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Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document
- AbstractH24 1y agoI'm the rare person who likes to be in the office (although I live in NYC where commuting is fast and easy). I miss 2023 when that made it easy for me to find a job. Now, if you aren't top talent, you have acquiesced and accepted the fact you need to be in an office to be employed.
- tenchu1125 1y agoAmazon also babysits its employees with a daily badge report, tracking if you physically badged in to a corporate office. This is a slap in the face to professionals.
- Gelob 1y agonew amazon hires must work at an office in Seattle or Virgina, the jobs posted in other cities aren't necessarily available
- fileoffset 1y agoGood
- BoorishBears 1y agoMy feelings on significant WFH have gone around from thinking it's a no brainer to accepting that it's not really doable for large companies (large headcount wise at least). It sucks, but I've found that the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher. And I suspect the larger the organization, the more the ratio skews towards the wrong side of that: since part of what makes WFH work is having people care deeply enough about the mission to stay motivated and operate in a way that aligns with the goals of the org, even under reduced oversight. And this excerpt... > Oracle, for example, has hired away more than 600 Amazon employees in the past 2 years because Amazon's strict RTO policy has made poaching easier, Bloomberg reported recently. If you're losing them to Oracle of all places, I'm not sure the losses paint the story the headline is selling.
- christhecaribou 1y agoWhat a bootlicking moron.
- darth_avocado 1y agoAmazon isn’t that great and Oracle especially OCI isn’t that bad.
- BoorishBears 1y agoAmazon isn't great and Oracle is typically worse. For AI, I'd go to IBM before Oracle.
- tkiolp4 1y agoAs a worker, I don’t care about squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in me. I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city, not having lunch with my loved ones. I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us). So, either you are one of them, or you don’t have the priorities of life clear.
- sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago> I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. This is usually met with "but people WANT to live there!" If this was true, walking to work wouldn't be an issue.
- brendoelfrendo 1y agoEasily solvable for whom? It's not easily solvable for the worker. Perhaps it is easily solvable: imagine a distributed network of office locations, such that each employee is able to work a reasonable distance from where I want to live. We could even hyperscale this concept, to the point where every employee has an office within their own home. I call it "edge officing."
- silenced_trope 1y agoI don't think it's just that. - Amazon's back-loaded vesting costs them top talent. - Amazon's pip culture is notorious. When Amazon managers get hired at other companies people immediately consider it a turning point for the company turning to crap. - Commuting is a killer for a lot of people. You either live somewhere expensive and have a short commute, or live somewhere less desirable but have a longer commute.
- exploringfalse 1y agoThis is definitely a big part. Some of that was listed in the article, but it's a big barrier when you look at COL in places like SLU Seattle. Then you have the terrible vesting schedule. Now this. It's no wonder people are looking for work elsewhere, and really I think this is just the final straw for many.
- Animats 1y agoHow does their "hub" thing work? Is your whole team in one place, or do you just report to some random cubicle farm?
- rtomaven 1y ago:::: How does their "hub" thing work? Is your whole team in one place, or do you just report to some random cubicle farm? Basically, you show up to random cubicle or sound-proof photo booth and "collaborate" via Chime (now Teams) with other workers around the world also sitting in random booths/cubicles. Unlike Google/Facebook you do not even get free lunch.
- EE84M3i 1y agoAmazon is off slack?
- valbaca 1y agocurrently on Slack and Zoom, moving away from Chime, and with some people using Teams.
- Animats 1y agoOh. No wonder people are leaving.
- UltraSane 1y agoWow, that sounds like something straight out of Kafka.
- theshrike79 1y agoThat's just straight up dystopian :D The whole point of being at the office is the snacks, drinks and amenities you can use while doing the "in person collaboration" -stuff.
- HelloNurse 1y agoCould it be a semi-deliberate way to discourage people who have a life and retain only "worker bees", including the visa-dependent immigrants that other comments mention?
