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For a company that is supposedly data driven like Amazon likes to tout, they have zero data that RTO would provide the benefits they claim[0]. They even admitte

• ChumpGPT 2y ago
  1000's of H1B's from India will work, sleep, and live at AMZN 24x7x365. Most folks are competing with this and it is happening across the industry. Junk away...
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    No need to be racist when you could have just said that it's a competitive hiring market.
    • ChumpGPT 2y ago
      Not at all, just stating the facts.
      • AbstractH24 2y ago
        How does return to office solve this? Particularly for anything not customer facing. We’ve proven that large amounts of work can be shifted to companies with lower COL, so why not do it? The question of if those workers work from their homes or offices is secondary at that point.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • wagiecoder 2y ago
    This is why they can force people back in
• changoplatanero 2y ago
  How would you even gather data to support this? You can't a/b test company culture.
  • no_wizard 2y ago
    Sure you can. Why can't you? Its lack of imagination and inability for upper management leadership to even consider that the way they "always done things" may no longer be the best way, and they need to evolve with the times. For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are. Thats off the top of my head. Never mind that there are actually more scientific approaches that can be used than what I've suggested, and there are researchers that are clamoring to do this as well.
    • changoplatanero 2y ago
      > For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are. I'm not sure I buy this. In my mind the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc. Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later.
      • no_wizard 2y ago
        Firstly, there are better more scientific ways than I what I proposed at thinking about it for maybe 30 seconds. Secondly, you're saying this >In my mind... There's still no objective metric being cited? >the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc. But we can prove these things can work well remotely. If they didn't, remote only companies would have such a higher bar to clear and that would be proven already. Gitlab did great in their IPO, and they're 100% remote. Zapier has grown strong and steady, 100% remote, Deel has grown quickly since 2019, also 100% remote etc. Clearly none of these businesses have issues collaborating. >Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later. So measure it as long as it takes. 1-2 years is a blip comparatively, and lots of companies already have internal data they could use to make this determination: look at employee performance and satisfaction rates before they worked from home and compare it to after they worked from home. Lots and lots of people worked at the same place before WFH became far more common, and after it became far more common. I imagine this is true at Amazon as anywhere else it would be. What I find entirely humorous about this is its executives that want hybrid / RTO by a large margin, and comparatively few employees want hybrid / RTO and prefer working from home. Do you think this would even be a conversation if it was the inverse?
• roughly 2y ago
  Open office floor plans are sufficient evidence that "data driven" is bullshit when it comes to management, corporate aesthetics, and cost saving. Obviously there's no data to back RTO.
• meta_x_ai 2y ago
  Unless you can spin an alternate universe, some complex-dynamic things like corporate culture can't be data driven. A classic example is this https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship... How will you design an experiment that would create a world where Jeff Dean WFH just solved the problem and 'completed his Task' and Google was just a search engine with a $10B market cap due to scaling issues or a huge operations cost. Today Google is $2.5T marketcap and you can bet a significant portion of it came from the work culture created in the office. No amount of Social Science can ever capture the tail events that has massive upside like tech companies. Even if 180,000 employees are unhappy, but the 20 who are happy create the next Amazon revolution can change the trajectory of Amazon that can't be measurable Edit : Butthurt HNers downvoting a perfectly logical argument. Then they expect leaders to listen to them
  • gagik_co 2y ago
    Online interactions aren’t any less complex, they’re just different. Newer generations are more online and less fan of an idea of an “office culture”. This all seems based on the idea that just because something happened before, the only way to reproduce it is to replicate its setup. Times have changed & people have changed since. Office work will continue to exist but some magical “work culture” isn’t just thanks to the office. And 20 people can change trajectory but they’re absolutely nothing without the 180k to stir the boat.
    • meta_x_ai 2y ago
      Do you have data to prove that? If not, then leaders have every right to go with their gut instincts. Give me an example of a company that is immensely successful (massive growth) like say OpenAI that are fully remote
      • ElevenLathe 2y ago
        You're arguing on capital's terms. The company isn't owed massive growth. They are allowed to have it if labor is willing to work under the conditions they provide and if the state continues to allow their incorporation and its related benefits (and they get lucky, presumably).
• tpurves 2y ago
  They'll have plenty of data to support the primary motivation: that enforcing arbitrary RTO policies will absolutely aid in generating staff turnover and voluntary attrition without having to payout severance costs. The policy gives them less direct control over who they lose, but I'm sure the data also points to any critical replacement employees being willing to work for less on average. That's the data they are looking at.
