moving.
- artyom 2y agoThis. It's just layoffs without saying it's layoffs. And the market answers. They've been doing it for quite some time and their stock is in an all time high.
- SavageBeast 2y agoAm I the only one who scrolled down and read the full memo? Thats the biggest load of shit Ive ever read - like maybe seriously it is. Thats epic bullshit. I don't even think Zuckerberg could top that with his brand of AW SHUCKS WE CAN DO BETTER GUYS! "I continue to believe that we are all here because we want to make a difference in customers’ lives, invent on their behalf, and move quickly to solve their problems." "We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way" "To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID." - The stock price is UP $100/share since March '19 If you didn't read the whole thing take a minute and revisit the article. NO MATTER WHAT DO NOT THROW YOUR LAPTOP OR PHONE! Now, we get to see if 5/15/40/40 is the handcuffs its intended to be.
- lnxg33k1 2y agoAre we near shareholders dividends or CEO bonus and we need people to quit without paying severance? My last company did the same announcement, I acted like I didn't receive anything, instead of quitting, eventually after 8 months of "Oh didn't get it", they terminated me with severance
- zer0zzz 2y agoWell, Amazon’s definitely not going to be poaching talent from the other faangs now (I think).
- wordofx 2y agoI always find it amusing, reading comments from all these people who claim to be more productive working from home, or think that it works better. It proves they work in silos and contribute little. But HN is like “no WFH good, WFO bad, me downvote you cos I fink I know wat I talk bout”
- itake 2y agoWhat do you think about these remote CEOs/executives (like the new CEO of Starbucks or Elon)? Do they contribute little too?
- wordofx 2y agolol you think Elon sits there writing shit at a desk? He delegates. Runs multiple businesses and floats about unblocking people and making sure progress is made. Engineers don’t work like that.
- itake 2y agoThis argument doesn't make sense. 1/ you're saying people managers should be allowed to work from home then? 2/ Why does delegation not require RTO but writing shit at a desk does?
- wordofx 2y agoYou probably don’t need most of those managers. And you missed the point of Elon being on site.
- itake 2y agoim still not understanding your point. When did you say elon is on site? how can he be onsite 5 days per week when he is CEO of Tesla, xAI, SpaceX (and up until recently, X).
- 2y ago
- lynx23 2y agoWow, look at the number of comments. Lots of entitlement around here. We have a saying around here, "give them a finger, and they will demand your whole hand." Fascinating how a single precedence case can raise expectations through the roof. The office will not go away, no matter how much the priviledge people rant.
- JSDevOps 2y agoIf they are that serious they should turn off the vpn. If they don’t this is just talking heads.
- horns4lyfe 2y agoBut then the execs won’t be able to work from home
- ConcernedCoder 2y agothis is why we need a union
- matthewsinclair 2y agoI find the “remote vs onsite” debate to be a little bit misguided. I try to reframe it as a balancing act between “broad work” and “deep work”. The difference being that broad work is the kind of thing that needs collaboration and interaction and deep work needs focus and singular attention. As an engineering leader, I have had some success and traction with non-engineers by re-framing the debate in this way. I wrote these ideas up as a blog post earlier this year: Broad work vs deep work https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0165-broad-work-vs-deep-work https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0165-broad-work-vs-deep-wor...
- Terr_ 2y agoNow that we're in the spiffy sci-fi year 2024 with video calls for all, I find that 90% of the "collaboration" work benefit is achievable remotely. (Like a co-debugging session.) Less task-oriented stuff--general office chatting--doesn't work quite the same though.
- matthewsinclair 2y agoI think the main thing you miss with 100% remote working is what I call "corridor creativity" [0]. As good as working from home is (or can be), I do miss the serendipity of walking past someone in a corridor, having a quick chat, drawing something on a whiteboard, and then continuing on about my day. In a fully remote world, I need to organise a meeting (over Zoom) for just about every interaction, which ends up being quite a chore and far less than serendipitous. [0]: Corridor Creativity: https://matthewsinclair.medium.com/0124-corridor-creativity-ec1c8cfed29d https://matthewsinclair.medium.com/0124-corridor-creativity-...