- randycupertino 1y ago5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale. 3 days, sure. 4 days, maybe. But 5 days in office is harsh. Top talent sees this as rude, lack of trust, unnecessary babysitting and middle managing. 3-4 days sure, good for networking, collaboration, etc. But give people 1 day a week flex at least to be trusted adults who can responsibly wfh.
- pllbnk 1y agoIn most companies this mythical collaboration doesn't exist unless it's between actual decision makers who steer the product's direction. In the end, most office employees just do their work, ask a question or two from their colleagues and participate in some, often unnecessary, ceremonies.
- konfusinomicon 1y agoSir David Attenborough is gonna make bank on the documentary featuring these animals engaging in these most unnatural of corporate environments
- bubblethink 1y agoThat may be the point of the 5 day RTO. Make 3 days attractive. You start with 5 so that everyone warms to the idea of 3 days.
- rufus_foreman 1y agoI work full remote. If they ask me to RTO, I quit and retire. Game over, man. But, given that, "5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale"? No. That's just normal for pretty much everyone on the planet. Top talent? If they're not willing to negotiate on 5 days RTO you need to adjust your ideas of how marketable you are, you're not top talent and you're not a trusted adult, you're a human resource.
- utyop22 1y agoIts not RTO is bad per se. Its the fact that the policy doesn't work in a shitty culture!
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- neonate 1y agohttps://archive.ph/ZDPe0 https://archive.ph/ZDPe0
- webdevver 1y agodo they even need top talent? arguably they are in a commodity business. doesn't take a genius to build a DC and sell compute slices.
- zetazzed 1y agoTheir revenue is like $670bln. If you come up with an innovation that increases that by 0.01%, say by better optimizing prices or targeting adds, you've added $60m of revenue. If you pay a star engineer $1m per year and they have even a reasonable chance of an improvement on this scale, or a similar reduction in costs, then you have a super profitable deal.
- flyinglizard 1y agoI don’t think anyone in senior management actually thinks like that. The company works on a plan (for better or worse), and the resources needed to fulfill it.
- Anon1096 1y agoThere are teams for maintaining massive services where you can build promo packets with a couple <1% cost reduction PRs. I've worked on a non Amazon but similar team where half our M2's org charter was explicitly cost reduction with KPIs of x dollars saved (measured using CPU/memory/etc that we had formulas to convert to infra dollar equivalents).
- oatmeal_croc 1y agoIt's a pretty non trivial problem to build and maintain infrastructure and customer relationships at that scale, yes, including the myriad of services they provide other than just "compute slices".
- mikert89 1y agoAmazon is in keeping the lights on mode in large swaths of the company. They are far beyond looking for top talent, most of the company is engineers keeping the computer systems running Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
- ajkjk 1y agois this, like, true? or gut feeling? or made up?
- mikert89 1y agoI worked there for a long time. It’s 100% true. They mostly need low level workers to keep the systems going.
- christhecaribou 1y agoI’ve only been at AWS for seven years, but it’s a completely different company than it was in 2018.
- cyanydeez 1y agoSo much technology is basically a public utility masquerading as a public growth company. It's time to start moving them into public ownership. It's either that or tax the fuck out of their profit centers.
- mikert89 1y agoThe hyper growth in AWS is gone, there’s a lot of clarity on what makes money, and a ton of technical debt that requires never ending support.
- daxfohl 1y agoIt's kind of true for all big companies. Sure, launch some little things and pretend to innovate, but the real job is to keep greasing the wheels of the cash cows. Like Meta loves to talk big about AI and VR and blockchain, but at least when I interviewed there, everyone I spoke to was from commerce or ads.
- MangoToupe 1y agoI truly believe that most mainstream companies don't really want "top talent" so much as they want to control their talent, hence why we don't have any option to work under 40 hours a week.
- IshKebab 1y agoMaybe it's different in the US but everywhere I've worked has been fine with me working 4 days a week. Normally I ask after I've started there rather than during the job interview.