  • regularfry 2y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more straightforward than that. They've got some very expensive office space that's extremely under-utilised, and they're probably at risk of the rent getting raised on a lot of it unless they can increase footfall.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      If you have way-underutilized office space that you can sell or not renew leases on, you can shed it like a former employer was doing when I left. Otherwise, there's basically no value in how many or few people are filling the space unless they're actually delivering some business value to the entity paying for the lease. (Unless, maybe, it relates to promises made to some local jurisdiction that gave you tax breaks.)
      • regularfry 2y ago
        A lot might depend on how long a lease was signed, and what penalties there might be for breaking it.
        • ghaff 2y ago
          Sure. Breaking leases have costs. But the cases I have some direct experience with are generally simply not renewing them.
          • galleywest200 2y ago
• flappyeagle 2y ago
  There’s absolutely no way that Amazon employees are more efficient at home. Nothing about the company’s organizational structure or resources are set up to be optimized for this. It’s like asking someone to play tennis, but you gave them a baseball bat.
  • devjab 2y ago
    I worked in digitalisation for a Danish city during Covid. Since I was the HR “data guy” I worked on every sort of metrics for them and sometimes had to sit through meetings just in case someone needed a technical explanation. I think that happened twice, but it’s been some years since. Anyway, I got to see the data on employees working from home. The short story is that efficiency and productivity went up but “hours worked” went down. Well, “hours spent active at the computer” and by that I mean not just keeping teams greens but actually doing things, went down. Which was taken to mean work, even though it could’ve been people doing their social media, shopping or whatever. The key take away for most of the decision makers involved was that productivity increased. Then they do the law required AMR and psychological evaluations that we do here in Denmark. It’s basically a questionnaire where you rate your mental well being, how the physical environment is and so on. For office workers the physical part is mostly about the air quality, but in a municipality you have employees who are physically assaulted from time to time, so the results can be pretty wild. You might expect that some of the groups working with Alzheimer, or some of the more violently mentally ill, patients. Employees who work in the department which removes children from bad parents. Such groups. Would be absolute outliners in these sort of analytics, and they were. The one group who scored higher on unhappiness, stress and a few other parameters were middle managers. So during Covid it was apparently worse to be a middle manager than someone who gets physically assaulted. Anyway, the positive reports were sort of buried. Unless you’ve worked in public service you probably don’t know what that means, but it basically comes down to bureaucrats vs politicians. So you might have someone with a candidate (or several) degrees in public management and a couple of decades of experience advice a janitor who is popular enough to have been elected to office for whatever reason. Obviously the bureaucracy wins. So they all went back to the office to keep the middle managers happy. I certainly don’t know how it’s like at Amazon, but I hope you can use my anecdotal story to see that it’s not always about productivity. Especially because measuring productivity in hours spent in office doesn’t show the same output as it would for someone standing at an assembly line.
• stonethrowaway 2y ago
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• thegrim33 2y ago
  Amazon has existed for 30 years. For 26 of those years it was primarily an in office job, only temporarily shifting to WFH, where applicable, in response to a full blown global pandemic. Now that the global pandemic is sufficiently wrapped up, they're trying to go back to business as they're used to. You, a random internet person, are claiming you know what's better for their business than they do. You claim that the CEO and all the Presidents and VPs and everyone involved in the decision have no data backing them? They're all just making this decision with no logical basis or internal data? You really claim you know better than them what's good for their business? It's not their job to provide data to you, random internet person, about their internal functioning and what they think is best for their company. Linking to literally .032% of their workforce signing a letter saying that it just isn't fair to go back into the office, while once again not providing a single piece of data to bolster that opinion, is not evidence that your opinion is right. I can't read your second link because it's behind a paywall and thus not accessible to 99.9% of the people reading your comment. The fact that I'm already downvoted to negative karma really highlights the strength of the echo chamber involved.
  • anigbrowl 2y ago
    I can't read your second link because it's behind a paywall and thus not accessible to 99.9% of the people reading your comment. It opens just fine in an incognito window. Failing that, you could use an alternative browser that doesn't have any cookies set. Failing that, you could look it up on archive.org. This would have taken less time than fulminating at an internet stranger. This is Hacker News, after all.
    • ipaddr 2y ago
      Hackers are lazy at the core otherwise we wouldn't spend writing a program once so we never have to do it again. Someone could do all of those things you list or form an opinion based on the title. Which way do you think a hacker would take?
      • anigbrowl 2y ago
        It would be foolish to do all the things when one is sufficient. It's also foolish to rely on superficial things like titles (which are written by editors, not the writer).
• ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  It's simpler - how will you have an affair if the secretary is not in the office? Working remotely makes quality of life for upper management worse. They have to schedule meetings instead of randomly drop by. They lose socialisation. You have to remember that their career is their life and their achievement. Starting at the screen is not what they signed up for. If they get a better life but company loses 5% productivity, they will take that deal
• paulddraper 2y ago
  > about control and/or backdoor layoffs Sure. I don't think anyone would honestly (i.e. outside of PR) disagree.