- squigglydonut 2y agoIt's possible to have this remote. The communication style of gen z and younger is entirely remote and also for younger millennials. But in a remote setting there has to be complete trust "in the chat". Just like in office you have to be open to allowing communication and ideas to be voiced. You also have to allow for impromptu video calls which can be disruptive but it's the same at a desk in office. I remember having to put up signs "do not disturb" that people promptly ignored. It's the same but different. My opinion is that what is happening now is just an uncomfortable generational shift. There is a very wide age range in the tech workforce because it's not limited by physical ability.
- aaravom 2y agoTechieTom: “I get that Amazon wants to boost collaboration and productivity, but isn’t the flexibility of remote work one of the biggest perks these days? I’m curious how this will affect employee morale.”
- blurbleblurble 2y agoTranslation: Amazon doesn't need so many engineers anymore.
- firefoxd 2y agoWhere I used to work, their theat was less subtle: https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxqnx/dont-mess-with-us-webmd-parent-company-demands-return-to-office-in-bizarre-video https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxqnx/dont-mess-with-us-web...
- rnts08 2y agoA lot of companies are speed running "How to lose your best engineers any%" lately. Yes, there are times for face to face but forcing people back to the office just to justify their space cost and middle managers meddling is a path to failure.
- slowhadoken 2y agoThe four day business day is still best. In office or not.
- aszantu 2y agoSo ppl have to bring their consoles and fridges to the office now
- Kon5ole 2y agoCommuting is probably pointless for a large number of individual office workers as well as their employers, but the busywork of commuting generates so much economic activity and value to society that it can't be killed overnight. Having people move between home and work drives value in car sales, public transport, real estate valuations, construction, lunch restaurants, public infrastructure projects and countless other things that generates value. The collected services catering to commuters is larger than any single company, and society can probably not handle a decision (most office workers can work from home) that effectively bankrupts it. It needs to slowly be replaced with something else.
- iLoveOncall 2y ago> the busywork of commuting generates so much economic activity and value to society that it can't be killed overnight Except when it was for 2 years and the economy boomed, you know?
- Kon5ole 2y ago>Except when it was for 2 years and the economy boomed, you know? It wasn't a boom, it was a bust. During the pandemic most governments paid through the nose to keep the economy going. The US even paid every American hundreds of dollars directly. Other countries subsidized everything from restaurants to car manufacturers. Now that this money has to be recovered, inflation has eliminated a decade of salary increases for most workers and governments are borrowing left and right. We can't do many more years like that. I'm not saying it's right that we force people to commute when they don't have to, but removing this part of the economy is a real problem that has to be handled. It's like when a coal mine closes, just saying "the coal mine is no longer needed" is no comfort to the unemployed coal workers and the nearby town.
- phendrenad2 2y agoCompanies are their people. What else does AWS have? Patents? Worthless. Name brand? Ephemeral. Server farms? Cost centers. We could all switch to Linode tomorrow and forget AWS existed the day after.
- oblio 2y agoAWS is orders of magnitude bigger than Linode in both depth and breadth and despite all the memes, there's a reason it makes so much money and that reason isn't purely "executive stupidity". Does Linode even offer something like SNS or SQS?
- phendrenad2 2y agoSerious answer: Most people have moved to K8s so most of AWS is a few lines of code away.
- oblio 2y agoHow do they store data? How do they handle queuing systems? Etc, etc.
- phendrenad2 2y agoYou can do all of that
- oblio 2y agoYou can do everything yourself but then your entire comment is beside the point.
- phendrenad2 2y agosigh I'm saying if AWS loses enough good people, their moat won't save them. It's a bit of an obvious statement, I do admit.
- xchip 2y agoAmazon tells employees to stay suck in traffic 5 days a week.
- andyish 2y agoI bet they're happy to have out-of-hours support done from home.
- jamalaramala 2y agoAnother point to consider: the environmental impact of having hundreds of thousands of people commuting to work every day. Transport is the second most important source of greenhouse gas emissions, after electricity and heat. I'm not sure if large office spaces are more energy efficient than home offices.