- ozim 1y agoWell you don’t run a company of 100+ employees on “top talent” you need maybe 1 top talent guy per 50 worker bees. But to get worker bees you have to lie that you hire only the best, make them jump through the hoops and the hoops or 2+ hours grilling is justified because you hire only the best. Just to select most obedient ones that will put up with your shenanigans. So you run the company on the processes not on people as they are replaceable cogs.
- ardit33 1y agoAmazon culture is only viable because the H1B system. I worked there (yes I was on H1B), and they made sure to delay any green card conversion at every step possible in order to keep you there longer. If they were unable to abuse it, they'd be more employee friendly.
- mikert89 1y agothe secret to amazons work culture is near unlimited visa labor, they couldnt get away with the work conditions with an american labor force
- cyanydeez 1y agoIts only viable because America has let fascism fester by deregulating and deunionizing and praying to the almighty CEO.
- AliveShine 1y agospot on
- programmertote 1y agoI left Amazon due to RTO. They hired me as a fully remote employee (I was told that the VP of Prime US was one of those who signed off on my remote arrangement). Anyway, a year later, they asked me to move to Seattle or Virginia (wherever their second office is) or Chicago (there's only like one or two directors from my team located there; most of the team are located in Seattle or Virginia). I started looking for a remote job and in 3 months, I was out. Things I didn't like about Amazon: - you get paid once a month (basically, you'll letting the company use your money for free) - if I remember correctly, you get your RSUs vested at the end of the year for the second year (I think it's like 20% of your total comp) - your comp is heavily reliant on RSUs for the third and fourth year AND the base salary was below 200K - some of the things they do are cult-y - too much writing instead of building prototypes - some folks there practice resume-driven development regardless of whether it's actually good for the org/group in terms of maintainability, simplicity, etc. Having said that, I met good coworkers and worked in a good team (luckily) although our on-calls were sometimes brutal (like hundreds of tickets a week during the on-call).
- illusive4080 1y agoBelow 200? And here I thought I’d at least make a pretty penny if I left my comfortable job for a tech company
- jedberg 1y agoAmazon is odd that way. Everyone has a base that low, even VPs. All of the comp is in RSUs and hiring bonus for the first two years. Even someone with a total comp of $1M a year will have a base salary of $250K, and a hiring bonus of $700K a year, and then RSUs that in theory make up the rest, as long as AMZN goes up at least 15% per year. When the stock was on a tear, some people would make 2x or 3x their expected total comp. But on down stock years, you could end up at 80% of the promised comp.
- coredog64 1y agoUntil circa 2022 (IIRC), the absolute maximum cash comp even for someone like Jassy was $180K. They lifted that and then the next year made the RSU comp even worse (e.g. limiting your upside on annual grants by focusing on out year 1)
- oatmeal_croc 1y ago5 days a work is diabolical. I was laid off earlier this year, received an Amazon offer and turned them down when I got another offer that was 3 days a week in the Bay. Now I wouldn't mind if I lived next to the office, but I don't. Commuting 5 days a week would ruin my life. Now I'm definitely not "top talent", I'm as middle of the barrel as they come, but if I feel this way, I'm sure folks much smarter than me would just block Amazon recruiters on LinkedIn.
- rtomaven 1y ago:::: 5 days a work is diabolical. 5 days is fine if you actually get paid to live near the office. Except you dont. You get paid enough to live 90min away, which makes 5 days in office diabolical. Further, pay for senior is not commensurate to costs for senior (e.g., enough to pay for private school or for the SF public schools' "donations")
- aaa_2006 1y agoThis whole issue makes me wonder whether the real problem is Amazon’s high cost structure rather than RTO policies alone. If employees are forced back into expensive offices just to justify those huge campus investments, maybe the better fix is shedding real estate, not tweaking attendance rules.
- MangoToupe 1y agoThe thing is, amazon could still operate if all those offices disappeared overnight. They couldn't do anything if nobody showed up to work.