• cj 2y ago
  I think it’s simpler than this. Managing people remotely is hard. Most managers still aren’t good at managing remote employees. When managers aren’t managing well, “productivity” goes down (however you measure it). So managers internally advocate for RTO because it’s easier to manage people when they’re in person. (Many people also miss the office, but that group tends to be way less vocal on HN) And since the company already has the office space, RTO is “free” to do. And if they’re already looking to cut head count, attrition as a result would be icing on the cake making the decision even more appealing to upper management. In other words, I think RTO would have still happened 4 years after Covid regardless of whether companies are trying to reduce staff or not. “They’re secretly using RTO to fire us” doesn’t make much sense - companies are very capable of doing layoffs. Hiding or disguising the layoff is more work than just flat out laying people off. If there’s a leaked memo, I wouldn’t be surprised if
  • hackable_sand 2y ago
    If you can't manage people remotely then you cannot manage people.
    • disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      Yeah but remote management is definitely way harder. That's not to say that management isn't hard anyway, but remote makes it even harder.
    • AbstractH24 2y ago
      Good managers are few and far between so we need to make the best of mediocre ones
      • hackable_sand 2y ago
        Fair enough
    • HDThoreaun 2y ago
      A good manager is hard to find
• tomcam 2y ago
  With respect, I'd like to suggest that they don't need to prove their preference to you. And I am genuinely trying to discuss a policy, not to be argumentative. I am also not assuming it's any better than remote. Maybe it is, I have no clue. If I ran a company, and I have, I would want the ability to require that people work at the office. (I didn't always require it; in fact, my last company was 100% remote for 21 years.) I wouldn't feel like I had to defend that policy to anyone. Put another way: why would Amazon need data for this? What's wrong with simply telling people they have to come in? If you don't want to come in, why not just find a remote job?
  • bestcoder69 2y ago
    permitted to force RTO without any data != ought to force RTO without any data
    • tomcam 2y ago
      Why though?
  • BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    They’re legally allowed to do this already. We’re questioning why they’re doing it because it could still be an action driven by bad motivations, which would inform us more as to the nature of amazon and its leadership.
  • antisthenes 2y ago
    > If I ran a company, and I have, I would want the ability to require that people work at the office. (I didn't always require it; in fact, my last company was 100% remote for 21 years.) I wouldn't feel like I had to defend that policy to anyone. This is tangential at best. It all depends on the original understanding of when an employee came on board. If you hired someone with the understanding that it's a remote position and there is nothing that requires to be present in the office (e.g. lab work or doctor/nurse), then if you want them to suddenly come in, you do need to defend it. Not doing so makes you an ass.
• pointkn2 2y ago
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• vondur 2y ago
  This is simply layoffs without having to do layoffs. Much cleaner. I work for a state institution, due to budget cuts, layoffs are Coming. However, almost everyone hired the last few years are temporary employees. So we aren’t laying people off, we are simply not renewing positions. No messy uniom notifications needed.
• eutropia 2y ago
  My favorite recently acquired pet theory about the amazon RTO is that it's driven by real estate occupancy rates in their incredibly expensive new hub offices, several of which also received massive government tax grants with strings attached(0): > "Now consider that Amazon spent $4-5B to build its two headquarters buildings in Seattle in 2015/16. Almost certainly it will need to refinance those loans in the next couple of years. > When that refinancing window opens, two things will determine Amazon’s real estate bill. Interest rates, and the value placed on the buildings. The latter will be driven almost entirely by occupancy rates. > So the answer to “why does Amazon care about occupancy rates” is that by driving those rates up, it can maximize the valuation of its properties, decrease to loan-to-value ratio of its financing, and secure the best interest rate possible. > The size of the prize is massive. > One point of difference in the interest rate attached to a commercial loan across a 10-year term equates to $100M in interest payments. Given Amazon will need to refinance several billion in commercial real estate over the next few years, the stakes of increasing occupancy could have a billion dollar price tag. Way more than the cost of pissing off employees. Way more than hiring to replace those who quit." [0] - https://radarblog.substack.com/p/falling-down https://radarblog.substack.com/p/falling-down
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  > I wouldn't be shocked if one day some leaked memos or emails come to light that prove it was all about control and/or backdoor layoffs, despite their PR spin that it isn't (what competent company leader would openly admit this?) Amazon is famous for a short email retention policy and laughably small storage space to make as much past communication disappear. They also do what all big tech companies do, hiding incriminating things behind privilege labels on communications.