- isoprophlex 2y agoAny improvement in heating/cooling efficiency will be greatly nullified by the environmental effects of commuting
- mattmaroon 2y agoAnd the fact that their homes are still being heated and cooled while they’re in the office too
- squigglydonut 2y agoYea it would be more efficient to have "living pods" essentially little chambers where the employee can sleep in after a long 16 hour day a work. The personal home emits too much energy and waste. It would be better for the employee to just go into the pod, plug in their nutritional tube, and watch netflix for a few hours before falling into an induced asleep at the mandated time as set by their work schedule.
- consteval 2y agoPerson one: hey driving is bad for the environment, why don't we drive less? Besides, wouldn't everyone enjoy that? Person two: this is slavery and you're a commie. I want muh freedom to be forced to drive 2 hours a day! Are you seeing how this isn't a reasonable response? Like, at all?
- squigglydonut 2y agoThis does not make sense. Who are you talking to and what is your point?
- james_woods 2y agoCiting an article from MIT Sloan Management Review: "But there’s no clear evidence that these mandates improve financial performance. A recent study of S&P 500 companies that was conducted by University of Pittsburgh researchers found that executives are “using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.” Those policies result in “significant declines in employees’ job satisfaction but no significant changes in financial performance or firm values,” they concluded." (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/return-to-office-mandates-how-to-lose-your-best-performers/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/return-to-office-mandate...)
- Peroni 2y ago>When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant. >we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; They believe there are advantages to being fully in-office because they have observed these things. Zero mention of actual data to back up their beliefs and observations despite substantial industry data verifying that remote and hybrid work environments are more beneficial on almost every level.
- pm90 2y agoAt the very least I would have expected some kind of internal survey data. But they’ve offered 0. Just vibes.
- valbaca 2y ago“Data-driven culture” until a board full of Boomers just kind of feels differently
- stubybubs 2y agoThey were called out on this for not living up to their "data driven culture" when they went to 3 days back and the response was basically "Uh well... Eat shit I guess."
- wildrhythms 2y ago
- ycic 2y agoMaybe there's an upside to this. If you take Jassey's comments about collaboration at face value, it may mean corporate spivs have a harder time justifying outsourcing to remote teams in other continents.
- arendtio 2y ago> pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings This is not a structural problem but a cultural one. Sure, you can address it by changing the org structure, but 15% fewer pre-meetings to pre-meetings sounds like a drop in the ocean. In my experience, pre-meetings are a result of low-trust environments. I wonder where CEOs are getting the input to drive these decisions forward. Has there been significant research lately suggesting that working from the office is better, or do they just rely on their gut feeling that the office feels more productive when people are present?
- btbuildem 2y agoPressure from local govt to somehow salvage the "downtown tax base", pressure from boards of directors that are inbred with big investment funds holding most of that commercial real estate. The relatively small group of ultra-rich parasites is trying to claw back the inevitable change of decentralization. We would all be so much happier in a scheme where instead of one giant "center" our metro areas were "distributed" ie more commercial centers closer to more residential areas.
- monch1962 2y agoI work for a consulting company in Melbourne Australia. The Melbourne city council has started petitioning the government to force govt employees to return to the CBD for work. Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels, which means employees need to start coming into the CBD more often. Apparently this is getting serious consideration. It's not like we home-based workers stopped going out to buy lunch on workdays. We still go to the local shops most days for coffee and food; as those shops aren't paying CBD-type rents, their food and coffee is generally cheaper and/or better quality, the service is friendlier and the local school kids have a lot more job opportunities. The past 4 years has seen a real community feel spring up around where I live, whereas before it was just another dormitory suburb where nearly all the workers disappeared during the day. From my perspective, we moved from pre-COVID, in-office work arrangements to post-COVID, remote arrangements, and that genii is now out of the bottle. We've all conclusively proved we can be productive working from home, and any attempt to roll that back is going to hit resistance in one form or another. It's gonna take a recession where the supply of workers exceeds the demand for everyone to come back into the office each day, and even then I don't think it'll stick long term.
- goosedragons 2y agoHere in Canada the federal government has started forcing federal public servants back to the office. Everybody thinks it's just to prop up the capital city businesses and commercial landlords. Their union has actually called for them to buy local in their neighborhood rather than in downtown. Ottawa has a pretty terrible downtown with many businesses having awful hours like 8a.m-2p.m M-F because they got so used to relying just on civil servants.