- dehrmann 1y agoOccupied offices are more expensive to operate than vacant ones (more power, more HVAC, more janitorial). Those buildings might be expensive, but using them is more expensive.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- henry700 1y agono shit
- calmbonsai 1y agoYup. As a former Premier Platinum Partner, RTO has been such a lovely recruiting boon. Hell, despite dog and booze-friendly office policies, folks didn't like even coming into the office (esp. downtown Seattle) in the mid 2000s. Whenever we would visit, they loved having the excuse of "entertaining out-of-town colleagues" to get out of the office and enjoy the city.
- malshe 1y agoI am convinced that by forcing employees to RTO, managers are converting meaningful work into bullshit jobs[1], thereby harming not only the employees but also the companies. At a macro level, this hurts societies and economies. What an extremely short-term oriented mindset! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
- jdmg94 1y agoI used to work at Amazon, 3-day RTO was not nice but tolerable, 5-day RTO made half of our senior staff leave. my commute to the office wasn't so bad, but my friends had to drive 1+ hours to the office and then pay $26/day for parking which you only get 50% reimbursed. Amazon touts "frugality" as one of their core tenets but its hard to reconcile frugality with all the expenses of going to the office.
- NathanKP 1y agoI just ended an eight year stretch of working for AWS. I quit in order to move out of the United States to New Zealand, so indirectly I quit over RTO. I wanted to work outside of a US hub city, even if it would have required relocating to AWS New Zealand and taking a resulting pay decrease that would have saved the company significant money to get the same amount of work from me. Acquisition and retention of good talent is absolutely a major issue for AWS. Don't get me wrong, I still like AWS a lot, even all it's frequently chaotic mess, but I'll probably wait until Amazon starts its Satya era before I'd consider reapplying to work there.
- anthem2025 1y agoIt’s not just the RTO, it’s the way they handled it. Telling people they can go ahead and plan their lives around working remotely only to aggressively flip flop on it is colossal disrespect. It’s just a giant fuck you to every employee. I didn’t want to work for Amazon before but I consider them a joke now.
- OfficeChad 1y ago[dead]
- sniffers 1y agoObviously true, but Amazon never wanted top tech talent. They wanted disposable tech talent. When I was there the expected tenure was 18 months. Managers were expected to fire 10% of their team every year. Benefits were mediocre and the pay was so so. They chewed through devs by putting them in brutal oncall rotations with expectations like, "when you are on call you have a maximum of 15 minutes from being paged to being checked in to the incident. Carry your laptop everywhere you go. Everywhere." So, of course it's costing them talent. They just don't care.
- viraptor 1y ago> "when you are on call you have a maximum of 15 minutes from being paged to being checked in to the incident. Carry your laptop everywhere you go. Why is that brutal? That's what on-call is. That's literally the point of paying someone extra for being available.
- QuiEgo 1y agoWhat’s this “paying someone extra for oncall” concept you speak of :|
- ElevenLathe 1y agoThey don't pay extra.
- viraptor 1y agoYou mean AWS doesn't pay for on-call at all? I'm sure it happens at least in some regions where it's mendatory by regulation.
- ElevenLathe 1y agoI only know second hand about some corners of AWS and Kindle where I know people, but no, they don't. Under US law, AIUI, you can be classified as exempt from overtime pay like this if you use a computer in your job (which is a weird standard leftover from decades ago when this was rare) and make more than some minimum salary, about 50k I think (changes every year). Since essentially all IT labor makes more than that, it is rare to be paid extra during oncall. This of course means that the company is not incentivized at all to minimize oncall time by doing things like investing in cross training, or backfilling after resignations, since it's just cheaper to make your engineers be on call half of their (waking AND sleeping) lives. This is obviously unjust and one of the reasons we need to increase our sector's union density. If you're actually interested in that and don't know where to start, I would recommend CWA's CODE training: https://code-cwa.org/upcoming-trainings https://code-cwa.org/upcoming-trainings You can learn about the organizing process (which is not as mysterious and daunting as you probably think) and, more importantly, get in touch with experienced organizers who can help get you started and help an the way through the process. CWA has had a lot of successes recently, and the momentum continues to grow.
- bigpeopleareold 1y agoI started to think that these type of articles posted on Hacker News are a bit excessive. This and the AI stuff. This is one American company (high-profile, for sure) that might or might not be having retention issues. It's up to them to decide that, individual employees of the said company to decide if this arrangement is still right for them and shareholders if this will be a worthy investment in the next years. I think a lot of people are none of these. In the meantime, these "top tech talent" probably make way more than I can ever possibly can, and have the mental acuity to keep up with the demands that their employer requires from them while continuing to have a higher ceiling on the type of employment benefits than I could ever have. I know I will have an argument over this which I won't both participating in, so please just downvote me. You want to know about my own employer's policy, and employer you might have never heard of? It's not like Amazon. Amazon is not a bellweather for the wider industry as I see it.
- christhecaribou 1y agoHow does that boot taste?
- bigpeopleareold 1y agoA quite delicate taste of leather on my soft palette.
- pjmlp 1y agoIf this or other perks are something dear to you, always fight to have them in the contract and be willing to turn down proposals otherwise. I learnt at my own costs that taking stuff for granted that isn't on the contract is a huge mistake, at any moment gets dropped without even a we're sorry from management.
- AgentOrange1234 1y agoWhen I ran the numbers, I realized commuting for RTO was going to cost the equivalent of 6 full time weeks of work. My whole team is at a different location. So I am driving in to be on Zoom calls. It is deeply pointless and frustrating. I mentioned all of this to my boss, who is great btw, and was told there is just no fighting this. After several months of trying to make the best of it, I’m done. I’m planning to leave after my next vest. It’s really a shame. I liked a lot about the job. So many good people have been forced out.
- zitsarethecure 1y agoThe blanket RTO mandate is peak cargo cult thinking and a great example of why executives should be the first employees that should be replaced with "AI", rather than the last.
- duxup 1y agoNot to justify the policy, but at some point maybe big companies don't NEED as much "top talent" as big companies tend to eventually have less innovation, get process heavy and so on?
- eviks 1y agoLess innovation is a result of having less "top talent", so how would you justify the cause by the effect?
- duxup 1y agoI think innovation starts with policies and leadership that allow for it. Big companies get process heavy and often simply wouldn't allow it to occur anyway. "We're going to be super innovative, now go get 8 non technical manager's approval!" It doesn't matter how innovative your people are at that point. Sometimes it's just the volume of people in the mix who can hold things up... big companies just have more opportunity for people to stifle innovation even if just out of misunderstanding, ignorance, etc.
- gilbetron 1y agoMy complete frustration with the RTO situation is that it is so backwards thinking. Instead of trying to enhance remote work to alleviate the negatives and enhance the positives, we just stop with "Zoom+Slack" and throw up our hands and stop innovating and trying to make better remote work.
- illegalsmile 1y agoIn addition to making remote work better, make the office better too. Build offices for the future, try new things, see what works. Maybe there are a lot of hot swap desks available to those who want it, a few dedicated offices and a large conference space a mandatory all hands can be held once or twice a month. You could use that space for weekly lunches and team building exercises for people who sign up for it. Or make it an easily convertible open work space. There seems to be a better way forward with the way office work is done for those who are generally in front of a screen all of the time. Instead we're returning to 20th century ideals of office/work life.
- kentich 1y agoYou're absolutely right. Big corporations don't like remote work and don't want to enhance it. Tech enthusiasts is the only hope for improvement in this area. The good news is that there are innovative projects that can significantly enhance remote work. I suggest trying MeetingGlass - video meetings through virtual frosted glass. This tool can make it easier for both employer and employees meet via video on a fair terms without violating prvacy.