- brandon272 2y agoThat same federal government, who wants to put tens of thousands of employees on the road in commutes to their offices, is simultaneously communicating to the public that carbon fuelled climate change is an existential threat and that carbon consumption is immoral and wrong, thus requiring end use carbon taxes, and even going so far as the current party's health minister saying that families taking summer road trips is sacrificing "the future of the planet". [1] [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/10542273/holland-road-trip-question-period/ https://globalnews.ca/news/10542273/holland-road-trip-questi...
- tr888 2y ago[dead]
- LightBug1 2y agoWell, he can shove that right up his Jassy.
- adornKey 2y agoWorking from home has advantages, but my boss also cancelled home-office. One big customer of us went for extensive home-office. And since then that company seems to be paralyzed. Workers there are openly doing personal stuff during video meetings. And it became impossible to get any decisions. A lot of people just don't have the discipline to work unsupervised.
- gttalbot 2y agoAnd this is how we operationalize age discrimination. Note the layoffs of middle management announced at the same time. Force everyone into the office, ideally through a difficult commute into an area that it's very expensive to have a family. People for whom this is really untenable will quit without severance. Some with difficult circumstances you can PIP out without severance. Then the rest you lay off. Congratulations now the severance bill you have to show to Wall St. is a lot smaller. Sociopaths.
- kreims 2y agoYou know, I’m actually pretty surprised that there’s not more lobbying for some kind of tax incentives to promote remote work. It takes a lot of burden off transportation networks. Honestly, it’s probably cheaper than building more roads and more rail. I suppose the best you can do is just use the commute cost in your calculations of what your compensation is worth. I made a lateral move to a company that offers hybrid work. The irony is the company I came from was all in office, but I worked exclusively with people outside of my office so I would drive to work just to interact with people on MSTeams.
- forinti 2y agoPublic transportation is also cheaper than building more and wider roads, but I'm not sure it's straightforward to sell this idea. In the Americas most people are still fixated on owning a car. In political debates in my city, public transportation is only ever talked about as a burden on the city's finances, never mind that car infrastructure costs many times more.
- 3minus1 2y agoThis reminds me of when cities in the Bay Area started considering restrictions on free meals at work, because local restaurants were annoyed it reduced their lunch crowd. I'm sure that same group has a vested interest in people commuting to jobs.
- dark-star 2y agoI really like to think that in a year or two, I can basically make a fortune by applying for jobs that require me to go to the office every day. I actually enjoy it. I have no proper office at home (nor room to build one). And it helps me separate work from "recreation" by having dedicated (disjoint) places for both. It seems that "being okay to commute to work daily" or even "enjoying work in an office" is a skill that is rapidly getting lost, like coding in Cobol. Cobol developers can basically set their own hourly rates and still get hired, so I hope that we few "like-to-go-to-the-office" people will be able to do the same soon.... So: who actually enjoys going to the office daily, like me?
- zulban 2y agoYou wouldn't enjoy it if your commute was 3 hours total a day, or nobody you work with is also in the office (all meetings are remote) or if the lunch options were bad and overpriced, or you rent a bad apartment from a negligent landlord because even a decade into your tech career you cannot own a home in your city (Canada). Your preference for in-office is not a skill, it's a privilege that you haven't experienced how stupid and horrible in-office can be.
- farceSpherule 2y agoThis is an attrition forcing tool. These CEO's who think they are business geniuses fail to grasp that they look like morons parroting this "RTO means productivity and collaboration" nonsense which has been disproven time and time again. They are doing this because they are just dumb people. They over hire and allow their organizations to become bloated because they know that when it's time to make their metrics look good, they just create such miserable work environments that they know they will lose some people. Next comes the layoffs. I mean, this is ape level intelligence here. No thought required.
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- commandlinefan 2y agoWell, that makes sense, since Amazon has been losing money and it's stock has been underperforming ever since they went fully remote - oh, wait.
- hn72774 2y agoThe only way out of this is probably unionization. Or a slow death from the inefficiency of idling or pushing out so many people who are job hunting while coasting. I never imagined Amazon could be a place to coast and collect a paycheck until they fire you. Bet there's a ton of 2-job 1-person incomes right now. The company culture is rotten and the leadership principles don't have any meaning.
- downrightmike 2y agoI'm really tired of seeing CEOs and the C-Suite all having three or more jobs. They really need to focus.
- GenerocUsername 2y agoEvery discussion about RTO is missing a big point, it's not being in an office that everyone hates, (even though it's generally worse than home), it's the commute to and existence of downtown cores. Companies, stop buying the most expensive real estate! Setup offices 2 towns outside a major city and encourage your employees to move to that town. The US with its top 15 cities are all infested shitty rat holes. Why do we continue to try to optimize existing cities, rebuilding over and over with insane expense rather than grow and invest in more, smaller cities.
- cooloo 2y agoThat was just question of time. Many managers like to keep stuff close, the reasoning not existence.
- Justsignedup 2y agoLayoffs incoming.
- shayankh 2y agoare there any Amazon folks out here looking to hire Applied scientists (ML, forecasting, recommender systems)?
- englishspot 2y agoI think it's really as simple as a big corpo just pushing their employees as far as they can, as always. we can debate on the benefits of WFH, but really in this market employees just don't have much leverage.
- gsck 2y agoI read five days a week and thought to myself, christ thats quite a lot. 70% of your week, then I remembered I do that. It is crazy to think you spend that much time in the office.
- bitcharmer 2y agoAt this point forced RTW is just a red flag and a clear giveaway about the company's execs and their culture. I think it's great they are doing this because we know who to avoid on the job market.
- jwmoz 2y agoMore importantly, is anyone here from Amazon quitting over this? What's your response?
- algebra-pretext 2y agoPurely observation from team members leaving and browsing the #remote-advocacy channel over the last two years, but the 3-day mandate and the relocations have already pushed most people who can (and want to) quit, to quit.
- j45 2y agoHaving worked remotely for many years more than most people than I meet by fair margin.. I love my home setup. It’s better than my office setup. But my office has faster fibre than I’ll ever get at home and I can get more done. It’s ok for both to be good for different things. Entirely remote or in person isn’t ideal. I maintain both a home and work. Just when I think I might not need one I get reminded. Too much of anything or one can limit or stall your growth and lead to all those feels of why do you feel you’re standing still when you’re sitting at home all the time, or just the same office. Companies have to be designed to be distributed, or suck at it. Distributed is a better word I find than remote (disconnected) or virtual (those contributions aren’t real) Having a mix of activity and locations to
- p3opl3 2y agoHow to induce mass layoffs without needing to offer severance packages.. without telling employees this is a massive layoff without severance packages being available.. Surprise surprise.. ... not really .. when it comes to Amazon.
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- vondur 2y agoThis is just a stealthy way to do some layoffs without having to do real layoffs.
- varelse 2y ago[dead]
- fsndz 2y agothey just want to layoff soon
- karaterobot 2y agoIt's like these LinkedIn awards for best company to work for mean nothing anymore!!! https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/linkedin-top-companies-2024 https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/linkedin-top-comp...
- TheMagicHorsey 2y agoThey can "tell" employees all they want, but the engineers who really get stuff done are not going to get fired for working from home, and a bunch of them are choosing to stay remote ... or paying lip service to office days by promising to come in and then not showing up. What are managers going to do with critical engineers who are delivering? Fire them? They will have another job doing their individual contributor work in a week. There's a real shortage of individual contributors with skills and the ability to deliver consistently. On the other hand, if you are in one of those political mid-career positions that mostly involves communication, coordination, impressions, etc., then yeah, the org doesn't need you as much as you need the org so you better haul your ass back to work.
- koinedad 2y agoAn experience I’m familiar with: 1. Hired fully remote to virtual location etc. 2. A few months after joining RTO (return to office) enforced even though I’m not technically returning 3. About a year later RTH (return to team hub) announced with about 1 month for internal transfer or move to Seattle with in a few months. 4. Roughly 2 months later 5 days a week announced.
- motbus3 2y agoCovid does not work as an excuse anymore. They need a different excuse to say it is not bad C level strategy or stupidly high bonus for someone who does nothing special
- adnjoo 2y agois there a spreadsheet somewhere that shows if a company is WFH or RTO or HYB? https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ar4qcghnGjlGwZAAXdu2Lvc6eTXnnN0mHKbSHg6Beew/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ar4qcghnGjlGwZAAXdu2...
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- anderson09lucas 2y ago[dead]